"Somnambulist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... priest to lift her on the horse, and sat like a somnambulist, neither completely asleep nor wholly awake. The Christian bound two branches together with bark, in the form of a cross, which he held up high as they rode through the forest. The wood became thicker as they went on, and at last became ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... by Samt as follows: During the seizure, the individual behaves like a somnambulist. Sometimes he is dazed, mute, and immovable; at others, he talks incessantly; at still others, he goes on with his ordinary occupations, travelling, reading, and writing: but in every case his personality ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... dream-fabrics, in which one may ask himself whether this be hallucination or reality, and of necessity and with deep conviction declare for the latter, only to wake up after all ... He walked through the sparsely peopled, draughty streets, lowering his head against the wind, and moved like a somnambulist in the direction of the hotel, the best in the city, where he intended to spend the night. A bow-legged man, carrying a pole surmounted by a flame, walked along before him with a rocking sailor's gait, lighting ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... Marietta's question checked her glowing enthusiasm; it rang in her ears like the name-call in the "Somnambulist," ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... may sometimes give pain and cause irritation. If a man be walking in a trance towards the crumbling edge of some ghastly precipice, who—let me ask—acts with the greater charity, he who is afraid to interfere, and will calmly allow the somnambulist to walk on, till he fall over into the abyss; or he who will shout, and, if need be, roughly shake him from his fatal sleep, and so, perhaps, save him from destruction? Surely, to allow a fellow-creature to follow a path of extreme danger, for fear of wounding his susceptibilities ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan
... his wife too had relapsed into a thoughtful silence, and her movements were beginning to show a troubled discomfort. Finally Richards got up and strode aimlessly about the room, ploughing his hands through his hair, much as a somnambulist might do who was having a bad dream. Then he seemed to arrive at a definite purpose; and without a word he put on his hat and passed quickly out of the house. His wife sat brooding, with a drawn face, and did not seem to be aware that she was alone. Now and then ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... come out"; and walked away toward the elevator like a somnambulist doing what he is compelled to by preconception without making note of his environment. And Millard wondered as ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... been Mr. Pike's profundity of passion, that he paused like a somnambulist, actually rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, and seemed ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... reported to have raised more than one corpse to life himself, was heard to say, after having attended her professionally, that her waking bliss and peace, although unfortunately unattributable even to autocatalepsy, much less to somnambulist exaltation, was on the whole, however unscientific, almost ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... world resembled a stanza or melody composed in a dream; it was wonderfully excellent to the half-aroused intelligence, but hopelessly absurd at the full waking; that the first cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage; that at the framing of the terrestrial conditions there seemed never to have been contemplated such a development of emotional perceptiveness among the creatures subject to those conditions as ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... As a somnambulist, wandering in his sleep, walks along the edge of a precipice, over which he would fall if he were awake, so my Emile, in the sleep of ignorance, escapes the perils which he does not see; were I to wake him with a start, he might fall. Let us first try to withdraw him from the edge of the precipice, ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... not understand, reframed from questioning him, for they saw there was nothing to do but let him go ahead without interruption, just as care is taken not to wake a somnambulist abruptly. They had no mistrust of his motives, for the idea was simply untenable that Rouletabille was fool enough to hope to save himself from them by an imbecile subterfuge. No, they yielded to the impression his ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... Rayne "you are always in that state of blissful forgetfulness, and if you don't mind yourself you'll fall into a chronic state of dreaming, and then be no more to us than a veritable somnambulist, now, you wouldn't ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... with his black hair flowing over his shoulders, and with a sort of pea-coloured swaddling-cloth thrown round him. In his hand he held a long military musket, and he dashed along on the tips of his slippers with the air of a somnambulist and with the nimbleness of a tiger. At intervals a detonation ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... a somnambulist than a wakeful man, pulled out the large canvas bag he carried by way of a purse, ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... last exclamation Jean appeared, candle in hand, peering into the room and at Mlle. Fouchette in the dazed way more characteristic of the somnambulist than of one awake and in the full ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... "We found a somnambulist, too," said Jim, "Rob Roy McGregor. We tied him up at the roadside, in case he might wake up and ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... impatience; and, letting his friend cross the bridge, he went his way along the quays by himself. He walked on with his arms hanging beside him, with his face turned towards the ground, seeing nothing, but taking long strides like a somnambulist who is guided by instinct. On the Quai de Bourbon, in front of his door, he looked up, full of surprise on seeing a cab waiting at the edge of the foot pavement, and barring his way. And it was with the same automatical step that he entered ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... self-contained, into a creature possessed by an almost animal fury, struck Ian with horror, although he accepted it as a phenomenon of somnambulism. He approached but did not touch her, for he had heard that it was dangerous to awaken a somnambulist. Her voice sank rapidly to a loud whisper and he heard her articulate—"My husband! Mine! Mine!"—but in no tone of tenderness, rather pronouncing the words as a passionate claim to his possession. Then suddenly she ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... were still deserted, for all loungers and street idlers were still tarrying in Broad Street or on the castle square. Many a time Gabriel cast a look of questioning entreaty upon Rebecca, but she saw it not; she seemed to see nothing whatever, for her eyes were gazing afar off; like a somnambulist, she strode along, and even when the baby in her arms began to cry she took no notice of it, nor sought to comfort it with tender, soothing words. At last they had passed the gate behind the willow bank, and found themselves ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... of the long, deserted dining-room of the Hotel Baltet, when served with the warmed-over soup and entrees of the table d'hote, they ate voraciously, without saying a word, eager only to get to bed. All of a sudden, Excourbanies, who was swallowing his food like a somnambulist, came out of his plate, and sniffing the air about him, ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... should say she is! Why she married a somnambulist, who gets up in his sleep every morning ...
— The New Pun Book • Thomas A. Brown and Thomas Joseph Carey
... of the interruption was instant and startling. Mr. Hallowell, who, in the last few minutes, had believed he was listening to a voice from the dead, collapsed upon the shoulder of Rainey, who sprang to support him. Like a somnambulist wrenched from sleep, Vera gave a scream of fright, half genuine, half assumed, and swayed as though about to fall. Vance caught her in his arms. He turned on Gaylor, his ...
— Vera - The Medium • Richard Harding Davis
... somnambulist awakened suddenly, and there was now some meaning in his stare; a sort of alarmed speculation. He opened his mouth slowly. Flora struck in with forced gaiety. ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... almost grotesquely, like an earthenware pitcher. Great drops hung from his chin, from his uptilted nose, and his cotton shirt was dark. Slim Simpson, white before, was like a corpse; only his great boyish eyes stared out, as a somnambulist stares, as one hypnotised. Last of all, at the end of the line was the stranger from the East, representative of another world. Piteous, horrible, the others had been; but he—but for his clothes, his most intimate ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... that she had hitherto experienced seemed to her like a far-off dream, or as if dimly seen in the background of a sleeping memory. The past lay behind her, as if she had traversed it, covered with a veil like one in a swoon, or with the unconsciousness of a somnambulist. It was the first time that she had experienced the feeling, the impression, at once bitter and sweet, violent and celestial, of the game of life brilliant in its plenitude, its regularity and ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... old he lived alone high above a busy part of the town. He was a recluse. His black hair that fell in a slant across his forehead and the rigidity of his eyes gave him the appearance of a somnambulist. He found life unnecessary and submitted to it ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... you are a somnambulist, portends that you will unwittingly consent to some agreement of plans which will bring you anxiety ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... to be lifted upon the horse, and she sat on its back like a somnambulist, who was neither in a waking nor a sleeping state. The Christian priest tied two small green branches together in the form of a cross, which he held high aloft; and thus they rode through the forest, which became ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... artful planning called for imagination as well as mere invention. In the 'Edgar Huntley' of Charles Brockden Brown the veil of doubt skilfully shrouds the unsuspected and the unsuspecting murderer who did the evil deed in his sleep—anticipating the somnambulist ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... particular course. What risks we run! famine and fire and pestilence, and the thousand forms of a cruel fate,—and yet every man lives till he—dies. How did he manage that? Is there no immediate danger? We wonder superfluously when we hear of a somnambulist walking a plank securely,—we have walked a plank all our lives up to this particular string-piece where we are. My life will wait for nobody, but is being matured still without delay, while I go about the streets, and chaffer with this ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... of this draft, but could find no suitable opportunity to inquire. The astonishing deception, then, was carried out without anything resembling a hitch. Mrs. Leroux went through with her part in the comedy, in the dreamy manner of a somnambulist; and the duplicate Mrs. Leroux, who waited at the appointed spot, had achieved so startling a resemblance to her prototype, that Mr. Soames became conscious of a craving for a peg of brandy at the moment of setting eyes upon her. However, ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... life. My great-aunt had a cancer that was to be taken out. The other was suffering from a nervous affection, which rendered her a confirmed invalid. She was a most peculiar woman, and was a clairvoyant and somnambulist of the most decided kind. Though not ill-natured, she was full of caprices that would have exhausted the patience of the most ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... dark stone steps, and stopped before a small brown door. The card nailed upon it was like the one he had in his pocket-book. The name was 'Giuditta Astarita,' and under it, in another character, was printed the word 'Somnambulist.' ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... uncrowned, unthroned, and stunned by the dreadful shock that annihilated the Grand Army and the Old Guard, "wandered aimlessly about on the lost field," in the gloom that palled a fallen empire, as Hugo describes him, "the somnambulist ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... good-looking, I thought, this remarkable friend of Miss Haldin's brother. I watched him go up to the letter-box and then retrace his steps. Again he passed me very close, but I am certain he did not see me that time, either. He carried his head well up, but he had the expression of a somnambulist struggling with the very dream which drives him forth to wander in dangerous places. My thoughts reverted to Natalia Haldin, to her mother. He was all that was left to them of ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... the sexual feeling of pleasure[10]), that she herself imagined it must represent a second sort of consciousness, and finally that she stood in such contact with the beloved person as that of a hypnotized subject—somnambulist—with her hypnotist. For she perceived also the mother's lightest word when most soundly asleep, in spite of her difficulty in hearing at ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... my scene, made my bow, and went away in the midst of very feeble and spiritless applause. I walked like a somnambulist, and on reaching Madame Guerard and Mlle. de Brabender fainted away in their arms. Some one went to the hall in search of a doctor, and the rumour that "the little Bernhardt had fainted" reached my mother. She was sitting far back ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... clandestine meetings, whispered conferences and the like, within the first week of the lovely niece's coming to Fort Frayne. That notes had been fetched and carried by "Crappo" as well as Pete; that Miss Flower was either a somnambulist or a good imitation of one, as on two occasions the maid had "peeked" and seen her down-stairs at the back door in the dead hours of the night, or the very early morning. That was when she first came. Then, since the recapture, Miss McGrath felt confident that though never again detected down ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... chairs, and galloped up and down the hall like a lot of little boys on laths. I thought of that now, and although it was rather a serious business, for I didn't know what minute they would come to blows, I couldn't help laughing. The sight was weird enough. Every one looked like a somnambulist as he pulled and hauled. The young lady in the stateroom was doing her full share. She was screaming, 'Won't somebody let me out?' and hammering on the door. I guess it was her screaming and hammering that brought the conductor at last, or maybe he just came round in the course of nature to take ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... moment, as is usual with an absent man who is recovering the train of his ideas, or a somnambulist when he is suddenly awakened, and then answered, ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... opened his mouth,—and shut it. A marked change took place in the expression of his countenance. His eyes became fixed and staring,—resembling the glassy orbs of the somnambulist. For a moment I feared that he was going to give me an object lesson in the 'visitations' of which I had heard so much. I rose, with a view of offering him assistance. He ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... mortals! A glance sufficed to show to myself, at least, that he was in a state of tense nervous excitation, similar to that of a subject of mesmerism. A preternatural power seemed to possess him. He moved and spoke like a somnambulist, with the same insulation from surrounding minds and superiority to material obstacles. I had long known him as a brave officer; but here was something more than bravery, more than the fierce energy of the hour. His mien, always commanding, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... have searched through the woods again that night just as a somnambulist searches, for he found himself towards dawn in the valley before the idol. Then it was daybreak—the world was full of light and colour. He was seated before the house door, worn out and exhausted, when, raising his head, he saw Emmeline's figure coming out from amidst the distant ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... hesitated to interrupt her with a word, as though she were a somnambulist wandering on the ridge of a roof. But while Frau Rupius was speaking of her past, a period through which the blessedness of being loved ever beamed brightly as its chiefest glory, Bertha's soul began to thrill with the hope of a happiness for herself such as she had not yet experienced. ...
— Bertha Garlan • Arthur Schnitzler
... Mr. Scogan, catching him by the arm; dazed and hardly conscious of what he was doing or where he was, Denis stood there for a moment like a somnambulist. "What's the matter?" Mr. Scogan went on. "you ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... had driven a stake to mark the place which the somnambulist had pointed out as indicating the ...
— Deadwood Dick, The Prince of the Road - or, The Black Rider of the Black Hills • Edward L. Wheeler
... which were wide opened like those of a somnambulist, were fixed upon him, but I did not see him, nor could I clearly ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... excitement of a superhuman love. Even the rumours of everyday life died away at the door of the room where she lived in seclusion; and, in past years, when she had been taken from one to the other end of France, from one inland spa to another, she had passed through the crowds like a somnambulist who neither sees nor hears anything, possessed, as she was, by the idea of the calamity that had befallen her, the bond which made her a sexless thing. Hence her purity and childishness; hence she was but an adorable daughter of suffering, who, despite the growth ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... somnambulist, then, who wandered idly along through the silent streets, apparently seeing nothing of the closed doors and the shuttered windows on either hand? A Policeman, standing at the corner of Waterloo Place, stared ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... put on his great-coat—the identical one he used to wear before he went away—and his hat and his gloves, and walked out into the crowded streets of London, with feelings somewhat akin, probably, to those of a somnambulist. Having been so long accustomed to the free-and-easy costume of the mines, Ned felt about as uncomfortable and stiff as a warrior of old must have felt when armed cap-a-pie. His stalwart frame was some what thinner and harder than when he last took ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... He walked as a somnambulist down the street. In his misery he thought of Isabel Souders. He would go to her for comfort. She'd understand and believe in him! He yearned like a hurt child for the love and tenderness of some one ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... the skirt of his coat and detained a man, haggard, pensive, sinister, gloomy, who, dragged to that point by the current of the rout, had just dismounted, had passed the bridle of his horse over his arm, and with wild eye was returning alone to Waterloo. It was Napoleon, the immense somnambulist of this dream which had crumbled, essaying once ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... universal knowledge, of absolute being, has once dawned on the dazzled beholder? The charm and the savor of everything relative and phenomenal is gone. A man may go on talking, teaching, writing—but the spring of personal action is broken; his actions are like the actions of a somnambulist. ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... is sleeping; but, with a precision such as the somnambulist so strangely exerts, she trod the well-known paths slowly, but surely, toward that summer's bower, where her dreams had not told her lay crouching that most hideous spectre of her imagination, Sir Francis Varney. He who stood between her and her heart's best joy; he who had destroyed ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... be present at the inquiry as to the cause of death. He did so like a somnambulist, in a kind of vision which showed him men and things as in a dream, in a cloud of intoxication, with that sense of unreality which perplexes the mind at the time of the ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... from the trance very much what he puts into it." Even Deleuze could have told Drs. Tanner and Hall this fact—having ascertained it nearly a hundred years before (1813); for he wrote in his Critical History of Animal Magnetism (pp. 134-5), in reply to those who would question the somnambulist ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... for a little while stood looking at her; no ghost nor somnambulist was she in appearance, with those bright wakeful eyes, the curious smile that played about her lips, and the rich colour, perhaps from confusion or shame at being detected, surging back into her lately pale face. She ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... down again, overcome by astonishment and fear, in front of the transparent crystal bottle! I looked at it with fixed eyes, trying to conjecture, and my hands trembled! Somebody had drunk the water, but who? I? I without any doubt. It could surely only be I? In that case I was a somnambulist. I lived, without knowing it, that double mysterious life which makes us doubt whether there are not two beings in us, or whether a strange, unknowable and invisible being does not at such moments, when our soul is in a ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... Frankfurt-on-the-Main, and consequently spoke at once of the Jews, declared that they had lost all feeling for the beautiful and noble, and that they sold English goods twenty-five per cent. under manufacturers' prices. A fancy to humbug him came over me, and I told him that I was a somnambulist, and must beforehand beg his pardon should I unwittingly disturb his slumbers. This intelligence, as he confessed the following day, prevented him from sleeping a wink through the whole night, especially since the idea had entered his head that I, while in a somnambulistic ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... to have no more letters! As in the time of the siege, if you desire to obtain news of your mother or your wife, you have no other alternative than to consult a somnambulist or a fortune-teller. This is not at all a complicated operation; of course you possess a ribbon or a look of hair, something appertaining to the absent person. This suffices to keep you informed, hour by hour, of what she says, does, and thinks. Perhaps you would prefer ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... three o'clock in the morning, as accompanied by the waiter, who, like others of his tribe, had become a kind of somnambulist ex-officio, I wended my way up one flight of stairs, and down another, along a narrow corridor, down two steps, through an antechamber, and into another corridor, to No. 82, my habitation for the night. Why I should have been so far conducted from the habitable portion of ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... watch, he found the hour to be no later than half-past four: so swiftly (truly treading upon one another's heels) events had moved since the incident of the somnambulist. ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... a shudder; "for know you not that the sleep-walkers awake out of their dreams when they are called by name? I am a somnambulist, who, with smiling courage, moves along a dizzy height; call me by name, and I shall awake, and, shuddering, plunge into the abyss beneath. Ah, Henry, I hate my name, for it is pronounced by other lips than yours. For you I will not be named as other men call me. Baptize me, my Henry; give me another ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... originality, and even with a little eccentricity. For example, he believes in fortune-telling, and undertakes to predict to each one of us his fate. He has also great faith in magnetism, and has told me that a somnambulist had predicted to him, two years ago, that a member of the family of the Emperor would return to France and would dethrone Louis Philippe. He is going to Brazil to make some experiments in electricity. The other passenger is an ancient librarian of Don Pedro, who has preserved all the manners ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... dead. Jones was a very old friend of his. He was rather seriously affected. He must have, in an unconscious state of mind like a somnambulist, carried the dead body of Smith to his own house without being detected in the act. Then his own fevered imagination endowed Smith with the faculty of speech, dead though the latter was; and in a moment of—well—call it temporary insanity, if you please—he inflicted the wound on the forehead ...
— Indian Ghost Stories - Second Edition • S. Mukerji
... experienced the horror of a somnambulist who wakes up from a complacent dream of activity to find himself walking on a quagmire. A profound disgust of the ground on which he was making his way overcame him. Even the image of the charming girl ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... to the sun-dial when I determined to cry out. Then, remembering the shock experienced by a suddenly awakened somnambulist, and remembering that the Chinese ladder hung from the window at my feet, I changed my mind. Checking the cry upon my lips, I got astride of the window ledge, and began to grope for the bamboo rungs beneath me. I had found the first of these, and, turning, had begun ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... the point of addressing him and inquiring what he wanted so late at night, when he was arrested by an icy shiver; there was something so unearthly and ghost-like in the old man's manner and bearing as well as in his set, pallid face. He perceived that he was in presence of a somnambulist. Crossing the hall obliquely with measured strides, the old man went straight to the walled-up postern that had formerly led to the tower. He came to a halt immediately in front of it, and uttered a wailing sound that seemed to come from the bottom of his ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... distance Davray's words came to him, and in the dialogue that followed he spoke like a somnambulist. ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... Randal, in the hollow, dreamy tone of a somnambulist. "At her father's house, at Norwood! ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Lucien Bonaparte commands order. Several deputies rush at the general, and fiercely shake him by the collar. He turns faint with excitement and chagrin; but Lefebvre and a few grenadiers rushing up drag him from the hall. He comes forth like a somnambulist (says an onlooker), pursued by the terrible cry, "Hors la loi!" Had the cries at once taken form in a decree, the history of the world might have been different. One of the deputies, General Augereau, ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... door without having made up my mind why I had been running about in pyjamas at one o'clock in the morning; the somnambulist tale did all right to annoy Lambert, but I was not such an idiot as to try it on a don. I had to knock twice before he told me to come in, and when he saw me he only said "good-morning." So I said "good-morning" ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... was to be lost; his life depended upon instant action. And yet, comprehending this, he went to work slowly, and as a somnambulist might, acting almost by instinct, and well knowing that a blunder ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... in this volume. The characters in "The Detective and the Somnambulist," will be easily recognized by many readers in the South. As the family of Drysdale are still living and holding a highly respectable place in society, the locality is not correctly given, and ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton
... what the boys did out of school. He was glad enough to accept utter irresponsibility for that portion of his time; so that between the two parts of the day, as they passed through the life of the master, there was almost as little connection as between the waking and sleeping hours of a somnambulist. ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... who adopted, with childlike delight, all the dramatic poses of the detective of fiction. The finest among his many fine qualities was his boyish appetite for the colour and poetry of London. Basil, who walked behind, with his face turned blindly to the stars, had the look of a somnambulist. ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... how. Others on the upper floor neither awoke nor moved from their beds, but were suffocated without a cry. From the first an instinctive idea of the hopelessness of combating the conflagration possessed them all; to a blind, automatic feeling to flee the building was added the slow mechanism of the somnambulist; delicate women walked speechlessly, but securely, along ledges and roofs from which they would have fallen by the mere light of reason and of day. There was no crowding or impeding haste in their ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... attack, less than women in a retreat, the finest cavalry Europe had ever seen was flying like sand before the wind: but the somnambulist rode on in his sleep, forgetting that on these vast and billowing fields twenty-six thousand gallant French heroes had died for the sake of ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... Niura, but, turning around unexpectedly, remained as she was with her mouth open. Looking in the direction of her gaze, Jennka had to wring her hands. In the doorway stood Liubka, grown thin, with dark rings under her eyes, and, just like a somnambulist, was searching with her hand for the door-knob, as a point ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... the eighteenth century, fed on Voltaire, Diderot, Helvetius,—I, a son of the Revolution, who scoff at all that antiquity and the middle-ages tell us of demoniacal possession,—well, monsieur, I affirm that nothing but such possession can explain the condition of my child. As a somnambulist she has never been able to tell us the cause of her sufferings; she has never perceived it, and all the remedies she has proposed when in that state, though carefully carried out, have done her no good. For instance, she wished ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... to be a somnambulist?" asked Mr. Breynton. This was the first time he had remembered to be worried over any of Gypsy's peculiarities all day. He had spent so much time in looking at her, and kissing her, ...
— Gypsy Breynton • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... steps toward the door of the partition; then stands still with an expression of fruitless brooding on her face. She interrupts herself in this brooding and runs to the window. Having reached it she turns and on her face there reappears the expression of dull detachment. Slowly, like a somnambulist, she walks up to the table and sits down beside it, leaning her chin on her hand. SELMA KNOBBE appears ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... faithless wife, who becomes a harrying beast, behaves to her lord. He had no sleep. Having put out his candle, an idea took hold of him, and he jumped up to light it again and verify the idea that this room . . . He left the bed and strode round it, going in the guise of an urgent somnambulist, or ghost bearing burden of an imperfectly remembered mission. This was ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... forget the pest, though it rages about them. They bear a charmed life, and think not of destruction until it touches their idol, and then they die without a pang, like zealots for their persecuted creed. A man in love wanders in the world as a somnambulist, with eyes that seem open to those that watch him, yet in fact view nothing but their own ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... as if he had been suddenly dragged into consciousness out of a bad dream, and stood for a second like a half-awakened somnambulist. ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... one I dreaded the most. Not that I had ever walked myself, or, indeed, enjoyed the embarrassing friendship of any one who did. But I had read the books and knew all about it. I would sooner have faced a dozen ghosts than a somnambulist. ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... again, perhaps it is some half-idiotic negress, some herdsman living among his cattle, who receives the gift of vision; some Hindoo fakir, seated by a pagoda, mortifying the flesh till the spirit gains the mysterious power of the somnambulist. ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... example: suppose a man has taken to reading nothing but romances of love and chivalry. Attracted and fascinated by his heroes, his thoughts and intentions gradually turn more and more towards them, till one fine day we find him walking among us like a somnambulist. His actions are distractions. But then his distractions can be traced back to a definite, positive cause. They are no longer cases of ABSENCE of mind, pure and simple; they find their explanation in the PRESENCE of ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... leisurely examining the wall of the passage. Presently, drawing out a footrule from his pocket, he actually began to measure it! Miss Du Page saw no more. Hurriedly closing her door, she locked and bolted it, firmly convinced that Gabriel Lane was harboring in the guise of Uncle Sylvester a somnambulist, a ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... not my strength,—her powers were a surprise. She passed into new states of great advance, but I understood these no better. It were long to tell her peculiarities. Her childhood was full of presentiments. She was then a somnambulist. She was subject to attacks of delirium, and, later, perceived that she had spectral illusions. When she was twelve, she had a determination of blood to the head. 'My ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... As a somnambulist might, she drew her mantle closer, and, moving to the wayside, ascended the hill. The silver and green of the olives closed around her, and with them the branching dates. Above, a star left by the morning glimmered feebly. In a myrtle a bird began to ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... this chapter, but I wish to add a curious thing, while it is in my mind. It is only relevant in that it is connected with piloting. There used to be an excellent pilot on the river, a Mr. X., who was a somnambulist. It was said that if his mind was troubled about a bad piece of river, he was pretty sure to get up and walk in his sleep and do strange things. He was once fellow-pilot for a trip or two with George Ealer, on a great New Orleans passenger packet. During a considerable ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... he broke in; "you're talking like a somnambulist. Get some sleep. Have you arranged ...
— The Mystery Of The Boule Cabinet - A Detective Story • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... successive attacks until she was 14 years. At one time she was in a public hospital for three weeks on account of this. It was stated that this was chorea, but of course we can not be sure on this point. Annie was always regarded as a very nervous child; she was frequently a somnambulist until she was about 12. She is very nervous before the onset of menstruation. Of recent years she has been an excessive user of tea— at times before we first saw her she is said to have had 12 cups of tea in a day. At times she was then suffering from sleeplessness, ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... sight of; and it is almost certain that during the time of its disappearance it was lying in its hidden receptacle under the floor beside the mantelpiece. But in that case, who but Archibald could have put it there? and when could he have put it there save in his sleep? It is known that he was a somnambulist during his unenlightened period, though never in his alternate state; and if he, as a somnambulist, remembered the hiding-place of the rod, it follows that he must also have remembered the rod's use, and visited the secret chamber. Thus it would seem that only in the boy's waking hours was ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... fetishes. The baptism of blood is said still to be practised in parts of Russia by parents "to preserve their child from the temptations of the prince of darkness," and in 1874, "a country-school teacher of the Strassburg district, and his wife, upon the advice of a somnambulist, struck their own aunt with the fire-tongs until the blood flowed, with which they sprinkled their child supposed to have been bewitched by her" (361. 73). Here it is the blood of adults that is used, but the practice demands the child's also. According ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... way, I was half asleep in the saddle! It was a veritable Drowsyland that we moved through on horseback! The Dutchmen, the "fraus," the "spreading," the sauer-kraut—the conestogas, the red barns, the guttural voices, the strange faces—were these actual things, or the mere fancies of a somnambulist? Was I an officer of real cavalry making a real march; or a fanciful being, one of a ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... the night's work had so exhausted and worn out this actor in it, that he had become a mere somnambulist. He was too tired to rest in his sleep, until he was even tired out of being too tired, and dropped into oblivion. Late in the afternoon he awoke, and in some anxiety sent round to Eugene's lodging hard by, to inquire ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... to the wives who love them, were it only on account of the perpetual miracles wrought by true love in the sublime regions of the spiritual world. The woman who loves is, in relation to the man she loves, in the position of a somnambulist to whom the magnetizer should give the painful power, when she ceases to be the mirror of the world, of being conscious as a woman of what she has seen as a somnambulist. Passion raises the nervous tension of a ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... overthrow of a noble nature as manifested itself in him. I believe that he had not himself suspected the strength of his passion; and the sole resource for him, as I said often, was to quit the city—to engage in active pursuits of enterprise, of ambition, or of science. But he heard me as a somnambulist might have heard me—dreaming with his eyes open. Sometimes he had fits of reverie, starting, fearful, agitated; sometimes he broke out into maniacal movements of wrath, invoking some absent person, praying, beseeching, ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... permitted the whole procession of events, like some retreating army with death at its heels, to stagger across her brain. Down the old river-path to the Hewsons' house, she had walked as if asleep, the glazed eyes of the somnambulist, staring in front, but seeing nothing. Up to her bedroom she had climbed with but one thought in her mind, the fear of waking any one. She had struck a match outside the door, lest the scratching of it in the room should ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... days there has not been a wind in the trees, and the landscape reminds me of a somnambulist—the same silence, the same mystery, the same awe. The thick foliage of the ash never stirs; even the fingery leaves hanging out from the topmost twigs are still. The hawthorns growing out of a tumbled wall are turning yellow and brown, the hollyhocks are over, the chrysanthemums are beginning. ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... it. A man, who was left a widower, had an only child, a lovely daughter of about fourteen years old, in whose existence his own was completely wrapped up. She was subject at times to curious fits of self-absorption or absence of mind, and while she was under their influence she resembled a somnambulist rather than a sane human being awake. Her father would not take her to a physician, for he dreaded lest he should be advised to send her away from home, and he also feared the effect which any recognition of her disorder might have upon her. He believed that in obscure and half-mental ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... have experienced this unconsciousness which I attributed to Neb. I must have walked like a somnambulist, without any knowledge of my steps, and Top must have guided me here, after having dragged me from the waves... Come, ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... by a fact mentioned concerning a somnambulist in the Lausanne Transactions, who sometimes opened his eyes for a short time to examine, where he was, or where his ink-pot stood, and then shut them again, dipping his pen into the pot every now and then, and writing on, but never opening his eyes ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... concealment trembled again. The reaction had come. He drew a long breath, moved his stiffened limbs and glanced at his companion. Her face was like wax, pale as death and as colorless. Her fingers in his were ice-cold. Her eyes, dark with bewilderment, sought his blankly like those of a somnambulist. Renwick rose stiffly to his knees and ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... of thunderstorms, though he pretended that this was his first. The sight of the moon produced in him 'emotions of horror.' He had visions, like the Rev. Ansel Bourne, later to be described, of a beautiful male figure in a white garment, who gave him a garland. He was taken to a 'somnambulist,' and felt 'magnetic' pulls and pushes, and a strong current of air. Indeed the tutor, Daumer, shared these sensations, obviously by virtue of 'suggestion.' They are out of fashion, the doctrine of animal magnetism ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... erratic, conduct. Thus, they could not understand his excessive somnolence in the forenoon, nor his excessive activity at night. When they found him wandering along the hallways at night, or climbing over giddy roofs, or running in the hills, they decided he was a somnambulist. In reality he was wide-eyed awake and merely under the nightroaming compulsion of his early self. Questioned by an obtuse medico, he once told the truth and suffered the ignominy of having the revelation contemptuously labeled ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... the heat. One man, collarless, with waistcoat unbuttoned, and hat set far back from his forehead, waved a fan before his death-white flabby face, and set down one foot after the other with the heaviness of a somnambulist. Another, as they passed him, was saying huskily to the friend at his side, "I can't stand this much longer. My hands tingle as if they had gone to sleep; my heart—" But still the multitude hurried on, passing, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... impostor; but Joan of Arc might have been the reality which the Nun attempted to counterfeit; and the history of the true heroine might have suggested easily to the imitator the outline of her part. A revolution had been effected in Europe by a somnambulist peasant girl; another peasant girl, a somnambulist also, might have seen in the achievement which had been already accomplished, an earnest of what might be done by herself. While we call the Nun, too, an impostor, we are bound ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... psychology. He finds pleasure in tracing the workings of the brain in times of emotional stress. The description of a sleepwalker digging a grave—a picture which captivated Shelley's imagination—is the starting-point of the book. Edgar Huntly is impelled by curiosity to track him down. The somnambulist, Clithero, has, in self-defence, killed the twin-brother of his patron, Mrs, Lorimer, to whom he is deeply attached. Obsessed by the idea of the misery his deed will arouse in her mind, he attempts, in a moment ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... overcoat with its high waist band and its amazing lapels that stick up over his shoulders like the ears of a jackass, here he comes embroidered and scented and looking like a cross between a soft-shoe dancer and a somnambulist. And here he takes his position, holding his gloves in his hand, his Prince of Wales derby jammed ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... room close behind the somnambulist. It is sometimes possible to question a person in that condition, and to learn what he would not ...
— The Crime of the French Cafe and Other Stories • Nicholas Carter
... have been prone to this species of superstition; from which, even the English of education were far from being free, a century since. Mademoiselle Normand existed in the present century, even, in the sceptical capital of France. But, the somnambulist is taking the place of the ancient soothsayer, in ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... quietly by, plucking at the tall bramble-bushes, till the ripe young berries fell down upon Helga's hands, as if inviting her to eat. Patiently she allowed herself to be lifted on the horse, and sat there like a somnambulist—as one who walked in his sleep. The Christian bound two branches together with bark, in the form of a cross, and held it on high as they rode through the forest. The way gradually grew thicker of brushwood, as they rode along, till at last it became ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... the homestead and the residence of a relation in its near vicinity. We remember as it were but yesterday the solemnity which sat upon the faces of the assembled neighbors, as they awaited the signal-groan from an adjoining apartment, to which, at about seven P. M., the Somnambulist usually retired for the night. When the door was opened the crowd pressed in. The sleeper, dressed in white muslin, lay straight and motionless in bed; her eyes closed, her face white and inflexible as marble; ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... reply, but slowly, and with the stiff movements of a somnambulist, he approached the spot to which he had pointed, stooped, picked up something, and said: "My folly is not deserving of ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... opened the first door I came to. Two women, one fat and the other slim, sat on straw-bottomed chairs, knitting black wool. The slim one got up and walked straight at me—still knitting with downcast eyes—and only just as I began to think of getting out of her way, as you would for a somnambulist, stood still, and looked up. Her dress was as plain as an umbrella-cover, and she turned round without a word and preceded me into a waiting-room. I gave my name, and looked about. Deal table in the middle, ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... conceive of it otherwise than as corresponding with her outward symmetry. To his thought it slumbered, as her form might repose upon her couch, in a death-like trance. She went and came among them like a somnambulist, guided by ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... with madame, like a somnambulist. She was to leave me to sleep alone that night. I had lost the talismanic pin I always stuck in the bolster of my bed. Uncle Silas sent up spiced claret in a little silver flagon. Madame abstractedly drank it off, and threw herself on my bed. I believed she was feigning ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... within him, . . emotions which he could neither control nor analyze,—and though he felt himself fully alive,—alive to his very finger-tips, he was ever and anon aware of a curious sensation like that experienced by a suddenly startled somnambulist, who, just on the point of awaking, hesitates reluctantly on the threshold of dreamland, unwilling to leave one realm of shadows for another more seeming true, yet equally transient. Entangled in perplexed reveries he scarcely noticed the brilliant crowds of people that were flocking hither and ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... suppressed, in his final edition, is the Latin translation of 'The Somnambulist' by his son. This will be republished, more especially as it was included by Wordsworth himself in the second edition of his ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... called hypnotic suggestion is nothing but the artificial selection of one idea to the exclusion of all others, so that it passes into action. Natural somnambulism similarly exhibits the force of ideas; whatever idea is conceived by the somnambulist, he carries into action. The kind of dream in which children often live is not without analogy to somnambulism. The fixed idea is another instance of the same phenomenon, which is produced in the waking state, and which, when exaggerated, becomes monomania, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Uriel arose and went through the pillared portico, speaking no word. The congregants, standing in groups about the canal-bridge, still discussing the terrible scene, moved aside, shuddering, silenced, as like a somnambulist that strange figure went by, the shoulders thrown back, the head high, in superb pride, the nostrils quivering, but the face as that of the dead. Never more was he seen of men. Shut up in his study, he worked feverishly day and night, writing ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... We put our books there, and used practically to live there for weeks together. That was just after I came into the place, before I went abroad. Alice was sixteen. I can see her now sitting in the doorway of the little house, hour after hour, staring into the woods like a somnambulist, one arm behind her head. One day I said to her: "Alice, what are you thinking of?" "Myself!" she said. So then I laughed at her, and teased her. And she answered quite quietly, "I know it is a pity—but I ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Like a somnambulist aroused from her sleep Natasha went out of the room and, returning to her hut, fell sobbing ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... ears from below the sound of Madame Prune's long prayers, ascending through the floor, monotonous as the song of a somnambulist, regular and soothing as the plash of a fountain. It lasts three quarters of an hour at least, it drones along, a rapid flow of words in a high nasal key; from time to time, when the inattentive spirits are not listening, it is accompanied by a clapping of dry palms, or by harsh sounds from ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Russian Peasant.' She then abandoned painting for sculpture, and one month later gained the highest commendations for a bust of 'Ariadne.' She then began to study the plastic art from life. Dissatisfied with herself, although her 'Somnambulist' gained a prize, Miss Ries left Moscow for Paris, but on her way stayed in Vienna, studying under Professor Hellmer. One year later, at the Vienna Spring Exhibition, she exhibited her 'Die Hexe.' Here is no traditional witch, though ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... represents the beginning of the battle on the side of the French. There on a slight elevation, in the wheatfield of June, sitting on his white horse, with his triangular hat lifted in silent salutation, surrounded by the princes and marshals of his Empire, sits the sardonic somnambulist, while before him on the left the Cuirassiers of the Guard, on their tremendous horses gathered out of Normandy, plunging at full gallop, bearing down through the broken wheat, with buglers in the van and sabers flashing high and bearded mouths wide open with ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... happiness, just as a somnambulist, having attained the peak of a roof, hears a voice, awakes, and falls crushed ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... was not to be moved, I once more threw myself on the lounge. I did not sleep; but, like a somnambulist, only dozed now and then; starting from my dreams; while Harry sat, with his hat on, at the table; the brandy before him; from which he occasionally poured into his glass. Instead of exciting him, however, to my amazement, the ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... must have been after midnight, for the fire was out—I was roused from sleep by Ed, who was moving about the shed. I thought at first that he was walking in his sleep,—for he was a somnambulist,—and gave him ...
— The Youth's Companion - Volume LII, Number 11, Thursday, March 13, 1879 • Various
... arguments employed by Mr Townshend in favour of the possibility of clairvoyance, are the authenticated cases of normal sleepwalking; these have been very little examined, but appear, in one respect, strikingly to differ from mesmeric coma. The eyes of the somnambulist are said to be open, and therefore there is every optical power of vision, and an increase of ordinary visual perception is all that is requisite. The acts performed by the sleepwalker are, moreover, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... post our bald somnambulist as missing from his flat We take soundings for the digger with a prop. By the day the board is gratis, by the week it's half of that; For the season there's a ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson
... fall is not apt to hurt a somnambulist, for the reason that in sleep the muscles are entirely relaxed; but the jar woke Kitty, and she found herself, clad only in her little white nightgown, lying in the midst of the ...
— Marjorie at Seacote • Carolyn Wells
... remaining on his knees, continued to look up to heaven. Then he rose slowly, and like a seer or a somnambulist, with eyes opened but seeing nothing, he went to his piano without knowing what he was doing. He sat down on the stool, and did not know it; his hands touched the keys and drew magnificent chords from them, and he did not hear them. He only heard the thousands of seraphic voices which in his ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... drawing himself to his full height, walked slowly down the street. The bullets were whistling around him and dropping at his side. He quietly walked on. He reached the house in which he was sojourning, and ascended the stairs slowly and with dilated eyes, like a somnambulist. He reached the first landing, and had turned already to the second staircase. All at once invisible influences seemed to stop his progress; his face commenced quivering, his eyes sparkled, and turned ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... walking in his sleep went to bed all right one night, but when he awoke he found himself on the street in the grasp of a policeman. "Hold on," he cried, "you mustn't arrest me. I'm a somnambulist." To which the policeman replied: "I don't care what your religion is—yer can't walk the ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... For the second time in his life, and to a greater extent than the first time, he was subjugated and controlled by one dominant idea. Throughout each day all things around him were dreamlike and unsubstantial, and he performed many actions as automatically as if he had been a somnambulist. He walked and talked or rode on the shaft of a wagon without in the least troubling to think what he was doing, and every time his thought became active it seemed to spring into vigor again merely to obey the prompting of the inner voice that ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... read and reread it with minutest care. A voice seemed to present the girl's case, arguing that she had no conscious part in the manifestations. "It is possible for one in deep trance to rise and manipulate horns, bells, and guitars at the suggestion of another precisely as a somnambulist walks without intention of wrong-doing, without conscious knowledge of what is being done. She might have had a veritable hand in to-night's drama and still be innocent. Hypnotism is now pretty thoroughly proven—and to Clarke you must look for ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... Mystischen Erscheinungen der Menschlichen Natur) of Catherine Emmerich, the somnambulist nun, who, when dying, saw again the whole of her past life, would incline one to think that this strange phenomenon, which traditional Catholicism appears to have called the "Private Judgment," and which theosophy defines ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... outside could enter, even her eyes took in no image of the prospect they dwelt on. Courant's kiss had brought her to a place toward which, she now realized, she had been moving for a long time, advancing upon it, unknowing, but impelled like a somnambulist willed toward a given goal. What was to happen she did not know. She felt a dread so heavy that it crushed all else from her mind. They had reached a crisis where everything had stopped, a dark and ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... above me, And Night is above the night. The sea is beside me soughing, or is still. The earth as a somnambulist moves on In a strange sleep ... A sea-bird cries. And the cry wakes in me Dim, dead sea-folk, my sires— Who more than myself are me. Who sat on their beach long nights ago and saw The sea in its silence; And cursed it or implored: Or with the Cross defied; ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice
... mood of repugnance and satisfaction. He walked all the way home. Finding the drawing-room dark, he went upstairs, and spent some time between the bedroom and the dressing-room, changing his clothes, going to and fro with the air of a thoughtful somnambulist. But he shook it off before going out again to join his wife at the house of the ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... all the inanimate things which, on the spoken stage, cannot act at all, the leading actors in the films. But they need not necessarily act to a diabolical end. An angel could have as well been brought from the cabinet as a murderous somnambulist, and every act of his could have been a work of beneficence and health and healing. I could not help but think that the ancient miracle play of the resurrection of Osiris could have been acted out with similar simple means, with a mummy case and great ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... without misgiving, and attained it without difficulty. My one dearest object I deemed secure long before I opened my lips and asked expressly for it. I think I walked through life at that time like a somnambulist; for I have since seen that I must have been piling mistake upon mistake until out of a chaos of meaningless words and smiles I had woven a Paphian love temple. At the first menace of disappointment—a thing as new and horrible to me as death—I fled the country. I came back with only the ruins ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... somnambulist's deliberate progress toward the mouth of the well continued he called her name softly. "Dona Isabel!" Then he repeated it ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... somnambulists, and, from some odd instinct or other, wishing to know what the hour was, got together a number of their watches, for the purpose of comparing them, as it would seem. Among them was a repeater, belonging to our young Marylander. He happened to wake up while the somnambulist was in his chamber, and, not knowing his infirmity, caught hold of him and gave him a dreadful shaking, after which he tied his hands and feet, and so left him till morning, when he introduced him to a gentleman used to taking care of such cases ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... the Key-stone, with eyes whose ray Grows dreamy like a somnambulist, and Ethel murmurs, "I saw you to-day At the church ...
— Victor Roy, A Masonic Poem • Harriet Annie Wilkins
... way across the width of the granary. Bags of musty smelling wheat stood at one end of this little room. Evidently Mr. Motherwell wished to discourage sleep-walking in his hired help, for the floor ended abruptly and a careless somnambulist would be precipitated on the old fanning mill, harrow teeth and other debris which ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... rejected, and everything closing in on me, I was in a complete maze. It was not till yesterday, when I was alone again, after having gone over my defence with Mr. Bramshaw, and shown what I could prove, that I saw exactly how it must have been, as clear as a somnambulist. I sometimes could fancy I had seen Sam listening at the window, and have to struggle not to think I knew him ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... The blood followed, and with the life-stream her strength flowed away. The hand that supported her head suddenly dropped, and she fell back. The man had been standing over her, speechless, motionless, breathless, like some wretched somnambulist, suddenly awakened in the commission of a crime, and gazing in horror, amazement, and unbelief upon the work of ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... Madame like a somnambulist. I rather quickened my step as I drew near my room. I went in, and stood a phantom at the window, looking into the dark quadrange. A thin glimmering crescent hung in the frosty sky, and all heaven was strewn with stars. Over the steep roof at the other side spread ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... reading the marquis's letter, to prepare the way for vengeance just as she had lately been preparing all for love, she was in that stage of mental intoxication which makes real life like the life of a somnambulist. But when she saw her house surrounded, by her own orders, with a triple line of bayonets a sudden flash of light illuminated her soul. She judged her conduct and saw with horror that she had committed a crime. ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... The Mystic's Vision Seeking From 'Tarantella' Songs of Summer O Moon, Large Golden Summer Moon A Parable Love's Somnambulist ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... Your uncle was the first to speak. He said to your aunt, 'God bless my soul, Dahlia, what are you doing here?' To which she replied, 'Well, if it comes to that, my merry somnambulist, what are you?' Your uncle then said that he thought there must be burglars in the house, as he had ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... 'if you place your hand in that of a somnambulist who, when awake, can press it only up to a certain average of tightness, you will see that in the somnambulistic state—as it is stupidly termed—his fingers can clutch like a vise screwed up by ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... one cognizant of it. But, Plume, others saw what he saw, and what is now known to many people on the post. Others than Wren were abroad that night. One other was being carefully, tenderly brought home—led home—to your roof. You did not know—Mrs. Plume was a somnambulist?" ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... name. The gate leading into the garden was open; I arose without replying and entered it, I stopped before a plot of grass in the centre of the garden; I was walking like a somnambulist, without knowing ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... before. She stooped low, stood up again and came towards him. From behind an unseen hand closed the panel. She came to him with her arms outstretched and all the wonderful things of life and love in her shining eyes. That faint touch of the somnambulist had passed. She came to him as she had never come before. She was a very real ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... magnetic property possessed and exerted by Weir. Such things do not occur without cause, and he was not the sort of man to yield himself, physically and mentally, his will and his perceptions, to the unconscious caprice of a somnambulist. And the scene had cut itself so deeply into the tablets of his memory that he found himself forgetting more than once that it was not an actual episode of his past. He wished he could see Weir, and hear her account of her mental ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... fickleness of the sex, as all men do when they are angry with any one woman in particular. But his exhibition must go on in spite of wretchedness; and he went about mechanically, talking of curtains and candles, and music, and attitudes, and pauses, and emphasis, looking like a somnambulist whose "eyes are open but their sense is shut," and often surprising those concerned by the ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... perceive that the little Gottfried in the story thought of this with such intensity, and with such perfect faith in its truth, as to cause him to walk in his sleep, like a somnambulist. No doubt your dear mother can tell you many strange and extraordinary stories of somnambulists, who do the most wonderful and startling things while in this kind of trance state, of which they are ...
— The Big Nightcap Letters - Being the Fifth Book of the Series • Frances Elizabeth Barrow |
