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More "Monotony" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... broken only by lines that were vertical and by the lines of juts and recesses that were always right-angled, were as chaste as those of a monastery. The irregular roof-line, however, relieved the hint of monotony. ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... lady-like English girl gained by the contrast. There was rather too much tranquillity to-day, perhaps; so he exerted some tact to draw Cecil from her reserve, the cause of which he was unable to guess. He agreed with her in reviling the monotony and stupidity of sleighing picnics, having to follow one by one like a string of geese, long after one was perished with cold, though he failed to detect in her weariness that she was wishing for her father to stop at the ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... affairs. Not merely was each man in full possession of the color and number of every calf in his neighbor's herd, it seemed that nothing could happen in the most remote cabin and remain concealed. Any event which broke the monotony of their life loomed large, and in all matters of courtship curiosity was something more than keen, it ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... Geoffrey was coming. He was very pleased. He had reached that stage in the progress of exile where one is inordinately happy to see any old friend. In fact, he was beginning to be "fed up" with Japan, with its very limited distractions, and with the monotony of his ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... remodelled and let out by the floor to young men mainly of Staff's ilk: there was an artist on the upper story, a writer of ephemeral fiction on the third, an architect on the first. The janitor infested the basement, chiefly when bored by the monotony of holding up an imitation mahogany bar over on Third Avenue. His wife cooked abominably and served the results under the name of breakfast to the tenants, who foraged where they would for their other meals. ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... very young then—- not thirteen years old; but if I was young, I had travelled much, and had gained that knowledge which is to be obtained by the eye—perhaps the best education we can have in our earlier years. I shall pass over the monotony of the voyage of eternal sky and water. I have no recollection that we were in any imminent danger at any time, and the voyage might have ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... experience, but because it took him for granted as a kindly stranger, an outsider admitted to these mysteries, and warned him that his time on this holy ground was short; nay, that it was drawing swiftly to a close. And how could he go back to the old monotony, the old routine? ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... Monotony had likewise marked my course— By that I mean that nothing rare Had happened at all, to cause recourse To friendly joy or ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... cherish grief, I rarely heave a sigh Before emotion takes relief In listless apathy; While from my pipe the vapours curl Towards the evening sky, And 'neath my feet the billows whirl In dull monotony! ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... indulgence, and unvarying tenderness, and though bitter sorrow had come upon me, and I had gone through severe suffering, it had not come in the form of discipline, or been turned to its salutary use. I dreaded the monotony, the associations of Elmsley, from which I saw, by this letter, that Henry was henceforward to be banished; and, altogether, when I walked into Mrs. Brandon's room, and announced to her my approaching departure, tears of vexation stood in ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... afternoon a small white-headed boy was seen revolving down the main street of Pattaquasset. I say revolving—for the slight suggestion of a small stone in the road—or a spot of particular dustiness—was enough to make the boy break the monotony of his walk with a somerset; by which style of progress he at last arrived at Mrs. Derrick's door, entered the gate and came up the steps. There he paused and ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... normal in its main features. It was, he said, one of those vitrified wildernesses of brick that have given the city the name of a place of homes; dreadful. Amazing in extent, it was without a single feature to vary the monotony of two-storied dwellings cut into exact parallelograms by paved streets; there was a perspective of continuous facades and unbroken tin roofs in every direction, with a grocery or drug-store and an occasional saloon ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... life means that the Lord Jesus lived His message, amid commonplace surroundings, in the midst of what is called the dull monotony of the daily round. That is, in the place where it is hardest to do it, He lived every bit of what He taught. And as we follow, simply, obediently, the Spirit will lead us along this same road. The same experience will ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... sensitive to this monotony as he was just then seeking change and novelty in order to write a new story. He was not looking for material,—his subjects were usually the same,—he was merely hoping for that relaxation and diversion which should freshen and fit him for later concentration. Still, he had often ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... River region intermarried, and spread out over middle Georgia. Those who were not akin were bound to each other by ties of long acquaintanceship; but the homogeneousness of the people, complete and thorough as it was, was not marked by any monotony. On the contrary, character and individuality ran riot, appearing in such strange and attractive shapes as to puzzle and bewilder even those who were familiar with the queer manifestations. Every settlement had its peculiarities, and every neighborhood boasted of its humorist,—its ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... once that change or variety is as much a necessity to the human heart and brain in buildings as in books; that there is no merit, though there is some occasional use, in monotony; and that we must no more expect to derive either pleasure or profit from an architecture whose ornaments are of one pattern, and whose pillars are of one proportion, than we should out of a universe in which the clouds were all of ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... the afternoon's ride, although the day was particularly fine, and their way was amid some bits of charming scenery. After going out into the country some five or six miles, the horse's head was turned, and they took their way homeward. Wishing to avoid the Monotony of a drive along the same road the young man struck across the country in order to reach another avenue leading into the city, but missed his way and bewildered in a maze of winding country roads. While ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... of their God-given functions. The treasures of life are not hidden; they are close at hand, so close that we overlook them. We cheat ourselves with a pitiful fear of ourselves. Men and women of the future will not seek happiness; they will have gone beyond it. Mere happiness would produce monotony. And their lives shall be lives of change and variety with the thrills produced by experiment ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... was distressed to find his two companions much indisposed. They set out from Mourzouk along with the caravan; the party consisted of 210 Arabs, commanded by their respective chiefs, who cheered the monotony of the way by tales and songs. The road lay along a sandy uneven soil highly impregnated with salt, the track being worn down by the footsteps of caravans. In these dreary regions no sound either of insect or of bird was heard. After ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... my position, only I am worse. You know how to behave in polite circles; I don't. You have a slightly tired look, as if this sort of thing wearied you by reason of its monotony." ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... banking house of Messrs. Barking Brothers & Barking. There his knowledge of modern languages, his industry, and a certain discreet aloofness commended him to his superiors. A minor clerkship fell vacant; it was offered to him. And from thenceforth, for Dominic Iglesias, the monotony of fixed routine and steady labour, until the day when, as a man of past fifty, restless and somewhat distrustful both of the present and the future, he watched the dying of the sullen sunset over Trimmer's Green from the windows of ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... that a legacy had been bequeathed to him, and that he was on his way to a distant city to claim it. He had stopped at the near-by port in order to break the monotony of the journey. "Before the disaster that befell me," continued he, "I lived in comparative comfort, but ever since I have been struggling. I was obliged to begin all over again and build a new house and start a new business. ...
— After Long Years and Other Stories • Translated from the German by Sophie A. Miller and Agnes M. Dunne
... The monotony of hospital life became intolerable. My recovery was slow and my impatience great. When I felt my strength begin to return, I wrote to Captain Haskell. No answer came. Before the end of February I had demanded my papers ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... a slight row to diversify the monotony of our military life. Young Premium, the son of the celebrated loan-monger, has bought in; and Dormer Stanhope, and one or two others equally fresh, immediately anticipated another Battier business; but, with the greatest desire to make a fool of myself, ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... perceive already in so large a sheet, and so small a hand, the promise of a long, a very long letter, longer, as I intend it, than all the letters which you send in a half-year together. I have again begun my life of sterile monotony, unvarying labour, the dull return of dull exercises in dull uniformity of tediousness. But do not think that ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... which rose to cluster about and literalize the romance of her youth which Sister Soulsby had so frankly outlined. He would think upon nothing but her as he knew her,—the kindly, quick-witted, capable and charming woman who had made such a brilliant break in the monotony of life at that dull parsonage of his. The only genuine happiness in life must consist in having bright, smart, attractive women ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... same if prolonged through eternity, unless we had God for our very own. Eternal is an awful word, even when the noun that goes with it is blessedness. And I know not how even the redeemed could be saved, as the long ages rolled on, from the oppression of monotony, and the feeling, 'I would not live always,' unless God was 'the strength of their hearts, and their portion for ever.' We must rise above everything that merely applies to changes in our own natures and in our relations to the external universe, and to other orders of creatures; and grasp, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... it might easily be bewildering, some revolting; but all is in harmony. The harmony is like that of Eastern music, not immediately conveying its charm, or even the secret of its measure, to Western ears; but a monotony coiling perpetually upon itself, after a severe law of its own. Or rather, it is like a fresco, painted gravely in hard, definite colours, firmly detached from a background of burning sky; a procession of Barbarians, each in the costume of his country, passes ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... and therefore in the excitement leading to the excretion of the digestive juices. If one ate salt pork and boiled potatoes always, eating would be a tiresome affair, and it is quite likely that such a sameness of food would fail to excite subsequent digestion, merely from the monotony of the affair. Salt, however, has a particular role in that the human body craves this mineral, and, while its exact value in the body is not clearly known, a certain amount of it must always be provided. The wild tribes of Africa, ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... is the only consolation I can get out of it. This movement has come into their lives like a new religion. It is a new religion—the religion of humanity. It does help them to forget mud and rain and cold and monotony." ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... very hard a day or night, so far as physical labour goes, is it? But, oh! the sameness, the deadly monotony, of repeating the same words to the same person at the same moment every night, sick or well, sad or happy—the ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... converted the Louisville goods into one panther, one deer, two bears, and a roll of "wildcat" money. It was not very good stock with which to begin life on a farm, but the monotony was relieved by a hooking, kicking cow, and a horse which ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... away on either side of the road. A windmill or two, the inevitable irrigation canals with their little sluices, and an occasional tree alone broke the monotony of the scene. But away to the right Robin noticed a clump of trees which, he surmised, might conceivably enclose ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... came over from the blacks' camp, where she had been holding a great palaver, and asked us if we should like to see a "corroborrie," or dance; and much pleased at getting a glimpse of the native customs, and glad of anything to break the monotony of our lives, we followed her to the group of palms, and there took up our positions to watch the proceedings. A tremendous fire was soon flaming on the beach, near it the gins and piccaninnies assembled, with bits of stick, clubs, ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... to our observations and reckonings, which I checked by those that I had taken upon my eastward journey. Our march, after the great adventure at the oasis, was singularly devoid of startling events. Indeed, it had been awful in its monotony, and yet, oddly enough, not without a certain charm—at any rate for Higgs and Orme, to whom ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... the facts, at least," said Katie. "If it's all true, I think it's hard on poor people like me, that never can find any pleasant excitement to break the monotony of life. ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... does not mean illumination that reveals every hidden corner of a room. We need shadows to betray form, relieve monotony and give depth to the ensemble. If in an illuminated area light is of a uniform intensity, we have a bad effect. The variation of tone in a fabric is due to the light reaching it from a given point. Differences in intensity make shadows ...
— Color Value • C. R. Clifford
... for this first employer Watteau made dozens and dozens of pictures of St. Nicholas; and when we think of the beautiful figures he was going to make, pictures that should delight all the world, there seems something tragic in the monotony and common-placeness of that first work he was forced by poverty to do. Certainly St. Nicholas brought one man bread and butter, even if he forgot ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... was the light of Tavistock Place, Bloomsbury. In the brown monotony of the street it stood out splendid, conspicuous. Its door and half its front were painted a beautiful, a remarkable pea-green, while its door knob and door-knocker were of polished brass. Mrs. Downey's boarding-house knew nothing of concealment or disguise. Every evening, at the hour of ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... perceive that this difficulty arose solely from the pre-assumption that the word was to be so continuously or monotonously spoken by a human being—I did not fail to perceive, in short, that the difficulty lay in the reconciliation of this monotony with the exercise of reason on the part of the creature repeating the word. Here, then, immediately arose the idea of a non-reasoning creature capable of speech; and very naturally, a parrot, in the first instance, suggested itself, but was superseded forthwith ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... States procured transfers to his command, and it frequently happened that men, the bulk of whose regiments were in prison, or who had become irregularly detached from them by some of the many accidents by which the volunteer, weary of monotony, is prompt to take advantage, would attach themselves to and serve temporarily with it. Probably every native citizen of Kentucky who will read these lines, will think of some relative or friend who at some time served with Morgan. Men of even the strictest "Union principles," ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... anticipations, expectations that went off on all sides, met each other, and rebounded, exploding in coruscations of sparks. Something had happened, something was going to happen, after months and months of eventless monotony. It warmed the thin blood in their veins like comet champagne, and quickened their faded appetites like some salt ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... warfare was not entirely devoid of interest, and several little incidents occurred to break the monotony. The first was a big "strafe" on the 25th of August, when for some unknown reason the enemy shelled Stansfield Road very vigorously, and obtained a direct hit on "C" Company Headquarters. Lieuts. Banwell and Edge were occupying the dug-out at the time, and were ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... brings to your mind such vivid memories, to your lips so lingering a smile, to your eye so ready a tear? True enough, "we could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.... What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... sky; great estates, much of them in pasture or fallow; an extremely thin population; the entire labouring class under the yoke of serfage; stretches of land attached to solitary ill-built farmhouses; in short, a monotony, a dead stillness, spreading over the whole country, an absence of life and activity that quite overcame my spirits. The home of the Mecklenburg noble, who weighs like a load on his peasants instead of improving their condition, gives me the idea of the den of some wild beast, ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... ladies, as foreign dress materials could no longer be purchased. Mrs. Wingfield made a point of always attending with her daughters at these entertainments, which to the young people afforded a cheerful break in the dullness and monotony of their usual life; for, owing to the absence of almost all the young men with the army, there had been a long cessation of the pleasant interchange of visits, impromptu parties, and social gatherings that had formed a feature in the life ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... greater (even three times greater) than the actuaries anticipated beforehand; while the Sick Insurance Societies of Germany, France, Austria, and Switzerland also report that women are ill oftener and for longer periods than men. Largely, no doubt, that is due to the special strain and the rigid monotony of our modern industrial system, but not entirely. Nearly two hundred years ago (in 1729) Swift wrote of women to Bolingbroke: "I protest I never knew a very deserving person of that sex who had not too much reason to complain of ill-health." The regulations ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... of the Native States of India, has also varied the monotony of inscriptions by the addition of a sort of jumping-jack figure. By some writers this is claimed to be a dancing dervish and by others a Nautch girl. As pictured on the stamp the figure does not present the sensuous outlines which have always ...
— What Philately Teaches • John N. Luff
... a giant red sun blazed mercilessly down upon a landscape from which every vestige of animal and plant life had apparently been stripped. Naked rocks and barren soil stretched illimitably to the far horizon in a vast monotony of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... made no protest and the two boys at once started up the track. Both were hungry and weary but the distance must be traversed, and there was no time or breath to waste in complaining. Steadily they trudged onward, the monotony of the walk increased by the deepening darkness. They had been gone from the station only about an hour when the shrill screech of the whistle from a locomotive approaching from behind them was heard, and in a ...
— Winning His "W" - A Story of Freshman Year at College • Everett Titsworth Tomlinson
... heard a steamer's long, rough whistle. The Pacific. Everyone jumps up in excitement, for the Pacific brings a taste of civilization, and her arrival marks the end of a busy week and breaks the monotony of daily life. We run to the shore and light strong lamps at fixed points, to indicate the anchorage, and then we rush back to finish dinner and put on clean clothes. Meanwhile, the boys have been roused, and they arrive, ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... worked hard—we have both worked hard. Our lives have not been altogether without pleasure. The occasional game of cards we have had together has always helped to relieve monotony, eh, Lablache? Yes—yes. No one can say we have not earned rest. But there—yes, you have been more fortunate than I. ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... children had no objection to being left, Mrs. Stone suffered herself to be persuaded. In fact, she went to her new duty with a certain zest, as a break in the monotony of her days. She had lent a hand often enough at the sugar-making to be familiar with the task awaiting her, and it was with an unwonted gaiety that she set out on what appeared to her almost in the light of ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... to learn that misery, as well as bliss, can swallow up the hours. She saw the monotony of cedar trees, but with blurred eyes; she saw the ground clearly enough, for she was always looking down, hoping for sandy places or rocky places where ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... little to vary the monotony of their life. A lion came one night, but did not molest horse or bullock. They had visits, too, from the jackals, but Tanta Sal was right—Jack came no more, and they saw nothing of the Kaffirs who had been his companions, though Dyke found a rough hut and traces of a fire in the patch of forest ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... running the words together and speaking with a parrot-like monotony in an unnaturally high-pitched key. Then his voice began to quaver a little till he stopped short with a cry of despair—"I cannot mind the words, I cannot say my prayers. Oh! will nobody say them for ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... introduction of slightly new elements into a method already established varies it beneficially; the new is soon fused with the old, and the monotony ceases to be oppressive. But if the new be too foreign, we cannot fuse the old and the new—nature seeming to hate equally too wide a deviation from ordinary practice and none at all. This fact reappears in heredity as the beneficial effects of occasional crossing on the one hand, and on the other, ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... the reader with the monotony of the mere rehearsal of difficulty and discouragement and despairful circumstance which I feel it needful to present in order to give faithful background to the story of the valley. I have by no means told all: of continued malevolence where there should have been help; ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... to large figures; and (2) certain figures clothed in vestments but little used at that time, whereby the minds of other artists were awakened and began to depart from that sameness which should rather be called obsolete monotony than antique simplicity. ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... simple play which delighted the minds of our forefathers, and helped to raise them from sordid cares and the dull monotony of continual toil. In our popular amusements the village folk do not take part, except as spectators, and therefore lose half the pleasure; whereas in the time of the Virgin Queen the rehearsals, the learning the speeches by heart, ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... lacked interest in same prior to my reading your first issue) same is described so plainly that I have no trouble in fully understanding exactly what the author conveys. I must thank you for this other interest in the monotony ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... whose obedience had restored what Eve's self-will had ruined, and the last threefold sob of endearment to the "kindly, loving, sweet, Virgin Mary." After the high agonisings and aspirations of the day's prayer, the awfulness of the holy Sacrifice, the tramping monotony of the Psalter, the sting of the discipline, the aches and sweats of the manual labour, the intent strain of the illuminating, this song to Mary was a running into Mother's arms and finding compensation there ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... a good subject for discourse, and the expounders of Heraclitus were not unnaturally blamed for monotony. All they could do was to iterate their master's maxim, and declare everything to be in flux. In suggesting laws of recurrence and a reason in which what is common to many might be expressed, Heraclitus had opened the door into another region: had ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... to the idea that his life could not have the tranquil monotony of a bourgeois existence, that it would experience shocks and storms, but that if he knew how to remain always master of his force and will, it would bring him ...
— Conscience, Complete • Hector Malot
... masterly force with which he grasps all his subjects—the measured fervour of his style—the precision and vivacity of his shorter sentences—the grand swell and sonorousness of his longer; on his frequent monotony—his sesguipedalia verba—the "timorous meaning" which sometimes lurks under his "boldest words;" or on the deep chiaroscuro which discolours all his pictures of man, nature, society, and human life. We have now only to speak of his poetry. That is, ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... stimulus or excitement to do it in any common way. But the idea of being actually married to another man while he was absent at a short distance from the city, would be something striking and new, which would vary, she thought, the dull monotony of ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... would have to surrender at last, if not at Genoa, certainly on the journey, when we would be thrown constantly in each other's society with nobody to spy upon our actions, and with nothing else to do but to make love. It is the weariness of a journey, the constant monotony, that makes one do something to make sure of one's existence; and when it comes to the reckoning there is usually more joy ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... said. Unless the will maintain a certain control over these movements, which it cannot stop, but can to some extent regulate, men are very apt to try to get at the machine by some indirect system of leverage or other. They clap on the brakes by means of opium; they change the maddening monotony of the rhythm by means of fermented liquors. It is because the brain is locked up and we cannot touch its movement directly, that we thrust these coarse tools in through any crevice, by which they may reach the interior, and so alter its rate ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... upon the monotony of the long, dark winter. The parishioners once more raised the discussion whether—the parish extending as it did—it was not absolutely necessary for Pastor Tappau to have help. This question had been mooted once before; and then ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... they hold up for the public's inspiration has on the obverse "More Births!" But on the reverse it bears "More Deaths!" It would be helpful to the public, and might even be wholesome for our enthusiasts' own enlightenment, if they would occasionally turn the medal round and slightly vary the monotony of their propaganda by changing its form and crying out for "More Deaths!" "It is a hard thing," said Johnny Dunn, "for a man that has a house full of children to be left to ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... They longed for the pleasures that pleased in the day of prosperity; the dance, the banquet, and those visits that won the momentary gratification of flattery and admiration were sighed for. So irksome was the monotony and so uncongenial the role forced upon them by disguise, they hailed with joy the least circumstance that might be the ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... ignorant. You will have to educate her . . . bring her up to your own level of intelligence and of learning. In the meanwhile, do sit down and drink with those who, like yourself, have come here for an hour or two to break the monotony of perpetual czigany ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... more we sped down that devious river, now swirling under the shadow of a steep bank, now steering around a sandspit. The scenery was hideous to me, bluffs of clay with pines peeping over their rims, willow-fringed flats, swamps of niggerhead, ugly drab hills in endless monotony. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... carried something between them, a struggling writhing something which they stood erect at the crater's edge. It was a girl!—a slim, bronzed figure that swayed there an instant uncertainly as the throb of the drums rose high and the voices of the assembled savages swelled in a monotony of ...
— Creatures of Vibration • Harl Vincent
... you to write another confession." There was a deadly monotony in Jimmie Dale's voice, as he tapped the paper with the muzzle of his automatic. "This one ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... is often called, especially by well-fed, optimistic sightseers, who look over the surface of things and are merely shocked by the intolerable sameness and meanness of it all. If the East End is worthy of no worse title than The City of Dreadful Monotony, and if working people are unworthy of variety and beauty and surprise, it would not be such a bad place in which to live. But the East End does merit a worse title. It should be called The ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... Christina's marriage and marriage presents to talk about. The girl had many friends and relatives far and near, and every one remembered her. It was a set of china from an aunt in Crail, or napery from some cousins in Kirkcaldy, or quilts from her father's folk in Largo, and so on, in a very charming monotony. Now and then a bit of silver came, and once a very pretty American clock. And there was not a quilt or a tablecloth, a bit of china or silver, a petticoat or a ribbon, that the whole village did not examine, and discuss, and offer their ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... as the repudiation was, it struck a self-convicting, almost sympathetic note in Janet. She herself had revolted against the monotony and sordidness of that existence She herself! She dared not complete ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... balance between these various instincts. For some time past she had gathered about her a train of small artists, whom she mothered and patronised, and whose wild talk and pecuniary straits diversified the monotony of her own childless middle age. Montjoie, whose undoubted talent imposed upon a woman governed during all her later life by the traditions and the admirations of the artist world, had some time before established a hold upon her, partly dependent on a certain magnetism ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... "Puffing Billy's" gunners, who had got the range from Bulwaan to a nicety, so that they could pitch shell after shell into the new encampment. Even their "Long Tom" also still pounded at them by way of varying the monotony of a daily duel with our naval guns. But the most annoying fire of all came from the newly-mounted 6-inch Creusot on Little Bulwaan, which, for the sake of distinction, is known officially as Gun Hill, in front of Lombard's Kop. Having an effective ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... found himself listening intently, for above the pounding of the old motor, with an occasional "miss" to break the monotony, he fancied he had caught the signal Jack was to give him when the time arrived for making a turn ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... been an ornament of our dingy office, and indulging in an easy, and careless overlook of the gossiping papers of the day, and in such chit chat with chance visitors, as keeps us informed of the drift of the towntalk, while it relieves greatly the monotony of our office hours." Here is the well remembered flavor of the "Reveries of a Bachelor" ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II. No. 5, February, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... structure, some fifty feet long by about twenty feet wide, with a door on the further side. In the red-brick wall nearer the house there was nothing to break the monotony except the small wicket through which the ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... "idyll" of Frog Farm, near London, and Frog Farm seemed to be a trifle less amusing than Hunter's Point, near New York. It introduced us to rural types of deadly monotony, among them being a "village patriarch," suggesting cheap melodrama; a veterinary surgeon, a postman, a village dressmaker and Jinny herself, who "ran" a wagon, and who subsequently fell in love with a rival who ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... tossing on a sick-bed. Then you find out very quickly the sort of stuff your man is made of. Those who fight are not the biggest heroes. Often the noblest and most helpful men are those who themselves are not only cheerful under monotony and dullness, but aid their comrades to be so. Therefore, Theo, when you took it upon yourself to bear your troubles in the Maine woods bravely you proved you had the first essential ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett
... hour to hour in this world where we live. Your morning paper, the new book from the library you have just got to read, the pipe you hope to smoke when you return from work, the very details of your work; a hundred and one petty things that make up the day of an ordinary man, breaking the monotony and breaking the prospect before ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... of the drawing-room of the sleeping car, life seemed as fantastic and unreal as the moss-hung Southern forest into which she stared. She was happy, as a child is happy who is taken on an excursion into the unknown. The monotony of existence was at last broken, and riven the circumscribing ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... a gallery, since she came to make her fortune in America; and as each day the heat pressed more heavily upon her with its leaden weight, she felt that she would collapse and "do something stupid" if she could not have a change. Anything—anything at all that was different and would break the monotony! ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... and elderly, and, as the girls added, "married and guaranteed not to flirt," but all the same he was jolly, had a hearty, affable manner, and a habit of making bad jokes and weak puns to break up the monotony of his lectures. It was decidedly the fashion to admire him, to snigger indulgently at his mild little pleasantries, and to call him "an old dear." Some of the girls even worked quite hard at their preparation for him. He had written his autograph in ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... hill had completely died away, and the stars were growing brighter and more luminous.... The mournfully monotonous chirping of the grasshoppers, the call of the landrail, and the cry of the quail did not destroy the stillness of the night, but, on the contrary, gave it an added monotony. It seemed as though the soft sounds that enchanted the ear came, not from birds or insects, but from the stars looking down upon us from ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... possible, leaving it to be inferred that she had enjoyed herself. The spring term was generally regarded at The Priory as a time of particularly close study and increased work. In the autumn there were lectures, concerts, or other little dissipations to break the monotony of school life; the summer term was arranged specially to allow extra time out-of-doors; but from January to April the girls were expected to put their shoulders to the wheel, and commit to memory such a number of pages in their textbooks, ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... was not all Eve's, it was probably shared by the majority of the women present. She was the object that conjured their minds from the dull monotony of their daily routine to realms of happy fancy. And the picture was drawn in a setting of Romance, with Love well in the foreground, and the guardian angel of Perfect Happiness hovering over all. No doubt somewhere in the picture a man was skulking, but even in the light of matrimonial ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... green grass bordering the "wheel-track" upon either side, shows that though the nearest, this road is not the most frequented way to the pond. Many reasons might be assigned for this. There is a wearisome monotony in the scenery along this plain. There are no hills, and but few trees to diversify the almost interminable prospect, stretching east, west, north, and south, like a broad ocean, without wave or ripple. The few trees scattered ...
— Be Courteous • Mrs. M. H. Maxwell
... the line—all of which reasons combine to limit the employment of minuscule for formal or monumental uses. On the other hand, the small letter form is excellently adapted for the printed page, where the occasional capitals but tend to break the monotony, while the ascenders and descenders strongly characterize and increase the legibility ...
— Letters and Lettering - A Treatise With 200 Examples • Frank Chouteau Brown
... not know how to think and cannot support the burden of trying to think. It springs at ideas and goes off with them in haste too great for reflection. He drops these ideas when he sees an excuse for another leap. Sequence to Lord Northcliffe is a synonym for monotony. He has no esprit de suite. But he has leaps of real genius. An admirable title for his biography would be, "The Fits and Starts of a Discontinuous Soul." There is something of St. Vitus in his psychology. You might call him the Spring-Heeled ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... to relieve the monotony and weariness of the Montreux life, was in her children; especially as, on the approach of spring, she wandered with them over the hill-sides in quest of flowers; then her delight knew no bounds. In a letter to Mrs. Washburn, dated ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... IN PLAIN DARNING STITCH (fig. 682).—The taste for ornamenting not only curtains but bed and table linen also, with lace and insertion of all kinds, to break the monotony of the large white surfaces, is becoming more and more general and the insertion here described will be welcome to such of our readers as have neither time nor patience for work of a ...
— Encyclopedia of Needlework • Therese de Dillmont
... simple little building at its best. The sky makes a glorious background, with fleecy clouds delicately veiling its brilliancy. The bright light throws a shadow of the tower across the roof, breaking the monotony of its length. The bareness of the big barn-like end is softened by the shadow in which it is seen. The plain side is decorated with the shadows of the buttresses ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... my life has been passed in all the vicissitudes of war and peace. The camp and the bivouac—the reckless gaiety of the mess-table —the comfortless solitude of a French prison—the exciting turmoils of active service—the wearisome monotony of garrison duty, I have alike partaken of, and experienced. A career of this kind, with a temperament ever ready to go with the humour of those about him will always be sure of its meed of adventure. Such has mine been; and with no greater pretension than to chronicle a few of the scenes in which ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... bright anticipations. He reminded himself of the glittering delights with which, during the past three Christmases, Lidey's kinsfolk in the Settlement had lovingly surrounded her. Now he, her father, could do nothing to make her Christmas different from all these other days of whose shut-in monotony she was wearying. Hope, now, and excited wonder were giving the little one new life. Dave Patton cringed within at the thought of the awakening, the disillusionment, the desolation of sorrow that would come to the ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... looked upon the white madness before; had seen men die from the deadly monotony of it all. It was conceivable that a book of bright pictures, anything with warm colors might penetrate the pall of white fog that clouded his brain and shatter the obsession, reinstating reason on its tottering throne. But there was only the howling of white ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... made a blur ahead of them. Now the 'pike sides faded from fresh green to a general dulness, and trees whispering to the rain lost their vistas and indentations of shade, and became a solid wall down which a steady pour hissed with settled monotony. Boswell and Johnson no longer foraged at the 'pike sides, or lagged behind or scampered ahead. They knew it was a rainy October night without lightning and thunder, slipped by mistake into the packet of June weather; and they trotted invisibly under the carriage, ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... of success in many a speaker who has both a good voice and good matter may be found in the fact that his voice, instead of being as flexible as a piece of whalebone, is as unbending as a bar of iron; or, worse still, perhaps he adopts the dreary monotony of the sing-song tone: the two unvarying notes so suggestive of the up and down movements of a pump-handle. This "cuckoo" tone would blight the best ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... prose idyll "My Winter Garden" tries to persuade himself that he was glad he had never travelled, "having never yet actually got to Paris." Monotony, he says, "is pleasant in itself; morally pleasant, and morally useful. Marriage is monotonous; but there is much, I trust, to be said in favour of holy wedlock. Living in the same house is monotonous; but three removes, say the wise, are as bad as ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... the clouds lifted and I enjoyed another wide view from the summit of the ridge of the vast grassy fountain region with smooth rolling features. A few patches of forest broke the monotony of color, and the many lakes, one of them about five miles long, were glowing like windows. Only the highest ridges were whitened with snow, while rifts in the clouds showed beautiful bits of yellow-green sky. The limit of tree growth ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... exercise, one can readily perceive that the days are not long and tiresome. Of course there are a few who yawn and complain of the monotony of frontier life, but these are the stay-at-homes who sit by their own fires day after day and let cobwebs gather in brain and lungs. And these, too, are the ones who have time to discover so many faults in others, and become our garrison gossips! If they ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... Island, and the performances on it he saw through no veils of illusion. Nothing is in general more gloomy and monotonous than declamations on the hollowness and transitoriness of human life and grandeur: but here, too, the great charm of Marcus Aurelius, his emotion, comes in to relieve the monotony and to break through the gloom; and even on this eternally used topic he is imaginative, fresh, ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... refreshing upland coolness of evening followed on the humid heat of a hot June day. Towards sunset Ann Penhallow, to her niece's surprise, drew on her shawl and said she would like to walk down to the little river. Any proposal to break the routine of a life unwholesome in its monotony was agreeable to Leila. No talk of the war was possible. When Ann Penhallow now more and more rarely and with effort went on her too frequently needed errands of relief or consolation, the village people understood her silence ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... Town? By degrees the old phrases, old catch-words, and old opinions have come to reign again. Troy's unchanged loveliness too, the daily round full of experiences familiar as old friends, the dear monotony of sight and sound in the little port—all have made for healing and oblivion. If you question us on a certain three months in our life, the chances are you will get no answer. We have agreed to forget, you see; and so we are beginning to persuade ourselves, almost, ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the question of food, a few words must be said on another requisite—variety. In this respect the dietary of the young is very faulty. If not, like our soldiers, condemned to "twenty years of boiled beef," our children have mostly to bear a monotony which, though less extreme and less lasting, is quite as clearly at variance with the laws of health. At dinner, it is true, they usually have food that is more or less mixed, and that is changed day by day. But week after week, ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... had been face to face with cruel conditions of life, had seen hardships and denials and injustices, and dreary monotony of days, and I wanted for a while to get away from it all, to breathe deep of that which would renew and reinforce and revitalize; wanted to be a child again, and, with Selwyn as my playmate, wander along the winding ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... wardrobe. Great was the bartering for old clothes, handkerchiefs, and hats; and great the number of useless and noisy animals we received in exchange. Great, too, was the merriment aboard, and the excitement when the canoes first came. The transition from the monotony of a sea-life to the loquacious bustle of barter with a half-civilized people is so sudden, that the mind at once feels in a strange land, and the commonest productions proclaim the luxuriant climes of ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... waters are; I could lie down like a tired child, And weep away the life of care Which I have borne, and yet must bear, Till death like sleep might steal on me, And I might feel in the warm air My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony. ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... will be to use hard wood in the first story and painted pine in the chambers, with various combinations and exceptions. The bath-rooms, halls and dressing-rooms of the second story should of course be without paint, and we may relieve the solid monotony of the hardwood finish with occasional fillets or bands of color, painted panels or any other irregularities we choose to invent. But this is invading the mighty and troublous realm of 'interior decoration,' from which I had resolved to keep at a respectful ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... more necessary, inasmuch as the material which our life and love offers to my spirit and to my pen is so incessantly progressive and so inflexibly systematic. If the form were also of that character, this, in its way, unique letter would then acquire an intolerable unity and monotony, and would no longer produce the desired effect, namely, to fashion and complete a most lovely chaos of sublime harmonies and interesting pleasures. So I use my incontestable right to a confused style by inserting here, in the wrong place, one ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... that, in the rank to which she belonged, she had few equals, and scarcely any superior. The variety of humours which is to be found in her novels is immense; and though the talk of each person separately is monotonous, the general effect is not monotony, but a very lively and agreeable diversity. Her plots are rudely constructed and improbable, if we consider them in themselves. But they are admirably framed for the purpose of exhibiting striking groups of eccentric characters, each governed ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... that the man was manoeuvring his cockleshell about, so as to get the cutter between it and the shore, and with pleasant visions in his mind of a lobster, crab, or some other fish to vary the monotony of the salt beef and pork, of which they had, in Hilary's thinking, far too much, he leaned over the side till the man allowed his boat ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn
... of watering places, the monotony of days that are all alike, proves hourly an incentive to ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... in sight after one week, it becomes tiresome. I am quick tempered, and get at it with all zeal when my interest is aroused, and would sit up all night to work it out, but I have never shone in endurance. However loyal a member of the heavenly-chastisement league I may be, I cannot escape monotony. On the sixth night I was a little tired, and on the seventh thought I would quit. Porcupine, however, stuck to it with bull-dog tenacity. From early in the evening up to past twelve, he would glue his eye to the shoji and keep steadily watching under ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... years after her marriage were spent almost without interruption in the still monotony of Nohant. "We live here as quietly as possible," she writes to her mother in June, 1825, "seeing very few people, and occupying ourselves with rural cares." That absolute dependence on each other's society that might have had its charm for a really well-assorted couple was, however, ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... rather common young man, but he had been sincerely in love with her. He was not sufficiently subtle to recognize that it was the idea of escaping from Miss Wickham and the deadly monotony of her days that tempted her. He had laid his case before Miss Wickham. There had been some terrible scenes. Nora had felt the lash of her employer's bitter tongue. Partly because she was still smarting from the attack, and partly because she was indignant with her suitor ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... well able to fight their way through battalions of clod-hoppers whose talk is of oxen. But, unless in times subject to special distress, it is not so easy to tempt away the weaver from his loom as the delver from his spade. We believe the reason to be, that the monotony of a rustic life is more oppressive to those who have limited resources than the corresponding monotony of a town life. For this reason, and for many others, it is certain—and perhaps (unless we get to fighting with steam-men) it will continue ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... excitement leading to the excretion of the digestive juices. If one ate salt pork and boiled potatoes always, eating would be a tiresome affair, and it is quite likely that such a sameness of food would fail to excite subsequent digestion, merely from the monotony of the affair. Salt, however, has a particular role in that the human body craves this mineral, and, while its exact value in the body is not clearly known, a certain amount of it must always be provided. The wild tribes of Africa, for instance, ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... advantageous marriage he was bound to make with a woman of family as good as his own, and of purse much longer. But as an object of contemplation for the present, as objective spirit rather than corporeal presence, Grace Melbury would serve to keep his soul alive, and to relieve the monotony of ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... under giesa not to refuse a woman's request. In the play of Mr. Moore and Mr. Yeats Diarmid and Grania "do not live," says the "Daily Express," "the exciting life of flight from cromlech to cromlech. They settle down very comfortably in the monotony of a prosperous farm. Diarmid busies himself with his sheep. Grania ... begins to pine for the society from which she has wilfully cut herself off, and to think more and more of the grim old warrior Finn. Then Finn ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... tiresome, but, possessing that placid, philosophical temperament which seems to have some casual connection with corpulence, she submits without murmuring, and tries to lighten a little the unavoidable monotony by paying visits and receiving visitors. The neighbours within a radius of twenty miles are, with few exceptions, more or less of the Ivan Ivan'itch and Maria Petrovna type—decidedly rustic in their manners and conceptions; but their company is better ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... be said that he had suffered. On the contrary, his character had regained its tone after weeks of depression. Another day was ended, and he went to rest, but he slept less soundly than before, and on the following morning he awoke early. The monotony of the existence struck him all at once in its reality. The fourth day would be like the third, and, for all he knew, hundreds to come would be like the fourth if it pleased his Eminence to keep him a prisoner. Corona would certainly never suspect that he was shut up in the ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... beyond expression. Down in these thick foundations no sound penetrated to break the terrible monotony of the silence around her, except the dull, solemn voice of the bell striking the ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... figures had stopped in the trail beside her pile of driftwood. In a tone singularly pleasing he was humming the air of the funeral lament, fitfully, experimentally at first, then as the haunting monotony of the strain became familiar, with a certain easy confidence. Jean forgot to be afraid. Almost unconsciously she found herself humming in unison with the motionless figure. Even when the man faced her and she ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... left me I went out one night into the town in search of amusement. I went, unaccompanied, into the native quarter, not a wise thing to do, especially at night, but at eighteen one is not always wise, and I was weary of the monotony of the sick-room, and eager for something which had in it a spice of adventure, I found myself in a street which I have reason to believe is no longer existing. It had a French name, and was called the Rue de Rabagas,—I ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... that their consequence is overlooked among their superiors. According as the punch circulated, however, their diffidence began to wear off; and occasionally an odd laugh or so might be heard to break the monotony of their silence. The youngsters, too, though at first almost in a state of terror, soon commenced plucking each other; and a titter, or a suppressed burst of laughter, would break forth from one of the more waggish, who was put to a severe task ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... every room. Rugs of priceless fur concealed the rough flooring. Chinese silks, Japanese damasks,—Oriental tapestries smuggled in by the fur traders,—covered the walls; and richest of silk attired the Russian officers and their ladies, compelled to beguile time here, where the only break in monotony was the arrival of fresh ships from America, or exiles from St. Petersburg, or gambling or drinking or dancing or feasting the long winter nights through, with, perhaps, a duel in the morning to settle ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... the monotony of seeing the spectacled Marquis reading, folding, and docketing, letter after letter. I wished to shut out the image which wearied me, but something prevented my being able to shut my eyes. I tried again and again; but, positively, I had lost the ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... hall—but, no! The tune stopped! The villain had turned 216 pounds over on a set of springs which shiveringly reported the man-quake in their midst. A brief moment of calm—just enough for a murderer to lick his chops and gather a lulling sense of monotony from the contemplation of a fresh wife-slaying, and he was off again with the sheriff after him for exceeding the speed limit. His horn was clearing the track and the vibrations ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... goat, he may settle anywhere between Windsor and Halifax. It is one of the most sterile regions in the Province. With the exception of a wild pond or two, we saw nothing but rocks and stunted firs, for forty-five miles, a monotony unrelieved by one picturesque feature. Then we longed for the "Garden of Nova Scotia," and understood what is ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... if it be not looked at in the light of its connection with 'the regions beyond.' From that connection life derives all its meaning. Surely nothing can be conceived more unmeaning, more wearisome in its monotony, more tragic in its joy, more purposeless in its efforts, than man's life, if the life of sense and time be all. Truly it is 'like a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.' 'The white radiance ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... upon free thought and free speech, and shaming even the most determined and intolerant spirit. One of such men, outspoken by nature, recorded his mind in some two thousand printed pages, and Roger Williams even to-day looms up with all the more power because we have become "rather fatigued by the monotony of so vast a throng of sages and saints, all quite immaculate, all equally prim and stiff in their Puritan starch and uniform, all equally automatic and freezing." It is most comfortable to find anyone defying the rigid and formal law of the time, whether ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... of these 'broiling' days. One calls up with a sort of wistfulness the great and picturesque cities abroad, with their grand streets and palaces, ever a delightful novelty. We long to be away, to be crossing over that night—enjoying a cool fresh passage, all troubles and monotony left behind. ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... train is running through the oasis. We shall soon be in the open desert. The soil is formed of alluvial beds extending up to the environs of Merv. I must get accustomed to this monotony of the journey which will last up to the frontier of Turkestan. Oasis and desert, desert and oasis. As we approach the Pamir the scenery will change a little. There are picturesque bits of landscape in that orographic knot which ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... pocket some toy or picture-book? Small things they often were—these gifts that meant so much to the child—often things of very slight money value; but to the invalid whose long, tedious days of convalescence were stretches of monotony the tiny presents seemed treasures from an ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett
... among themselves, and Desmond found some alleviation of the monotony of his life in learning the lingua franca of India under the Babu's tuition. He was encouraged to persevere in the study by the fact that the Babu proved to be an excellent storyteller, often beguiling the tedium of wakeful hours in the shed by relating ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... stone a Shepherd, Stone and Shepherd sleeping, Under the high blue Attic sky; Along the green monotony ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... the stubble-fields immeasurably spread at times, and I did not always resent the roadside planting of some sort of tall hedges which now and then hid the olives. But olive orchards may vary their monotony by the spectacle of peasants on ladders gathering their fruit into wide-mouthed sacks, and occasionally their ranks of symmetrical green may be broken by the yellow and red of poplars and pomegranates around the pleasant farmsteads. The nearer we drew to Granada ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... of the "Blessed Virgin and Child," and on the other that of a "Guardian Angel." Hanging opposite the bed is an oil painting of "Mater Dolorosa," besides sundry little chromos and photographs that destroy the monotony of bare walls. There is nothing left to wish for—beauty, utility, grandeur have been harmoniously blended here, and this is the nook that Henry Rayne offers Honor Edgeworth, one worthy of a princess, indeed. Mrs. Potts had promised herself that nothing should be left undone ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... of becoming known as a song-writer; he cultivated his gift to relieve the monotony of an unintellectual occupation, and the usual auditor of his lays was his younger brother Matthew, who for some years was his companion in the workshop. The acquaintance of Robert Archibald Smith, the celebrated musical composer, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... at school the doubtful talent of reading French with facility, and was soon deep in the fascinating pages, whose theme is the usual one of French novels,—a young wife, tired of domestic monotony, with an unappreciative husband, solacing herself with the devotion of a lover. Lillie felt a sort of pique with her husband. He was evidently unappreciative: he was thinking of all sorts of things more than of her, and growing stupid, as husbands ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... not be denied the house. At first she was quite unhappy, finding the convent dull, triste, and strict. I cannot conceive of a convent being a very pleasant place for a worldly young lady, in any country or in any age of the world. Its monotony and routine and mechanical duties must ever have been irksome. The pleasing manners and bright conversation of Theresa caused the nuns to take an unusual interest in her; and one of them in particular exercised a great influence upon her, so that she was ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... miles the track runs through rank, steamy swamps, devoid of beauty, the monotony only broken by the endless cemeteries and an occasional alligator dozing on ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... to catch a boat for Samoa. He wired to his friend, Monsieur de Letz, the French Consul, that he was coming, and received an enthusiastic welcome. The Consul was a bachelor, approaching middle age, was intensely bored with the monotony of life on an island of the Pacific, and was ravished with the chance of entertaining a personage so brilliant in the great far-away world as the Marchese Loria. He had a charming house, and a good cook; some wine also, and cigars of the best. Loria arrived at dinner-time, and afterward, smoking ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... cannot strive. After all I am persuaded that they get a fair amount of happiness. Simple pleasures are the greatest, perhaps the only real pleasures. We all like to be free of responsibilities. There is no rent-day coming round with dread certainty and irritating monotony to the nomads. No rate collector irritates them with his imperious "demand note." No school-board officer rouses them to a sense of duty by his everlasting efforts to force their children to school. No butcher, ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... always pointed and very frequently as brilliant as it was copious. With all the monotony of utterance, says Taylor, 'there was such a variety and richness of thought and language, and often so much wit and humour, that one could not help being interested and attentive.' On matters of business, he adds, 'the talk could not be of the same quality and was of the same continuity.' ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... are; I could lie down like a tired child, And weep away the life of care Which I have borne, and yet must bear, Till death like sleep might steal on me, And I might feel in the warm air My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony. ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... glossy. Who was the idiot who first set afloat the notion—now become an established prejudice in England—that mustaches were unseemly? To nine faces out of ten, they are a most becoming addition, increasing physiognomical character, almost giving it where there is none; relieving the monotony of broad flat cheeks, and abridging the abomination of a long upper-lip. Uncleanly, say you? Not a bit of it, if judiciously trimmed and trained. What, Sir! are they not at least as proper looking as those foxy thickets extending from jawbone to temple, which you yourself, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... restless spirits would soon tire of the monotony of work without ultimate interest. Ordinarily the hope of a big cut is sufficient to keep men of the right sort working for a record. But these men had no such hope—the camp was too small, and they were too few. Thorpe adopted the expedient, now quite common, of posting ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... glorious details: modest because they are so very common, because they are constantly being repeated in their noble monotony and springing up from every side, numberless as the essential actions of our daily life; and glorious because before this war they seemed so rare ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... so did this young man hear the rumble of the traffic down Piccadilly. He listened to it very attentively, and it was, he told himself, very like the noise of some huge animal breathing in its sleep. There was a regularity, a monotony about it ... and also perhaps a sense of great force, quiescent now and held in restraint. He was a very normal, well-balanced young man and thoughts of this kind were ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... the rushing of many waters, growled amongst the ranks and the surrounding spectators, while a short sharp exclamation of horror every now and then gushed out shrill and clear, and fearfully distinct above the appalling monotony. ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... send her word that she was entirely free from him, and would bid her do according to the nature of the Lovels. But in the evening, as he would wander back, slowly, all alone, tired of his work, tired of the black solitude of the life he was leading, longing for some softness to break the harsh monotony of his labour, he would remember all her prettinesses, and would, above all, remember the pretty oaths with which she had sworn that she, Anna Lovel, loved him, Daniel Thwaite, with all the woman's love which a woman could give. He would remember the warm kiss ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... reeds now in full leaf. Everything was spellbound that day; the shadows of reed and island seemed fixed for ever as in a magic mirror—a mirror that somebody had breathed upon, and, listening to the little gurgle of the water about the limestone shingle, one seemed to hear eternity murmuring its sad monotony. ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... were built of bricks, either baked or unbaked, the outer surfaces of which were covered with white or tinted rough-casting. The high and narrow doors were nearly always hidden away in a corner of the front; the bare monotony of the walls was only relieved here and there at long intervals by tiny windows, but often instead of a flat roof the building was surmounted by a conical dome or by semi-cupolas, the concave sides of which were turned inwards. The inhabitants ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... in my power to give a narrative of the daily occurrences on the plantation. The history of one day was that of all. The gloomy monotony of our slavery, was only broken by the overseer's periodical fits of drunkenness, at which times neither life nor limb on the estate were secure from ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... system of tributaries, and its plateau were being uplifted from the primeval ocean, it consisted of nothing but a wild, barren waste of rock. Not a tree, not a shrub, not a flower, not a blade of grass relieved the monotony of the wilderness of rocks which emerged from the great Eocene sea. Not a lizard, horned toad, centipede, tarantula, chuckwalla, campamouche,* frog, tree-toad, turtle or snake was to be found on the long stretching areas of its lifeless shores. Not a chipmunk, prairie-dog, coyote, rat, mouse, porcupine, ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... conversion of the boatswain, who seemed the only hopeful subject in the ship's company. There were a hundred and thirty steerage passengers, emigrants for the most part from Protestant countries, though a party of Garibaldian refugees and a few equally wild Frenchmen enlivened the monotony of sea-life by some bloody fights. There were but two cabin passengers besides the Redemptorists, and the former being confined to their staterooms by nearly continual sea-sickness, the cabin was turned into ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... silence of Nature all about him, he might plead in lover-like retirement with his refractory Muse, and strive to coax her into a sweeter and more indulgent humor. It was not that thoughts were lacking to him,—what he complained of was the monotony of language and the difficulty of finding new, true, and choice forms of expression. A great thought leaps into the brain like a lightning flash; there it is, an indescribable mystery, warming the soul and pervading the ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Australian literature. Others have shown the cheerful, hopeful, romantic aspects of the new land; he, not less honestly, but with a more concentrated and individual view, has pictured some of the monotony of its half-grown society, the gloom of its scenery, and the painful realities of its early penal systems. Reputed only as a novelist, he possessed besides imagination some of the higher qualities of the critical historian. And had his life been prolonged, he might ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... ash, far more alert and far more suspicious than the common species. Its harsh, loud song consists of a series of cries—can! can! can! can!—with no intervals of silence subdividing the poem into stanzas. Thanks to its monotony and its harsh shrillness, it is a most odious sound, especially when the orchestra consists of hundreds of performers, as is often the case in my two plane-trees during the dog-days. It is as though ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... correct, and for the next week Geoffrey was allowed to remain quietly in the yard when the gang went out to their work. At the end of that time his wound had closed, and being heartily sick of the monotony of his life, he voluntarily fell in by the side of Boldero when the gang was called to work. The overseer was apparently pleased at this evidence of willingness on the part of the young captive, and said something ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty
... journey lay through that brain-wearying plain whose endless flatness oppressed soul and body with its monotony and soon drove her back to her own thoughts. Towards evening there were signs of rain. Clouds were rising and then, at least, there would be something new to point at in the eternal monotony of the sky. Unfortunately clouds ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... whistle, whereupon everybody sought the shelter of the nearest and largest boulder. But although, when the huge shell burst, the air seemed unpleasantly full of whizzing iron fragments, no damage was done, and the gun merely mitigated, to some extent, the monotony of idleness. ...
— The Second Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the South African War - With a Description of the Operations in the Aden Hinterland • Cecil Francis Romer and Arthur Edward Mainwaring
... naval officers, retired from the service, and took grants of land in the neighbourhood of Lake Simcoe. Being possessed of considerable private means, the Commodore built a palatial residence on the borders of that lake, and varied the monotony of a life ashore by an engrossing interest in politics and the active duties of a Legislative Councillor. The illness of his wife, to whom he was devoted, had in the past two years almost entirely withdrawn him from political ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... a break came upon the monotony of the long, dark winter. The parishioners once more raised the discussion whether—the parish extending as it did—it was not absolutely necessary for Pastor Tappau to have help. This question had been mooted once before; and then Pastor Tappau had acquiesced ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... but nothing happened, and after a week of bed he began to realize that the job might be a long one. The monotony, to a man of his active habits, became almost intolerable, and the narrated adventures of Mr. James Flynn, his only caller, filled him with an uncontrollable longing to ...
— Night Watches • W.W. Jacobs
... that these thirty notebooks taken at random—Bavarian, Saxon, Pomeranian, Brandeburger, or from the provinces of Baden and the Rhine—must of necessity represent hundreds and thousands of others quite similar, as we may judge from the frightful monotony of their recitals; if we consider all this, we must, I think, be forced to admit that these atrocities are nothing less than the practical application of a ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... of arrested activities, the energies of a restless people turned otherwhere for interest. To relieve the monotony of political stagnation, popular attention was now turned toward the affairs of Hungary. We could not solve our own problems, but we were as ready to solve those of Europe as Europe was to offer us aid in ours. Therefore, instant interest attached ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... laughed at. The silence of the place was broken only by the noise of coopering which seemed to be going on in every other house; the solitude relieved only by the Newfoundland dogs that stretched themselves upon the thresholds of the cooper-shops. The monotony of these shops and dogs took Kitty's humor, and as they went slowly by she made a jest of them, as she used to do with things ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... these quiet people in calm monotony of life, without any greater event than that which has been recorded,—the being left behind at the Towers, until she was nearly seventeen. She had become a visitor at the school, but she had never gone again to the annual festival at the great house; it was ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... can we expect the child who has stood openmouthed before a poster representing a woman chloroformed by a burglar (while that hero escapes in safety with jewels) to display any interest in the arid monotony of the multiplication table? The illegitimate excitement created by the sight of the depraved burglar can only be counteracted by something equally exciting along the realistic but legitimate side of appeal; and this is where the story of the ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... taken the opposite view, and it is impossible not to admire the delicacy with which he has handled an exceedingly difficult theme. ....Feeling convinced that monogamy is a happier state than polygamy, he would save the married couple from the monotony and satiety which follow possession, by varying their pleasures in every conceivable way and by supplying them with the means of being psychically pure and physically ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... the use of going on with this writer's criticisms upon me, when I am confined to the dull monotony of exposing and oversetting him again and again, with a persistence, which many will think merciless, and few will have the interest to read? Yet I am obliged to do so, lest I should seem ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... the only breaks in the monotony of that life, were to eat, and, when possible, to sleep. Thought, reason, and reflection dwindled in their brains. Instincts—the primitive, elemental impulses of the animal—possessed them instead. To eat, ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... hour had passed, and Martha's sense of the humorous had long since vanished under the dreary monotony of the conversation, when Alfred Barton seemed to have come to a desperate resolution to end his embarrassment. Grasping his knees with both hands, and dropping his head forward so that the arrows of her eyes might glance from his fat ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... pondered as she went about her household business, or sat in the chamber upstairs with Mistress Alice; and it was of these things that she talked with the few priests that came and went from time to time in their circuits about Derbyshire. It was a life of quietness and monotony inconceivable by those who live in towns. Its sole incident lay in that life ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... America-bound emigrant to this day. Such, at least, was the feeling that was lurking in my heart while the Bremen steamer was carrying me to New York. Day after day passes and all you see about you is an unbroken waste of water, an unrelieved, a hopeless monotony of water. You know that a change will come, but this knowledge is confined to your brain. ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... social or political aspects of the East. They attended a not unimportant war on the northern frontier, another one on our western boundary, and a third in Upper Burma. Then their regiment sat still to recruit, and the boundless monotony of cantonment life was their portion. They were drilled morning and evening on the same dusty parade-ground. They wandered up and down the same stretch of dusty white road, attended the same church and the same grog- shop, and slept in the same lime-washed ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... we became close companions. As an operator he had no superiors and very few equals. Most of the time he was monkeying with the batteries and circuits, and devising things to make the work of telegraphy less irksome. He also relieved the monotony of office-work by fitting up the battery circuits to play jokes on his fellow-operators, and to deal with the vermin that infested the premises. He arranged in the cellar what he called his 'rat paralyzer,' a very simple contrivance consisting of two plates ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... if a third man of any trade come along the character of business in Burunda may entirely change. But while there are but two of each, the chances are that any day the visitors may have the quiet monotony of the place broken ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... sense, kept her eye on the game,—she had to, and her little triumphs satisfied her. Nan Lawton varied the monotony of "the ordinary round" by emotional dissipations that Isabelle felt herself to be above. Other women of their set got variety by running about the country to New York or Washington, to a hotel in Florida or in the mountains of Carolina, or as a perpetual resource ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... orchestra; but the possibilities of orchestral contrasts and changes in the working out of the part known as "free fantasia" permits the symphonic composer to conduct his work in larger lines and carry it to a greater length than is advisable for the composer of sonatas for a single instrument, in which monotony of tone-color is an element which must not ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... space. The chronometer pointed out the hours with exasperating slowness. The six hours that were to elapse before the first stop seemed as many days. They had thought of this trip as a wonderful adventure in itself, but the soundless continued monotony was depressing. They wandered around, aimlessly. Wade tried to sleep, but after lying strapped in his bunk for half an hour, he gave ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of color in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony which reigns in the countenances, that immovable veil of black which covers all the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... superior appreciation of his companion. The fact that this woman was an actress, an abomination vaguely alluded to by her father as being even more mysteriously wicked than her sister and mother, and correspondingly exciting, as offering a possible permanent relief to the monotony of her home life, seemed to excuse her brother's weakness. She was almost ready to become his partisan—AFTER she had ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... after night, till his life's end, plenty and comfort and neatness and respectability and warmth in dull monotony; while outside somewhere in the cold and rain, in poverty and want and wretchedness, wandered Edith with the wailing baby ...
— Zoe • Evelyn Whitaker
... and receive pay, and other advantages, the number who sent in their names was small. The men who did so were, for the most part, picked men; foresters, wood cutters, and others who preferred the certainty of active and stirring service, among the franc tireurs, to the pay and comparative monotony of the regular service. There were some forty of these men among the corps, the rest being all able to provide at least their outfit. Subscriptions had come in rapidly and, in a week, an ample sum was collected ...
— The Young Franc Tireurs - And Their Adventures in the Franco-Prussian War • G. A. Henty
... love-making, viz., propinquity; the same proximity producing hostility in whose sterner natures, that, in others of a gentler cast, produces its opposite feeling. We sailed, and it is scarcely necessary to tell the reader how much the tedium of so long a voyage, and the monotony of a sea-voyage, was relieved by the graces and gentle intercourse of our upper cabin. The other apartment being so crowded and hot, I passed most of my time in the poop, which was both light and airy. Here I generally found the father and daughter, though ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... of the lights, the heat of the room, the heavy perfume of the flowers, the cadence of the music, even the physical fatigue, reacted in some strange way upon their oversensitive feminine nerves, the monotony of repeated sensation producing some sort of mildly hypnotic effect, a morbid hysterical pleasure the more exquisite because mixed with pain. These were the girls whom one heard declaring that they could dance all night, the girls who ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... near, and every one remembered her. It was a set of china from an aunt in Crail, or napery from some cousins in Kirkcaldy, or quilts from her father's folk in Largo, and so on, in a very charming monotony. Now and then a bit of silver came, and once a very pretty American clock. And there was not a quilt or a tablecloth, a bit of china or silver, a petticoat or a ribbon, that the whole village did not examine, and discuss, ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... strains of feeling influenced her just then. First, her growing recognition of the change in Richard, of that passing away of childhood which could not but make for difficulty and, in a sense, for pain. Secondly, the natural excitement of her brother's homecoming, disturbing the monotony of her daily life, bringing, along with very actual joy, memories of a past, well-beloved yet gone beyond recall. Lastly, the practical and immediate fear that Dickie had come uncommonly near tumbling incontinently out of the window. And so, being ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... her mistress is allowed to show. Then, according to the general plan of all these books, in which fierce wars and faithful loves alternate, there is more fighting, and though Artamene is victorious (as how should he not be, save now and then to prevent monotony?) he disappears and is thought dead. Of course Mandane cries, and confesses to the confidante, being entirely "finished" by a very exquisite letter which Artamene has written before going into the doubtful battle. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... with the crowd of workers from the saltpeter works,—"broken-down" [originally a term of contempt is now a complimentary by-name] Chileans, laboring men from all countries, who did not know how to spend their day's wages in the monotony of these new settlements. Their intoxication diverted itself with most mistaken magnificence. Some would let the wine run from an entire cask just to fill a single glass. Others used the bottles of champagne lined up on the shelves of the cafes as a target for their revolvers, paying ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... were times when all the loveliness of that island seemed but a hideous place of exile, an abhorrent monotony which surrounded her—grasped her—clung to her—hemmed her in, as if it were an evil spirit, having life and the power to torture her. She thought of those whom she loved, she pondered upon all the grand schemes of her existence, and she felt herself ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... alleviate the monotony of riding hour after hour was to walk; occasionally this was rendered absolutely necessary by some accident, such as breaking a wheel or axle, or when an animal gave out before a station was reached. In such cases, however, no deduction was made from ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... during the ensuing two hundred and fifty years and so few are the records remaining, that not even the names of all the governors and the periods of their rule can be accurately determined. The colony barely existed, the monotony of its life was interrupted only by occasional attacks or menaces of attacks by pirates or ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... side. Seats, too, flanked the porch, and the carefully trimmed wistaria vine hung gracefully over all. Across both ends of the house ran wide verandahs, with porte cochere, sun parlour, conservatory and tea-porch breaking the monotony. ...
— Patty and Azalea • Carolyn Wells
... lived about fifty-eight years of solid monotony, broken only by the novelty of coming to Japan as a school teacher thirty years before and, although my soul yearned for the chance to indulge in the frills of romance, opportunity to do so was about the only thing that ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... containing the whitish, globular eggs of the Rose-beetle, encumbered mantel and furniture; glass aquariums half full of earth, sod, and youthful larvae of the same sinful beetle lent pleasing variety to the monotony of Scott's interior decorative effects. Microscopes, phials, shallow trays bristling with sprouting seeds, watering-cans, note-books, buckets of tepid water, jars brimming with chemical solutions, blockaded the legitimate and natural runways of chamber-maid, parlour-maid, ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... stories, because they are human, has come the humanity of the players: the thing which makes it possible for them to feel this music, and to play it, not as a machine would play, grinding it out with dead monotony, but with all the colour and passion ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... so on through the revolving year, in all places in all weathers, there is pleasure in the open air, except on these chalk hills because of their bleak nakedness. There the wind and driving rain are not for but against you, and may overcome you with misery. One feels their loneliness, monotony, and desolation on many days, sometimes even when it is not wet, and I here recall an amusing encounter with a bird-scarer during one ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... less calculated to invite poetic inspiration no votary of the muse had ever resided. On every side of his lonely dwelling extended a wild uncultivated plain; nor for miles around did any other human habitation relieve the monotony of this cheerless solitude. In her gayest moods, Nature never wore a pleasing aspect in Long-gate, nor did the distant prospect compensate for the dreary gloominess of the surrounding landscape. For his poetic suggestions ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... a shade of minute, woven pieces of various silks. Behind her was a cottage organ, a mass of fretted woodwork; a wall pierced by a window was ornamented by a framed photograph of a woman dead and in her coffin. The photograph had faded to a silvery monotony, but the details of the rigid, unnatural countenance, the fixed staring eyes, were still clear. Redly varnished chairs with green plush cushions and elaborate, thread antimacassars, a second table ranged against the wall, bearing ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... gaslit clattering monotony that immense and deafening conveyance took me. There were cafes everywhere, thickly strewn on both sides of the way—at first large and lofty and richly decorated, with vast glazed facades, and manned by waiters in black and white, then gradually growing smaller and ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... that would be an insult to a heathen idol; hideous factories (Why need they be hideous!); chimney- pot hats, baggy trousers, vulgar advertisements, stupid fashions for women that spoilt every line of their figure: dinginess, drabness, monotony everywhere. It was ugliness that was strangling the soul of the people; stealing from them all dignity, all self-respect, all honour for one another; robbing them of hope, of ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... the natural advantages of abrupt rocks, feathery hanging woods, and broken water. Thenceforward there is little to interest or to compensate for the sluggishness of pace and frequency of delays. The track winds on always through the same monotony of forest and hill, plunging into the gorges and climbing the shoulders of bluffs, with the audacity of gradient and contempt of curve that marks the handiwork of American engineers. I wonder that one of these did not take ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... only in private, and through a stupid, careless interpreter. Yet notwithstanding these disadvantages, he was one of the greatest men and most eloquent orators I ever knew. His cadence was measured and yet very musical. In ordinary utterance it amounted to a sort of musical monotony. But when excited he would spring to his feet, elevate his head, expand his arms and utter with indescribable effect of manner and tone, ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... to cheerless, charred embers and ashes gone gray; warm sunlight, and eyes grown heavy with the weariness of surfeited pleasure. Bullock carts creaked again, their squealing growing gradually fainter as the fat-jowled senoras lurched home to the monotony of life, while the senoritas drowsed and dreamed, and smiled in ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... farther. For the reader is not to think of the flat-woods as in the least resembling a Northern forest, which at every turn opens before the visitor and beckons him forward. Beyond and behind, and on either side, the pine-woods are ever the same. It is this monotony, by the bye, this utter absence of landmarks, that makes it so unsafe for the stranger to wander far from the beaten track. The sand is deep, the sun is hot; one place is as good as another. What use, then, to tire yourself? ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... the fire was so distant that it did no harm. Dick and his comrades watched the shells in their flight, noting the trails of white smoke they left behind, and then the showers of earth that flew up when they burst. It was rather a pleasant occupation to watch them. In a way it broke the monotony of a long ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Monday, January 28. Our stay there would have been exceedingly pleasant under ordinary conditions but it was impossible not to chafe at the delay occasioned by the caravan. Traveling southward for two days over bare brown mountain-sides, their monotony unrelieved except by groves of planted pine and fir trees, we descended abruptly into the great subtropical valley ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... brother, because it is fit for you to serve him, do not take back your words when you find that prudent people do not commend you. Adhere to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant and broken the monotony of a decorous age. It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person,—"Always do what you are afraid to do." A simple manly character need never make an apology, but should regard its ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the layman—is, in fact, not comprehended in its entity by outsiders—which is called for want of a better term "sympathy between officers and men." It is a bond of mutual generosity and loyalty, strong as steel, more formidable to an enemy than armaments; strengthened by monotony and a common vigil, it thrives on hardships shared, and endures triumphant, as countless tales shall tell, down to ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... ways, by censorship and privacy at the source, by physical and social barriers at the other end, by scanty attention, by the poverty of language, by distraction, by unconscious constellations of feeling, by wear and tear, violence, monotony. These limitations upon our access to that environment combine with the obscurity and complexity of the facts themselves to thwart clearness and justice of perception, to substitute misleading fictions for workable ideas, and ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... others, Augusta, I admit. But what I was going on to say was that for clear monotony the dinner programmes ever since Paris have beaten the record. Bramley told me how it would be. Consommy, he said—that's soup—consommy, the whole enduring time. Fish frite or fried, roast beef a l'Italienne ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... did you. You were too afraid you would drop it. I was thinking how unmotherly, I had almost said unwomanly, you looked. You were made for the great world,—the restless world, where people fly faster from monotony than from ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... has been so highly flavored that life is absolutely without savor or sweetness to her now, nothing but tasteless insipidity. She has stood on a pinnacle till all things have come to look flat and dreary; mere shapeless, colorless, level monotony to her. Poor woman! what a fate to be condemned to, and yet how she has been envied, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... surface of the globe. It is a region of extreme cold—an eternal winter; of utter darkness—an eternal night—relieved only by the fitful gleams of "phosphorescent" animals; of enormous pressure—2-1/2 tons on the square inch at a depth of 2,500 fathoms; of profound calm, unbroken silence, immense monotony. And as there are no plants in the great abysses, the animals must live on one another, and, in the long run, on the rain of moribund animalcules which sink from the surface through the miles of ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... indeed, alternated between an eternal racking anxiety and a monotony before which the imagination sinks appalled. "Between days and nights I am almost wore out," he wrote briefly to Stanhope on April 29th, 1806, "but I do not mean to quit my station while I have health"; and on September ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... Water,—and to our right and rear is their sandy confluence. Southward, almost to the very horizon, in waves and rolls and ridges, bare of trees, void of color, the earth unfolds before the eye, while, as though to relieve the strain of gazing over the expanse so illimitable in its monotony, a blue line of cliffs and crags stretches across the sky line for many degrees. Beyond that, out of sight to the southeast, lies the sheltered, fertile valley of the upper White Earth River; and there are the legal ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... time to time the taunt is thrown at Religion, not unseldom from lips which Science ought to have taught more caution, that the Future Life of Christianity is simply a prolonged existence, an eternal monotony, a blind and indefinite continuance of being. The Bible never could commit itself to any such empty platitude; nor could Christianity ever offer to the world a hope so colourless. Not that Eternal Life has nothing to do with everlastingness. That is part of the conception. And it ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... find monotony in an Eden so well arranged; the perfect happiness which the first woman found in her terrestrial paradise gave her at length a sort of nausea of sweet things, and made the countess wish, like Rivarol reading Florian, for a wolf in the fold. Such, ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... days in her chamber, reading, or working at a great embroidery, a masterpiece of patience and taste, which she had undertaken with a faint hope that it might become useful in case of distress. But a new source of trouble roused her soon after from this dull monotony. Her money grew less and less; and at last the day came when she changed the last gold-piece of her nine hundred francs. It became urgent to resort once more to the pawnbroker; for these were the ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... an event in Havana; it was something to vary the monotony of this beautiful island-city, and the inhabitants seized upon it as a gala day. Business was suspended; the throng put on their holiday suit, the various regiments appeared in full regalia and uniform, for the new lieutenant-commander-in-chief was to review them in the after ...
— The Heart's Secret - The Fortunes of a Soldier, A Story of Love and the Low Latitudes • Maturin Murray
... the hills were taking on the slate grays and chocolate tones of late autumn and the woods were almost denuded of the flaunting gorgeousness which had so recently held carnival there, yet the sodden drabness of winter had in nowise settled to its monotony, for through the grays and browns ran violet and ultramarine reflexes like soft and creeping fires that burned blue, and those few tenacious leaves that clung valiantly to their stems were as rich of tone as the cherry-dark hues that come ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... windows high up in the wall on one side, the other side resting on a little, round-shouldered hill. It was built facing away from the sea like the beach-stone cottages, from which it was separated by a patch of common. From the rear of the inn the marshes stretched in unbroken monotony to the line of leaping white sea dashing sullenly against the breakwater wall, and ran for miles north and south in a desolate uniformity, still and grey as the sky above, devoid of life except for a few migrant birds feeding in the salt ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... continuity, if of nothing more insolent, in one field, and accessibility to distraction in every other. Variety of imagination—what is that but fatal, in the world of affairs, unless so disciplined as not to be distinguished from monotony? Mr. Verver then, for a fresh, full period, a period betraying, extraordinarily, no wasted year, had been inscrutably monotonous behind an iridescent cloud. The cloud was his native envelope—the soft looseness, so ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... change the monotony of his solitude before the time of the Bon,—the great Festival of the Dead,—which begins upon the thirteenth day of the seventh month. Then he decorated his house, and prepared everything for the festival;— hanging out the lanterns that guide ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... her example, taking position as near to her as it was safe to lie. As usual, when the vessels came into port, there was a great excitement on board, for new sights and sounds are peculiarly agreeable after the voyager comes from the monotony of the swelling ocean; and the students made the most of them. In coming into port, all hands had been on duty; and after the sails had all been furled, Captain Shuffles declared that he was perfectly satisfied with the discipline of his crew. The runaways, who were generally ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... as the reading sounded in that studio, I remember at the moment to have doubted if it would prove quite so effective from a public platform. Perhaps there seemed to be so much insistence on the rhythm, and so prolonged a tension of the rhyme sounds, as would run the risk of a charge of monotony if falling on ears less concerned with points of metrical beauty than with fundamental substance. Personally, however, I found the reading in the very highest degree enjoyable ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... at a number of points we passed long piles of whitened antlers. Other game too, ducks, geese, and ptarmigan had become plentiful since we entered the caribou country, and now and then a few were taken to vary the monotony of the diet of dried caribou meat. Loons were about us at all hours, and I grew to love their weird call as much almost ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... was small, his limbs feeble and angular, his step irresolute, his attitudes affected, his gestures destitute of harmony or grace; his voice, rather shrill, aimed at oratorical inflexions, but only produced fatigue and monotony; his forehead was good, but small and extremely projecting above the temples, as if the mass and embarrassed movement of his thoughts had enlarged it by their efforts; his eyes, much covered by their lids and very sharp at the extremities, ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... she went back to Fillmore Street—when she thought of the monotony, yes, and the sordidness of home, when she let herself in at the door and climbed the dark and narrow stairway, that her feet grew leaden. In spite of the fact that Hannah was a good housekeeper and prided herself on cleanliness, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... grace of his lady, who is placed far above him, must be sought as a favour; for that favour he must qualify himself by all knightly virtues, and chief among these, as the position requires, are the virtues of discretion and patience. Hence the poet's ingenuities of adoration; hence often the monotony of artificial passion; hence, also, subtleties and curiosities of expression, and sought-out delicacies of style. In the earlier chansons some outbreak of instinctive feeling may be occasionally ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... of the repetition of the same or similar ideas, which ceases to please, and must therefore be excluded from compositions of Taste in painted landscapes, or in ornamented gardens; which is then called formality, monotony, or insipidity. Why the excitation of ideas should give additional pleasure by the facility and distinctness of their production for a certain time, and then cease to give additional pleasure; and gradually to give ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... less than a third of the distance to the midpoint, in over half the time. But our speed was still increasing 200 miles a second every second, almost four times the speed of light in an hour. Our watches went on with a not altogether disagreeable monotony. ...
— Out Around Rigel • Robert H. Wilson
... French dinner, in the perfect balance of every item from hors d'oeuvre to caf noir, in the ways with seasoning that work miracles with left-overs and preserve the daily routine of three meals a day from the deadly monotony of the American rgime, in the garnishings that glorify the most insignificant concoctions into objects of appetising beauty and in the sauces that elevate indifferent dishes into the realm of creations and enable a ...
— Twenty-four Little French Dinners and How to Cook and Serve Them • Cora Moore
... and onions, their wives and children helping—entirely contented and comfortable, if looks go for anything. We never met a man, or woman, or child anywhere in this sunny island who seemed to be unprosperous, or discontented, or sorry about anything. This sort of monotony became very tiresome presently, and even something worse. The spectacle of an entire nation groveling in contentment is an infuriating thing. We felt the lack of something in this community—a vague, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... true that around it the simple superstitions of our ancestors still love to linger; and there the half-sportful, half-serious charms of which I have spoken are oftenest resorted to. It would be altogether out of place to think of them by our black, unsightly stoves, or in the dull and dark monotony of our furnace-heated rooms. Within the circle of the light of the open fire safely might the young conjurers question destiny; for none but kindly and gentle messengers from wonderland could venture among them. And who of us, looking back to those long autumnal evenings of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the allies, and so lay where they fell, in torment in the sun beside the more fortunate slain. On landing, the Prince had passed the hospitals, full to overflowing, and the ambulances with the wounded crowding what had been the squares. There was nothing to relieve the horrible monotony of destruction and devastation except the bridge, which promised retreat from this misery, and which ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... still look in various directions to become aware of all the relations between the psychological factors and the economic output. We may begin with one question which plays a large, perhaps too large, role in the economic and especially in the popular economic literature. I refer to the problem of monotony of labor. ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... whether, in such poems as this, Coleridge is overtaken by his besetting indolence, or whether he is deliberately writing down to the theories of Wordsworth. Another criticism of his own on his early blank verse, where he speaks of "the utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the monotony and dead plumb down of the pauses, and the absence of all bone, muscle and sinew in the single lines," applies only too well to the larger part of his work in this difficult metre, so apt to go ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... princess again exchanged the splendors of a court for the melancholy monotony of Woodstock does not appear from this document, nor from any other with which I am acquainted; but several circumstances make it clear that we ought to place about this period an incident recorded by ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... a more picturesque and refreshing spectacle to the traveler, wearied with the lifeless monotony of a voyage through Lake Huron, than the first sight of the island of Michilimackinac, which rises from the watery horizon in lofty bluffs imprinting a rugged outline along the sky and capped with ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... in loneliness and monotony. Yet they have brought a great change. A prosperous village now surrounds the church, and orchards surround the village. And the folk are no longer savages. How smartly they are now dressed on Sundays! The young people have more knowledge than the old, but too little reverence ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... birthday and it occurred to me that it would be a pleasant variation to give a birthday dinner in his honor and to have a sort of feast to relieve the monotony of our daily life, and give the men something to think about and revive their spirits; for "bucking the trail" day after day with no change but the gradual change of scenery does grow monotonous to most men, and the ardor of the best of them, especially men ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... passed a fortnight, when the monotony of their lives was fearfully disturbed. The Jacobins had established their ascendency. They had created a Revolutionary Tribunal, which at once began its course of wholesale condemnation, sending almost every one who was brought ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... in extent could be seen stretching away on the shore-line. The trees were of enormous size. We landed after anchoring near a sandy beach, and waded ashore, and were rewarded by finding a quantity of nuts that were very palatable and satisfying to hunger, and a welcome change from the monotony of our ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson
... striking still. If the former of these two men, the worker, consumes within the year any profit which may have been left him in that year, he is always at the point from which he started, and his destiny condemns him to move incessantly in a perpetual circle, and a monotony of exertion. Labor, then, is rewarded only once. But if the other, the 'gentleman,' consumes his yearly income in the year, he has, the year after, in those which follow, and through all eternity, an income always equal, inexhaustible, perpetual. Capital, then, is remunerated, ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... two days and nights of the journey southward were devoid of any special interest or adventure. The lonely river, wrapped in the silence of the wilderness, brought to me many a picture of loveliness, yet finally the monotony of it all left the mind drowsy with repetition. Around each tree-crowned bend we swept, skirting shores so similar as to scarcely enable us to realize our progress. In spite of the fact that the staunch little Warrior was proceeding down stream, progress was slow because of the unmarked channel, ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... plants, water-lilies, rushes, papyrus, and gigantic reeds spring up in dense masses, and make the low-lying country look like a vast prairie, whose native freshness even the sun at its zenith has no power to destroy. Everywhere else nature is as dreary in its monotony as the vast sandy deserts which border the country on the west. In one place the yellow soil is covered with a dried, almost calcined, stubble; in another, with a grey dust which rises in clouds before the slightest breeze; in the neighbourhood of the ancient townships it ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
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