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More "Inert" Quotes from Famous Books



... in fact almost amounted to absurdity, the inhabitants of this thickly-populated province nowhere venturing to rise against the handful of robbers by whom they were so cruelly persecuted. A Baron von Puckler offered an individual exception: his endeavors to rouse the inert masses met with no success, and, rendered desperate by his failure, he blew out his brains. When too late a prince of Anhalt-Pless assembled an armed force in Upper Silesia and attempted to relieve Breslau, but Thiele ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks

... upon hands and knees until he had passed the first of the Indian wigwams. Here he dropped for a silent interval of caution into shadow and lay there scarcely breathing. On toward the door of Diane's shelter he crept and once more lay inert and quiet. ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple

... running around the corral, following the line of the fence, and in the center of the bunch was the little bay pony with the inert, and probably dead, body of a man hanging head downward on the pony's flank, rolling horribly, and in constant danger of being hit by the flying heels of the other ponies, who were frantic ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor

... that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be,"' &c. Neither this nor that is the body that abideth. Abideth, I say; for that which riseth again must have remained, though perhaps in an inert state.—It is not dead, but sleepeth;—that is, it is not dissolved any more than the exterior or phenomenal organism appears to us dissolved when it lieth in apparent ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge

... but true it is! Similar statements if not more remarkable ones could be made about many of the other herbs herein discussed. Many of these are spoken of as "formerly considered specific" for such and such troubles but "now known to be inert." ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains

... How could I dishonour him by bearing myself towards him as to that other . . . worthless . . . ! Oh! the happy, happy girls, who have mothers . . . !' All the muscles of her body seemed to shrink and collapse, till she was like an inert mass at the ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker

... electricity to pass through it, and the minium is thereby reduced to metallic spongy lead on the negative pole, and oxidized to peroxide of lead on the positive pole; when the cell is discharged the reduced lead becomes oxidized, and the peroxide of lead is reduced until the cell becomes inert. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various

... who can murder, can massacre, the trees, and he raves. Tensely he listens and hears in the soughing wind a response to his cries of desire. Overwhelmed, he resumes his walk, weeping, until he arrives at the chateau and sinks to his bed exhausted, an inert mass. ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans

... not, as he had first thought, dead; her breathing was slow and deep and harsh, her pulse deliberate and full; she was warm, too, but her face was suffused by an unnatural blueness and the pupils of her inert eyes were barely discernible. He shook her with an unceremonious vigor, but there was no answering energy; she fell across his arm in a sheer weight of satin-covered body. He moved back in a momentary uncontrollable ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer

... inert, paralyzed. Then Dick, accustomed to act quickly in every emergency, slung the line around a boulder, took a half hitch to secure it and, without stopping to see whether it would hold or not, ran down stream at top speed with Bob and Bill ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace

... and a more bounding elasticity. So one might foretell, before the study of a single fact of experience, that, other things being equal, he who had few or no thoughts would have not only a dormant mind, but also a sluggish and inert body, less active than another, less enduring, and especially less defiant of physical ills. And one might prophesy, too, that he who had high thoughts and wealth of knowledge would have stored up in his brain a magazine of reserved ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various

... that double, mysterious life which makes us doubt whether there are not two beings in us—whether a strange, unknowable, and invisible being does not, during our moments of mental and physical torpor, animate the inert body, forcing it to a more willing obedience than it ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant

... Goddess on the colonnades of the Court of the Universe amounts to a definite creation of a new type of repeated architectural finial - a human figure conventionalized to be come architecturally static - yet not so devitalized as to be inert. Based on another style of architecture the finials of the cloister of the Court of Ages serve a correspondingly related purpose, and the crouching figures on columns in this court are excellent ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry

... into blackness. And it seemed, as I went down, that Alan's inert body was falling ...
— Beyond the Vanishing Point • Raymond King Cummings

... crossed her threshold, had taken in the unhappy, childlike figure, and that other figure, sunken in its seat, slumbering, inert, the image of decay. He stood still for a moment before Laura, as a man stands when he ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair

... of his passion that his hands trembled on the steering-wheel. Afraid of losing all muscular control, he brought the automobile to a full stop at the roadside. Her sapphirine eyes were shining, her hands lay inert in her ...
— The House of Mystery • William Henry Irwin

... brain lay passive, inert, receiving into its vacancy restless siftings of past sights and sounds: Rol, weeping, laughing, playing, coiled in the arms of that dreadful Thing: Tyr—O Tyr!—white fangs in the black jowl: the women who wept on The foolish ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman

... prettiness, with a snub nose and petulant little mouth, who held up her satin-and-lace skirts with a sort of fastidious disdain, as though she scorned to set foot on earth that was not carpeted with the best velvet pile. As they approached their carriage the inert dark bundle, crouched in the corner, started into life—a woman, with wild hair and wilder eyes, whose pale lips quivered with suppressed weeping as her piteous voice ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various

... was ready for action. All those formidable qualities in her nature, which a gentler and wiser training than hers had been might have held in check—by development of preservative influences that lay inert—were now driven back to their lurking-place; leaving only the faintest traces of their momentary appearance on the surface. Her breathing seemed to be oppressed; her eyelids ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins

... lay staring at the ceiling—waiting. Here in this dismal room, alone and facing death with a courage amazing to behold, she made a picture which so stirred me that despite earlier wounded feelings I went to her side. The little hands were cold and inert when I took them, but her fingers tightened ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris

... had continuously labored for the well-being of others. Yet the works of a good man follow him and in numberless homes, in public buildings, on church spires, honored monuments to the memory of Simon Willard still survive—monuments far more useful than are inert blocks of marble—monuments that pulse with life and keep hourly before those who look upon them the thought of one who performed for his fellow men a practical and ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett

... is per se forever inert, unchangeable, indestructible, then we fall into the dilemma of a materialistic monism on the one hand, Manichaean dualism on the other. Even under the most spiritual interpretation we could offer—that, shall we say, of those today who try to run ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram

... meant to wear the yoke so as not to be pitied. For she did think of the coming years with presentiment: she was frightened at Grandcourt. The poor thing had passed from her girlish sauciness of superiority over this inert specimen of personal distinction into an amazed perception of her former ignorance about the possible mental attitude of a man toward the woman he sought in marriage—of her present ignorance as to what their life with each ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... least a poor nail then, Where my heart may hang inert. For I want it not again, With ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier

... nearly two months, and finally consented to it when the enemy had been reinforced by 30,000 from Meade, and by Sherman's army from Memphis, of 20,000, just when he could not spare a large detachment! In other words, lying inert before a defeated army, when concentrated; and dispersing his forces when the enemy was reinforced and concentrated! If disaster ensues, the government will suffer the terrible consequences, for it assumed the responsibility of retaining ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones

... blood, crazed with liquor. With clubbed guns we cleared it again and again, battering mercilessly at every head that fronted us. Then a great giant of a fellow—dead or alive I know not—was hurled headlong through the opening, an inert, limp weight, that bore the two soldiers beside me to the floor beneath his body. With wide sweep of my gun I struck him, shattering the stock into fragments, and swung back to meet the others, the hot barrel falling ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish

... for a while, then lay dull and inert for hours. She had a passive longing for death. After the suffering and the hideous mortification of that day there seemed no other climax. The cavalcade rode beneath her windows once more, with their untired laughter, their splendid vitality. They scattered ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton

... success. When Blake said, "If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise," he expressed a profound truth which Nietzsche and others have done little more than amplify. There is nothing so hopeless as inert or inactive virtue: it is a form of life grown putrid, and it turns into poisonous, decaying matter in the soul. If Coleridge had been more callous towards what he felt to be his duties, if he had not ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons

... sleepers were difficult to wake. The wakers shook the sleeping, but in vain. At last Geoffrey began to stir. But in vain Louis lifted Ciccio's shoulders from the table. The head and the hands dropped inert. The long black lashes lay motionless, the rather long, fine Greek nose drew the same light breaths, the mouth remained shut. Strange fine black hair, he had, close as fur, animal, and naked, frail-seeming, tawny hands. There was a silver ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence

... action of a dead substance, which cannot act upon a living substance that can? Assuredly not! Is it not rather the recognition by the living substance of the lifeless one? The whole theory of drug action is easily explainable on this hypothesis. Drugs—inert substances—do not act upon the living organism, but are acted upon, with a view to their expulsion from the living domain. If it were not so, if drugs really acted upon the various organs, then their action should be equally as effective after death as before. But no, nature ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell

... Thus I continued, inert, helpless, motionless, till the Princesse d'Henin came into my apartment. Her first news was, that Bonaparte had already reached Compigne, and that to-morrow, the 20th of March, he might arrive in Paris, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay

... also, in violation of the Divine Law, that we shall surrender the fugitive slave who takes refuge at our fireside from his relentless pursuers. 'What, then,' you say; 'can nothing be done for freedom because the public conscience is inert?' Yes, much can be done—everything can be done. Slavery can be limited to its present bounds; it can be ameliorated; it can and must be abolished, and you and I can ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander

... the gloom was too oppressive to permit an elevated tendency of either thought or spirit. I could do nothing but sit listless and inert. Paper and pencil were before me, but I could not write—I could not even think coherently, and was on the point of rising and rushing out into the streets for a wild walk, when there came a hesitating knock at ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley

... shaping and shaped by events, hardened or fused by conflict, and preserving through all vicissitudes and convulsions the incomparable vitality of the nation. France, more than any other country, is to be studied as a living spirit, not as an inert mass, and in a study of this kind the mechanico-philosophical method will not carry us far. It does not appear to strike Professor Adams as singular that a nation "abandoned for the last eighty years to the domination of Siva, the fierce god of destruction," ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various

... "Sure it does," he said. "I'd say it was a matter of resistance. Moving an inanimate object is pretty simple— comparatively, anyhow—because inert matter has ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett

... stumbled and its rider was rolling headlong down the hill, while the frightened animal pawed the earth in a wild attempt to regain its feet. The girls, terrified, started swiftly for the spot, but even as they ran the unfortunate rider went over a sharper turn and struck. Then—she lay in an inert heap against a jagged rock! In a moment they were ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft

... you to take this seriously. It is not to be understood as mere Bible teaching to be stored away in the mind along with an inert mass of other doctrines. It is a marker on the road to greener pastures, a path chiseled against the steep sides of the mount of God. We dare not try to by-pass it if we would follow on in this holy pursuit. We must ascend a step at a time. If we refuse one ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer

... or wood, was the first stage in the development of man's power; and tools or machines, in iron or steel, are the last and most efficient method of economising it, and enabling him to intelligently direct the active and inert ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth

... of the week in the Dingy City. A heavy weight of dusty grey cloud lay oppressively inert, vaguely resting on the house and tree tops, and underneath the cloud the air seemed stagnantly confined; in its lowest strata people had been breathing it all day—all the week, in fact—in and out of their lungs, so that it was no wonder it felt ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch

... of strength and purpose, of honor and aspiration, to such casually picturesque changes as an avalanche may make in a mountain landscape, or a railway accident in a human figure. To call this Natural Selection is a blasphemy, possible to many for whom Nature is nothing but a casual aggregation of inert and dead matter, but eternally impossible to the spirits and souls of the righteous. If it be no blasphemy, but a truth of science, then the stars of heaven, the showers and dew, the winter and summer, the fire and heat, the mountains and hills, may no longer ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw

... the lion stood, with the tail swinging in that pendulum-like motion; the great eyes gazing heavily at him; while during those painful minutes Dyke's brain grew more and more active. He thought of mice in the power of cats, and felt something of the inert helplessness of the lesser animal, crouching, as if fascinated by the cruel, claw-armed tyrant, waiting to make its spring. And he knew that at any moment this beast might come at him as if discharged from a catapult. But all the same the brain grew more and more acute in its endeavours to find ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn

... state analogous to the ordinary "waking trance" of the hypnotists. It is believed that all bodies convey, or are the vehicles of certain universal property called od or odyle (od-hyle), which is not regarded as a force but as an inert and passive substance underlying the more active forces familiar to us in kinetic, calorific and electrical phenomena. In this respect it holds a position analogous to the argon of the atmosphere, and is capable of taking up the vibrations of those bodies to which it is related and which it invests. ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial

... with his one sound arm he caught Maurice by the elbow and helped him to struggle to his feet. The horse, dazed with terror, snorted at the smell of blood, but he did not move. Maurice, equally dazed, scrambled into the saddle—almost inert—a dead weight—a thing that impeded progress and movement; but the thing that Crystal loved above all things on earth and which Bobby knew he must wrest out of these devouring jaws of Death and lay—safe and sound—within ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy

... this systematic brutality, had its theorists and apologists; human faculties were denied to the blacks. They were classed as a race between the flesh and the spirit. Thus the infamous abuse of power, which was exercised over this inert and servile race, was called necessary guardianship. Tyrants have never wanted sophists: on the other hand, men of right feeling towards their fellows, who had, like Gregoire, Raynal, Barnave, Brissot, Condorcet, La Fayette, embraced the cause of humanity, ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine

... principal cities there is generally at least one dealer who adheres to fixed prices for his goods. A daily paper is now published in Chinese at Shanghai, and the English school there is well patronized. All these things convince me that at last Western civilization is making an impression. The inert mass begins to move, and China will march forward ere long. The most convincing proof of this is found, perhaps, in the fact that the government appropriated in 1872 nearly two millions of dollars to maintain a hundred and fifty students in the United States. ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie

... assistant, "Apply that to the other wire," said he; and dropping his own wire, he put his hand over the cylinder, with his fingers dipping into the vessel from which the other wire sprang. When the wire hummed under the tuning-fork and the vibration thrilled again, instantly he felt as if an inert obstruction had been removed. The vibratory influence whirled wildly through him, there was a pause of a second or two (which seemed to him many minutes in duration), and then suddenly a kind of rigor passed upon the form and features of ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban

... still—and thy wild name Was ne'er more bruited in men's minds than now That thou art nothing, save the jest of Fame, Who woo'd thee once, thy vassal and became The flatterer of thy fierceness, till thou wert A god unto thyself—nor less the same To the astounded kingdoms all inert, Who deemed thee for a time ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart

... ground-floor of the house, and on the threshold of each room ejaculated "Ah!" or "Ha!" Then he and the doctor went upstairs. Priam remained inert, and excessively ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett

... sank down into the chair again, breathless and inert, and sobbing deep, low sobs. The sound of dancing came from the hall, with cries of "Hooch!" and the voice ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine

... place where they might gain access to the shore by a path down a landslip. As they descended through the rockery, yellow with ragwort, they felt themselves dip into the inert, hot air of the bay. The living atmosphere of the uplands was left overhead. Among the rocks of the sand, white as if smelted, the heat glowed and quivered. Helena sat down and took off her shoes. She walked on the hot, glistening sand till her feet were delightfully, almost ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence

... place almost before she knew it. She saw him stoop with absolute assurance and slip his arm under the boy's shoulders. Tommy's inert head fell back against him, but she saw his strong right hand come out and take the spoon that Ralston held out. His dark face was bent to his task, and it held no dismay, ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell

... neither be bribed nor browbeaten out of the discharge of their duty, which points to death as 'the surest calculation that can be made,—as the unavoidable keystone of every individual life.' A grim consolation, you think? True; but all I shall ever receive. Dr. Grey, in your estimation I am sinfully inert and self-indulgent; and you conscientiously commend my idle hands to the benevolent work of knitting socks for indigent ditchers, and making jackets for pauper children. Now, although it is considered ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson

... limp and pallid and wide-eyed against the wall, holding before her the tape that had told her the story—and not realizing that she held it. Then the man awoke from his sleep-walker's vacancy and realized her presence. At the sight of her despairing eyes and inert figure resting for support against the mahogany panels, his expression altered. His eyes woke to life and, again moistening his lips, he forced the ghost of a smile which at first ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck

... the inert old woman across the street and a short distance along the opposite pavement. Here, there was a pleasant, modest-looking tea-shop with the name of Walcker over the front, and embedded in the plate glass were the ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston

... and everything in it, himself included,—a disgust which varies in intensity, rising at times into a longing for death, sinking often into weary apathy, but is never dispelled for more than brief intervals. Such a state of feeling is inevitably adverse to any kind of decided action; the body is inert, the mind indifferent or worse; its response is, 'it does not matter,' 'it is not worth while,' 'it is no good.' And the action required of Hamlet is very exceptional. It is violent, dangerous, difficult to accomplish perfectly, on one side repulsive to a man of honour and sensitive feeling, ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley

... like the French, were not disposed to remain inert under the terms of the treaty. Captain Moon sailed down from Nelson, with two strongly-manned ships, to attempt the recapture of Albany. At the moment when he had loaded a cargo of furs from the half-abandoned fort on one of his vessels, d'Iberville ...
— The "Adventurers of England" on Hudson Bay - A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North (Volume 18 of the Chronicles of Canada) • Agnes C. (Agnes Christina) Laut

... however,—points not of detail, but of principle,—the Scripture does seem to speak decisively. 1st. The whole body of the church was to take an active share in its concerns; the various faculties of its various members were to perform their several parts: it was to be a living society, not an inert mass of mere hearers and subjects, who were to be authoritatively taught and absolutely ruled by one small portion of its members. It is quite consistent with this, that, at particular times, the church should ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold

... blindly worked out by the dumb agents who were quite unable to recognise their nature. If, in short, we wish to discover the secret of the great ecclesiastical and political struggles of the day, we should turn, not to the men in whose minds beliefs lie inert and instinctive, nor to the ostensible dialectics of the ostensible apologists and assailants, but to the great poet who shows how they were associated with the strongest passions and the most ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen

... almost womanish tenderness, Carew had brought his friend back to the tent, and made him over to the care of Paddy who gave up all things else, for the sake of his little Canuck. All that afternoon and night, Weldon lay passive, inert, while Paddy bathed him, fed him, poured cool, soft things over his wounds, fed him again, and then sat down beside him with his own stubby hand resting against Weldon's limp fingers. But, the next morning, Weldon rose, buttoned and belted himself with elaborate care. Then, disregarding ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller

... pole in and out and around until he had located the submerged sheep. He lifted its head above the dip. The sheep showed no sign of life. Down on his knees dropped Glenn, to reach the sheep with strong brown hands, and to haul it up on the ground, where it flopped inert. Glenn pummeled it and pressed it, and worked on it much as Carley had seen a life-guard work over a half-drowned man. But the sheep did not respond to Glenn's ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey

... figure. There was not the slightest trace of feebleness in his impassioned tones. Except once or twice, as he hesitated a moment or two for a word to express his thought, there was not a reminder that the brain at seventy may be inert or the fire be dampened ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman

... supplied and the party moved on. About to descend into the sunken road the bearers ducked to that fatal shell whine ... too late. Three blood-soaked figures were visible through the lifting-smoke stretched inert on the ground. ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq

... and the Beef Trust, the Liquor Trust and the Traction Trust and the Money Trust—those masters of America who do not want citizens, free and intelligent and self-governing, but who want the slave-hordes as they come, ignorant, inert, ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair

... creature lived. The earth was then a far hotter place than now; a terrible steaming swamp, full of rank and luxuriant vegetation, gigantic palms, ferns as big as trees. The diplodocus was upwards of a hundred feet long, a vast inert creature, with a tough black hide. In spite of its enormous bulk its brain was only the size of a pigeon's egg, so that its mental processes must have been of the simplest. It had a big mouth full of rudimentary teeth, of no use to masticate its food, ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson

... building, with its wealth of breathing misery, and my own desolate heart to endure it all. I reached him just as the sun was going down, and from his window saw the red disc sink. As it sank he became less and less frenzied, and just as it dipped he slid from the hands that held him, an inert mass, on the floor. It is wonderful, however, what intellectual recuperative power lunatics have, for within a few minutes he stood up quite calmly and looked around him. I signalled to the attendants not to hold him, for I was anxious to see what he would do. He went straight over ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker

... as the dying animal fell back, spurning the bloody pool with tail and flippers; but the mighty heart sent forth its wasted life-tide, until its current was exhausted and the powerful "old hood" was like his whilom rival—a lifeless mass of inert flesh. ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall

... brain-activity to an extreme, enfeeble their bodies,"[25] does not often exist in female operatives, any more than in male. On the contrary, they belong to the class of those who, in the words of the same author, by "pushing bodily activity to an extreme, make their brains inert."[26] Hence they have stronger bodies, a reproductive apparatus more normally constructed, and a catamenial function less readily disturbed by effort, than their student sisters, who are not only younger than they, but are trained to push "brain-activity to an extreme." Give ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke

... nothing. She only put down the lantern and slipped her arms under the shoulders that lay in the wet grass, shuddering as her hands closed on the warm moisture of blood, and Rowlett rose with an effort and rallied his spent strength to lift the inert knees. While the old man lighted their footsteps the little procession made its painful way down what was left of the mountainside, across the road, and ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... extract of Hemlock, blended with potash, is kept by the chemists, to be mixed with boiling water, for inhalation to ease a troublesome spasmodic cough, or an asthmatic attack. In Russia and the Crimea, this plant is so inert as to be edible; whereas in the South of ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie

... It is then in the condition known as sleep, or trance. Sleep is the natural withdrawing of the consciousness from the physical body. When the separation occurs in the case of the medium it is called a trance. The cause of the inert condition of the physical body is the same in both cases—the withdrawal of the consciousness of the ego. The physical body is then unoccupied, but the consciousness maintains magnetic connection with it. In death that tie is severed ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers

... Julia's expression as she sprang round to face the newcomer. She saw it change, swift as lightning, from a look of horrified dismay to one of sudden transforming tenderness, as the girl recognized the intruder, that the hand already in the act of pushing open the door of the clock fell inert and limp to her side, and if she had been able to move she would have lost no time in retreating. She knew instinctively that she was seeing a secret laid bare which she had no right to spy upon. And yet, though her impulse was to fly from the place in embarrassment and confusion, something ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce

... Lady Mabel stood aside, with L'Isle, and had the pleasure of witnessing a genuine impromptu Spanish ball in the open air. They were at once struck with the sudden gayety and activity of a people habitually so grave and inert. But as one dance followed another, the vivacity of the party increased. Many of the officers and some of their fair friends were from Andalusia, where music and the castinets are never heard in vain. Presently the tune was changed, and the excited dancers slid over into the fandango and volero, ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen

... he was only ruthless and predatory after the manner of his kind. A thrill of admiration tingled his spine. The women of his race were chattels, lazy and inert, without fire, merely drudges or playthings. Here was one worth conquering, a white flame to be controlled. To bend her without breaking her, that must be his method of procedure. The skin under her chin was as white as the heart of a mangosteen, and the longing to sweep ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath

... 'one'. Let any man ask himself, whose understanding can both reason, and become the depository of truth, whether, if 'one mind' thus regulated, with absolute authority, 'three', or, otherwise, 'four' persons, with all their congeries of material parts, would not these parts, inert in themselves, when subjected to one predominant mind, be, in the most logical sense, 'one person'? Are ligament and exterior combination indispensable pre-requisites to the sovereign influence of mind over mind? or mind over ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman

... The Na-che shot by at uncontrollable speed, her crew shouting directions as she passed. Milton at last, just as the Ida entered a roaring fall, brought Forrester to the gunwale, but having achieved this, the end of the rope dropped from his fingers and he lay inert, his eyes closed. Forrester clung to the edge of the boat ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow

... them, I began for the first time to realise fully the exceeding awkwardness of my situation, and to realise, too, that if deliverance was to come to me I must bestir myself and do what might be possible to meet it, for to remain passively lashed to that inert piece of drifting wreckage might very well mean a slow and agonising death by starvation. Yet, after all, what could I do? The land was my nearest refuge, and that, I considered, must be at least twenty miles distant, altogether too far to dream of swimming ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood

... They were palmy, too; it must have hurt like thunder to be plucked out of them. And yet," the clear eyes swept from the topmost wave of brown hair down across the intent face, so curiously alive, down across the inert body, so curiously dead; "and yet, I'll be hanged if I don't believe you are more of a man, more of an active force, than you ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray

... from the inert body. The torch had hissed itself out. Grantline swung on our building corner, and I leaned down with him to examine it. The torch had fused and scarred the surface of the wall, burned almost through. A pressure-rift had opened. We could see it, a curving gash ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various

... The ancient trade of the country was conducted on a much larger and more profitable scale; and new branches of industry were explored. The active and regular habits of the English capitalist drove out of all the more profitable kinds of industry their inert and careless competitors of the French race; but in respect of the greater part (almost the whole) of the commerce and manufactures of the country, the English cannot be said to have encroached on the French; for, in fact, they created employments and profits which had not previously existed. A few ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... so far, surrounded by such endless, desolate wastes of gloomy forest, the Shadow was cold, inhospitable; and she was afraid to face it alone. If Ben would only waken and sustain her drooping spirit with his own! She was lonely and afraid, in the shadow of the inert spruce, ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall

... energetic, and beyond all things despised dreaming fainans (such, for instance, as we find the politicians, or even the conspirators, of Italy, Spain, and Germany, whose whole power of action evaporates in talking, and histrionically gesticulating). Yet still the best of them seemed inert by comparison with my uncle, and to regard his standard of action and exertion as trespassing to a needless degree upon ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... under a king, foolish, inert, and lazy, at a time when all other nations are active, and work gloriously, while we sleep? Gentlemen, pardon me for saying before a prince, who will perhaps blame my temerity (for he has the prejudices of family), that for four years we ...
— Chicot the Jester - [An abridged translation of "La dame de Monsoreau"] • Alexandre Dumas

... has been shown to be true of some of the most destructive diseases which infect animals, such diseases as the sheep pox, such diseases as that most terrible and destructive disorder of horses, glanders, that in these, also, the active power is the living solid particle, and that the inert part is the fluid. However, do not suppose that I am pushing the analogy too far. I do not mean to say that the active, solid parts in these diseased matters are of the same nature as living yeast plants; but, so far as ...
— Yeast • Thomas H. Huxley

... one side when he and Pederson had short-circuited each other, had time to get behind the protection of the office door. He couldn't close it because Lasser's and Pederson's inert forms blocked the doorway, but at least it afforded protection ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)

... confederate. She ran to the dressing-table and took up a small penknife. Jim was leaning over his victim, wresting the gun from his hand, when she reached him. The knife came down twice in his shoulder. The intense pain caused him to drop the gun, but he picked it up again, hurled his inert opponent across the room, and went to Edith. The knife dropped from her fingers as she saw the blood streaming ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild

... and more inert, and the breeze grew more and more powerful. The Mediterranean is like a capricious woman; the North Sea is like a violent and capricious man. The foredoomed smack was almost like a buoy in a tideway; the sea came over her, screaming as it ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman

... of despair La Mothe would have turned away, but Commines held him fast. His faith was unshaken, but the natural reaction from the day's tense emotion had sapped its buoyancy, leaving it negative and inert rather than positive and aggressive. The half-hour's slackless concentration of nerve and muscle in the defence of the stairway had drained him of strength and energy like the crisis of a fever. For him Ursula de Vesc's curt No! stood against ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond

... crowd, consisting of listless idlers calmly smoking their cigars, or listening to or retailing the—in general—very dull news of the capital; but on the day of which I am speaking the mass was no longer inert. There was much gesticulation and vociferation, and several people were running about shouting, "Viva la constitucion!"—a cry which, a few days previously, would have been visited on the utterer with death, the city having for some weeks past been subjected to the rigour of martial law. I occasionally ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... unwillingness to have it tampered with, that is to-day the great obstacle to our Uneasy Woman putting her program of relief into force. And it is the effort to move this mass which she derides as inert that leads to much of the overemphasis in her program and her methods. If she is to attract attention, she must be extreme. The campaigner is like the actor—he must exaggerate to get his effect over the footlights. ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell

... garden[543]. It was now somewhat obstructed by branches of trees and other rubbish, which had come down the river, and settled close to it. Johnson, partly from a desire to see it play more freely, and partly from that inclination to activity which will animate, at times, the most inert and sluggish mortal, took a long pole which was lying on a bank, and pushed down several parcels of this wreck with painful assiduity, while I stood quietly by, wondering to behold the sage thus curiously employed, and smiling with an humorous satisfaction each time when he ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell

... God, that a higher thing, human life, comes into being. Naturally, as the Bible is the history of man's redemption it does not dwell upon this phase of truth, but seemingly each new and higher impartation of the Spirit of God brings forth a higher order of being. First, inert matter; then motion; then light; then vegetable life; then animal life; then man; and, as we shall see later, then the new man; and then Jesus Christ, the supreme Man, the completion of God's thought of man, the Son of Man. This is the Biblical thought ...
— The Person and Work of The Holy Spirit • R. A. Torrey

... right to know. Look at this!" She reached forward and picked up that inert, cold, ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber

... lay back upon the cushioned seat inert and passive. In the flash of each passing street-light her face showed waxen pale, a cameo against the dark background; so drawn and pinched were her features, that Brencherly, in panic, seized her pulse, in order to assure himself that life had not already fled. ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford

... the earth for the support of each bud, and the new leaves are capable of performing their office of exposing these juices to the influence of the air; the placental vessels cease to act, coalesce, and are transformed from sap- wood, or alburnum, into inert wood; serving only for the support of the new tree, which ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... atmosphere is free fluorine (F{2}) in a rather low concentration, about 4 or 5 percent. With it appears a mad collection of gases. There are a few inert diluents, such as N{2} (nitrogen), argon, helium, neon, etc., but the major fraction consists of CF{4} (carbon tetrafluoride), BF{3} (boron trifluoride), SiF{4} (silicon tetrafluoride), PF{5} (phosphorous pentafluoride), SF{6} (sulphur hexafluoride) and ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr

... Olmutz business is by no means reckoned brilliant, even in the Fabius line; but, on the contrary, inert, dim-minded, inconclusive; and in reality, till almost the very last, he had been of little help to the besieged. For near three weeks (till May 23d) Daun sat at Leutomischl, immovable on his bread-basket there, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle

... a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end. The extent to which this generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul. For it is the inert effort of each thought, having formed itself into a circular wave of circumstance, as for instance an empire, rules of an art, a local usage, a religious rite, to heap itself on that ridge and to solidify and hem ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... would come upon the strings and false bottoms and wigs and masks of the game. But the office boy's contemplation of her distress was real. Something must be done. The whole machine of things could not indefinitely hang thus suspended, inert, waiting her pleasure. ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various

... it was unusually glorious. Nature seemed to aid and abet Dinah, who, as Bianchon had predicted, gradually developed a heart-felt passion. In one month she was an altered woman. She was surprised to find in herself so many inert and dormant qualities, hitherto in abeyance. To her Lousteau seemed an angel; for heart-love, the crowning need of a great nature, had made a new woman of her. Dinah was alive! She had found an outlet for her powers, she saw undreamed-of vistas in the future—in short, she was happy, happy ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac

... and herein, as in other respects, the son had to confront difficulties unknown in the days of his father. The task of the elder Pitt was simple compared with that of humouring and spurring on five inert and yet ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... the mouth of the box any while, by virtue thereof the addercop is overcome and dieth, as it were suddenly. And this same I have seen proved oft in many and divers places." Possibly the fact that the addercop is so infrequent an invader of our modern life accounts for the fact that we are left inert upon reading so surprising a statement; or possibly our incredulity dominates ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison

... the regiment, and the real life of the soldier began. How tame to tell, but how "imperial the hour" when these one thousand lads first went, on guard! Yes, the fact was now before them. They were no longer segregated atoms, inert, ineffective, eccentric. They were part of that mighty bulwark of blood and iron that stood between law and rebellion, between the nation's heart and the assassin ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan

... step as I regained Frapesle. Ineffable contentment filled my mind. A way was open for the devotion that swells in all youthful hearts and which in mine had been so long inert. Like the priest who by one solemn step enters a new life, my vows were taken; I was consecrated. A simple "Yes" had bound me to keep my love within my soul and never to abuse our friendship by leading ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac

... should not have chapping sticks"; that is, weapons of offence. Mr. Bertram was no sooner possessed of the judicial authority which he had so much longed for, than he began to exercise it with more severity than mercy, and totally belied all the opinions which had hitherto been formed of his inert good nature. We have read somewhere of a justice of peace, who, on being nominated in the commission, wrote a letter to a bookseller for the statutes respecting his official duty, in the following orthography,—"Please send the ax relating to a gustus pease." No doubt, ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott

... exercised and broken the spirit that is supposed to be contained within it; yet the slight memorandum, written at that time, lies unchanged before me, and gives evidence of the comparatively impassible duration of inert matter over man; whose home, and whose abiding-place is not ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various

... occupying its back, and the sciatic hastening to escape from it. It is not difficult to imagine that these, to a certain degree, will sympathize with the healthy and also the morbid state of the rectum; and that, when it is inert, or asleep, or diseased, they also may be powerless too. Here is something like fact to establish a very important theory, and which should be deeply considered by ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt

... brutish passions, and from these are born the bitter fruits of ignorance and hatred. The secularist is one in whom the intellect is passionate, and the passions cold. The supernaturalist on the other hand reverses the order, and in him the passions are active and the intellect inert. In each man there dwells a tyrant who creates for him a deity materialized out of these factors of ignorance and fear. It is science and reason which must destroy for him this monstrous apparition. But, as yet, there is no ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks

... leading up to a temple, and among the crowd a little girl of four or five years was thrown down the steps, cutting a severe gash on her forehead. With the usual dullness of ignorance, a crowd gathered about the now insensible child, frightened at the sight of blood, while the mother stood inert, where the child lay upon the ground, her own agonized features and clasped hands forming a picture of despair. No experienced traveler will be without sticking-plaster, and for us to pick up the child, wash out the wound, draw the lips carefully ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou

... They passed by the inert figure on the floor and out, Kendric with his left hand always on her arm. Again the knife was hidden under his coat, but his fingers did ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory

... a king, foolish, inert, and lazy, at a time when all other nations are active, and work gloriously, while we sleep? Gentlemen, pardon me for saying before a prince, who will perhaps blame my temerity (for he has the prejudices of family), ...
— Chicot the Jester - [An abridged translation of "La dame de Monsoreau"] • Alexandre Dumas

... enters farms to devastate the poultry yards. When he is discovered he runs away, but is soon caught, and blows from sticks rain upon him. Seeing that he cannot escape correction he seeks at least to save his life. Letting his head fall and straightening his inert legs he receives the blows without flinching. Often he is considered dead, and abandoned. The cunning little beast, who desires nothing better, arises, shakes himself, and rather bruised, but at all events alive, takes his way ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay

... desultory and erratic. Conscious of their power, they are supposed to have subjected it to system and discipline. They apply its secret and trackless energy with an intentness and a vigour, which ordinary mortals may in vain attempt to emulate in an application of the force of inert matter, or of the different physical powers by means of which such stupendous effects have often been produced.—How universal and familiar then must we consider the ideas of witchcraft to have been before language which properly describes the secret practices of such persons, and ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin

... version the tender concern and questioning surprise of the attendant angels contrast with the inert weight of the beautiful dead body they support. Their childish limbs and butterfly wings make a sinuous pattern against the lacquered black of the ground-work, and Mr. Roger Fry makes the interesting suggestion that the effect, ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps

... their previous diseased condition. These tubercular deposits must have disposed of themselves in one of three ways: first, they might soften down and be expectorated; second, they might soften and be absorbed; or, thirdly, they might become calcined and remain as inert foreign material. In many cases all these processes might unite in the removal, and a long life follow, as is well known in ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill

... a rock, watching her without understanding. Yarra, who had stolen near to Ryder's body, crouched upon the rock, staring intently at the face of his friend. Presently Jim noticed that Lucy was lying inert, and he lifted her to the pool and bathed her forehead with the cool water. Yarra brought a pannikin and a bottle containing brandy from the cave, and Jim poured a little of the spirit between the girl's lips. Lucy revived after ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson

... living and incorruptible Spirit of God was in all things, whether ape or man, whether beast or human; ay, and in the very flowers and grass of the field, and in every element of all that is ignorantly thought to be dead and inert matter. So that the soul of man, he said, is one with the soul that is in all Nature, only that when man is truly human, in him alone the soul becomes self-knowing and self-concentrated; the mirror of Heaven, and the focus of ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford

... whispered, still standing very straight in the middle of the doorway. She was not looking at the inert thing on the walk below, but into her father's eyes. He did not, could not answer. He seemed frozen stiff. She went on in the same dull, whispered monotone. "I begged him to let me come alone. I begged him to let me see you first. But he would come. He brought me all the way ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon

... peace. She lay on her bed, now smiling, now inert, eyes closed, weak and relaxed, but already aware from time to time of the beginnings within herself of new vitality, food for her child. Her body felt profoundly changed, and so it was with her spirit. Again the thought rose in her mind ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole

... reproduce themselves with much difficulty when deprived of air, and gradually become more languid; and if they do multiply, it is in strange and monstrous forms. A little older still, they remain absolutely inert in a medium deprived of free oxygen. This is not because they are dead; for in general they may be revived in a marvellous manner in the same liquid if it has been first aerated before they are sown. It would not surprise us to learn that at this point certain preconceived ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various

... things differently. We went out with arms in our hands, and hewed out spaces in savagery for homes. You don't seem to see it; but you are straining every nerve merely to shift people from many places to one, and there to exploit them. You wind your coils about an inert mass, you set the dynamo of your power of organization at work, and the inert mass becomes a great magnet. People come flying to it from the four quarters of the earth, and the first-comers levy tribute upon them, as the price of ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick

... crying and half inert with mental anguish and pain, she could not afterwards have told. Nor did she know what it was that roused her from this torpor, and caused her suddenly to sit up in her chair, upright, wide-awake, her every sense on ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... variety of pills, potions and lozenges too numerous to mention. So also are those marvelous discoverers of "hair restorers," "removers of freckles," and so on. Most of these do little harm beyond lightening the purses of the purchasers, and in some cases the administration of an inert substance, by exciting the victim's imagination, produces a cure. But the great injury, so far as these innoxious preparations are concerned, lies in the fact that they prevent the sufferer from seeking proper professional treatment. Still this class of quacks is rather to be reckoned ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe

... the whole future of the individual is so strongly stamped. To come into contact with no stimulus and arousing agent in the home, or the neighborhood in the earliest years is to become settled into a life-long habit of inert dullness. ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

... careless of me," he admitted, "and when our friend here perks up I'll apologise. I say, old chap," taking one of the inert wrists, "can't ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris

... the mottled bottom. Over the edge of the stone came swimming slowly one of the gold-and-azure fish, its jewelled, impassive eyes on the watch for some small prey. Up from the bottom, swift as a whip-lash, darted one of those inert-looking weed-stems, and fastened about the bright fish ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts

... opened it, and was astonished. It was a treatise on entomology. A history of ants by an English author. And as he remained inert, believing that he was making sport of her, she ...
— Yvette • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant

... magnificence, and that repose which springs from long prosperity, that the new age at last began. Europe was, as it were, a fallow field, beneath which lay buried the civilization of the Old World. Behind stretched the centuries of mediaevalism, intellectually barren and inert. Of the future there were as yet but faint foreshadowings. Meanwhile, the force of the nations who were destined to achieve the coming transformation was unexhausted, their physical and mental faculties were unimpaired. No ages ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... this bet because—the odds are all against me." He smiled, letting her hands swing back and hang inert ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers

... and oppressed too. Worse than before. He felt himself rotting earthwards, like a fungus of his own native forests under autumn rains. His body remained inert but his eye, roaming away from the straw pallet, fixed itself upon the door. When, when would that kindly gentleman ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... whirling missile caught the bartender full in the face and without a sound he crashed backward carrying Ike Stork with him to the floor. The next instant the Texan was upon his feet and a gun in each hand, grinned down into the face of the terrified man who lay helplessly pinned by the inert form of the bartender. "Any friends or relations you want notified, Isaac, or any special disposal of the remains?" he questioned, as the guns waved back and forth above the ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx

... boys and girls whose mental and moral development has been markedly retarded because of mouth breathing. One need only look at a child or adult who constantly keeps his or her mouth open to be impressed by the listless, vacant, inert appearance of the face thus disfigured. Figure 74 shows a photograph of a schoolgirl just before an operation and the characteristic expression due to adenoids is plainly marked. Earache is largely due to adenoids or to inflammation that rapidly leads ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden

... a morning of the warmest week of mid-July, and Canaan lay inert and helpless beneath a broiling sun. The few people who moved about the streets went languidly, keeping close to the wall on the shady side; the women in thin white fabrics; the men, often coatless, carrying palm-leaf fans, and replacing collars with handkerchiefs. In the Court-house yard ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington

... feel like sleeping," said Fuller. "You may call this safe, but it would only take an instant to fall down to the surface of that thing there." He looked down at their inert, but titanically powerful enemy whose baleful glow seemed even now to ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell

... the field. My farmer describes how they attended him one foggy day, as he was mowing in the meadow with a mowing-machine. It had been foggy for two days, and the swallows were very hungry, and the insects stupid and inert. When the sound of his machine was heard, the swallows appeared and attended him like a brood of hungry chickens. He says there was a continued rush of purple wings over the "cut-bar," and just where it was ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs

... showed him that this would be impossible, for the poor fellow had sunk over sidewise as soon as he had been lifted out of the saddle, and lay perfectly inert and with his eyes half-closed. West knelt down by him and, taking his slung water-bottle, he raised his injured companion's head a little and began to trickle, a few drops at a time, a little water between the ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn

... chemical and organic compounds, by natural forces, upon the cessation of which, it is liberated by nature's great destroyer, and re-appears in the world of elements. Thus, man is formed out of the very dust by means of energies which reconstruct the crude, inert matter, and to dust he returns ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... which Lena's little feet had lately trod, many and serious thoughts had come to her; thoughts of which those about her were all unconscious, as she lay seemingly inert and passive from exhaustion, except when pain forced complaint from her; and chief among these had been the recollection of the unpleasant relation which for some time had existed between herself and Gracie Howard, and which had culminated in the attack of jealousy and ill-temper ...
— Bessie Bradford's Prize • Joanna H. Mathews

... of the men to escape to warn the Wongolo. At an hour after sunrise they arrived at the village. The majority of the paddlers were so exhausted that they dropped in the canoes and had to be thrown ashore, where they lay inert, their backs, bloody with the urgent bayonet pricks, ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle

... and the impotent forms of the will. In its normal and complete form will culminates in an act; but with wavering characters and sufferers from abulia deliberation never ends, or the resolution remains inert, incapable of realization, of asserting itself in practice. The creative imagination also, in its complete form, has a tendency to become objectified, to assert itself in a work that shall exist not only for the creator but for everybody. ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot

... proclaim it, and withdraw his people from the rebellion, in pursuance of what was known as the policy of "separate State action." I told him, if he saw Governor Brown, to describe to him fully what he had seen, and to say that if he remained inert, I would be compelled to go ahead, devastating the State in its whole length and breadth; that there was no adequate force to stop us, etc.; but if he would issue his proclamation withdrawing his State troops from the armies of the Confederacy, ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman

... this phase of the disaster. Still he was hoping, against hope, that human life had not been dashed and roasted out, in the wreck. And again he shouted, as he worked his way to the other side of the machine—to the side which, seen from the cliff above, had seemed to show him that inert ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England

... distinct methods, for it is true of people who have been allowed to remain undeveloped and whose facilities are inert and sterile, that they cannot take their learning heavily. It has to be diffused in a social atmosphere, information must be held in solution, in a medium of fellowship and good will. Intellectual life requires for its expansion and manifestation ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... although the old system still stands in many countries with the inert stolidity of established institutions, it no longer commands general approval. As Paul and Victor Margueritte have truly stated, in the course of an acute examination of the phenomena of state-regulated prostitution as found in Paris, the system is "barbarous to start with and ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... a chair in such a state of depression that he could think no more, he remained inert without the power of suffering, till little by little the soul, recovered from its torpor, came to itself in ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans

... good, solid stuff, no doubt: but tame, inert, if not actually lifeless. As M. Jusserand says of Anglo-Saxon poetry in general, it is like the river Saone—one doubts which way it flows. How tame in comparison with ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... work in the universe would not let it remain so. Out of space would come the persistent call of gravitation: atoms would cry silently to atoms. There could be no perfect equality of pull on all sides; from one side or another the pull would be the stronger. Slowly the inert mass would obey and begin falling toward it; it might be an inch at a time, but with rapid increase, until at last it also was hastening some whither in this universe which appears to us to ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton

... these Russian sons of Anak, Friedrich Wilhelm grudged not to send German smiths, millwrights, drill-sergeants, cannoneers, engineers; having plenty of them. By whom, as Peter well calculated, the inert opaque Russian mass might be kindled into luminosity and vitality; and drilled to know the Art of War, for one thing. Which followed accordingly. And it is observable, ever since, that the Russian Art of War has a tincture of GERMAN in it (solid German, as contradistinguished from unsolid Revolutionary-French); ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle

... have been laid open by her," continued the diminutive priest. "Inert matter is engaged in warlike commotion and she hath brought fire down from the heavens to entertain her. She hath placed our land in such a state of defence that no invader can approach it; she hath brought from over the great black water the ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux

... young ladies had tried to whistle till their mouths ached, when the voice of Captain Willis was heard ordering the crew to trim sails. With alacrity they flew to their posts at the joyful sound; and those who but a minute before were so silent and inert, were now all ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston

... generally at least one dealer who adheres to fixed prices for his goods. A daily paper is now published in Chinese at Shanghai, and the English school there is well patronized. All these things convince me that at last Western civilization is making an impression. The inert mass begins to move, and China will march forward ere long. The most convincing proof of this is found, perhaps, in the fact that the government appropriated in 1872 nearly two millions of dollars to maintain a hundred and fifty students in the United ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie

... the front upon a trench, digging with knives and cocoa-shells; and a continuous stream of children brought them water. The young sappers worked crouching; from the outside only an occasional head, or a hand emptying a shell of earth, was visible; and their enemies looked on inert from the line of the opposing forts. The lists were not yet prepared, the tournament was not yet open; and the attacking force was suffered to throw up works under the silent guns of the defence. But there is an end even to the delay of islanders. As the white men ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... wire," said he; and dropping his own wire, he put his hand over the cylinder, with his fingers dipping into the vessel from which the other wire sprang. When the wire hummed under the tuning-fork and the vibration thrilled again, instantly he felt as if an inert obstruction had been removed. The vibratory influence whirled wildly through him, there was a pause of a second or two (which seemed to him many minutes in duration), and then suddenly a kind of rigor ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban

... had been flowing through many places a current of talk about America. What was she going to do? Was she going to do anything at all? Would it be possible for her hugeness, her power, her wealth to remain inert in a world crisis? Would she be content tacitly to admit the truth of old accusations of commerciality by securing as her part in the superhuman conflict the simple and unadorned making of money through the dire necessities ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... strength was gone, exhausted, fighting against the impassive snowy depths that always held him back. Once or twice he fell, but his will brought him to his feet again, and he went on, his mind now directing wholly the almost inert mass ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler

... profoundest terror; and the panic in fact almost amounted to absurdity, the inhabitants of this thickly-populated province nowhere venturing to rise against the handful of robbers by whom they were so cruelly persecuted. A Baron von Puckler offered an individual exception: his endeavors to rouse the inert masses met with no success, and, rendered desperate by his failure, he blew out his brains. When too late a prince of Anhalt-Pless assembled an armed force in Upper Silesia and attempted to relieve Breslau, but Thiele neglecting to make a sally at the ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks

... is cold and inert, has been represented, has it not? as enveloped in a deep and sublime silence. But the reader must please to receive a very different impression; nothing can give any fit idea of the tremendous tumult of a day ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams

... reward, caught him, pulled him away and held him off until Haines, pale with rage, rose to his feet and began kicking his assailant vigorously. With the aid of well-directed blows of his fists he forced the Negro down, who, unable to regain his feet, finally, whether from fear or exhaustion, lay inert, until the constable, having worked off his worst anger, and not deeming it to his advantage seriously to disable the prisoner, in whom he had a pecuniary interest, ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt

... been lying in a rough bunk in the mountain cabin, and David, beside him on a wooden box, had been bending forward and feeling his pulse. He had felt weak and utterly inert, and he knew now that he had been very ill. The cabin had been a small and lonely one, with snow-peaks not far above it, and it had been very cold. During the day a woman kept up the fire. Her name was Maggie, ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... impression? Is it the action of a dead substance, which cannot act upon a living substance that can? Assuredly not! Is it not rather the recognition by the living substance of the lifeless one? The whole theory of drug action is easily explainable on this hypothesis. Drugs—inert substances—do not act upon the living organism, but are acted upon, with a view to their expulsion from the living domain. If it were not so, if drugs really acted upon the various organs, then their action ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell

... humanity. Like the earth they master and serve, those men, slow of eye and speech, do not show the inner fire; so that, at last, it becomes a question with them as with the earth, what there is in the core: heat, violence, a force mysterious and terrible—or nothing but a clod, a mass fertile and inert, cold and unfeeling, ready to bear a crop of plants that sustain life or ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad

... The student of history will not fail to see in these facts striking testimony of the extraordinary resources of China, and of the capacity of resistance to even a vigorous conqueror possessed by its inert masses. Even the Mongols did not conquer until they had obtained the aid of a large section of the Chinese nation, or before Kublai had shown that he intended to prove himself a worthy Emperor of China and not merely a great Khan of the ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger

... obtained a fair earnest of success. The exclusion of all other qualities of light save that with which he desired to operate, was accomplished by using chloride of silver as his sensitive material, that substance being chemically inert to all other but those precise rays in which the corona has the advantage.[544] Plates thus sensitised received impressions which it was hardly possible to regard as spurious. "Not only the general features," Captain Abney affirmed,[545] "are ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... 'the surest calculation that can be made,—as the unavoidable keystone of every individual life.' A grim consolation, you think? True; but all I shall ever receive. Dr. Grey, in your estimation I am sinfully inert and self-indulgent; and you conscientiously commend my idle hands to the benevolent work of knitting socks for indigent ditchers, and making jackets for pauper children. Now, although it is considered neither orthodox nor modest to furnish left-hand with a trumpet for sounding the praises of ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson

... my plan and went down out of the village by a steep road towards the shore. I wandered down through the rain and spindrift to the very edge of the sea, and there found a corner among the rocks a little sheltered from the wind, and sat, inert and wretched; my lips salt, my hair stiff with salt, and my body wet and cold; a miserable defeated man. For I had now an irrational and entirely overwhelming conviction of defeat. I saw as if I ought always to have seen that I had been pursuing a phantom of hopeless happiness, that my dream ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells

... matter of their vital experiences possesses. They learn not to expect that sort of reality of it; they become habituated to treating it as having reality for the purposes of recitations, lessons, and examinations. That it should remain inert for the experiences of daily life is more or less a matter of course. The bad effects are twofold. Ordinary experience does not receive the enrichment which it should; it is not fertilized by school learning. ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey

... may thank Clement for dispelling a chimera by a simple act of consistency. The power of the See of Rome in England was a constitutional fiction, acknowledged only on condition that it would consent to be inert. So long as a legate's court sat in London, men were able to conceal from themselves the fact of a foreign jurisdiction, and to feel that, substantially, their national independence was respected; when the fiction aspired to become ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude

... snored. The clock ticked softly. The logs fell apart in a red glow. In drawing away from the flying sparks, Joyce placed her stool nearer Gaston, and the pretty bent head came within easy distance of the hand lying inert ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock

... there were at least fourscore thousand more. But when he had recovered from his surprise on being told of this army, which has not its parallel, what must be his astonishment to be told again, that this mighty force was kept up for the mere purpose of an inert and passive defence, and that in its far greater part, it was disabled by its constitution and very essence from defending us against an enemy by any one preventive stroke, or any one operation of active hostility? What must his reflections be ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke

... noted the purity of her face, the beautiful pose of her body, stretched in the deck-chair, her fine white hands and arms that hung there, slender, inert and frail. He admired these things so much that he failed to see that they expressed not only beauty but a certain delicacy of physique, and that her languor which appealed to him was the ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair

... half-finished houses. A curve at its upper end hid the thoroughfare beyond, although the sound of wheels and the hoarse cries of hucksters were audible to him as he dropped upon one knee, and gently raised the inert figure. Blood was upon it; he felt it and knew that it was staining his hand. Had no one heard that dreadful, thrilling cry but himself? It seemed not. He shouted loudly with the ...
— A Bachelor's Dream • Mrs. Hungerford

... carefully around the sharp ledge corner, and they went on again. Her arms seemed almost paralyzed, but they clung to the child ahead, and the child ahead clung to the little dog, who hung very straight and inert in ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White

... accost him; they shake him and put irons on his wrists, and he cannot resist, for he is still more than half asleep. He sleeps in the wagon into which he is thrust; in the boat, where he lies utterly inert; and how happy he is after being thus buffeted about to finally throw himself on a straw pallet, shut out from all further disturbance by ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet

... further. It has to be remembered that the Actors of Life, interesting as they are, exist for the audience, and not the audience for the Actors. The Actors are the abnormal and exceptional people, born out of due time, at variance with the environment; that is why they are Actors. This vast inert mass of people, with no definite individualities of their own, they are normal and healthy Humanity, born to consume the Earth's fruits, even when these fruits happen to be dancers and suffragettes. It is thus that harmony is established between Actors and Spectators; neither ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis

... light of stairway and landings she seemed to feel, to see, a ghostly procession, sad-eyed, weary. But Captain Forsythe had said that John Steele had helped many, many. Her own heart seemed strangely inert, without life; she stood suddenly still, as if asking herself why she ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham

... the physics labs was operating on the differential ability of various gas molecules to "leak" through plastic membranes under pressure, causing separation of the various molecular constituents of the atmosphere; shunting carbon dioxide off in one direction, and returning oxygen and the inert nitrogen and other gases ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond

... save him. The Dutch ambassador made vigorous efforts to procure a reprieve, while the French and Spanish ambassadors were inert. The ambassadors from the states nevertheless persevered, and early in the day of the 30th obtained some glimmering of hope from Fairfax. "But we found," they say in their despatch, "in front of the house in which we had just ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various

... of a heavy body as it fell. And then, heaven and earth seemed to stand still for one awful minute as, feeling no further resistance, he raised himself and looked down upon his friend, William Hapgood. Inert and still he lay, with his skull crushed in just above ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry

... pillows in a sitting posture, gazed vaguely before her with the eyes of an idiot. The death of her son had been like a blow on the head that had felled her senseless to the ground. For hours she remained tranquil and inert, absorbed in her despair; then she was at times seized with attacks of weeping, shrieking ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola

... awnings—leaning against the wall by the post-office, sitting on boxes by the grocery; some indolently telling stories and chaffing; some looking sleepily before them in absolute repose; some in various stages of inert drunkenness. All stared curiously at young Strong and the strange lady, and prepared to talk them over afterward, but ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various

... up in his nightshirt and walked about. It was good to feel his way in the dark in this cool silent house which he knew so well. Soon his nerves felt quieter. He went back to his bed and lay there inert. How good it would be to get ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole

... chronometer with a movement somewhat like that of his own heart, therefore he is mechanical, metallic, and round. Against this anthropomorphic materialism science lifts up its voice; for what modern philosopher, worthy of the name, fails to distinguish between phenomenon and fact, inert matter and active force? Says a recent writer, "We infer that as our own master of the mint is neither a sovereign nor a half-sovereign, so the force which coins and recoins this ulh, or matter, must be altogether in the god-part and none of it in the metal ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley

... ever in action, for ever in contention, and from excelling in them all other mortals, what advantage derive we? I would not ask what satisfaction, what glory? The insects have more activity than ourselves, the beasts more strength, even inert matter more firmness and stability; the gods alone more goodness. To the exercise of this every country lies open; and neither I eastward nor you westward have found any ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor

... sat down, lighted a cigarette, and stared moodily out of the window, down upon the shifting crowd which still thronged the beach. His hand, hanging inert by his side, became suddenly the receptacle for a ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson

... while to practical purpose itself, that larger and more profound invention, which poetry stimulates, supplied the grand design and the subtle view—leading him beyond the mere ingenuity of the mechanic, and habituating him to regard the inert force of the matter at his command with the ambition of the Discoverer. But, above all, the discontent that was within him, finding a vent, not in deliberate war upon this actual world, but through the purifying channels of song—in ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various

... rise to, and his heart, his simple heart, was torn with pity. He was no judge, not he; not even a merciful judge; he was a man full of weakness and a son full of love. He remembered nothing of what his brother had told him; he neither reasoned nor argued, he merely laid his two hands on his mother's inert body, and not being able to pull the pillow away, he exclaimed, kissing ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant

... girl said. Immediately this was done; Claire remained quite still. Her cheeks were smouldering and her left hand was lying inert in ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell

... beginning than the Divine Thought of which it is the utterance,—no more than the Deity Himself. The duration of the Universe is but a point halfway upon the infinite line of eternity; and God was not inert and uncreative during the eternity that stretches behind that point. The Archetype of the Universe did never not exist in the Divine Mind. The Word was in the BEGINNING with God, and WAS God. And the Ineffable NAME is that, not of the ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... would naturally grow out of and unite with these, the multitudes, who have risen, stand; and, if they desert them, must fall.—Riddance, mere riddance—safety, mere safety—are objects far too defined, too inert and passive in their own nature, to have ability either to rouze or to sustain. They win not the mind by any attraction of grandeur or sublime delight, either in effort or in endurance: for the mind gains consciousness of its strength to undergo only by exercise among materials which admit ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... imply the same thing. Will, and a confidence in its efficiency, "travel through, nor quit us till we die." It is this which inspires us with invincible perseverance, and heroic energies, while without it we should be the most inert and soulless of blocks, the shadows of what history records and poetry immortalises, ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin

... remedy is not difficult. It is to grow clover less frequently on such soils. Sufficient time must be given to enable more of the inert potash in the subsoil to become available. Another way would be to apply potash somewhat freely to these soils, and subsoil them where this ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw

... by drag or harrow, under the rolled earth now they lie, those mighty, those inert seeds. Down into the darkness about them the sun rays penetrate day by day, stroking them with the brushes of light, prodding them with spears of flame. Drops of nightly dews, drops from the coursing clouds, trickle down to them, moistening the dryness, ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen

... her more than an hour to do it, to pull and lift and shove the inert figure! Afterward she used to wonder how she had done it; wonder how she had given the final push, which got his sagging body up on to the floor of the wagon! It had strained every part of her;—her shoulder against his ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland

... themselves slowly and sluggishly over the boat's edge as though wishing to contemplate with their sea-green eyes this medley of white and dark bodies. The ship-wrecked men rowed with nervous desperation; then they lay down inert, recognizing the uselessness of their efforts, lost in the ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... five in the afternoon the heavy machine was still motionless—inert upon the ground. We need not attempt to describe the scene which took place as the impatience of the multitude increased. Sneers of derision made themselves heard on all sides. A universal murmur, rapidly developing into a clamour, ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion

... were approximating in their habits, their residence, and not a little in their characters. The group, of whom we write, was composed of the family of the squatter. They stood indolent, lounging, and inert, as usual when no immediate demand was made on their dormant energies, clustered in front of some four or five habitations of skin, for which they were indebted to the hospitality of their Teton allies. The terms of their unexpected confederation were sufficiently explained, by the ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper

... awful presence; one seemed to meet the immutable, the indestructible, the eternal, face to face, and to feel the trivial and fleeting nature of his own existence the more sharply by the contrast. One had the sense of being under the brooding contemplation of a spirit, not an inert mass of rocks and ice—a spirit which had looked down, through the slow drift of the ages, upon a million vanished races of men, and judged them; and would judge a million more—and still be there, watching, unchanged and unchangeable, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... bloody pool with tail and flippers; but the mighty heart sent forth its wasted life-tide, until its current was exhausted and the powerful "old hood" was like his whilom rival—a lifeless mass of inert flesh. ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall

... urban parishes possess no general administrative importance and further mention need not be made of them here. Under the act of 1894 the rural parish, however, has been revived in a measure from the inert condition into which it had fallen, and it to-day fills an appreciable if humble place in the rural administrative regime. The style of its organization is dependent to a degree upon its population. In each parish there is a meeting in ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg

... formed to overcome the Revolution and save the monarchy, remained inert and sterile. The Opposition insultingly charged it with impotence; it called it the hectoring ministry, the dullest of ministries, and, for answer, it prepared the expedition of Algiers and prorogued the Chambers, protesting always its fidelity to the Charter, promising itself to get out ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand

... this group of species there is no segregation of sclerenchyma into an effective tissue. The cones are inert under hygrometric changes and may always be recognized in herbaria by their persistent occlusion and soft tissues. The seeds are released only by the disintegration of the fallen cone. There is, however, a vicarious dissemination by predatory ...
— The Genus Pinus • George Russell Shaw

... we shall otherwise find to be abundantly certain; and it produced conspicuous definite results. It is, as it were, the one fact still worth human remembrance in this expensive Radewitz and its fooleries; and is itself left in that vague inert state,— ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle

... very few degrees less ruinous and disgusting. What would one of your Yankee farmers say to such abodes? When I think of the white houses, the green blinds, and the flower plots, of the villages in New England, and look at these dwellings of lazy filth and inert degradation, it does seem amazing to think that physical and moral conditions so widely opposite should be found among people occupying a similar place in the social scale of the same country. The Northern farmer, however, thinks it no shame to work, the ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble

... life. He sees that mercy which overlooks the sins of man when repentance is pure; but his life is full of moral blemishes; he has sinned against the innocent, against the God of forgiveness. The inert of his nature is unfolding itself,—he has lived according to the tolerated vices of society-he has done no more than the law gave him a right to do! And yet, that very society, overlooking its own wrongs, would now strip him of its associations. He lives in a ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams

... sign of interest. His fingers finished rolling the cigarette. Not another muscle of the inert body moved. ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine

... skin tepee, where all three had been summarily placed, Maren Le Moyne sat with her head upon her arms and her arms crossed on her drawn-up knees. Across the opening, just inside the flap, the body of McElroy lay inert, though she knew that a low breath rose and fell within him, for she had laid a hand upon his breast. Beside her, close in the darkness, De Courtenay sat upright and alert, as if no forty hours of torture had hail their will of him. She could ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe

... examined—one being of partially burnt bone, and another of chalk, the third, consisting chiefly of vegetable matter, resembled a bezoar,—all of them (except the first, which possessed a slight absorbent power) were quite inert, and incapable of having any effect exclusive of that on the imagination of the patient. Thunberg was shown the snake-stone used by the boers at the Cape in 1772, which was imported for them "from the Indies, especially from Malabar," ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... exhalation; and, as out of darkness and death, he called into birth the flowers and the numberless forests,—even as he himself was every morning born anew out of darkness,—so he called the children of the earth to a glorious rising in his light. Everything of the earth was inert, weighing heavily upon the sense and the heart, only waiting its transfiguration and exaltation through his power, until it should rise into the heavens; which was the type of his translation to ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various

... holding before her the tape that had told her the story—and not realizing that she held it. Then the man awoke from his sleep-walker's vacancy and realized her presence. At the sight of her despairing eyes and inert figure resting for support against the mahogany panels, his expression altered. His eyes woke to life and, again moistening his lips, he forced the ghost of a smile which at first ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck

... Standing behind the bushes—against which I now placed the gun to be nearer at hand—I watched the nets till my eye was caught by the motions of the ferret-bag. It lay on the grass and had hitherto been inert. But now the bag reared itself up, and then rolled over, to again rise and again tumble. The ferrets left in it in reserve were eager to get out—sharp set on account of a scanty breakfast—and their motions caused the bag to roll ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies

... awake. And as she leaned over him, searching the dim and wrinkled eyes, she read something in their unwonted luster that struck her silent. It was only when she heard her brother's step on the stairs that she roused herself, bent, and kissed the aged head lying there inert among the pillows. ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers

... abundant. Specimens of six distinct genera were found, including the large red howler, inert and easily located by its deep, roaring bellow which can be heard for a distance of several miles; the giant black spider monkey, very alert, and, when frightened, fairly flying through the branches at astonishing ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham









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