"Somnolency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was not read at one time, but in several instalments, and accompanied by various comments from different persons at the table. The company were in the main attentive, with the exception of a little somnolence on the part of the old gentleman opposite at times, and a few sly, malicious questions about the "old boys" on the part of that forward young fellow who has figured occasionally, not always to his advantage, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Britannia's Pastorals that their perusal sends you to sleep. It had been subtler criticism, as well as more amiable, to observe that you can wake up again and, starting anew at the precise point where you dropped off, continue the perusal with as much pleasure as ever, neither ashamed of your somnolence nor imputing it as a fault to the poet. For William Browne is perhaps the easiest figure in our literature. He lived easily, he wrote easily, and no doubt he died easily. He no more expected to be read ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... not general. The old-fashioned whaling tubs kept the seas, while the growing scarcity of the whales and the blow to the demand for oil dealt by the discovery of petroleum, checked the development of the industry. Now the rows of whalers rotting at New Bedford's wharves, and the somnolence of Nantucket, tell of ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... which is, to call my alumni at 6.30, to accompany them in a walk before breakfast, and map out the scheme of reading which they are to follow until luncheon. I only trust that this isolated omission of a plain duty may not wreck their futures! As a result of my somnolence, I had but ten minutes in which to prepare two lectures on subjects of which I had previously been ignorant; but, thanks to Mr. Gow's Handbook to School Classics—a work with which my pupils are unfamiliar because I have not yet told them to read it—I succeeded in displaying an erudition ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... strongly against the proposal to extinguish the Irish Parliament. Eloquent speakers like Plunket warned that body that suicide was the supreme act of cowardice, besides being ultra vires. The neighbouring towns and counties joined in the clamour. The somnolence of Cornwallis, his neglect to win over opponents by tact or material inducements, and the absence of any Ministerial declaration on the subject, left all initiative to the Opposition. On 24th December Cooke wrote to Auckland in ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... was breathing heavily, taking full toll of slumber, for he was not so very strong and the day's happenings had exhausted him greatly. Blaine sought shelter under another angle of the basement, and after a vigorous struggle against somnolence, finally dropped off. ...
— Our Pilots in the Air • Captain William B. Perry
... thanks for the testimonial; many thanks for your blind, wondering letter; many wishes, lastly, for your swift recovery. Insomnia is the opposite pole from my complaint; which brings with it a nervous lethargy, an unkind, unwholesome, and ungentle somnolence, fruitful in heavy heads and heavy eyes at morning. You cannot sleep; well, I can best explain my state thus: I cannot wake. Sleep, like the lees of a posset, lingers all day, lead-heavy, in my knees and ankles. Weight on the shoulders, torpor on the brain. And there is more than too much ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... The ward was in the somnolence of mid-afternoon. The nearest patient, a man in a wheel-chair, ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... for the third time, looked at his watch, sighed, lifted his finely arched brows with a whimsical smile for his own somnolence; then, with an "I beg your pardon, my love," took out a lace handkerchief, spread it over his face and head, and, crossing his legs, sunk back into the capacious corner of the coach. In three minutes ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... in the afternoon of the next day, and house and garden alike wore a rather uncomfortable air of heat fatigue and somnolence. The blinds were down in all the windows that faced south and west, with the object, no doubt, of keeping them cool—a most desirable condition of things, but one, on the present occasion, but imperfectly realized. Nor were things much better to the east of ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... now speaking only of the early developments of physical phenomena exhibited by the first magnetizers and mesmerizers—the conjurers by passes and somnolence and other purely physical processes; the crazy and idiotic performances of their successors, the so-called spiritualists, with their grotesque and disgusting pretence of intercourse with the spirits of the dead through the legs of their tables and chairs, seemed to me the ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... silent. Madame Nanteuil began to nod. Then, being aroused from her somnolence by the servant, who brought in the salt-cellar ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... make clear the quality of my doubts. I think the English mind cuts at life with a dulled edge, and that its energy may be worse than its somnolence. I think it undervalues gifts and fine achievement, and overvalues the commonplace virtues of mediocre men. One of the greatest Liberal statesmen in the time of Queen Victoria never held office because he was associated with a divorce case a quarter of a century ago. For him to have taken ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... aroused from this state of somnolence, awakened as if by a blow in the chest, and imperiously forced to fix our attention on what we saw, for amidst this whirl of strange sights, one stranger than all attracted our eyes and seemed to say ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... had careered for a brief space over the woods; but the brooding heat, the mastering silence, the feeling that multifarious quiescent living things were ready to start into action, all took the senses with somnolence. That drowsy joy, that soothing silence which seemed only intensified by the murmur of bees and the faint gurgle of water, were like medicine to the soul; and it seemed that the conception of Nirvana became easily understood as the delicious open-air reverie grew more ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... appropriately, since it helps to bring out the close relation between waking and sleeping illusion. The mind does not pass suddenly and at a bound from the condition of dream-fancy to that of waking perception. I have already had occasion to touch on the "hypnagogic state," that condition of somnolence or "sleepiness" in which external impressions cease to act, the internal attention is relaxed, and the weird imagery of sleep begins to unfold itself. And just as there is this anticipation of dream-hallucination in the presomnial condition, so there is the survival of it in the postsomnial ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... countess cried out across the table, suddenly waking from her somnolence; she had overheard the baroness in spite of the low tone in which the dialogue had been carried on; her voice was so mellifluously sweet, one instinctively scented a touch of hidden poison in it—"Mees Gay, there is a question being put at this ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... had been moving rapidly with Lewis, they had by no means been at a standstill at Nadir since that troubled day on which he had rebelled, quarreled, and fled, leaving behind him wrath and tears and awakened hearts where all had been apathy and somnolence. ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... sea-gulls, shrieking, retired to their hiding-places in the rocks. The sea commenced to disappear beneath a thin mist. The lighthouse of Europe shone like a diamond from afar in the heavens above the Strait, which were still clear. A sweet somnolence seemed to arise from the dying day, enveloping all Nature. The two human atoms, lost in this immensity, felt themselves invaded by the universal tremor, oblivious to all that but a short time before had constituted ...
— Luna Benamor • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Cumberland fell-side with a mutton sandwich and a mountain stream. You wish it even although you hate mutton sandwiches and like meringues filled with Alpine strawberries and whipped cream; for the clatter and the clack going on around you, and the asphyxiating air, bring on a demoralising somnolence that you despise and cannot easily throw off. You sit about as lazily as anyone else half through the golden afternoon, drink a cup of coffee at four o'clock, look at mountains of cake, and then start for the restaurant, which is said to be eine gute Stunde from the hotel. You find, as you expected, ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... provide botanical quips, or, conversely, hired raw writers who had inhabited the fringes of Hollywood since Mack Sennett days on the strength of a single agrostological illusion. Newspapers ran long articles on Cynodon dactylon and the editors of their garden sections were roused from the somnolence into which they had sunk upon receiving their appointment and shoved into doubleleaded ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... sponge over my poor brain even as I pass it over the blackboard. The network of ideas remains and forms as it were a moving cobweb in which repose wriggles and tosses, incapable of finding a stable equilibrium. When sleep does come at last, it is often but a state of somnolence which, far from suspending the activity of the mind, actually maintains and quickens it more than waking would. During this torpor, in which night has not yet closed upon the brain, I sometimes solve mathematical difficulties with which I struggled ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... whole a salutary effect, although many of the objects of attack seem, at this date, to have been hardly worth the ammunition. But the explosion cleared the muggy air like a thunder-storm and denned many an issue that it was well to have defined. Writers of every ilk were shaken out of their somnolence and compelled to look in the direction of Weimar; and when it was a question of taking sides, where was the force that could hope to make headway against the combined strength of Goethe and Schiller? The odds were too great; there was nothing to do but to grumble ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... and sprang to the ground. He, too, immediately dismounted. She felt very wide-awake now, as though the sudden consciousness of that encircling grasp, or something in his glance before she slipped from him, had startled away the torpor of somnolence. ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... moment when a man first recognizes that he is out of place in the football field, that he cannot stoop with the old agility to pick up a skimming stroke to cover-point, that dancing is rather too heating to be decorous, that he cannot walk all day without undue somnolence after dinner, or rush off after a heavy meal without indigestion. These are sad moments which we all of us reach, but which are better laughed over than fretted over. And a man who, out of sheer inability to part from boyhood, clings desperately and with ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... pealing of the high organ; children afield, bathers by the brookside, ramblers on the brambly common, kite fliers in the windy and cloud navigated sky; and then, at another cadence of the hymn, back again to church, and the somnolence of summer Sundays, and the high genteel voice of the parson (which he smiled a little to recall) and the painted Jacobean tombs, and the dim lettering of the ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... the middle of an oppressive afternoon. The days of late had assumed an extraordinary oppressiveness for the season of the year. She came amidst the peaceful calm when all farm life seems to be wrapped in a restful somnolence, when the animal world has spent its morning energies, and seeks rest that it may recuperate for the affairs surrounding its ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... that lent an element of luxury to the simple meal. The warm room, the excellent food, better cooked than any they had had for seven months, produced a gentle somnolence. The thought of the inviting look of the white-covered bed upstairs lay like a balm on the spirits of men not born to roughing it. As the travellers said an early and grateful good-night, the Boy added sleepily something about ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... after whiskey. The orders from brigade headquarters had been strict against illuminations, for the Confederates were near at hand in force, and a surprise was proposed as well as feared. A tired and sleepy youngster, almost dropping with the heavy somnolence of wearied adolescence, he stumbled on through the trials of an undiscernible and unfamiliar footing, lifting his heavy riding-boots sluggishly over imaginary obstacles, and fearing the while lest his toil were labor misspent. It was a dry camp, he felt dolefully certain, or there would have been ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... drowsy after the long, oppressive day, seemed to rouse themselves to renewed interest. Lebrun, like a big, shaggy dog, shook himself free from creeping somnolence. Robespierre smiled between his thin lips, and looked across at Merlin to see how the situation affected him. The enmity between the Minister of Justice and Citizen Droulde was well known, and everyone noted, with added zest, that the former wore a keen ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... expert swimmer, but he could keep above water, and was particularly fond of floating. One summer day as he lay on the surface of the tepid sea quite unconcernedly, the sense of comfort led to a slight somnolence. All at once he felt the water heaving under him as if suddenly parted by some heavy body, and then seething against his person. In an instant he thought of a shark, and turned quickly to swim away from the monster; but whether from hurry, fright, or ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Polish • Various
... who arrived upon this post, advancing with head erect and light elastic tread, no one could have recognised Pepe the sleeper— Pepe, habitually plunged in a profound state of somnolence—Pepe, of downcast mien and slow dragging gait—and yet it was he. His eyes, habitually half shut, were now sparkling in their sockets, as if even the slightest object could not escape him even in ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... a City that was an important port in Revolutionary days—became absolutely oppressive. We could not understand it, but our thoughts were more intent upon the coming transfer to our flag than upon any speculation as to the cause of the remarkable somnolence of Savannah. ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... family arose late the next morning. The fatigues and excitements of the evening and the preparation for it were followed by a natural collapse, of which somnolence was a leading symptom. The sun shone into the window at a pretty well opened angle when the Colonel first found himself sufficiently awake to address his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... reappeared, took up the candle, stood awhile listening, then moved cautiously to the edge of the counter, behind which the woman slept in her lair. He peeped over to assure himself of her complete somnolence. Satisfied that Mex would not likely be roused by any slight disturbance, he stole to the front door and undid the fastenings so softly that not a creak of the bolt sliding from its staple was heard even by his own quick ear. ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... was sleeping soundly, his feet resting against the shaggy sides of Terror, who was equally oblivious to the external world. There could be no doubt of Tim's somnolence for he gave unmistakable evidence of it. The light was just sufficient to afford a distinct view of the other shore, and in the clear summer air of the morning it had a cool appearance, very pleasing ...
— Adrift in the Wilds - or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys • Edward S. Ellis
... out to the wharves, and moored to these wharves are side-wheel steamers which once plied the Sound. It served somebody's purpose or pocket better to discontinue the line, and with its cessation and the cessation of work in the ship yards close by, the old town passed into a state of salty somnolence. The harbour is glassy and still, opening out to the blue waters of the Sound. Still are the white steamers by the wharves, where once the gang planks shook with the tread of feet and the rumble of baggage trucks. Many a time, as the train paused at the station, ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... But if the scamps were not at Mere Cognette's every night, they always met during the day, enjoying together the legitimate pleasures of hunting, or the autumn vintages and the winter skating. Among this assemblage of twenty youths, all of them at war with the social somnolence of the place, there are some who were more closely allied than others to Max, and who made him their idol. A character like his often fascinates other youths. The two grandsons of Madame Hochon—Francois Hochon and Baruch Borniche—were ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... nearness soothe, as her voice has brought me calm! Quiet I may some day enjoy, but slumber again, never! I see that souls in hades must ever have their misdeeds before them. Happy man in this world, the repentant's sins are forgiven! You lose your care in sleep. Somnolence and drowsiness—balm of aching hearts, angels of mercy! Mortals, how blessed! until you die, God sends you this rest. When I recall summer evenings with Sylvia, while gentle zephyrs fanned our brows, I would change Pope's famous line ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... an easy prey during its hours of somnolence. Every Cigale encountered by the ferocious grasshopper on its nocturnal round must miserably perish. Thus are explained those sudden squeaks of anguish which are sometimes heard in the boughs during the hours of the night and early morning, although ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... edging into the backwater at the foot of the rapids, lay their paddles across the thwarts and stare silently at the great structures that began to arise. And this, in a way, was the attitude of most of the folk of St. Marys. They were in it but not of it, and the long somnolence of the past was too tranquil to be easily dispelled. But in spite of their indifference the masterful hand of Clark had set the town definitely on the industrial map. A little later, the water was turned on and rows and rows of electric lights glittered down the ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... quite unnecessary. The proper test of magnetic susceptibility is either to excite the organ of somnolence and observe if the eyes are disposed to close, or to pass your fingers over the outstretched hand of the subject, within one or two inches, and observe if he feels any impression. A distinct feeling of coolness is sufficient ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... the shifting gaze of the restless listener finally fastened itself with a fascination which he found it impossible to resist, and the Sepoy, with all the modulated lights and shadows of ardor, animation, lethargy, somnolence, peace, with which he complemented ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... into matters occult gave to Etienne's life the apparent somnolence of meditative genius. He would spend long days lying upon the shore, happy, a poet, all-unconscious of the fact. The sudden irruption of a gilded insect, the shimmering of the sun upon the ocean, ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... his hut asleep. The man was soon up, apologizing for his somnolence, and preparing tea for his master's entertainment. "It is not Christmas like at home at all; is it, Mr. 'Eathcote? Dear, no! Them red divils is there ready to give us a Christmas roasting." Then he told how he had boldly ridden up to ...
— Harry Heathcote of Gangoil • Anthony Trollope
... sleepily contented, in its pen, returned to him. It wasn't that he found an actual analogy between the pig and life, individuals, on a higher plane, so much as that he was vaguely disturbed by the impression that there was an ultimate similitude between him, Lee Randon, and a fattened somnolence of existence. ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... her drink, put the glass on a table, and wandered over to the couch. She stretched out on it. A drowsy somnolence enveloped her almost instantly. She closed ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... the child, it was genuine slumber mingled with pleasant dreams, as the smile upon her lips and the lines that played upon her brow and cheeks clearly testified. With Zulma it was not real sleep, but somnolence, or rather the torpor of dim meditations. Her eyes were closed, her head was thrown back upon the rocking chair, her limbs were somewhat extended, while an air of forced resignation or preparation for the worse was set upon her noble features. The blue and yellow flames of the chimney flickered ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... the skin—he was only awakened by it—nothing more. He yawned, raised himself lazily, and gazed round with that vacant stare of unreasonable surprise which is common to man on passing from a state of somnolence to ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... to the text at this point, else how could so material a circumstance have silently dropped out of the narrative? There are passages in every separate book of the canon, into which accident, or the somnolence of copyists, has introduced errors seriously disturbing the sense and the coherence. Many of these have been rectified in the happiest manner by ingenious suggestions; and a considerable proportion of these suggestions has been since verified and approved by the discovery of new manuscripts, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... soundly, while still holding the reins to deceive other wayfarers. The footman, seated behind, was snoring like a wooden top from Germany—the land of little carved figures, of large wine-vats, and of humming-tops. The Baron had tried to think; but after passing the bridge at Gournay, the soft somnolence of digestion had sealed his eyes. The horses understood the coachman's plight from the slackness of the reins; they heard the footman's basso continuo from his perch behind; they saw that they were masters of the situation, and took ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... a double, as you know, and placed him in a position where his kidnapping would be an easy matter. I was sure that the victims were being taken away by air and that lethane was being used to reduce the neighborhood to a state of profound somnolence, so I hid myself near my double with a gas detector which would find even minute traces ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... of war, when the steamer service was suspended, Swanage had no day trippers and the quietness of the town was accentuated, and the camp on the southern slopes of Ballard Down did not interfere to any great extent with this somnolence. But now the steamers pant across to Swanage pier again and unload the curious crowd who make straight for the Great Globe and Tilly Whim and pause to "rest and admire" as they breast the steep ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... literatures and arts for outlets and return-expressions, and, of course, to correspond, within outlines common to all. To these, the main affair, the thinkers of the United States, in general so acute, have either given feeblest attention, or have remain'd, and remain, in a state of somnolence. ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... hoped that Monck would smoke his cigarette and suffer himself to be lulled into somnolence by such melody as she was able to extract from the crazy old ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... inn and closed the window without fearing to make a noise, and went to bed at once. His moral and physical lassitude was certain to bring him sleep. In a very short time after laying his head on his mattress, he fell into that first fantastic somnolence which precedes the deepest sleep. The senses then grew numb, and life is abolished by degrees; thoughts are incomplete, and the last quivering of our consciousness seems like a sort of reverie. ...
— The Red Inn • Honore de Balzac
... that state of somnolence in which one may dream and yet be aware that one is dreaming,—the state where one, during a dream, dreams that one pinches one's self to be sure that one is not dreaming. He was therefore aware of a ringing quality about the words he had ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... the town there was each morning enacted the same little scene. The driver slowly unhitched his mules and turned them about to the other end of the car, in readiness for the return journey. Matters having progressed this far, the mules fell at once into a deep state of dejection and somnolence, their ears lopping down, their bodies drooping and motionless, save as now and then a faint swish of tail or wag of a weary ear bespoke the knowledge of some bold, marauding fly. The driver, perched upon his seat, his feet upon the rail, his knees pushed toward his chin, sat with his ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... he spoke of it afterwards as worthy of mention in his biography. Fresh from the dinner-table, the audience generally fell asleep during the slow movements! When the novelty of the Salomon concerts had worn off, many of the listeners lapsed into their usual somnolence. Most men in Haydn's position would have resented such inattention by an outburst of temper. Haydn took it good-humouredly, and resolved to have ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... my breast and go off into oblivion. Nor am I particular where I sit or if I sit at all. Any ordinary person can fall asleep on a sofa or at a sermon, but it requires a practitioner with an inborn faculty for the art to achieve the triumphs of somnolence which stand to my credit. I have taken a nap on horseback; I have marched for miles, a musket on my shoulder, in complete slumberous unconsciousness; I have nodded while Phelps was acting, snoozed while Mario was singing, and played ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... is tired of thinking On the Wherefore and the Whence; Baby's precious eyes are blinking With incipient somnolence. ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... was the hunger-sense when provender was low, and Gor-wah drove them out with grunts and gibes to hunt the wild-dogs and lizards and lesser beasts; and not infrequently there was the other sense, the not-hunger, when the bring had been exceptional and there was somnolence ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse
... alarmed when face to face with one another. They put the coldness of their attitude down to prudence. Their calm, according to them, was the result of great caution on their part. They pretended they desired this tranquillity, and somnolence of their hearts. On the other hand, they regarded the repugnance, the uncomfortable feeling experienced as a remains of terror, as the secret dread of punishment. Sometimes, forcing themselves to hope, they sought to resume the burning dreams of other days, and were quite astonished ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... keep one's resolution at the due pitch. Factious disturbance ceases not: as indeed how can they, unless authoritatively conjured, in a Revolt which is by nature bottomless? If the ceasing of faction be the price of the King's somnolence, he may awake when ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... masturbators, also their tired appearance, dilated pupils, and languid movements. We note also mental disturbances as well as physical, especially diminished powers of attention and memory, and somnolence up to the point of narcolepsy. According to Fere, the physical and the mental symptoms alike can be detected by precise investigations. In children suspected of masturbation, dynamometric observations disclosed a notable diminution, to the extent even of one-half, when the children ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... a waking somnolence, lulled by the familiar, profound, withdrawn repose of the valley. He could distinguish Clare's form weaving back and forth in a low rocker; the moonless, summer night embraced, hid, all; there were no lights in the house at his back, no lights ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... desirous of making an attack upon Flanders by capturing the town of Steenberg. The faithful Roger Williams had strongly seconded the proposal. "We wish to show your Excellency," said he to Leicester, "that we are not sound asleep." The Welshman was not likely to be accused of somnolence, but on this occasion Sidney and himself had been overruled. At a later moment, and during the siege of Neusz, Sir Philip had the satisfaction of making a ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... eyes dilated and yet stupid, life kept in him by a spoonful of milk, a lump of ice, a drink of lemon-water; always muttering, when he spoke at all, "Moufflou, Moufflou, dov' e Moufflou?" and lying for days together in somnolence and unconsciousness, with the fire eating at his brain and the weight lying on ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... noise, she follows me as we descend the staircase and cross the garden full of sunshine, where the dwarf shrubs and the deformed flowers seem, like the rest of the household, plunged in warm somnolence. ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... to which I might look forward if I remained in the company of my present owners; and accordingly when my sable companions disposed themselves to sleep, I apparently did the same, but summoned all my energies to aid me in the task of resisting the tendency toward somnolence that ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... man's beard and the great man's manner annoyed Dick Bellamy, stimulating him even through his shroud of somnolence. ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... for over an hour on his knees in the empty church. With folded hands and eyes fixed on the golden Virgin rising planet-like amid the verdure, he sought the drowsiness of ecstasy, the appeasement of the strange discomfort he had felt that day. But he failed to find the semi-somnolence of prayer with the delightful ease he knew so well. However glorious and pure Mary might reveal herself, her motherhood, the maturity of her charms, and the bare infant she bore upon her arm, disquieted him. It seemed as if in heaven itself there were a repetition of the exuberant life, through ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... condition is seen in the breaking up of old habits. The newspaper is as imperious as a Russian Ukase; it will be had, and it will be read. To this all else must give place. If we must go out at unusual hours to get it, we shall go, in spite of after-dinner nap or evening somnolence. If it finds us in company, it will not stand on ceremony, but cuts short the compliment and the story by the divine right of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world. The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... be to dull the ear, And one would be to dim the eye, So whispered love they'd never hear, And glance coquettish never spy; They'd be taught somnolence, and how Ofttimes closed eye for sleep atones; Had I a million, I'd endow A ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... to sleep, and indeed long before that only an occasional footfall resounds from the flagging. At seven the same bell rouses all to the morning's leisurely bustle, and again at twelve it rings a noon somnolence in upon Main street that is even more startling to the stranger than ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... slowly to the ground. Except for this sound the garden was fast held in the warm peace of a summer afternoon. I found a most happy little neglected orchard with old gnarled apple-trees and thick waving grass. Here I lay on my back, watching the gold through the leaves, soaked in the apathy and somnolence of the day, sinking idly into sleep, rising, sinking again, as though rocked in a hammock. I was in England once more—at intervals there came a sharp click that exactly resembled the sound that one hears in an English village on a summer afternoon when they are playing cricket in the ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... once the sensation subsided, she held it there. The gold bands of the rings that were pressed against her throat cooled it, but the palm of the hand was wet. Unconscious of that, she was unaware that she could not think. A crack on the head makes you dizzy and into her dizziness a somnolence had entered. The somnolence dulled all the cells of the brain save one and that one cell, vehemently active, was inciting her to some effort, though to what ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... who survive this drastic weeding out which Night imposes upon her wooers—so as to cull and choose only the truly meritorious lovers—experience supreme delights which are unknown to their snoring fellows. When the struggle with somnolence has been fought out and won, when the world is all-covering darkness and close-pressing silence, when the tobacco suddenly takes on fresh vigour and fragrance and the books lie strewn about the table, then it seems as though all the rubbish and floating matter of ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... just a case of what we call narcolepsy— pathological somnolence—a sudden, uncontrollable inclination to sleep, occurring sometimes repeatedly or at varying intervals. I don't think it hysterical, epileptic, or toxemic. The plain fact of the matter, gentlemen, is that neither myself nor any of my colleagues whom I have consulted ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... and rather dishevelled, for it had cost her half an hour's hard wrestling to get baby placed in recumbent somnolence. She now sought to soothe her feelings by tickling the chin of the black kitten—a process to which that active ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... gas causes spasm of the glottis, insensibility, and death from asphyxia, at once; diluted, causes sense of weight in forehead and back of head, giddiness, vomiting, somnolence, loss of muscular power. Insensibility, stertorous breathing, lividity of face and body, and death from ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... inadvertantly added to the gaiety of nations by provoking that delightful trial, which, farcical as it seemed at the moment, not merely evoked from Whistler himself some imperishable dicta on art and the relation of critics to art, but really did something towards the long-drawn awakening of that mysterious somnolence called the public consciousness on the strange mission of beauty in this world, and, incidentally of the status of those "eccentric" ministers ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... several minutes, and then ceasing abruptly, as though at a signal, to recommence as abruptly a few minutes later. These sounds were commonplace enough, and after an hour or two to allow the ear to become accustomed to them, would of themselves have been soothing and conducive to somnolence rather than the reverse, but they were constantly being broken into by others so strange, and in some cases so weird, that the night threatened to be a sleepless one for at least the two white men of the party. For instance, at pretty frequent intervals there came from the depths of the ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... established. It is the business of the composer to create music which will supplement the poem. A lullaby should not have a martial melody, neither should an exhortation to lofty patriotism be given a melody which induces somnolence. ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... elation; Is, to others, mere stagnation. Days of passive somnolence, At its wildest, indolence. Hours of empty quietness, No delight, and ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... The bullets whipped and whizzed past, or plopped into the heaps of debris above. Now that there was sufficient military reason for laziness on his part, Mac, recognizing, of course, that he would have worked had it been at all possible, sank with an easy conscience into somnolence. ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... Duck Bank into the hollow. On the right, opposite the lighted Dragon Hotel, lay Duck Square in obscure somnolence; at the corner of Duck Square and Trafalgar Road was a double-fronted shop, of which all the shutters were up except two or three in the centre of the doorway. Framed thus in the aperture, a young man stood within the shop under a bright central gas-jet; ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... Valence is! There was supposed to be a fair there when I was at Valence, but even that could not wake it up. But the fair was in a condition of the utmost somnolence itself. Why—I did not suspect till I reached Vienne, when I found that this latter place had drawn to it all that was enterprising, startling, attractive, and left only the very dregs of fairings ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... the girl's rhythmic gait lulled to semi-somnolence, made no objection, and their rapture began afresh. They now went on more slowly, fearing the moment when they would have to retrace their steps. So long as they walked onward, they felt as though they were advancing to the eternity of their mutual embrace; the return would mean separation ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... raised, perhaps, too late, reminding us of some important new fact, some threatened danger? On the morning of the day when the contract was to be signed and the fete given, one of these flashes of the soul illuminated the mind of Madame Evangelista during the semi-somnolence of her waking hour. The words that she herself had uttered at the moment when Mathias acceded to Solonet's conditions, "Questa coda non e di questo gatto," were cried aloud in her mind by that voice of memory. In spite ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... girl, roused from semi-somnolence, would pull herself together with a little jerk, would straighten her shoulders and lift her chin, whilst a quickly smothered sigh of weariness would ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... as daylight. I only marvelled how his Honour could waste his time and mine by putting what he thought were searching questions to the accused relating to his past. Francis Smethurst, who had quite shaken off his somnolence, spoke with a curious nasal twang, and with an almost imperceptible soupcon of foreign accent, He calmly denied Kershaw's version of his past; declared that he had never been called Barker, and had certainly never been mixed up in any murder case ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... Severiano himself is in the patio, presiding over the saddling and harnessing department; for some of us are to bestride horses. The ladies and children are to drive; and mules, and carts drawn by oxen, are reserved for the conveyance of the luggage and the domestics. By way of dispelling our lingering somnolence, and fortifying us for the heavy journey before us, cups of strong coffee are handed round; and, with a view to getting over as much ground as possible before blinding daylight shall appear, we start at ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... stamping across the boards of the porch. They cursed, imprecated, shook their fists, and threatened, as they surged into the road and looked down it toward the approaching driver. The men in the shade got quickly to their feet, interested spectators, and the burros awoke from their drowsy somnolence, and turned inquiring, ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... more than one had tried to sleep. It was also true that in consequence the saloon breakfast had been abrogated, that even the saloon lunch lacked vicacity, and that at least one passenger was at that moment dozing in his cabin. But not on account of fatigue and somnolence was Audrey remaining in the saloon instead of taking the splendid summer afternoon on deck under the awning. She felt neither tired nor sleepy. The true secret was that she feared the crowd of village idlers, quidnuncs, tattlers and newsmongers who all day gazed ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... towards the stream below. He looked above, and saw the fabled ledge—its mossy bank all snow-covered—with the entrance to Jenny Greenteeth's chambers dark against the white that lay around. Tired with the search, yet glad at heart with the find, he climbed and entered, the somnolence wrought by the snow soon closing his eyes, and its subtle opiate working on his now wearily excited brain. There ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... our opinion that they were most serious, and might speedily end. She would rally briskly enough of some evenings, and entertain a little company; but of late she scarcely went abroad at all. A somnolence, which we had remarked in her, was attributable in part to opiates which she was in the habit of taking; and she used these narcotics to smother habitual pain. One night, as we two sat with her (Mr. Miles was ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... he was awakened by the accidental fall of a rod in the canopy of his bed, which touched him on the neck. Thus even a prolonged interview with a ghost may conceivably be, in real time, a less than momentary dream occupying an imperceptible tenth of a second of somnolence, the sleeper not realising ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... somnolence I sometimes dream how, perhaps, in the days to come, another hand may write in glowing terms the faithful history of "Eubiogen" and say kind feeling words and fair of the hard worked lone scientist who gave its healing virtues to mankind, terming it—he too perhaps—the stereotyped "Ambrosia," ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann |
