"Stagnant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... movement of the festoons under the breeze was like the sighings of desolation made visible. The dense tangle of the undergrowth stretched everywhere, repellent, unrelieved by the vivid color flashes of the mountain blossoms. Stagnant wastes of amber-hued water ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... multitude of brooks and torrents that fall into these lakes, and of internal springs by which they are fed, and which circulate through them like veins, they are truly living lakes, 'vivi lacus;' and are thus discriminated from the stagnant and sullen pools frequent among mountains that have been formed by volcanoes, and from the shallow meres found in flat and fenny countries. The water is also of crystalline purity; so that, if it were not for the reflections of the incumbent mountains by which it is ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... need never be afraid of going too fast. The violence of inertia—the suction of the stagnant bog—is almost invincible. Like the horse, we are creatures of cast-iron habit. We abandon ourselves easily to careless acquiescence. We make much of external laws, and, like a mother bemused with torpid beer ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... while this was really at the root. Besides, this one was driven to it by necessity, while the other amused herself by playing with that enchanting, disgusting, frightful passion. This woman of the street was like stagnant, smelling water offered to those whose thirst was greater than their disgust; that other one in the theatre was like the poison which, unnoticed, poisons ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... into a swamp country and crossed a bayou where cypress knees and blue gums showed fantastic in the eerie gloom of the stagnant water. From this they emerged to a more wooded region and made an early camp on the edge of a grove of ash trees bordering a small stream where ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... miles) from Caesarea," half the distance given in the next chapter as between Acre and Haifa, and less than half the breadth of the Sea of Tiberias. The Jordan reminds Daniel of his own river, the Snow, especially in its sheets of stagnant water. ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... As waters will sometime their course delay, Stagnant, and penned in pool by human skill, Which, when the opposing dyke is broke away, Fall, and with mighty noise the country fill: 'Twas so the Africans, who had some stay, While Dardinello valour did instil, Fled here and there, dismayed ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... severe illness the mind of Artois had often been clouded, had been dispossessed of its throne by the clamor of the body's pain. And afterwards, when the agony passed and the fever abated, the mind had been lulled, charmed into a stagnant state that was delicious. But now it began to go again to its business. It began to work with the old rapidity that had for a time been lost. And as this power came back and was felt thoroughly, very consciously by this very conscious man, he took alarm. What affected ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... the Cordilleras. Small currents of air chased trains of cloud with unequal velocity, and in opposite directions: they bore the appearance of streamlets of water in rapid motion and flowing in all directions, amidst a great mass of stagnant water. The causes of this partial motion of the clouds are probably very various; we may suppose them to arise from some impulsion at a great distance; from the slight inequalities of the soil, which reflects in a greater or less degree the radiant heat; from a difference ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... to the great mass of working-people, the state of misery and insecurity in which they live now is as low as ever, if not lower. The East End of London is an everspreading pool of stagnant misery and desolation, of starvation when out of work, and degradation, physical and moral, when in work. And so in all other large towns—abstraction made of the privileged minority of the workers; and so in the smaller towns and ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... flight of steps made of gigantic blocks of stone older than history, and groping our way up those we followed the Gray Mahatma to a gallery at the top, on the other side of which was a sheer drop and the smell of stagnant water. I could hear something sluggish that moved in the water, and somewhere in the distance was a turning around which light found its way so dimly that it hardly looked like light at all, but more like filmy mist. A heavy monster ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... engaged in a lawsuit with each other, and finally one of them threw the whole concern into chancery; and for years that dreary chancery suit seemed to envelop us in an atmosphere of palpitating suspense or stagnant uncertainty, and to enter as an inevitable element into every hope, fear, expectation, resolution, event, or action ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... demonstrably an integral but insignificant fragment; the enormous period of his existence for which man has had no religious history, and has been, so far as we can tell, not a religious being at all; and the vast majority of the race that are still stagnant and semi-barbarous. Is it possible, we ask, that a God, with so many stars to attend to, should busy himself with this paltry earth, and make it the scene of events more stupendous than the courses of countless ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... alone In a world of moan, And my soul was a stagnant tide, Till the fair and gentle Eulalie became my blushing bride, Till the yellow-haired young Eulalie ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... all the commercial aristocracy of Lyons, an honest right-minded city, but one of money, where all becomes a calculation, and where ideas have the weight and immobility of interests. Ideas have an irresistible current, which attract even the most stagnant populations; Lyons was led on and overwhelmed by the opinions of the epoch. M. Roland was raised to the municipality at the first election, and spoke out with all the earnestness of his principles, and the energy inspired by his wife. Feared ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... these animals remains free and capable of new thought in new situations. It is fully alive to the needs and dangers of arboreal life, and advances no farther in its native habitat because there is nothing more of importance to be learned. But while fixed it is not stagnant. When the ape is taken from its native woods and put among the many new conditions arising on shipboard and in human habitations, we quickly perceive indications of its mental alertness. Its faculties of observation and imitation are actively ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... unromantic, but Minnie did not fall into a decline. She is alive and well at this moment. Life may be over, and yet we may live functionally through long stagnant years. Life is not a calendar of dates, but of feelings. Minnie will live a calm, chastened life. She cannot love again; but she is not soured by her experience. She will be one of those rare old maids who are so sweet and ...
— The Hunted Outlaw - Donald Morrison, The Canadian Rob Roy • Anonymous
... In this rural retreat, or academic bower, Atticus spends a due portion of the autumnal season of the year; now that the busy scenes of book-auctions in the metropolis have changed their character—and dreary silence, and stagnant dirt, have succeeded to noise and ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... situate in one of the best wooded parts of the home counties, which twenty years ago was almost uninhabitable, owing to the swarms of gnats which penetrated into every room. But the present proprietor, being the reverse of pachydermatous, has substituted covered drains for stagnant ditches, filled up a number of slimy ponds as neither useful nor ornamental, and now in most seasons the gnats ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 303 - October 22, 1881 • Various
... besieging army encompassed the city like an iron wall. Each individual felt that he was a fellow-prisoner of his neighbor, and drew closer to companions of his own rank and opinions. Business was stagnant, idleness and anxiety weighed like lead on the minds of all, and whoever wished to make time pass rapidly and relieve his oppressed soul, went to the tavern to give utterance to his own hopes and fears, and hear what others were thinking and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... balance-of-payments support. As part of the 1987 agreement with the IMF, the government agreed to institute a reform program to reduce inflation, promote economic growth, and improve its external position. The reforms have been slow in coming, however, and the economy has been largely stagnant for the past three years. The addition of 1 million people every seven months to Egypt's population exerts enormous pressure on the 5% of the total land ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... cut a trackway in the pulpy green stuff. They then set forward through the forest, over their ankles in swampy mud, up to their knees sometimes in rotting leaves, clambering over giant tree trunks, wading through stagnant brooks, staggering and slipping and swearing, faint with famine; a very desperate gang of cut-throats. As they marched, the things called garapatadas, or wood-ticks, of which some six sorts flourish ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... and the dead were alike exterminated, and where the ancient and sacred city of Sardasa had stood nothing remained but an excavation filled with dead bodies and building materials, shreds of cat and blue patches of decayed dog. The place is now a vast pool of stagnant water in the center ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... great plains, and the rushing and turbulent Goose Creek ignominiously evaporates—either ascending to the skies in vapor or burrowing obscurely under the sprawling sands that lie within its course. Only stagnant pools and feeble rivulets running in widely separated channels—hiding under osiers or lurking within shady stretches of a friendly bank—remain to show where in April the noisy Goose engulfs everything within reach ...
— The Mountain Divide • Frank H. Spearman
... and Tolpatchcs flying about. Northward between Striegau and the higher Mountains there is an extensive TEICHWIRTHSCHAFT, or "Pond-Husbandry" (gleaming visible from Hohenfriedberg Gallows-Hill just now); a combination of stagnant pools and carp-ponds, the ground much occupied hereabouts with what they name Carp-Husbandry. Which is all drained away in our time, yet traceable by the studious:—quaggy congeries of sluices and fish-ponds, no road through them except on intricate dams; have scrubby thickets ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the breeze had come. The sails flapped, the main boom swung over with a thump, and the stagnant water, stirred at last, bubbled merrily ...
— Miss or Mrs.? • Wilkie Collins
... attack upon that provision which belonged more to mine than to me. He would soon have supplied every deficiency, and symmetrized every disproportion. It would not have been for that successor to resort to any stagnant wasting reservoir of merit in me, or in any ancestry. He had in himself a salient, living spring of generous and manly action. Every day he lived he would have re-purchased the bounty of the Crown, and ten times more, if ten times more he had received. He was made a public creature, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... In stagnant vivaries they lie, Forgetful of their ancient haunts; And how shall he that standeth by Refrain his ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... abroad came to swell the dull murmur of public discontent. Disturbance was arising everywhere. "From stagnant chaos France has passed to tumultuous chaos," wrote Mirabeau, already an influential publicist, despite the irregularity of his morals and the small esteem excited by his life; "there may, there ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Wakarusa Basin suffered intermittency and, according to Mr. Melvon H. Wertzberger, the local Work Unit Conservationist with the Soil Conservation Service, many of them dried completely or contained only a few widely-scattered, stagnant pools. The effect of the drought on stream-flow at the mainstream gaging station 2.1 miles south of Lawrence ...
— Fishes of the Wakarusa River in Kansas • James E. Deacon
... those of a city, whereof the name, indeed, is glorious, but the purlieus infamous—in which the very grandeur of its public edifices is as a shadow to screen from the public eye sin and misery the most appalling. If the wealth of the Abbey be stagnant, and not diffusive; if it in no way rescue the neighboring population from the depths in which it is sunk, let there be no jealousy of any one who, by whatever name, is ready to make the latter his care, without ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... self-consciously. A fool's errand might yet be a pleasant one, even though his immediate surroundings seemed to mock the sound of his mirth. Woolhanger Moor in November was a drear enough sight. There were many patches of black mud and stagnant water, carpets of treacherous-looking green moss, bare clumps of bushes bent all one way by the northwest wind, masses of rock, gaunter and sterner now that their summer covering of creeping shrubs and bracken had lost their foliage. It was indeed the month ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... minutes, for I was in a stupor of bitter disappointment And when I rose again I was the sport of chance, for whether my way lay before me or lay behind me, or to left or right, was altogether beyond my decision. It was well on in the day: high above this stagnant plain among tall bens there must be shining a friendly and constant sun; but Elrigmore, gentleman and sometime cavalier of Mackay's Scots, was in the very gullet of night for all he could see around him. It was folly, I knew; but on somewhere I must be going, so ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... of Hereward and his men had of course stirred the great current of her life, and indeed that of St. Omer, usually as stagnant as that of the dikes round its wall. Who the unknown champion was,—for his name of "Naemansson" showed that he was concealing something at least,—whence he had come, and what had been his previous ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... traveler may be reduced to the extremity of using stagnant or even putrid water; but this should never be done without first boiling it. Some charred wood from the camp fire should be boiled with the water; then skim off the scum, strain, and set in ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... and modest piety of the young novice touched the sisterhood; she was endeared to all of them. Her conversion was an event that broke the lethargy of their stagnant life. She became an object of general interest, of avowed pride, of kindly compassion; and their kindness to her, who from her cradle had seen little of her own sex, had a great effect towards calming and soothing her mind. But, at night, her ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book V. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... about 'Art for Art's sake.' Would that all these poets and painters who are trying to find beauty in corruption—and there is a phosphorescent glimmer in rotting wood, and a prismatic colouring on the scum of a stagnant pond—would that all those men who are seeking to find beauty apart from goodness, and so are turning a divine instinct into a servant of evil, would learn that the true gracefulness comes from the grace which is the fullness of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... hostess is the widow of a German physician, and her fair young daughter, alert and capable as the typical Hausfrau of her native land, has established a reputation for supplying the guests with the home comforts and restful atmosphere which make the Hotel Rupert an ideal abiding-place in stagnant Java, where as a rule the sole luxuries are out-of-doors, and of Nature's providing. That the Dutchman flourishes on his diet of tinned meat, his appalling rice-table, and the extraordinary sequence of dishes which probably belonged to the early days of colonisation, either proves herculean ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... difficulty to the top of her head, eyes with no lashes to protect you from their stare, a mouth that pulled at an invisible curb, a sallow skin stretched so tight over her cheek-bones that the red veins stood stagnant there; and with it all, poor lady, a dull, strained expression ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... and the bracing air, to take to long days' marching over dull waste and treeless prairie, covered only by sage brush, rent and torn by dry ravines, shadeless, springless, almost waterless, save where in unwholesome hollows dull pools of stagnant water still held out against the sun, or, further still southeast among the "breaks" of the many forks of the South Cheyenne, on the sandy flats men dug for water for their suffering horses, yet shrank from drinking it themselves lest their lips should crack and bleed through ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... places as you would a plague. Damp places where there are mosquitoes, should be well drained, and open to an abundance of sunshine. Mosquitoes breed only in water, but a very little water is sufficient if it is dirty and stagnant. Two inches of water standing in an old tin can will breed an innumerable horde. These "diminutive musicians" are not only a nuisance, but dangerous, as malaria and typhoid spreaders ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... brandished forests of spears, lucerne spread out in soft beds of green satin broidered with purple flowers. And all these were seen, to right, to left, in front, everywhere, rolling over the level soil, showing like the mossy surface of a stagnant sea, asleep beneath the sky which ever seemed to expand. Here and there, in the vast expanse, the vegetation was of a limpid blue, as though it reflected ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... reflection to discover that all these great ships, these railways, these telegraphs, these factories, these printing-presses, without which the whole fabric of modern English society would collapse into a mass of stagnant and starving pauperism,—that all these pillars of our State are but the ripples and the bubbles upon the surface of that great spiritual stream, the springs of which only, he and his fellows were privileged to see; and seeing, to recognise as that which it behoved them above all things to ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... advanced towards the West, and is now at its meridian; in a few centuries more it will probably be seen sinking below the horizon even in the new world, and there will be left darkness only where there is a bright light, deserts of sand where there were populous cities, and stagnant morasses where the green meadow or the bright cornfield once appeared. I called up images of this kind in my imagination. "Time," I said, "which purifies, and as it were sanctifies the mind, destroys and brings into utter decay the body; and, even in ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... for our barrack. The building had been originally what is known on the north-western coast of Scotland, with its ever-weeping climate, as a hay-barn; but it was now merely a roof-covered tank of green stagnant water, about three-quarters of a foot in depth, which had oozed through the walls from an over-gorged pond in the adjacent court, that in a tract of recent rains had overflowed its banks, and not yet subsided. Our new house did look exceedingly like a beaver-dam, with this disadvantageous difference, ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... o'clock the moon came up, a great ball of silver in a clear blue sky, and turned the stagnant water of the bog to pools of silver. It was a beautiful night to look at, but a bad night for fugitives. Bromley, being a little heavier than either Edwards or I, broke through the crust of the bog several times, and had difficulty ...
— Three Times and Out • Nellie L. McClung
... voice said it would not be always right. The calm and noiseless tide of the old man's ceasing life had ebbed slowly and reluctantly from her shore, and she had followed the sad sea in her sorrow to the furthest verge of its retreat; but as she stood upon the edge of the stagnant waters, gazing far out and trying to follow even further the slow subsiding ooze, the tide had turned upon her unawares, the fresh seaward breeze sprang up and broke the dead calm with the fresh motion of crisp ripples that once more flowed ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... covered with weeds, and in the flower-beds were the half decayed props which had supported the plants of the previous autumn. The statues were spotted by the dust and rain; a fine moss covered the monsters of the fountains, and the little water remaining in the pond was stagnant. ...
— The Amulet • Hendrik Conscience
... without dwelling at great length on the question of relative superiority or inferiority. It may be unhesitatingly asserted that all animals live, move, and have their being, in every essential respect, in the same way. Whether one considers those creatures of microscopic size living in stagnant ponds, or man himself, it is found that certain qualities characterize them all. That minute mass of jelly-like substance known as protoplasm, constituting the one-celled animal amoeba, may be described as ingestive, digestive, ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... of food, frozen food, soft food, unwholesome food, stagnant water, or drinking large quantities of water at one time, purgative medicines, or it may be associated with blood diseases, lung and intestinal affections, or produced by micro-organisms. Many horses, particularly slack loined, slight, ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek
... the thought of Gerald Digby and in the consciousness of the situation that his coming had created. From soft exhilaration she had passed to miserable depression, yet a depression far different from the stagnant melancholy of her former mood; this was a depression of frustrated feeling, not of lack of feeling, and it was accompanied by the recognition of the fact that she exceedingly disliked Lady Pickering and wished exceedingly that she would ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... intercourse, were, as has heretofore been observed, the Chinooks, the Clatsops, the Wahkiacums, and the Cathlamets. The Chinooks reside chiefly along the banks of a river of the same name, running parallel to the sea-coast, through a low country studded with stagnant pools, and emptying itself into Baker's Bay, a few miles from Cape Disappointment. This was the tribe over which Comcomly, the one-eyed chieftain, held sway; it boasted two hundred and fourteen fighting ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... course of the canoe had been through a mere thread of a stream, and Rene now noticed that they were traversing the mazes of a dark swamp. The little stream connected a series of stagnant pools or bayous, and just as they came into the open water of one of these they caught a glimpse of another canoe leaving it on the opposite side. Even as they sighted it, it shot in among the trunks of a dense cypress ...
— The Flamingo Feather • Kirk Munroe
... flew from its recesses, till it was sometimes difficult to see the sky. Now that the sun was getting high it drew thin sickly looking clouds of poisonous vapour from the surface of the marsh and from the scummy pools of stagnant water. ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... forgetting this heavenly union, bathes her heart in the earthly stream, without seeking the living spring whence it flows; who worships the fire-ray that falls upon the altar, without giving glory to him from whom it descended. The stream will become a stagnant pool, exhaling pestilence and death; the fire-ray will kindle a devouring flame, destroying the altar, with the gift and the heart a burning bush, that ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... are arranged to produce a certain pattern of artistic beauty beyond all painter's skill? What a waste of power, on any utilitarian theory of nature! And once more, why are those strange microscopic atomies, the Diatomaceae and Infusoria, which fill every stagnant pool; which fringe every branch of sea-weed; which form banks hundreds of miles long on the Arctic sea-floor, and the strata of whole moorlands; which pervade in millions the mass of every iceberg, and float aloft in countless ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... of industrial plants, the waste of natural resources, the exploitation of the consumers of natural monopolies, the accumulation of stagnant surpluses, child labor, and the ruthless exploitation of all labor, the encouragement of speculation with other people's money, these were consumed in the fires that they themselves kindled; we must make sure that as we reconstruct our life there be no soil in which such ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... consciousness, that in the change and upheaval of whole universes the soul of man should forever over-ride disaster! But now that we know ourselves to be of no more importance, relatively speaking, than the animalculae in a drop of stagnant water, what great works can be done, what noble deeds accomplished, in the face of the declared and proved futility of everything? Still, if you can, as you say, liberate me from this fleshly prison, and give me new ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... queer kind of sewer," he went on. "This streamlet is as much mud as water, is almost stagnant. Evidently this underground sewer way is ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... lane and vaporous, stagnant landscape were once more dead and silent, and would for a long time remain so, for though potters begin work early, colliers begin work much earlier, living in a world of customs of their own. At last a thin column of smoke issued magically ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... slimy canals crept, like half-torpid green snakes, beside the road; and formal pollard willows edged level fields, tilled like kitchen-garden beds. The sky, too, was monotonously gray; the atmosphere was stagnant and humid; yet amidst all these deadening influences, my fancy budded fresh and my heart basked in sunshine. These feelings, however, were well kept in check by the secret but ceaseless consciousness of anxiety lying in wait on enjoyment, like a tiger crouched in a jungle. The breathing of ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... with the gazing throng which, in the afternoon hours, trickles heavily between the tables, like the Sunday crowd in a lion-house. In the stagnant flow of the mass, identities were hardly distinguishable; but Lily presently saw Mrs. Bry cleaving her determined way through the doors, and, in the broad wake she left, the light figure of Mrs. Fisher bobbing after her like a row-boat at the stern ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... tranquil sea. So they passed the lights of Sargyll, most remote of the Red Islands, while Anaitis talked of Procris and King Minos and Pasiphae. As color went out of the air new colors entered into the sea, which now assumed the varied gleams of water that has long been stagnant. And a silence brooded over the sea, so that there was no noise anywhere except the sound of the voice of Anaitis, saying, "All men that live have but a little while to live, and none knows his fate thereafter. So that a man possesses nothing certainly save a brief loan of his ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... Fens, some miles to the east of the great north road, without any special trade, and without any neighbouring territorial magnates, it is hardly surprising that the place seemed incapable of progress, and remained long eminently respectable and stagnant. In one of his caustic epigrams Dean Duport does indeed speak of the wool-combers as if there were a recognised calling that employed some numbers of men; but he is not complimentary to those employed, for he says that the men that comb ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... the churchyard, we had to cross an embankment, and get over a stile near a sluice-gate. There started up, from the gate, or from the rushes, or from the ooze (which was quite in his stagnant way), Old Orlick. ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... with this we need to emphasize the various forms of progress which are an essential part of British blessing to India. We have seen that India was a stagnant land, that its people were preeminently unprogressive and ultra-conservative. England has helped her to break down many of these barriers of the past. Though India is obstinately slow in her acceptance of the ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... pleaded for sinners in a glorious human imitation of the Divine pleading. And the exuberant vitality poured by the Conqueror of death into the human race, flowing strongly through that tiny chapel, had carried the little, thin, stagnant stream of Molly's soul into the great flood of grace that purifies ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... never stagnant in our ancient communities, at the period of my story, oftentimes grew extremely warm, and then every leading citizen took his personal part. Nor is it strange that the survivors of those who had borne their share in the Revolutionary War, who had the traditions, ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... He had got back his self-assertiveness. Raven could guess his jealous anger, the tide of fury coming, flooding the stagnant marshes of his soul. "I want to hear one more testimony. Thyatira Tenney, get up and tell what ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... increased trade with the American continent, raised it to prosperity. One sign of vigor, the roll of capital, was wanting; speculation was fast asleep. The government of the day seems to have observed this with regret. A writer of authority on the subject says that, to stir stagnant enterprise, they directed "the Bank of England to issue about four millions in advances to the state and in enlarged discounts." I give you the man's words; they doubtless carry a signification to you, though they are jargon in a fog to me. Some months later the government took a step ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... creak meanders among the trees, some two hundred yards from the spot. At about a like distance below, it discharges itself into the stagnant reservoir of the swamp. ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... silent. The vapor hung so heavily upon the plains of marsh level with their heads that they seemed to be piercing a dense, low cloud. The light was growing stronger, but the earth still lay like a corpse, livid, dumb, cold and still. There was a chill stagnant ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... Ruysdael (c. 1625-1682), a painter of Haarlem, in Holland. His favourite subjects were remote farms, lonely stagnant water, deep-shaded woods with marshy paths, the sea-coast—subjects of a dark melancholy kind. His sea-pieces ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... arranged for his amusement. Since the Trappist's visit, the chevalier had entered, as it were, upon a fresh term of life. Endowed with strength and pertinacity, like all his race, it seemed as if he had been decaying for want of excitement, for the slightest demand on his energy immediately set his stagnant blood in motion. As he was very much pleased with this idea of a hunt, Edmee undertook to organize, with my help, a general battue and to join in the sport herself. One of the greatest delights of the good old man was to see ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... the same barbarous custom upon States and individuals. Observe the putrid state of inert water, the clear and sparkling beauty of the moving stream, bearing away by the force of its own motion aught that might contaminate it. Men more often resemble the stagnant water than the rivulet. A healthy social state enforces labour by natural laws, and banishes inertia as much as possible from the system. If the principles of some noisy English politicians were fully ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... the birds began to twitter; day was breaking. The girl was worn out and panting; and when the sun rose in the purple sky, she stopped, for her swollen feet refused to go any farther; but she saw a pond in the distance, a large pond whose stagnant water looked like blood under the reflection of this new day, and she limped on slowly with her hand on her heart, in order to dip both her feet in it. She sat down on a tuft of grass, took off her heavy shoes, which were full of dust, pulled off her ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... house was all run wild; the trees grown out of shape; the fish-ponds stagnant; the urns and statues fallen from their pedestals and buried among the rank grass. The hares and pheasants were so little molested, except by poachers, that they bred in great abundance, and sported about ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... water-hole, and found it very low indeed; a great number of dead fish all round it. This must certainly be a very unprecedentedly dry season indeed; this water-hole does not seem to have received any water for the last two years. The water being old and stagnant, I am afraid will make us ill; we have all already been suffering much from stagnant waters we have been compelled to use. I, however, must give the horses a day's rest to enable them to make the next and last ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... the stately mastodon Roam at his will o'er earth's prolific plains, And the unwieldy megatherium Dragging his cumbrous, disproportioned weight Through quaternary marsh and stagnant fen; Or watched the ichthyosaurus plow the seas, Churning the waters till the glistening foam Rode on the greenish undulating waves; And huge saurian and reptilian shapes Amphibious and pelagic, swim and crawl, Cleaving the waters with tremendous strokes, Writhing ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... centuries before. Milton contended for free publication of opinion mainly on these grounds: First, that the opposite system implied the 'grace of infallibility and incorruptibleness' in the licensers. Second, that the prohibition of bold books led to mental indolence and stagnant formalism both in teachers and congregations, producing the 'laziness of a licensing church.' Third, that it 'hinders and retards the importation of our richest merchandise, truth;' for the commission of the licenser enjoins him to let nothing pass which is not vulgarly received ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... in it. The diverse means of acquisition, the desire for diverse kinds of wealth, O giver of profuse presents, the methods of agriculture and other operations that form the chief source of the revenue, and the various means for producing and applying illusions, the methods by which stagnant water is rendered foul, were laid down in it. All those means, O tiger among kings, by which men might be prevented from deviating from the path of righteousness and honesty, were all described in it. Having ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... privileges to none. And with a simple, unaffected urbanity, as if he were constructing rhyming verses, he would pair statistics off, underscoring the absurd manner in which the nation was taking leave of a century of revolution during which all peoples had done things while Spain was lying stagnant. ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... The heavy rains of a French winter quickly transform the ground, already churned up by months of shell-fire, into a slimy, glutinous swamp, incredibly tenacious and unbelievably deep. Through this vast stretch of mud, pitted everywhere with shell-holes filled with stagnant water, the infantry has to make its way and the guns have to be moved forward to support the infantry. On one stretch of road, only a quarter of a mile long, on the Somme, twelve horses sank so deeply in the mud that it was impossible to extricate ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... complicated one like one of the flowering plants, or some humbler member of the vegetable kingdom,—a moss, seaweed, toadstool,—or even some still simpler plant like a mould, or the apparently structureless green scum that floats on a stagnant pond. In any case the impulse is to investigate the form and structure as far as the means at one's disposal will permit. Such a study of structure constitutes "Morphology," which includes two departments,—gross anatomy, ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... visited King's Cobb. The noise of the waters got into my brain and stayed there. It turned everything else out—sleep, thought, faith, hope, and charity. From that first awakening my skull was a mere globe of stagnant fluid, for any disease germs ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... upon him. Life had become stagnant, a tasteless thing. He was keen for the open stretches, honing to be gone down the wind. He fretted and ate out his heart for the freedom of the range. Old Anita, passing at some work or other, stopped and gazed at him for a ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... descent, so must they go a bit further and admit the Renaissance to have sprung because of contact between feudal Europe and African Mohammedanism. Again we must admit, no matter how bitter the taste, that the mixed race has always been the great race—the pure race always the stagnant race. One potent reason for the possible downfall of European civilization to-day is the fact that the Aryan element has proven incapable of the mighty trust. It has forgotten the everlasting lesson of history that mergence of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... even when we seem to have sunk into a fixed and stagnant mood. The man is awakened from his dream of passion by inexorable event; he finds the house of the soul not swept and garnished for a new life, but possessed by demons who have entered unseen. In short, such profound ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... high-spirited are plunged into war with a neighbour, now a foe, and yet fight, as their nature compels them, bravely and magnanimously, they but drive their enemy back to the field of a purer life, and, perhaps, to the realisation of a more beautiful existence, a dream to which his stagnant soul steeped ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... to me a foolish being; he drives along over the waves of time, endlessly thrown up and down, and descrying a little verdant spot, formed of mud and stagnant moor and of putrid green mouldiness, he cries out, Land! He rows thither, ascends—and sinks and sinks—and is no more to be seen."—The Golden ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... beeches he sank down, and all sense and thought and consciousness sank with him, as though his being had become a dead forgotten lake, hidden in a lifeless wood; where birds sang not, nor rain fell, nor fishes played, nor currents moved below the stagnant waters. But presently a wind seemed to wail among the trees, and the sound of it traveled over the King's senses, stirred them, and passed. But only to return again, moan over him, and trail away; and so it kept coming and going till first he heard, then listened to, ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... even me. I am doubly happy and a hundred times repaid in the little help I gave it. It needed help, to enable it effectively to keep connection with its source. As it became gradually shut off from this, it weakened, became then stagnant, and finally it ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... serious thing to be alive: to these men it is a drunken jest, a joke,—horrible to angels perhaps, to them commonplace enough. My fancy about the river was an idle one: it is no type of such a life. What if it be stagnant and slimy here? It knows that beyond there waits for it odorous sunlight,—quaint old gardens, dusky with soft, green foliage of apple-trees, and flushing crimson with roses,—air, and fields, and mountains. The future of the Welsh puddler passing just now is not ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... in arid countries frequently contain pools of stagnant water; but the places where these pools are to be found are not necessarily those where they have been found in preceding years. The conditions necessary for the existence of a pool are not alone those of the rocky ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... drainage is, not to carry away the quick flush of a shower, but to relieve a soil too heavily saturated by opening new outflows, setting new currents astir of both air and moisture, and thus giving new life and an enlarged capacity to lands that were dead with a stagnant over-soak. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... carbon filter is better still; but nothing is so effective as boiling. A carbon filter is a tube with a wad of compressed carbon inserted, through which the water is sucked, but as a rule clay-coloured water is comparatively innocuous, but beware of the bright, limpid water of long stagnant ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... Olives in scant patches, a lost vineyard, a speck of tilled soil, proved that men still laboured amid this vast and awful silence, but rarely was a human figure visible. As they approached the city, marshy ground and stagnant pools lay on either hand, causing them to glance sadly at those great aqueducts, which for ages had brought water into Rome from the hills and now stood idle, cleft by the Goths during the ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... himself into the house with his latch-key, and banged the door behind his back. But no sooner had he breathed the soft, woolly, stagnant air within than a change came over him. His ferocious strength ebbed away, and he began ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... day, and no wind—the burning sun Blister'd and scorch'd, and, stagnant on the sea, They lay like carcasses; and hope was none, Save in the breeze that came not; savagely They glared upon each other—all was done, Water, and wine, and food,—and you might see The longings of the cannibal arise (Although they spoke not) ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... dumped on either side as it was removed from the cut. By the latter part of December the ditch had been completed and connected with the special sewer which, by permission of the city, had been built to carry the overflow to the river, and, the open weather still holding, the stagnant pool which had been a blot upon the landscape for untold ages began to flow sluggishly away, displaced by the ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... infiltration through the forest. The marshy shores of the pond, covered with aquatic trees, alders, willow, and ash, were the terminus of all the wood-paths, the remains of former roads and forest by-ways, now abandoned. The water, flowing from a spring, though apparently stagnant, was covered with large-leaved plants and cresses, which gave it a perfectly green surface almost indistinguishable from the shores, which were covered with fine close herbage. The place is too far from human habitations for any animal, unless a ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... in a low tone. "I've another bite Ned." Jack and his comrade continued to fish in silence till the day broke. The mist rolled off the stagnant water, and discovered the brig, who, as soon as she perceived the boats, threw out the French tricolour, and ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... the wearisome and interminable jolting over bad roads and the insufferable heat. It was the middle of August in an exceptionally warm summer, and after passing Genoa the heat became almost tropical. There was no relief even at night, for the warm air hung stagnant and suffocating, and the inside of my travelling coach was often like ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... great way down the Arabian side, where it is supposed the waters from Horeb went into that sea." Barnes says: "Mount Horeb was higher than the adjacent country, and the water that thus gushed from the rock, instead of collecting into a pool and becoming stagnant, would flow off in the direction of the sea. The sea to which it would naturally flow would be the Red Sea. The Israelites doubtless, in their journeyings, would be influenced by the natural direction of the water, or would not wander far from it, ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... ground with their hands, and made the cold, damp earth their bed. A slimy brook ran through the grounds, foul with filth from the camps of the Rebels. There was a marsh in the centre of the yard, full of rottenness, where the water stood in green and stagnant pools, breeding flies, mosquitos, and vermin, where all the ooze and scum and slops of the camp came to the surface, and filled the air with horrible smells. They had very little food,—nothing but a half-pint of coarse ...
— Winning His Way • Charles Carleton Coffin
... the rear houses where we heard those dreadful shrieks in the night. There is no sign of life, but we discover enough filth to breed diphtheria and typhoid throughout a large section. In the area below our window there are several inches of stagnant water, in which is heaped a mass of old shoes, cabbage heads, garbage, rotten wood, bones, rags and refuse, and a few dead rats. We understand now why Em keeps her room full of disinfectants. She tells us that she dare not make any appeal to the sanitary ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... the subject, I have been getting a lot of swimming lately. At a big cement works in a neighbouring town there is an enormous pond in a quarry. The water is about 15 feet deep all round and not at all stagnant, and there is a splendid place for diving. Yesterday I was down at a neighbouring seaport on business and got a delightful swim in the sea. A swim means to me almost as much as a Rugby match. I ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... pumped out by powerful steam-engines; wheeling, digging, hewing, or bearing burdens it made one's shoulders ache to look upon; exposed meantime to every change of temperature, in log-huts, laid down in the very swamp, on a foundation of newly-felled trees, having the water lying stagnant between the floor-logs, whose interstices, together with those of the side-walls, are open, pervious alike to sun or wind, or snow. Here they subsist on the coarsest fare, holding life on a tenure as uncertain as does the leader of a forlorn hope; excluded from all the advantages ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... forces—positives and negatives in fine adjustment. His equilibrium disturbed, he was in extremity at once. If an emotion possessed him at all, it ruled him; a feeling not mastering him was entirely latent. Stagnant or rapid, it was never slow. He was always hit mortally, or ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... to side with the students. Rumors are one of China's strong suits. When you realize that we have been here less than six weeks, you will have to admit that we have been seeing life. For a country that is regarded at home as stagnant and unchanging, there is ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey
... moisture painted the bark of tall trees, and lay in shiny green patches among them. The Southern moss dripping from the giant branches shrouded them in a weird drapery, soft as mist. There was something dreary and painful to a Northern eye in the scene; the tall and shrouded trees, the stagnant pools of water gleaming among them, the vivid green patches of moss, the barren stretches of sand. The very beauty in it all seemed the unnatural glory of decay, repelling the beholder. Here and there were cabins. One could not look at them without wondering whether the inhabitants had the ague, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... own overweening eagerness. She saw Keith, alone, thinking that he would be at a loss to fill his time, suddenly remembering her, thinking in a rather contemptuous way of their days together, and supposing that she would do as well as another for an hour's talk to keep him from a stagnant evening. If that were so, good-bye to her dreams. If she were no more to him than that there was no hope left in her life. For Keith might ply from port to port, seeing in her only one girl for his amusement; but he had spoilt her ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... the tower stood the vane, A black yew gloomed the stagnant air; I peered athwart the chancel pane, And saw the altar cold and bare. A clog of lead was round my feet, A band of pain across my brow; "Cold altar, heaven and earth shall meet Before you hear ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... word, in the sense in which it exists now—that evil will not exist then, because every man will believe and every man will know what he is living for and no one will seek moral support in the crowd. Dear Nadya, darling girl, go away! Show them all that you are sick of this stagnant, grey, sinful life. Prove ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... glowing in a clear blue sky overhead, that was unflecked by a single cloud, while a fresh breeze blowing from the westwards to prevent the air from becoming stagnant; and the barometer, at "set Fair," made all prophets of evil, if such there were about, keep their lips tightly closed and say nothing to damp the spirits of ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson |
