|
|
|
More "Monotony" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... week in slow monotony, broken by a little rough weather, but that was all. The soldiers were drilled on deck till Nic pretty well knew the ordinary routine, and Lieutenant Lance laughingly asked him if he would like to take command. ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... and this is why the common rabble of nature are so malicious and envious toward us. Their slim wretched fashion is next door to the slimy eel: there is nothing edifying in such an edifice. From that piece of monotony to the prawn is already a good step; and how far above that is the seal! how do we surpass them both, as well as the seastar, the crab, and the lobster, my trustiest cousin, in our excursive irregularities, which defy ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... fair girls set off on their errand of inquiry to Camden Terrace, where Mr. Ellis resided, meeting with a very kind reception from Mrs. Ellis, and a joyful greeting from Mabel and Julia, who, to say the truth, were getting rather tired of the monotony of home, especially as, the nursemaid being away for a fortnight, and mamma not being well, they were under the necessity of taking care of the children, if care it could be called, where neither love nor forbearance were in exercise; but the little ones were only prevented from doing mischief, ...
— Aunt Mary • Mrs. Perring
... not, however, a good subject for discourse, and the expounders of Heraclitus were not unnaturally blamed for monotony. All they could do was to iterate their master's maxim, and declare everything to be in flux. In suggesting laws of recurrence and a reason in which what is common to many might be expressed, Heraclitus had opened the door ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... and he fell asleep, waking at the door of his father's lodge. His relatives gathered and gave him welcome, and he learned that he had been in the sky for a year. He took the privations of a hunter's and warrior's life less kindly than he thought to, and after a time he enlivened its monotony by taking to wife a bright-eyed girl of his tribe. In four days she was dead. The lesson was unheeded and he married again. Shortly after, he stepped from his lodge one evening and never came back. The woods were filled with a strange radiance on that ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... worthy of being compared favourably with those which have been outlined. We have seen enough to convince us that, although his drama may be classified in general as psychological and feminin there is great diversity in the individual plays, and never monotony. ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... mild Even as the winds and waters are; I could lie down like a tired child, And weep away the life of care Which I have borne, and yet must bear, Till death like sleep might steal on me, And I might feel in the warm air My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony. ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... had been on the road, and yet were only halfway across the desert. Every day had been exactly like the day before—an endless routine of eating and sleeping, camp-making and camp-breaking in sun, rain, or wind. The monotony of it all would be appalling to a westerner, but the Oriental mind seems peculiarly adapted to accept it with entire contentment. Long before daylight they were on the road again, and when we awoke only the smoking embers of an argul fire remained as ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... very well that Jack was acting contrary to orders, but anything was to them a change from the monotony of a man-of-war, and they, as well as Mesty, ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... to San Francisco. There he was just in time to catch a boat for Samoa. He wired to his friend, Monsieur de Letz, the French Consul, that he was coming, and received an enthusiastic welcome. The Consul was a bachelor, approaching middle age, was intensely bored with the monotony of life on an island of the Pacific, and was ravished with the chance of entertaining a personage so brilliant in the great far-away world as the Marchese Loria. He had a charming house, and a good cook; some wine also, and cigars of the best. ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... plan is matched by its practical advantages. The compact grouping of the Exposition palaces not only meant a saving of ground and labor, but it makes it easier to handle the crowds, and lessens the walking required of the visitor. There is no monotony. In developing the general idea, each architect and artist was left free to express his own personality and imagination. The result is that varied forms and colors in the different courts and buildings ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... it; thus she is incompetent to direct her servant, upon whose inferior judgment and taste she is obliged to depend. She is continually subjected to impositions from her ignorance of what is required for the dishes she selects, while a lavish extravagance, or parsimonious monotony betrays her utter inexperience in all the minute yet indispensible ...
— The Jewish Manual • Judith Cohen Montefiore
... prairie was now left behind, and the train was rattling through a heavy forest. Betty was glad that the rather nippy breeze had apparently kept every one else indoors, or else the monotony of a long train journey. The platform continued to be deserted, and, wondering what delayed Bob, she took up the camera to try again for a picture of the receding track. She and Bob had used up perhaps half a dozen films on this one subject, and the gleaming point where ...
— Betty Gordon in the Land of Oil - The Farm That Was Worth a Fortune • Alice B. Emerson
... 7th.—This morning the monotony of fine weather was relieved by a hearty squall, accompanied by torrents of rain, much thunder, and forked lightning. The ship reeled to and fro like a drunken man, and the passengers, as usual in such cases, performed various involuntary evolutions, cutting right angles, sliding, spinning round, ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... continued to occupy one end in an immovable manner, but at the other there was no monotony. Man after man came in, padded and gloved, and looking capable of mighty things. They took guard, patted the ground lustily, as if to make it plain that they were going to stand no nonsense, settled their caps over their eyes, and prepared to receive ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... stone of this region, a delicate cream. The uniformity is broken by great boldness and variety in the structural form of the building, and by its pillars, deep colonnades and heavy cornices, giving shadows which prevent monotony ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... rode twenty-one miles to Crossville, stopping on the way to contract for some lumber, arriving in Crossville in time for an eight o'clock supper; spent an hour after breakfast with brother Cameron, rode twenty-seven miles to Deer Lodge, half the way in a hard rain, getting pretty wet. The monotony of the trip was broken, Thursday, by picking my way through the brush rather than following the road. For ten miles before reaching Deer Lodge, I followed closely the track of the storm, the week ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 44, No. 5, May 1890 • Various
... the same thing, and then some more. Such sights and sounds—authentic visions and echoes of hell—merely repeated, began to lose their uncanny fascination. The man who excited us became a bore. For the worst thing about Gorki is his dull monotony, and vice is even more monotonous than virtue, perhaps because it is more common. Open the pages of almost any of his tales, it is always the same thing, the same criminals, the same horrors, the same broken ejaculations and brutish rage. Gorki has shown no capacity for development, ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... much scope for initiative. It is just a sordid affair of mud, shell-holes, corpses, grime and filth. Even in billets the thing remains intensely dull and uninspiring. One just lives, eats, drinks, sleeps, and all apparently to no purpose. The monotony is excessive. My chief function in life seems to be the filling up of endless Army forms. I thoroughly sympathise with the recent protest from military men in the Spectator about the "Military Babu," who is occupying ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... she had tried it twice, and had turned back because there seemed no end to the trail twisting through the sage and rocks. West she had not gone, but she had no doubt that it would be the same dreary monotony of dull ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... The monotony of a life whose sole negative enjoyment consisted in the persecution of others, induced Captain De Courcy to make occasional excursions to the different watering-places; and whether that, to a certain degree, he was schooled by banishment from society at home, ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... fanlight above and columns at either side. Seats, too, flanked the porch, and the carefully trimmed wistaria vine hung gracefully over all. Across both ends of the house ran wide verandahs, with porte cochere, sun parlour, conservatory and tea-porch breaking the monotony. ...
— Patty and Azalea • Carolyn Wells
... about that, remarking it was always foolish to go half-way to meet trouble that might never come; while as to my being a strange sort of fellow, that, she supposed, I could not help, and if other people were willing to put up with me, there was an end of the matter. The monotony of life, she added, was a common experience; there she ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... broken by gullies containing water, nourishing dense crops of cane reeds and broad- bladed grass, and, emerging from this district, wide savannah covered with tall grass open into view, with an isolated tree here and there agreeably breaking the monotony of the scene. The Makata is a wilderness containing but one village of the Waseguhha throughout its broad expanse. Venison, consequently, abounds within the forest clumps, and the kudu, hartebeest, antelope, and zebra may be seen at early dawn emerging into ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... monotony of sewing upon prison garments had undermined all her great natural strength. She sat there panting for breath, and white to the lips. The excitement had been too much for this ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... reading of those pregnant words, all the even and hopeless monotony, all the dull and barren plane of life had suddenly erupted into one towering and consuming passion for activity, for return to his old world with its gentle anaesthesia of ever-widening plans and its obliterating and absolving years ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... fortitude of landowners who spend the winter in the country; there's so little to do that if anyone is not in one way or another engaged in intellectual work, he is inevitably bound to become a glutton or a drunkard, or a man like Turgenev's Pigasov. The monotony of the snowdrifts and the bare trees, the long nights, the moonlight, the deathlike stillness day and night, the peasant women and the old ladies—all that disposes one to indolence, indifference, and an ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... plain and the broken sierra, now of Elysian gardens of the vine, the olive, the orange, and the aloe, then of trackless, vast, silent, uncultivated wastes, the heritage of the wild bee. Here we fly from the dull uniformity, the polished monotony of Europe, to the racy freshness of an original, unchanged country, where antiquity treads on the heels of to-day, where Paganism disputes the very altar with Christianity, where indulgence and luxury contend with privation and poverty, where a ...
— A Supplementary Chapter to the Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... with a pair of jack-screws and raise it, by fractions of an inch, until I could get my rollers under it one at a time. I think that it was the deadly dullness of this jack-screw work that I most resented—the stupid monotony of doing precisely the same sort of utterly wearying work all day long and for day after day. But in the end I got it finished: all my rollers properly in place, and the cradle made fast to hold it from starting before I was ready to have it go—although of that there was ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... cliffs, to watch banks of fern massed against the right of way where for a day and a night parched sagebrush, brown tumble-weed, and such scant growth as flourished in the arid uplands of interior British Columbia had streamed in barren monotony, hot and ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... impossible for people to herd together as is the case in many other industries. This has its good side, but also its bad. There are no rural slums for the breeding of poverty and crime; but on the other hand, there is an isolation and monotony that tend to become deadening in their effects on the individual. Stress and over-strain does not all come from excitement and the rush of competition; it may equally well originate in lack of variety and unrelieved routine. How ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... among themselves, and Desmond found some alleviation of the monotony of his life in learning the lingua franca of India under the Babu's tuition. He was encouraged to persevere in the study by the fact that the Babu proved to be an excellent storyteller, often beguiling the tedium of wakeful hours in the shed by relating interminable ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... been, the vigour, the invention, the volume and rush of language, and the keenness and truth of ear amid its diversified tasks are indeed admirable, which could keep up so prolonged and so majestic a stream of original and varied poetical melody. If his stanzas are monotonous, it is with the grand monotony of the seashore, where billow follows billow, each swelling diversely, and broken into different curves and waves upon its mounting surface, till at last it falls over, and spreads and rushes up in a last long line of foam upon ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... over. Now no command, no power was left to them. The years went by, dragging their slow length of days, and bringing no change or brightness to the lives of these two men who lived in secret and alone. It was a melancholy life, the monotony only broken by visits from the minister, or a few other friends, who brought them all the gossip and news of the town. These were but small matters. But to the two men shut off from all other human beings they seemed ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... Creditors pressed hard; the captain had no money to pay his workmen, and he would not work himself. Disgusted with his location, but unable to change it for a better; without friends in his own class (for he was the only gentleman then resident in the new township), to relieve the monotony of his existence with their society, or to afford him advice or assistance in his difficulties, the fatal whiskey-bottle became his refuge from ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... from the sufferer's own mouth. 'Clarissa Harlowe' is in fact one long lamentation, passing gradually from a tone of indignant complaint to one of despair, and rising at the end to Christian resignation. So prolonged a performance in every key of human misery is indeed painful from its monotony; and we may admit that a limited selection from the correspondence, passing through more rapid gradations, would be more effective. We might be spared some of the elaborate speculations upon various phases of the affair which pass away without ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... For a moment this monotony was interrupted by the ill-conducted engagement at Ball's Bluff. On October 21 nearly 2000 troops were sent across the Potomac by the local commander, with the foolish expectation of achieving something brilliant.[146] ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... days drifted dreamily past with peaceful, unvarying monotony, Jose's faculties, which had always been alert until he had been declared insane, gradually awakened. His violently disturbed balance began to right itself; his equilibrium became in a measure restored. The deadening thought that he had accomplished ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... irksome. To his chivalrous spirit there was a pleasure in thus watching over an innocent being, while she slept, unconscious of the danger that menaced her. Lighting his cigar, he resigned himself to the dream of blissful anticipations, which relieved the monotony ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... refreshing to find that a big-wig like you can talk just as much nonsense as a little-wig like me," she said; "but you don't know, for all that, what the silence and monotony of life here can be. The very voice of a stranger falls like music on one's ears. I was so glad to see you, and you were so kind and sympathetic about—my boy. And then, all in a moment, my joy was turned into mourning, wasn't ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... does his suffering mean? "What's the use of complaining?" says one wounded man to another. "That's what war is, not the battles, but the terrible unnatural weariness; water up to the middle, mud, filth, infinite monotony of wretchedness, interrupted by acute tragedies."—At intervals, human groans, profound shudders, issue from the silence and ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... just received your note, which, on the principle of single sighs or breaths being wafted from Indies to the poles, arrived quite safely, and I was very glad to have it. I shall fall into monotony if I go on to talk of my continued warm sense of your wonderful kindness to me, a stranger according to the manner of men; and, indeed, I have just this moment been writing a note to a friend two streets away, and calling it 'wonderful kindness.' I cannot, however, of course, allow you to ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... course! I ought never to have indulged my wishes, but have grown gray in the same dull manner in which I was brought up! Because I once venture a step beyond the drear monotony of my past life, and look around me to see whether there be not some new source of enjoyment ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Kitchener. It goes on for weeks with the effect of being quite sane and intended and the right thing, and then, then suddenly it comes whacking into one's head, 'But this—this is utterly mad!' This going to and fro and to and fro and to and fro; this monotony which breaks ever and again into violence—violence that never gets anywhere—is exactly the life that a lunatic leads. Melancholia and mania.... It's just a collective obsession—by war. The world is really quite mad. I happen to be having just one gleam of sanity, that won't last after ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... the unexcited persistency of the man's movement. He followed it, watched it, and became more and more interested in the unvarying monotony of it. There were the same up-and-down strokes of the long pole, the slight swaying of the upstanding body, the same eddy behind the cedar logs—and occasionally wisps of smoke floating behind when the pursuer smoked his pipe. Not once did Peter see Breault turn his head to look behind him. Yet Breault ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... Must I bear the awful burden of authority, that unlovely appendage to youth? Must I voluntarily assume duties to which the task of the criminal that tramps, tramps day after day the revolving tread-mill, seems light; for that is mere physical labor and monotony, not the wear and tear of mind, heart, ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... grasping the right hand of his friend which he scarce perceptibly, though measuredly, lifted and let fall throughout the length of all the curious performance. The voice was not unmusical, nor was the quaint old ballad-air adopted by the singer unlovely in the least; simply a monotony was evident that accorded with the levity and chance-finish of the improvisation—and that the song was improvised on the instant I am certain—though in no wise remarkable, for other reasons, in rhythmic worth or finish. And while his smiling auditors all drew nearer, and leant, with parted ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... in the little gray, dim room now, and waited with brooding eyes. Within, all was quiet with that air of awesome mystery peculiar to the cloister, which so soon gives place with increasing familiarity, to a sense of deadly monotony. It is only from outside that the mystery of the cloister continues to interest. Juanita knew every stone in this silent house. Its daily round of artificial duties appeared small to ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... jolly heart of his beating strong and loyal under his brown palmer's coat, that James Douglas rode towards Machecoul, only whistling low to himself and wishing that something would happen to break the monotony ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... My good old tutor had taken care to provide himself with five or six bottles of white wine from the cellar of The Armed Man, which he laid under the cushions, and which we drank to overcome the monotony of the journey. ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... distressful state, which was the worst to those who tended him, he would roll his head upon the pillow, incessantly repeating the name in a hurried and impatient manner, with the misery of a disturbed mind, and the monotony of a machine. Equally, when he lay still and staring, he would repeat it for hours without cessation, but then, always in a tone of subdued warning and horror. Her presence and her touch upon his breast or face would often ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... pictures in the mosaic pavement of the squares, and on the inner walls of the colonnades, were doubly effective against the light masses of marble surrounding them, which in their turn were indebted to the pictures for affording the eye an attractive variety instead of dazzling monotony. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... under a somewhat different aspect they represent the same groups of animals. In certain latitudes, or under conditions of nearer proximity, these differences may be less marked. It is well known that there is a great monotony of type, not only among animals and plants, but in the human races also, throughout the Arctic regions; and some animals characteristic of the high North reappear under such identical forms in the neighborhood of the snow-fields in ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... picture of Souls we are given. When we think that if all men were perfect, all would be alike, we err with a wide mistake. The nearer you get to the Soul, and the more perfect is the expression of it, the less is there monotony or similarity; and almost the one thing you may posit about any avatar is, that he will be a surprise. Tom and Dick and Harry are alike: 'pipe and stick young men'; 'pint and steak young men'; they get born and marry and die, and the grass grows over them with wondrous alikeness; ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... stretching along this portion of the California coast seeming to keep well back, away from the heavy winds, so that very little is seen of them; while there are no deep inlets or lofty mountains visible to break the regular monotony. Along the coast of Oregon the woods of spruce and fir come down to the shore, kept fresh and vigorous by copious rains, and become denser and taller to the northward until, rounding Cape Flattery, we enter the Strait of Fuca, where, sheltered from the ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... new effects in the ever-shifting scenes of Naples. Here is the reverse of monotony; if any thing becomes wearisome, it is the variety. Here is the monotony of incessant change. The whole city, with all its vast suburbs, ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... of fashionable Parisian conversation, which is, says our author, "a prodigious labor of improvising," a "chef-d'oeuvre," a "strange and singular thing, in which monotony is unknown," seems to be, if correctly reported, a "strange and singular thing" indeed; but somewhat monotonous at least to an English reader, and "prodigious" only, if we may take leave to say so, for the wonderful rascality which all the conversationists betray. Miss Neverout and the Colonel, in ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... that he meant what he said, yet it seemed to Aynesworth equally certain that the time would come, and come quickly, when the unnatural hardness of the man would yield to the genial influence of friendship, of pleasure, of the subtle joys of freedom. Those past days of hideous monotony, of profitless, debasing toil, the long, sleepless nights, the very nightmare of life to a man of Wingrave's culture and habits, might well have poisoned his soul, have filled him with ideas such as these. But everything was different now! ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to find monotony in an Eden so well arranged; the perfect happiness which the first woman found in her terrestrial paradise gave her at length a sort of nausea of sweet things, and made the countess wish, like Rivarol reading Florian, for a ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... have nervous prostration, and are so often a little deaf. The floor was strewn with bits of paper, that they had used to make calculations on, and they had a lovely kind of game of snowballing with it now and then—I suppose to vary the monotony of shouting and screaming. The young ones would pelt each other. It must have been a nice change.—Then there were a lot of partitions with glass panels at the end of the room, and into these they kept rushing like rabbits ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... lowest class of work wages fall even lower. Mr. Schloss gives the wages of five men working in a small workshop, whose average is less than 11s. a week. These wages do not of course represent skilled work at all. Machinery has taken over all the skilled work, and left a dull laborious monotony of operations which a very few weeks' practice enable a completely unskilled worker to undertake. Probably the bulk of the cheapest work is executed by foreigners, although from figures taken in 1887, of four typical London parishes, ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... "that sublime composer's works with what by common consent is called Italian music. What feebleness of ideas, what limpness of style! That monotony of form, those commonplace cadenzas, those endless bravura passages introduced at haphazard irrespective of the dramatic situation, that recurrent crescendo that Rossini brought into vogue, are now an integral part of every composition; those vocal fireworks ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... man, are almost destitute of animal life. Dr. Newberry, describing the vast forests of the yellow pine of the West, Pinus ponderosa, remarks: "In the arid and desert regions of the interior basin, we made whole days' marches in forests of yellow pine, of which neither the monotony was broken by other forms of vegetation, nor its stillness by the flutter of a bird or the hum of an insect."—Pacific Railroad Report, vol. vi., 1857. Dr. Newberry's Report on Botany, ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... seven does kneel, and therefore the effect is lost. So it is with the washing of the high altar. If one priest alone went up and poured the wine and oil over the sacred stone, and then cleansed the shrine from any spot or stain, the grandeur of the idea would not be marred by the monotony of the performance; but when some four hundred priests and choristers defile past, each armed with a chip besom, like those of the buy-a-broom girls of our childhood, and each gives a dab to the altar as he passes, ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... Marker, and his work would reveal itself. Meanwhile he was in the dark, the flimsiest adventurer on the wildest of errands. This easy, settled place, these Englishmen whose minds held fast by polo and games, these English ladies who had no thought beyond little social devices to relieve the monotony of the frontier, all seemed to make a mockery of his task. He had fondly imagined himself going to a certainty of toil and danger; to his vexation this certainty seemed to be changing into the most conventional of visits to the ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... ridiculous speed. The whisper that carries them is very small, in the great scale of things, of air and space and progress, but it's also very safe, for there's no compression, no sounding-board, to make speakers responsible. And then repetition at sea is somehow not repetition; monotony is in the air, the mind is flat and everything recurs—the bells, the meals, the stewards' faces, the romp of children, the walk, the clothes, the very shoes and buttons of passengers taking their exercise. These things finally grow at once so circumstantial and so arid that, in comparison, ...
— The Patagonia • Henry James
... has endeavoured to enliven the monotony of his subject, are sometimes very far-fetched. He has scarcely finished his exordium, when he goes back to the third day of the creation, and then passes on to the deluge. This reminds one of the Mock Advocate in the Plaideurs of Racine, who, having to defend ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... the old one in beauty and comfort, it might be sanctioned for the sake of uniformity, as suggested in the previous chapter; but when it is otherwise why should we imitate? Why should the world assume a depressing monotony of costume? Why should we allow nature's diversities to disappear? Formerly a Chinese student when returning from Europe or America at once resumed his national dress, for if he dared to continue to favor the Western garb he was looked ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... the lesson. Not swiftness only, but patient persistence through days and years, is the mark of true living. There are many people who can work under pressure for a little time, but who tire of the monotony and slack in their duty by and by, failing at last because they cannot endure unto the end. There are people who begin many noble things, but soon weary of them and drop them out of their hands. They may pass for brilliant ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller
... stared as he rushed to and fro, hardly heeding the piles of luggage with which railway servants seek to break the dull monotony of a platform promenade. There was French blood in Tressamer: short, dark, thick-necked, yet far from stout in figure, he possessed the strain of sombre passion which runs through the blood of the Celtic races. He could no ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... in haste to leave these walls. Yesterday, one of you, who was praised, replied, that "if she did well she hoped that efforts would be made to have her pardoned." I can feel the monotony and dreariness of your confinement, but I entreat you to believe that for many of you it would be the greatest misfortune to be taken from here too soon. You know, better than I can, the temptations that await you in the world; and you must now perceive how dark ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... hedge-trees, groves, and copses that intersect and internect the vast expanse of green and gold were planted by man's hands. Such a landscape would convince them that the prairies of Illinois and Iowa may be recovered from their almost depressing monotony by the same means. The soil of this district is apparently the same as that around Chicago—black and deep, on a layer of clay. It pulverises as easily in dry weather, and makes the same inky and sticky composition in wet. To give it more ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... rarity. What if the change would freshen and brighten her, and bring her back to them with some of the sparkles that continually danced in Sadie's eyes; but what, on the other hand, if she should grow utterly disgusted with the monotony of their very quiet, very busy life, and refuse to work in that most necessary treadmill any longer. So the mother argued and hesitated, and the decision which was to mean so much more than any of those knew, trembled in the balance; for let Mrs. Ried once find voice to say, "Oh, Ester, I don't see ...
— Ester Ried • Pansy (aka. Isabella M. Alden)
... ready to begin, for with the implements and materials provided at each table the guests are required to produce a facsimile of the animal for which the table is named. Different materials are provided at each table, so there is no monotony, as the guests progress from table to table after half an hour's stay ...
— Entertaining Made Easy • Emily Rose Burt
... pay tribute to the skill and dash of the German flying officers and to the spirit of the flying battalions. The officers they found to be fine-drawn, lean, determined-looking youngsters, unlike the well-known heavy Teutonic type. Owing partly to the monotony of German regimental life there was great competition, they were told, to enter the flying service, eight hundred candidates having presented themselves for forty vacancies. In 'The Prince Henry Circuit', a cross-country flight of more than a thousand miles, to be completed in six days, ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... She would have been quite willing to give up her life to a round of such pleasures as society and wealth can procure, but the society must be good and entertaining, and its pleasures must be refined and free from monotony. In some parts of England she might have found what would have satisfied her, and under the influence of a pleasure-seeking life, she would in due course have become the woman of a type. As she grew older the horizon of her life ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... books worrying their minds, but really absorbing nothing. A senior wrangler has been known to find five or six hours a day of real work at mathematics as much as he could stand. Of course, work involving little hard physical exertion and hardly any mental effort can go on much longer, but the very monotony which in some ways makes it easy, has a deadening effect. A factory operative minding a "mule" being asked: "Is it not very hard work always watching and piecing threads?" answered, "No, but it is very dree work." But the evil effects of too long hours are not confined to the fact that unrest or ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... fillets, painted like marble that cross the opening in such a way that in the middle rest the two parts and one of the bands, where medallions are placed, as shall be told in due course; and this has been done to avoid monotony, which is born of sameness. Now, at the head of the chapel, in the first opening, which is one of the smaller ones, is seen how the Omnipotent God in the heavens by the movement of His arms divides light from darkness. In the second space is how He created the two great ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... put their heads together to devise some method of breaking the deadly monotony of the desert days, and bringing added ...
— Tabitha's Vacation • Ruth Alberta Brown
... settled in the Brazils, to join him there, and a married woman whose husband had been working as a tailor for the last six years in Rio Janeiro. People soon become acquainted on board ship, and generally endeavour to agree as well as possible, in order to render the monotony of a ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... road, and this was selected as a course for a race to be run between the horse of Captain Mitchell of the Louisiana Tigers and that of the Colonel of a Virginia regiment of cavalry. The troops now so long inactive, nothing to break the monotony between drills, guard duty, and picketing, waited with no little anxiety the coming of the day that was to test the metal of the little grey from the Pelican State and the sorrel from the Old Dominion. Word had gone out among all the troopers ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... soothed to drowsiness by the hum of insects, and the monotony of passing winds among the foliage around him, when he soon unwarily fell asleep with his gun folded in his arms. But after a while he awoke from his sleep, and for a moment or two still lay in the same position, as it happened, ...
— A Sketch of the History of Oneonta • Dudley M. Campbell
... light on the subject. She sighed for her brother. The hours with M. Muller were the best substitute she had; they were dearly prized by her, and, to say truth, by him. He had no family, he lived alone; and the visits of his docile and intelligent little pupil became very pleasant breaks in the monotony of his home life. Truly kind-hearted and benevolent, and a true lover of knowledge, he delighted to impart it. Ellen soon found she might ask him as many questions as she pleased, that were at all proper to the subject they were upon; and he, amused and interested, was equally ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... expounded consists mainly in the contemplative spirit of reposeful didacticism which pervades the entire collection. Nor is there anything Oriental about the form of the poems,—the rhymed Alexandrine reigning supreme with wearisome monotony. ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... incident enlivened the monotony of November. The Khalifa continued his defensive preparations. Mahmud remained motionless at Metemma; and although he repeatedly begged to be allowed to advance against the force near Berber he was steadily refused, and ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... our face and manner to dolefulness, and talk of anything heartrending. Thus we carry darkness to those in darkness, shade to those in shade. We increase the isolation of solitary lives and the monotony of the dull and sad. We wall up some existences as it were in dungeons; and because the grass grows round their deserted prison-house, we speak low in approaching it, as though it were a tomb. Who suspects the work of infernal cruelty which ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... o'clock the first break in the drowsy monotony occurs; for on the stroke of this hour the first peeress enters the transept, clothed like Solomon for splendour, and is conducted to her appointed place by an official clad in satins and velvets, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... before he began to expend his surplus energy in playing Rugby football, the Welshman was accustomed, whenever the monotony of his everyday life began to oppress him, to collect a few friends and make raids across the border into England, to the huge discomfort of the dwellers on the other side. It was to cope with this habit that Dreever Castle, in the county of Shropshire, came into existence. ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... forbidding me to feel, to will. Sometimes I think it is an actual physical disability—the horror that is in me of change, of movement, of effort. Can you bear with me? Can you be poor? Can you live a life of monotony? Oh, impossible!' he broke out, almost putting her hand away from him. 'You, who ought to be a queen of this world, for whom everything bright and brilliant is waiting if you will but stretch out your hand to it. It is a crime—an infamy—that I should be speaking to ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... have drifted down to us no doubt remain true to the ancient type, however much they may have changed in quality. They show the characteristics that stamp all primitive music—plaintiveness to the degree almost of sadness, monotony, lack of acquaintance with the full range of intervals that make up our diatonic scale, and therefore a measurable absence of that ear-charm we call melody. These are among ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... to be so. Often the ground was uneven; sometimes we had hills to ascend, and precipitous elopes to slide down, not knowing what might be at the bottom; and then a wide plain to traverse, without a tree or a shrub to break its monotony or to assist us in directing our course. Soon after we set out in the morning our eyebrows became covered with frost, our caps froze to our brows, surrounded by a rim of icicles. The fronts of our coats were fringed with similar ornaments; even our eyelashes were covered ...
— Snow Shoes and Canoes - The Early Days of a Fur-Trader in the Hudson Bay Territory • William H. G. Kingston
... had a long "spell'' of fine weather, without any incident to break the monotony of our lives, I may have no better place for a description of the duties, regulations, and customs of an American merchantman, of which ours ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us. And is this difference of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less suffusions of color in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reign in the countenances, that immovable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race? Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favor of the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... outdoor exercise, one can readily perceive that the days are not long and tiresome. Of course there are a few who yawn and complain of the monotony of frontier life, but these are the stay-at-homes who sit by their own fires day after day and let cobwebs gather in brain and lungs. And these, too, are the ones who have time to discover so many faults in others, and become ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... because they are human, has come the humanity of the players: the thing which makes it possible for them to feel this music, and to play it, not as a machine would play, grinding it out with dead monotony, but with all the colour and passion of ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... that Hal got a holiday, relieving the monotony of his labours as stableman: an accidental holiday, not provided for in his bargain with the pit-boss. Something went wrong with the ventilating-course in Number Two, and he began to notice a headache, and heard the ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... darkness, the positive negation of bliss, the recoil of self to devour itself, and forever. The consciousness of being was intense, but in all the universe was there nothing to enter that being, and make it other than an absolute loneliness. It was, and forever, a loveless, careless, hopeless monotony of self-knowing—a hell with but one demon, and no fire to make it cry: my self was the hell, my known self the demon of it—a hell of which I could not find the walls, cold and dark and empty, and I longed for a flame that I might know there ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... during these summer days. He had departed in his abrupt way for his first pleasure cruise in The Blue Moon, taking no friend, save the ever-present Larpent, to relieve the monotony. No one knew whither they were bound, or if the voyage were to be long or short. He dropped out of his circle as a monkey drops from a tree, and beyond a passing wonder at his movements no one questioned ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... Gray, who was also then postmaster, offered him a position in the Cleveland post-office, which he accepted, and entered upon its duties; but at the end of two months, being dissatisfied with the dull routine and monotony of such an occupation, he threw up his position; and having, on the very day he left the post-office, decided to adopt the legal profession, before night he had secured a position in the law office of Charles ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... had its sports to relieve the monotony of savage existence, the game of the stick and the rolling ring, the archery practice of boys, horse-racing on the neighboring prairie, and incessant games of chance; while every evening, in contrast to these gayeties, the ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... made repeated efforts to destroy his influence with the remainder of the tribe, and owing to the monotony of his pacific rule, were, on one occasion, nearly successful. A spirit of discontent pervaded his people—they complained of the extent of the power which he wielded—they needed excitement, and as his measures were all of a peaceful character, they sought it in a change of rulers. The matter ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... against their foreman, conversed and thought only of matters closely and manifestly connected with their work. Only rarely, and then but faintly, did solitary sparks of impotent thought glimmer in the wearisome monotony of their talk. Returning home they quarreled with their wives, and often beat them, unsparing of their fists. The young people sat in the taverns, or enjoyed evening parties at one another's houses, played the accordion, ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... offending it. And the playful wit of her lover made Therese marvel. She never could have imagined the infallible taste which he exercised naturally in joyful caprice and in familiar fantasy. At first he had displayed only the monotony of passionate ardor. That alone had captured her. But since then she had discovered in him a gay mind, well stored and diverse, as well as the gift ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... tones, or greens or greys. To vary the character of each room, introduce different colours in the furniture covers, the sofa-cushions and lamp-shades. Our point is to urge the repetition of a main background in a small group of rooms; but to escape monotony by planning that the accessories in each room shall strike individual notes of decorative, ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... catch up with the truck. At the end of the first half mile, the horrible roadbed began to take toll of the elderly tires. There were two punctures, in rapid succession. Then came a blowout. And, at the bottom of the mountain a third puncture varied the monotony of the ride. Thus, the truck reached the Place well ahead of the ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... ninety-nine in 1881. This, Mr. Gray seems to think, is due to a neglect of varied food scales; but it may also very probably have arisen from the neglect of the regulation about lime-juice, either as to issue or quality, or both. But it is also a fact of very great importance that mere monotony of diet has a most serious effect upon health; variety of food is not merely a pandering to gourmandism or greed, but a real sanitary benefit, aiding digestion and assimilation. Our Board of Trade has nothing to do with the food scales of ships, but Mr. Gray hints ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... torrents of rain we were being parboiled in steamy atmosphere. The track was as tracks usually are "during the Wet," and for four hours we laboured on, slipping and slithering over the greasy track, varying the monotony now and then with a floundering scramble through a boggy creek crossing. Our appearance was about as dashing as our pace; and draggled, wet through, and perspiring, and out of conceit with primitive travelling—having spent the afternoon combining ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... admitted with a sigh, "I hate giving up my profession, but there is a sort of monotony about it when Jimmy insists upon being my ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... represented, the National Woman Suffrage Society was formed, which has done most efficient service, holding conventions in many of our large cities, and awakening thought and action. In Saratoga and Newport a new class was reached. Wearied with the monotony of fashionable dissipation and the driveling idiocy of flirtations, women were glad to hear a few sensible, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... heard it asserted,' he says, 'that a slight flavour of monotony occasionally assails the honeymoon. Variety is the salt of life, I begin to think. Some of these fine days, Maddie, we'll both get married and ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... being a painter, he was unable or unwilling to tell me. I could make nothing of it. I tried to persuade myself than an obscure feeling of revolt had been gradually coming to a head in his slow mind, but to challenge this was the undoubted fact that he had never shown any impatience with the monotony of his life. If, seized by an intolerable boredom, he had determined to be a painter merely to break with irksome ties, it would have been comprehensible, and commonplace; but commonplace is precisely what I felt he was not. At last, because I was romantic, I devised an explanation ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... and uneventfully by. Guy's letters from India formed almost the only break in the monotony of the household. Zillah soon found herself, against her will, sharing in the general eagerness respecting these letters. It would have been a very strong mind indeed, or a very obdurate heart, which could have remained unmoved ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... Then, according to the general plan of all these books, in which fierce wars and faithful loves alternate, there is more fighting, and though Artamene is victorious (as how should he not be, save now and then to prevent monotony?) he disappears and is thought dead. Of course Mandane cries, and confesses to the confidante, being entirely "finished" by a very exquisite letter which Artamene has written before going into the doubtful battle. However, he is (yet once more, of course) not dead at all. What (as that ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... the feeling of the worshippers. It was this, perhaps, which caused the enthusiasm excited by Cimabue's great Madonna, and made the people shout and dance for joy when it was uncovered before them. Compared with the spectral rigidity, the hard monotony, of the conventional Byzantines, the more animated eyes, the little touch of sweetness in the still, mild face, must have been like a smile out of heaven. As we trace the same softer influence in the earliest Siena and Cologne pictures of about the same period, we may fairly regard ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... combine to limit the employment of minuscule for formal or monumental uses. On the other hand, the small letter form is excellently adapted for the printed page, where the occasional capitals but tend to break the monotony, while the ascenders and descenders strongly characterize and increase the legibility ...
— Letters and Lettering - A Treatise With 200 Examples • Frank Chouteau Brown
... as she progressed with the description of Great Titchfield Street, that her mind was well occupied with the daily work; she gave the recital clearly and well, avoiding repetition and excluding any suggestion of monotony. Every moment of the hours there seemed to engage her interest. It was her duty to keep the books, and keep them straight; to answer the telephone, and sometimes make purchases of reels of gold ...
— Love at Paddington • W. Pett Ridge
... state of affairs clearly," said Mr. Barraud; "the young folks are getting weary of the monotony of a sea voyage, and desire to ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... edifices, for commercial and other purposes, in the vicinity of the lake; but intermixed with these there are many quaint buildings of a stern gray color, and in a style of architecture that I prefer a thousand times to the monotony of Italian streets. Immensely high, red roofs, with windows in them, produce an effect that delights me. They are as ugly, perhaps, as can well be conceived, but very striking and individual. At each corner of these ancient houses frequently is a tower, the roof of which ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... The calm monotony of a life at Trooditissa was disturbed every now and then at distant intervals by trifling events which only served to prove that peculiar characters existed in the otherwise heavenly atmosphere which showed our connection with the ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... the trainer's autocratic rule, the life of the team while in training was not just one long grind, without any recreation to break the monotony. Reddy, it is true, prohibited theaters and kindred amusements, because they necessarily meant late hours, and late hours, as the trainer well knew, meant decreased efficiency, both physical ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... stream, diverted to the sluices, went purling down over the riffles. The drip from countless negligible leaks commenced in its monotony. Into the puddles of mud and water the three old miners sloshed, with shovels and picks in hand. They were tired before their work began. Gettysburg, at sixty-five, had been tired for twenty-five years. Nevertheless, he began his day with song, ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... John, "you have worked hard—we have both worked hard. Our lives have not been altogether without pleasure. The occasional game of cards we have had together has always helped to relieve monotony, eh, Lablache? Yes—yes. No one can say we have not earned rest. But there—yes, you have been more fortunate than I. I ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... he said severely, sitting very erect, with one white hand on the table and the other on the hilt of his sword (yet full of courtesy, and longing to enjoy the cheer and conversation of his host); "the peaceful monotony of our lives has been rudely shaken by a demand upon three fallible human beings to alter the course of history in two great nations. That is a sufficient excuse for the suspense to which we have been forced to subject you. The marriage of a Russian and a Spaniard is of no great moment ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... over there," he said, pointing over the starboard bow. Far away Ezra could see a long roll of foam breaking the monotony of the broad stretch of ocean. "Them's the Goodwins," he went on; "and them craft ahead is at anchor in ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... went back to the window, but the monotony was not relieved by any change in the face of things and so they determined that it was rather stupid to stand there. Nettie brought down her two dolls and they played with these for a while, but keeping house in a make believe way was not so exciting when there was the reality close at ...
— A Dear Little Girl at School • Amy E. Blanchard
... quickly, frequently broke the monotony of the trip. One moment the Casco would be sailing along easily and the "next moment, the inhabitants of the cabin were piled one upon another, the sea was pouring into the cockpit and spouting in fountains through forgotten deadlights, and the steersman ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... Cain, an' the oldest, a pretty little girl of thirteen, was doin' her best to quiet 'em. There was six others besides what had been accounted for, but I soon found that they belonged to a neighbour, an' was just visitin' to relieve the monotony. ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... raised. It is recorded that in moments of defeat pirates voluntarily have set fire to their powder magazines and thus were blown to destruction rather than plead for mercy. During long cruises, when no ships upon the horizon line varied the monotony of the daily routine, pastimes were invented, each one out-rivalling the other in sheer wickedness. Captain Teach considered it rare sport to lock his men in the ship's hold and then set sulphur afire to ascertain how long they could withstand asphyxiation. Yet ...
— Pirates and Piracy • Oscar Herrmann
... her Countess-mother, who, in the matter of dress, was a consummate artist,—Nathalie carried a great cluster of vivid crimson camellias, that gave a perfect finish to a costume now relieved from any suspicion of monotony, or too conventional simplicity. The red of the waxen camellia, vividly transparent as it was, was scarce redder than the unroughed cheeks and lips of their bearer. Nor was the brilliant sparkling of the diamonds in the kakoshnik inadequately reproduced in the ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... inserted several sets of questions for every day in the week, differing in length, to prevent monotony, and to accommodate those occasions when you ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... all monotony. When we had worried along our easting to 126 degrees west longitude, we left the variables and headed south through the doldrums, where was much calm weather and where, taking advantage of every fan of air, we were ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... that their restless spirits would soon tire of the monotony of work without ultimate interest. Ordinarily the hope of a big cut is sufficient to keep men of the right sort working for a record. But these men had no such hope—the camp was too small, and they were too few. Thorpe adopted the expedient, now quite common, of ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... the one-legged boy went out of the room with the inspector, the latter accompanied by the anxious and protesting superintendent. After that monotony settled down again. The long morning and the longer afternoon wore away and the whistle blew for quitting time. Darkness had already fallen when Johnny passed out through the factory gate. In the interval the sun had made a golden ladder of the sky, flooded the world with its ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... stretching away on the shore-line. The trees were of enormous size. We landed after anchoring near a sandy beach, and waded ashore, and were rewarded by finding a quantity of nuts that were very palatable and satisfying to hunger, and a welcome change from the monotony ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson
... this lifeless monotony with a resigned smile, but it made Elinor visibly nervous; not actively nervous as in the case of annoyance, but mournful and weary, as one often becomes after many days of rain, when all one's gloomy thoughts seem to pour down upon one with the rain; or ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... in which I so long resided. The flat roofs, the measured pace of the camel, the half-naked negro, the uncouth Bedouin, the cloudless heavens, the tawny earth, and the meagre apology for turf, are exchanged for ricketty wooden houses with coarse tiling, laid in such a way as to eschew the monotony of straight lines; strings of primitive waggons drawn by buffaloes, and driven by Bulgarians with black woolly caps, real genuine grass growing on the downs outside the walls, and a rattling blast from the Black Sea, more welcome than all the balmy spices of Arabia, for it reminded me that I ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... peaceful and most united family life goes on without monotony. But I cannot speak of the things which touch me most, except clumsily. So it is better to keep from doing so. The Princess writes to me from Rome that she shall be delighted to obtain possession of the two water-colors ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... now endeavoured to while away their long hours of captivity by watching spiders making their webs. I can understand this. In the dreary monotony of this dreariest of sieges a spider would be an event. But alas, the spider is outside, and we are the flies caught in his toils. Never did time hang so heavily on human beings as it hangs on us. Every day seems to have twice the usual ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... appetites, condiments and canned goods, how fondly we turn from the dreary monotony of the "dainty" menu to the memory of the satisfying dishes of our mothers! What made us, like Oliver Twist, ask for more? Were those flavors real, or was it association and natural, youthful hunger that enticed us? Can we ever forget them; or, what is more practical, can we again realize ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... is matched by its practical advantages. The compact grouping of the Exposition palaces not only meant a saving of ground and labor, but it makes it easier to handle the crowds, and lessens the walking required of the visitor. There is no monotony. In developing the general idea, each architect and artist was left free to express his own personality and imagination. The result is that varied forms and colors in the different courts and buildings blend truly into ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... the body of officers. In their secret hearts every one of them was glad that in the deadening monotony of their garrison life this affair, painful as it was, was now assuming tangible proportions. For not a single one of them had any kindly feeling for Kolberg, whose secretive disposition and whose absence from nearly all ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... Now the metre may have great merits. I am disposed to say that, having fascinated Mr. Swinburne, it must have great merits. That I dislike it is, no doubt, my fault, or rather my misfortune. But undoubtedly it is a metre that no man but Mr. Swinburne could handle without producing a monotony varied ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... strenuous work required of a section laborer, the foreman had to refuse their request. Then they tried to find employment amongst the scattered ranches which here and there commenced to break the monotony of the prairie, but as the planting had been finished long ago, and the harvest would not commence until after school had re-opened, their appeals were in vain. Then they discovered that we had ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... are two lonely Western barbarians in a strange land. We'll play together for a little while. We're not used to each other's sort of play, but that will break up the monotony of life all the more. I don't know how long we'll ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... nevertheless, I marvel at the fortitude of landowners who spend the winter in the country; there's so little to do that if anyone is not in one way or another engaged in intellectual work, he is inevitably bound to become a glutton or a drunkard, or a man like Turgenev's Pigasov. The monotony of the snowdrifts and the bare trees, the long nights, the moonlight, the deathlike stillness day and night, the peasant women and the old ladies—all that disposes one to indolence, ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... the monotony to be as maddening as ever. There were times when she rebelled passionately against the solitude of the place. There were moments to her when it seemed that her mind couldn't ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... the thought, she was willing to lie in Philip's arms and take what he could give. They were two of a kind, she thought scornfully. In her bitterness, the bleak, snow-covered land, with its drooping pines, seemed in its cold monotony a fitting background for two ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... life. And so, whereas during her grief, he had revered and respected it even to a point of silent sympathy, now that she was gladdened, his heart rose on the wings of strengthened hopes. Even in the dreary monotony of this existence in his Aunt Babette's conciergerie, Time had not failed in his work, and now, perhaps, soon he might humbly strive to help Time. The very next day he returned—on some pretence of ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... reader to experience its weariness, if he were truly desirous of so doing. But I hesitate to take such a course, and trust that some of these lines even once repeated may convey some inkling of the dulness of the days. Monotony of view—for we live at the centre of a complete circle of sea and sky; monotony of food—for all things taste the same on board ship; monotony of existence—for each day is but a barren repetition of ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... How can they keep on so steadily, so swiftly? Cases are emptied and refilled; bottles are labeled, stamped and rolled away; jars are washed, wiped and loaded, and still there are more cases, more jars, more bottles. Oh! the monotony of it, the never-ending supply of work to be begun and finished, begun and finished, begun and finished! Now and then some one cuts a finger or runs a splinter under the flesh; once the mustard machine broke—and still the work goes on, on, ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... across the wide monotony of prairie with its undulating wavelets, a tawny green beneath the scorching summer sun. He was thinking deeply; perhaps dreaming, although dreaming had small enough place in his busy life. His lot was a stern fight against crime, and, ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... that a confession can often be extracted by the endless repetition of one question alone; they cannot bear the pressure of its monotony. Perhaps it was the monotony of the measured rattle and clack of the machine going on so steadily that finally impelled Wes Dean, after his long frowning survey of the scene, to vault the low stone wall ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... touched, and her unfailing energies exercised in behalf of Mr Snow's melancholy, nervous wife. In upon the monotony of her life she had burst like a ray of wintry sunshine into her room, brightening it to at least a momentary cheerfulness. During a long and tedious illness, from which she had suffered, soon after the minister's arrival in Merleville, Janet had watched with her a good many nights, and ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... tramp-life is the absence of monotony. In Hobo Land the face of life is protean—an ever changing phantasmagoria, where the impossible happens and the unexpected jumps out of the bushes at every turn of the road. The hobo never knows what is going to happen the next moment; hence, he lives only in the present moment. He has learned ...
— The Road • Jack London
... not reply. She was indeed too much upset for words. Tea-drinking was the only form of dissipation in which she and her friends indulged, or had indulged for many years past. In more energetic days an occasional dinner had varied the monotony, but as time crept on there seemed a dozen reasons for dropping the more elaborate form of entertainment. A dinner-party upset the servants; it necessitated the resurrection of the best dinner-service from the china cupboard, and the ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... greater pleasure than do ordinary people, because they have got the notion, they themselves would make a better dinner off the viands served at our tables than their own. And doubtless some break in the monotony gives a fillip of pleasure. And that explains why folk in general look forward with pleasure to high days and holy days—mankind at large, but not the despot; his well-stocked table groaning from ...
— Hiero • Xenophon
... lumber, arriving in Crossville in time for an eight o'clock supper; spent an hour after breakfast with brother Cameron, rode twenty-seven miles to Deer Lodge, half the way in a hard rain, getting pretty wet. The monotony of the trip was broken, Thursday, by picking my way through the brush rather than following the road. For ten miles before reaching Deer Lodge, I followed closely the track of the storm, the week before. Trees were torn up, houses and barns unroofed, the ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 44, No. 5, May 1890 • Various
... with earth containing the whitish, globular eggs of the Rose-beetle, encumbered mantel and furniture; glass aquariums half full of earth, sod, and youthful larvae of the same sinful beetle lent pleasing variety to the monotony of Scott's interior decorative effects. Microscopes, phials, shallow trays bristling with sprouting seeds, watering-cans, note-books, buckets of tepid water, jars brimming with chemical solutions, blockaded the legitimate ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... suit me excellently for coming. I have acted exactly up to your instructions, and have sold my rubbish at the broker's in the next street. All this movement and bustle is delightful to me after the weeks of monotony I have endured. It is a relief to wish the place good-bye—London always has seemed so much more foreign to me than Liverpool The mid-day train on Monday will do nicely for me. I shall be anxiously looking out for you on ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... pursuit? A summons, a bogus appointment, and all would be over. It is well they don't have days of fog in the Latin countries—the countries of assassination. By Jove! here comes something at last to break our dead monotony." ...
— The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans • Arthur Conan Doyle
... her generous purse and pours forth melodies of her myriad-tongued voices for man's delectation, for, if the shackles of wage slavery are not loosed, the mind is stultified and ambition destroyed by the long hours of toil's monotony in the factory, the machine shop, in the mines, at the desk, and on the farm. It matters not, though the fireside of the home sheds forth a radiance in which is blended paternal love, health and happiness, for, if woman is denied equal suffrage, then this queen of the household, perforce, ...
— The Art of Lecturing - Revised Edition • Arthur M. (Arthur Morrow) Lewis
... But the white monotony of the rolling land and level lake remained unbroken. The reindeer did not come. The days became shorter, dimmer, darker. The mercury kept ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... building perched on pillars. But much that is ancient and simple in square red brick remains. The plain, low-roofed houses, with their flat facades and crumpled, lichened tiles, succeed one another down Castle Street and West Street with a delightful monotony. The elaborate carved and painted doorways, knockers, lunettes, doors and steps are quite a model exhibition. The two streets wear a Georgian air of poke-bonnets and long purse-strings. Or they are ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... overwhelmingly for Mr. Bryan on the free-silver issue four years previously, and it was thought that I, because of my knowledge of and acquaintanceship with the people, might accomplish something towards bringing them back into line. It was an interesting trip, and the monotony usually attendant upon such a campaign of political speaking was diversified in vivid fashion by occasional hostile audiences. One or two of the meetings ended in riots. One meeting was finally broken up by a ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... on Sunday, and being, as usual, wearied by the monotony and apparent insincerity of it all, he again gives ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... of the guests gathered together at Blandings Castle that the place was dull. The house party had that air of torpor which one sees in the saloon passengers of an Atlantic liner—that appearance of resignation to an enforced idleness and a monotony to be broken only by meals. Lord Emsworth's guests gave the impression, collectively, of being just about to yawn and look ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... Covenanters up and down the West Country. Their wedding day was the 10th of June, but it was not till August that Claverhouse and his wife came home to Dudhope. Since then four years have passed, during which the monotony of his duty in hunting Covenanters had been relieved by the office of Provost of Dundee, in which it is said he ruled severely, and the sameness of Jean's life at Dudhope by a visit to the Court of London, where she produced a vast impression, and was said to have been ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... list of ordinary discomforts and privations. Two of the men twice a year drove their cattle two hundred and fifty miles to the nearest railway station, but none of the women accompanied them on these trips, which were always looked forward to by their husbands as a relief from the monotony ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... broken by Welsh groins—that is to say, groins which cut into the main arch below the apex. It is not singular in the principle of its design, but it is unique in its proportions, in which the exact mean seems to be attained between the poverty and monotony of a waggon-headed ceiling and the ungraceful effect of a mere groined roof with a depressed roof or large span—to which may be added, that with a richness of effect scarcely, if at all, inferior to fan ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... sun her natural filth was no menace to the eye, no repulse to the senses. Above the Liffey, even at so early an hour, the heat shimmers like a silver mist. The bells of churches were ringing, and the great cathedral bells boomed in thrilling monotony over the peaceful city. Here and there in the shabby yet renowned streets, horsemen moved along; now and then the costermonger raised his cry of fresh fruit, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... sagacity, and to elevate him by the frequent evidence of the marvels of animal life—all these calls upon our higher faculties will be wanting, and lacking them your immortal part will be dizzied, stunned by the monotony of the scrubbing-brush, and poisoned past the remedy of perfume by yellow soap. Your wife and children, too, will have their faces continually shining like the holiday saucers on the mantel-piece. Now consider the conceit, the worse than arrogance of this; the studied ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... young, unknown, and apparently an ordinary country doctor. The prince, however, soon perceived that he was far superior to his circumstances and position, and placed himself upon a very confidential footing with him. One day he complained of the desolation and monotony of his life and asked, in a tone between jest and earnest, what he ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... and his head began to ache. He longed for home that he might lie down and breathe, but a long way and a great snowy wind were betwixt him and rest. He fell into a reverie, and seemed to get on better for not thinking about the exertion he had to make. The monotony of it at the same time favoured the gradual absorption of his thoughts in a dreamy meditation. Alternately sunk in himself for minutes, and waking for a moment to the consciousness of what was around him, he had walked, as it ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... glad to be able to break the monotony of this long journey by a visit to a half-sister of mine, who was then living at the hill-station of Mussoorie. The change to the delightful freshness of a Himalayan climate after the Turkish-bath-like atmosphere of the plains in September was most grateful, ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... there came another break in the monotony of outpost life which had, if possible, a more powerful and exciting influence on us than the arrival of the ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... leaning on the blackened handle, the heavy head of the hammer buried in the snow, and looked after his brother, who was walking along the road northward, toward the wood. Above this wood a sharp, orange red streak now seemed to slash through the monotony of the landscape like a gaping wound. The sun was sinking. The dark, still and motionless wood seemed to keep watch and ward over the young man's path, above this the flame colored band, against which the separate treetops ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... time, imparting that terrible disease[203] which has swept off whole nations; as woodmen in his forest, and intrusive tillers of his ground, scaring away to the far West those animals of the chase given by the Great Spirit for his food: there is to him a terrible monotony of result. In the delicious islands of the Caribbean Sea, and in the stern and magnificent regions of the northeast, scarcely now remains a mound, or stone, or trace even of tradition, to point out the place where any among the departed ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... their arrival at Baltimore, their lives were of the most dreary monotony. The rain, which had begun to fall soon after their arrival, continued to descend in torrents, and they found themselves close prisoners in the sanded parlors of the miserable inn. They could but compare this wretched place with the grand old forests and broad ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... up—the dead—that were in it." Haltingly the words fell through the silence. There was a certain monotony about them, as if they had been often repeated. The speaker turned his head from side to side upon the pillow uneasily, as if conscious of restraint, then spoke again in the tone of one newly awakened. "Why doesn't that fellow come?" he demanded restlessly. "Did ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... in somebody else, there is still enough of it for all the purposes of examination. In my contacts with the species I find no one who possesses a quality which I do not possess. The shades of difference between other people and me serve to make variety and prevent monotony, but that is all; broadly speaking, we are all alike; and so by studying myself carefully and comparing myself with other people, and noting the divergences, I have been enabled to acquire a knowledge of the human race which I perceive is more accurate and more ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... travelling along it could possibly see him. He can just descry the lone cottonwood afar off, outlined against the horizon like a ship at sea. It is the only tree in sight; elsewhere not even a bush to break the drear monotony of ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... and literalize the romance of her youth which Sister Soulsby had so frankly outlined. He would think upon nothing but her as he knew her,—the kindly, quick-witted, capable and charming woman who had made such a brilliant break in the monotony of life at that dull parsonage of his. The only genuine happiness in life must consist in having bright, smart, attractive women like that ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... smokestack guys and rigging, were huge rope-nettings, hung there for the purpose of breaking the force of the seas and so saving our mess-room doors. But the doors were smashed and the mess-rooms washed out just the same. And yet, out of it all, arose but the one feeling, namely, of monotony. ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... highball, boredom, disgust, the monotony of time, the turbidity of events, sank into a vague background before which glittering cobwebs formed. Things became reconciled to themselves, things lay quietly on their shelves; the troubles of the day arranged themselves ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... (for his passion was usually short-lived, and his nature kind), he looked about him on his Sundays and holidays, and he saw how much monotony and weariness there was, and thence how drunkenness arose with all its train of ruin. Then he appealed to the Bigwig family, and said, "We are a labouring people, and I have a glimmering suspicion in me that labouring people of whatever condition were made—by a higher intelligence than ...
— Some Christmas Stories • Charles Dickens
... west of that town[1120] lay the strong city of Capsa.[1121] It marked almost the extremest limit of Jugurtha's empire in this direction, placed as it was just north of the great lakes and west of the deepest curve of the Lesser Syrtis. The town was the gift of an oasis, which here broke the monotony of the desert with pleasant groves of dates and olives and a perennial stream of water. The sources of this stream, which was formed by the union of two fountains, had been enclosed within the walls, and supplied drinking water for the city before ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... entire day the Princess Ziska herself never left her private apartments, and towards late afternoon Gervase began to feel the hours drag along with unconscionable slowness and monotony. Never did the sun seem so slow in sinking; never did the night appear so far off. When at last dinner was served in the hotel, both Denzil Murray and Dr. Dean sat next to him at table, and, judging from outward appearances, ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... Zobeide, reassured by the monotony of his voice, decided at last to come out of her shell. First she showed the point of her little horny nose, then her black eyes, her flat-pointed tail, and finally her strong little claw-tipped feet. Seeing the melon, she made a gesture of ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... two Weeks it was immense. In time, however, it struck him that there was a certain Monotony in spending one's Money on the Night Owls and showing up with the Milkman. The Poker Players were into him and he began to suspect that he ...
— People You Know • George Ade
... in China, it is religion which breaks the monotony of female life, and collects within the temples, on the various festivals, an array of painted faces and embroidered skirts that present, even to the European eye, a not ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... temperature. For dreary hours that lengthened into weary days and nights, and these again into never-ending weeks, the driving, drenching flood poured down upon the sodden earth, searching the very marrow of the five thousand hapless men against whose chilled frames it beat with pitiless monotony, and soaked the sand bank upon which we lay until it was like a sponge filled with ice-water. It seems to me now that it must have been two or three weeks that the sun was wholly hidden behind the dripping clouds, not shining ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... relations, and the lavish use of pathos. Did we still possess the whole of the comic literature of the Greeks, we should, without doubt, find in it the models of all these species, with this difference, however, that the clear head of the Greeks assuredly never allowed them to fall into a chilling monotony, but that they arrayed and tempered all in due proportion. Have not we, even among the few pieces that remain to us, the Captives of Plautus, which may be called a pathetic drama, the Step-Mother of Terence, a true family picture; while the Amphitryo borders on the fantastic boldness ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... beam of oak hung from a rope tied about the center, and this beam is struck with a hammer, first on one side, and then the other. Sometimes an iron klepalo is used as well, and then they strike first the beam and then the iron bar, so as to vary the monotony of the call. I found that the wooden klepalo could be heard for a distance of about one and a half miles over land, and the iron one for over two miles. Now we can easily make a wooden klepalo for use in this camp, and then if Dutchy, or any of the rest of us, keep within a mile ...
— The Scientific American Boy - The Camp at Willow Clump Island • A. Russell Bond
... laws of syllable-counting given above. But if in this respect the Spanish poet has less freedom than the English versifier, he has infinitely greater liberty in the arrangement of his rhythms. The sing-song monotony of regularly recurring beats is intolerable to Latin ears. The greater flexibility of Spanish rhythm can best be ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... of which by loving eyes might have been read uneasy thought patiently carried, and the lack of some essential to conscious well-being. The other girls were looking on this side and that, eager to catch sight of anything to trouble the monotony of the daily walk; but the eyes of this one were cast down, except when occasionally lifted in answer to words of the schoolmistress, the grenadier, by whose side she was walking. They were lovely brown eyes, trustful and sweet, and although, as I have said, ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... to write the adventures of the last year. As I compose my mind to the task, there arises before me the memory of days of suffering, and nights of sleepless apprehension—days and nights that, in their black monotony, seemed well nigh eternal. And the sorrow, too, which I felt on that terrible day, when my companions, whom common dangers and common sufferings had made as brothers to me, were dragged away to an ignominious death ...
— Daring and Suffering: - A History of the Great Railroad Adventure • William Pittenger
... most poor mortals were forced to get on without this magic atmosphere. They had never been goddesses; they did not know what they were going without. But her child, who had been, as it were, born a fairy, would miss tragically the delicate beauty of her every-day life, would fade under the ugly monotony of poverty. ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... the horses have done nothing for days on end but feed and grow fat, and the drivers nothing but clean up and look after their teams and harness. If the guns up in the firing line had to shift position it has meant no more to the teams than a break of the monotony for a day or two, a night or two's marching, and ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... years later he became divisional engineer in the Pas-de-Calais, at the Marles mines. When there he married the daughter of the rich owner of a spinning factory at Arras. For fifteen years they lived in the same small provincial town, and no event broke the monotony of existence, not even the birth of a child. An increasing irritation detached Madame Hennebeau, who was disdainful of this husband who gained a small salary with such difficulty. The misunderstandings between them ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... the dulness and monotony of the life there was little to complain of, and Godfrey was surprised to find how far it differed from his own preconceived notions of the life of a political prisoner in Siberia. It was only when, by an effort, he looked ahead for years and tried to fancy the possibility of being so cut ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... in Havana; it was something to vary the monotony of this beautiful island-city, and the inhabitants seized upon it as a gala day. Business was suspended; the throng put on their holiday suit, the various regiments appeared in full regalia and uniform, for the new lieutenant-commander-in-chief was to ...
— The Heart's Secret - The Fortunes of a Soldier, A Story of Love and the Low Latitudes • Maturin Murray
... listen to what he called reason, and therefore he held his tongue. The idea that a French ship might be somewhere near, behind that wall of fog, had in it something which to him was not unpleasant, since it afforded some variety to the monotony of his situation. He stood, therefore, in silence, with his face turned towards the direction indicated by Zac, and listened intently, while the skipper stood in silence ...
— The Lily and the Cross - A Tale of Acadia • James De Mille
... Very few of them appeared to reside in any large town, but to prefer rural retreats "far from the madding crowd," where doubtless a letter, even on the business of the Corporation, would be a welcome diversion to the monotony of existence. As to the clergy, doubtless their names had been suggested by the good Bishop of S—, who would be in a position to introduce a considerable connection to his fellow- directors. Reginald ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... at the time capable of doing this for themselves, and mosaicists were brought from Constantinople, who covered the churches of Italy with a sublime monotony of Byzantine traditions. But the Gothic blood was burning in the Italian veins; and the Florentines and Pisans could not rest content in the formalism of the Eastern splendour. The first innovator was, I believe, Giunta of Pisa, the second Cimabue, the third Giotto; the last only being a man of ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... of one of my unfortunate fellow-countrymen, which I am permitted to make, will afford an interesting view of the internal administration of the Sing Sing prison, by one of its inmates. After alluding to the absolute monotony of prison life, he gives one day as a specimen of every day. "Monday morning, the large prison bell rings at five o'clock, when we all rise; half an hour after, we all go out to work, to our respective shops, till breakfast, ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... of home-study "hooky" to break the monotony. He would run off a couple of pages of regular exercise, and then turn back to the hunt-and-peck system of typing to work on a story. He took a furtive glee in this; he felt that he was getting away with something. In mid-July, ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... day, which was Saturday, in order to be in time for the gathering of the Indians in the pueblo on Sunday. I therefore travelled on after nightfall, though the road was much longer than I expected, leading through extensive pine forests, the monotony of which was interrupted only once by the appearance of ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... a legacy had been bequeathed to him, and that he was on his way to a distant city to claim it. He had stopped at the near-by port in order to break the monotony of the journey. "Before the disaster that befell me," continued he, "I lived in comparative comfort, but ever since I have been struggling. I was obliged to begin all over again and build a new house and start a new business. You can easily understand that I soon fell ...
— After Long Years and Other Stories • Translated from the German by Sophie A. Miller and Agnes M. Dunne
... these stories, because they are human, has come the humanity of the players: the thing which makes it possible for them to feel this music, and to play it, not as a machine would play, grinding it out with dead monotony, but with all the colour ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... took in a party of ladies, which somewhat relieved the monotony of the cabin, and I was amused by listening to their lively prattle, and the little gossip with which they strove to wile away the tedium of the voyage. The day was too stormy to go upon deck—thunder and lightening, accompanied with torrents of rain. Amid the confusion ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... too, flanked the porch, and the carefully trimmed wistaria vine hung gracefully over all. Across both ends of the house ran wide verandahs, with porte cochere, sun parlour, conservatory and tea-porch breaking the monotony. ...
— Patty and Azalea • Carolyn Wells
... scene! Imposing too in its sorrowful grandeur, and well suited to a land which may be called a graveyard of empires and nations. The monotony of the landscape would be unbroken, but for certain elevations and hillocks of strange and varied shapes, which spring up, as it were, from the plain in every direction; some are high and conical or pyramidal in form, ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... voice seemed to come from farther off. The sunlight through the stained glass projected colored splotches here and there. I wondered if the people knew how homely they looked with those splotches on their faces, like great birth-marks. That suggested a pastime to relieve the monotony. ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... said he, 'un prix extreme a voir votre attention fixee sur la question qui interesse mon pauvre pays; la misere surpasse tout ce que vous pouvez imaginer.' Pamphlets about the plague had been showered upon the public, the monotony of waste paper being broken, at rare intervals, by a more or less useful publication. 'The Pharmacopoeia of the Silkworm,' wrote M. Cornalia in 1860, 'is now as complicated as that of man. Gases, liquids, and solids have been laid under contribution. From chlorine ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... drudgery may be lightened and its efficiency heightened by the introduction of a richer content that shall provide a greater variety in the repetitions, insure an adequate motive for effort, and relieve the dead monotony that frequently rendered the older methods so futile. I look forward to the time when to be an efficient drillmaster in this newer sense of the term will be to have reached one of ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... functions. The treasures of life are not hidden; they are close at hand, so close that we overlook them. We cheat ourselves with a pitiful fear of ourselves. Men and women of the future will not seek happiness; they will have gone beyond it. Mere happiness would produce monotony. And their lives shall be lives of change and variety with the thrills produced by ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... front of a low one-family house with a flight of outside steps, differing in no wise from the other houses on the block, which were all built on the same plan, of exactly the same height, of exactly the same width, and with absolute similarity of detail. Frederick had observed such architectural monotony only in workingmen's houses in Germany, while here it was the mark of a ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... home, with cisterns of water as well as springs and wells; to have fields of wheat, vineyards of grapes, and gardens of melons and all luscious fruits—this is the picture that haunts the wandering Arab, amid the hardships and monotony ...
— Hebrew Life and Times • Harold B. Hunting
... of the congregation was, as ever, a reflection of the sermon. The heat of the day, the reaction from the long week in the open air, the quiet monotony of the well modulated voice rising and falling in regular cadence in what is supposed by so many preachers to be the tone suitable for any sacred office, produced an overwhelmingly somnolent effect. Many of them slept, some frankly and openly, others ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... had a vaguely mysterious air and you could imagine that it would be a fit scene for shady transactions. It suggested a more lurid time, when ruthless men carried their lives in their hands, and violent deeds diapered the monotony of life. ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... dark day followed, with nothing to break its melancholy monotony except the bulletins that came from hour to hour reporting little change either for better or for worse. Rose broke the news gently to Aunt Plenty and set herself to the task of keeping up the old lady's spirits, for, being ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... this a very interesting experience—quite a jolly break in the dull monotony of the day. Hunting up the stick, he laid it in the lawyer's hands, and then turned his eye ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... from France to the monotony of everyday affairs. But a girl showed him the beauty ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... of it," said the man eagerly; and he followed his officer promptly as he walked round the cottage, and said a few words to his sentries, who seemed to gladly welcome the coming of some one to relieve the silence and monotony ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... And no monotony! You climb the inviting hills and woods day by day, week after week, ever to find fresh enchantment. Not a bend of road or winding mountain-path but discloses a new scene—here a fairy glen, with graceful birch or alder breaking the ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... how much of first-class art they have in these prairies—how original and all your own—how much of the influences of a character for your future humanity, broad, patriotic, heroic and new? how entirely they tally on land the grandeur and superb monotony of the skies of heaven, and the ocean with its waters? how freeing, soothing, nourishing they ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... have already spoken, and would add, in proof of the pains taken by the former superintendent, Dr. Browne, to break the monotony of asylum life, that he introduced private theatricals, in which vaudevilles and farces were performed by and for the lunatics, and even before the public. A practice still beneficially preserved is that of ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... luxuriously fitted up "dahabeah," that I arrived at Korosko, a Nubian village about a thousand miles from the Mediterranean. The ascent of the Nile was simply a prolonged feast in this comfortable sailing-craft, with the panorama of imposing temples and gigantic ruins relieving the dreary monotony of the river-banks. The valley of this ancient stream, from the First Cataract, where it ceases to be navigable, to Cairo, is remarkable alone to the traveler for its vast structures and mausoleums. ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... overcritical Americans, and thought it was time to give one of them a lesson. Perhaps he was tired of trapping ordinary garden variety spies of the Belgian brand. It would be a pleasing variation in the monotony of convicting defenseless, helpless Belgians if he could show that one of these fellows masquerading as Americans was a sham. Especially one of that journalistic tribe that had been sending out reports of German atrocities. Furthermore, it would ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... often seemed to me that if there be, as certain ancient philosophers fabled, one certain figure pervading all nature, human and universal, it is the circle. Round, in one vast monotony, one eternal gyration, roll the orbs of space. Thus moves the spirit of creative life, kindling, progressing, maturing, decaying, perishing, reviving and rolling again, and so onward forever through the same course; and thus even would seem to revolve the mysterious mechanism of human events ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... too long, and end by tiring of the pursuit while it is yet in its early stages. Many excellent plots, admirable from the constructive point of view, have been wasted by stringing them out too far; the reader recognizes their merit, but loses his enthusiasm on account of a sort of monotony of strain; he wickedly turns to the concluding chapter, and the game is up. "The Woman in White," by Wilkie Collins, was published about 1860, I think, in weekly installments, and certainly they were devoured with insatiable appetite by many thousands ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... variety of material to work with than Puccini. Japanese music is arid and angular, and yet so great is Puccini's skill in combining creative imagination and reflection that he knew how to make it blossom like a rose. Pity that he could not wholly overcome its rhythmical monotony. Japanese melody runs almost uninterruptedly through his instrumental score, giving way at intervals to the Italian style of lyricism when the characters and passions become universal rather than local types. ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... difficult to say whether, in such poems as this, Coleridge is overtaken by his besetting indolence, or whether he is deliberately writing down to the theories of Wordsworth. Another criticism of his own on his early blank verse, where he speaks of "the utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the monotony and dead plumb down of the pauses, and the absence of all bone, muscle and sinew in the single lines," applies only too well to the larger part of his work in this difficult metre, so apt to go to sleep ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... day, night after night, till his life's end, plenty and comfort and neatness and respectability and warmth in dull monotony; while outside somewhere in the cold and rain, in poverty and want and wretchedness, wandered Edith with the wailing baby in ...
— Zoe • Evelyn Whitaker
... Knight began to weary of the monotony of his existence, and to sigh for fresh adventures and more excitement. The Squire, too, wished for change, and was not altogether pleased with the buffet he regularly got every evening at the ...
— The Seven Champions of Christendom • W. H. G. Kingston
... inevitable mother—with a couple of little sisters; how shall a man desert his family? He was born on a farm on the Murge, the watershed between this country and the Adriatic. Thinking of the Murge, that shapeless and dismal range of limestone hills whose name suggests its sad monotony, I began to understand the origin of ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... Ocean was heard far inland; but just when the tempest had lulled, it sounded as if hundreds of heavy wagons were driving over a hard tunnelled road. Joergen heard it even in his dungeon, and it was a change in the monotony of his existence. No old melody could have gone more deeply to his heart than these sounds—the rolling ocean—the free ocean—on which one can be borne throughout the world, fly with the wind, and wherever one went have one's ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... it. And the playful wit of her lover made Therese marvel. She never could have imagined the infallible taste which he exercised naturally in joyful caprice and in familiar fantasy. At first he had displayed only the monotony of passionate ardor. That alone had captured her. But since then she had discovered in him a gay mind, well stored and diverse, as well as the gift of ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... did not leave Ryde until the 23d, it is possible that Fielding received a reply. During the remainder of this desultory voyage he continued to beguile his solitary hours—hours of which we are left to imagine the physical torture and monotony, for he says but little of himself—by jottings and notes of the, for the most part, trivial accidents of his progress. That happy cheerfulness, of which he spoke in the Proposal for the Poor, had not yet deserted him; and there are moments when he seems rather on a pleasure-trip ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... hostility. His brow was smooth and his smile cheerfully condescending. Indeed, he appeared anxious to have me enter, and cast an indulgent look at Rudge, whose irrepressible joy at this break in the monotony of his existence was tinged with a very evident dread of offending his master. Interested anew, I followed this man of contradictory impulses into the room toward which he ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... marks. Every day there were herds or single deer to be seen along the way, and at a number of points we passed long piles of whitened antlers. Other game too, ducks, geese, and ptarmigan had become plentiful since we entered the caribou country, and now and then a few were taken to vary the monotony of the diet of dried caribou meat. Loons were about us at all hours, and I grew to love their weird call as much almost ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... end?" he queried, although he flushed a little at her words. "It's not profitable to meditate upon a blank monotony, you know." ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... am," observed lady Feng, "and I only wish some one would come and have a chat with me to break my dull monotony." ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... Catholic prisoners. The convicts have no privileges; a sharp, intelligent lad may become a hall boy or get employed in the mess room; or a mechanic may be appointed to one of the workshops and so gain some slight relief from the monotony of their lives; but they get no reward, beyond a little tobacco once a week for chewing; smoking is strictly prohibited; once a month they are allowed to be visited by their friends. On entering the building the visitor is forcibly struck ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... treat, particularly when it enabled them to prepare nourishing broth for their sick, and once Rose shot a stag, giving them several good meals, but this happened so seldom as to do little toward varying the monotony of their fare. ...
— The Moravians in Georgia - 1735-1740 • Adelaide L. Fries
... and leaden in their sockets, that there was a drumming in his ears, and that if heat and weariness thus made an end of him, he need no longer watch the oppressive multitude of stars, or hear the monotony of ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... work and eager to finish the poem of my "Valkyrie" in a fortnight. Some recreation after that will be a necessity; I want the change of traveling, and should especially dislike to finish my last poetic work, the great introductory play, here, where the monotony of my accustomed surroundings oppresses me, and where troublesome visitors put me generally in a bad temper. I want to go to the Alps, and should like at least to have a taste of the frontier of Italy, and to ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... were times when all the loveliness of that island seemed but a hideous place of exile, an abhorrent monotony which surrounded her—grasped her—clung to her—hemmed her in, as if it were an evil spirit, having life and the power to torture her. She thought of those whom she loved, she pondered upon all the grand schemes of her ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... then, those motives which were not the best were made to seem so very weak and mean by the way in which Miss Todd approached them. When she thought of the matter alone, it seemed to her that she was perfectly reasonable in wishing to be married, in order that she might escape the monotony of a lonely life; and she thought that if she could talk to Miss Todd about the subject gently, for a quarter of an hour at a time every day for two or three months, it was possible that she might explain ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... were sham fights galore, but it was mostly squad and company drill, until if some devil had scooped out our brain-boxes and filled them with sawdust we could have carried out the orders just as well. In fact, one fellow must have gone mad with the monotony of it and perpetrated the rhyme, to the tune of ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... grey sand, grey rocks, grey over-arching sky, relieved only by the soft purple of the sage—a picture of utter loneliness, of intense desolation, which was a horror. The eye found nothing to rest upon—no landmark, no distant tree, no gleam of water, no flash of colour—only that dull monotony of drab, motionless, and with no ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... interview with Mr. Cartwright, he had passed through a stormy scene with James Greenfield and the words of the president of The King's Basin Land and Irrigation Company were ringing in his ears with painful monotony: ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... individuality were in her case not so much the outcome of the feeling proper to the character, as the manifestation of diligent painstaking art which had not yet learnt to conceal itself. The gleam of the smallest spark of genius would have been a welcome relief to the monotony of talent.... It must not be forgotten, however, that a highly artificial play like 'Ingomar' is by no means a favorable medium for the display of an actress' powers, though it may fairly indicate their nature. Before a definite rank can be assigned to her among English actresses, Miss Anderson ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... and handkerchiefs were strung along indiscriminately with Jonathan's trousers, coats, waistcoats and socks. Here and there, in between, prismatic quilts, red bordered tablecloths and fringed napkins varied the monotony. ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com
|
|
|
