"Stagnant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... attentive, we have seen the hen bird tearing her mate's nest to pieces, but why we cannot tell. Kites and vultures are busy overhead, beating the ground for their repast of carrion; and the solemn-looking, stately-stepping Marabout, with a taste for dead fish, or men, stalks slowly along the almost stagnant channels. Groups of men and boys are searching diligently in various places for lotus and other roots. Some are standing in canoes, on the weed-covered ponds, spearing fish, while others are punting over the small intersecting streams, to ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... the island, either driving the few Gaels to other districts or admitting them to their confederacy. As the country was in a very wild state, much overgrown with forests in which bears and wolves wandered, and abounding with deep stagnant pools, which were the haunts of the avanc or crocodile, Hu forthwith set about clearing it of some of its horrors, and making it more fit to be the abiding place of civilised beings. He made his people cut down woods and forests, ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... but who seek from inferior or fallen natures the seal of their own superiority—if indeed they do not openly beg for praise. Calyste found nothing to protect in Sabine, she was irreproachable; the powers thus stagnant in his heart were now to vibrate for Beatrix. If great men have played before our eyes the Saviour's part toward the woman taken in adultery, why should ordinary men be wiser in their generation ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... be able to prevent a disease which, in too many cases, our known remedies cannot cure."—W. Carr, Esq., Blackheath, British Medical Journal, December 7, 1861.] want of ventilation; overflowing privies; low neighbourhoods in the vicinity of rivers; stagnant waters; indeed, everything that vitiates the air, and thus depresses the system, more especially if the weather be close and muggy; poor and, improper food; and last, though not least, contagion. Bear in mind, too, that a delicate ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... called the Rhine, and throws off another branch, the Yssel, which flows into the Zuider Zee. Once more the river bifurcates into insignificant streams, one of which is called the Kromme Rijn, and beyond Utrecht, and under the name of the Oude Rijn, or Old Rhine, it becomes so stagnant that it requires the aid of a canal to drain it into the sea. Anciently the Rhine at this part of its course was an abounding stream, but by the ninth century the sands at Katwijk had silted it up, ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... people for its welcome shades, where artificial waterfalls, from the "Isar rolling rapidly," add chill to the natural dampness; where unwilling streamlets creep slowly through tortuous channels toward a stagnant pond, and pestiferous miasma, rising like incense at the going down of the sun, broods over the meadows until his rising again. It was in one of the streets bordering this park that the cholera broke ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... of cases, simply help to glut the already crowded labour market and still further lower the wages of the workers; and the other great towns in like manner grow, while the rural population remains stagnant or lessens. Agricultural distress, which helps to keep the tide of emigration high, also accounts in part for this singular, undesirable displacement of population; while recent testimony points to the fact that the terribly unsanitary and inefficient housing ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... blindly out after something better than their surroundings, striving after an ideal, and are in just so much the superiors of the foolish souls who mock them—better, even misguided efforts, than the ignoble stagnant quagmire of slouch into which we seem to be ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... full of brine, and the flesh gets back again into the circulation of the blood, and makes the previously mentioned disorders still greater. There are other and worse diseases which are prior to these; as when the bone through the density of the flesh does not receive sufficient air, and becomes stagnant and gangrened, and crumbling away passes into the food, and the food into the flesh, and the flesh returns again into the blood. Worst of all and most fatal is the disease of the marrow, by which the whole course of the body is reversed. There is a third class ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... voice. A blank silence followed. Then the veil was suddenly withdrawn; the vast plain, stretching from the mountain to the sea, shone as clearly as in the light of day; the moving current of the channel glittered like black pearls, the stagnant pools like molten lead; but not a sign of life nor motion broke the monotony of the broad expanse. She must have surely dreamed it. A chill wind drove her back to the house again; she entered her bedroom, and in half an hour she was in a ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... from Hell where bloodily locked with him in fight I woke. Where we fall down caverns ruddily Spilt with glazing gore and muddily Dashed with stagnant night and smoke. Yet I do not care, ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice
... shouldst be living at this hour: England hath need of thee: she is a fen Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen, Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, Have forfeited their ancient English dower Of inward happiness. We are ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner. The very gold and silver fish, set forth among these choice fruits in a bowl, though members of a dull and stagnant-blooded race, appeared to know that there was something going on; and, to a fish, went gasping round and round their little world ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... marshes or stagnant water is undesirable on account of the dampness, mosquitoes, and the diseases which the latter transmit. The high banks of lakes or large streams often make desirable ...
— Infantry Drill Regulations, United States Army, 1911 - Corrected to April 15, 1917 (Changes Nos. 1 to 19) • United States War Department
... Day was pleased with what he saw; for Madras is not without beauty. In those idyllic days, moreover, the Cooum river, which was known then as the Triplicane river—and which even to-day can be beautiful, although for the greater part of the year it is no more than a stagnant ditch—must have been a limpid water-way; and to Mr. Francis Day, seeing it in winter, in which season the current swollen by the rain sometimes succeeds in bursting the bar, it must have appeared almost as a noble river, rushing down to the great sea—a river such ...
— The Story of Madras • Glyn Barlow
... against the vessel's sides. Every curl swung a load of broken frozen pieces against the bows and bends, and the shocks resounded through her like blows from cyclopean hammers. It was as if I had been seated in the central stagnant heart of a small revolving hurricane, feeling no faintest sigh of air upon my cheek, whilst close around whirled the hellish tormenting conflict of ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... spite of the very dry weather we had been having, the ground each moment became more moist, which indicated that we were approaching the swamps we had heard about. It was a rough track over fallen trees and dry streams, but before long we passed along the banks of a creek full of stagnant water. ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... 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 her on horseback, ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... are made in the side walls—so as to allow the lower fields to be flooded. This method of irrigation provides for the maximum use of the water, and also supplies a constant current which prevents the formation of stagnant pools. ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... English, all living a life of abundance on a fine river amid pleasing scenery, with good supplies of fish and game, a fertile soil, and a wilderness of opportunity to the west of them. All were well pleased to be relieved from the stagnant despotism of the Duke of York and to take part in the free popular government of William Penn in Pennsylvania. They became magistrates and officials, members of the council and of the legislature. ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher
... bosom then, Still as a stagnant fen! Hateful to me were men, The sunlight hateful! In the vast forest here, Clad in my warlike gear, Fell I upon my spear, Oh, ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... century, and the culminating condemnation of slavery in the rebellion. A Southern journal (The Nashville Times) has lately said, with great truth and force: 'Slavery can no more violate the law of its existence and become loyal and law-abiding than a stagnant pool can freshen and grow sweet in its own corruption.' Discard all other considerations; say, if we please, that slavery has nothing to do with the origin of the war; yet we must recognize the fact of a confederacy ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... but I was surprised at the inferiority of the quality, and at the apparent weakness of the plants where the water-supply was plentiful. On closer examination I observed great carelessness in the absence of drainage; the plants were allowed to perish in stagnant water, which soured the land. Upon a longer acquaintance with M. Mattei's farm, I found the same fault generally. Many portions of valuable land were chilled and rendered fruitless by too much water, which remained ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... jogged his ribs and brought him back to earth. He advanced with extended hand to the smiling young Mission worker, and in an instant he was transported into a world where she and he alone mattered; the other people, the ship, the stagnant stream, all went out of his ken like ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... see; and the central secret of this sad phenomenon, so I am sure, has been suggested here. When the socializing faith of a nation has perished, the alternative for it becomes this, that it can be stable only as it is stagnant, and vigorous only as it ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... despatched telegrams and been bombarded by interviewers, he led the way back to the coach on the Hill, and the company prepared for their return. The sun had now gone, a thick veil of stagnant clouds had gathered over it, the sky looked sulky, and Glory's head tad begun to ache between the eyes. Rosa was to go home by train in order to reach her office early, and Glory half wished to accompany her. But an understudy was to play her part that night and she had no excuse. ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... they cut down all of the plant life whose upturned leaves or fronds held stagnant, mosquito-breeding water, climbed tall palms to brush out the rain water accumulated in the concave depressions where frond joins trunk, even twisted off the cuplike scarlet blossoms from hibiscus shrubs. They carried green ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... robes of Capuchin friars. So sped the early standard bearers of that ferocious liberty which had sprung from the fires in which all else for which men cherish their fatherland had been consumed. So swept that resolute but fantastic band along the placid estuaries of Zeeland, waking the stagnant waters with their wild beggar ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... could not see this and be content. He has more cunning than ten thousand men, and he found out a way to compass his end. He betook himself to the marsh, collected little bubbles of the stagnant water, and passed over them a sevenfold echo of lying words to give them strength. Then he pounded up paid-for heroic poems and lying epitaphs, as many as he could get, boiled them in tears that envy had shed, put upon them rouge he had scraped from faded cheeks, and of these he composed a ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... bewailed, and now as he walked up the silent road he still bewailed, the fate that had called him to such an uneventful life as a pedagogue's. What a prosaic existence he led, so stagnant, so colourless! Secure, methodical, year in year out, what call was there for bravery? He thought enviously of those roving, mediaeval days, so near and so remote, of quests and spies and condottieri and many a risky blade-drawing business. ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... governed Ravenna by provveditori and podesta, as happily and successfully, it might seem, as she governed Venetia and a part of Lombardy. For her doubtless the acquisition of Ravenna was not a very great thing, nor does it seem to have changed in any very great degree the half-stagnant life of the city itself, which, as we may suppose, had for so long ceased to play any great part in the life of Italy, that a change of government there was not of much importance to any one except the Holy ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... Peter stands the convicted sponsor! Thus Slavophilism, under the leadership of Aksakoff, instead of leading forward with the great liberal movement that came after the Crimean War, resulting finally in the emancipation of the serfs, would lead backward to the stagnant hours of medieval Russia. Then there were no German words to disfigure the Russian language! Then there were no German divisions of rank among the officials to strangle life by their formality. No, none of these, nor the disturbing importations of Peter; in Aksakoff's ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... shabbiness in Jermyn Street. In 1866, with its dark passages and crooked stairs, its candles, its carpets and stuffs which had outlived their patterns, its narrow dining-room where a thousand busy flies ate together at one long table, its acrid stagnant atmosphere, and its disturbing sensation of dirt everywhere concealing itself, it stood forth in rectitude as a good average modern hotel. The patched and senile drabness of the bedroom made an ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... streams are clear and comparatively pure, because their organic impurities are constantly brought to the surface and oxidized, whereas in stagnant pools these impurities accumulate. Reservoirs of water for city supply have sometimes been freed from impurities by aeration, i.e. by forcing air into ...
— An Introduction to Chemical Science • R.P. Williams
... your nature, make it stagnant if you will: Dam it up to drudge forever at the service of your will. Mine the rapture and the freedom of the torrent on the hill! I shall wander o'er the meadows where the fairest blossoms call: Though the ledges seize and fling me headlong from ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... shady clump of bamboos, overhanging, with their ostrich—feather—like plumes, a round pool of water, mantled or creamed over with a bright green coating, as if it had been vegetable velvet, but nothing akin to the noisome scum that ferments on a stagnant pool in England. It was about the time we had promised ourselves dinner, and in fact our black guide and Pegtop had dismounted, to ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... As soon as there is a sign of a real house, or what you call civilization, there is dirt, smells, refuse heaps and flies—and of all the sights in my life, bar none, the washstand in Mr. Hubble's store, with wet newspaper, stagnant slop jar, dirty tooth brush, filthy basin, sloppy soap—all humming with flies—is the worst I have ever seen and the most stomach turning. There is some freak from Boston in a checkered suit and goggles who walks around with some ideas for Indian betterment. I think they have reached the highest ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... the God of grace, From the loud wind to me a hiding-place! Thee gird broad lands with genial motions rife, But in thee dwells, high-throned, the Life of life Thy test no stagnant moat half-filled with mud, But living waters witnessing in flood! Thy priestess, beauty-clad, and gospel-shod, A fellow laborer in the earth with God! Good will art thou, and goodness all thy arts— Doves to their windows, and to ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... gone, we looked at each other, and then without a word began to gaze after her. We saw her pick her dainty way in the little high-heeled shoes she always wore (because they had been in fashion in her youth), among the yellow pools of stagnant water that had gathered in the clayey soil. John Footman followed, stately, after; afraid too, for all his stateliness, of splashing his pure white stockings. Suddenly my lady turned round and said something to him, and he returned ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... dilapidated offices—which we might fit up, we were told, 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 ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... suppose that it exists only for a very brief time, say a second. Then, according to physics, what happens is that a spherical wave of light travels outward from the star through space, just as, when you drop a stone into a stagnant pond, ripples travel outward from the place where the stone hit the water. The wave of light travels with a certain very nearly constant velocity, roughly 300,000 kilometres per second. This velocity may be ascertained by sending ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... dart and glance Above the stagnant stream— And I am fighting here in France As in ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... with elegance, and even splendor. The city of Alcala underwent many important and expensive alterations, in order to render it more worthy of being the seat of a great and flourishing university. The stagnant water was carried off by drains, the streets were paved, old buildings removed, and new and ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... power brought him scant consolation. A spirit of dreariness seemed to rise up from the faint reflections that floated on the stagnant water; it blew stealthily out of the encroaching woods, and was voiced in the stuttering, tentative note of an awakened owl. Familiarity with nature had freed him from that sense of pursuit in the woods at night which oppresses even a ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... to my feet. Then oot came more hares and rabbits, and after them the twa dogs in full chase. One hit me as I was getting up and sent me rolling into the ditch full of stagnant water. ...
— Between You and Me • Sir Harry Lauder
... noon, And Helon knelt beside a stagnant pool In the lone wilderness, and bathed his brow, Hot with the burning leprosy, and touched The loathsome water to his fevered lips, Praying he might be so blest—to die! Footsteps approached, and ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... sideward glance of smiling eyes, with a bobbing of his tail and a quick love-flattening of his ears, turned his nose shoreward again and resumed his reading of the jungle tale that was wafted to him on the light fans of the stifling and almost stagnant air. ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... military tradition. Capt. F.W. von Herbert ("Bye Paths in the Balkans") wrote (some years before the present war): "The Bulgars as Christian subjects of Turkey exempt from military service, have tilled the ground under stagnant and enfeebling peace conditions, and the profession of arms is ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... with smoke and gasoline. Mr. Howe in The Story of a Country Town had long ago made it cynically clear—to the few who read him—that villages which prided themselves upon their pioneer energy might in fact be stagnant backwaters or dusty centers of futility, where existence went round and round while elsewhere the broad current moved away from them. Mark Twain in The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg had more recently put it bitterly on record that villages which prided ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... thick and the air was admitted through openings two feet square secured at each end by massive iron bars. Before these loopholes was situated a broad ditch, which was filled with water only when it rained; at other times it was a stagnant marsh continually emitting disease; beyond this were the outer walls of the castle, so that the slightest breeze could never refresh the inmate. Each cell had two doors, one of iron, the other of wood nearly two feet thick, ...
— The Spirit of Lafayette • James Mott Hallowell
... and fever, a lengthened residence in the island may be contemplated, without the slightest apprehension of prejudicial results. These pestilential localities are chiefly at the foot of mountains, and, strange to say, in the vicinity of some active rivers, whilst the vast level plains, whose stagnant waters are made available for the cultivation of rice, are seldom or never productive of disease. It is even believed that the deadly air is deprived of its poison in passing over an expanse of still water; and one of the most remarkable circumstances is, ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... out of the solid rock; arches thrown up by craftmen's hands, beautiful in proportion and elegant in form, but supporting nothing. Tunnels formed here—deep pits there. Yawning gulfs, where the fetid, stagnant waters threw up their baneful odours. Here the work is finished off, as if the mason had laboured with consummate skill to complete his work, so that all the world might see and admire, although no human eyes, ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... in which, from its concave and impermeable bottom, the waters remain stagnant, rendering the surface a ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... draught. We had, in a degree, become "loony" on the subject, particularly in the middle of the day, when one could not raise moisture in his mouth to even spit. For about ten days the only water we had was obtained from the pools by which we would camp. These pools were stagnant and their edges invariably lined with dead cattle that had died while trying to get a drink. Selecting a carcass that was solid enough to hold us up, we would walk out into the pool on it, taking a blanket with us, which we would swash around and get as full of water as ...
— In the Early Days along the Overland Trail in Nebraska Territory, in 1852 • Gilbert L. Cole
... of men around thee! Men are foul With avarice, ambition and deceit; The worst of all, ambition. This is life, Spent in a feverish chase for selfish ends, Which has no virtue to redeem its toil, But one long, stagnant hope to raise the self. The miser's life to this seems sweet and fair; Better to pile the glittering coin, than seek To overtop our brothers and our loves. Merit in this? Where lies it, though thy name Ring over distant lands, ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... whatever to give to the world. He had only a hasty but elaborate machinery for spreading the principles that he hadn't got. What he called his ideals were the dregs of a Darwinism which had already grown not only stagnant, but poisonous. That the fittest must survive, and that any one like himself must be the fittest; that the weakest must go to the wall, and that any one he could not understand must be the weakest; that was the philosophy which he lumberingly believed through life, ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... flaws in M. Massenet's score. In the first place, compared with the vast volume of stuff poured forth by his younger colleagues of Italy, and even by some of his confrres of France, it makes appeal for approval by its evidences of consummate technical mastery. It never trickles; it never grows stagnant; it never gropes; it never fails for want of matter and manner in utterance. Its current is smooth and self-reliant. It carries action and scene buoyantly and unceasingly, even if it does not always expound them deeply or give them adequate external adornment. When it has ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... want: that animal necessity, in short, to snatch at least at a fallen leaf of the bread-fruit tree, if not at the fruit itself. The higher the position in which one finds oneself transplanted, the greater is the suffering. Everyday necessity is the stagnant pool of life—no lovely picture reflects itself therein. Lieutenant, love, and lack of money—that is a symbolic triangle, or much the same as the half of the shattered die of Fortune. This the lieutenant felt most poignantly, and ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... on a clay loam as it retains moisture and coolness, which the currant prefers. Their roots run somewhat shallow, and hence sandy or friable soils are not desirable. Soils such as will prevent a stagnant condition during heavy rainfalls are essential. I plant my currants early in spring as soon as the frost leaves the ground and a proper preparation can be secured. I plant them five by five feet apart, as they require a thorough ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... the trusted guide, they stand at last in the heart of things, the heaped and dim woods all around them, the single and slim thread of water slipping from slab to slab, the ruined chapel perched half-way up in the Alpine gorge, reached by the one-arched bridge where the water is stopped in a stagnant pond, where all day long a bird sings, and a stray sheep drinks at times. Here, where at afternoon, or almost eve, the silence grows conscious to that degree, one half feels it must get rid of what it knows, they walked side ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... edifice, one half of which is devoted to soldiers' barracks, and the other to markets. The chimes are called the finest in Europe. It is well to hear the finest at once, and so have done with the tedious things. The Belgians are as fond of chimes as the Dutch are of stagnant water. We heard them everywhere in Belgium; and in some towns they are incessant, jangling every seven and a half minutes. The chimes at Bruges ring every quarter hour for a minute, and at the full hour attempt a tune. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... economists paid too much attention to the accumulation and too little to the distribution of wealth. Men have become more sensible to the high level of happiness and moral well-being that has been attained in some of the smaller and somewhat stagnant countries of Europe, where wealth is more generally attained by thrift and steady industry than by great industrial or commercial enterprise, in which there are few large fortunes but little acute poverty, a low standard ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... movement, the feverish hand she clasped, and he answered these calls by tightening his fingers a little. Each pressure said something to them, evoked some period of their finished past, revived in their memory the stagnant recollections of their love. Each was a secret question, each was a mysterious reply, sad questions and sad replies, those "do you remembers?" of ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... Mine was from my father. Miss Matty's was printed. My father's was just a man's letter; I mean it was very dull, and gave no information beyond that he was well, that they had had a good deal of rain, that trade was very stagnant, and there were many disagreeable rumours afloat. He then asked me if I knew whether Miss Matty still retained her shares in the Town and County Bank, as there were very unpleasant reports about it; though nothing more than ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... feeling for her was something more than brotherly love,—he was quite conscious that there were degrees in brotherly love, and that if she had been homely or stupid, he would never have disturbed her in the stagnant life of the house behind the cedars. There had come to him from some source, down the stream of time, a rill of the Greek sense of proportion, of fitness, of beauty, which is indeed but proportion embodied, the perfect adaptation of means to ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... or epoch is not one of darkness, but of light; not of discouragement, but of hope. It is neither retrograde nor stagnant, but progressive to a degree never before witnessed in the history of man on so large a scale and involving all classes and so many ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... activity, too, is at its height, especially in the education of boys for the church. Italy affords one catalogue mention, of a Horace copied under Desiderius. Peter Damian was its man of greatest learning, but the times were intellectually stagnant. The popes were occupied by rivalry with the emperors. It was the century of ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... from neglect and age. Handrails were broken down, planks rotted and wrenched away leaving gaps through which the cloudy greenish blue water could be seen as it purred and chuckled beneath. Here, at the river level, it was hot to the point of sultriness, the air heavy, even stagnant, since the Bar shut off the ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... valleys, all huddled together in their fear, raised doleful cries which no ear could shut out. The trees themselves were burnt and blackened by the storm, the glens as dark as night, the heaven above one canopy of fiery cloud and stagnant vapour. ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... made accessible to all. New shipping was built by the companies and additional commercial intercourse created. [Footnote: Bonnassieux, Les Grandes Compagnies de Commerce, 514.] New territories were made valuable and new centres of activity created in old and stagnant as well as in new and undeveloped countries. Above all, the chartered companies were the actual instruments by which many colonies were founded, and a strong impress given to the institutions of these colonies through all their ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... sailing hitherto briskly before the wind, had suddenly encountered a bank of calm, of utter and ominous calm; it was a thing spell-bound; a toy of circumstances beyond human control. The canvas hung in the stagnant air. From which quarter would the quickening breeze arrive? Whither would it ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... parties in Hillsboro, Ohio, 1,112 acres of land near Georgetown, and 1,200 acres west of Fincastle, in Eagle Township, were purchased for homes for these slaves. These lands were covered with thickets of undergrowth and sloughs of stagnant water and were almost valueless at that time for any purpose other than pasturage. Here in June, 1818, came nearly 900 persons, a part of whom located on the Georgetown lands, the remainder on the Fincastle purchase. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... calling to him out of the mists of heat, and to himself he had seemed to be defying them, to be thrusting their voices from him. For were they not the hills of a land where the lotus bloomed, where a weariness bred of stagnant delights wrapped men in a garment of Nessus, steeped in a subtle poison which drew from them all their energies, which brought them not pain but an inertia more deadly to the soul than pain? Now they had no power over him. He did not need to defy them, because he had gained in strength. Ere they ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... laugh at Love to whom the fullness of living has been denied, in whose cold veins, adulterate with inherited disease, a stagnant liquid mocks the purpose of the rich red blood of a healthy race; that in that laugh of theirs is the, knell of them and of their people; that the nation which has ceased to love ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... 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 composed that highly beneficial treatise, the divine ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... that followed proved to be a season of unrest for our town. Mrs. Aurelia Potts was a leaven of yeast that fermented its social waters, erstwhile calm, not to say stagnant. ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... time, and as an after-effect, a revolution is going on in minds and the moral effect of the show is greater and more lasting than the events themselves. The minds have been stirred to their very depths; stagnant passions and slumbering pretensions are aroused. The multitude of offices presented and expected vacancies "has excited the thirst for power, stimulated self-esteem, and fired the hopes of men the most inept. ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... bury living men, so does inertia practise 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 carried out, and all things made 'free,' inertia would be increased, and listless indolence ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... the north of the waters of Merom, now called Lake Huleh, it flows first into the Lake of Tiberias, and then through a long deep valley into the Dead Sea. Here at a depth of 1293 feet below the level of the sea it is swallowed up and lost; the sea has no outlet, and parts with its stagnant waters through evaporation alone. The evaporation has made it intensely salt, and its shores are consequently for the most part the picture ...
— Patriarchal Palestine • Archibald Henry Sayce
... 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 flying particles ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... now go out in their canoes all day long, for there was a dead calm for many weeks and months. And with that all the waters became stagnant. They were so thick that Glooskap could not paddle his canoe. Then he thought of the Great Bird, and went to ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... advance to meet us; but have faith in its intrinsic merit, look for beauty, and you will find it. Could you predict that from the plants lying in the stagnant pool such a perfect flower as a lily would spring? If you were passing a low, thatched cottage made of rough stone, its only pretence being a coat of whitewash, would you guess it held a poet? And, if you were riding along ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... nest. Among the five, the nest that interested me most was that of the blue grosbeak. Here this bird, which according to Audubon's observations in Louisiana, is shy and recluse, affecting remote marshes and the borders of large ponds of stagnant water, had placed its nest in the lowest twig of the lowest branch of a large sycamore, immediately over a great thoroughfare, and so near the ground that a person standing in a cart or sitting on a horse could have reached it with his hand. ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... don't exaggerate. Love, no doubt, is—ahem—a disquieting passion. Still, every emotion that changes life from a stagnant pool into the freshness and play of a running stream is disquieting to the pool. Not only love and its fellow-passions, such as ambition, but the exercise of the reasoning faculty, which is always at work in changing our ideas, is very disquieting. Love, Mr. Chillingly, has its good ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... were usually sickly in Illinois and Missouri. Emigrants, in shoals, had spread over a wide range of country within a year or two preceding. Multitudes were placed under circumstances the most unfavorable to the preservation of health, in new and open cabins of green timber, often using the stagnant water of creeks and ponds, with a luxuriant vegetation around them undergoing decomposition, and all the other evils attendant on the settlement of a new and unbroken country. Under such circumstances, can it be surprising that many were sick, and that many died? The summer of 1820 was the ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... perdition's lean and inauspicious loam). She will love well," I said, "The flowers of the dead; Where dark Persephone the winter round, Uncomforted for home, uncomforted, Lacking a sunny southern slope in northern Sicily, With sullen pupils focussed on a dream, Stares on the stagnant stream That moats the unequivocable battlements of Hell, There, there will she be found, She that is Beauty veiled from men ...
— Second April • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... taught in its name, are still taught in its name. Falsehood has claimed the authority of truth, and its claim has been granted. The stream which flowed out pure from its source has been caught in foul cisterns, has been led into narrow channels, has been made stagnant in desolate pools and wide-spread weedy marshes. The doctrine of Christ has had thus far in the world but very few hearers who have understood it. Many a modern creed might well go back to heathenism for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... at eve the dreaming one By the base of that icy steep, When over his stiffening limbs begun The deadly slumber of frost to creep, And they cherished the pale and breathless form, Till the stagnant blood ran ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... as a store-ship whence the provisions were to be issued daily, under the superintendence of Ensign Venables. The remainder of the troops were also ordered to disembark and encamp, the position of the Briton in a stagnant swamp of half salt, half fresh water, with mangrove trees crushed under it, being considered prejudicial to the ...
— The Wreck on the Andamans • Joseph Darvall
... may be said to have given, during the next few days, the coup de grace to his intellectual career—a career which had extended over the greater part of a dozen years. He did nothing, however, for some long stagnant time to advance his new desire, occupying himself with little local jobs in putting up and lettering headstones about the neighbouring villages, and submitting to be regarded as a social failure, a returned purchase, by the half-dozen ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... consecrate the strains Pour'd o'er the urn enrich'd with WHITE'S Remains! While touch'd to transport, Taste's responding tone Makes the rapt poet's ecstasies thine own; Ah! think that he, whose hand supremely skill'd, The heart's fine chords with deep vibration thrill'd, In stagnant silence and petrific gloom, Unconscious sleeps, the tenant of the tomb! Extinct that spirit, whose strong-bidding drew From Fancy's confines Wonder's wild-eyed crew, Which bade Despair's terrific phantoms pass Like Macbeth's ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... of the town were just now abounding with apple-gatherings. They stood in the yards in carts, baskets, and loose heaps; and the blue, stagnant air of autumn which hung over everything was heavy with a sweet cidery smell. Cakes of pomace lay against the walls in the yellow sun, where they were drying to be used as fuel. Yet it was not the great make of the year as yet; before the standard crop came in there accumulated, in ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... stagnant, habit dulls the edge of appetite, a weariness of the mind and of the body makes one cease to taste well-used delights; a strong new stimulus is required to revive the emotional life that is sinking to decay. Such a stimulus must not only be strong ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... historical disasters, or that they retarded the general advancement of the human race. In time the barbarians became civilized and fused with the peoples whom they conquered. They introduced, too, into communities which had grown stagnant and weakly, a fresh and invigorating atmosphere that acted as a stimulant in every sphere of human activity. The Kassite, for instance, was a unifying and therefore a strengthening influence in Babylonia. He shook off the manacles of the past which bound the Sumerian and ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... one fountain-head and running a parallel course through long reaches may yet remain wholly distinct, one finding its way satisfactorily to the sea, while the other loses itself in sand or becomes a stagnant marsh, so our modern male and female movements, taking their rise from the same material conditions in modern civilisation, and presenting endless and close analogies with one another in their cause of development, yet remain fundamentally ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... have peace. They cannot understand that the discords of the finite make the harmony of the infinite. They fail to see that these warring creeds are but the necessary differentiations of a common faith. Lay the winds, still the tides, and old ocean, that perennial fount of health, becomes a stagnant pool of putrefaction—a malodorous "mother of dead dogs." Force presupposes friction. Let the sectaries fight, each doing valiant battle for his own dogma, for when they all agree religion will be dead and progress ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... be living at this hour: England hath need of thee; she is a fen Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen, Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, Have forfeited their ancient English dower Of inward happiness. We are selfish men; Oh! raise us up, return to us again; And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power. Thy soul ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... liberty in the interests of greater social efficiency or of increased production or rigid uniformity of doctrine. With the sacrifice of individual initiative will go the loss of all "soul," and the result will be degeneration to a mechanical type of existence, a merely stagnant institution expressing nothing of man's spirit. This personal power of initiative Bergson appeals to each one to maintain. In an important passage of his little work on Laughter he makes a personal ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... Dictionary, circa 1730, I find the following: 'Natron; or, a Natron, from Gr. Natron (?), a kind of black greyish salt, taken out of a lake of stagnant water in the territory of Terrana, ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... Wight known throughout the world by the lovely pictures that have been made of it. It has lately fallen into disrepute by the destruction of some of its beautiful trees, but more specially by the leakage of the pond which left it stagnant, dirty, and partly dry. This has now to a large extent been remedied, and the pond once more assumes its former aspect, giving reflection in its surface to the lovely forms of beautiful foliage with which it is overhung. The village is one ...
— Pictures in Colour of the Isle of Wight • Various
... "violate" it. No man can violate the Sabbath; he can, however, violate his own nature, and this he is more apt to do through enforced idleness than either work or play. Only running water is pure, and stagnant nature of any sort is dangerous—a ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... over the morass, and the interstices were filled with moss and other elastic matter. Upon this the clay and soil were laid down, and the road does float, for we passed over it at the rate of five and twenty miles an hour, and saw the stagnant swamp water trembling on the surface of the soil on either side of us. I hope you understand me. The embankment had gradually been rising higher and higher, and in one place, where the soil was not settled enough to form banks, Stephenson ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... them a smooth, luxuriant flower-enamelled prairie. Rejoicingly the army pressed forward over this beautiful expanse, when suddenly they found their steps again arrested by a series of sluggish streams, stagnant ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... malignancy of the cholera, and multiply upon the community numerous other mortal diseases? Who cannot see that it is a foul, deep, and fatal injury inflicted on society? that it is in a high degree cruel and unjust? that it scatters the population of our cities, renders our business stagnant, and exposes our sons and our daughters to premature and sudden death? So manifestly is this the case, that the board of health of the city of Washington, on the approach of the cholera, declared the vending of ardent spirit, in any quantity, to be a nuisance; and, as ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... he would need no long 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 ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... hopelessness of abject servitude and consciousness of unrequited toil had its impress on the brow of the laborer. Now cheerfulness, a spirit of industry, enterprise, and fraternal feeling replaced the stagnant humdrum of slavery. Nor was progress observable only among the freedmen. Many evidences of kindness and sympathy were shown and expressed by former owners for the moral and mental advancement of their former bondsmen, which, to ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... siesta. It was now the cool as well as the dry season on the island, yet the heat of the sun at midday was terrific. But the temperature brought us neither illness nor even any great degree of lassitude. Always around the island blew the faint cooling breath of the sea. No marsh or stagnant water bred insect pests or fever. Every day while we were there the men worked hard, and grew lean and sun-browned, and thrived on it. Every afternoon with unfailing regularity a light shower fell, but in twenty minutes it was over ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... day they ran 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 ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... a statue of black marble, with wimple and face and hands of alabaster, she stood so breathlessly still. Her heart did not seem to beat; her blood was stagnant in her veins. She felt no faintness. Her observation was unnaturally keen, her mind dazzlingly clear; her brain seemed to work with twice its ordinary power. She thought. He glanced at the shabby watch ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... why had she come to torture him? To him she now appeared as the incarnation of his tragedy. In her the Past, from which he had fled to the far corners of the earth, hiding his trail in seas and deserts and in stagnant backwaters of humanity, had tracked him down at last. And all the grief and bitterness and hatred that he had beaten down, or thought he had beaten down, had returned to rend ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... 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 no ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 303 - October 22, 1881 • Various
... every kind; the sower, too, about to sow must cleanse the soil, and what he takes as refuse from it needs only to be thrown into water and time itself will do the rest, shaping all to gladden earth. [9] For matter in every shape, nay earth itself, [10] in stagnant water ...
— The Economist • Xenophon
... describe how much the mind is depressed by this state of passive suffering. In common evils, the necessity of action half relieves them, as a vessel may reach her port by the agitation of a storm; but this stagnant listless ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... generations, as the aphis (see Amenit. Academ.) produce their progeny in the manner above described, that is, without a mother, and not without a father; and thus experience a lucina sine concubitu. Those who have attended to the habits of the polypus, which is found in the stagnant water of our ditches in July, affirm, that the young ones branch out from the side of the parent like the buds of trees, and after a time separate themselves from them. This is so analogous to the manner in which the buds of trees appear ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... 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
... natural home of those spirits with which we just now claimed fellowship for Roderick—the spirits with a deep relish for the artificial element in life and the infinite superpositions of history. It is the immemorial city of convention. The stagnant Roman air is charged with convention; it colors the yellow light and deepens the chilly shadows. And in that still recent day the most impressive convention in all history was visible to men's eyes, in the Roman streets, erect in a gilded coach drawn by four black horses. ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... productions offers, instead of flourishing verdure, only an incumbered space pierced by aged trees, loaded with parasitic plants, lichens, agarics—impure fruits of corruption. In the low parts is water, dead and stagnant because undirected; or swampy soil neither solid nor liquid, hence unapproachable and useless to the habitants both of land and of water. Here are swamps covered with rank aquatic plants nourishing only venomous insects and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... in 105various hues, like pennants in the wind, with such heedless velocity, urged no doubt by the anticipated delicacies of the dinner-pot, that he came in furious, unexpected, and irresistible contact with Squire Tallyho, who borne forward by the shock, was precipitated into a stagnant collection of mud and water, to the total disfigurement of his Boots, which had that morning received the "matchlessly brilliant polish of Warren's inestimable Jet blacking." Not like many others in London, who will run you down and leave you to your fate, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... of 1914 was a much greater factor in the life of Canada than the Grand Trunk of 1894; it had become nation-wide in its interests, and had shaken off the unfortunate traditions of its earlier stagnant {219} days. Difficult tasks still faced it: the building up of the traffic of the far north would demand ceaseless effort, and when the wheel of time should bring round slackened business once more, it would call for all its powers to make ends ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... Atlantic. But under the lead of Prince Henry they began to grope their way down the coast of Africa, braving the torrid heats and awful calms of that equatorial region, where the blazing sun, poised overhead in a cloudless sky, was reflected on the bosom of a stagnant and glistening ocean. It was their constant hope that at some point the land would be found to roll back and disclose an ocean pathway round Africa to the East, the goal of their desire. Year after year they advanced farther, ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
... chance deigns to join their sports, or mingle in their joyous songs. The woodcock seeks the darkest and most silent thickets, and likes a marly soil, damp meadows, and the neighbourhood of brooks and stagnant water. ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... by Monsieur fail to amuse. Still, she is "indebted to him for all the pleasure or amusement" that she had, and in spite of her indebtedness, she records a "total want of companionship". "I lead an easeful, stagnant, silent life, for which ... I ought to be very thankful" (but she is not). May I point out that though you may be "silent" in the first workings of a tragic and illegitimate passion, you are not "stagnant", ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... village, on the Lokuzhwa, we found it stockaded, and stagnant pools round three sides of it. The Mazitu had come, pillaged all the surrounding villages, looked at this, and then went away; so the people had food to sell. They here call themselves Echewa, and have a different marking from the Atumboka. The men have the hair dressed as if a number of ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... hearts of the men who are the leaders of the nation. For dramatic intensity it would be hard to equal this. The imaginations of their hearts are as the unclean snakes and beasts that are found only in the damp, unwholesome slime and ooze of swamp and stagnant pond. ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... prevent it. We each received a tin basin, but the washing was all done at three pumps outside. All the drinking water was derived from this source, and had a strong and disagreeable taste. A few feet away from each pump was a stagnant pool into which the waste water flowed. I think it is reasonable to suppose that a good proportion of it, after filtering through the sand, was pumped up again. In spite of these trifles we were told ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight
... finished. Joe was burdened by no troublesome convictions touching the advantages of a gravelly soil or a southern exposure, and the word sanitation had it been spoken in his presence would have conveyed no meaning to his mind. He had never heard of germs, and he had as little prejudice concerning stagnant water as he had predilection for clear water. He knew in a general way that all water was wet, but further than this he gave the element ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... Hsi Jen, "take these medicines and dissolve them in wine and then apply them on him, and, when the fiery virus from that stagnant blood has been dispelled, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... You call it an altogether 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 ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... pool of stagnant, scummy water we hooked up and plunged ahead, creaking and groaning and dust enveloped, constantly outstripped by the hurrying construction trains thundering over the newly laid rails, we ourselves the tortoise in ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... eight versts (four 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
... outspokenness, my disregard for their social laws, my impatience of all constraint. Among my books and my drugs in my lonely den at Mansie I could let the great drove of the human race pass onwards with their politics and inventions and tittle-tattle, and I remained behind stagnant and happy. Not stagnant either, for I was working in my own little groove, and making progress. I have reason to believe that Dalton's atomic theory is founded upon error, and I know that mercury ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... for sleep as a man might wait for the executioner. I wait for its coming with dread, and my heart beats and my legs tremble, while my whole body shivers beneath the warmth of the bedclothes, until the moment when I suddenly fall asleep, as one would throw oneself into a pool of stagnant water in order to drown oneself. I do not feel as I used to do formerly, this perfidious sleep which is close to me and watching me, which is going to seize me by the head, to close my eyes and annihilate ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... and susceptibility of true enjoyment. The vine that finds no support for its upward growth, grovels on the earth and covers it with rank, unshapely leaves. The mountain stream, turned back from its course, becomes a dark and stagnant pool. Even if the rank and long-neglected vine is made to twine round some sustaining fabric, it carries with it the dampness and the soil of the earth to which it has been clinging. Its tendrils are heavy, and have a ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... "lightning" species) which we have seen dangling disjointed from the roofs and walls of dwelling-houses in the country. At the first shock, good-bye to you! if you are anywhere around. Or, rather, he may be compared to the miasma from ditches and stagnant ponds, inhaled at all times by our rustic fellow citizens, with the trustfulness (if not relish) of the most extreme simplicity. And yet, it kills them, all the same. No one out West would have cared a pin about WILLIAM'S "disobedience" and "negligence," if these trifling eccentricities hadn't ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 11, June 11, 1870 • Various
... 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 ceased its ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... water to the sea. These ravenous fiumare have become a feature in Calabrian scenery; underneath one of the most terrible of them lies the birthplace of Praxiteles. Dry or half-dry during the warm months, and of formidable breadth, such torrent-beds—the stagnant water at their skirts—are ideal breeding-places for the anophelines from their mouth up to a height of 250 metres. So it comes about that, within recent times, rivers have grown to be the main arteries of malaria. And ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... could appreciate the sensation of a man caught by an octopus. Yet Marrineal didn't look like an octopus.... What did he look like? What was that subtle resemblance which had eluded him in the first days of their acquaintanceship? That emanation of chill quietude; those stagnant eyes? ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... have a certain influence in the propagation of the disease, for it has been ascertained that the species of mosquito which serves as an intermediate host for the yellow fever germ may breed in cesspools and sewers, as well as in stagnant pools of water. If, therefore, the streets of a city are unpaved and ungraded and there are open spaces where water may accumulate in pools, as well as open cesspools to serve as breeding places for Culex fasciatus, the city will present conditions more favorable for the propagation ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... seamen say—men, too, who loved their wives and families—that they believed the extreme pleasure of meetings after long separations, the delights of hope, and the zest of excited feelings, have rendered their years of active service more replete with agreeable sensations, than the stagnant periods of peace. Never having been married myself, I can only speak ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... noticed that Vaca did not thrust his foot clear home in the stirrup, but he attributed this to the other's condition. The Mexican was a sick man. His swarthy face had gone yellow, and he leaned forward, clutching the horn. The heat was stagnant, unwavering. ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... narrow-mindedness is relieved by intensity of purpose. They are not seldom aggressive, argumentative, unpleasant, but they refresh the dry world by being thoroughly alive. It seems, indeed, as if life were only made tolerable through the ferment of the desire to reform. Even the most stagnant pools of the human soul are sometimes stirred by the breeze of change. We all hope, we all look forward, we all grope for a future which will be better than the present. In some the hope is firmly rooted to earth and man-made conventions, in others ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... more exhausted, and I was obliged to remain. Then followed a weary hour, in which the Express Agent's five emissaries were searching for a room, and considerably after dark I found myself in a rambling old over- crowded yadoya, where my room was mainly built on piles above stagnant water, and the mosquitoes were in such swarms as to make the air dense, and after a feverish and miserable night I was glad to get up ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... Fenelon and Jean Paul. Let the same event befall these men on the self-same day: if it fall into the running waters of their wisdom, it will undergo complete transformation, becoming different in every one; if it fall into the stagnant water of their reason, it will remain as it was, unchanged. If Jesus Christ and Socrates both were to meet the adulterous woman, the words that their reason would prompt them to speak would vary but little; but belonging ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... to which we have referred, is a luxury usually indulged in during the hot months of summer, when the buffaloes are tormented by flies, and heat, and drought. At this season they seek the low grounds in the prairies where there is a little stagnant water lying amongst the grass, and the ground underneath, being saturated, is soft. The leader of the herd, a shaggy old bull, usually takes upon ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... into a canebrake, which formed the bed of a shallow and stagnant brook, and, crossing it, they entered a field full of stones and without the slightest trace ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... these principles is obvious, but what is not obvious is the extreme greatness of their effects. Taken together, they make the whole difference between times of brisk trade and great prosperity, and times of stagnant trade and great adversity, so far as that prosperity and that adversity are real and not illusory. If they are satisfied, everyone knows whom to work for, and what to make, and he can get immediately in exchange what he wants'himself. ...
— Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market • Walter Bagehot
... things, singly or combined, are the explanations, as they are the causes, of half the stagnant Christianity that chokes our churches. Men have vowed, and did not know what they were vowing, pledging themselves, in a moment of excitement, to what after years discover to them to be a hard and uncongenial course of life. They have been carried ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... error uppermost in the minds of some men, which is this: the world of fashion has not hitherto been painted with effect, for the same reason that nobody thinks it worth while to describe a ditch; both being, in the estimation of these persons, stagnant perfumed entities, rich in peculiarly useless vegetation, abounding in vermin and animalculae, and diffusing a contagious effluvia over the surface of society. This error, like many other errors, is an excuse for ignorance, and only shows the innate uncharitableness of some men; they run down, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... rejoined. "If you prefer your puddle should be stagnant—admirable metaphor, by the way—it shall be as you wish. Only I hate to see the way things are going with you, and I'm bound to tell you so. You are losing your spirit, tying your hands, and throwing all your ...
— That Mother-in-Law of Mine • Anonymous
... this second trinity of objections an idle instance taken from those who feel such people as the Irish to be weakened or made stagnant by superstition. I only added it because this is a peculiar case of a statement of fact that turns out to be a statement of falsehood. It is constantly said of the Irish that they are impractical. But if we refrain for a moment from looking at what is said about them and look ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... be a side-eddy in the current. I shall grow stagnant and slimy and lead nowhere. And the rushing waters will go leaping and ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... delicious invigorating freshness in the air, without the least chill, the sky of a more than Italian blue, the ranges of mountains in the distance covered with snow, and standing out, sharp and clear against this lovely glowing heaven. The town itself, I must say, seemed very dull and stagnant, with little sign of life or activity about it; but nothing can be prettier or more picturesque than its situation—not unlike that of a Swiss village. Our day came to an end all too soon, and we re-embarked for Wellington, the most southern town of the North Island. The seat of government ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... 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 wholesome that even youth, hot and impatient, ...
— The Hunted Outlaw - Donald Morrison, The Canadian Rob Roy • Anonymous
... recovered from the shock, they leaped into the room and fell over my body in the middle of the floor. They lighted one of the lanterns, and saw the strangest sight that can be imagined. The floor and walls to the height of about six feet were running with something that seemed like stagnant water, thick, glutinous, sickening. As for me, I was drenched with the same cursed liquid. The odor of musk was nauseating. They dragged me away, stripped off my clothing, wrapped me in their coats, and hurried to the hospital, thinking me ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... 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 dreams brought before her the ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book V. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... force of a remark made by medical friend last summer, when, in consequence of the continual rains, the ague was very prevalent. It was this: wherever you will find the ague an habitual guest with the inhabitants you need not look for healthy grapevines. Wherever we find stagnant water let us avoid the neighboring hillsides, for they would not be congenial to our grape-vines. But on the bluffs overhanging the banks of our large streams, especially on the northern and western sides, where the vines are sheltered from the north and west winds, and fully exposed to the ...
— The Cultivation of The Native Grape, and Manufacture of American Wines • George Husmann
... Squire Loftus!" there's somebody cries;— Nay, friend, not so fast, if you please; His wisdom was that of the self-deceived fool Who quits the clear fount for the foul, stagnant pool, Who puts out his eyes lest the light he descry, Then shouts 'mid the gloom "how clear-sighted am I!" Who turns from the glorious fountain of Day, To follow the wild ignis fatuus' ray Through ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... of the woods into an open valley that might have been picturesque if it had not been despoiled by the work of man. A log fence ran along the edge of open ground and a mud dam held back a pool of stagnant water, slimy and green. As Carley rode on the baa-baa of sheep became so loud that she could ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... clear, cool, far-seeing, but never visionary, scientific observation,—his own accurate analysis, unprejudiced by even a savant's enthusiasm, and uninfluenced by any personal desire or greed of gain,—that Tasajara City had risen from the stagnant tules, was a speculation that had never occurred to him. There was a much more uneasy consciousness of what he had done in Mr. Harcourt's face a few moments later, when his visitor's name was announced, and it is to be feared that if that name had ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... plight. Trapped in an underwater craft, they saw themselves doomed to perish even more miserably than their companions. As the horrible thought sank home, a cool breath of air, suggesting the smell of stagnant salt water, blew through an opening created by the crushing of the plates in the vessel's hull—an opening larger than the body of a man. Miles and Ward stared at it with puzzled eyes. With such a hole in her hull, ...
— The Heads of Apex • Francis Flagg
... appetites of KINGS; When the low Flattery of their reptile Lords Falls flat and heavy on the accustomed ear; When Eunuchs sing, and Fools buffoon'ry make. And Dancers writhe their harlot limbs in vain: Then War and all its dread vicissitudes Pleasingly agitate their stagnant hearts.... ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas |
