DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • More 'Sluggish' Quotes from Famous Books

... had tried its mailed hand on the slow and sluggish Dutch, with the result that the Spaniards were driven from the Netherlands. Holland was the home of freedom. Amsterdam became a Mecca for the oppressed. The Jews flocked thither, and among others who, in Sixteen Hundred Thirty-one, landed ...

— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard

... vouchsafed the honour of commencing the great battle of that night. By an expiring blue-shot beam of moonlight, Farina beheld a vast realm of gloom filling the hollow of the West, and the moon was soon extinguished behind sluggish scraps of iron scud detached from the swinging bulk of ruin, as heavily it ground on the atmosphere in the first thunder-launch ...

— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... practicable for at least the better grade of farmers. The English plan of moldboards, that overcome all possible traction and necessitate the duplex stationary engines, with the cumbrous "artillery of attachments," may do for sluggish people but will never meet the ...

— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various

... darkling woods With sunlit glades, and pools where lilies blow. Here, but the wiry grass and sorrel beds, The gaping edges of the sand ravines, Whose shifting sides are tufted with dull herbs, Drooping above a brook, that sluggish creeps Down to the whispering rushes in the marsh. And this is all, until I reach the cliff, And on the headland's verge I stand, enthralled Before the gulf of the unquenchable sea— The sea, inexorable in its might, Circling the pebbly beach with limpid tides, Storming in ...

— Poems • Elizabeth Stoddard

... meadows, nor whether it followed the custom of its French neighbours on the watershed, and was called by some such epithet as hangs to all the waters in that gap of Belfort, that plain of ponds and marshes: for they are called 'the Sluggish', 'the Muddy', or 'the Laggard'. Even the name of the Saone, far off, meant once ...

— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc

... if I could here, this night, be the means of melting the ice that binds the hearts of some halfway believers, and if the angel would trouble the sluggish pool in others. May God help you, friends, to feel a sense of your duty, and, like these honest Samaritans named in the text, "believe the things spoken concerning the Kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, and be baptized, both men ...

— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline

... and new things, have come to occupy this France. Her old Speech and Thought, and Activity which springs from those, are all changing; fermenting towards unknown issues. To the dullest peasant, as he sits sluggish, overtoiled, by his evening hearth, one idea has come: that of Chateaus burnt; of Chateaus combustible. How altered all Coffeehouses, in Province or Capital! The Antre de Procope has now other questions than the Three Stagyrite Unities to settle; not theatre-controversies, but a world-controversy: ...

— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... powers, being in their nature sluggish and inactive, cannot put themselves in motion. The grand design then of the passions is, to rouse them to action. These lively and vigorous principles make us eager in the pursuit of those things that are approved ...

— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis

... not that you are sluggish, reluctantly unselfish, inattentive, spasmodic. The wonder is that you are ever anything else.... Do you realize that a few million generations ago, everything that stirs in us, everything that exalts human life, self-devotions, heroisms, the ...

— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells

... told that the sun was straight above. Carley ached as never before. A deep pang seemed invested in every bone. Her heart felt swollen out of proportion to its space in her breast. Her breathing came slow and it hurt. Her blood was sluggish. Suddenly she shut her eyes. She loathed the light of day. What was it that ...

— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey

... live for months in the muddy, impure water is to me a puzzle. They are very sluggish, possessing none of the quick motions of their allied C. bartonii, for when taken out and placed either in water or on the ground, they move very slowly. The power of throwing off their claws when these are grasped is often exercised. About the middle of May the eggs ...

— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various

... Julia Ann on before it. Straight up the river their course lay, without veering a point for miles. The sun was lowering towards the horizon and the heat was lessening momently, even without the south breeze which bade it be forgotten; and the blue waters of the river, so sluggish a little while ago, were briskly curling and rippling, and heading like themselves ...

— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner

... interesting illustration of "public spirit in schools." It recounted how "An Old Bedford Boy"—no relation to ROBERT, the Waiter, we believe—in the course of returning thanks, said, "I have bathed in all the great rivers of the world." Then he added, "the water of the sluggish Ouse is the sweetest of them all." Oddly enough his name was "ZINCKE," though evidently he must be a first-rate "Zwimmer." With genuine love for his old school, he might have added that he wished he was a Buoy again. But he seems to have got ...

— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 22, 1891 • Various

... diarrhoeas and dysenteries, and all such disorders. When the constitution is disordered by excess of fire, continuous heat and fever are the result; when excess of air is the cause, then the fever is quotidian; when of water, which is a more sluggish element than either fire or air, then the fever is a tertian; when of earth, which is the most sluggish of the four, and is only purged away in a four-fold period, the result is a quartan fever, which can ...

— Timaeus • Plato

... Countries (HIPC) program. Considerable potential exists for development of a tourist industry, and the government has taken steps to expand facilities in recent years. The government also has attempted to reduce price controls and subsidies, but economic growth has remained sluggish. Sao Tome is also optimistic that significant petroleum discoveries are forthcoming in its territorial waters in the oil-rich waters of the Gulf of Guinea. Corruption scandals continue to weaken the economy. At the same time, progress ...

— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... sky, indeed, looked in harmony with unnatural sensations; as though some dread burst of passion were gathering intensity under their apparently sluggish calm. ...

— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various

... are right about the horses," said the professor quietly, "for they are terrible cowards in their way; but I think you are right about the snake. Serpents that are formed like this, with the thick, sluggish-looking shape, and that peculiar short tail, are mostly venomous. Well, this one will do no more ...

— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn

... ground beside the sluggish estuary, imparted to his accomplice the details of a bloody design, Palafox in the tavern waxed more and more violent. He menaced an imaginary foe with clinched fist. Mex tried to soothe him. He sat for a while in sulky quiet. Rousing again, he ordered a candle, opened a leathern ...

— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable

... visible. It had the sound of water in it. Whatever lived here spent half its life expecting the running of waveless but briny tides up the creeks, through mud-paved culverts into the dykes that fed the wet marshes with fresh wetness; and the other half deploring their slow, sluggish sucking back to the sea. Sorrow or any other intemperance of feeling seemed a discourteous disturbance of an atmosphere filled with ...

— The Judge • Rebecca West

... actions, they were obliged to evacuate every position on the maritime Alps, and the allied armies threatened the country of Nice and the territory of the republic. If the allies had pushed their advantages with vigour, the republicans must have lost more; but they, as was their general rule, were sluggish and irresolute. Nelson, who had been detached with a small squadron to co-operate with the Austrian general, Devins, and who served on the coast of Nice, was almost frantic at his sluggishness. A plan had been formed for ...

— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... twilight and long darkness of the dead of winter with an irresistible power and an inflexible menace. Fifty below, sixty below, even seventy below, the thermometer reads. Mercury is long since frozen solid and the alcohol grows sluggish. Land and water are alike iron; utter stillness and silence usually reign. Bare the hand, and in a few minutes the fingers will turn white and be frozen to the bone. Stand still, and despite all clothing, all woollens, all furs, the body will ...

— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck

... was to be seen save a few tall crimson spikes of Epacris, and here and there a bunch of lemon-coloured Correas. Altogether, he kept them so well amused, that they were astonished to come so quickly upon the station, placed in a snug cove of the forest, where it bordered on the heath beside a sluggish creek. Then, seeing the mountain towering up close to them, and hearing, as they stayed at the door, a low continuous thunder behind a high roll in the heath which lay before them, they knew that the old ocean was close at hand, and ...

— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley

... reconstruction. I regard this as a measure which lays the grasp of Congress upon this great question—a grasp which is to hold on to it until it shall be finally settled. I regard it as a measure which is to take that great question out of that sea of embarrassment and sluggish inactivity in which, through the course which the President has thought proper ...

— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes

... quit the path Beaten before, and tread a road unknown. Trembling the youth nor knows to pull the reins Which side, nor knowing would the steeds obey. Then first the frozen Trioenes from Sol Felt warm, and try'd, but try'd in vain, to dip Beneath the sea. The frozen polar snake, Sluggish with cold, and indolently mild, Warm'd, and dire fierceness gather'd from the flames. Thou too, Booetes, fled'st away disturb'd, Though slow thy flight, retarded by thy teams. And now the luckless Phaeton ...

— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid

... play in this respect arises from the instant muscular response to volition. Delay, half-hearted response, inattention, preoccupation, whimsicalness, carelessness, and every sluggish performance of the order of the will, disqualifies the player so that when we take into account the adolescent passion to excel, and the fact that 80 per cent of the games of this period are characterized by intense physical activity, ...

— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben

... activity are agriculture and trading, with most private industrial investment predating 1980. The economy's base is agriculture, which employs 80% of the work force. Industry mainly processes agricultural items. Sluggish economic performance over the past decade, attributable largely to declining annual rainfall, has reduced levels of per capita income and consumption. A high foreign debt and huge arrearages continue to cause ...

— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... workers who so often cause this enthusiasm as our present group, with their wonderful felicity of language; with their command of those lyrical measures which seem so easy and are so difficult; with their almost unparalleled blend of a sensuousness that does not make the intellect sluggish and of the ...

— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... with little steely waves. The line of the heavy beak cut the opening between the tapering point of the Lido and the misty outline of Tre Porti. Inside the white lighthouse tower a burnished man- of-war lay at anchor, a sluggish mass like a marble wharf placed squarely in the water. From the lee came a slight swell of a harbor-boat puffing its devious course to the Lido landing. The sea-breeze had touched the locust groves of San Niccolo da Lido, ...

— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick

... riches increasing in an unparalleled ratio, by agriculture, by manufactures, by commerce, with schools and churches, with books and newspapers thick as leaves in our own forests, with institutions sprung from the people, and peculiarly adapted to their genius; a nation not sluggish, but active, used to excitement, practiced in political wisdom, and accustomed to self-government, and all its vast outlying parts held together by the Federal government, mild in temper, gentle in administration, and beneficent in ...

— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various

... and helped Philip to bear the cost of the Armada. It was the Papal exchequer which supported the world-wide diplomacy that was carrying on negotiations in Sweden and intrigues in Poland, goading the lukewarm Emperor to action or quickening the sluggish movements of Spain, plotting the ruin of Geneva or the assassination of Orange, stirring up revolt in England and civil war in France. It was the Papacy that bore the cost of the religious propaganda that was fighting its stubborn ...

— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green

... the Bulkley through clouds of mosquitoes and endless sloughs of mud. The river was out of its banks, and its quicksand flats were exceedingly dangerous to our pack animals, although the river itself at this point was a small and sluggish stream. ...

— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland

... and stepped upon the wagon tongue where he might squint into the dust cloud and decide which gray, plodding horseman alongside the herd was Robert Birnie. Far across the sluggish river of grimy backs, a horse threw up its head with a peculiar sidelong motion, and Ezra's eyes lightened with recognition. That was the colt, Rattler, chafing against the slow pace he must keep. Hands cupped around big, chocolate-colored ...

— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower

... joys and sorrows, through their long journey together. It was fifty-five years since their union, and now the bond was broken. One was an angel of light, the other was left to drift awhile upon the ocean of life, ere his frail bark sails over death's sluggish stream. ...

— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna

... in drawing the relations of the Idens, father, mother, and daughter. How true, how unerringly true to human nature is this picture of the Iden household; how delicately felt and rendered to a hair is his picture of the father's sluggish, masculine will, pricked ineffectually by the waspish tongue of feminine criticism. Further, we not only have the family's idiosyncrasies, their habits, mental atmosphere, and domestic story brought before us in a hundred pages, ...

— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies

... that portion of the walk which lay upon the bridge. More life than was usual upon the bridge moved there on Sunday. Then the cars were crowded with people seeking the parks. Many crossed on foot, stopping to look idly down at the dark and sluggish water. ...

— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens

... visit to him he one day told Barbier the fact of his French descent. Barbier declared that he had always known it, had always realised something in David distinct from the sluggish huckstering English temper. Why, David's mother was from the south of France; his own family came from Carcassonne. No doubt the rich Gascon blood ran in both their veins. Salut ...

— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... sailin' a vessel," sneered the Cap'n, squinting forward with deep disfavor to where the members of the Smyrna Ancient and Honorable Firemen's Association were contentedly fishing over the side of the sluggish Dobson. "Here, leave hands off'm that tops'l downhaul!" he yelled, detecting Ludelphus Murray slashing at it with his jack-knife. "My Gawd, if he ain't ...

— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day

... point of the back porches of Stenton the sluggish maids could see the Greenstream stage fast diminishing. The dust rose and enveloped it, until it appeared to be a ball, gilded by the sun, rolling over the rank grey-green plain. Finally it disappeared from the vision of the ...

— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... herself wading through a sluggish pool of muddy water, which rippled, curdling as she stepped into it, and which, as she advanced, darkened with the slime raised by her feet. She was bearing in her arms the semblance of a sick child, which struggled convulsively and ...

— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton

... necessary continuance of the career of the needy struggler: our mental changes are like our gray hairs or our wrinkles—but the fulfillment of the plan of mortal growth and decay: that which is snow-white now was glossy black once; that which is sluggish obesity to-day was boisterous rosy health a few years back; that calm weariness, benevolent, resigned, and disappointed, was ambition, fierce and violent, but a few years since, and has only settled into submissive repose after many a battle and defeat. Lucky he ...

— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray

... was addressed to her father. She implored him to rescue her from this place, come or send for her. "Her uncle, Matanesse Van Wibisma," she said, "seemed to be a sluggish messenger; he had probably enjoyed the evenings at her aunt's, which filled her, Henrica, with loathing. She would go out into the world after her sister, if her father compelled her to stay here." Then she began a description of her aunt and her ...

— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... is a stately and majestic river from its width and depth, but never slow and sluggish; you can always hear its murmur. It travels through a woody country, now varied with cottages and green meadows, and now ...

— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... titter, played very prettily with his interrupter, the lecturer went back to his picture of the past, the drying of the seas, the emergence of the sand-bank, the sluggish, viscous life which lay upon their margins, the overcrowded lagoons, the tendency of the sea creatures to take refuge upon the mud-flats, the abundance of food awaiting them, their consequent enormous growth. "Hence, ladies and gentlemen," he added, ...

— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle

... state of ignorance; on the other side, the civilized blow of the fist. Helmsgail fought as much with his nerves as with his muscles, and with as much intention as force. Phelem-ghe-Madone was a kind of sluggish mauler—somewhat mauled himself, to begin with. It was art against nature. It was ...

— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... illegality during the two months or so that they might be settled at Maumsey. As to what might happen later, she, like Delia, declined to give any assurances. The parliamentary situation was becoming desperate, and any action whatever on the part of women which might serve to prod the sluggish mind of England before another general election, was in her view not only legitimate ...

— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... waves be intercepted by bodies like ammonia, while the more rapidly recurrent waves of the whole visible spectrum are allowed free transmission? The answer I hold to be that, by the act of chemical combination, the vibrations of the constituent atoms of the molecules are rendered so sluggish as to synchronize with the motions of the longer waves. They resemble loaded piano strings, or slowly descending water jets, requiring notes of low pitch to set ...

— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various

... disciples of the rule. The rule can well calm the sensuous nature, but not awaken human nature, the superior faculties: look at those flat and inexpressive physiognomies; the finger of nature has alone left there its impression; a soul inhabits these bodies, but it is a sluggish soul, a discreet guest, and, as a peaceful and silent neighbour who does not disturb the plastic force at its work, left to itself. Never a thought which requires an effort, never a movement of passion, hurries the calm cadence of physical life. There is no danger that the architectonic ...

— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... gazing at them, the dreary consciousness of imbecility makes them curse their birth hour. To such men, we give for a companion him whose rare talents, which perhaps require a Revolution for their exercise, are buried in the tomb of sluggish circumstances. ...

— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... no longer identical, Mrs. Stanton. One is normal, healthy, and lively. The other is ... well, as you know, he is slow, sluggish, and badly co-ordinated. The condition may improve with time, but, until we know more about such damage than we do now, he will ...

— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett

... It is near closing time now, and many of the dealers, with their wives and children, are sitting out in front of their shops, and, if not under their own vines and fig-trees, at least under their own gaudy flannels and "loud-patterned" cotton goods, which are waving overhead in the sluggish evening breeze. Nothing can be more suggestive of lazily industrious Jewry than this short, thick-set clothier, with the curved nose, and spiral, oily hair, who sits out on the sidewalk and blows clouds from his meerschaum pipe. The women who lounge ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various

... beckoned and danced in the haze, luring him on to become one of themselves. Keith was not a dreamer, nor one to yield easily to such brain fancies, but the mad delirium of loneliness gripped him, and he had to struggle back to sanity, beating his hands upon his breast to stir anew the sluggish circulation of his blood, and talking to the ...

— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish

... creature before moved, were now filled with salmon, trout, pike, tittymeg, methy, barble, turbot, and tench, while along the curling waves of the Great Lake the mighty black and white whale, the more sluggish porpoise, and many other finny creatures, sported their gambols. The flesh he dispersed over the land, commanding it to become different kinds of beasts and land-animals, and it obeyed his commands. The heavy moose, and the stupid we-was-kish, came to drink in the Coppermine ...

— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones

... incompatible with the stronger passions. Love, in particular, which, in the modern sense of the word, implies protection and devotion on the one side, confidence on the other, respect and fidelity on both, could not exist among the sluggish and heartless slaves who cringed around the thrones of Honorius and Augustulus. At this period the great renovation commenced. The warriors of the north, destitute as they were of knowledge and humanity, brought with them, from their forests and marshes, those qualities without ...

— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... trail took many a turn, now to avoid the dyke of a former governor and Porfirio Diaz, who planned to pump dry this end of the lake, now for some reason only those with Mexican blood in their veins could fathom. Peons were fishing in the irrigating ditches with machetes, laying their huge, sluggish victims all but cut in two on ...

— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck

... to that of his comrade who had so stealthily entered the wood. Convinced that his real peril lay among those trees, Grimcke began a backward movement with such caution that he hoped it would not be noticed by the native who was approaching with a sluggish pace. ...

— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis

... dear heart, forgive my rude brutishness; forgive me, sweet one, or I shall go out and do some injury to myself or another, thou hast so stirred my sluggish heart"— ...

— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin

... in was a difficult one to move troops over. The streams were numerous, deep and sluggish, sometimes spreading out into swamps grown up with impenetrable growths of trees and underbrush. The banks were generally low and marshy, making the streams difficult to approach except where there ...

— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... of Freethought brands persecution as the worst crime against humanity. It stifles the spirit of progress and strangles its pioneers. It eliminates the brave, the adventurous and the aspiring, and leaves only the timid, the sluggish and the grovelling. It removes the lofty and spares the low. It levels all the hills of thought and makes an intellectual flatness. It drenches all the paths of freedom with blood and tears, and makes earth the vestibule ...

— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote

... needful to this soul, so strong, so rich in enthusiasm, is a humble moral quality that she disdains, and when she has occasion to speak of it, even slanders,—namely resignation. This is not, as she seems to think, the sluggish virtue of base souls, who, in their superstitious servitude to force, hasten to crouch beneath every yoke. That is a false and degrading resignation; genuine resignation grows out of the conception of the universal order, weighed against which individual ...

— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert

... seduction: she "plays round the head, but reaches not the heart." Her beauty and absence, her kindness and cruelty, her disdain and inconstancy, produce no correspondence of emotion. His poetical account of the virtues of plants, and colours of flowers, is not perused with more sluggish frigidity. The compositions are such as might have been written for penance by a hermit, or for hire by a philosophical rhymer, who had only heard of another sex; for they turn the mind only on the writer, ...

— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson

... soon left the little blue lake well behind, passing through a pleasant country well wooded with elm, ash, birch, cottonwood, and box elder, and the grass growing high everywhere. They crossed more than one clear little stream, a pleasant contrast to the sluggish, muddy creeks ...

— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler

... not consider them so. In the earlier days of the State, when alligators eighteen feet in length were occasionally found, they may have attacked men when they caught them in the water. On land they are rather sluggish; but they are right smart in the water. The largest ones we are likely to see will not be over twelve feet long; and you will find ten little ones to one of this size. None of them will meddle even with ...

— Down South - or, Yacht Adventure in Florida • Oliver Optic

... very showy beauties it is seldom noticed; but I, being in my way a physiognomist, consider that it is always worth heeding as an index of character. It is the ear. Remark how delicately it is formed in her: none of that heaviness of lobe which is a sure sign of sluggish intellect and coarse perception. Hers is the artist's ear. Note next those hands: how beautifully shaped! small, but not doll-like hands,—ready and nimble, firm and nervous hands, that could work for a helpmate. By no means very white, still less red, but ...

— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... needed it; and in the same dejected way she sipped it slowly; and then there was a long silence—the silence of a fatigue, like that of fever, near which sleep refuses to come. But she sat in that waking lethargy in which are sluggish dreams of horror, and neither eyes nor ears for that which is ...

— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... fortune, or to gallop about the field and vaunt his courage. Already had grey December covered the tops of the surrounding mountains with the first-fallen snow. Here and there in the streets of Derbend lay a crust of ice, but over it the mud rolled in sluggish waves along the uneven pavement. The sea lazily plashed against the sunken turrets of the walls which descended to the water, a flock of bustards and of geese whizzed through the fog, and flew with a complaining cry above the ramparts; all was dark and melancholy—even ...

— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various

... entered the narrow, sluggish creek, and Jim beached the boat on the northern side. She saw several stakes driven in the earth, and realized that these marked the boundaries of the ...

— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild

... tumbledown rooms on Pilot's Island, at the far end of Ekateringofsky Prospect. Here amongst tangled grass, old, deserted boats, stranded, ruined cottages and abraided piers, I hung above the sea. Not indeed the sea of my Glebeshire memories; this was a sluggish, tideless sea, but in the winter one sheet of ice, stretching far beyond the barrier of the eye, catching into its frosted heart every colour of the sky and air, the lights of the town, the lamps of imprisoned barges, the moon, the sun, the stars, the purple sunsets, and the strange, mysterious ...

— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole

... of your life, and hindering you alike from work and from pleasure. It must not be. And so, my dear, I beg you go forth, once more, to all your many friends and to society. You are too young, and too gifted, to remain here in this sluggish backwater, alongside a derelict like me. It is not right. You must make for the open stream again and let the free wind and the strong current bear you gladly on your appointed course. And my gratitude and my blessing will go with you always. ...

— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... body up, And cast it in a stream,— A sluggish water, black as ink. The depth was so extreme My gentle boy, remember this Is nothing ...

— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 340, Supplementary Number (1828) • Various

... vis inertiae in inanimate substances; and as the impulse which will move a wooden ball may not suffice to move a leaden ball, so the motive which will start into action a quick and sensitive temperament, may produce no effect on a person of more sluggish nature. Thus, among men utterly destitute of honesty, some are tempted by the most paltry opportunities for theft or fraud; others, not one whit more scrupulous, have their cupidity aroused only by the prospect of some substantial gain. So, too, some sincerely ...

— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody

... expecting to have to strip and do some disagreeable work in the water. Considerable mud is encountered, and three small streams, not over three feet deep, are crossed; but further on I am brought to a stand by a deep, sluggish stream flowing along ten feet below the level of the ground. Though deep, it is very narrow in places, and might almost be described as a yawning crack in the earth, filled with water to within ten feet ...

— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens

... the gravel slope, past the clump of firs, and by the old ivied wall which marked the boundary of the ancient priory, when, after crossing a field or two, they came to the raised bank which kept the sluggish river within bounds. ...

— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn

... that great man Copernicus had proposed, following in the footsteps of Aristarchus of Samos, though there was nothing in it contrary to mathematical principles, was in opposition to those of physics, as the heavy and sluggish earth is unfit to move, and the system is even opposed to the authority of Scripture. The absence of annual parallax further involves an incredible distance between the outermost planet and the ...

— History of Astronomy • George Forbes

... king! The habitual lethargic meekness had vanished from his face, and the large crown threw a shadow, like a frown, over his brow. His spirit seemed to have risen from the weight it took from the sluggish blood of his father, Ethelred the Unready, and to have remounted to the brighter and earlier sources of ancestral heroes. Worthy in that hour he seemed to boast the blood and wield the sceptre ...

— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... promontory washed on the one side by the slow stream of the Dorset Stour, and on the other by the no less sluggish flow of the Wiltshire Avon, not far from the place where they mingle their waters before making their way amid mudflats and sandbanks into the English Channel, stands, and has stood for more than eight hundred years, the ...

— Bell's Cathedrals: Wimborne Minster and Christchurch Priory • Thomas Perkins

... avoided. This Dark Forest is a large tract of scrub oak, birch and holly, with dense undergrowths of briar; the haunt of innumerable small birds that dart in and out, chirping faintly. In its depressed portions the 'forest' has degenerated into a marsh through which a sluggish stream wends it way to the distant river. Slimy reptiles bask in the warm sun and glide lazily over the black, oozy soil. At intervals the stillness is broken by the splash of a gigantic bullfrog returning to his favorite pool. This acrobatic feat is usually accompanied by a deep-throated ...

— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald

... Stanley: the more Mr. Wyllys examined this point, the clearer it appeared to him, who had known his friend's only son from an infant, and had always felt much interested in him. As a child, and a boy, William Stanley had been of a morose temper, and of a sluggish, inactive mind—not positively stupid, but certainly far from clever; this claimant, on the contrary, had all the expression and manner of a shrewd, quick-witted man, who might be passionate, but who looked like a good-natured person, although his countenance ...

— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper

... between them and the sea; for if they took fright at any thing, they would come down in such numbers, that, if you could not get out of their way, you would be run over. Sometimes, when we came suddenly upon them, or waked them out of their sleep, (for they are a sluggish sleepy animal), they would raise up their heads; snort and snarl, and look as fierce as if they meant to devour us; but as we advanced upon them they always run away, so that ...

— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook

... mortal house, will change him from a leader of armies, or a hunter of tigers in the jungle, to one who shudders at a centipede! That courage also which is mere insensibility crumbles at once before any object of terror able to stir the sluggish imagination. There is a fear, this for one, that for another, which can appall the stoutest who is ...

— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald

... young man of five-and-twenty, well grown and handsome, and as strong as a flint. He had the reputation of being a sensible and reasonable fellow. He could read and write, and very rarely drank, but as a workman this strong and healthy young man was not worth a farthing. A sluggish, overpowering sloth was mingled with the strength in his muscles, which were strong as cords. Like everyone else in his village, he lived in his own hut, and had his share of land, but neither tilled it nor sowed it, and did not ...

— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... image; he has not stopped at the scowling ferryman of the one, nor at the sweeping blow and demon-dragging of the other; but, seized Hylas-like by the limbs, and tearing up the earth in his agony, the victim is dashed into his destruction; nor is it the sluggish Lethe, nor the fiery lake, that bears the cursed vessel, but the oceans of the earth and the waters of the firmament gathered into one white, ghastly cataract; the river of the wrath of God, roaring down into the gulf where the world ...

— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler

... York Aquarium, where they lived for satisfactory periods. The indoor life and atmosphere did not seem to injure the natural vitality of the animals. In fact, I think they were far more lively in the Aquarium than were the sluggish creatures that Mr. Ward saw on the Triangle reefs, and described in his ...

— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday

... spirits cheer'd:—aloft she towers, Borne on stiff pennons, and of war's alarms, And trophies won, in loftiest numbers sings. 'Tis thou the hero's breast to martial acts, And resolution bold, and ardor brave, Excit'st: thou check'st inglorious lolling ease, And sluggish minds with generous fires inflam'st. O thou! that first my quickened soul didst warm, Still with thy aid assist me, that thy praise, Thy universal sway o'er all the world, In everlasting numbers, like the theme, I may record, and sing ...

— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... a bugle call, a strain of wild music came from the enchanted forest. Evelina threw back her head, gasping for breath; her sluggish feet stirred forward. Some forgotten valour of her spirit leaped to answer the summons, as a soldier, wounded unto death, turns to follow the singing trumpets that ...

— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed

... the hissing crest with a good deal of grumbling and plunging and rolling and complaining. But she had a good grip of the water, and with decently careful steering she showed but small inclination to broach-to or do anything else she wasn't wanted to. She might not be a beauty; she might be sluggish as a haystack in a light breeze; but, as Haigh said, this was just her day, and we were not too nervous to take advantage of it. Still, considering her small tonnage, and the fact that all her tackle was so infernally rotten, she took a tidy bit ...

— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne

... dances, funerals, weddings—in short, at all social and public gatherings? Obviously, because it has the power of uniting the feelings of many into one homogeneous and sympathetic wave of emotion. It has a sort of compulsive force which hurries along even those who are sluggish or unwilling. Plato, in his Republic, gives the curious advice that, at meetings of older people wine should be distributed, in order to make them more pliable and receptive to the counsel of sages. Many would object to such a risky policy, which, ...

— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck

... and willows that grew thick along the banks of the deep, sluggish bayou; and she ...

— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin

... was bright and clear, while a north-west wind blew away the smoky clouds that hovered over the city like a funeral pall, displaying to our view the silver sinuosities of old Father Thames, as he moved in sluggish grandeur by Westminster, Blackfriars Bridge, the Tower, and to Gravesend, on his way to the channel ...

— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce

... regret, to be conducted out of this fresh sylvan scene to the dusty, pompous parterres of the Greffier Fagel. Every flower that wealth can purchase diffuses its perfume on one side; whilst every stench a canal can exhale, poisons the air on the other. These sluggish puddles defy all the power of the United Provinces, and retain the freedom of stinking in spite of their endeavours: but perhaps I am too bold in my assertion; for I have no authority to mention any attempts to purify these noxious pools. Who knows but their ...

— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford

... of these cutting-exhibitions, Emma was likely to be not quite her usual brisk self. A mystic glow replaced the alert brightness of her eye. Her wide-awake manner gave way to one of almost sluggish inactivity. ...

— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber

... blushes to her cheek, nor yet the kiss her husband gave her, nor the congratulations of the guests, nor Aunt Barbara's tears, which dropped upon the forehead of her darling as the good woman bent over her and thought how she had lost her; but when Frank Van Buren stooped down to touch her lips the sluggish blood quickened and a thrill went through and through her veins, sending the bright color to her cheeks, which burned as with a hectic flush. Frank saw the power he held, but to his credit he did not then exult; he only felt that it was finished, that Ethie was gone past his ...

— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes

... when I returned to my rooms, from which I had been absent since the previous day, I heard from the concierge that a visitor awaited me. I climbed the stairs without anticipation. My thoughts were sluggish, my limbs leaden, my eyes heavy and bloodshot. Twilight had gathered, and as I entered I discerned merely the figure of a woman. Then she advanced—and all Hell seemed to leap flaring to my heart. ...

— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick

... This was nothing more than the establishment of a temporary lighthouse on shore during the night, which, in case of our getting adrift, would, together with the soundings, afford us that security which the sluggish traversing of the compasses otherwise rendered extremely doubtful. For this purpose, two steady men, provided with a tent and blankets, were landed on the east point of Amherst Island at sunset, to keep up some bright lights during the eight hours of darkness, and to be sent for at daylight ...

— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry

... From Bures, near Bayeux, in this department, where Henry was then holding his court, the four knights followed the Primate to Canterbury, sternly bent on showing their lord that they were neither 'sluggish nor half-hearted.' Of the abbatial buildings which stood here then few traces are left. But the handsome modern mansion built here by Guizot rests, I believe, on the massive foundations, and certainly incorporates some of the solid masonry above ground of the ancient abbot's ...

— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... to master. His pulse was pounding; his breath swelled in his lungs. Sleep? That was for those who merely risked their lives for Cuba. Hunger? No food could satisfy a starving soul. Rest? He would never rest until he held Rosa Varona in his arms. This rusty, sluggish tub was standing still! ...

— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach

... mingle by a subtile chemistry with every fibre, and give it a finer life and a more bounding elasticity. So one might foretell, before the study of a single fact of experience, that, other things being equal, he who had few or no thoughts would have not only a dormant mind, but also a sluggish and inert body, less active than another, less enduring, and especially less defiant of physical ills. And one might prophesy, too, that he who had high thoughts and wealth of knowledge would have stored up in his brain a magazine of reserved power ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various

... of the Indian, perhaps of most half-animal races, that their moral conduct depends on physical feeling. Like the animal, they are good-humored, even sportive, when all is well; like the animal, they are sluggish and unreasoning in ...

— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch

... picture of the plains country as flat prairie, with sluggish, winding rivers. Such a picture would not be true of the Saskatchewan. From end to end of the river, for only one interval is the course straight enough and are the banks low enough to enable the traveller to see in ...

— The "Adventurers of England" on Hudson Bay - A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North (Volume 18 of the Chronicles of Canada) • Agnes C. (Agnes Christina) Laut

... hard. When poverty pinches like winter's night, when fuel fails, and hunger is our company, then poverty becomes harsh and unpalatable, and not to be boasted of; though even penury has spurred many a sluggish life to conquering moods. When a man lies with his face to the wall, paralytic, helpless, useless, a burden to himself and others, and hears the rub of his wife washing for a livelihood—and he loves her so; took her to his home in her fair girlhood, when her beauty bloomed ...

— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle

... I've always said that if I wanted to write a heart-searchin', heart-meltin' tragedy, I had just as soon turn away from the big cities and go into some lonesome hamlet of New England, into some big faded farmhouse standin' by a dark weed-bordered sluggish creek, shaded by tall pollard willers. And there, behind the scraggly lilocks and cinnamon roses, and closed blinds of solid wood, with a little heart-shaped hole in the centre that casts strange shadders on the clean painted floor within, there I ...

— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley

... the Atlantic coast is navigable to the limit of high tide or a little beyond. Navigation extends to the point where the coast-plain joins the foot-hills. Above this limit, called the "Fall Line," the streams are swift and shallow; below it they are deep and sluggish. As a result, a chain of important river ports extends along the Fall ...

— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway

... share, instead of laurels proud— Ye who have borne the hardest brunt, that Freedom might advance, Victorious in defeat and death—June-warriors of France! Yes, wrong and treason everywhere, the Elbe and Rhine beside, And beat, oh German men! your hearts, with calm and sluggish tide? No war within your apron's folds? Out with it, fierce and bold! The second, final war with all who Freedom would withhold! Shout: "The Republic!" till it drowns the chiming minster bells, Whose sound this swindle of your ...

— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various

... opened his eyes: the old man straightened up his shaking head and did likewise. The sound was like an icy sword-blade thrust into a slumbering and tepid fountain—startling all the water spirits from repose and propriety,—or like Christmas suddenly obtruded, keen and pure, into the sluggish rest of midsummer. Of what the old man mused as his waking thoughts recognized the sound, can never be known—possibly of the wealth which he had garnered and of the broad lands over which that sound went ringing—all his own, ...

— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford

... economy has been dependent on sugarcane cultivation and related activities, but in recent years the production has diversified into manufacturing and tourism. Sluggish performances in the sugar and tourism sectors - which declined by 25% and 8% respectively - tempered economic expansion in 1995; output increased by 2% for the year, down from nearly 4% in 1994. Improved ...

— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... heart was in his throat! It had been a contest to stir the most sluggish blood. In spite of the absence of Grafton and Kenneth, Lower had played a hard, fast game, and had she made a decent per cent of her tries at goal would have been the winner at this moment. But Jim Marble had missed almost every ...

— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour

... cried, 'send thou some token that I may know thy will.' Even as I gazed upon the crucifix clenched in my unlifted hand, the message I so craved had come, for the cross was stained with blood, which from it fell in sluggish drops. I looked more intently, filled with amazement, and perceived that so closely had I pressed the silver image of the blessed Savior it had cut into the flesh. But 'twas God's voice in answer to ...

— The Fifth of November - A Romance of the Stuarts • Charles S. Bentley

... this commodity; but it seems as if the most ghastly and disgusting portion of the meal was reserved for the present day, and its most hideous concoction for the writer before us,—who is never so much in his favourite element as when he can "on horror's head horrors accumulate." He assimilates the sluggish sympathies of his readers to those of sailors and vulgar ballad readers, who cannot be excited to an interest in the battle of the Arethusa, unless they learn that "her sails smoaked with brains, and her scuppers ran blood;"—a line which threatens him ...

— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... and cents. It is situated on a marsh, and bounded by the river on one side, and on the other by a continuation of the marsh on which it is built, beyond which extends a forest swamp. All sewerage and drainage is superficial—more generally covered in, but in very many places dragging its sluggish stream, under the broad light of day, along the edges of the footway. The chief business is, of course, in those streets skirting the river; and at this season—December—when the cotton and sugar mania is at its height, the ...

— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

... * * * entering the Bayou of Plaquemine, Soon were lost in a maze of sluggish and devious waters, Which, like a network of steel, extended in every direction. Over their heads the towering and tenebrous boughs of the cypress Waved like banners that hang on the walls of ancient cathedrals. Deathlike the silence ...

— Reminiscences of two years with the colored troops • Joshua M. Addeman

... fully explained. Our author is sorely puzzled to account for the existence of the watery heavens above the fiery, they being cold and moist, but is sure from scriptural reasons that they are there, and ventures the hypothesis that their presence may account for the sluggish and evil properties of Saturn, the planet whose ...

— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele

... his head as though struggling with some problem, but the few words I caught were disconnected, yielding me no knowledge of what he was trying to solve. The bow of the boat had been deflected to the north, and was silently cleaving the sluggish downward trend of the water, for we had passed out of the swifter current and were close in to the eastern shore. The bank appeared low and unwooded, a mere black line barely above the water level and I guessed that behind it stretched uninhabitable marshes overflowed ...

— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish

... a rugged arch, in the dusk below, 640 Came mother Cybele! alone—alone— In sombre chariot; dark foldings thrown About her majesty, and front death-pale, With turrets crown'd. Four maned lions hale The sluggish wheels; solemn their toothed maws, Their surly eyes brow-hidden, heavy paws Uplifted drowsily, and nervy tails Cowering their tawny brushes. Silent sails This shadowy queen athwart, and faints away In ...

— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats

... seconds it quivered as a horse will after being hard-driven. The General went to the window and looked out. The houses had been left behind and around them was a country of grey mud-flats with the river dragging its sluggish length through it like a great serpent. There was a windmill on the horizon, breaking the uniform grey of land and river and sky. The sky was heavy with ...

— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan

... rude, unfinished state in which good works are commonly left, through the tame circumspection with which a timid prudence so frequently enervates beneficence. In doing good, we are generally cold, and languid, and sluggish, and of all things afraid of being too much in the right. But the works of malice and injustice are quite in another style. They are finished with a bold, masterly hand, touched as they are with the spirit of those vehement passions that call forth all ...

— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... odorous flowers opening their petals to the genial sunbeams, and groups of singing birds merry on all the foliage-covered trees, still Esq. Pimble was cold—always cold, summer and winter. No genial influence could warm his sluggish blood, or impart a glow to his dry, ...

— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton

... of Jenny Milsom's room looked towards the road. From that window she could see nothing of the sluggish ditch ...

— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... as though something sluggish and viewless, dormant and deadly, had been suddenly upstirred to furious life by the wind of robes and tread of myriad dancing feet,—by the crash of cymbals and heavy vibration of drums! Within a few days there has been a frightful increase of the visitation, an almost incredible expansion of ...

— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn

... as those ancients answered about the symbol of another Revolution, when they said that they knew not so much as whether there were a Holy Ghost or not. The same want of kindling power in the national intelligence which made of the English Reformation one of the most sluggish and tedious chapters in our history, has made the still mightier advance of the moderns from the social system and spiritual bases of the old state, in spite of our two national achievements of punishing a king ...

— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley

... which has cost me many months' heavy work, 'while I bore burdens with dull patience and beat the track of the alphabet with sluggish resolution[31],' I have, I hope, shown that I am not unmindful of all that I owe to men of letters. To the dead we cannot pay the debt of gratitude that is their due. Some relief is obtained from its burthen, ...

— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell

... Scandinavian traditions represent the Apple as the food of the gods, who, when they felt themselves growing feeble and infirm, resorted to this fruit for renewing their powers of mind and body. Also the acids of the Apple are of signal use for men of sedentary habits, whose livers are sluggish of action; they help to eliminate from the body noxious matters, which, if retained, would make the brain heavy and dull, or produce jaundice, or skin eruptions, or other allied troubles. Some experience of this sort has led to the custom of our taking Apple sauce with roast pork, roast ...

— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie

... to all the charms of nature, gazed with rapture as the boat plunged between the mountains on either hand, and turned a wistful gaze down the river, in the vain hope that Antonio might, at the same moment, be enjoying the scene—but the sluggish sloop was now far behind, and the eye of Antonio, bright as it was, could not pierce the distance. Julia felt rather relieved than otherwise, when the vessel which contained her hero was hid from ...

— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper

... which woke me from my grief and caused my blood which had grown sluggish to run again. For when she knew that she was safe the lady Blanche came out of the cave and addressed me as I stood there leaning against the rock with the red sword Wave-Flame in my hand, as I had drawn it ...

— The Virgin of the Sun • H. R. Haggard

... fruiting bodies in the fall. As soon as the spore falls on the caterpillar it sends out germ-threads which penetrate the caterpillar. Here the threads form long narrow spores which break off and form other spores until the body-cavity is entirely filled. The caterpillar soon becomes sluggish and dies. The fungus continues to grow until it has completely appropriated all of the insect's soft parts, externally a perfect caterpillar but internally completely filled with mycelial threads. Under favorable conditions this mycelial caterpillar, ...

— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard

... constitution of the Republic. May 24 occurred the retirement of President Thiers, and likewise that of Dufaure, but in the Assembly, the two proposed measures were none the less referred to a commission of thirty. Consideration in committee was sluggish, and the Assembly itself was not readily roused to action. During the twelvemonth that followed several projets were brought forward, and there was desultory discussion, but no progress. In the summer of (p. 305) 1874 a new commission ...

— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg

... to flow, and we had to quit our explorations, and return to the Betsey. The little wind had become less, and all the canvas we could hang out enabled us to draw but a sluggish furrow. The stern of the Betsey "wrought no buttons" on this occasion; but she had a good tide under her keel; and ere the dinner-hour we had passed through the narrows of Kyle Akin. The village of this name was designed by the late Lord M'Donald for a great seaport town; but it refused to grow; ...

— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller

... branches sheltering the roof in a picturesque, half foreign fashion. Here and there were massive old houses and shops, with some approach to the size and the substantial—even costly—fittings of "Robinson's." A side street led down to a little sluggish canal which joined the Dewes, a river of considerable size on which Redcross had originally been built. This canal was crossed by a short solid stone bridge, bearing a quaint enough bridge-house, still used ...

— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler

... high and sweeping views—as larks soar. It isn't that you yourself are high and sweeping.... No, but still I turn to you. In the old days I used to turn to you and shake your mind and make you think about things you seemed too sluggish to think about without my clamor. Once do you remember at Martens I shook you by the ears.... And when I made you think, you thought, as I could never do. ...

— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells

... one fifth of the kingdom. If so, their force is naturally not contemptible. To say that in all contests the decision will of course be in favor of the greater number is by no means true in fact. For, first, the greater number is generally composed of men of sluggish tempers, slow to act, and unwilling to attempt, and, by being in possession, are so disposed to peace that they are unwilling to take early and vigorous measures for their defence, and they ...

— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... well defined. The moon shone on it, and it looked like a great shimmering ice-field, with the heads of the distant tors as rocks borne upon its surface. Holmes's face was turned towards it, and he muttered impatiently as he watched its sluggish drift. ...

— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle

... towns—oh, but they are not made for the towns, they are so strangely out of place in the towns which the foreigner has contrived for himself on the borders of their brown, sluggish rivers, towns which he has created by pushing backward for a little the jungle, while he builds his pink and yellow bungalows beneath the palm trees, and spaces them between the banana trees, along straight tracks which ...

— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte

... of these birds may frequently be seen along sluggish, secluded streams in the woods, feeding upon the seeds of various water or brookside plants, and probably upon insects also. At such times they often indulge in a curious spluttering, squeaking, musical concert that one listens to with pleasure. The breeding ...

— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan

... springing from the consciousness of a historical idea, awakens in a people its will to historical formation: the will to action. The political people is no passive, sluggish mass, no mere object for the efforts of the state at government or protective welfare work ... The great misconception of the democracies is that they can see the active participation of the people only in the form of plebiscites ...

— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various

... he will not want to do it again. A horse that has once run away, however, is never safe afterward. Indeed, in all the tens of thousands of mules that I have handled, I never yet found an habitual runaway. Their sluggish nature does not incline them to such tricks. If a team attempts to run away, one or two of them will fall down before they have gone far, and this will stop the remainder. Attempt to put one up to the same speed you would a horse, over ...

— The Mule - A Treatise On The Breeding, Training, - And Uses To Which He May Be Put • Harvey Riley

... in the glare Of the moon's dying light. As a fen-fire's beam On a sluggish stream Gleams dimly, so the moon shone there; And it yellowed the strings of thy tangled hair, That shook ...

— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti

... Nothing of her past awakened more keen regret in this young girl's heart than the thought of her undutiful, unsisterly life. It was all to be different now. She thanked God that he had let her come back to that very kitchen and dining-room to undo her former work. The old sluggish, selfish spirit had gone from her. Before this every thing had been done for Ester Ried, now it was to be done for Christ—every thing, even the mixing up of that flour and water; for was not the word given: "Whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God?" ...

— Ester Ried • Pansy (aka. Isabella M. Alden)

... know. His sins trickled from his lips, one by one, trickled in shameful drops from his soul, festering and oozing like a sore, a squalid stream of vice. The last sins oozed forth, sluggish, filthy. There was no more to tell. He bowed his ...

— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce

... river the ford was so deep that the water almost touched the feet of the riders. But fortunately the current was sluggish, so the horses managed to keep their footing. They were allowed to take their own time, so it took several minutes to gain ...

— The Rover Boys in the Air - From College Campus to the Clouds • Edward Stratemeyer

... least to see animals in cases. These animals know that one is standing staring at them; they feel hundreds of inquisitive looks upon them; are conscious of them. No; I would prefer to see animals that didn't know one observed them; shy creatures that nestle in their lair, and lie with sluggish green eyes, and lick their claws, ...

— Hunger • Knut Hamsun

... what I call a success. I don't care a tinker's darn for the prizes, but the way you boys built up to the girls last night warmed the sluggish blood in my old veins. Even if Cotton did claim a dance or two with the oldest Vaux girl, if Theo and her don't make the riffle now—well, they simply can't help it, having gone so far. And did any of you notice Scales and old June and Dan cutting the pigeon wing like colts? I reckon Quirk ...

— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams

... when thou art sluggish at rousing thee, let this thought be present; "I am rising to ...

— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett

... influence is exerted by the thyroid gland. In myxedema, a condition characterized by a lack of thyroid secretion, there is dulness of the reflexes and of the intellect, a lowered muscular power, and generally a sluggish discharge of energy. In Graves' disease there is an excessive production of thyroid secretion. In this disease the reflexes are increased, the discharge of energy is greatly facilitated, and metabolism is at a maximum. The same phenomena occur also after the administration ...

— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile

... week after she had opened, a friend of the poet's came to her with a request that she would pay him a visit at his pretty house in the suburbs of Boston, Longfellow being indisposed at the time, and confined to his quaint old study, overlooking the waters of the sluggish Charles, and the scenery made immortal in his verse. Here was commenced a warm friendship between the beautiful young artist and the aged poet, which continued unbroken to the day of his death. He was ...

— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar

... their part, but slow is the growth of institutions which depend on individual charity for their support. As an illustration of what may be done by public patronage, when States are in earnest with their universities, and as strangely contrasting the sluggish fortunes of our own Alma, look at the State University of Michigan. Here is an institution but twenty-five years old, already numbering thirty-two professors and over twelve hundred students, having public buildings equal in extent to those which two centuries ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various

... The days were longer and drearier than they used to be. Every day she awoke with a faint sense of expectation that was like an undefined hope; something would come to pass, something would happen to her before the day was done, to quicken the sluggish current of her life; and at nightfall, when the uneventful day had passed in its customary blankness, her heart would grow very heavy. Her father watched her somewhat anxiously at this crisis of her life, and was inwardly disturbed ...

— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon

... broad thumb on his plastic mind without his conscious knowledge. Canada with her young, red-blooded vigour swept into him like a tidal wave of open sea into a sluggish, marshy creek. Canada thrust her vastness and her limitless potentialities at him with a careless hand, as though to say: "Here's opportunity for the taking." Canada taught him in ten days what at home ...

— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg

... plugs (of sebum) and stimulate the skin glands. For this purpose prolonged (ten minutes at a time) bathing of the face with hot water and soap; tincture of green soap in the more indolent, sluggish cases, should precede the pressing out of the blackheads: Lateral pressure with the fingers or with the comedone extractor, especially contrived for this purpose, will express the black-heads. After they are out, the skin dried and cleaned, various ...

— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... was a dreary one at that time; as oppressive, sad, and solitary by night, as any about London. There were neither wharves nor houses on the melancholy waste of road near the great blank Prison. A sluggish ditch deposited its mud at the prison walls. Coarse grass and rank weeds straggled over all the marshy land in the vicinity. In one part, carcases of houses, inauspiciously begun and never finished, rotted away. In another, the ground was cumbered with rusty iron monsters of steam-boilers, wheels, ...

— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens

... life the gaunt and grisly form of death; a disease which medicine never cured, wealth never warded off, or poverty could boast exemption from; which sometimes moves in giant strides, and sometimes at a tardy sluggish pace, but, slow or quick, is ...

— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens

... birds had escaped. The other I tried to feed, and sometimes, when a morsel of bread was thrust into its open mouth, it would swallow it. But it appeared to suffer very much, vociferating loudly when disturbed, and panting, in a sluggish agony, with eyes closed, or half opened, when let alone. It distressed me a good deal; and I felt relieved, though somewhat shocked, when B——— put an end to its misery by squeezing its head and throwing it out of the window. They were of a slate-color, ...

— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... common, some seven or eight hundred yards in length, on which have been erected the butts used by those well-known defenders of their country, the Copperhouse Volunteer Rifles; and just below the bridge the sluggish water becomes a little lake, having probably at some time been artificially widened, and there is a little island and a decoy for ducks. On the present occasion carriages were drawn up on all the roads, and horses were clustered on each side of the brook, and the ...

— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope

... hundred and ten stadia, and its length not more than seven thousand one hundred and thirty-two stadia. In some parts 12 it is moorland, in others there are wooded plains, and sometimes it rises into mountain peaks. The island is surrounded by a sluggish sea, which neither gives readily to the stroke of the oar nor runs high under the blasts of the wind. I suppose this is because other lands are so far removed from it as to cause no disturbance of the sea, which indeed is of greater width here than anywhere ...

— The Origin and Deeds of the Goths • Jordanes

... certain. Snatching a tambourine from a bystander as he entered, the stranger thrust the male dancer aside, faced the woman and began a series of saturnalian antics, compared with which all that had gone before was tame and sluggish; and as he finally leaped, with tinkling heels, clean over his bewildered partner's head, ...

— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable

... my apathy behind me. The importance of time and the imperative need of immediate action was burned into my brain by Black Hoof's words. I sought Patricia and found her seated on the bank, staring into the sluggish waters. ...

— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter

... there, as he was going the circuit of the province, by commission from the praetor, for the administration of justice, and had reached Gades, seeing a statue of Alexander the Great in the temple of Hercules, he sighed deeply, as if weary of his sluggish life, for having performed no memorable actions at an age [21] at which Alexander had already conquered the world. He, therefore, immediately sued for his discharge, with the view of embracing the first opportunity, which might present itself in The City, of entering ...

— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus

... The night came down, and a blind glare of dull red seemed to show itself above, revealing nothing else. For the first time since the forest fires had begun to smoulder, the dead air took a sense of motion. It stirred with a long, sluggish heave, and brought with it a dreadful heat, and a noise altogether disproportionate to the pace at which it moved—the sound of a mighty tempest. It breathed fitfully, heavily, and as if with labour; ...

— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray

... commanding the noblest mountain scenery. It is rarely that the pond-lily and the speckled trout are found together,—the fish the soul of the purest spring water, the flower the transfigured spirit of the dark mud and slime of sluggish summer streams and ponds; yet in Moxie they were both found in perfection. Our camp was amid the birches, poplars, and white cedars near the head of the lake, where the best fishing at this season was to be had. Moxie has a small oval head, rather shallow, but bumpy with rocks; a long, deep neck, ...

— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs

... and shaky by half," said young Thorpe. "I haven't kept you up enough in your gymnastics lately. We must have some more leap-frog in the garden; and I'll bring my boxing gloves next time, and open your chest by teaching you to fight. Splendid exercise, and so good for your sluggish old liver." ...

— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins

... eyes, from savage men, 80 His rest and food. Nature's most secret steps He like her shadow has pursued, where'er The red volcano overcanopies Its fields of snow and pinnacles of ice With burning smoke, or where bitumen lakes 85 On black bare pointed islets ever beat With sluggish surge, or where the secret caves, Rugged and dark, winding among the springs Of fire and poison, inaccessible To avarice or pride, their starry domes 90 Of diamond and of gold expand above Numberless and immeasurable halls, Frequent with crystal column, and clear shrines Of pearl, and ...

— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... is owing to the felicity of our times, less fertile in great offences than those which have gone before us, or whether it is from a sluggish apathy which has dulled and enervated the public justice, I am not called upon to determine,—but, whatever may be the cause, it is now sixty-three years since any impeachment, grounded upon abuse of authority and misdemeanor in office, has come before this tribunal. The last ...

— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... strength at every breath. They were very silent as they sat watching with keen delight the varied business of the ship, doubly interesting to them now that they could not take part in it, when the wind began to drop, and the course of the vessel to grow more sluggish. ...

— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn

... summarized by Ayrton. It absorbs a good deal of energy; it cannot be constructed for small potential differences, as the wire cannot be made thicker, as it would make it more sluggish; there is vagueness in the readings near the zero point and sometimes inaccuracy in the upper ...

— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone

... On the 2d, owing to the inclemency of the weather, we did not travel; but the morning of the 3d brought brilliant sunshine and with the perfume of the forest in our nostrils we pushed on, soon reaching a flatter and a marshy country, where the creek deepened and narrowed with a sluggish current. Here the paddling was good, and for a little way ...

— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace

... conditions life in the camp grew monotonous and dull. More serious still, the food they had to eat was the common fare of such isolated winterers; it was chiefly salt meat. The effect of this was seen as early as December. Some of the party became listless and sluggish, their faces turned sallow and their eyes appeared sunken. They found it difficult to breathe and their gums were swollen and spongy. Macdonell, a veteran in hardship, saw at once that scurvy had broken out among ...

— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood

... woman made from her graveyard herbiage, and long before that could come, Harry might be dead. And so he pressed the batteries against the unconscious man's cheeks, holding them there tightly, that the full shock of the electricity might permeate the skin and arouse the sluggish blood once more to action. Then to the hands, the wrists, the feet and back again; it was the beginning of a routine that was ...

— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper

... a beautiful country, one of Nature's daintiest creations, where the sun and the moon and the sky seem to take the greatest delight in revealing their manifold charms, where the green fields and the clear-cut trees and the rushing rivers and the sluggish canals all seem to have been put in their place to conform to an artistic landscape design—for, truly, Holland is a vast picture. Its cattle are picture cattle, its myriad windmills seem to stand as alluring models to attract the artist, its sunsets, the haze that rests ...

— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield

... admired many women in the bright years of his youth, and had fancied himself desperately in love more than once in his life; but it is doubtful whether the mighty passion had ever really possessed the Captain's heart, which was naturally cold and sluggish, rarely fluttered by any emotion that was not engendered of selfishness. Horatio had set up an idol and had invented a religion for himself very early in life; and that idol was fashioned after his own image, and that religion had its beginning and ...

— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon

... this cease to be his disposition when the remains of depravity shall be done away? Will not this disposition be increased and strengthened? Or is there reason to think that those will have no power to serve God, who are freed from sluggish bodies? ...

— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee

... ever yet could sound thy bottom? Find The ooze, to show what coast thy sluggish crare Might ...

— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... reciprocal offices of a social state, much more so to the still higher obligations of a civil compact. Together with these aims of those who were put into places of authority, they were obliged daily to use their endeavors to bring the restive and quarrelsome into proper subordination; to keep the sluggish and lazy diligently employed, and to teach the thriftless to be ...

— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris

... I was loping through the snowdrifts in the direction of the old inn. The snow whirled and eddied over the stubble fields; the winds sang past my ears; the trees creaked and the river flowed on, black and sluggish. It was a dreary scene. It was bitter cold, but I had no mind for that. On, on I went. Two miles were left in the rear. The horse was beginning to breathe hard. Sometimes the snow was up to his knees. What if the old man was not there? ...

— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath

... bristling arms of the besieged upon the wall, the boom of the great mortars made of ropes and leather and throwing mighty balls of stone, the stormy flight of arrows, the ladders planted against the defenses and staggering headlong into the moat, enriched for future agriculture not only by its sluggish waters, but by the blood of many men. I suppose that most of these visions were old stage spectacles furbished up anew, and that my armies were chiefly equipped with their obsolete implements of warfare from museums of armor and from cabinets of antiquities; ...

— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells

... discuss idly various academic questions—as to whether the great inaccessible pool below the Falls really contains the legendary Biggest Trout; what direction the River takes above; whether it really becomes nothing but a series of stagnant pools connected by sluggish water-reaches; whether there are any trout above the Falls; and ...

— The Forest • Stewart Edward White

... life of ease and degeneracy, than the "reef-building polypifer"—to give him his scientific name. He is the hobo of the animal world, but, unlike the hobo, he does not even tramp for a living. He exists as a sluggish and gelatinous worm; he attracts to himself calcareous elements from the water to make himself a house—mark you, the sea does the building—he dies, and he leaves his house behind him—and a reputation for industry, beside which ...

— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... the latter was built round the tree, with its branches sheltering the roof in a picturesque, half foreign fashion. Here and there were massive old houses and shops, with some approach to the size and the substantial—even costly—fittings of "Robinson's." A side street led down to a little sluggish canal which joined the Dewes, a river of considerable size on which Redcross had originally been built. This canal was crossed by a short solid stone bridge, bearing a quaint enough bridge-house, still used ...

— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler

... the huge gasometers and furnaces of the Gas Company, and over the railway and canal bridges, to the Harrow Road, when he turned mechanically to the right. His eyes saw nothing—neither the sluggish barges gliding through the greasy black stream on his right, nor the doleful string of hearses and mourning coaches which passed him on their way to or from the cemetery. It was with some surprise that, as he began ...

— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey

... by and by comes my brother Tom to me, though late (which do vex me to the blood that I could never get him to come time enough to me, though I have spoke a hundred times; but he is very sluggish, and too negligent ever to do well at his trade I doubt), and having lately considered with my wife very much of the inconvenience of my going in no better plight, we did resolve of putting me into a better garb, and, among other things, to have a good velvet cloake; that ...

— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

... thought passed through his mind as he watched—this time by the couch, as he hoped, of a new birth. He was about to see what could be done by one man, strengthened by all the aids that love and devotion could give, for the redemption of his fellow. As through the darkness of the night and a sluggish fog to aid it, the light of a pure heaven made its slow irresistible way, his hope grew that athwart the fog of an evil life, the darkness that might be felt, the light of the Spirit of God would yet penetrate the heart of the sinner, and shake the ...

— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald

... and the pine, but the whole satyr circle, intervening between the headship of the vine and the mere earth, the grosser, less human [15] spirits, incorporate and made visible, of the more coarse and sluggish sorts of vegetable strength, the fig, the reed, the ineradicable weed-things which will attach themselves, climbing about the vine-poles, or seeking the sun between the hot stones. For as Dionysus, the spiritual form of the vine, is of the highest human type, so the fig-tree and the ...

— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... still were Floing, Saint-Menges, Fleigneux, Illy, small villages that lay nestled in the hollows of that billowing region where the landscape was a succession of hill and dale. And there, too, to the left was the great bend of the Meuse, where the sluggish stream, shimmering like molten silver in the bright sunlight, swept lazily in a great horseshoe around the peninsula of Iges and barred the road to Mezieres, leaving between its further bank and the impassable forest but one single ...

— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... dangerous as they turned beneath the mill on either side, kept up a curious rumbling and splashing sound that was full of suggestions of what the consequences would be should anyone be swept over them by the sluggish current in the dam, and down into the dark ...

— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn

... killed her by drugging her spirit as with anodyne. As she had fallen at Gracedieu, so she fell now into a languid habit where tears swam in flood about the lids of her eyes, where the eyes were too heavy for clear sight and the very blood sluggish with sorrow. She grew pale again, hollow-eyed, diaphanous—a prism for an unearthly ray. Her beauty took on its elfin guise; she walked a ghost. Night and day she felt for the ring; though she knew it was not there, her hand was always in her vest, her bosom always numb and cold. Sometimes ...

— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett

... for my part, I feel that, if I were to believe that my exertions ought to detract the millionth part from his merits, I should be one of the most unprincipled and contemptible of mankind. Ask the question simply, Who has borne the real evil, who has encountered the real opposition, who roused the sluggish public to sentiments of honor and pity? Why, Mr. Sadler; and I come in (supposing I succeed) to terminate in the twelfth hour his labor of the eleven. I greatly fear my ability to carry on this measure. I wish, most ardently I wish, that some other had been found to undertake the cause; ...

— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy

... from one island or key to another, slipping along the shady shores, the canoe suddenly struck out across the wider stretch of water, beyond which lay the mainland. Presently it thrust its nose into the soft bank of a stream, or, rather, a sluggish water-course which made a clear channel in an ocean of waving saw-grass. The men shipped their paddles, stepped out, and lifted Hugh to his feet; then they dragged ...

— The Boy Scouts on Picket Duty • Robert Shaler

... streets are numerous and wealthy, And many unfrequented nooks there be, Fitted by kind for violence and theft; But take you thence, and many a watchful ruffian Will soon strike home, by force and not by words: This way, or not at all, stand you in hope. Come, come, our comrades, with more sluggish wit, To vigilance and duty consecrate, Will we acquaint with all that we intend, And we will so commit them to our cause That they cannot stand off or "square" themselves; But to your wishes' height you'll all advance. The City's courts have houses of ill-fame, Town's palaces are full ...

— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 19, 1890 • Various

... hear Ramsden mutter something, but he did not seem to be coming on; and mastering the dull, sluggish feeling, accompanied by a throbbing headache, the lad stole cautiously back to where he could look round and see their approaching enemy between them and ...

— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn

... Because of its key geographic location, Panama's economy is service-based, heavily weighted toward banking, commerce, and tourism. Panama's former protectionist policies have taken their toll, and the economy has been sluggish the last two years, with GDP growth at 1.9% in 1995 and 1.5% in 1996. Although tourism and the Panama Canal posted growth in 1996, most sectors remained stagnant, and some, like the Colon Free Zone, ...

— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... to land for the first time in France, to be pursued by little boys who say "Souvenir!" and "Good night!" early in the morning. And there is something about getting there at last, after months of weary training, which must stir the most sluggish imagination. ...

— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham

... design,'—'I doubt if it be believed, that there was any rising,' either in North Wales or at Shrewsbury, or on Marston Moor, 'at the very time when there was an Insurrection at Salisbury'—' therefore, how men of wicked spirits may traduce Us in that matter—I leave it!'[59] Surely 'sluggish mortals, saved from destruction,' not caused by secret agencies, but from an actual 'Rebellion,' which threatened to bring every one of them into 'blood and confusion,' need not be required to believe in the very existence of so ...

— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various

... height; that fire proof construction and at least two stairways from the upper floors should be provided; that day rooms should be on the first and sleeping rooms on the second floor; that all buildings for the insane who suffer from sluggish and enfeebled circulation of the blood should be capable of being warmed to 70 deg. in the coldest weather; that ample cubic space and ventilation should be provided; and that, as far as possible, without too great increase of the cost of maintenance or sacrificing essential provisions ...

— Scientific American Supplement, No. 799, April 25, 1891 • Various

... there's always some reason FOR love," said Baird, and he felt that he had said something brilliant—as is the habit of people of sluggish mentality when they say a thing they do not themselves understand. "You don't doubt that I love her?" he went on. "Why should I ask her to marry me ...

— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips

... Miss Peck, abruptly, and rolled her sluggish, inviting eyes upon me. "You're a case, too, ...

— Lin McLean • Owen Wister

... it had before been shot away the fire of the fleet did not stop, and Johnston accordingly went on the roof and showed a white flag. As he stood there the Ossipee was approaching at full speed to ram on the starboard side, passing the sluggish Winnebago, whose captain, still outside his turret, exchanged greetings with his more fortunate competitor. Her helm was put over and engines backed at once, but it was too late to avoid the collision. ...

— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan

... is enticed into thoughtless dissipation, and, after a brilliant start, finds that he is at the mercy of the cleverer villains who surround him; that he has been bought and sold like a sheep; that his character is gone, and his imagination become sluggish; and, finally, he has to escape from utter ruin by scarcely describable degradation. He writes a libel on one of his virtuous friends, who is forgiving enough to improve it and correct it for the press. In order to bury his mistress, who has been ruined with ...

— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen

... William Stanley: the more Mr. Wyllys examined this point, the clearer it appeared to him, who had known his friend's only son from an infant, and had always felt much interested in him. As a child, and a boy, William Stanley had been of a morose temper, and of a sluggish, inactive mind—not positively stupid, but certainly far from clever; this claimant, on the contrary, had all the expression and manner of a shrewd, quick-witted man, who might be passionate, but who looked like a good-natured person, although ...

— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper

... that doesn't make any particular difference. Sometimes a man may think that he feels well, but when he gets up to speak he finds that he is simply sluggish. Reckon I'll get through all right. Do the best I can, any way, and if I fail it can't be helped. Guess we'd ...

— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read

... but they are not made for the towns, they are so strangely out of place in the towns which the foreigner has contrived for himself on the borders of their brown, sluggish rivers, towns which he has created by pushing backward for a little the jungle, while he builds his pink and yellow bungalows beneath the palm trees, and spaces them between the banana trees, along straight tracks which he calls roads. Wide, red roads, which the ...

— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte

... sin, as the very embodiment of pride and arrogance. We find him portrayed as neither seeking nor avoiding danger, for there are few things about which he cares; as ashamed to accept favors, since that implies inferiority; as sluggish and indifferent except when stimulated by some great honor to be gained or some great work to be performed; as frank, for this is characteristic of the man who despises others; as admiring little, for nothing is great to him. His pride ...

— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton

... killed one nineteen feet long, and three feet and a half in its greatest breadth. A friend of mine killed one twenty-two feet long, and the legs of both these, which on land seemed to move with great difficulty, were not above a foot in length. But however sluggish they be on land, in the water they move ...

— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz

... sluggish seconds crawled on. There was the sound of feet among the dry forest leaves—the hum of deep voices. He waited, trembling, for now it would be a man on foot with naked sabre who should sink under his spring. Would ...

— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers

... become established there, inhabited chiefly by people whose business is in the city and who are obliged to go back and forth on the trains. After a number of years the growth of the towns becomes more sluggish, and the managers find that the commutation traffic is not after all extremely profitable; therefore they lessen their train service and increase the rates of fare. Perhaps they may abolish commutation rates altogether. It is a well known fact that the value of suburban real estate ...

— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker

... if it were a conscript army; that is with the necessary margin of men unable to serve or needed to serve otherwise. Ours is a country in which that democratic spirit which is common to Christendom is rather unusually sluggish and far below the surface. And the most genuine and purely popular movement that we have had since the Chartists has been the enlistment for this war. By all means say that such vague and sentimental volunteering is valueless in war if you think so; or even if you don't think ...

— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton

... be kept for the purpose. Moreover, he held that the average Russian peasant remains active and willing (rather than lazy) only so long as he wears a shirt and a peasant's smock; but that as soon as ever he finds himself put into a German tailcoat, he becomes awkward, sluggish, indolent, disinclined to change his vest or take a bath, fond of sleeping in his clothes, and certain to breed fleas and bugs under the German apparel. And it may be that Vassili was right. At all events, the brothers' peasantry were exceedingly ...

— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... International Hotel at La Crosse, looking out on the Great Mother of Waters, on whose cold bosom the ice and the steamers were struggling for mastery. Beyond stretched the snow-clad bluffs, sternly looking down on the Mississippi, as if to say, "'Thus far shalt thou come and no farther'—though sluggish, you are aggressive, ever pushing where you should not; but all attempts in this direction are alike vain; since creation's dawn, we have defied you, and here we stand, to-day, calm, majestic, immovable. Coquette as you will in other latitudes, with flowery ...

— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... as Mrs. Blake had left it; her highbacked Elizabethan chair, filled with cushions, stood on the hearth; the dried grasses in the two tall vases shed their ashy pollen down upon the bricks. Even the yellow cat, grown old and sluggish, dozed in her favourite ...

— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow

... we find that we have made life much too short, and thrown away a huge portion of our time. Then we, in our mind, deduct from the sum total of our years the hours that we have needlessly passed in sleep; the working-hours each day, during which the surface of the mind's sluggish pool has not been stirred or ruffled by a single thought; the days that we have gladly got rid of, to attain some real or fancied object that lay beyond, in the way between us and which stood irksomely the intervening days; the ...

— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... rabbit-coop. He draws with elegance and precision a chair, a clock, a harpsichord, a barometer, a piece of needle-work. But Cowper was an out-door as well as an in-door man. The Olney landscape was tame, a fat, agricultural region, where the sluggish Ouse wound between plowed fields and the horizon was bounded by low hills. Nevertheless Cowper's natural descriptions are at once more distinct and more imaginative than Thomson's. The Task reflects, also, the new philanthropic spirit, the enthusiasm of humanity, the feeling of the brotherhood ...

— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... of those days was a leisurely vehicle. Its ordinary pace was a rather sluggish trot, and in a thickly populated thoroughfare its speed was further reduced by frequent stoppages. Bearing these facts in mind, I gave an occasional backward glance as we jogged northward, though my attention soon began to wander from the rather remote possibility of pursuit to ...

— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman

... his great influence to further higher and secondary education, and fixed the main lines of action which were followed for a century. He hoped that a liberal education of his countrymen would make for both an intellectual and moral regeneration, and emancipate the people from their sluggish obedience to conventionality. The schools then were part of the ecclesiastical organization and have never ceased to be so wholly, and until recently the title of the Prussian minister has been: "Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs, Instruction, ...

— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier

... went out together. They climbed the Ponte Vecchio, leaned against the rail back of the bust of Cellini and contemplated the trembling lights on the sluggish waters. ...

— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath

... lands. The salt tract runs the whole way down the coast, and forms a desolate strip a few miles broad. Towards the beach it rises into sandy ridges, from 50 to 80 ft. high, sloping inland and covered with a [v.03 p.0240] vegetation of low scrub jungle. Sluggish brackish streams creep along between banks of fetid black mud. The sandhills on the verge of the ocean are carpeted with creepers and the wild convolvulus. Inland, it spreads out into prairies of coarse long grass and ...

— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... my Ship from Holland—where I stayed—two days!—and was so glad to rush away home after being imprisoned in a sluggish un- sweet Canal in Rotterdam: and after tearing about to Amsterdam, the Hague, etc., to see things which were neither new nor remarkable to me though I had never seen them before—except in Pictures, which represent to you ...

— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald

... however appropriate my metaphor might be as applied to race-horses in general, it was singularly unsuitable as applied to the particular horse which he proposed to give me. From a foal upwards this remarkable animal had been the idlest and most sluggish of his race. Whatever capacities for speed he might possess he had kept so strictly to himself, that no amount of training had ever brought them out. He had been found hopelessly slow as a racer, and hopelessly lazy as a hunter, and was fit ...

— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens

... from spiritual knowledge on the one hand, or from their discipline on the other. That which arises from the first, will be a perfect virtue. It will produce activity in excellence. That which arises from the second, will be inferior and sluggish. But, however it may be subject to this lower estimation, it will always be able to produce for those who have it, a certain degree of moral reputation in the opinion ...

— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson

... who could not sleep were drugged with morphine. The moaning never stopped, but rose and fell and rose again. It shook my heart. We turned from the ashen faces and went out into the grey morning light. Everything seemed very grey. A mist was drawing up slowly from the sluggish Lys, and we wondered as we went shivering through it across the soaked grass what was happening beyond it over there ...

— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan

... just before sunset, that our small scout of ten were halted by a burnt log bridge over a sluggish inlet to a lake. The miry trail to the Chinisee Castle led over it, swung westward along the lake, rising to a steep bluff which was gashed with a number of ...

— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers

... ground lizards found in many states from Kansas to California and southward. They are very quick in their movements. Their food consists of insects of the more sluggish type. They do not stalk their prey ...

— Pathfinder - or, The Missing Tenderfoot • Alan Douglas

... down, and it was very still without,—still and hot. The masses of luminous vapor were gathering thickly overhead, no longer urged by the gusty wind. The great masses of rank wisteria leaves, with here and there a second blossoming of purple flowers, hung dead over the window in the sluggish air. Across the roofs I could hear the sound of a belated fiacre in the streets below. I filled my ...

— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram

... broadened hotly; the shadows of the Lombardy poplars curdling up into a sluggish pool of black at their roots along the dry gutters. The old schoolmaster in the shade of the great horse-chestnuts (brought from the homestead in the Piedmont country, every one) husked corn for his wife, composing, meanwhile, a page ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various

... excited feverish condition, which requires the soothing quieting thought, the patient is dull and sluggish, perhaps unconscious, as in fainting, spasms or something similar; then vigorous, rousing thoughts should be given—sharp, decisive and emphatic, as when ...

— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson

... right eye was quite bereft of sight. It was the coma of my whole being, as if a thunderbolt had struck me. My will was annihilated; not a fiber of flesh obeyed my bidding. And yet amid the impotency of my inert limbs my thoughts subsisted, sluggish and ...

— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola

... intended to stand the wear and tear of years, and all weathers; it is relatively very costly, and is an investment, one may say, of his capital rather than of his income; the invention of his people is sluggish, and their arts are few, consequently he is perforce taught to be conservative, his ideas are fixed, and he becomes scandalised even at the suggestion ...

— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton

... the ex-soldiers who will not settle down. You have the phenomenon as well as we. It is common after war. Only our men are more turbulent than any other in Europe. You have seen them, large, full-blooded, and excitable heroes, not so sluggish and obedient as the French, more nervous and clamorous than the English. But we are working. The women and children are more industrious than formerly, and make up for the men's defection. Italy ...

— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham

... him. It is so still. We cannot dispense with European culture, because we refuse to separate ourselves from the mighty past, which has settled there in forms of human life unrepresented among us. We cannot step out of the world's current, though it looks sluggish beside our rushing stream, because there is a spiritual demand in us which cries louder than the thin voice of a self-conscious national life. This demand is profoundly at one with the deeper, holier sense of national being which does not ...

— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder

... is weighed down by a feeble body. In me a strong body is allied to a sluggish soul. You would fitly leave me behind. Impeded as you also are, I may yet ...

— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... head over heels through the air at the rate of dozens of miles a minute. In spite of the innumerable circles he was describing per second, he thought; for thought is wonderful—sometimes as sluggish as flowing pitch, sometimes as instantaneous as light. He thought in a second, and willed. "Let me come down safe and sound. Whatever else happens, let me ...

— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... middle of the river the ford was so deep that the water almost touched the feet of the riders. But fortunately the current was sluggish, so the horses managed to keep their footing. They were allowed to take their own time, so it took several minutes to gain the ...

— The Rover Boys in the Air - From College Campus to the Clouds • Edward Stratemeyer

... body is at first obese, but rapidly loses flesh, the skin becomes greasy and damp, owing to hypersecretion of the sebaceous and sudoriparous glands, and soils the garments. Memory becomes enfeebled, speech uncertain and defective (dysarthria), the association of ideas sluggish, sensibility blunted, perception confused, judgment erroneous, and every species of regular and continued application impossible. The earlier hallucinations reappear, but in a less vivid form and only at long ...

— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero

... consequence to distinguish between slow and sluggish attention. Sometimes children appear stupid and heavy, when they are absolutely exhausted by too great efforts of attention: at other times, they have something like the same dulness of aspect, before ...

— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth

... in everything, the whole meeting seemed too good to be true. I felt again that strange sensation of lightness which I had experienced after I had seen her face in the garden. The great rooms seemed brighter, life seemed worth living; my sluggish, melancholy blood ran faster, and filled me with a new sense of strength. I said to myself that without this woman I was but an imperfect being, but that with her I could accomplish everything to which ...

— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne

... vast throngs of men and in solitude; he grew angry if requests were preferred, or if they were not preferred. He would start out on enterprises with the greatest amount of dash, and then carry them through in the most sluggish manner. He both spent money most unsparingly and showed a thoroughly sordid spirit in exacting it. He was alike irritated and pleased both at those who flattered him and at those who spoke their own minds. Many who were guilty of great crimes he neglected to punish and many who had done no wrong ...

— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio

... posts of the felza was rippling with little steely waves. The line of the heavy beak cut the opening between the tapering point of the Lido and the misty outline of Tre Porti. Inside the white lighthouse tower a burnished man- of-war lay at anchor, a sluggish mass like a marble wharf placed squarely in the water. From the lee came a slight swell of a harbor-boat puffing its devious course to the Lido landing. The sea-breeze had touched the locust groves of San Niccolo da Lido, ...

— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick

... to other craft. By and by the beat of her screw and the ripple of the water from her bow sounded so near that Alvin edged closer to land. In the heavy mist loomed a minute later a bulky steamer, surging southward at sluggish speed, the crew, as seen for an instant, looking like ...

— The Launch Boys' Adventures in Northern Waters • Edward S. Ellis

... the US. Other issues facing the government are the curbing of the budget deficit, including the containment of social welfare costs, and further privatization of public enterprises. Growth slowed in 1998-2002, due to sluggish tourist and tuna sectors. Also, tight controls on exchange rates and the scarcity of foreign exchange have impaired short-term economic prospects. The black market value of the Seychelles rupee is half the official exchange rate; without a devaluation of the currency ...

— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... meantime, I can show you all that's to be seen. I can show you where the gold grows, and may be had for the gathering. We've snug quarters for the woods, plenty of venison; and, as you must be a good shot coming from Carolina, you may bring down at day-dawn of a morning a sluggish wild turkey, so fat that he will split open the moment he strikes the ground. Don't fight shy, now, 'squire, and we'll have sport just so long as you ...

— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms

... word,' said the Miller, 'you are very lazy. Really, considering that I am going to give you my wheelbarrow, I think you might work harder. Idleness is a great sin, and I certainly don't like any of my friends to be idle or sluggish. You must not mind my speaking quite plainly to you. Of course I should not dream of doing so if I were not your friend. But what is the good of friendship if one cannot say exactly what one means? Anybody can say charming things and try to please and to flatter, ...

— The Happy Prince and Other Tales • Oscar Wilde

... which the India berries (Cocas de Levante) are put in the Philippines, is to throw them into small sluggish streams or into lakes with the object of intoxicating the fish which soon come to the surface and float there as if dead. This custom is very extensive in Malaysia, in India and even in Europe, where, in order to avoid the cases of poisoning ...

— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera

... enthusiasm, and shedding on the wearied new hopes, and on the sick unwonted health, and stirring in sluggish souls some aspirations that greatened and inspired, the King appeared. But no illusions deceived His calm prescience. From the beginning He knew the path which stretched before Him; and while the transient loyalty of the ignorant shouted hosannas around ...

— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... sends out germ-threads which penetrate the caterpillar. Here the threads form long narrow spores which break off and form other spores until the body-cavity is entirely filled. The caterpillar soon becomes sluggish and dies. The fungus continues to grow until it has completely appropriated all of the insect's soft parts, externally a perfect caterpillar but internally completely filled with mycelial threads. Under favorable conditions this mycelial caterpillar, which has become a storage organ, ...

— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard

... mouth bespoke a sullen, determined, and sneering disposition, as if it belonged to one brutally obstinate, one who could not by any gentle means be persuaded from his purpose. Such a man in a passion would have been a terrible wild beast; but the current of his feelings seemed to flow in a deep, sluggish channel, rather than in a violent or impetuous one; and, like William Penn, when he reconnoitred his unwelcome visitors through the keyhole of the door, I looked at my strange guest, and liked him not. ...

— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie

... wandered about. The amount of tobacco which he had smoked since his return to these parts, exactly in that spot, was considerable, for there he might have been found at some period of the afternoon at least three times a week. He would sit on this rail for half an hour looking down at the sluggish waters of the little river, rolling the smoke out of his mouth at long intervals, and thinking perhaps of the great book which he was supposed to be writing. As he sat there now, he suddenly heard voices and laughter, and presently three girls came round the corner of the hedge, ...

— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope

... reached the camp, she was already tired, but the pleasant excitement was still upon her. When she had skimmed the big, slow-bubbling pot of syrup, tested a ladleful of it in the snow, poured in some fresh sap, and replenished the sluggish fire, dusk was already stealing upon the forest. In her haste she did not notice that the candle in the old lantern was almost burned out. Snatching up the lantern, which it was not yet necessary to light, and the big tin sap-bucket, ...

— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts

... never liked it. He wrung his livelihood from it, and that was all the sea was, the place where he worked, as the mill, the shop, and the counting- house were the places where other men worked. Romance never sang to him her siren song, and Adventure had never shouted in his sluggish blood. He lacked imagination. The wonders of the deep were without significance to him. Tornadoes, hurricanes, waterspouts, and tidal waves were so many obstacles to the way of a ship on the sea and of a master on the bridge—they were ...

— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London

... upon his table between two flambeaux. A heavy watch in a brass case lay near the pistol. De Thou, wrapped in a black cloak, sat motionless with folded arms. Cinq-Mars paced backward and forward, his arms crossed behind his back, from time to time looking at the hand of the watch, too sluggish in his eyes. He opened the tent, looked up to ...

— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... not much of it, but fair, so that we were able to log a sluggish two knots on our northerly course. The mornings of the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh found us with a similar breeze. We were fearfully weak, but we abided by our decision and continued ...

— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London

... when he told him of the qualities of the violet rays. Could they in any way affect his mind? The mere thought stimulated his imagination to such an extent that already he was convinced that his senses were wandering—that his mind was becoming sluggish ...

— The Ivory Snuff Box • Arnold Fredericks

... have roused the most torpid of mankind to emulation. He saw his rival, weak, sickly, wounded, swimming the river, struggling through the mud, leading the charge, stopping the flight, grasping the sword with the left hand, managing the bridle with a bandaged arm. But none of these things moved that sluggish and ignoble nature. He watched, from a safe distance, the beginning of the battle on which his fate and the fate of his race depended. When it became clear that the day was going against Ireland, he ...

— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... of the male chicken is commonly practised in certain localities. This operation changes the disposition of the cockerel. He becomes more quiet and sluggish, never crows, the head is small, the comb and wattles cease growing and the hackle and saddle feathers become well developed. A capon always develops more uniformly and is larger ...

— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.

... grain are called malt liquors. Lager beer, and all kinds of ales and porters, are malt liquors. They make people dull, sluggish, and stupid who drink much of them. They do much mischief in the body, though it takes a larger quantity of any one of them to make a person drunk than it does of ...

— Object Lessons on the Human Body - A Transcript of Lessons Given in the Primary Department of School No. 49, New York City • Sarah F. Buckelew and Margaret W. Lewis

... were now in was a difficult one to move troops over. The streams were numerous, deep and sluggish, sometimes spreading out into swamps grown up with impenetrable growths of trees and underbrush. The banks were generally low and marshy, making the streams difficult to approach except where there were ...

— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant

... always taciturn, was now painfully silent. His brain, always quick and clear to comprehend a problem in Legendre, now seemed beclouded and sluggish. At length, embarrassed by the oppressive silence, Lizzie endeavored to arouse ...

— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott

... one of themselves. Keith was not a dreamer, nor one to yield easily to such brain fancies, but the mad delirium of loneliness gripped him, and he had to struggle back to sanity, beating his hands upon his breast to stir anew the sluggish circulation of his blood, and talking to the horse in ...

— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish

... deity to you. For, if you should put me to death, you will not easily find such another, though it may be ridiculous to say so, altogether attached by the deity to this city as to a powerful and generous horse, somewhat sluggish from his size, and requiring to be roused by a gad-fly; so the deity appears to have united me, being such a person as I am, to the city, that I may rouse you, and persuade and reprove every one of you, nor ever cease besetting ...

— Apology, Crito, and Phaedo of Socrates • Plato

... and his expensive stockings were, if possible, more plentiful and elegant and expensive than ever. When Miss Josephine appeared in a fresh costume, his small gray eyes revolved about her with an appearance of sluggish satisfaction which for him was ...

— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various

... sings Gwalchmai "and their sweet voices in the lulling songs of the wood"; he watches at night beside the fords "among the untrodden grass" to hear the nightingale and watch the play of the sea-mew. Even patriotism takes the same picturesque form. The Welsh poet hates the flat and sluggish land of the Saxon; as he dwells on his own he tells of "its sea-coast and its mountains, its towns on the forest border, its fair landscape, its dales, its waters, and its valleys, its white sea-mews, ...

— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green

... see separated from Woods analyz'd only the vulgar way in close vessels any volatile Salt in a dry and Saline form, as that of Soot, which we have often had very Crystalline and Geometrically figur'd. And then, whereas the Saline parts of the Spirits of Guajacum, &c. appear upon distillation sluggish enough, the Salt of Soot seems to be one of the most volatile Bodies in all Nature; and if it be well made will readily ascend with the milde heat of a Furnace, warm'd only by the single Wieck of a Lamp, to the top of the highest Glass Vessels that are commonly ...

— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle

... hanging in a shade of rose colour directly overhead, fell with sinister distinctness on the slender figure of the young wife, lying in a huddled heap on the bed, her fashionable rest gown stained with blood, which oozed from her breast in a sluggish stream on the satin quilt. A sharp, pungent odour was mingled with the heavy atmosphere of the room—the smell of a burning fabric. There was no disorder, no weapon, no indication of a struggle. Only the motionless, bleeding figure on the bed revealed to the guests clustering outside ...

— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees

... of real intellectual improvement in many a mind has been in the new home of persons just married. The reading aloud of an interesting work, the one to the other, is a delightful entertainment, and gives a new charm to life. Every effort must be employed to keep the mind from becoming sluggish and barren. We need information, the thoughts of the good and great and richly endowed, to ...

— The Wedding Day - The Service—The Marriage Certificate—Words of Counsel • John Fletcher Hurst

... could see no sign of human habitation. As far as could be made out, the river was about three hundred yards broad, and about this time we became aware that it must be very nearly low tide, for the stream which passed us was growing more and more sluggish, till at last it ceased ebbing, and the Teaser began to swing slowly round, a sufficient indication that ...

— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn

... into being by Lord Kitchener and his advisers, who adopted modern advertising methods to stir the sluggish imagination of the masses, so that every wall in London and great cities, every fence in rural places, was placarded ...

— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... Pe-ke-sa-we-see, which we ascended, are elevated and pretty uniform. From its mouth to the first fork, is a growth of cedar, on either bank, intermixed with hemlock, pine, birch, and a few scattered maples. Thence to the third fork, denoted on the map, the growth is exclusively pine and fir. This river is sluggish and deep, and is navigable for boats of ten to fifteen tons burden, without any obstruction to the third forks. Its width is uniform, about sixty to ...

— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft

... every position on the maritime Alps, and the allied armies threatened the country of Nice and the territory of the republic. If the allies had pushed their advantages with vigour, the republicans must have lost more; but they, as was their general rule, were sluggish and irresolute. Nelson, who had been detached with a small squadron to co-operate with the Austrian general, Devins, and who served on the coast of Nice, was almost frantic at his sluggishness. A plan had been formed for getting between the French divisions that occupied the Nissard territory ...

— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... clouds drifted slowly along the heavy sky. The Dead Boxer again had recourse to his pageantries of death. The funeral bell tolled heavily during the whole morning, and the black flag flapped more dismally in the sluggish blast than before. At an early hour the town began to fill with myriads of people. Carriages and cars, horsemen and pedestrians, all thronged in one promiscuous stream towards the scene of interest. A dense multitude stood before the inn, looking with horror on the ...

— The Dead Boxer - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... fence surrounded the property on three sides, the fourth being bounded by a sluggish, disreputable creek whose fetid waters seemed to crawl onward even more slowly after receiving the noisome waste liquor from the tan-pits. At only one point, that nearest the village, did any of the buildings ...

— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston

... transferableness are variable, (some documents passing only in certain places, and others passing, if at all, for less than their inscribed value), both the mass, and, so to speak, fluidity, of the currency, are variable. True or perfect currency flows freely, like a pure stream; it becomes sluggish or stagnant in proportion to the quantity of less transferable matter which mixes with it, adding to its bulk, but diminishing its purity. [Articles of commercial value, on which bills are drawn, increase the currency indefinitely; and ...

— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... such as might be supposed to come from the movement of an enemy stealing through the current, but each of the three knew it was not caused by friend or foe. They had noticed the same thing many a time before, and knew it was caused by a drooping branch or projecting root, acted upon by the sluggish current which caused it to dip in and out ...

— The Wilderness Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis

... was a name to appeal to the most sluggish imagination; the mere sound of it filled Marietta with a joyful confidence. Within the hour she had hailed a passing broker and negotiated with him for five hundred shares of the stock ...

— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller

... we would be glad to hear how it all happened, and he began to tell us. At first the current of his memory—or imagination—seemed somewhat sluggish; but as his embarrassment wore off, his language flowed more freely, and the story acquired perspective and coherence. As he became more and more absorbed in the narrative, his eyes assumed a dreamy expression, and he seemed to lose sight of his auditors, and to be living over again in monologue ...

— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various

... consciousness of other men and seeing the springs of action at their source in the recesses of individual character. The best parts of these longer poems are bursts of impassioned soliloquy, and his fingers were always clumsy at the callida junctura. The stream of narration is sluggish, if varied by times with pleasing reflections (viridesque placido aequore sylvas); we are forced to do our own rowing, and only when the current is hemmed in by some narrow gorge of the poet's personal ...

— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various

... loud wail. Tommy and Hazel stood in blank, rigid silence. They could not believe that Harriet was gone. Miss Elting sank down on a pack, while Jane stood gazing moodily off over the sluggish river. ...

— The Meadow-Brook Girls in the Hills - The Missing Pilot of the White Mountains • Janet Aldridge

... had already gone. I leaned over the bank, and called after their vanishing figures,—"What did you say I could do?" The answer floated slowly up on the hot, sluggish air,— ...

— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte

... made his purchases, and hiring a skiff rowed slowly up the river against the sluggish current on his return. In twelve hours he reached the trading-post. It was now late in the evening. The sky had been lowering all day, and by dusk it began to snow. Disregarding the admonitions of the traders, he left his goods under their care and struck out boldly through the forest over the ...

— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler

... opaque as chestnuts, in the direction of his son. Though he would never have observed the improvement unless his wife had called his attention to it, his kind heart was honestly relieved to discover that Stephen looked better. He had worried a good deal in his sluggish way over what he thought of as "the effect of the war" on his son. With the strong paternal instinct which beheld every child as a branch on a genealogical tree, he had been as much disturbed as his wife by the gossip which had reached him about ...

— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow

... pursue further this mighty subject, yonder landscape of Claude,—calm, fresh, delicate, yet full of flavor,—should be likened to a bottle of Chateau Margaux. And what is the Poussin before spoken of but Romanee Gelee?—heavy, sluggish,—the luscious odor almost sickens you; a sultry sort of drink; your limbs sink under it; you feel as if you had been drinking ...

— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... sunshine, and her girl's faces,—a little graver than usual, perhaps, but still full of youth and the brightness of energy; and the sluggish nightmare of yesterday's grief began to fade ...

— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey

... his head at home; and only as you see it there, whether looking out in quiet majesty from a lonely point over a silent lake, or leading him in his terrific rush through the startled forest, will your heart ever jump and your nerves tingle in that swift thrill which stirs the sluggish blood to your very finger tips, and sends you quietly back to camp with your soul at peace—well satisfied to leave Umquenawis where he is, rather than pack him home to your admiring friends in a ...

— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long

... fifteen feet. The country people not infrequently make of it a kind of house pet. When that is done, the reptile often makes its home in the cottage thatch, living on birds and mice. They are dull and sluggish in motion. While visiting a sugar plantation a few years ago one of the hands asked if I should be interested by their maja. He dipped his hand into a nearby water-barrel in the bottom of which two of them were closely coiled. He dragged out one of perhaps ten or twelve feet ...

— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson

... panel. He carried the epistle about with him all day, and observed the weather with solicitous attention, but no change occurred. The turquoise sky remained without a cloud. Fires from burning leaves sent up sluggish pillars of smoke, that spread out equilaterally above the trees in ...

— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... to slacken our speed. The river runs far more slowly in its latter course than when it came babbling and leaping down the hillside. And sometimes a Christian life seems as if it crept rather than ran, like those sluggish streams in the Fen country, which move so slowly that you cannot tell which way the water is flowing. Are not there all round us, are there not amongst ourselves instances of checked growth, of arrested development? There are ...

— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... began first, like the plants, in the bosom of the ocean. From the slimy depths of the water life crawled hideous to the land. Great reptiles dragged their sluggish length through the tangled vegetation of ...

— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock

... same time he welcomed the change of life. Politics had already begun to take on that unpleasantness for a Northern man of his affiliations which could make even so dull a participant as he was, in his sluggish conservatism, very uncomfortable; he had felt its rude censures and misapprehensions of delicate personal relations—such as existed between himself and President Pierce—disagreeably near at hand; and he was glad to get away from his native land, upon which before ...

— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry

... necessarily slow and laborious. About the middle of the afternoon the swamp became almost impassable, and the major was about to suggest the propriety of picking out an easier path, when George suddenly halted on the banks of a narrow, but deep and sluggish, stream, and, wiping his forehead with his coat-sleeve, said, with something like ...

— Frank on a Gun-Boat • Harry Castlemon

... ranks. A silver spring broke ground at the corner of the paddock fence. A pool had been scooped out for the cattle to drink at; but it was not muddied, and the stream tinkled down over the polished pebbles to the wider, more sluggish stream that meandered away from the farm into the ...

— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr

... unhappy Charles a few weeks later, the infant Henry VI. was proclaimed King of France as well as of England, at both Paris and London, while Charles VII. was only proclaimed at Bourges, and a few other places in the south. Charles was of a slow, sluggish nature, and the men around him were selfish and pleasure-loving intriguers, who kept aloof all the bolder spirits from him. The brother of Henry V., John, Duke of Bedford, ruled all the country north of the Loire, with Rouen as his head-quarters. For seven ...

— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge

... flying through her sluggish mind, she rose and moved heavily from the room, with a parting look of encouragement at Alloway, as though to say, a man that ...

— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... again the famous passage in the preface where he dismisses the claim of the unities of place and time to be necessary to the proper illusion of drama. Never did critic show himself freer of the easy slavery to traditional rules which afflicts or consoles sluggish minds. In Johnson's pages at any rate, there is "always an appeal open," as he says, "from criticism to nature." And, though all his prejudices, except those of the Anti-Gallican, must have carried ...

— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey

... In a short time our own royals and topgallant sails followed their bad example. The captain gave a stamp of impatience on the deck. The breeze was falling, even the topsails and courses no longer bellied out as before. Still, the frigates glided on, but the sluggish eddies astern showed how greatly ...

— The Boy who sailed with Blake • W.H.G. Kingston

... that thus schooled by you in patience I may endure my own, which, God knows, I would gladly, were it possible, transfer to you, seeing that you are so well fitted to bear them." These words aroused the hitherto sluggish and apathetic king as it were from sleep. He redressed the lady's wrong, and having thus made a beginning, thenceforth meted out the most rigorous justice to all that in any wise offended against the majesty of ...

— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio

... time after Reuben's visit to him he one day told Barbier the fact of his French descent. Barbier declared that he had always known it, had always realised something in David distinct from the sluggish huckstering English temper. Why, David's mother was from the south of France; his own family came from Carcassonne. No doubt the rich Gascon blood ran in both ...

— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... we went away, hastening with the Martian velocity of motion until as the sun hung in the zenith, we had reached a hillside sloping upon a meadow space through which passed the clear but sluggish waters of a wide stream. A tulip-like grass was distributed in the heavy luxuriant growth of the meadow, which bore upon pendant threads a blue bell-like flower. A gentle wind, rising and falling, swept over them, lifting and blowing out the cups as it passed off to the surface ...

— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap

... waterhole, and although we tried every means in our power, we found it impossible to get him out. All the ground beneath the surface was a bottomless quicksand, through which the beast sank too rapidly for us to get bushes of timber fairly beneath him; and being of a very sluggish stupid nature he could never be got to make sufficiently strenuous efforts towards extricating himself. In the evening, as a last chance, we let the water in from the creek, so as to buoy him up and at the same time soften the ground about his legs; but it was of no ...

— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills

... for woman's sweet companionship that leads these to rear happy homes—sacred shrines from which incense mounts night and day to the throne of Omnipotent God—goads those to lawless love. The empurpled juice that warms the cold heart and stirs the sluggish blood that gives to the orator lips of gold, to the poet promethean fire abused doth breed the hasty quarrel and make ...

— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... been in Boston or Charlestown! If one must go to church in such a case, it was Gerald's opinion, one does not go to bed at all. But she belonged to the class of people who would miss the last act of an opera rather than miss a train or allow the beans to burn. A bread-and-butter person, a sluggish, fat-brained person, elementary, not awakened and sharpened to appreciation and wonder. If he had not been in such a good humor he might have been cross, scornful of her; as it was, he indulgently thought her merely too flatly ...

— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall

... overflown by the river, offered, as may be supposed, no small hindrances to the progress of the travellers. In some places it was quite impossible, from the thickly-timbered character of its banks, to approach the main stream; in others they appeared to be almost entirely surrounded by sluggish waters, of which they knew neither the depth nor the nature of their banks. Elsewhere, unable to cross some deep stream, the explorers were driven miles out of their way, and sometimes even in their tents, the water stood to the depth of two or ...

— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden

... service laws were approved in Paris, which was about the middle of July, 1913, the French Cabinet was at its wit's end to provide the financial end of the tremendous military budget. Investment markets were sluggish, and there were thousands of notes whose values were rapidly depreciating. The French Government was unable to float a loan of $200,000,000 which was necessary ...

— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller

... the Thebans were defeated by the Spartans. To the north of Coronea was Chaeronea, where was fought the great battle with Philip, which subverted the liberties of Greece. To the north of the river AEsopus, a sluggish stream, was Thebes, the capital of Boeotia, founded by Cadmus, whose great generals, Epaminondas and Pelopidas, made it, for a time, one of the great powers ...

— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord

... our hunters was upon the Bayou Crocodile. This, like all the bayous of Louisiana, is a sluggish stream, and here and there expands itself into large ponds or lakes. It is called Bayou Crocodile from the great number of alligators that infest its waters, though in this respect it differs but little from the other rivers ...

— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid

... liked their tobacco strong. The pungent smoke drifted in sluggish clouds along the low, black ceiling, following its upward slant toward the east wall and away from the high bar at the other end. This bar, rough and strong, ran from the north wall to within a scant two feet of the south wall, the opening bridged by a hinged board which served ...

— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford

... paid the same attention to the two; Meeting and parting without joy or pain, He seem'd to come that he might go again. The wondering girl, no prude, but something nice, At length was chill'd by his unmelting ice; She found her tortoise held such sluggish pace, That she must turn and meet him in the chase: This not approving, she withdrew, till one Came who appear'd with livelier hope to run; Who sought a readier way the heart to move, Than by faint dalliance of unfixing love. Accuse me not that I approving paint ...

— The Borough • George Crabbe

... world of strange and awful beauty into which Roosevelt stepped as he emerged from the dinginess of the ramshackle hotel into the crisp autumn morning. Before him lay a dusty, sagebrush flat walled in on three sides by scarred and precipitous clay buttes. A trickle of sluggish water in a wide bed, partly sand and partly baked gumbo, oozed beneath steep banks at his back, swung sharply westward, and gave the flat on the north a fringe of dusty-looking cottonwoods, thirstily drinking the only ...

— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn

... and shouting lustily, "Now, who will come and strike a stroke for the lass he loves the best, with a good Lincolnshire yeoman? How now, lads? Step up! Step up! Or else the lasses' eyes are not bright hereabouts, or the blood of Nottingham youth is sluggish and cold. Lincoln against Nottingham, say I! For no one hath put foot upon the boards this day such as we of Lincoln ...

— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle

... Doune, They sink in distant woodland soon; Blair-Drummond sees the hoofs strike fire, They sweep like breeze through Ochtertyre; They mark just glance and disappear The lofty brow of ancient Kier; They bathe their coursers' sweltering sides Dark Forth! amid thy sluggish tides, And on the opposing shore take ground With plash, with scramble, and with bound. Right-hand they leave thy cliffs, Craig-Forth! And soon the bulwark of the North, Gray Stirling, with her towers and town, Upon their fleet career ...

— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott

... followed was one calculated to arouse the most sluggish soul present. The choir sang quite thrillingly "The Maple Leaf Forever"; the mouth organ and concertina band played "Upon the Heights of Queenston" four times through without stopping to take breath; while the boys at the back of the church kept time vigorously with their feet. During ...

— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith

... ask me to do that! You know what a sluggish brain mine is. I can quite understand your not wanting to marry me, but why you should want to marry a farmer—like Jeff ...

— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell

... of this indolence of temper, this sluggish meanness of spirit, the reader cannot be surprised to find the future conduct consist of a continued serious of blunders, for he who had not spirit to prosecute an advantage put in his hands, will ...

— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber