"Sluggish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in two short chapters to describe the infinite variety and charm of these Burmese forests—the rushing mountain torrents, the sweeping rivers, and noble waterfalls; the sluggish streams, which reflect the glories of the surrounding forest; its teeming life, its solitude, and the wonderful effects of light and colour; but perhaps I have said enough to convey to you some idea of that wealth of exuberant beauty which has forced upon me the conclusion ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly
... boards that open like trapdoors, and it is supplied with pumps surmounted with shining brass ornaments kept scoured and bright at the public cost. The city is intersected by numerous water roads formed by the river Rhine, there grown sluggish, fatigued by its long travel, but more than one hundred and fifty stone bridges reunite the dissevered streets. The same world-renowned river, degraded from the beautiful, free-flowing Rhine, serves as a moat from the rampart that surrounds Leyden and is crossed by drawbridges ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... always justly been the pride of our country; and it was to be expected that it would first feel the impulse of inventive genius. Confident in our strength and resources, we had long remained comparatively sluggish, and regardless of those interesting experiments which other great maritime powers had been carefully making with a view to render ships invulnerable. We looked on quietly, observed the results, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... night-fall, indulge in pleasant banquets and drain great bowls. No longer is it hard for them to break off sweet sleep and to leave their soft beds as formerly. O fortunate ones! whose hearts the sweet draught has often Bathed. No sluggish torpor holds their minds, they briskly Rise for their prescribed duties and rejoice to outstrip the rays of the ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... which the city at present contains; who contrasts the cheap and humble dwellings of that earlier date, with the costly and magnificent edifices which now beautify the metropolis; who studies the sluggish state of the mechanic arts at the dawn of the Republic, and the mighty demonstrations of skill which our Fulton, and our Stevens, our Douglas, our Hoe, and our Morse, have produced; who remembers the few and humble water-craft conveyances of ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... the camp, she was already tired, but the pleasant excitement was still upon her. When she had skimmed the big, slow-bubbling pot of syrup, tested a ladleful of it in the snow, poured in some fresh sap, and replenished the sluggish fire, dusk was already stealing upon the forest. In her haste she did not notice that the candle in the old lantern was almost burned out. Snatching up the lantern, which it was not yet necessary to light, and the big tin sap-bucket, and giving the baby, who had begun ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... retention, the other a law of momentary warming up through exercise. The law of retention, or of forgetting, is the same as atrophy through disuse. The warming-up effect, well seen in the muscle which is sluggish after a long rest but becomes lively and responsive after a bit of exercise, [Footnote: See p. 73.] appears also in the fact that a skilled act needs to be done a few times in quick succession before ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... passed the old Dutch town of Schenectady, Johnson Hall and Johnson Castle, Forts Hunter and Herkimer, and at length reached the head of river navigation at Fort Stanwix. From here a short portage through the forest led him to the waters of Wood creek, where he might again embark and float with the sluggish current to the Royal Blockhouse on the shore of Oneida lake. Crossing this, and passing under the walls of Port Brewerton at the source of the Oswego river, he would descend the swift waters of that stream to Fort Oswego on the shore of Lake Ontario. ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... His blood runs languidly. It needs The pricking of a vein to make the heart Beat, and the sluggish rivers flow. I have brought A lance for it. I'll let a little blood. Not over-much; enough, enough to set The ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... speaker is of course exposed to all this inequality of spirits, and must expect to be sometimes mortified by ill success. When the moment of speaking arrives, his mind may be slow and dull, his thoughts sluggish and impeded; he may be exhausted by labor, or suffering from temporary indisposition. He strives in vain to rally his powers, and forces his way, with thorough discomfort and chagrin, to the end ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware
... understand, are done you; that thus schooled by you in patience I may endure my own, which, God knows, I would gladly, were it possible, transfer to you, seeing that you are so well fitted to bear them." These words aroused the hitherto sluggish and apathetic king as it were from sleep. He redressed the lady's wrong, and having thus made a beginning, thenceforth meted out the most rigorous justice to all that in any wise offended against the ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... been the effect produced by the stirring of the sluggish waters of indifference. The Society that had been with such difficulty established at home, was numbering multitudes of subscribers both in England and America; it had awakened a like spirit in other sects, and whereas no dissenting minister in London had at ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... and a shot from a pistol, sped to the farthest limits of the line of searching riders and prodded every drop of sluggish blood within them to ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... his arms on the masonry coping of the old bridge and drew at his cigarette. But for the distant rumble of an approaching vehicle, the spring evening was very still. The river curved away gently towards the left, flowing black and sluggish between its flat banks, on which the pines grew down to the water's edge. It was delightful to stay quiet for a few moments, and Merriman took off his cap and let the cool air blow on his forehead, enjoying ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... Thrums, and pinching him when he had finished, to make sure that he was really made just like common human beings. He was a thin, pale boy, while she looked like a baby rose full blown in a night because her time was short; and his movements were sluggish, but if she was not walking she must be dancing, and sometimes when there were few people in the street, the little armful of delight that she was jumped up and down like a ball, while Tommy kept the time, ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... through a formal grove. All at once they were before the house, red brick and marble, with wide-flung porte-cochere and verandas, beyond which could be seen immaculate lawns, and in the middle distances the sluggish gray of a river that crawled down from the turbulent hills on the horizon. Another creature in livery tripped down the steps and held the door for him. He passed perplexed into the hall, which was fresh with the breeze that swept through ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... demand less courage than the uneventful terror of the daily commonplace. There's something splendid and exhilarating in going forward among bursting shells—we, who have done all that, know that when the guns have ceased to roar our blood will grow more sluggish and we'll never be such men again. Instead of getting up in the morning and hearing your O.C. say, "You'll run a line into trench so-and-so to-day and shoot up such-and-such Hun wire," you'll hear necessity saying, "You'll work from ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... strong moonlight, I saw the ruin of a mill. Water, therefore, must have risen behind it. I expected and found yet another uncertain height, and beyond it a third, and, a mile beyond, another. This summit was like those random marshy steps which rise continually and wearily between the sluggish rivers of the prairies. ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... task in order to be a man among men; he was free from that delusion, but at the same time he welcomed the change of life. Politics had already begun to take on that unpleasantness for a Northern man of his affiliations which could make even so dull a participant as he was, in his sluggish conservatism, very uncomfortable; he had felt its rude censures and misapprehensions of delicate personal relations—such as existed between himself and President Pierce—disagreeably near at hand; and he was glad to get away from his native land, upon which before a year had passed he looked back ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... he went down upon one knee, his flesh too numbed now to feel the additional cold of the snow, snow so hard that its crust delivered a knife's cut. Unemotionally, he watched a thin line of red trickle in a sluggish drop or two down the blue skin of his leg. The rope jerked him forward, and Ross scrambled awkwardly until one of his captors hooked a fur mitten in his belt and heaved him to his feet ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... subsistence, and even luxury, of a Tartar camp. But the exploits of the hunters of Scythia are not confined to the destruction of timid or innoxious beasts; they boldly encounter the angry wild boar, when he turns against his pursuers, excite the sluggish courage of the bear, and provoke the fury of the tiger, as he slumbers in the thicket. Where there is danger, there may be glory; and the mode of hunting, which opens the fairest field to the exertions of valor, may justly be considered as the image, and as the school, of war. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... with the necessary exactitude) you will observe that I have modified several expressions, and have held them in more just bounds. Believe me, dear friend, the domain of artists is in the greater part guilty of our sluggish state of Art, and it is from this side especially that we must act, in order to bring about gradually the reform ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... on coming also upon an arm or a leg, or an ugly-looking skull; but the most disgusting sight was an arm and leg, protruding out of the centre of the stream, washed to the consistency of a washer-woman's hand after a hard day's washing. If you can fancy all this on a dark, sluggish-looking stream, surrounded by high and barren rocks, you may, perhaps, guess what feelings of disgust it excited in us. However, before reaching Candahar we were pretty well accustomed to these sights, and got rather callous ...
— Campaign of the Indus • T.W.E. Holdsworth
... describe the sluggish waters of the Dead Sea, but what pen can portray the Indian Ocean lashed ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... together. Poor Leonore had a sickly childhood, and this rather, I believe, than nature, has given to her an unsteady and violent temper, and has unhappily sown the seeds of envy towards her more fortunate sisters. She is not deficient in deep feeling, but the understanding is sluggish, and it is extremely difficult for her to learn anything. All this promises no pleasure; rather the very opposite. The expression of her mouth, even in the uncomfortable time of teething, seemed to speak, "Let me be quiet!" It is hardly possible that she can be other than ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... the middle of a broad and now sluggish river the banks of which were lined by giant, arboraceous ferns, raising their mighty fronds fifty, one hundred, two hundred feet into the quiet air. Close by us something rose to the surface of the river and dashed at the periscope. I had a vision of wide, distended jaws, ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... blushes to her cheek, nor yet the kiss her husband gave her, nor the congratulations of the guests, nor Aunt Barbara's tears, which dropped upon the forehead of her darling as the good woman bent over her and thought how she had lost her; but when Frank Van Buren stooped down to touch her lips the sluggish blood quickened and a thrill went through and through her veins, sending the bright color to her cheeks, which burned as with a hectic flush. Frank saw the power he held, but to his credit he did not ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... of sluggish streams, of lonely lakes and ponds, you may see the beaver, the muskrat, very rarely the otter, and sometimes an ugly little, long-bodied animal belonging to the marten family called the fisher. These are all interesting, each in its own way, and well worth hours of quiet observation. ...
— On the Trail - An Outdoor Book for Girls • Lina Beard and Adelia Belle Beard
... cause. The con trary principle, or the ethereal operative fire, being active, and capable of producing all things from matter, with consummate skill, according to the forms which it contains, although in its nature corporeal, considered in opposition to gross and sluggish matter, or to the elements, is said to be immaterial and spiritual. For want of carefully attending to the preceding distinction, some writers have been so far imposed upon, by the bold innovations of the Stoics in the use of terms, as to inter from the appellations which ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... ridges now, swelling from the plain and breaking away into little rocky cliffs tufted with wild fig trees: sluggish streams wound down from the east where, far away, loomed the snow-tipped summits of Apennine, while toward the west the sky reflected a brighter light from the sea that ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... substituted for the worsted as soon as the marrow is about six feet long. Make a muslin bag out of a pair of drawing-room curtains and enclose the marrow in it. This will protect it from mosquitoes. As soon as the marrow ceases growing or if it becomes sluggish and exhibits loss of appetite it is ready for the table. Marrows grown in this way ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 9, 1919 • Various
... sloping beach along which I walked was thickly strewn with strangely shaped, colored shells; some empty, others still housing as varied a multitude of mollusks as ever might have drawn out their sluggish lives along the silent shores of the antediluvian seas of the outer crust. As I walked I could not but compare myself with the first man of that other world, so complete the solitude which surrounded me, so primal and untouched the virgin wonders and ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... heare This from our Servants and not punish it? Where is the terrour of our names, our powre That Spaine with feare hath felt in both his Indies? We are lost for ever, and from freemen growne Slaves so contemptible as no worthie Prince, That would have men, not sluggish Beasts, his Servants, Would ere vouchsafe the owning. Now, my frends, I call not on your furtherance to preserve The lustre of my actions; let me with them Be nere remembred, so this government Your wives, your lives and liberties be safe: And therefore, ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... Far from the sun In Nastroend; Its doors are northward turned, Venom-drops fall In through its apertures; Entwined is that hall With serpents' backs. She there saw wading The sluggish streams Bloodthirsty men And perjurers, And him who the ear beguiles Of another's wife. There Nidhog sucks The corpses of ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... lines of action which were followed for a century. He hoped that a liberal education of his countrymen would make for both an intellectual and moral regeneration, and emancipate the people from their sluggish obedience to conventionality. The schools then were part of the ecclesiastical organization and have never ceased to be so wholly, and until recently the title of the Prussian minister has been: "Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs, Instruction, and Medical Affairs." That part ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... just!" said the professor, solemnly, though still with a sluggish utterance. "I sought to glorify God to the end of mine own glorification, and lo! He hath taken from me my own heart's blood!" Swept off his feet by the profundity of his emotion, the ministerial form of speech, so long disused, rose naturally ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... dimensions, still flitted before his eyes, and he preferred the absolute sovereignty of this contracted territory to the influential but dangerous regency which his friends urged him to seize. Besides, he was sluggish, changeable, and altogether untrustworthy. "He is an exceedingly weak person"—suggetto debolissimo—said Suriano. "As to his judgment, I shall not stop to say that he wears rings on his fingers and pendants in his ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... sufficiency of life and colour—parrokeets flashing from tree to tree, like emeralds made visible and vocable; village women swathed in red and yellow veils; prancing Rajput cavaliers, straight from the Middle Ages; ox-carts and camels—unlimited camels, with flapping lip and scornful eye; a sluggish stream of life, rising out of the landscape and flowing, from dawn to dusk, through the seven Gates of Jaipur. And there, on the low spurs, beyond the walls, he sighted the famous Tiger Fort, and the marble tomb of Jai ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... classify them by temperament rather than by the theories they possess; and this is not so unscientific as it sounds, for theories usually spring from temperaments. No man whose eliminatory processes function perfectly is ever a pessimist, except under the compulsion of hard facts. No sluggish liver ever believes that joy of living is the prime quality to be sought in literary art. And by the same eternal principle, moody temperaments embrace one theory of criticism; cold, logical minds another. I identify my classes of reviewers by their ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... and anger did he rush upon the mice, but he could no more come up with them than if they had been gnats or birds of the air, except one only, which, though it was but sluggish, went so fast that a man on foot could scarce overtake it. After this one he went, and he caught it and put it in his glove, and tied up the opening of the glove with a string, and kept it with him, and returned to the palace. Then he came to ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... an hour passed slowly away, without news of what was passing upstairs, and her agony seemed to be more than she could bear. Every sense had been on the strain, as she stood in trembling expectancy of hearing a shot fired—a shot that she knew would be at the life of her boy's father; but the sluggish minutes crawled on, and still all was silent above, while outside she was constantly hearing little things which showed how thoroughly the soldiery were ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... my veins And fills with sleep the droning times, Like sluggish dreams among my brains, There runs the drollest sort of rhymes, Idle as clouds that stray through heaven And vague as if they were a myth, But in these rhymes is always given A health for ...
— Songs, Merry and Sad • John Charles McNeill
... the tent the breeze blew the flap lazily back and forth. A light rain fell with muffled gentle insistence on the canvas over their heads, and out through the opening the landscape was blurred—the wide stretch of monotonous, billowy prairie, the sluggish, shining river, bending in the distance about the base of Black Wind Mountain—Black Wind Mountain, whose high top lifted, though it was almost June, a white point of snow above dark pine ridges of the hills below. The five officers talked a little as they waited, ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... nation, but why are there not more people who are patriotic toward the whole human race? One has been used to seeing it now for centuries, good people all over the world hanging their harps on willow trees, or snuggling down together by the cold sluggish stream of their lives, and gossiping about how the world has abused them, when they would be far better occupied, nine out of ten of them—in doing something that would make it stop. There was a poet and soldier some thousands of years ago who put more real religion (and put it too, into his ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... cord tightens in his hand. He pulls again, he pulls with force; the cord resists! Fire mounts to his brain; his sluggish blood is quickened; his heart and temples beat violently; his fever returns, but only to restore to him, at this decisive moment, his former vigor. He hastily digs new steps in the interstices of the rock; with his hands suspending himself to the lasso, assisted by his feet, by his knees, sometimes ...
— The Solitary of Juan Fernandez, or The Real Robinson Crusoe • Joseph Xavier Saintine
... it was only a few years ago—in Southeast Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America, even outer space—that communism sought to convey the image of a unified, confident, and expanding empire, closing in on a sluggish America and a free world in disarray. But few people would ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... water as smooth as it then was, I thought there ought not to be much difficulty in doing either. The righting of the boat, however, proved to be very much more difficult than I had imagined. She was a fairly big boat and, floating wrong side up and full of water, she was very sluggish, and for a long time scarcely responded to my efforts; but I eventually succeeded, and, with a glad heart, seized the bucket I had secured, hove it into the boat, and climbed in after it, finding to my joy that, even with my weight in her, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... nevertheless with such an overall insight that we may still approve almost all the outlines of their summary chart. The (newly discovered) primitive Man was not a superior being, enlightened from above, but a coarse savage, naked and miserable, slow of growth, sluggish in progress, the most destitute and most needy of all animals, and, on this account, sociable, endowed like the bee and the beaver with an instinct for living in groups, and moreover an imitator like the monkey, but more intelligent, capable of passing by degrees from the language of gesticulation ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... conveys a lively notion of the pleasure they derive from their pursuits. I feel ashamed to go among such people when I compare their lives with my own, their knowledge with my ignorance, their brisk and active intellects with my dull and sluggish mind, become sluggish and feeble for ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... lack sacrifice More splendid, when the white Sierras call Unto the Rockies straightway to arise And dance before the unveiled ark of the year, Sounding their windy cedars as for shawms, Unrolling rivers clear For flutter of broad phylacteries; While Shasta signals to Alaskan seas That watch old sluggish glaciers downward creep To fling their icebergs thundering from the steep, And Mariposa through the purple calms Gazes at far Hawaii crowned with palms Where East and West are met,— A rich seal on the ocean's bosom set To say that East and West are twain, With different loss and gain: ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... found it impossible to get him out. All the ground beneath the surface was a bottomless quicksand, through which the beast sank too rapidly for us to get bushes of timber fairly beneath him; and being of a very sluggish stupid nature he could never be got to make sufficiently strenuous efforts towards extricating himself. In the evening, as a last chance, we let the water in from the creek, so as to buoy him up and ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... sailin' a vessel," sneered the Cap'n, squinting forward with deep disfavor to where the members of the Smyrna Ancient and Honorable Firemen's Association were contentedly fishing over the side of the sluggish Dobson. "Here, leave hands off'm that tops'l downhaul!" he yelled, detecting Ludelphus Murray slashing at it with his jack-knife. "My Gawd, if he ain't cut it off!" ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... some disorders along the coast. But in other respects the consequences of this measure are becoming important enough. The negro race has been too much attached to the whites, or too ignorant or too sluggish to show any signs of revolt in places remote from the presence of the federal armies: but on some points where the federals have been able to maintain themselves in force in the midst of a large negro population, the process of enrolling and arming black regiments ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... was very still without,—still and hot. The masses of luminous vapor were gathering thickly overhead, no longer urged by the gusty wind. The great masses of rank wisteria leaves, with here and there a second blossoming of purple flowers, hung dead over the window in the sluggish air. Across the roofs I could hear the sound of a belated fiacre in the streets below. I filled my ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... experienced captains as Drake, Frobisher,[25] and Hawkins[26]—from infancy at home on blue water—was manifest in the very first encounter. They obtained the weather-gage at once, and cannonaded the enemy at intervals with considerable effect; easily escaping at will out of range of the sluggish Armada, which was incapable of bearing sail in pursuit, altho provided with an armament which could sink all its enemies at close quarters. "We had some small fight with them that ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... this prince were granted to the Duke of Parma. The articles made no mention of Piedmont or Parma, or of the Pontifical States. The First Consul did not wish to commit himself on this point or encounter the sluggish proceedings of a congress. The Emperor of Austria had treated for the Empire as for himself. The Diet assembled at Ratisbon simply ratified the conditions of the treaty. Henceforth England found itself isolated in Europe, as France had ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... walking through a swampy soil they arrived at the edge of a sluggish stream of water. Here tied to a bush was a boat constructed of basket work covered with hide. In it lay two long poles. The men took their places in the coracle, pushed out into the stream, and using their poles vigorously were soon lost to sight among the thick grove ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... beaver, Shoes asplay; Lilies flopping, Washed-out roses; Eaves dropping, Red noses; Pools, splashes, Spouts, spirts; Swollen sashes. Gutters, squirts; Limp curls, Splashed hose; Pretty girls, Damp shows; Piled grates, Cold shivers; Aching pates, Sluggish livers; Morn cruel, Eve a biter; Hot gruel, Sweet nitre; Voice a creaky Cracked cadenza, Face "peaky," INFLUENZA!!! Gloom growing, Glum, glummer Noses (and nothing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, 13 June 1891 • Various
... he could not seriously pity himself. And this, I think, may be pleaded against the reproach that he was selfish. Externally, in the ordinary action of life as distinguished from the literary action proper to his genius, he was no doubt sluggish and weak because of his giantism. He ended as an unproductive drunkard and swindler; for the repeated sales of the Daventry plot, in so far as they imposed on the buyers and were not transparent excuses for begging, were undeniably swindles. For all that, he does ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... vapours and air permeate this vessel, as they do the pulmonary bronchia, wherefore do we find neither air nor fuliginous vapours when we divide the pulmonary vein? Why do we always find this vessel full of sluggish blood, never of air, whilst in the lungs we find abundance ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... the Arctic regions likewise reads like pure romance to the ignorant and untravelled. "After one day's journey to the north of Thule," says Pytheas, "men come to a sluggish sea, where there is no separation of sea, land, and air, but a mixture of these elements like the substance of jelly-fish, through which one can neither walk nor sail." Here the nights were very short, sometimes only two hours, after which the sun rose again. This, in ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... matter by the local sportsmen. So little was known of the form of the two men, neither having figured as principal in a love-affair before, that even money was the best you could get, and the market was sluggish. I think my own flutter of twelve golf-balls, taken up by Percival Brown, was the most substantial of any of the wagers. I selected James as the winner. Why, I can hardly say, unless that he had an aunt who contributed occasional stories to the "Woman's Sphere". These things sometimes ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... Norham Castle on Tweed, with the holds of Eital, Chillingham, and Ford, which he made his headquarters, and awaited the approach of Surrey and the levies of the Stanleys. On September 5th he demolished Ford Castle, and took position on the crest of Flodden Edge, with the deep and sluggish water of Till at its feet. Surrey, commanding an army all but destitute of supplies, outmanoeuvred James, led his men unseen behind a range of hills to a position where, if he could maintain himself, he was upon James's line of communications, and thence marched against him to Branxton Ridge, ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... footways, and impossible to stock. It was called Little Wolf because it was narrower than the willow-fringed stream into which it emptied. But Big Wolf Creek could rarely boast of half the volume of water that the sluggish little tributary held. Big Wolf was shallow, with more shale and sand along its bed. Little Wolf was narrow and ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... rectangular herring-bones, spreading out as it went into the depressions to right and left, until the mighty pattern of fire shone in its full length and breadth on the flood of sand; and the workmen, who had been coaxing the sluggish, lava-like flood along with their iron rods, rested from their labors and wiped their hot brows, while a thin cloud of steamy vapor floated up to the begrimed rafters. Standing in the doorway we could watch the familiar pattern—the ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... before his eyes a welcome sight, Like a sweet dream of some mild summer night. But, oh! his path leads o'er that awful stream, Across a dizzy arch 'mid sulphurous steam That covers all the grimy bridge with slime. He stands perplexed beside the waters grime, Which sluggish move adown the limbo black, With murky waves that writhe demoniac,— As ebon serpents curling through the gloom And hurl their inky crests, that silent come Toward the yawning gulf, a tide of hate; And sweep their dingy waters ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... devotes his time and his energies to the duties of his office. Gentle in his strength, unobtrusive in his modesty, and unswerved by partisan clamor, he endeavors to do what he—from his personal and political standpoint—regards as right. He is above medium height, quite stout, and rather sluggish in his movement. He is of the Teutonic type—blonde, with ruddy color. His head is large, with a broad forehead, deeply set blue eyes, a large, straight nose, with vigorous nostrils, and a firm mouth, partly shaded by a drooping light mustache. He generally wears a frock ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... sluggish, though I planted in hills far apart each way in a rich warm loam enriched by everything that could make a sincere watermelon get up and hump itself. The melons were to be very large indeed, with a center like a rose. According to the picture, these melons generally grew so large and plenty ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... too. It was only natural, for after dawn the air currents that may have become sluggish during the night were in the habit of awakening ...
— The Outdoor Chums on the Gulf • Captain Quincy Allen
... sorrow, And well I know her doleful voice again. Hark! the breezes from the nightshade borrow A heavy burden of lament and pain, And where Delight held lately sweet hey-day, Now like spectres pallid moonbeams play, Very still the little rosebud sleeps, Heavily the drooping myrrh tree weeps Sluggish ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... so sworn to do it as he had sworn to perform that murder. Then she added, how practicable it was to lay the guilt of the deed upon the drunken, sleepy grooms. And with the valor of her tongue she so chastised his sluggish resolutions that he once more summoned up courage to the ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... argue the point. They went to the shore where their little flat-bottomed boat was drawn up. Perota Lake, on which the tiny frame cottage stood, was a shallow, reedy pond, connecting by sluggish brooks with a number of other lakes. The shore on this side of the lake was a tangled thicket; the opposite shore rose in a gentle slope to fields of sun-dried grain. The landscape was rich, peaceful, uneventful, with wide spaces of sun and cloud and large ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... a bleak and cheerless country, crossed by the ravines of a few sluggish creeks, the water of which was unpleasant to drink, and dotted at long intervals by ponds bitter with alkali. In places, stunted poplar bluffs cut against the sky, but, for the most part, there was only a rolling waste of dingy grass. The trail was heavy, the wheels sank deep in sand as they climbed ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... that unfortunate boy the victim of examinations for commissions. Boys must be subjected to high pressure before they can thoroughly enter into the importance of the issues that depend upon it; and when a sluggish, dull intellect is forced beyond endurance, there is an absolute instinct of escape, impelling to shifts and underhand ways of eluding work. Of course the wrong is great, but the responsibility rests with the taskmaster in the same manner as the thefts of a starved slave ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... regret, probably with bitterness, on his eight months' sojourn in Vienna. Not only did he add nothing to his fame as a pianist and composer by successful concerts and new publications, but he seems even to have been sluggish in his studies and in the production of new works. How he leisurely whiled away the mornings at his lodgings, and passed the rest of the day abroad and in society, he himself has explicitly described. That this was his usual mode of life at Vienna, receives further support from the self-satisfaction ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... God hath of us; and we profanely make the unspotted righteousness of Christ serve only as a covering to wrap up our foul deformities and filthy vices in."[20] This tendency, wherever it appears, is but legal religion. Men adopt it because it does not "pinch their sins." It gives them a "sluggish and drowsie Belief, a lazy Lethargy to hugg their supposed acceptation with God"; it enables them "to grow big and swell with a mighty bulk with airy fancies and presumptions of being in favour with Heaven," and it fans up "a pertinacious Imagination ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... blow, thou keel-compelling gale! Till the broad Sun withdraws his lessening ray: Then must the Pennant-bearer slacken sail, That lagging barks may make their lazy way.[125] Ah! grievance sore, and listless dull delay, To waste on sluggish hulks the sweetest breeze! What leagues are lost, before the dawn of day, Thus loitering pensive on the willing seas, The flapping sail hauled down to halt for ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... premature decay. The ribs of the water-wheel appeared amid a tangle of shrubs and driftwood, and were twined with long grasses and straggling vines; mounds of sawdust and heaps of "brush" had taken upon themselves a velvety moss where the trickling slime of the vanished river lost itself in sluggish pools, discolored with the dyes of redwood. But on the other side of the rocky ledge dropped the whole length of the valley, alternately bathed in sunshine or hidden in drifts of white and clinging smoke. The ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... through the street—the torrent that swirled out and back from that vast Pit of roaring within the Board of Trade. Now the Pit was stilled, the sluice gates of the torrent locked, and from out the thousands of offices, from out the Board of Trade itself, flowed the black and sluggish lees, the lifeless dregs that filtered back to their level for a few hours, stagnation, till in the morning, the whirlpool revolving once more, should again suck them ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... October the "Ranger" left Portsmouth, and made for the coast of France. Astute agents of the Americans in that country were having a fleet, powerful frigate built there for Jones, which he was to take, leaving the sluggish "Ranger" to be sold. But, on his arrival at Nantes, Jones was grievously disappointed to learn that the British Government had so vigorously protested against the building of a vessel-of-war in France for the Americans, that the French Government had been obliged to notify the American agents ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... tent, and it was by no means uncomfortable. Probably this was the time when Scott first thought of taking a five-man party to the Pole. By Monday evening the blizzard was over, the dogs came up, and we did 61/2 miles of very heavy going. Gran's pony, Weary Willie, a sluggish and obstinate animal, was far behind, as usual, when we halted our ponies at the camping place. Farther off the dog-teams were coming up. What happened never became clear. Poor Weary, it seems, was in difficulties in a snow-drift: ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... 'humanity,' more of manhood, than I thus do! More humanity, I say, more of manhood, and of sense for what the dignity of man demands imperatively of you and of me and of us all. We call it charity, beneficence, and other fine names, this brutish Workhouse Scheme of ours; and it is but sluggish heartlessness, and insincerity, and cowardly lowness of soul. Not 'humanity' or manhood, I think; perhaps apehood rather,—paltry imitancy, from the teeth outward, of what our heart never felt nor our understanding ever saw; dim indolent adherence to extraneous and extinct traditions; traditions ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... Mr. Wright's land, on the route to Ballarat, was a small forest of gum trees, through which ran a small stream, similar to the one that we crossed on the night that we captured the bushrangers. The water was shallow and sluggish, with a soft, sticky bottom, and boggy sides. This stream Mr. Wright had told us we should have to cross, and that after we were over we could soon find the numerous trails and roads leading to the mines, and probably ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... loud wail. Tommy and Hazel stood in blank, rigid silence. They could not believe that Harriet was gone. Miss Elting sank down on a pack, while Jane stood gazing moodily off over the sluggish river. ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls in the Hills - The Missing Pilot of the White Mountains • Janet Aldridge
... news and trading center, between Fort Towson and Wheelock, was called "Clear Creek." Clear Creek is a rustling, sparkling little stream of clear water that flows southward in a section of the country where most of the streams are sluggish and of a reddish hue. The Clear Creek post office was located in a little store building a short distance east of this stream and about three ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... keyingup of the altitude, manners take on a heartiness, a vivacity, that is one expression of the half-unconscious excitement which Colorado people miss when they drop into lower strata of air. The heart, we are told, wears out early in that high atmosphere, but while it pumps it sends out no sluggish stream. Our two friends stood gripping each other by ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... not found in any part of Shark's Bay; the anchorage is secure and the bottom clear of rocks. There is also an abundance of fish and turtle, and of the latter a ship might embark forty or fifty every day, for they are very sluggish and make no effort to escape, perhaps from knowing the impossibility of their scrambling over the rocky barrier that fronts the shore, and dries at half ebb. Of fish we caught only two kinds; the snapper, a species of sparus, called by the French the rouge bossu, and a tetradon which ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... level. With the aid of some creepers a raft capable of sustaining them all was speedily made, and on this they took their places, and the Indians having cut two poles to steer by, they pushed off into the middle of the stream. The current was very sluggish, and they would have made but small way had not the two Indians poled vigorously. Stephen was thankful indeed for the change; upon the previous day he had only been enabled to keep up with the greatest difficulty, and had felt that another day's labour would bring ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... and beauty doth appear. Flow'rs hate the spring, and with a sullen bend Thrust down their heads, which to the root still tend. And though the sun, like a cold lover, peeps A little at them, still the day's-eye sleeps. But when the Crab and Lion with acute And active fires their sluggish heat recruit, Our grass straight russets, and each scorching day Drinks up our brooks as fast as dew in May; Till the sad herdsman with his cattle faints, And empty channels ring with ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... school, but it is not often found to possess attractions for these children. Again, after their day's work and confinement in the hot rooms, they are tired; they want fresh air and exercise. To sum up: there are no existing inducements for the children to read and study; most of them are sluggish of intellect; outside the evening schools there are no facilities for them at all; they have no books; when evening comes they are tired; they do not understand their own interests; after a day's work they like an evening's rest; of the two paths open to every man at every juncture, ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... feared that dreadful sea, and its rocks, and shoals, and fogs, and bitter freezing storms; and they told strange stories of it, some false and some half-true, how it stretched northward to the ends of the earth, and the sluggish Putrid Sea, and the everlasting night, and the regions of the dead. So the heroes trembled, for all their courage, as they came into that wild Black Sea, and saw it stretching out before them, without a shore, as far ...
— The Heroes • Charles Kingsley
... no longer identical, Mrs. Stanton. One is normal, healthy, and lively. The other is ... well, as you know, he is slow, sluggish, and badly co-ordinated. The condition may improve with time, but, until we know more about such damage than we do now, he ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... it is. Noted you not how quiet and sluggish the dogs were at suppertime tonight? They would scarce come to receive a morsel of meat, and as often as not turned away in indifference, and curled themselves to sleep again. Indoors and out they are all alike. And did you not hear Jack Devenish say as he came in from his last round that he ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... could be seen between the posts of the felza was rippling with little steely waves. The line of the heavy beak cut the opening between the tapering point of the Lido and the misty outline of Tre Porti. Inside the white lighthouse tower a burnished man- of-war lay at anchor, a sluggish mass like a marble wharf placed squarely in the water. From the lee came a slight swell of a harbor-boat puffing its devious course to the Lido landing. The sea-breeze had touched the locust groves of San Niccolo da Lido, and caught up the fragrance of the June blossoms, filling the ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... road-ways and ravines filled with chestnut trees which gash the sides of the hill with their deep gulleys. The upper town is silent, clean, solemn, surmounted by the imposing ruins of the old chateau. The lower is a town of mills, watered by the Voulzie and the Durtain, two rivers of Brie, narrow, sluggish, and deep; a town of inns, shops, retired merchants; filled with diligences, travelling-carriages, and waggons. The two towns, or rather this town with its historical memories, its melancholy ruins, ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... is pathological. Men overmuch in studies and universities get ill in their livers and sluggish in their circulations; they suffer from shyness, from a persuasion of excessive and neglected merit, old maid's melancholy, and a detestation of all the levities of life. And their suffering finds its vent in ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... continued. As he lay awake before getting up, eager to finish his book, yet dreading the torrid temperature of his room, which made the brain sluggish and the hand slow, Goldthorpe saw how two or three energetic spiders had begun to spin webs once more at the corners of the ceiling; now and then he heard the long buzzing of a fly entangled in one ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... realization of it; an invention which proposes to substitute for the languishing feeble motion which is involved in the study of books—the kind of books which this author found invented when he came—for the passive, sluggish receptivity of another's thought, the living glow of pursuit and discovery, the flash ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... inhabit within the precincts of the said colony." The colonists were in fact to be his subjects. And having read aloud his commission, and having thus as it were shown his authority, Lord Delaware next spoke sternly to his new subjects. He warned them that he would no longer endure their sluggish idleness or haughty disobedience. And if they did not amend their ways they might look to it that the most severe punishment of the law would come upon them. Having thus spoken his mind plainly, to cheer them he told of the plentiful ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... conceivable consideration would I use it to whip up a tired or sluggish brain. Indeed, for me there is no working time so good as between breakfast and lunch, when there is not a trace of alcohol ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... eye, than this mighty volume of water, rushing, roaring, plunging, boiling, foaming, tossing its foam like snow into the face of heaven, throwing up rainbow after rainbow from unfathomable abysses, then sinking gradually into a sluggish calm, as if exhausted by the stupendous efforts it ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... confusion; which not being able to mend, all that I can do is to heed them as little as possible. "What care I for the house? I am only a lodger." On the whole, I have sat under the wing of Saint Swithin; uncheery, sluggish, murky, as the wettest of his Days;—hoping always, nevertheless, that blue sky, figurative and real, does exist, and will demonstrate itself by and by. I have been the stupidest and laziest of men. I could not write even to you, ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... pitch-water!" Then he took the oil of Nahma, And the bows and sides anointed, Smeared them well with oil, that swiftly 100 He might pass the black pitch-water. All night long he sailed upon it, Sailed upon that sluggish water, Covered with its mould of ages, Black with rotting water-rushes, 105 Rank with flags and leaves of lilies, Stagnant, lifeless, dreary, dismal, Lighted by the shimmering moonlight, And by will-o'-the-wisps illumined, ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... water are folk who sigh, and make this water bubble at the surface, as thine eye tells thee wherever it turns. Fixed in the slime, they say, 'Sullen were we in the sweet air that by the Sun is gladdened, bearing within ourselves the sluggish fume; now we are sullen in the black mire.' This hymn they gurgle in their throats, for they cannot ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... instructions, I have ordered A and B, servants of our tribunal, who are mindful of their own past responsibilities, to assist you and your staff[855]. Beware therefore, lest you incur the blame of corruptly discharging the taxpayer, or of sluggish idleness in the discharge of your duties, in which case your own fortunes will suffer from ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... mainmast was so pulverised by dry rot that a walking-stick could be thrust into it. Of another ship, the Ramilies—his favourite ship, too—he says, "It became water-logged whenever it blowed hard." The ships' bottoms grew a rank crop of grass, slime, shells, barnacles, &c., till the sluggish vessels needed almost a gale to move them. Marines were not yet invented; the navy had no uniform. The French ships of that day were better built, better armed, and sometimes better fought than British ships. A British 70-gun ship in armament ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... close, overcast summer evening. The clouds, which had been threatening all day, spread out in a dense and sluggish mass of vapour, already yielded large drops of rain, and seemed to presage a violent thunder-storm, when Mr. and Mrs. Bumble, turning out of the main street of the town, directed their course towards a scattered little colony of ruinous houses, distant from ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... disappear, vanish; dar por perdido consider lost. perdido, -a lost, ruined, done for, beside one's self, vanished, defeated, wandering. perdidoso, -a losing, loser. perdn m. pardon, forgiveness. perdonar pardon, forgive. peregrino, -a strange, wonderful. perezoso, -a sluggish. prfido, -a perfidious, treacherous. perfumado, -a sweet-scented, perfumed. perfume m. perfume, fragrance, sweet odor. pero conj. but, however. perpetuo, -a perpetual, continual. perro m. dog. perseguir pursue, importune, beset. persona f. ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... again; and at Glogau, and a good space farther, flows in that direction;—till once Bober strikes in, almost at right angles, carrying Oder with HIM, though he is but a branch, straight northward again. Northward, but ever slower, to the swollen Pommern regions, and sluggish ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... blind, sir," said the Professor; "believe me, they mean well—mainly to themselves, no doubt: that is only human nature. Every body in the community, whether energized or sluggish, has some weight attached to it; and the more that bodies can agree to combine the greater is their weight politically. One has to recognize that consensus of opinion carries with it a certain moral as well as physical force. Out of that springs ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... their day, were determined enemies to any thing like innovation on the long established customs of their caste; and although, unlike the said senators, they were made to bear all the burdens of the state, still did they not suffer themselves to be driven out of the sluggish habits in which sluggish animals, of every description, seem to feel themselves privileged to indulge. Whip and spur therefore were alike applied in vain, as to any accelerated motion in themselves; ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... their way. Higher up there are small rivers which run into this, where boats can go up and get to where the trees are not all crowded together, but more open like this patch here," he continued, waving his hand to where the forest retired back. "There are sluggish streams where you can wander for days, and camp ashore, and shoot all kinds of things. I used to at one time, when it was all new to me; and I collected skins and sent them to Cadiz and other European cities, where they sold well. But I have given all ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... ocean of molten fire. No wave agitated its placid bosom—no sound—no wind breathed over its fearful stillness. A lone rock, cold, barren, and dismal, yet like an oasis in a desert, lifted its gray summit from the sluggish surface. Upon this he stood, rigid and motionless, like a marble statue on its pedestal; and, ever and ever, around and above him, rushed to and fro shadowy forms, upon whose countenances was engraven ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... dissipation, and, after a brilliant start, finds that he is at the mercy of the cleverer villains who surround him; that he has been bought and sold like a sheep; that his character is gone, and his imagination become sluggish; and, finally, he has to escape from utter ruin by scarcely describable degradation. He writes a libel on one of his virtuous friends, who is forgiving enough to improve it and correct it for the press. In ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... after he has run away, and in most cases he will not want to do it again. A horse that has once run away, however, is never safe afterward. Indeed, in all the tens of thousands of mules that I have handled, I never yet found an habitual runaway. Their sluggish nature does not incline them to such tricks. If a team attempts to run away, one or two of them will fall down before they have gone far, and this will stop the remainder. Attempt to put one up to the same speed you would a horse, over a rough road, and you will have performed ...
— The Mule - A Treatise On The Breeding, Training, - And Uses To Which He May Be Put • Harvey Riley
... in his own words, he went back to England 'to play a game in which the stakes were heads!' From Bures, near Bayeux, in this department, where Henry was then holding his court, the four knights followed the Primate to Canterbury, sternly bent on showing their lord that they were neither 'sluggish nor half-hearted.' Of the abbatial buildings which stood here then few traces are left. But the handsome modern mansion built here by Guizot rests, I believe, on the massive foundations, and certainly incorporates some of the ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... sector's main areas of activity are agriculture and trading, with most private industrial investment predating 1980. The economy's base is agriculture, which employs 80% of the work force. Industry mainly processes agricultural items. Sluggish economic performance over the past decade, attributable largely to declining annual rainfall, has reduced levels of per capita income and consumption. A high foreign debt and huge arrearages continue to cause difficulties. In 1990 the International ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... decisive and incisive faculty of thought, his sureness and intensity of perception, his rapid and trenchant resolution of aim. To charge him with obscurity is about as accurate as to call Lynceus purblind, or complain of the sluggish action of the telegraphic wire. He is something too much the reverse of obscure; he is too brilliant and subtle for the ready reader of a ready writer to follow with any certainty the track of an intelligence which moves with such incessant rapidity, or even to realise with what spider-like ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... hours; for the boat was heavy, there was no wind to propel it, and the crew were obliged to ply their huge oars the whole way. In a word, this passage was the reverse of the first,— safe in every respect,—but so sluggish and tiresome, that I a hundred times wished myself again under the guidance of the wild lad, galloping before the hurricane over the foaming billows. From eight till ten the cold was truly terrible, ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... lost more and more of of its rapidity as it came out into a still wider valley, and became quite sluggish. We picked red berries that grew on bushes that overhung the water. They were sour and might have been high cranberries. One day I killed an otter, and afterward hearing a wild goose on shore, I went for the game and killed it on a small pond on which there were also some mallard duck. ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... by those singular steps, or ridges, formerly banks or shores oL antediluvian oceans, till it reaches the vicinity of the Holland river, a tortuous, sluggish, marshy, natural canal, flowing or lazily creeping into Lake Simcoe, at an elevation of upwards of seven-hundred and fifty feet above Lake Ontario, and emptying itself into Lake Huron by a series of rapids, called the Matchedash ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... nothing could be more slothful or slow, more given up to a life of ease and degeneracy, than the "reef-building polypifer"—to give him his scientific name. He is the hobo of the animal world, but, unlike the hobo, he does not even tramp for a living. He exists as a sluggish and gelatinous worm; he attracts to himself calcareous elements from the water to make himself a house—mark you, the sea does the building—he dies, and he leaves his house behind him—and a reputation for industry, beside which the reputation of the ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... block was alerted. The people, like some sluggish beast goaded reluctantly into action, began to make tentative movements toward Dennison, impelled by the outraged cries of ...
— Forever • Robert Sheckley
... breadth is said to be over two thousand three hundred and ten stadia, and its length not more than seven thousand one hundred and thirty-two stadia. In some parts 12 it is moorland, in others there are wooded plains, and sometimes it rises into mountain peaks. The island is surrounded by a sluggish sea, which neither gives readily to the stroke of the oar nor runs high under the blasts of the wind. I suppose this is because other lands are so far removed from it as to cause no disturbance of the sea, which indeed is of greater width here than anywhere else. ...
— The Origin and Deeds of the Goths • Jordanes
... equatorial parts of the earth performing their diurnal revolution with greater velocity than the rest, a larger circle being described in the same time, the waters thereabout, from the stronger centrifugal force, may be supposed to feel less restraint from the sluggish principle of matter; to have less gravity; and therefore to be more obedient to external impulses of every kind, whether from the winds or any ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... a wide, sluggish, clayey water, oozing out of fens, and in this part of its course it strained among some score of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to look on the bright side of things, to be optimistic; the melancholic tends to moodiness and gloom; the choleric is easily irritated, quick to anger; the phlegmatic is not easily aroused to emotion, is cold and sluggish. An individual seldom belongs exclusively to ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... caterpillar it sends out germ-threads which penetrate the caterpillar. Here the threads form long narrow spores which break off and form other spores until the body-cavity is entirely filled. The caterpillar soon becomes sluggish and dies. The fungus continues to grow until it has completely appropriated all of the insect's soft parts, externally a perfect caterpillar but internally completely filled with mycelial threads. Under favorable conditions this mycelial caterpillar, which has become a ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... than 60% of GDP. The country continues to derive most of its foreign exchange from tourism, remittances, and bauxite/alumina. Remittances account for nearly 20% of GDP and are equivalent to tourism revenues. Jamaica's economy, already saddled with a record of sluggish growth, will suffer an economic setback from damages caused by Hurricane Dean in August 2007. The economy faces serious long-term problems: high but declining interest rates, increased foreign competition, ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... exhausted his moral and physical energies." Such was the case between the eve of the battle of Moscow and the morning after his entry into Moscow: "a constant dry cough, difficult and intermittent breathing; the pulse sluggish, weak, and irregular; the urine thick and sedimentary, drop by drop and painful; the lower part of the legs and the feet extremely oedematous." Already, in 1806, at Warsaw, "after violent convulsions ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... without movement, the genial sunshine pouring upon him and saturating his miserable body with its warmth. A fine day, he thought. Perhaps he could manage to locate himself. By a painful effort he rolled over on his side. Below him flowed a wide and sluggish river. Its unfamiliarity puzzled him. Slowly he followed it with his eyes, winding in wide sweeps among the bleak, bare hills, bleaker and barer and lower-lying than any hills he had yet encountered. Slowly, ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... done with shy and large fish of these species. Early rising is necessary because they only feed freely, as a rule, from daybreak till about three hours after sun-rise. The heat of a summer or early autumn day makes them sluggish, but an hour or two in the evening is sometimes remunerative. The bait for them all should usually lie on the bottom, and it consists mainly of worms, wasp and other grubs, pastes of various kinds; and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... to the mills had been quarried from the solid rock, which rose abrupt and bare on one side of the cinder-covered road, while the river, sluggish and black, crept past on the other. The mills for rolling iron are simply immense tent-like roofs, covering acres of ground, open on every side. Beneath these roofs Deborah looked in on a city of fires, that burned hot and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... say there is nothing that one ought to see.' Or, 'I sat in the cathedral at Lucerne while the others were going round. The organ was playing, and it was such rest!' Or, again, after a day on the Lago di Como, 'It was glorious, and if you and Edward were here, perhaps the beauty would penetrate my sluggish soul!' ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... this concise, close way of Expression lies the chiefest Grace of Pastorals: for in my opinion there's nothing in the whole Composition that can delight more than those frequent stops, and breakings off. Yet lest in these too it become dull and sluggish, it must be quickned by frequent lively touches of Concernment: such as that of the ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin
... titter, played very prettily with his interrupter, the lecturer went back to his picture of the past, the drying of the seas, the emergence of the sand-bank, the sluggish, viscous life which lay upon their margins, the overcrowded lagoons, the tendency of the sea creatures to take refuge upon the mud-flats, the abundance of food awaiting them, their consequent enormous growth. "Hence, ladies and gentlemen," he added, "that frightful ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... as he gazed upon the schoolmaster, whose blue and yellow silk handkerchief was spread over the back of his head and tied under his chin. To quote Wordsworth then would have been like putting a match to a powder magazine. The flies were worst on the margin of a pond formed by the extension of a sluggish black stream. "Go on, Wilks, my boy, out of the pests, while I add some water plants to my collection;" but this, Wilkinson's chivalrous notions of friendship would not allow him to do. He broke off a leafy branch from a young maple, and slashed it about him, while the botanist ran along ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... courage. Already had grey December covered the tops of the surrounding mountains with the first-fallen snow. Here and there in the streets of Derbend lay a crust of ice, but over it the mud rolled in sluggish waves along the uneven pavement. The sea lazily plashed against the sunken turrets of the walls which descended to the water, a flock of bustards and of geese whizzed through the fog, and flew with a complaining cry above the ramparts; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... through clouds of mosquitoes and endless sloughs of mud. The river was out of its banks, and its quicksand flats were exceedingly dangerous to our pack animals, although the river itself at this point was a small and sluggish stream. ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... that there were no faster dogs in the world than our black-and-white Darling and her daughter Wizard. Not a hare could get away from them. But Uncle Seryozha said that the gray hares about us were sluggish creatures, not at all the same thing as steppe hares, and neither Darling nor Wizard would get near ...
— Reminiscences of Tolstoy - By His Son • Ilya Tolstoy
... how your armored fleets kept creeping o'er the deep, Too indolent to organize, too feeble to resist, Too timid to return the blow of Europe's mailed fist; And Asia's conquest seemed to you a matter of such ease That all your kings knew perfectly the part which each would seize. Of such a "sluggish, inert mass" why should you be afraid? You wanted ports and provinces for purposes of trade, And monster "spheres of influence", whose wealth could be controlled And plundered by your Governments to fill their vaults with gold; Hence, since it ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... form some picture of our aerial ocean. We can imagine the active atoms of oxygen floating in the sluggish nitrogen, and being used up in every candle-flame, gas-jet and fire, and in the breath of all living beings; and coming out again tied fast to atoms of carbon and making carbonic acid. Then we can turn to trees and plants, and see them tearing ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley
... when sea-winds pierced our solitudes, I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods, Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook, To please the desert and the sluggish brook. The purple petals, fallen in the pool, Made the black water with their beauty gay; Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool, And court the flower that cheapens his array. Rhodora! if the sages ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers
... body, are burdened by its weight; that in carrying about this heavy body and digesting this excessive quantity of food, much force is expended; and that, having but little remaining, the creature is sluggish. Compare with the cow a horse—an animal of nearly allied structure, but habituated to a more concentrated diet. Here the body, and more especially its abdominal region, bears a smaller ratio to the limbs; the powers are not taxed by the support of such massive viscera, nor the digestion of so ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... was with Ericson. Just as he thought the quest was hopeless, just as he thought the last opportunity was slipping by, his sluggish servant, Memory, woke up with a start, and fulfilled ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... shaky by half," said young Thorpe. "I haven't kept you up enough in your gymnastics lately. We must have some more leap-frog in the garden; and I'll bring my boxing gloves next time, and open your chest by teaching you to fight. Splendid exercise, and so good for your sluggish ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... especially that portion of the walk which lay upon the bridge. More life than was usual upon the bridge moved there on Sunday. Then the cars were crowded with people seeking the parks. Many crossed on foot, stopping to look idly down at the dark and sluggish water. ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... flying head over heels through the air at the rate of dozens of miles a minute. In spite of the innumerable circles he was describing per second, he thought; for thought is wonderful—sometimes as sluggish as flowing pitch, sometimes as instantaneous as light. He thought in a second, and willed. "Let me come down safe and sound. Whatever else happens, let me ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... tangle openings, and pink turf, Different colors, pale gray and green, purple, white, and gold, the play of light through the water, Dumb swimmers there among the rocks, coral, gluten, grass, rushes, and the aliment of the swimmers, Sluggish existences grazing there suspended, or slowly crawling close to the bottom, The sperm-whale at the surface blowing air and spray, or disporting with his flukes, The leaden-eyed shark, the walrus, the turtle, the hairy sea-leopard, and the sting-ray, Passions ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... him that we would be glad to hear how it all happened, and he began to tell us. At first the current of his memory—or imagination—seemed somewhat sluggish; but as his embarrassment wore off, his language flowed more freely, and the story acquired perspective and coherence. As he became more and more absorbed in the narrative, his eyes assumed a dreamy expression, and he seemed to lose sight of his auditors, and to ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... where to look for arbutus, for pipsissewa, for the early orchis; they have their particular haunts, and their surroundings are nearly always the same. The yellow pond-lily is found in every sluggish stream and pond, but Nymphaea odorata requires a nicer adjustment of conditions, and consequently is more restricted in its range. If the mullein were fragrant, or toad-flax, or the daisy, or blueweed, or goldenrod, they would doubtless be far less troublesome to the agriculturist. ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... bodies have been taken from the river, dragged from the sluggish pools of mud or dug out of the sand about Kernville during the day. Three hundred of them were spread out upon the dry sand along the river's bank at one time this afternoon. The sight is one that cannot be described, and is one of the most distressing ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... certain places, and others passing, if at all, for less than their inscribed value), both the mass, and, so to speak, fluidity, of the currency, are variable. True or perfect currency flows freely, like a pure stream; it becomes sluggish or stagnant in proportion to the quantity of less transferable matter which mixes with it, adding to its bulk, but diminishing its purity. [Articles of commercial value, on which bills are drawn, increase the currency indefinitely; and substances ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... that all that can be said will be anticipated. The living voice, the sparkling eye, and the beaming countenance will do much to put off the evil day, when we shall say, I have had enough. But the time will come in which we shall feel that this after all is but little, and we shall become sluggish, ourselves to communicate, or to excite the dormant faculties of our friend, when the spring, the waters of which so long afforded us the most exquisite delight, ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... rest of the lake was fair and smiling. It was closed in by a high overhanging bank, crested by two tall trees, whose tangled roots protruded through it like monstrous reptiles, while their branches cast a heavy shade over the deep, sluggish water. ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... to the tissues, and a general lowering of the vitality follows. The capillaries no longer supply the skin with its needed pabulum, hence it loses its elasticity and color—grows yellow and forms in furrows. The circulation being sluggish, the deposition of these earthy substances in the neighborhood of the various joints and the muscular structures is facilitated, and we have the stiffness of joints and muscular pains that usually accompany age. The supply of blood to the brain and nerve substance is curtailed in the same manner, ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... of the anemone, or actinia, is very sluggish. It will remain days and weeks in the same spot, and it moves only by sliding one edge of its base very slowly along the object to which it is fastened, and drawing the other after it. It can therefore never pursue its food, and appears to have no sense except that of touch, as a worm ...
— Harper's Young People, April 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... all day, a sluggish drizzle, soaking the earth, but not accumulating enough water on it to produce visible trickles flowing on the surface. The air was perfectly windless, so that no rain blew in on us as we lay; we ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... turn to cross a tiny toll bridge spanning a sluggish creek, the bed of which ran seepage oil from the wells beyond, ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... reasons why people feel so sluggish on first awaking:—the position in bed is cramped, the limbs are contracted, the circulation is impeded and the breathing is greatly hindered. When lying down, all the functions of ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry
... alone in death. The Indian was magnificent in mien, superb in confidence. Fear was not in him. His vast figure, nourished on sweet meat of the plains, fed by pure air and developed by continual exercise, showed like the torso of a minor Hercules, powerful but not sluggish in its power. His broad and deep chest, here and there spotted with white scars, arched widely for the vital organs, but showed no clogging fat. His legs were corded and thin. His arms were also slender, but ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough |
