DICTIONARY ONE.COM • More 'Monotonous' Quotes from Famous Books

... of the taller of the twin poplars that flanked the picket gate opening upon the Gwynnes' little garden sat a robin, his head thrown back to give full throat to the song that was like to burst his heart, monotonous, unceasing, rapturous. On the door step of the Gwynnes' house, arrested on the threshold by the robin's song, stood the Gwynne boy of ten years, his eager face uplifted, himself poised ...

— The Major • Ralph Connor

... prerogative, which so eminently distinguishes us from the rest of the animal creation. The dog, the cat, the horse, the bear, the lion, all of them have voice. But we may almost consider this as their reproach. They can utter for the greater part but one monotonous, eternal sound. ...

— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin

... take branding irons, and use them to mark each of their camping-places with its number. This is especially useful in Australian travel, where the country is monotonous, and there are few natives to tell ...

— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton

... As their monotonous chant rose high, Nazu was rushed to the edge of the pit. The ghastly, shimmering heat-ghost drifted hungrily to await the flinging of the slight form into its consuming embrace. Carr was glad to see that Ora ...

— Creatures of Vibration • Harl Vincent

... more struck than upon this occasion by the inexhaustible variety and extent of his information. He is not so agreeable as such powers and resources ought to make any man, because the vessel out of which it is all poured forth is so ungraceful and uncouth; his voice unmusical and monotonous, his face not merely inexpressive but positively heavy and dull, no fire in his eye, no intelligence playing round his mouth, nothing which bespeaks the genius and learning stored within and which burst out with such extraordinary force. It ...

— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville

... jealousy expressed by Don Garcia is neither sufficiently terrible to frighten, nor ridiculous enough to amuse the audience; he always speaks and acts as a prince, and hence, he sometimes becomes royally monotonous. ...

— Don Garcia of Navarre • Moliere

... at that, never removing your eyes from it for a moment, and see what happens." And, thus saying, the man went and squatted himself upon his heels in the centre of the floor, and began to chant, in a low, monotonous voice, certain words the meaning of which ...

— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood

... surviving records of the court-martial with which we are concerned go to show that he was certainly not a gifted speaker. His vocabulary was limited, his rhetoric clumsy, and Major Carruthers denounces his delivery as halting, his very voice dull and monotonous; also his manner, reflecting his mind on this occasion, appears to have been perfectly unimpassioned. He had been saddled with a duty and he must perform it. He would do so conscientiously to the best of his ability, for he seems to ...

— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini

... gather, and gather, and gather, Until they crowd the sky, And listen, in breathless silence, To the solemn litany. It begins in rocky caverns, As a voice that chants alone To the pedals of the organ In monotonous undertone; And anon from shelving beaches, And shallow sands beyond, In snow-white robes uprising The ghostly choirs respond. And sadly and unceasing The mournful voice sings on, And the snow-white ...

— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... lengthening, wrapped in thought, unheeding what was taking place around him. This worried her a great deal, and a new sense of responsibility began to shape itself in her mind. She believed that he missed his old home in Connecticut more than he would acknowledge, and that he was wearying of the monotonous life in the wilderness. Perhaps he needed a change, and she wondered how this ...

— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody

... soul; I think it full of deep pathos and beauty. All I wish away is the marriage hymn at the end, and that for every reason I wish away—it's a discord in the music. The monotony is a part of the position—(the sea is monotonous, and so is lasting grief.) Your complaint is against fate and humanity rather than against the poet Tennyson. Who that has suffered has not felt wave after wave break dully against one rock, till brain and heart, ...

— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon

... but languorous, wistful, haunting, as if it eternally pursued, through the fugitive seasons, an immortal and ineffable beauty. The enchanted crystal had been shattered in an instant, and she saw life now, not imprisoned in magical sunshine, but gray, sordid, monotonous, as utterly hopeless as the faces thronging in Broadway. Yet not many months ago she had seen in these, same faces the inward hope, the joy in sadness, the gaiety in disappointment, which had brightened the world for her. Then she had been aware of an invisible current flowing from the ...

— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow

... respectable families. On sunny afternoons there were the same groups of clerics and military airing themselves in the Bombe. The great bells of the cathedral continued to peal at certain hours, when old lady-devotees were seen hastily wending their way to the service of the rosary, or nones, and the monotonous voice of the canons sounded solemnly in the silence of the ...

— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds

... bore up against the flatness and sameness of our lives. The sea, of all things, grows heavy and wearing to people whose constitutions are not capable of drinking in health and elasticity from its exhilarating breezes. There is nothing so monotonous as the wailing and lashing sea, especially in the night time, when darkness covers it, and its presence is announced only by that eternal surging and moaning of the waters which strike upon the invalided fancy like the ...

— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various

... curious, hard physical labour! One actually stops thinking. I often work long without any thought whatever, so far as I know, save that connected with the monotonous repetition of the labour itself—down with the spade, out with it, up with it, over with it—and repeat. And yet sometimes—mostly in the forenoon when I am not at all tired—I will suddenly have a sense as of the world opening around me—a sense of its beauty and ...

— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson

... of an opportunity to stretch their legs, and then they tried their luck at fishing, also. After a time this became monotonous for the active young ones, and they started up the Creek to adventure. The Third Lake Creek came down over moss-covered rocks, which were held in place by gnarled roots of giant trees. These ancient foresters stood looking benignly down upon the placid waters of the lake, as if watching the ...

— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy

... I cannot remember, nor is it of any importance. He was not an intellectual man, nor had he many gifts beyond his rather sleek manner and a soft manageable voice. He was obviously proud of that, and reckoned it an instrument of success. It became as monotonous to me as the slow oily swell of a tropic sea in calm. I would have preferred a Boanerges, a bitter John Knox. The intent of his sermon was the usual one at such periods; this was the end of the year, the beginning was at hand. Naturally he addressed himself to ...

— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts

... seldom came in much before it was time to dress for dinner; but young men's habits are not usually very regular, the monotonous custom of doing everything by clockwork being a tedious concomitant of old age. Maud could not calculate on his absence at any particular hour of the day unless he were on duty, and the bare notion that she should wish thus to calculate ...

— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville

... steamer was under way. He could, however, see nothing. A sort of shutter was fastened outside the scuttle, which gave him the opportunity to take a glimpse of the sky, but nothing of the shore or water. Nothing could be more monotonous than the journey, and yet the air and light that came down through the port-hole rendered it far more pleasant than existence in a prison cell. He knew, too, that, dull as it was in the cabin, there would be little to see on deck, for the shores of the rivers ...

— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty

... but of that empty lie called drapery. The purpled silks of Titian's Lilac Lady, in the Pitti, the embroidered hems of Boccaccini da Cremona, the crimson velvet of Raphael's Joanna of Aragon, Veronese's cloth of silver and shot taffety, are replaced by one monotonous nondescript stuff, differently dyed in dull or glaring colors, but always shoddy. Characteristic costumes have disappeared. We shall not find in any of their Massacres of the Innocents a soldier like Bonifazio's Dall'Armi. ...

— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... till she has grown to perfect womanhood that he discovers that he has given his love to the daughter of his enemy. This is a noble story, but the workmanship, though good of its kind, is hardly adequate to the idea. The style lacks grace, movement and variety. It is correct but monotonous. Seriousness, like property, has its duties as well as its rights, and the first duty of a novel is to please. A Child of the Revolution hardly does that. ...

— Reviews • Oscar Wilde

... echoed oddly clear and solitary above the incessant booming of the breakers and the monotonous ...

— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume XIII, No. 51: November 12, 1892 • Various

... they came out or gone in to rest on the return. Stransom, besides, now faltered; he couldn't walk as of old. The omission made everything false; it was a dire mutilation of their lives. Our friend was frank and monotonous, making no mystery of his remonstrance and no secret of his predicament. Her response, whatever it was, always came to the same thing—an implied invitation to him to judge, if he spoke of predicaments, of how much comfort she had in hers. For him indeed was no comfort even ...

— The Altar of the Dead • Henry James

... voice, with which the mind had little to do, but which kept time with the swaying of the ship and the faint lapping of the dark water, and resembled a vague improvization restrained, nevertheless, by sweet and monotonous forms." ...

— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb

... darling Athens for the Peloponnesian war. These things Mr. Stoddard feels while the locomotive shrieks in his ears, while the omnibus, speeding to the steamship, rattles the glass of his window, while the newsboy cries his monotonous advertisement, or his servant hands to him a telegraphic dispatch; and he is right. The body in which Grecian art existed, is indeed dead, but the spirit which animated it is indestructible. There will be poets to worship ...

— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various

... between him and the source of the Golden River. He entered on it with the boldness of a practised mountaineer; yet he thought he had never traversed so strange or so dangerous a glacier in his life. The ice was excessively slippery, and out of all its chasms came wild sounds of gushing water; not monotonous or low, but changeful and loud, rising occasionally into drifting passages of wild melody, then breaking off into short melancholy tones, or sudden shrieks, resembling those of human voices in distress ...

— Junior Classics, V6 • Various

... just left on the first preparatory stage of our homeward journey; and, far back on the inland level, a larger and loftier mass, the grove surrounding the great Paknam pagoda, was the only thing on which the eye could rest from the vain task of exploring the monotonous sweep of the horizon. Here and there gleams as of a few scattered pieces of silver marked the windings of the great river; and on the nearest of them, just within the bar, the tug steaming right into the land ...

— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad

... on stupefaction; but the perpetual clatter of sabots and shoes in the passage kept the mind alert and the eyes open. The chorus of the wounded rose in gusts; there were always in the adjoining wards some dozen men wounded in the head, and suffering from meningitis, which provoked a kind of monotonous howling; there were men wounded in the abdomen, and crying out for the drink that was denied them; there were the men wounded in the chest, and racked by a low cough choked with blood... and all the rest who lay moaning, hoping for an ...

— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel

... two other voices of lower pitch sing a monotonous refrain, 'Sing cuccu nu, Sing cuccu,' which they repeat ad infinitum till the four who sing the Round are tired. This refrain is called Pes (or 'foot'), and this is the kind of thing which Lucrece means ...

— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor

... hours for the two first meals were gone by. Then he was awakened. He rose, descended to his shady walk, then came out a little into the sun, as if to partake its warmth for a minute with his absent child. And then the dismal, monotonous walk recommenced, until, quite exhausted, he regained the chamber and the bed, his domicile by choice. For several days the comte did not speak a single word. He refused to receive the visits that were paid him, and, during the night, he was seen to relight his ...

— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas

... dancing. Dancing and drinking were the favorite pastimes of the Peruvians. These amusements continued for several days, though the sacrifices terminated on the first.—Such was the great festival of Raymi; and the recurrence of this and similar festivities gave relief to the monotonous routine of toil prescribed to the lower orders ...

— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott

... audible; a far-off railway whistle was startling in its abruptness. In the midst of this calm the opening of the door of the salon, with the sudden uplifting of voices in the hall, told Paul that Yerba's guests were leaving. He heard Dona Anna's arch accents—arch even to Colonel Pendleton's monotonous baritone!—Milly's high, rapid utterances, the suave falsetto of Don Caesar, and HER voice, he thought a trifle wearied,—the sound of retiring footsteps, and ...

— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte

... slightest attention or thought; the more fluently they read, the worse it is for them; for their preceptors, whilst words and sentences are pronounced with tolerable emphasis, never seem to suspect that the reader can be tired, or that his mind may be absent from his book. The monotonous tones which are acquired by children who read a great deal aloud, are extremely disagreeable, and the habit cannot easily be broken: we may observe, that children who have not acquired bad customs, always read as they speak, when they ...

— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth

... receive the new ones, proceeded to lay them out. The new specimens had all to be examined by the addition to the botanical party, their botanical and vulgar names to be recited to her, and, then, the arranging began. This was too monotonous work for the Captain, who carried the children off for a romp on the verandah. Marjorie stayed for a minute or so after they were gone, and then remembered that she had not given papa his morning button-hole. Coristine ...

— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell

... atmosphere, distinct and particular forms of treatment were necessary: others were established by convention. The question of length was left to the discretion of the musician, whose aim was not only to put the listener into a certain mood, but also to avoid rendering that mood monotonous by unduly protracting it. A further stage was reached when the interpretations of contrasted moods were made to follow one upon the other, and the charm of light and shade was discovered; and yet another step was made when the same piece of music was allowed to ...

— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche

... it seems rather an odd life for an artist: at least it strikes one as a life, despite Haydn's own opinion, not particularly conducive to originality. To use extreme language, it might almost be called a monotonous and soporific mode of existence. Probably its chief advantage was the opportunity it afforded, or perhaps the necessity it enforced, of ceaseless industry. Certainly that industry bore fruit in Haydn's ...

— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman

... proportion of his cosmos. Bobby listened to him while he spoke of the obvious motive for the deed; but when he began again, and in detail, to go over the evidence already adduced, Bobby ceased to listen. Only the monotonous cadences of the voice went on and on. The clock tick-tocked. People breathed. It reminded him ...

— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White

... clever inventors, but let us remember this is only after they have spent long years studying the problem. In the case of the steam engine, however, a quite important improvement came very curiously. Humphrey Potter was a lad employed to turn off and on the stop cocks of a Newcomen engine, a monotonous task, for, at every stroke one had to be turned to let steam into the boiler and another for injecting the cold water to condense it, and this had to be done at the right instant or the engine could not move. How to relieve himself from the drudgery ...

— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie

... though of a character somewhat uniformly rustic. Under everlasting groves is displayed an opulent and monotonous verdure, in the thickness of which contented-looking oxen ruminate. I can understand my coachman's twelve meals; the idea of eating must occur frequently and almost exclusively to the imagination of any man who spends his life in the midst of this rich nature, ...

— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet

... come. I was driven out of my attic during the middle hours of the day, and the others found it pleasanter on the doubly shaded stoop than in their chambers. We were thus thrown more together than usual,—a circumstance which made our life more monotonous to the others, as I could see; but to myself, who could at last talk to Eunice, and who was happy at the very sight of her, this 'heated term' seemed borrowed from Elysium. I read aloud, and the sound of my own voice gave me confidence; many passages suggested ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various

... describe the voyage in detail. Africa, with all it meant, was behind us, England was before, and the intervening time, monotonous though it was, passed quickly with that absorbing thought. My chief impression is that of living in an eternal jostle; forming interminable queues outside canteens, washing-places, and stuffy hammock-rooms ...

— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers

... a love quite separate from her affection for all the young souls in her charge, and secretly admired the strength of will which more than once had been pitted against her own; moreover, accustomed to the quiet monotonous passage of time, she suddenly realised that she needed someone young ...

— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest

... and the police. Slowly the gorgeous State-coach lumbered up to the entrance of the ground railed off for the ceremony, —and between a line of armed guards, the King alighted. Vociferous cheering again broke out on all sides, which his Majesty acknowledged in the usual formal manner by a monotonous military salute performed at regular intervals. Received with obsequious deference by all the persons concerned in the Grand National Theatre project, he conversed with one or two, shook hands with ...

— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... They take the evidence of Harding and the five Frenchmen with him. Besides, they haven't had a hanging yet, and they're keen for it. You see, things have been pretty monotonous. They haven't located anything big, and they got tired of hunting for Surprise Lake. They did some stampeding the first part of the winter, but they've got over that now. Scurvy is beginning to show up amongst them, too, and they're ...

— Smoke Bellew • Jack London

... the voice of the auctioneer, in constant and monotonous repetition, interrupted at intervals by the smart rap of his ivory mallet. I knew that the sale was going on; and, by the frequent strokes of the hammer, I could tell that it was rapidly progressing. ...

— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid

... the dreams and thoughts that set us free from sordidness, that teach our minds versatility and sympathy, that create for us hobbies and avocations of worth, that rest and refresh us. If we must be ocean liners all day, plodding between known and monotonous ports, at least we may be tramp ships at night, cargoed with strange stuffs and trafficking for lonely and ...

— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks

... wounded men. The Kursaal is built in terraces and galleries going all round the front and side of it. I took the wrong turning round one of them and found myself in the doorway of an immense ward. From somewhere inside there came loud and lacerating screams, high-pitched but appallingly monotonous and without intervals. I thought it was a man in delirium; I even thought it might be poor Fisher, of whose attacks we had ...

— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair

... Lillian found something peculiar about her. It was not the somewhat foreign dress and ornaments she wore; it was in her face, her movements, and the tone of her voice, for as she walked she sang a low, monotonous song, as if unconsciously. Lillian watched her keenly, marking the aimless motions of the little hands, the apathy of the lovely face, and the mirthless accent of the voice; but most of all the vacant fixture of the great dark eyes. Around and around she went, with ...

— The Mysterious Key And What It Opened • Louisa May Alcott

... salmon goes to smoke his pipe after meals. Get such a stream amid fields of breast-high crops surrounded by hills of pines, throw in where you please quiet water, long-fenced meadows, and a hundred-foot bluff just to keep the scenery from growing too monotonous, and you will get some faint notion of the Clackamas. The weir had been erected to pen the Chenook salmon from going further up-stream. We could see them, twenty or thirty pounds, by the score in the deep pools, or flying madly against the weir and ...

— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling

... earnest, uncompromising men are more or less open to the charge of narrowness. A man is narrow when he concentrates himself upon a point; even a cannon-shot is. Whitman was narrow in the sense that he was at times monotonous; that he sought but few effects, that he poured himself out mainly in one channel, that he struck chiefly the major chords of life. His "Leaves" do not show a great range of artistic motifs. A versatile, many-sided nature he certainly was not; a large, broad, tolerant ...

— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs

... was solidarity. It defied earthquakes. It was planted for a thousand years. The honest concrete was overlaid by a cream-stucco of honest cement. Again, this very sameness of color might have proved monotonous to the eye had it not been saved by the many flat ...

— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London

... landscape was covered with a deep snow that was evenly distributed over hollow and hill alike—the lower lying land and the higher eminences so running into one another that they could not be distinguished. The tops of the loftiest peaks, indeed, seemed to be dwarfed down to the monotonous level of the plain; and, where elevated at all, they resembled more a cluster of little round mounds like sugar- loaves ...

— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson

... nights now lingered slowly along while the captives were perishing in monotonous misery. The severity of their imprisonment was continually increased by new deprivations. No communications from the world without were permitted to reach their ears. Shutters were so arranged that even the sky was scarcely visible, and no employment whatever was allowed them to beguile ...

— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott

... but quietly, for the darkness and silence which reigned outside their little shelter, and the monotonous lapping of the waves made them drowsy; and one by ...

— The Adventure League • Hilda T. Skae

... more wan and wretched than any we had encountered yet. No songs of birds were in the air, no pleasant scents, no moving lights and shadows from swift passing clouds. Hour after hour, the changeless glare of the hot, unwinking sky, shone upon the same monotonous objects. Hour after hour, the river rolled along, as wearily and slowly ...

— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens

... a better lightning criticism of "Junius" and his style than that conveyed in Leaker's words. She had got the exact touch. "Junius," in truth, is not only empty for her, but empty for the whole world except as regards his style. There he is unquestionably great. Tumid, exaggerated, and monotonous as it often is, his style does affect one like wine. That is certainly how it affected, and still affects, me. Even at an age when I did not really know much more about the Duke of Grafton than did Leaker, and probably cared less, I had got the ...

— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... life was dull at Ehrenberg, it could not be called exactly monotonous. We were not obliged to seek our excitement outside; we had plenty of it, such as ...

— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes

... broad horizon above the lake was piled deep with clouds. Beyond the oak trees, in the southern sky, great tongues of flame shot up into the dark heavens out of the blast furnaces of the steel works. Deep-toned, full-throated frogs had begun their monotonous chant. ...

— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... that across the vast and vacant sea! Now and then a distant sail glimmered upon the horizon, but disappeared like a vanishing snowflake. The equator was crossed; the air grew colder; storm and calm followed each other; the daily entry now becomes monotonous. ...

— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard

... and the main question ordered, the yeas and nays were called on the motion to reconsider—and the intense silence succeeding the monotonous calling of the names was broken by the voice of the Speaker declaring the motion to reconsider, carried, by 112 yeas ...

— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan

... Governments it is the commonest. In France and all the best of the Continent it rules like a superstition. It is to no purpose that you prove that the pay of petty officials is smaller than mercantile pay; that their work is more monotonous than mercantile work; that their mind is less useful and their life more tame. They are still thought to be greater and better. They are decords; they have a little red on the left breast of their coat, and no argument will answer that. In England, ...

— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot

... bided the coming winter. Chill rains drizzled over the gloomy 'clearing,' and drenched the palisades and log-built barracks, raw from the axe. Buried in the wilderness, the military exiles [Legardeur and his garrison] resigned themselves as they might to months of monotonous solitude; when, just after sunset on the eleventh of December, a tall youth [and he was only an inch shorter than Lincoln, six feet three inches] came out of the forest on horseback, attended by a companion ...

— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley

... London with Squire Pinner to see those new agricultural implements—or whatever it is. They are sure to be away as much as three days. I was thinking if we could but persuade mamma to come to us for the time papa is to be away, it would be a delightful little change for her—a break in her monotonous life." ...

— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood

... was slowly dressing, he was suddenly aware of the sound of a woman's voice speaking or reading—he fancied from its monotonous cadence that it must be the latter—in some room that could not be far away from his own chamber. In those days such an accomplishment as reading was not at all common to the inhabitants of a farm, and Paul stood ...

— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green

... been a very pathetic scene in the church at East Barnet which few of those present could have witnessed without emotion. The clerk was a man of advanced age. He always conducted the singing, which must have been somewhat monotonous, as the 95th and the 100th Psalm (Old Version) were invariably sung. On one occasion, after several vain attempts to begin the accustomed melody, the poor old man exclaimed, "Well, my friends, it's no use. I'm too old. I ...

— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield

... childhood, what she had heard revealed in the most skillful feminine dissections, had cleared her understanding to a point that made the advances of hopeful men quite entertainingly obvious. Their method was appallingly similar and monotonous. She liked, rather than not, the younger ones, whose confidence that their passion was something new on earth at times refreshed her; but the navigated materialism of greater experience finally became distasteful. She ...

— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer

... tell you, it is not Hartmann, but Hartung: now, repeat it after me—not Hartmann, but Hartung.' Then Lampe, looking sulky, and drawing himself up with the stiff air of a soldier on guard, and in the very same monotonous tone with which he had been used to sing out his challenge of—Who goes there? would roar—'not Hartmann, but Hartung.' 'Now again!' Kant would say: on which again Lampe roared—'not Hartmann, but Hartung.' 'Now ...

— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... puffing and blowing as he removed his heavy boots before entering the sacred premises. On other occasions, at nightfall, when he was returning to the hotel, downcast at having discovered nothing at the mosque or the baths, he would hear, as he passed one of the Moorish houses, monotonous songs, the muffled sound of guitars, the rattle of tambourines and the light laughter of women, which made his heart beat faster. "Perhaps she is there" He would say to himself, and approaching the house he would lift the heavy knocker and ...

— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet

... almost with a feeling of irritability that he heard the quick sharp note of the "Whip-poor-will," as she flew from bough to bough of an old withered tree beside him. Another, and again another of these midnight watchers took up the monotonous never-varying cry of "Whip-poor-will, Whip-poor-will;" and then came forth, from many a hollow oak and birch, the spectral night-hawk from hidden dens, where it had lain hushed in silence all day, from dawn till sunset. Sometimes their sharp hard wings almost swept his cheek ...

— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill

... carriage made its way but very slowly, and after the lapse of two hours the travellers had arrived at a point about eight miles from the castle, at which the road strikes through a desolate and heathy flat, sloping up distantly at either side into bleak undulatory hills, in whose monotonous sweep the imagination beholds the heaving of some dark sluggish sea, arrested in its first commotion by some preternatural power. It is a gloomy and divested spot; there is neither tree nor habitation near it; its monotony is unbroken, except by here and there the grey front of a rock peering ...

— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

... largely at once but gradually grow into it. I know what it is to be on the farm and work hard day after day; there is no chance for us under the old conditions; but in higher forms of agriculture or horticulture the American people will find the greatest benefits and pleasures. It gets monotonous for a man who has a profession to stick to that all the time, day in and day out without change, week in and week out, year in and year out, and he gets to driving in a rut. If he will take up a side line it will do him much good. I have gone into nut growing for recreation, not profit, and I think ...

— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifth Annual Meeting - Evansville, Indiana, August 20 and 21, 1914 • Various

... carpeted with short green grass and bordered with acacia-bushes covered with feathery leaves and a profusion of yellow ball-shaped flowers that perfumed the air with their fragrance. The view up and down these winding flower-bordered streams was lovely. We rode for miles over this monotonous country, gradually rising to higher ground. Suddenly, almost at our very feet, a little bowl-shaped valley about half a mile in circumference opened to view. The upper rim all around was covered with smooth green grass, and the sides were hidden by ...

— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various

... on, with the paces of the horses at a slow walk growing monotonous in the extreme; and for some time past the excitement of the flight had been giving place to the first approaches of a drowsiness that was rapidly becoming invincible, when with a faint cry of joy the lad noticed, as he looked off to ...

— The King's Esquires - The Jewel of France • George Manville Fenn

... her as possible that if he were going to fall in love with her at all, that catastrophe should be postponed beyond six months from their first acquaintance. Nor did it seem extraordinary to her that she should actually look forward to those visits, and take pleasure in that monotonous intercourse. Her life was very quiet; it was natural that she should take whatever diversion came in her way, and should even be thankful for it. Mr. Juxon was an honest gentleman, a scholar and a man ...

— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford

... outbursts of ill-temper. Nobody ever knew what his wife had to endure in secret; her calm and restrained manner must have effectually hidden the constant anxiety of her life; nor had she children to warm her heart, and brighten up her monotonous existence. Little Charles, of the Reading-book, who is bid to come hither, who counted so nicely, who stroked the pussy cat, and who deserved to listen to the delightful stories he was told, was not her own son but her brother's child. When he was born, she wrote to entreat that he might be ...

— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)

... the hopeless exigencies of the occasion. With the exception of that whited sepulchre, all was neat, artistic, eminently habitable. She surveyed it critically: the "Mona Lisa," the large "Melrose Abbey," the Burne-Jones draperies, and the "Blessed Damozel" that spread a placid if monotonous culture through the rooms of educated single women. A proper appreciation of polished wood, the sanitary and aesthetic values of the open fire, a certain scheme in couch-pillows, all linked it to ...

— A Reversion To Type • Josephine Daskam

... I write, the rain of an English April pours down; the sky is leaden and cold, the houses in front of me are almost terrible in their monotonous greyness, the slate roofs are shining with the wet. Now and again people pass: a woman of the slums in a dirty apron, her head wrapped in a grey shawl; two girls in waterproofs, trim and alert notwithstanding the inclement weather, one with a music-case under her arm. ...

— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham

... a practiced mountaineer; yet he thought he had never traversed so strange or so dangerous a glacier in his life. The ice was excessively slippery; and out of all its chasms came wild sounds of gushing water: not monotonous or low, but changeful and loud, rising occasionally into drifting passages of wild melody, then breaking off into short, melancholy tones, or sudden shrieks, resembling those of human voices in distress or pain. The ice was broken into thousands of confused shapes, but ...

— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester

... taken to deal with this great evil, which has made the town of Amritsar and other parts of the district liable to serious outbreaks of fever. There are two small riverain tracts on the Bias and Ravi and a poor piece of country in Ajnala flooded by the Sakki. The main part of the district is a monotonous plain of fertile loam. The two western tahsils, Amritsar and Tarn Taran, are prosperous, Ajnala is depressed. The rainfall is moderate averaging 21 or 22 inches, and the large amount of irrigation makes the harvests secure. The chief crops ...

— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie

... sat talking till the fire-bells ceased their monotonous and ominous clang, and the late dawn of a winter morning reddened the eastern sky. It was half-past nine o'clock when they met again at their breakfast; yet late as it was, Mr. Danby, usually a very early riser, was not quite ready for it. ...

— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh

... said, 'and a monotonous life; but I must have her near me. I must keep her near me. If the thought that I may die and leave my darling, or that my darling may die and leave me, comes like a spectre, to distress my happiest hours, and is ...

— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens

... any kind of outline in a woodcut; but the rough sketch, Fig. 33., is enough to give an idea of its arrangement. The aim of the painter has been to give the intensest expression of repose, together with the enchanted lulling, monotonous motion of cloud and wave. All the clouds are moving in innumerable ranks after the sun, meeting towards the point in the horizon where he has set; and the tidal waves gain in winding currents upon the sand, with that stealthy ...

— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... the number he sought was a five-story structure of gray stone, and had evidently once been a home of wealth; but the manufacturing district had long since encroached on the region and it now was the only residence remaining in the midst of monotonous blocks of houses of industry. In fact, at dusk—the time at which Ben Stubbs paid his first visit to it—the neighborhood was practically deserted, as the factory hands who worked there during the day had all gone home and they lived in ...

— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton

... of occupation does not leave me a moment of repose, he overpowers me by his uselessness; his idle life positively wears me out. His two eyes always open and gazing at mine compel me to keep them lowered. Then his monotonous remarks: ...

— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac

... was something vividly impressive about her just now, though her pallid, prematurely mature face and the thin figure in the regulation black dress and white apron showed ordinarily only insignificant. "Tell me now," she repeated, with a monotonous emphasis that somehow moved Sarah to obedience against her will, greatly to ...

— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana

... on, and the Green family overslept each morning, Rusty began to grow very weary of the monotonous "Cuckoo! cuckoo!" which came every half hour, all day long, through the kitchen ...

— The Tale of Rusty Wren • Arthur Scott Bailey

... reaching the capital were by springless cart over the grey alkali plains, or by boat along the Grand Canal. Both were slow; neither was enjoyable, but since the latter perhaps presented fewer discomforts, Robert Hart chose to spend a week in the monotonous scenery of mudbanks, and land at Tungchow, a little town some fifteen miles from his destination. Thence he made his way over a roughly paved stone causeway—one of those roads that the Chinese proverb ...

— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon

... the human face and form, of thought, feeling and affection, we do not need gorgeous apparel to distinguish us. Moreover, if it is fitting that woman should dress in every color of the rainbow, why not man also? Clergymen, with their black clothes and white cravats, are quite as monotonous as the Quakers." Whatever may be the abstract merit of this argument, it is certain that the simplicity of Lucretia Mott's nature, is beautifully expressed by ...

— The Underground Railroad • William Still

... end. The coming of the Watchman, who has evidently been aroused by the noise, is foretold by his horn. The crowd is seized with a panic. All the brawlers disappear behind doors. The sleepy Watchman stares about him in amazement, rubs his eyes, sings the monotonous chant which publishes the hour of the night, continues on his round, and the moon shines on a quiet street in Nuremberg as ...

— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... lightly, "that's hardly worth talking about. I'll strike something. So long as you're pretty active there's generally work to be had, and when it grows monotonous you pull ...

— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss

... admit that the withdrawal of stimuli, or their monotonous repetition, are factors which do undoubtedly stand out as primary causes of sleep. We may suppose, if we like, that consciousness depends upon a certain rate of vibration which takes place in the brain structure. This vibration is maintained by the stimuli of the present, which ...

— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various

... drag of two or three seconds between numbers, there was not a change in the figure of the girl. She still lay with her back turned on him, and the only expressive part that showed was her hand. First it lay limp against her hip, but as the monotonous count proceeded ...

— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand

... recited alternately, in a monotonous voice, with an odd gravity, the points in a sort ...

— Putois - 1907 • Anatole France

... reaction may be devastating. But it's a sign of grace that they've at last discovered sufficient intelligence to be bored with their somewhat monotonous selves. And Mrs. Oglethorpe always does exactly as she pleases. Better ...

— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... sail to break its wide expanse, with never a sound to break our solitude, save the sullen murmuring wash of the surf as it rippled up on the beach, and the heavy, deep-drawn sigh of the water as it rolled back to its parent ocean, taking its weary load of pebbles and sand below, as if sick of the monotonous task, which it was doomed to continue on without cessation, with ever and for ever the same motion, now that its wild, brief orgy was o'er, and its regular routine of duty ...

— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson

... her firmness or obstinacy, which represented in her case what would have been gesture and action in another, as she replied with her deliberate strength of speech: 'No, sir, I do not forget. To lead a life as monotonous as mine has been during many years, is not the way to forget. To lead a life of self-correction is not the way to forget. To be sensible of having (as we all have, every one of us, all the children of Adam!) ...

— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens

... a monotonous, wind-swept plain, slightly undulating, its higher parts not even 500 feet above sea level. To the northward and eastward it descends gradually into the still lower lands of East Prussia and White Russia, but in the south it lifts into the foothills ...

— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various

... seeds in their calabashes. They were trying to appease the dread deity of Thunder, as did their Inca ancestors. The voice of the old priest led the worship, and for four hours there was no cessation of the monotonous song, except when he performed some mystic ceremony ...

— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray

... shabby, weather-beaten figure was uppermost, saw this figure reach for and grasp the heavy cane, saw the long arm rise and fall, heard a muffled groan, a sharp cry, a shout of agony; but the long arm rose and fell untiring, merciless, until all sounds were hushed save for a dull moaning and the monotonous sound of blows. ...

— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol

... The monotonous forest of trees became indistinct; for half an hour the rain fell in sheets—ghostly white in the dusk. It became difficult now to evade the roots and holes. It grew colder, yet there was no breeze. ...

— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith

... that time is fast approaching for the American people. They must either seize the chance of a better future, or else become a nation which is satisfied in spirit merely to repeat indefinitely the monotonous measures ...

— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly

... near the pass, miles of Arctic wastes bared themselves. All about towered bald domes, while everywhere stretched the monotonous white, the endless snow unbroken by tree or shrub, pallid and menacing, maddening to ...

— Pardners • Rex Beach

... many are unable to move their elbows. Take away the friar, gentlemen, and you will see how the Philippine edifice will totter; lacking robust shoulders and hairy limbs to sustain it, Philippine life will again become monotonous, without the merry note of the playful and gracious friar, without the booklets and sermons that split our sides with laughter, without the amusing contrast between grand pretensions and small brains, without the actual, daily representations of the tales of Boccaccio and La Fontaine! Without the ...

— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal

... on. It did go on! Their voices were monotonous, thick, emphatic. They were harshly pompous, like men in the smoking-compartments of Pullman cars. They did not bore Carol. They frightened her. She panted, "They will be cordial to me, because my man belongs to their tribe. God help me if I ...

— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis

... had been accustomed to this monotonous life by his first queen, and he did not care for any other. The new Queen, upon arriving, soon found this out, and found also that if she wished to rule him, she must keep him in the same room, confined as he had been kept by her predecessor. ...

— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... I am not speaking now about their resolutions on trade questions, which they thoroughly understand, but about resolutions on such subjects as foreign politics, the Army and Navy, and Colonial and Imperial questions, resolutions which are always upon the same monotonous lines. I do not believe that the working classes are the unpatriotic, anti-national, down-with-the-army, up-with-the-foreigner, take-it-lying-down class of Little Englanders that they are constantly represented to be. I do not believe it for a moment. I have ...

— Constructive Imperialism • Viscount Milner

... that? No woman on earth loved him as she did? What if he should show her the contrary? He must no longer love, only permit himself to be loved! This advice did not displease him. In fact perhaps it was sensible to direct a wild life full of adventures which, in reality, were meaningless, monotonous, and profoundly unsatisfying, into the channels of a regulation domestic existence. But if he himself decided to bring it to a close, it should not be the end which Else ...

— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau

... we turned southward into the great Porsanger Fjord, which stretches nearly a hundred miles into the heart of Lapland, dividing Western from Eastern Finmark. Its shores are high monotonous hills, half covered with snow, and barren of vegetation except patches of grass and moss. If once wooded, like the hills of the Alten Fjord, the trees have long since disappeared, and now nothing can be more bleak and desolate. ...

— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor

... An ugly, straight-edged, monotonous fir-plantation? Well, I like it, outside and inside. I need no saw-edge of mountain peaks to stir up my imagination with the sense of the sublime, while I can watch the saw-edge of those fir peaks against ...

— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous

... satirical that it might seem to have been given to the "fashionable" quarter of the dead city by the united sneers of all the ghosts who haunt the undistinguished graves below. In this aristocratic quarter there is of course no monotonous uniformity. The monuments, some of freestone and some of marble, are of every conceivable form and degree of splendor, and death is made to look pretty and coquettish by the introduction of numerous weeping willows and other ...

— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various

... village had hushed—the strident call of voices had ceased. Somewhere a woman was pounding grain in a wooden mortar—a dull monotonous "thud, thud, swish, thud" carrying on the dead air. Night-jars were circling above the trees, their plaintive call, "chy-eece, chy-e-ece!" filtering downward like the weird cry of spirits. Once the deep sonorous bugling note of a saurus, like the bass pipe of an organ, smote the stillness ...

— Caste • W. A. Fraser

... one individual over others apparently of the same class. Political history is wont to tell this chapter of Rome's story under the title of the "Rise of the Plebeians," but the presence of the Plebeians was only the outward symbol of an inward change. This change was the breaking up of the monotonous one-class society of the primitive community with its one—agricultural—interest, and the formation of a variegated many-class society with manifold interests, such as trade, handicraft, and politics. It was the awakening ...

— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter

... she wished, or believed that she wished, that Lady Ingleton had gone. Then this matter which tormented her would be settled, finished with. There would be nothing to be done, and she could take up her monotonous life again and forget this strange intrusion from the outside world, forget this voice from the near East which had told such ugly tidings. Till now she had not even known where Dion was. She knew he had given up his business in London and had left ...

— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens

... observation decided me, and in a few days we were at Cheltenham; and having made our appearance at the rooms, were soon in the vortex of society. "Newland," said Carbonnell, "I dare say you find time hang rather heavy in this monotonous place." ...

— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat

... the defenders was becoming monotonous, mounting guard, firing a little, and drilling a great deal; for Ben gave the men no rest in the way of practising them in the management of ...

— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn

... participation in the tumults of 1825, on the accession to the throne of Nicholas I. He spreads a thick bear-skin rug, puts in down-pillows, hangs up a holy image (ikona) in the corner, grieving the while. After this prologue, the journey of the devoted wife is described; the monotonous way being spent in great part by the noble woman in vision-like memories of her happy childhood, girlhood, and married life. On arriving at Irkutsk she receives a visit from the governor, an old subordinate of her father, who endeavors by every possible means to deter her from pursuing ...

— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood

... colour which had made her so easy to delude. How strong the need is, how seductive the proposal to supply it, Celia knew well. She knew it from the experience of her life when the Great Fortinbras was at the climax of his fortunes. She had travelled much amongst monotonous, drab towns without character or amusements. She had kept her eyes open. She had seen that it was from the denizens of the dull streets in these towns that the quack religions won their recruits. Mme. Dauvray's life had ...

— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason

... rhyming,[FN4] in a few cases in the "Boar of Mac Datho" these rhymes are alternate, and in the extract from the Glenn Masain version of the "Sons of Usnach" there is a more complicated rhyme system. It has not been thought necessary to reproduce this metre in all cases, as to do so would sound too monotonous in English; the metre is, however, reproduced once at least in each tale except in that of the "Death of the Sons of Usnach." The eight-lined metre that occurs in five of the verse passages in the "Combat at the Ford" has in one case been ...

— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy

... could not be transformed, even in imagination, into snow, nor heat into frost, any more easily than we could turn dried apples into roast beef and plum-pudding. Excellent food as dried fruit is, yet it is apt to become monotonous when it must do duty for breakfast, dinner, and tea! Such was our scanty fare; nevertheless we managed to keen up the appearance of being quite ...

— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie

... window, from the Grand Canal and the lesser canals, rose the manifold noises of Venetian life. All other sounds were dominated by the monotonous shouts of the gondoliers. Somewhere close at hand, perhaps in the opposite palace (was it not the Fogazzari palace?), a woman with a fine soprano voice was practising; the singer was young—someone who could not have been born at the time when ...

— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler

... the character, are unmarked by any notable events. A steady, orderly routine, a gradual progression, perseverance in hard work, often do more to educate and form than a varied and eventful life. Erica's two years of exile were as monotonous and quiet as the life of the secularist's daughter could possibly be. There came to her, of course, from the distance the echoes of her father's strife; but she was far removed from it all, and there was little to disturb her mind in the quiet Parisian school. There is no need to ...

— We Two • Edna Lyall

... middle-aged servant, grave in his address, with eyes always a bit lowered. He is argumentative and loves to read sermons directed at his master. His voice is usually monotonous. To his master his tone is blunt and sharp, with even a touch of rudeness. He is the cleverer of the two and grasps a situation more quickly. But he does not like to talk. He is a silent, uncommunicative rascal. He wears a shabby ...

— The Inspector-General • Nicolay Gogol

... have blushed in former times. In spite of herself, however, she took a passionate interest in the game that was being played between her mother and herself, and of which her secret was the stake. It was an ever-palpitating interest in her hitherto monotonous life, and ...

— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau

... monotonous chant rose high, Nazu was rushed to the edge of the pit. The ghastly, shimmering heat-ghost drifted hungrily to await the flinging of the slight form into its consuming embrace. Carr was glad to see that ...

— Creatures of Vibration • Harl Vincent

... religion was left as an empty shell. Yet the word ritual does not, as normally used, convey to our minds this notion of intense vitalism. Rather we associate ritual with something cut and dried, a matter of prescribed form and monotonous repetition. The association is correct; ritual tends to become less and less informed by the life-impulse, more and more externalised. Dr Beck ("Die Nachahmung und ihre Bedeutung fur Psychologie und Volkerkunde", Leipzig, 1904.) in his brilliant monograph on "Imitation" has ...

— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... woman grew better very slowly. The doctor was surprised, and charged her with coddling herself when she related that she now felt a dreadful weight in her legs. She always kept up her monotonous moaning, lying on her back and rolling her head to and fro; but she closed her eyes, as though to give her visitors an opportunity for unrestrained talk. One day she was to all appearance sound asleep, but beneath their lids her little black eyes continued watching. ...

— A Love Episode • Emile Zola

... October or November. There are, however, certain fallacies in dealing with institutions like Normal schools, where the conditions are not perfectly regular throughout the year, owing to vacations, etc. It is, therefore, instructive to find that under the monotonous conditions of prison-life precisely the same spring and autumn rises are found. Binet takes the consumption of bread in the women's prison at Clermont, where some four hundred prisoners, chiefly between the ages of thirty and forty, are confined, and he presents two curves for the years 1895 ...

— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... the machinery again, and there was no sign that anything out of the monotonous round had happened, except in the excited way that people talked. Several men we knew paid a visit to the steerage, and came back with stories which flew about from group to group in the first-class cabin, and no doubt the ...

— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... ground; the women gathered, the men bound it into sheaves, and the children, who now were at liberty to pass by the closed door of the schoolhouse, ran about over the stubble and collected the stray ears. The hammering of scythes after the day's work was done, this monotonous village music, had ceased; in its stead could now be heard by day the creaking of ox carts over the hardened clayey road, while cries of "gee," "haw" and the cracking of whips woke the echoes in the ...

— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various

... getting decidedly monotonous!" he exclaimed, still speaking French. Then rapidly recovering his consciousness as the full horror of the situation began to break on his mind, he went on muttering audibly: "Have they really hopped the twig? Bah! Fudge! what has not been able to knock the ...

— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne

... the thousands of islands that stud the bosom of the North Pacific, from the Paumotus to the Pelews, the Kingsmill and Gilbert Islands are the most uninviting and monotonous in appearance. ...

— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke

... swiftly on in that tireless Apache running walk. Once there again, he kept his broncho at the trot to hold his own, and a broncho trot, after a mile or two of warming up, becomes something besides monotonous. Away to the far front, the north-east, flickered the tiny blazes; guiding lights, as Willett would have it; bale fires, as Harris began to believe—fires set by confederates to blind the eye of the pursuit, or lure pursuers ...

— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King

... originality was regarded as a mark of bad taste and insufficient culture. Fourthly, the submission to a very limited and very arbitrary system of versification, adapted only to the production of tragic alexandrines, and limiting even that form of verse to one monotonous model. Lastly, the limitation of the subject to be treated to a very few classes and kinds." If to this description be added a paragraph from Gautier's "Histoire du Romantisme," we shall have a sufficient idea of the condition of French literature and art before the appearance of ...

— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... steadily thickened on the roads. More than once I got down and ran on ahead, calling out with monotonous refrain to the drivers of civilian carts to keep well over to the right of the road, so as to let the guns pass. They all did their best to obey, poor brutes, and we gained some useful ground in ...

— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton

... it, perhaps so much the better. We are apt to be rounded by being rubbed against each other, like the stones on the beach, till there is not a sharp corner or a point that can prick anywhere. So society becomes utterly monotonous, and is insipid and profitless because of that. You Christian people, be yourselves, after your own pattern. And whilst you accept all help from surrounding suggestions and hints, make it 'a very small thing that you be judged of ...

— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren

... all; and to the extent to which you fit yourself for it, it will come to you. So, if you content yourself with always speaking in your Thought the Creative Word of "Being" from day to day, you will find it the Way of Peace and the Secret of a Happy Life—by no means monotonous, for all sorts of unexpected interests will be continually opening out to you, giving you scope for all the activities of which your present degree of "being" renders you capable. You will always find plenty to do, and find pleasure in doing it, so you need never be afraid ...

— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward

... meant to or not, you would—so long as we are struggling with poverty. However self-willed I am, I am not selfish; and to see you living a monotonous, imprisoned life would be a serious hindrance to me in my own living and working. Of course the fact is so at present, and I often enough think in a troubled way about you; but you are out of my sight, and that enables me to keep you out of mind. If I ...

— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing

... Their reports were monotonous to weariness: The high priests and some of the nomarchs, under the leadership of Herhor and Mefres, had shut themselves up in the temple of Ptah. The army was full of hope, and the people excited. All were blessing ...

— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus

... to await the car which contained the image of the Virgin. Preceding this car were some people dressed in a fantastic manner which made children cry and babies scream. In the midst of that dark mass of habits, hoods and girdles, to the sound of that monotonous and nasal prayer, one could see, like white jessamine, like fresh pansies among old rags, twelve young lassies dressed in white, crowned with flowers, with hair curled and eyes bright as the necklaces they wore. Seizing hold of two wide blue bands ...

— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal

... I have no right to this," she began abruptly, "and I beg your pardon for keeping it." The words were spoken in a low, monotonous voice, as if they were a lesson. "I am sorry I was so rude, and I trust you ...

— Polly of Lady Gay Cottage • Emma C. Dowd

... had gone on for some time, the chief seized a drinking-cup, or cuja, which he gravely dipped into the pot and took a sip. Then the shaking of the rattle and the monotonous song began again. The chief next took a good pull at the cup and emptied it; after which he presented it to his companions, who helped themselves at pleasure; and the dance and monotonous music became more furious and noisy the ...

— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne

... to make the grounds that surrounded the building devoted to games of chance the handsomest in the world. In its great halls one sees every sort and variety of people. Lords and Ladies, Princes and Princesses, Dukes and Duchesses, gamblers and courtesans, all find place at the table where the monotonous voices of the croupiers and the clinking of the little ivory ball are about the only sounds that ...

— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson

... the morning with a sullen lowered countenance, his gaze on the monotonous road. He made no reply to the blind man's infrequent remarks, and the latter, except for an occasional murmur, fell silent. At last Harry Baggs saw a group of men about the fence that divided a small lawn and neatly painted frame house from the public road. A porch was ...

— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer

... That must have been a very pathetic scene in the church at East Barnet which few of those present could have witnessed without emotion. The clerk was a man of advanced age. He always conducted the singing, which must have been somewhat monotonous, as the 95th and the 100th Psalm (Old Version) were invariably sung. On one occasion, after several vain attempts to begin the accustomed melody, the poor old man exclaimed, "Well, my friends, it's no use. I'm too old. ...

— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield

... Harding, Marcia Arnold and half a dozen girls who were worshipful admirers of the French girl, soon found flower gathering decidedly monotonous. ...

— Marjorie Dean High School Freshman • Pauline Lester

... daylight to-morrow morning, to return next day, when I shall know definitely the result of the sale, which, indeed, is the object of the journey. On my return I passed a day with M. A. Monsieur is cold, formal, monotonous, repulsive. Gods! what a mansion is that bosom for the sensitive heart of poor M. Lovely victim! I wish she would break her pretty little neck. Yet, on second thought, would it not be better that he break ...

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

... higher, the heat became greater than during the previous days. At moments when the camels halted there could not be felt the slightest breeze, so that the air as well as the sands seemed to slumber in the warmth, in the light, and in the stillness. The caravan had just ridden upon a great monotonous level ground, unbroken by khors, when suddenly a wonderful spectacle presented itself to the eyes of the children. Groups of slender palms and pepper trees, plantations of mandarins, white houses, a small mosque with projecting minaret, and, lower, walls surrounding gardens, ...

— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... exception of the spectacle of an English steamer passing, at weary intervals, over its dreary expanse, and some moldering remains of ancient cities on its eastern shore, it affords scarcely any indications of life. It does very little, therefore, to relieve the monotonous aspect of solitude and desolation which reigns over the region into which it ...

— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott

... happened that first evening on the river. Soon after nightfall they entered a shoal crossing. Clemens, standing alone on the hurricane-deck, heard the big bell forward boom out the call for leads. Then came the leadsman's long-drawn chant, once so familiar, the monotonous repeating in river parlance of the depths of water. Presently the lead had found that depth of water signified by his nom de plume and the call of "Mark Twain, Mark Twain" floated up to him like a summons from the past. All at once a little ...

— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... Boat" Crane again gains his effects by keeping down the tone where another writer might have attempted "fine writing" and have been lost. In it perhaps is most strikingly evident the poetic cadences of his prose: its rhythmic, monotonous flow is the flow of the gray water that laps at the sides of the boat, that rises and recedes in cruel waves, "like little pointed rocks." It is a desolate picture, and the tale is one of our greatest ...

— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane

... melancholy and religious. They advanced by the baleful light of the conflagration, which was consuming the centre of their commerce, the sanctuary of their religion, the cradle of their empire! Filled with horror and indignation, they all kept a sullen silence, which was unbroken save by the dull and monotonous sound of their footsteps, the roaring of the flames, and the howling of the tempest. The dismal light was frequently interrupted by livid and sudden flashes. The brows of these warriors might then be seen ...

— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur

... stimulus to commercial intercourse. But, on the other hand, the artistic possibilities of brick structures were soon exhausted. The house could be indefinitely extended in length and even height, but such an extension only added to the monotonous effect. With clay as a building material, so readily moulded into any desired shape, and that could be baked, if need be, by the action of the sun without the use of fire, it was almost as easy to build a large house as a small one. But ...

— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow

... in the dome of the sky. From a high, sandy neck their path surmounted, he beheld the minarets of the town, seeming to cut the sky above the sharp sea-line. The timbre of his mother's voice made for inattention like the monotonous shrill note of the cicada; and he had at all times a trick of projecting his wits into the scene around him, whence it needed a shout to re-collect them, as she knew to her grievance. She shouted now, and ...

— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall

... commenced to work again, and her head swung round in a wide circle, pointing to the land. Evidently they had passed over the rock and were once more in deep water, through which they travelled at a good speed but with a heavy list to starboard. The pumps got to work also with a monotonous, clanging beat, throwing out great columns of foaming water on to the oily sea. Men began to cut the covers off the boats, and to swing some of them outboard. Such were the things that went ...

— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard

... but one sufficiently elegant to satisfy the advancing standards of taste and refinement. Among the marked features of the building are several small casements, lighting closets and staircases, which give variety to the monotonous symmetry of windows all of a size, one on top of another, and where all the openings for egress or light are in straight lines and of equal dimensions. It is many years since my visit, and I hope you will see it, for much that was peculiar, and made a weird impression at the time, ...

— Old New England Traits • Anonymous

... he gave no sign. He was not one who wore his emotions where they could be read by all who ran, or even by those who sat and openly studied him with malice and amusement. His face was as serene as usual, and his envied gift of turning events of the monotonous everyday veld life into interesting topics of conversation remained unimpaired. He had even risen, as always, with his air of careless courtesy, to open the door for the woman ...

— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley

... mind up to the dominion of these day-dreams, with whose intoxicating power every heart is more or less familiar. She loved to retire to the solitude of the cloisters, when the twilight was deepening into darkness, and alone, with measured steps, to pace to and fro, listening to the monotonous echoes of her own footfall, which alone disturbed the solemn silence. At the tomb of a departed sister she would often linger, and, indulging in those melancholy meditations which had for her so many charms, long for her own departure to the bosom of her heavenly Father, where she might enjoy ...

— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott

... its lines, but utterly absurd in meaning. Arrows have had nothing to do with eggs (at least since Leda's time), neither are the so-called arrows like arrows, nor the eggs like eggs, nor the honeysuckles like honeysuckles; they are all conventionalised into a monotonous successiveness of nothing,—pleasant to the eye, useless to the thought. But those Christian cornices are, as far as may be, suggestive; there is not the tenth of the work in them that there is in the Greek arrows, but, as far as that work will go, it has consistent ...

— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin

... at Medellin in Estramadura in 1485, of an ancient, but slenderly-endowed family; after studying at Salamanca for some time, he returned to his native town, but the quiet monotonous life there was little suited to his restless and capricious temper, and he soon started for America, reckoning upon the protection of his relation Ovando, the Governor ...

— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne

... on. I wanted to earn a little money. I could then send some to my old aunt who had brought me up. She always waited for me in the low-ceilinged room, where her sewing-machine, afternoons, whirred, monotonous and tiresome as a clock, and where, evenings, there was a lamp beside her which somehow ...

— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse

... loveliness was so old to her, so familiar, that it was scarcely lovely, only monotonous. With all a child's usual ignorant impatience of the joys of the present—joys so little valued at the time, so futilely regretted in the after-years—she was heedless of the hour's pleasure, she was longing for what ...

— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... well the habits of a university life, need not be told how singularly monotonous and contemplative it may be made to a lonely man. The first year I was there, I mixed, as you may remember, in none of the many circles into which that curious and motley society is split. My only recreation was in long and companionless ...

— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 17, No. 483., Saturday, April 2, 1831 • Various

... the shadows of the summer night. From a veranda chair he looked at the stars. He wore a white beard, and his eyes, grown small with age, watered continually as if he were weeping. Half-hidden under his beard his emaciated lips kept the monotonous grimace of a smile ...

— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht

... was in a few minutes adjusted to my neck. I felt its pressure, and I heard the confused sounds of the monotonous voice of the clergyman, as he muttered some prayers, that I must confess sounded to me at the time like a mockery ...

— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest

... underground world of the dead, as the Hebrews did. We no longer believe in a heaven just above the blue, as Christendom has believed for so long. We no longer believe in a heaven where all struggle and thought and study and growth are left out, where there is to be only a monotonous enjoyment that would pall upon any living rational soul. The form of it is passing away; but there never was a time when there was such a great and inspiring hope, not simply for myself and my friends, ...

— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage

... droned a dirgeful song that had a half Oriental, half negro suggestion in its monotonous pitch, while from afar, like an echo over the mountainside, came faintly the wailing cadence of the caramella of some shepherd boy, and the tinkle of goat bells, interrupted by the hoot of little owls crying through ...

— The Title Market • Emily Post

... dialogue about the alarming change in the captain, the sallow steward looking down with a sinister frown, Franklin rolling upwards his eyes, sentimental in a red face. Young Powell had heard a lot of that sort of thing by that time. It was growing monotonous; it had always sounded to him a little absurd. He struck in impatiently with the remark that such lamentations over a man merely because he had taken a wife ...

— Chance • Joseph Conrad

... to thank her, he rushed thither. Noko had the reputation of being a sort of seer, though she seldom used her gift. She sat on the stone beside her door, and a woman knelt before her, to whom she was talking in a low monotonous tone. His step startled the listener, ...

— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas

... perception of the cloud which lowered upon his house, the dwarf was in his ordinary state of cheerfulness; and, when he found he was becoming too much engrossed by business with a due regard to his health and spirits, he varied its monotonous routine with a little screeching, or howling, or some other innocent ...

— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens

... worked—or played— with both hands. Dr. Baumann says it is customary on bright moonlight nights for two lines of men to sit facing each other and to clap—one can hardly call it ring—these bells vigorously, but in good time, accompanying this performance with a monotonous song, while the delighted women and children dance round. The learned doctor evidently sees the picturesqueness of this practice, but notes that the words of the songs are not "tiefsinnige" (profound), as ...

— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley

... man turned feverishly to the task of snow-shoe making on which he had been engaged. Through his mind with monotonous reiteration beat a phrase that he had read long ago, where, he had forgotten. "My salvation is in work, my salvation is in work!" He worked like a man possessed, without looking up, whilst the girl busied herself with unnecessary tasks. She also knew what he knew, and she held him in ...

— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns

... wings, though aptly form'd for flight, From cowardice are seldom spread; Who folds the arms, and droops the head; Stealing, in pilgrim guise along, With needless staff, and vestment grey, It scarcely trills a vesper song Monotonous at close of day. Cross but its path, demanding aught, E'en what its pensive mistress sought, Though forward welcoming she hied, And its quick ...

— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham

... shocked by the wanton display of immorality, but practicing the license of political usage; sometimes bitter, often genial, always intelligent — Lodge had the singular merit of interesting. The usual statesmen flocked in swarms like crows, black and monotonous. Lodge's plumage was varied, and, like his flight, harked back to race. He betrayed the consciousness that he and his people had a past, if they dared but avow it, and might have a future, if they could but ...

— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams

... walked across an open space, passed beneath the remnant of a gateway into a court and, crossing the court, threaded his way through a network of narrow alleys between crumbling mud walls. As he advanced the sound of a voice reached his ears—a deep monotonous voice, which spoke with a kind of rhythm. The words Phillips could not distinguish, but there was no need that he should. The intonation, the flow of the sentences, told him clearly enough that somewhere ...

— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason

... drawn for the next poem is 'Sunrise,' about which I know very little. K. and I continue to learn twenty lines of poetry a day, and I do not find it unpleasant, though the 'Deserted Village' is rather monotonous. ...

— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell

... content Abel drew in his line, unhooked a flapping cod, returned the jigger to the water, and, as he resumed the monotonous tightening and slackening of line, turned his eyes again to the peaceful ...

— Bobby of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace

... impressionable state than ever before. The day was dark and lowering, showing every sign of an approaching storm; outside there had been the noisy bustle of active business life, while within the limits of Lucille's mystic chamber all was hushed in a deathly silence. The monotonous swinging of the lamps, the perfume-laden air, the ghastly skeletons, and the imperious bearing and powerful will of Lucille—all struck upon her imagination with resistless force. As she sank into the seat which Lucille pointed out, she felt like a criminal entering the prisoner's ...

— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton

... conventions have gone, or are changed, and we are all glad of it. Wordsworth effected a wholesome deliverance when he attacked the artificial diction, the personifications, the allegories, the antitheses, the barren rhymes and monotonous metres, which the reigning taste had approved. But while welcoming the new freshness, sincerity, and direct and fertile return on nature, that is a very bad reason why we should disparage poetry so genial, so simple, so humane, ...

— Studies in Literature • John Morley

... Everything became monotonous—the country, the absence of an enemy. They found Prussia and especially Poland, ugly, dirty, miserable, all the houses were full of dirt and vermin, domestic animals of all kinds were the intimate syntrophoi of the peasants in their living rooms. The ...

— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose

... boat continued its course, the musicians made a great noise, and the courtiers began, like them, to be out of breath. Besides, the excursion became doubtless monotonous to the princess, for all at once, shaking her head with an air of impatience,—"Come, gentlemen,—enough of this;—let ...

— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... from Tennessee, a big, scared Pole, and the disdainful Celt whom he had sat beside on the train—the two former spent the evenings in writing eternal letters home, while the Irishman sat in the tent door whistling over and over to himself half a dozen shrill and monotonous bird-calls. It was rather to avoid an hour of their company than with any hope of diversion that, when the quarantine was lifted at the end of the week, he went into town. He caught one of the swarm of ...

— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... in Lincoln Park it became evident that luck was not with the two golf-killing Nobles of the Mysterious Mecca, because about all these two gentlemen did was to continue the monotonous business of knocking a couple of innocent looking white balls across the landscape. Every now and then they would come upon a grass lawn with an iron cup in the centre of it, and then each Potent Noble would waste a lot of time urging his ball into the cup with the short ...

— Lady Luck • Hugh Wiley

... the rites of Adonis. "During the whole of Good Friday a waxen effigy of the dead Christ is exposed to view in the middle of the Greek churches and is covered with fervent kisses by the thronging crowd, while the whole church rings with melancholy, monotonous dirges. Late in the evening, when it has grown quite dark, this waxen image is carried by the priests into the street on a bier adorned with lemons, roses, jessamine, and other flowers, and there begins a grand procession of the multitude, who move in serried ranks, with ...

— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... have seen, was not without influence over her husband. No woman is; she can always incline him to do either what she wishes, or the reverse; and on the composite impulses that were threatening to hurry Mr. Tulliver into "law," Mrs. Tulliver's monotonous pleading had doubtless its share of force; it might even be comparable to that proverbial feather which has the credit or discredit of breaking the camel's back; though, on a strictly impartial view, the blame ought rather ...

— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot

... cane, saw the long arm rise and fall, heard a muffled groan, a sharp cry, a shout of agony; but the long arm rose and fell untiring, merciless, until all sounds were hushed save for a dull moaning and the monotonous sound of blows. ...

— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol

... there are various degrees of skill in playing, I have never yet learned to be critical. I can only see a difference in style. Some are dramatic, some classical, some furious and others buffo. The song is a monotonous, drawling wail, with which the drumming has no sort of connection, for it increases and diminishes in rapidity according to the pleasure or strength of the player. I am sure a concert, such as I witnessed nightly, would cause a sensation in New York, though I do not believe it would prove ...

— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder

... it in that light, and did not bless the blessing. Slowly and heavily he went on, without much heed of anything, swinging his clouded cane now and then, as some slashing reviews occurred to him, yet becoming more peaceful and impartial of mind under the long monotonous cadence and quiet repetitions of the soothing sea. For now he was beyond the Haven head—the bulwark that makes the bay a pond in all common westerly weather—and waves that were worthy of the name flowed towards him, with a gentle breeze stepping ...

— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore

... There was not a tree even. The awful loneliness filled him with dismay. He had about given up when, in the last quarter of the horizon he saw, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, what looked like a fine trickle of blackish smoke that appeared to rise from a shapeless mound that bulged above the monotonous level. ...

— A Little Book for Christmas • Cyrus Townsend Brady

... half-raised, was leaning on his hand, But, when again beside him sat the maid, His eyes for one slow minute having scanned Her moonlit face, he laid him down, and said, Monotonous, like solemn-read command: "For Love is of the earth, earthy, and is laid Lifeless at length back in the mother-tomb." Strange moanings from ...

— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald

... looking with some interest and regret at the beautiful spot in which we had spent the last few weeks. "All on board?" cried Domingos. "On, boys, on!" and giving a shove with his pole, we left the bank and glided down the stream, our dark-skinned crew keeping time with their paddles to the monotonous song which they struck up. Although the wet season was commencing, the weather promised to be fair for a time; and we hoped soon to have Arthur on board, and to continue our voyage without interruption till we should at length fall in with those dear ones ...

— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston

... enthusiasm," Harry admitted, "but I should like to do some actual work. I ride out on the sands every day and sit looking on while the real work is being done. This problem of conquering the Man-killer is growing monotonous. I'm tired of pegging away at the same old task day in and ...

— The Young Engineers in Arizona - Laying Tracks on the Man-killer Quicksand • H. Irving Hancock

... could I hear but the sighing Of winds, in the Valley of Pines; And the heavy, monotonous dropping Of dew from the shivering vines. But all day, 'mid the clashing of Labour, And the city's unmusical notes, With thoughts that went seeking the hidden, I pondered that ...

— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous

... from them, though we were now in daily expectation of the arrival of a messenger whom they had promised if possible to send back to us, with an account of their progress. Our days were beginning to grow somewhat monotonous, from the fact that we had no great difficulty in supplying ourselves with food, and were unwilling to go out and kill creatures merely for the sake of amusement. Stanley made a second excursion to assist our friends in the northern village, and succeeded in killing two more ...

— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston

... meal every one at the table goes and shakes hands with the host and hostess and says "tack" (thank you); certainly a pretty little courtesy on the part of strangers, but rather monotonous from children, when there are many of them, as there often are in Finland, especially when the little ones cluster round the parents or grandparents as a sort of joke, and prolong the "tack" ...

— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie

... was out there, but in what way bad it was impossible to judge, even from the knowledge we had of life in less remote regions. Who would venture to draw conclusions from the little we knew as to the thousand small details which made up that grey, monotonous existence? Who could clearly bring them before the imagination? Only experience could reveal them in their appalling nakedness. Of one thing we were certain, that was that in a measure as the populousness decreases, and you ...

— Selected Polish Tales • Various

... the chamber, and, passing through Alfgar's little room, beheld, by the light of many torches, Edmund bathed in his own blood, which still dripped with monotonous but terrible sound on ...

— Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake

... did; but Tuesday's work was "meaner" than Monday's. There did not seem to be even so much as a variation. It was all one dull, monotonous, miserable hunt for something he could not find. It was just so on Wednesday, and all the while, as he said, "Money will just melt away; and somehow ...

— Crowded Out o' Crofield - or, The Boy who made his Way • William O. Stoddard

... air—and smell the Bazaars! But Egypt is ugly a pin's prick beneath its beauty. It is so old and covered with bones and decayed ideas. The Nile is associated with Moses, and it is long it is true, but it is also very narrow and shallow, and its banks are monotonous to a degree; a mile or so of green crop on either side, then stones, sand, bits of crockery, human bones and rags, then desert sand—a cross between a cemetery and a kitchen garden. The ruins are awfully ugly! "Think of their age!" people say, and you look at the exquisite spirals of shells in ...

— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch

... in Cincinnati, Ohio.] I found in the bar-room three respectable-looking men. I told them my story. One said to the others, 'He is always the same old fellow!' I stared at him in amazement. He held out one hand and moved the other as if fiddling. Monotonous creaking sounds followed, and I gradually awoke. The same sounds continued, but they were caused by the grasshoppers and tree-toads, who pipe monotonously all night long ...

— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland

... created to receive impressions of the bleak vastness of space, how easily the mountains might have been made to breathe terror from their cliffs and walls, how easily the general effect of extended landscapes might have been monotonous and gloomy! If religion is, as it has so often been conceived to be, hostile to the natural good and joy which the heart seeks instinctively,—if sadness, if melancholy, be the soul of its inspiration, and misery for myriads the burden of its prophecy,—I do not believe that the vast deeps of ...

— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James

... the huge plane high above them gave little thought to what passed below, engrossed with their papers or books, or engaged in casual conversation. This monotonous trip was boring to most of them. It seemed a waste of time to spend six good hours in a short 3,500 mile trip. There was nothing to do, nothing to see, except a slowly passing landscape ten miles below. ...

— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell

... is skeptical as to the reality of what is called mind. So far as his clients are concerned, it is notable for its absence. To be confronted day after day by the absent-minded, and to listen to their monotonous tale of woe, is disenchanting. It is difficult to observe all the amenities of life when one is dealing with ...

— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers

... however, it will appear that the physical structure of the southern parts of the colony is as varied, as that of the western interior is monotonous, and we may now pursue our original observations on the soil of the colony with ...

— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt

... out good Englishmen, who may continue worthily and even develop further a glorious national tradition. To do this, we must appeal constantly to the imagination, which Wordsworth has boldly called "reason in her most exalted mood." We may thus bring a little poetry and romance into the monotonous lives of our hand-workers. It may well be that their discontent has more to do with the starving of their spiritual nature than we suppose. For the intellectual life, like divine philosophy, is not dull and crabbed, as fools suppose, but musical as ...

— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various

... that live under a solemn sense of eternal danger, one inch only of plank (often worm-eaten) between themselves and the grave; and, also, that see for ever one wilderness of waters—sublime, but (like the wilderness on shore) monotonous. All sublime people, being monotonous, have a tendency to be dull, and sublime things also. Milton and Aeschylus, the sublimest of men, are crossed at times by a shade of dulness. It is their weak side. But as to a sea captain, a regular nor'-nor'-wester, and sou'-sou'-easter, ...

— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey

... barren and monotonous as Augusta's—a life in which the small external events were so firmly interwoven with the subtler threads of yearnings, wants, and desires—the introduction of so large and novel a fact as Marcus Strand would naturally produce ...

— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... beautify her flat for Gilbert, but in the first place she did not wish to spend money on it, in the second place she was too indolent to buckle to the enterprise, and in the third place if she beautified it she would be doing so not for Gilbert, but for the monotonous procession of her clients. Her flat was a public resort, and so she would do nothing to it. Besides, she did not care a fig about the look of furniture; the feel of furniture alone interested her; she wanted softness and warmth ...

— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett

... several ensuing years present nothing of sufficient interest to induce us to record them in detail. A perpetual succession of sieges and skirmishes afford a monotonous picture of isolated courage and skill; but we see none of those great conflicts which bring out the genius of opposing generals, and show war in its grand results, as the decisive means of enslaving or emancipating mankind. The prince-cardinal, one of the many who ...

— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan

... a listener, was a vocal quartet by Cherubini, performed under his direction. Later in the evening, the whole party armed itself with larger or smaller 'mirlitons' (reed-pipe whistles), and on these small monotonous instruments, sometimes made of sugar, they played, after the fashion of Russian horn music, the overture to 'Demophon,' two frying-pans representing the drums." On the 27th of March this "mirliton" concert ...

— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris

... it while the talk about degrees and latitudes has been going on, here strikes in again; he will use his influence. Perhaps the good man, living up here among the pine trees and the sea winds, and involved in the monotonous round of Prime, Lauds, Nones, Vespers, has a regretful thought or two of the time when he moved in the splendid intricacy of Court life; at any rate he is not sorry to have an opportunity of recalling himself to the attention ...

— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young

... about forty-five miles in length and from four to twelve in breadth. Drained successively by Roman, by Goth, and by pope, they successively relapsed into their natural state, until the perseverance of Pius VI. completed the work. It is now largely cultivated, but the scenery is monotonous and the journey tedious. The few inhabitants found here get their living by hunting and by robbery, and are distinguished by their pale and sickly appearance. At this time the disturbed state of Italy, ...

— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille

... hours she had been alone with her dismal thoughts, no sound broke the stillness, save the monotonous ticking of the clock or an occasional sob and moan from the half spent ...

— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens

... cross, and her half-year at home had rendered her much less capable of concealing ill-humour. Something was owing to wear and suspense, together with the effects of the summer heat and confined monotonous life without change or luxury; but much was chargeable on the manifestations of temper to which she had given way in the home circle. She told Wilmet the trouble, which Ferdinand wished to have kept from open discussion till he ...

— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge

... discovery of a vein of coal or other combustible matter, which could be turned to account in warming some erection which they might hope to put up? A prolonged existence in their underground quarters was felt to be monotonous and depressing, and although it might be all very well for a man like Professor Rosette, absorbed in astronomical studies, it was ill suited to the temperaments of any of themselves for any longer ...

— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne

... all the time under the conditions forced upon the English proletarian? It is still the same thing since the introduction of steam. The worker's activity is made easy, muscular effort is saved, but the work itself becomes unmeaning and monotonous to the last degree. It offers no field for mental activity, and claims just enough of his attention to keep him from thinking of anything else. And a sentence to such work, to work which takes his whole time for itself, ...

— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels

... wondering if here—here in Corsica—I had really heard that inappropriate sound, soon across the hillside on my left echoed an even stranger one—yet one I recognised at once as having mingled with my dreams; a woman's voice pitched at first in a long monotonous wail and then undulating in semitones above and below the keynote—a voice which seemed to call from miles away—a sound as dismal as ever fell ...

— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... this is almost always attended by pain. Hence it is that existence is essentially painful, and that many persons for whose wants full provision is made arrange their day in accordance with extremely regular, monotonous, and definite habits. By this means they avoid all the pain which the movement of the will produces; but, on the other hand, their whole existence becomes a series of scenes and pictures that mean nothing. They are ...

— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer

... Islands are formed by the intersection of the creeks and arms of the sea. They have a uniform level, are without any stones, and present a rather monotonous and uninteresting scenery, spite of the raptures of French explorers. The creeks run up into the islands at numerous points, affording facilities for transportation by flats and boats to the buildings which are usually near them. The soil is of a light, sandy mould, and yields in the best ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... The work is monotonous, but it must be done, or there'll be the mischief to pay. Now, ...

— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond

... cold. I walked most of the day, leading my horse, upon whom I had packed a part of the outfit to relieve the other horses. There was no fun in the day, only worry and trouble. My feet were wet, my joints stiff, and my brain weary of the monotonous black, ...

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

... voice continued, "I feel it here," pointing to her breast. She was quiet for a while, then went on in the low, monotonous voice of the desperate poor. "This winter ver had. My man no work. Sometime go wood yard, but only fifty cents one day. He walk, walk, walk, looka for work. We must eat, we must pay rent. We all work maka da flower, ...

— Drusilla with a Million • Elizabeth Cooper

... cramming received in the lecture-rooms, the arduous drill and the somewhat monotonous work on the slow-moving tenders, the runs seaward on these new and trim little vessels, the manoeuvring at nineteen knots, the breeze of passage and the feeling of controlled power acted as an elixir on both mind and body. ...

— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife

... "this is getting monotonous, and I'm growing tired of it. If they do shoot us both, they'll have had to pay for it. Why, they must have used a couple of hundred cartridges. Not very good work for such crack shots as they are said to be. If they spend a hundred cartridges to shoot ...

— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn

... time, sir," the man interrupted me, speaking in the emotionless, monotonous voice ...

— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer

... heights of philosophy already? Then, perhaps, I shall not seem to be talking nonsense, when I tell you that there is nothing in the world of which you would not tire after the first joy of possession was over, no position which would not seem monotonous. You do not believe me? Of course not. We all buy our own experience in life; on one of two rocks we split: either we do not want a thing after we have got it, or we do not get it till we no longer want it. Some of us ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various

... the clowns at a fair, and the men round the basement steps laughed aloud and bowed in imitation, and then began to call to them; but the bailiff came out again to the cart, and they quickly disappeared down the steps. From the house itself there came a far-off, monotonous sound that never left off, and insensibly added ...

— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo

... of the poor horses hanging out of their mouths. Day dawned, and there were no signs of the caravan. A thick vapor was rising from every quarter, and they hoped that when it cleared up they would be more fortunate; but no, there was the same monotonous landscape, the same carpet of flowers without perfume. The sun was now three hours high, and the heat was intense; their tongues clove to the roofs of their mouths, while still they went on over flowery ...

— The Mission • Frederick Marryat

... self and the world are alike forgotten, the subject knows himself to be in possession of the highest and fullest truth; but this truth is only possessed in the quite undeveloped, simple, and bare form of monotonous feeling; what truth the subject possesses is not filled up by any determination in which the simple unity might unfold itself, and it lacks therefore the clearness of knowledge, which is only attained when thought harmonises differences ...

— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge

... last gazing on the sea, which seemed to mock his hopes and fears with its monotonous roll and roar, and fixed his eyes on the dim outline of the Heogue, which his sister had named "Boden's purple crown;" and he wondered if Signy could see the dear old hill from her place amid the waves. He would not think that the Osprey had capsized ...

— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby

... towards the end of November, 1793. The rain was beating down in a monotonous drip, drip, drip on to the roof of a derelict house in the Rue Berthier. The wan light of a cold winter's morning peeped in through the curtainless window and touched with its weird grey brush the pallid face of a young girl—a mere child—who sat in a dejected attitude on ...

— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy

... rustic cousin to it, or rather a caricature; namely, a close coatee, with stand-up collar, and very short skirts,—skirtees, they might be called,—the color gray; pantaloons and vest the same;—making the wearer a monotonous gray man throughout, invisible at twilight. The proposers of this metamorphosis, to make it go, selected an individual of small and agreeable figure, and procuring a suit of fine material, and a good fit, placed him on a platform ...

— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall

... its name the bird suddenly ceased its monotonous beak and claw gymnastics for a space, becoming on the instant alertly attentive. There came a preliminary craning of neck and winking of white-parchment-lidded eyes, and then, in shockingly human fashion it proceeded to give voluble utterance to some ...

— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall

... to ascertain what time the Company's boats may be expected, or when certain sledges of meat may come to the Fort. Another man is sick and the medicine-man is summoned, and a drum is beaten during the night with solemn monotonous 'tum, tum, tum', and certain confidential communications take place between the Doctor and his patient, during which the sick man is supposed to divulge every secret he may possess, and on the perfect sincerity of his ...

— Owindia • Charlotte Selina Bompas

... funeral was over, and she was once more at home, that she expressed the slightest concern. Then she laid her hand in Peter's and threw back her heavy crepe veil: "You have saved me from disgrace, Mr. Grayson," she said, in a low, monotonous voice, "and my little boy as well. I try to think that Garry must have been out of his mind when he took the money. He would not listen to me, and he would not tell me the truth. Jack is going to pay it back to-morrow, ...

— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith

... time, the female relations of each of the consecrated company, after having bathed, anointed, and drest themselves in their finest apparel, stood, in two lines opposite the door, and facing each other. This observance they kept up through the night, uttering a peculiar, monotonous song, in a shrill voice for a minute; then intermitting it about ten minutes, and resuming it again. When not singing their silence ...

— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint

... every age of variation without end, from the poet, the rhetorician, the fabulist, the moralist, the divine, and the philosopher. All, amidst the sad vanity of their sighs and groans, labor to put on record and to establish this monotonous complaint, which needs not other record or evidence than those very sighs and groans. What is life? Darkness and formless vacancy for a beginning, or something beyond all beginning—then next a dim lotos ...

— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... chaplain belonged to that class of friends, which may be termed argumentative. Their constant discussions were a strong link in the chain of esteem; for they had a tendency to enliven their solitude, and to give a zest to lives that, without them, would have been exceedingly monotonous. Their ordinary subjects were theology and war; the chaplain having some practical knowledge of the last, and the captain a lively disposition to the first. In these discussions, the clergyman was good-natured and the soldier ...

— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper

... longings and desires with His own great fulness. Other food palls upon man's appetite, and we wish for change; and physiologists tell us that a less wholesome and nutritious diet, if varied, is better for a man's health than a more nutritious one if uniform and monotonous. But in Christ there are all constituents that are needed for the building up of the human spirit, and so we never weary of Him if we only know His sweetness. After a world of hungry men have fed upon Him, He remains ...

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

... was to keep her appointment. But the step she was about to take had difficulties and terrors in her own eyes, though she had no reason to apprehend her father's interference. Her life had been spent in the quiet, uniform, and regular seclusion of their peaceful and monotonous household. The very hour which some damsels of the present day, as well of her own as of higher degree, would consider as the natural period of commencing an evening of pleasure, brought, in her opinion, ...

— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... as he stood, and he tried to move a few steps. On all sides curious looks were directed upon him, but no one offered to make way, and still the monotonous singing continued until he felt himself deafened, as he faced ...

— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford

... light, but now she was always in a gloom where all objects about her were dim and spectral; she was used to the thousand various sounds which are the cheer and music of a busy life, but now she heard only the monotonous footfall of the sentry pacing his watch; she had been fond of talking with her mates, but now there was no one to talk to; she had had an easy laugh, but it was gone dumb now; she had been born for comradeship, and blithe and busy work, and all manner of joyous ...

— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... voice in man—the human larynx. He says of singing: "The habits of savages give no indication of how this faculty could have been developed by Natural Selection, because it is never required or used by them. The singing of savages is a more or less monotonous howling, and the females seldom sing at all. Savages certainly never choose their wives for fine voices, but for rude health, and strength, and physical beauty. Sexual selection could not therefore have developed ...

— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart

... few countries which present a more lovely appearance than Ceylon. There is a diversity in the scenery which refreshes the eye; and although the evergreen appearance might appear monotonous to some persons, still, were they residents, they would observe that the colour of the foliage is undergoing a constant change by the varying tints of the leaves in the different stages of their growth. These tints are far more lovely than the autumnal shades of England, and their ...

— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker

... is that so, but this same communion with God, which is the opening of the heart for the influx of the divine power, brings to bear upon all our work new motives which redeem it from being oppressive, tedious, monotonous, trivial, too great for our endurance, or too little for our effort. All work that is not done in fellowship with Jesus Christ tends to become either too heavy to be tackled successfully, or too trivial to demand our best energies, and in either case will be done ...

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

... long I might have continued to rhapsodize in this strain, had not my wandering thoughts been suddenly recalled to my own immediate neighbourhood by the monotonous clatter of a horse's hoofs upon the road, evidently moving, at that peculiar pace which is neither a walk nor a trot, and yet partakes of both, so much in vogue ...

— The Purcell Papers - Volume III. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

... was now falling more steadily, with a low, monotonous susurration, interrupted at long intervals by the sudden slashing of the boughs of the trees as the wind rose and failed. The night was well advanced, but both sympathy and curiosity held me a willing listener to my friend's monologue, which I did not interrupt ...

— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce