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More "Spiritless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... activity, on the other, to the thought and knowledge of the world as a whole, but at the centre Greece was 'living Greece no more,' her politics sank to the level of a dreary farce, her philosophy died down to a dull and spiritless scepticism, to an Epicureanism {211} that 'seasoned the wine-cup with the dust of death,' or to a Stoicism not undignified yet still sad and narrow and stern. The hope of the world, alike in politics and in philosophy, faded as ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... and shared in by the few women present. The sermon was short and lifeless and the entire service—though read from the Book of Common Prayer, as fine a model of impressive English as exists—was spiritless. When we left the church we met lines of well-dressed, but plain, proper men, women and children in Sunday garb. I inquired where these people came from, and was informed they were Methodists on the way home from their meeting house. ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... Magalona once sat in thy place, and alighted from thence, not into the grave, but into the throne of France, if there is truth in history? And do not I sit by thee, that I may vie with the valorous Peter, and press the seat that was once pressed by him? Come, blindfold thyself, poor spiritless animal, and let me not hear thee betray the least symptom of fear, at least not in my presence."—"Well," quoth Sancho, "let them bind me; but, if you will not let one say his prayers nor be prayed for, it is no marvel one should fear that we may have a legion of imps about us to deal ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... brother; and there would be no point in keeping the incident for the benefit of Attila. That Gunnar should first detect the imposture, and should then recognise the heart of his brother, is a fine piece of heroic imagination of a primitive kind. It would have been wholly inept and spiritless to transfer this from Gunnar to Attila. The poet of Atlaml shows that he understands what he is about. The more his work is scrutinised, the more evident becomes the sobriety of his judgment. His ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... impatiently and made his way to the livery-stable, where he hired a saddle horse. His idea was merely to be alone. The reins hung on the neck of his spiritless mount and the roads he went were the roads it took of its own ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... girl. Some authors say that for the purpose of winning her over he should not speak to her for three days, but the followers of Babhravya are of opinion that if the man does not speak with her for three days, the girl may be discouraged by seeing him spiritless like a pillar, and, becoming dejected, she may begin to despise him as an eunuch. Vatsyayana says that the man should begin to win her over, and to create confidence in her, but should abstain at first from sexual pleasures. Women being of a tender nature, want tender beginnings, and when ...
— The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - Translated From The Sanscrit In Seven Parts With Preface, - Introduction and Concluding Remarks • Vatsyayana
... the frosty air, and Clarence, though equally tall, well-made, and with more refined features, looked pale and effaced, now that his sailor tan was worn off. The one talked as eagerly as he ate, the other was shy, spiritless, and with little appetite; but as he always shrank into himself among strangers, it was the less wonder that he sat in his drooping way behind my sofa, while Griffith kept us all merry with his account of ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... it gains a vogue, and incorporates it in the accredited standard of decency. The next step is to make this standard of decency the point of departure for a new move in advance in the same direction—for there is no merit in simple spiritless conformity to a standard of dissipation that is lived up to as a matter of course by everyone in ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... fortune of the Imperialists departed. The cavalry of the left wing, already beaten, and only rallied by his exertions, no sooner missed their victorious leader than they gave up everything for lost and abandoned the field of battle in spiritless despair. The right field fell into the same confusion, with the exception of a few regiments which the bravery of their colonels, Gotz, Terzky, Colloredo, and Piccolomini, compelled to keep their ground. The Swedish infantry, with prompt determination, profited by the enemy's confusion. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... Clemency about it. Clemency appeared at the dinner-table, but she looked pale and forlorn, and said good evening to James without lifting her eyes. When her uncle asked if her head was better, she said, "Yes, thank you," in a spiritless tone. She ate almost nothing. After dinner, James had a call to make, and, on his return, entered by the office door. He found Gordon fast asleep in his chair, with the dog at his feet. The dog started up at sight of James, but he motioned him down, and went softly out into ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... of those gray, heavy days of the early winter—one of the vacant, spiritless days of portent that wait hushed and numb before a coming storm. Not a crow, nor a jay, nor a chickadee had heart enough to cheep. But little Hyla, the tree-frog, was nothing daunted. Since the last week in February, throughout the spring and the noisy summer on till this dreary time, he had been ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... the evening dusk, She now went slowly to that small kiosk, Where, pondering alone his impious schemes, MOKANNA waited her—too wrapt in dreams Of the fair-ripening future's rich success, To heed the sorrow, pale and spiritless, That sat upon his victim's downcast brow, Or mark how slow her step, how altered now From the quick, ardent Priestess, whose light bound Came like a spirit's o'er the unechoing ground,— From that wild ZELICA whose every glance ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... spiritless. Something, for the moment, seemed to have passed from him. He seemed, indeed, to lack both inspiration and courage. Her fingers clung slightly to his. She was praying, even, that he might laugh to scorn her unspoken ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... wall for its photographs and testimonials. Now workingmen were sitting around the same tables. Under the shining loving cups, wreaths, bows and flags their colorless gray or brown clothes reflected the want and stress of their existence like a spiritless sea. Victor's eye took in at once the contrast between the childish trash of the privileged class that covered the walls and the seriously contained, yet deeply gnawing consciousness of belonging to the disowned that slumbered ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... second Bull Run, McClellan's neglect to follow up the drawn battle of Antietam with energetic operations, the gradual change of early Western victories to a cessation of all effort to open the Mississippi, and the scattering of the Western forces to the spiritless routine of repairing and guarding long railroad lines, all operated together practically to stop volunteering and enlistment by ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... variableness of Language, not only very uncouth but in many Places unintelligible; whereby the mind instead of being Raised and spirited in Singing The Praises of Almighty God and thereby being prepared to Attend to other Parts of Divine Service is Damped and made Spiritless in the Performance of the Duty at least such is the Tendency of the use ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... disdain; while those of Calvus are held in the highest esteem. We see these men prosing in their ancient style before the judges; but we see them left without an audience, deserted by the people, and hardly endured by their clients. The truth is, their cold and spiritless manner has no attraction. They call it sound oratory, but it is want of vigour; like that precarious state of health which weak constitutions preserve by abstinence. What physician will pronounce that a strong habit of body, which requires constant care and anxiety ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... anomaly of a candidate canvassing in his own behalf, the campaign was devoid of exciting incidents. The personal canvass of Douglas was indeed almost the only thing that kept the campaign from being dull and spiritless.[860] Republican politicians were somewhat at a loss to understand why he should manoeuvre in a section devoted beyond question to Lincoln. Indeed, a man far less keen than Douglas would have taken note of the popular current in New England. ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... this horrible disfigurement, this obstinacy which holds fast to it all. The shy, spiritless manner, the absolutely changed ways of the child hurt and worry me so. It takes away all my joy and all my courage and paralyzes all hope for the future. It has absolutely ...
— Cornelli • Johanna Spyri
... God existing in and for Himself; and the Soul, the One and Many, occupying the sphere of appearance or imperfect reality—God as action. Soulless matter, which only exists as a logical abstraction, is arrived at by looking at things "in disconnexion, dull and spiritless." It is the sphere of the "merely many," and is zero, as "the One who is not" ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... uninteresting; he scolds, worries and punishes his pupils, when he himself is the fitter subject for the lash. He awakens the sense of fear which should lie dormant, while the other faculties of his pupils slumber in spiritless inactivity. ...
— The Philosophy of Teaching - The Teacher, The Pupil, The School • Nathaniel Sands
... as I said before, the need for pity seems sometimes overwhelming, surpassing all imagining. I am sure that I myself would assuredly have gone mad had I not been able to lose myself a little in travel and change of scene. When the heart is tormented by some great pain, the spirit seems too utterly spiritless to do anything but despair. But life teaches us, among other things, some of the panaceas of pain. It teaches us that the mind finds it difficult to realise two great emotions at once, and that, where an emotion helps to take us out of ourselves, by exactly the strength of that emotion, ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... brief bliss of life's little day Grow cold in this spot as the spiritless clay, And thought be at work with the long-buried hours, And tears ...
— Poems • Mary Baker Eddy
... is any radical weakness of authority proceeding from the Constitution; if in any respects it opposes the genius, temper or habits of the governed, I fear, unless a remedy can be provided, in less than seven years, government will sink in a spiritless langour, or expire in a sudden CONVULSION. It would be foreign to my present purpose to suggest any of those alterations, which, in my apprehension are necessary to enable the constitution to support itself with dignity and efficiency, and its friends with security. ...
— Nuts for Future Historians to Crack • Various
... blessed people? First of all, he says, they are the "poor in spirit." And who are the poor in spirit? It sometimes seems as if Christians thought that to be poor in spirit one must be poor-spirited—a limp and spiritless creature, without dash, or vigor, or force. But the poor in spirit are not the poor-spirited. They are simply the teachable, the receptive, the people who want help and are conscious of need. They do not think they ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... great soldier, or a great sailor, or anything great. But he had good spirits, and he concealed about his person a heart of gold; and after he left Thetford Grammar School, boys found that somehow the games in the old playground seemed flat and spiritless. They said that things weren't as they used to be in ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... bay, their strength gradually gave out under their unhealthy diet, and when they were ready to travel, they were in a pitiful condition to endure its fatigues. Their horses were even worse off than themselves. Worn with privation to skeletons, they were drooping and spiritless; and had not the wanderers used great exertion to collect the young grass for them, they would have perished, for they were too ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... while all others were sitting; or that I, who could impose silence on all and sundry, should be ordered to be silent by a water- clock; that I, whom it was a crime to interrupt, should be subjected even to abuse, and that I should make people think I was a spiritless fellow if I let an insult pass unnoticed, or proud and puffed up if I resented and avenged it. Again, there was this embarrassing thought always before me. Supposing appeal was made to me as tribune either ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... genius was kindled. In short, the unknown seemed to have imbued him with some hitherto unfelt attributes—invested him either with new powers, or awakened his hitherto dormant faculties. As before, by a few touches, the crude, spiritless mass became living and breathing under the master's hand. Not many hours elapsed ere a pretty head, respectably executed, appeared on the canvas. Conrad ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... third order. Nor is the music of M. Rachmaninoff ever quite completely new-minted. Has it a melodic line quite properly its own? One doubts it. Many of the melodies of M. Rachmaninoff have a Mendelssohnian cast, for all their Russian sheen. Others are of the sort of sweet, spiritless silken tune generally characteristic of the Russian salon school. Nor can one discover in this music a distinctly original sense of either rhythm of harmony or tone-color. The E-minor Symphony, for all its competence and smoothness, is full of the color and quality and atmosphere of Tchaikowsky. ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... man in matters of the toilet. It was not merely that. But Dolly's eye saw that his step was unsteady, his face dull and flushed, and his eye had a look which even a very little experience understands. His air was haggard, spiritless, hopeless; so unlike the alert, self-sufficient, confident manner of old, that Dolly's heart got a great wrench. And something in the whole image was so inexpressibly pitiful to her, that she did the very last thing it had been in her purpose to do; ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... of his birth; there is nothing too bad for him to do, and very little so bad but what he has done it. He is a gambler, a swindler, and, as I believe, a forger and a card-sharper. He has lived upon the wages of the woman he has professed to love. He has shown himself to be utterly spiritless, abominable, and vile. If my clerk in the next room were to slap his face, I do not believe that he would resent it." Sir Harry frowned, and moved his feet rapidly on the floor. "In my thorough respect ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... interference—a look that Ellen came to regard with absolute abhorrence. She kept away by herself as much as she could; but she did not know what to do with her time, and for want of something better often spent it in tears. She went to bed cheerless night after night, and arose spiritless morning after morning, and this lasted till Mr. Van Brunt more than once told his mother that "that poor little thing was going wandering about like a ghost, and growing thinner and paler every day, and he didn't know what she would come to ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... unity. To the Psalms so-called of David, the glorious outbursts of sacred song in their mythico-historical books, as in Isaiah {103} and some of the minor prophets, the finest of the Vedic or Orphic hymns or the Homeric ballads are cold and spiritless. These address themselves to scholars alone, or chiefly to a cultivated few, and address themselves to them eloquently and gloriously. The hymns of the Jews have so interpenetrated the very heart of humanity, so identified themselves with the best longings, ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... a November morning, and Fleda had been doing some of the last jobs in her flower-beds. She was coming in with spirits as bright as her cheeks, when her aunt's attitude and look, more than usually spiritless, suddenly checked them. Fleda gave her a hopeful kiss and asked ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... 6th Massachusetts foot regiment, which was just leaving for the lake on its usual road-mending detail, stood in spiritless silence to see the artillery pass; their Major, Whiting, as well as the sullen rank and file, seeming still to feel the disgrace of Cherry Valley, where their former colonel lost his silly life, and Major Stacia was taken, and still ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... a cry from above—almost inaudible it was so spiritless and faint—yet, gaze as I might toward the top, I could see nothing. I skirted the main rock and climbed as far as I easily could up the ravine. Here my attention was arrested by a dot of scarlet against ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... our glory has passed, And there is no smile From her in the aisle, But where it once shone A marble, men say, With her name thereon Is discerned to-day; And spiritless In the wilderness I shrink from sight And desire the night, (Though, as in old wise, I might still arise, Go forth, and stand And prophesy in the land), I feel the shake Of wind and earthquake, And consuming fire Nigher and nigher, And the voice catch ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... reminded you of a cat's eyes. Boniface Cointet never excited himself; he would listen to the grossest insults with the serenity of a bigot, and reply in a smooth voice. He went to mass, he went to confession, he took the sacrament. Beneath his caressing manners, beneath an almost spiritless look, lurked the tenacity and ambition of the priest, and the greed of the man of business consumed with a thirst for riches and honors. In the year 1820 "tall Cointet" wanted all that the bourgeoisie finally obtained by the Revolution ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... went by. By this time the Count had gained possession of Diane's hand; it felt cold and spiritless. The beautiful hand, with all the treasures in its grasp, might have been supple wood; there was nothing of Diane in it; he had taken it, it had not been given to him. As for Victurnien, the spirit had ebbed out of his frame, he had ceased to think. He would not have seen the ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... unbelievable change in him, upsetting all her preconceived notions of the man, appalled her. There had been times in the past when they had clashed, but he had never really matched his will with hers, and she had judged him weak and spiritless. Now, therefore, failing to dominate him as usual, she was filled with a strange feeling of ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... and spiritless when she reached the ranchhouse, and very tired, physically. Agatha's questions irritated her, and she ate sparingly of the food set before her, eager to be alone. In the isolation of her room she lay dumbly on the bed, and there ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... of the essential difficulties in the way of the smooth and rapid reconstruction of Great Britain—and very probably of the reconstruction of all Europe—after the war. The Braintree high road, I will confess, becomes at times an image of the world for me. It is a poor, spiritless-looking bit of road, with raw stones on one side of it. It is also, I perceive, the high destiny of man in conflict with mankind. It is the way to Harwich, Holland, Russia, China, ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... there is imitation or careless makeshift. Even the pina embroideries, which are fabricated with such wonderful patience and skill, and are so celebrated for the fineness of the work, are, as a rule, spiritless imitations of Spanish patterns. One is involuntarily led to these conclusions by a comparison of the art products of the Spanish-American communities with those of more barbarous races. The Berlin Ethnographical Museum contains many proofs of the facts ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... becomes formal or spiritless in the treatment of his favorite topics, and often rises to a high degree of enthusiastic eloquence. Witness the following noble appeal in behalf of a cheerful earnestness in the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... sound. Only when I reached the nest would the female leave it, and then she withdrew but a short distance, returning as soon as I began to descend. The devotion of these wild creatures to their young is often marvellous. Mr. Audubon describes this hawk as 'spiritless, inactive, and so deficient in courage that he is often chased by the little sparrow-hawk and kingbird.' Another naturalist dissents emphatically from this view, and regards the broad-winged as the most courageous and spirited of his family, citing an instance of a man in his employ who, ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... the cats live on the green garth, and sometimes die there, I did not see much of the Canons; but the cats seemed to me very sad-depressed, nostalgic even, I might describe them, if there had not been something more languid, something faded and spiritless about their habit. It was not that they quarrelled. I heard none of those long- drawn wails, gloomy yet mellow soliloquies, with which our cats usher in the crescent moon or hymn her when she swims at the full: there lacked even that comely resignation we may see on any sunny window-ledge at ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... extreme dissoluteness and unseemliness lies, do you see, not in himself, but somewhere outside in space. And so—an ingenious idea!—it is not only he who is dissolute, false, and disgusting, but we . . . 'we men of the eighties,' 'we the spiritless, nervous offspring of the serf-owning class'; 'civilisation has crippled us' . . . in fact, we are to understand that such a great man as Laevsky is great even in his fall: that his dissoluteness, his ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... begin. I could see how much our chance acquaintance had brightened the perspective for her, and how eagerly she had repaired all her illusions; and I thought how much better it would have been if she had been left to the dull and spiritless resignation in which I had first seen her. From that there could no fall, at least, and now she had risen from it only ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... be with him, and I used to stay on his farm for two or three days at a time. I liked his house, and his park, and his big fruit garden, and the river—and his philosophy, which was clear, though rather spiritless and rhetorical. I suppose I was fond of him on his own account, though I can't say that for certain, as I have not up to now succeeded in analysing my feelings at that time. He was an intelligent, kind-hearted, genuine ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... passionate anguish and many parting kisses; but in face of his enemies, and in hearing of the cries which burst from the ranks demanding her death by fire as a murderess and harlot, the whole heroic and passionate spirit of the woman represented by her admirers as a spiritless imbecile flamed out in responsive threats to have all the men hanged and crucified in whose power she now stood helpless and alone. She grasped the hand of Lord Lindsay as he rode beside her, and swore "by this hand" she would "have his head for this." In Edinburgh she was received ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... slipped by and brought us to the date when Viola's operetta was to be produced. On the evening which she had so looked forward to, now it had come, she seemed tired and spiritless, and we dressed for dinner almost in silence. Captain Lawton and another man who had helped in the production of the piece were dining with us, and we were then going on to our box at ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... the one who directed the laborers at the abbey had but too faithfully obeyed the orders of the Abbot. Poor Beiffror was brought back, lean, spiritless, and chafed with the harness of the vile cart that he had had to draw so long. He carried his head down, and trod heavily before Charlemagne; but when he heard the voice of Ogier he raised his head, he neighed, his eyes flashed, his former ardor showed itself by ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... by fatigue, trembling with emotion. An instant after Fouquet called Gourville, who crossed the gallery amid the universal expectation. At length, he himself reappeared among his guests; but it was no longer the same pale, spiritless countenance they had beheld when he left them; from pale he had become livid; and from spiritless, annihilated. A living specter, he advanced with his arms stretched out, his mouth parched, like a shade that comes to salute friends of former days. On seeing him thus, every one cried out, and ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... besides, there had been no real court in Bleiberg for the space of ten years, so he was told. Those solemn affairs of the archbishop's, given once the week for the benefit of the corps diplomatique, were dull and spiritless. Her Royal Highness was seldom seen, save when she drove through the streets. Persons who remembered the reign before told what a mad, gay court it had been. Now it was funereal. The youth and beauty of Bleiberg held a court of its own. Royalty was not included, ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... was something inexpressibly melancholy and desolate, mist-shrouded, and lonely, terrible in its grey and shivering spaces; and their tone about it is always elegiac and plaintive, as a place of dreary spiritless wandering and unmarked graves. When the English settled they lost the sense of the sea; they became a little parochial people, tilling fields and tending cattle, wool-gathering and wool-bartering, their shipping confined to cross-Channel merchandise, and coastwise sailing ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... was written on every face. The singing was spiritless, and as the people filed out of church and gathered in knots about the door, the old-time head-shaking was resumed, and the ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... failed, have no interest for the reader of Gordon's life. It failed to accomplish the object which alone justified its being sent, and, it must be allowed, that it accepted its failure in a very tame and spiritless manner. Even at the moment of the British troops turning their backs on the goal which they had not won, the fate of Gordon himself was unknown, although there could be no doubt as to the main fact that the protracted siege of Khartoum had terminated in its capture by the cruel ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... would lend to it the influence of all its spiritual authority. Paris was every hour agitated by rumors of the approach of the armies of invasion. The people all believed that Louis wished to escape from Paris and head that army. The king was spiritless, undecided, and ever vacillating in his plans. Maria Antoinette would have gone through fire and blood to have rallied those hosts around her banner. Such was the position of the Girondists in reference to the Royalists. They were ready to adopt the most energetic measures to repel the interference ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... not venture to decide whether you are right or not, my dear madame," he said, in a spiritless voice, after a second's pause. "I only know one thing. Whether Hartmut be guilty or innocent, he is to be envied in ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... the Cretans, answered him again: "O Thaos, now is there no man to blame, that I wot of, for we all are skilled in war. Neither is there any man that spiritless fear holds aloof, nor any that gives place to cowardice, and shuns the cruel war, nay, but even thus, methinks, must it have seemed good to almighty Kronion, even that the Achaians should perish nameless here, far away from Argos. But Thoas, seeing that of old thou wert staunch, and ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... even since the first of August, 1834, the evils of West India emancipation on the lips of the advocates of slavery, or, as the most of them nicely prefer to be termed, the opponents of abolition, have remained in the future tense. The bad reports of the newspapers, spiritless as they have been compared with the predictions, have been traceable, on the slightest inspection, not to emancipation, but to the illegal continuance of slavery, under the cover of its legal substitute. ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... sufficient to possess taste, but for its production there is still another talent needed, spirit or genius. For an art product can fulfill the demands of taste and yet not aesthetically satisfy; while formally faultless, it may be spiritless. ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... cause of barrenness, is want of love between man and wife. Love is that vivid principle that ought to inspire each organ in the act of generation, or else it will be spiritless and dull; for if their hearts be not united in love, how should their seed unite to cause Conception? And this is sufficiently evinced, in that there never follows conception on a rape. Therefore, if men and women design to have children, let them live ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... bring in coffee," said the young lady in a spiritless tone; and then she leaned her arm and head against the kitchen mantelpiece, and hung listlessly over ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... To Stanton, Lincoln's patience seemed a mystery; to McClellan—a vain man, full of himself—the President who would merely smile at this bullyragging on the part of one of his subordinates seemed indeed a spiritless creature. Meanwhile Lincoln, apparently devoid of sensibility, was seeking during the anxious months of 1862, in one case, merely how to keep his petulant Secretary in harness; in the other, how to quicken his ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... seldom has there been a stronger illustration of the inexorable law, that when a superior and inferior race come in contact the lower is annihilated. Every step of the white man's progress has been a step of the red man's decay. And now this tribe, once so warlike, is a nation of spiritless beggars, crouching near the white settlements for protection from their old foes, over whom in times past they were ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... shot-gun policy, tissue ballets, and intimidation at the South, while a gigantic, bold, and matchless system of fraudulent voting was pushed with vigor in the North, there was little show of success for the Republican ticket. The contest on the part of the Republicans was spiritless. It was difficult to raise funds or excite enthusiasm. The Republican candidate had only a local reputation. He had been to Congress, but even those who had known that had forgotten it. A modest, retiring ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... is all your work: it is useless for you to defend yourself," said she, tossing away her husband's hat from the arm-chair, and then throwing herself in a spiritless manner into it. ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... very pale, Miss Isabel," said the housekeeper. "He wasn't white, not like that when he come first to Llanfeare." To this Isabel made no reply; but she, too, had remarked how wan, how pallid, and how spiritless ...
— Cousin Henry • Anthony Trollope
... garden with my wonted vigour, and feel ten times as tired as usual with a walk in your absence; so you see, when you are not by, I am a person without ability, affections or vigour, but droop dull, selfish, and spiritless; can you ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... would be unique, and would remain unique for ever—and yet perhaps less to witness it than to be able to recount to their grandchildren that they had witnessed it. Many more were visiting nearer holiday resorts for a day or two days. Those who remained, the poor, the spiritless, the afflicted, and the captive, felt with mournful keenness the shame of their utter provinciality, envying the crowds in London with a bitter envy, and picturing London as the ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... ill, but dull and spiritless. I don't know what is the matter. They are tired with their journey perhaps, and forlorn in a strange place. Maybe they would feel better if they saw the doctor. I think such ...
— Opportunities • Susan Warner
... is true, even if they have not been taken too seriously by the people of these islands, have for a long time past respected themselves, but the calling of a dramatist till quite of late has been but an invertebrate and spiritless concern. Pruned and prismed by the censor, exploited by the actor, dragooned and slashed by the manager, ignored by the public, who never even bothered to inquire the names of those who supplied it with digestives—it ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... away. Oppressed and thoughtful, Banneker walked slowly across the blazing, cactus-set open toward his shack. There was still the simple housekeeping work to be done, for he had left early that morning. He felt suddenly spiritless, flaccid, too inert even for the little tasks before him. The physician's pronouncement had taken the strength from him. Of course he had known that it couldn't be very long—but ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... whole soul was weary of the spiritless West, and who was as sick of Europe as I then was, this fragment of the East which moved cheerfully and changingly before my eyes was a refreshing solace; my heart enjoyed at least a few drops of that draught which I had so often tasted in gloomy Hanoverian or Royal Prussian ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Hahn and his son Fritz were on a summer journey in the Tyrol. They had started from Mayrhofen early in the afternoon, on two meek-eyed, spiritless farm horses, and they intended to reach Ginzling ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... probably the last letter that I shall ever write to you. Do not pity me, my fate is more worthy of envy than of pity. I never knew, I never dreamed of anything more beautiful. It has been said time and again that real life is tame, spiritless and disenchanted by the side of the fictions of the poets. What a mistake! There is a more wonderful inventor than any rhapsodist, and that inventor is called reality. It wears the magic ring, and imagination is but a poor magician compared with it. ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... warned me that I was intruding on a household primitive in their hours, as in every thing else, and I rose to take my leave. But I could not be altogether parted with yet. It seems that they had found me a most amusing guest; while, to my own conception, I had been singularly spiritless; but the little anecdotes which were trite to me had been novelties to them. Fashion has a charm even for philosophers; and the freaks and follies of the high-toned sons and daughters of fashion—who wore down my ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... ridiculous incident, the fact that the wife of a subprefect had danced at the Moulin Rouge, forced the minister to face a vote of censure, and he was within a few votes of being defeated. According to general opinion, Paul Visire had never been so weak, so vacillating, or so spiritless, as on ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... in an easy chair, his arms folded, his face grave and set. Miss Carr pointed to the sofa, and the three girls sat down, turning inquiring eyes on her face. It was horribly formal, and even Norah felt cowed and spiritless. ...
— Sisters Three • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... finished supper to-night, as blue as indigo and as spiritless as a wet hen, when I heard the sound of voices. It took me only ten seconds to make sure whose they were. Dinky-Dunk had come back with Olie! I made a high dive for a book from the nearest shelf, swung ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... shake hands all round, to ply his rosy gullet with truffles and champagne, and to create uncomfortable eddies and obstructions among the constituent atoms of the American colony. He was shamefully idle, spiritless, sensual, snobbish. He irritated our friend by the tone of his allusions to their native country, and Newman was at a loss to understand why the United States were not good enough for Mr. Tristram. He had never been a very conscious patriot, but it vexed him to see ...
— The American • Henry James
... themselves were so continually torn and scratched that the wounds never had a chance to heal and became infected until they were a mass of sores. On occasion they died, or, when they had become too abjectly spiritless to attack even a rat, were set to work on the tight- rope with the doped starved rats that were too near dead to run away from them. And, as Miss Merle Merryweather said: the bonehead audiences, tickled to death, applauded Duckworth's Trained Cats and ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... glimpse of him. The inspired look that his face had worn in the Cathedral had faded quite away and the sunlight showed the lines of care and fatigue. When he had alighted and passed, with the heavy, spiritless tread of weary and heart-sick old age, into the house, Gemma turned away and walked slowly to the bridge. Her face seemed for a moment to reflect the withered, hopeless look of his. Martini ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... were red, her eyelids heavy with tears, her face was pinched and narrower, the corners of her mouth had a most piteous droop, her very hair, pushed back off her forehead, seemed sad, and hung in spiritless masses about her neck and ears. "Mein liebes Kind," stammered poor Fritzing; and his hand shook so that he upset ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... have referred to, says, 'Thou makest my feet like hinds' feet,' what he is thinking about is that light and easy, springing, elastic gait, that swiftness of advance. What a contrast that is to the way in which most of us get through our day's work! Plod, plod, plod, in a heavy-footed, spiritless grind, like that with which the ploughman toils down the sticky furrows of a field, with a pound of clay at each heel; or like that with which a man goes wearied home from his work at night. The monotony of trivial, constantly recurring doings, the fluctuations in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... left me; exhausted, spent, my life shrunken up within me, my energy burned out, a puny, spiritless remnant of the strong woman who lay down upon that couch, I lay despondent, vacant of all interest in the world hitherto so exciting to me. I had not seen Monsieur since this apparent commencement of recovery. A great, good-natured nurse kept watch over ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... a subdued caress in return, not from any lack of feeling, but because she did everything in a quiet and spiritless fashion. ...
— Light Freights • W. W. Jacobs
... made poor combat soldiers. It followed then that the size of a unit was immaterial, and indeed, given the manpower that the Army received from reenlistments and Selective Service, any black unit, no matter its size, would almost assuredly be an inefficient, spiritless group of predominately Class IV and V men. For in addition to its educational limitations, the typical black unit suffered a further handicap in the vital matter of motivation. The Gillem Board disregarded this fact, but it was rarely overlooked by the black soldier: he was called ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... hair and energetic dignity, she took an immediate fancy, once she found that he was born in Kentucky; this made of him a link between the old life and the new. But toward the women she felt a definite hostility. Myra, her future sister-in-law, seemed the essence of spiritless conversationality. Her conversation was so utterly devoid of personality that Sally Carrol, who came from a country where a certain amount of charm and assurance could be taken for granted in the women, was ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... them thus; for if I strive to put the very spirit of beauty into form and give it motion, it is for thy sake alone. O throbbing heart, be quiet! If my labor be thus thwarted, there will come vague and unsatisfied dreams which will leave me spiritless to-morrow." ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... still the main subjects of instruction. It mattered little if the student could neither speak nor write Danish correctly, but he must be able to define the finest points in a Latin grammar of more than 1200 pages. Attendance at religious services was compulsory; but the services were cold and spiritless, offering little attraction to ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... endeavouring to make a gentleman of AEneas, and succeeding too for a while in raising the more than equivocal character of his hero, by placing him in the picture-gallery of the Queen of Carthage, and giving him leisure to contemplate and to criticise, and poetically to describe to his silent and spiritless lounger-friend many noble and many touching works. In this passage we also obtain the great Latin poet's opinion of the ameliorating effect of "collections." The hero of the AEneid knew immediately he was among an amiable people. The ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... considerably departed from the original plan laid down by Wolf, which was the cultivation of the pupil. The old estimate of scholarship and scholarly culture, as an absolute, which Wolf overcame, seems after a slow and spiritless struggle rather to have taken the place of the culture-principle of more recent introduction, and now claims its former exclusive rights, though not with the same frankness, but disguised and with features veiled. And the reason why it was impossible to make public schools ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Holy Sepulchre, and on her way home, having landed at Cyprus, met with brutal outrage at the hands of certain ruffians. Broken-hearted and disconsolate she determined to make her complaint to the king; but she was told that it would be all in vain, because so spiritless and faineant was he that he not only neglected to avenge affronts put upon others, but endured with a reprehensible tameness those which were offered to himself, insomuch that whoso had any ill-humour to vent, took occasion to vex or mortify him. The lady, hearing this report, despaired of redress, ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... peach and pear will, when next year returns, burst out again in bloom, But can it e'er be told who will next year dwell in the inner room? What time the third moon comes, the scented nests have been already built. And on the beams the swallows perch, excessive spiritless and staid; Next year, when the flowers bud, they may, it's true, have ample to feed on: But they know not that when I'm gone beams will be vacant and nests fall! In a whole year, which doth consist of three hundred and ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... understood it clears away more than half of the objections that have been urged against our Revision. Of the remainder I cannot but agree with good Bishop Westcott that no criticism of the Revision—and the criticisms were of every form and kind "pedantry, spiritless literality, irritating triviality, destroyed rhythm," and so forth—no criticism ever came upon us by surprise. The Revisers, as the Bishop truly says, heard in the Jerusalem Chamber all the arguments against their conclusions they have heard since; and he goes on to say that no ...
— Addresses on the Revised Version of Holy Scripture • C. J. Ellicott
... the gods. For whoever of the deathless gods that hold the peaks of snowy Olympus pours a libation of her water is forsworn, lies breathless until a full year is completed, and never comes near to taste ambrosia and nectar, but lies spiritless and voiceless on a strewn bed: and a heavy trance overshadows him. But when he has spent a long year in his sickness, another penance and an harder follows after the first. For nine years he is cut off from the eternal ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... of that day was spent in spiritless wandering about the streets. Once he made another attempt to obtain work, this time at a merchant's office. But again the inconvenient question of character was raised, and he was compelled to denounce himself. ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... now lasted uninterruptedly for more than an hour, when William seized the opportunity of turning the tide of battle against his spiritless adversary. Putting himself at the head of the left wing, he crossed the Boyne by a dangerous and difficult ford a little lower down the river; his cavalry for the most part swimming across the tide. The ford had been ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... to me!" exclaimed Matty. "There's nothing that I adore like Parade; often and often I've wished to have it. I'm quite astonished that Nelly should prefer that dull, spiritless creature, Content." ...
— The Crown of Success • Charlotte Maria Tucker
... of the illuminator continued to flourish until the progress of modern inventions and various processes, added to the general cheapening of books, led to its disuse. Its present application seems to be almost solely to diplomas and testimonials, and in point of quality, usually as poor and spiritless as the incapacity of most of ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... she was as quiet as if she hoped to escape war by submission. The chance of revenge was offered as it had never been offered in forty years; yet she did not stir to grasp it. Her enemy gave every provocation, yet she stayed as still as if she were spiritless; and all the while she was the proudest nation on the earth, so proud that she did not need to threaten or boast. Then came the first failure, and she took it as if she had expected nothing better. She had to make war in a manner wholly contrary to her ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... Mrs. Poe, or Miss Arnold, as she was still sometimes called, was, she had managed by a mighty effort of will and the aid of stimulants to appear once or twice before the footlights. But her acting had been spiritless and her voice weak and it finally became necessary for the manager to explain that she was suffering from "chills and fevers," from which he hoped rest and skillful treatment would relieve her and make it possible for her to take her usual place. But she did not appear. ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... eyes inspire vain hopes no more; For all my fortune, all my fate in love, My life, my death, the good, the ills I prove, To her are trusted by one sovereign power. Hence 'tis, whene'er my lips would silence break, Scarce can I hear the accents which I vent, By passion render'd spiritless and weak. Ah! now I find that fondness to excess Fetters the tongue, and overpowers intent: Faint is the flame ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... point out the best covers for game, knew where to find the first bird's-nest, and could climb the loftiest forest tree to obtain the young of the hawk or crow with more certainty of success than her gay companions. Their sports were dull and spiritless without Mary Mathews. ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... then, after the supreme indignity and outrage we had suffered, would have been to provoke every further wrong, and to furnish the means for its commission. It would have been to placard ourselves on the walls of the shattered fort, as the spiritless race the proud labor-thieves called us. It would have been to die as a nation of freemen, and to have given all we had left of our rights into the hands of alien tyrants in ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... heat among the sands The gembok nations, snuffing up the wind, Drawn by the scent of water—and the bands Of tawny-bearded lions pacing, blind With the sun-dazzle in their midst, opprest With prey, and spiritless for lack ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... Northumberland made him regard all increase of possessions and titles, either to himself or his artisans, as steps only to further acquisitions. Finding that Somerset, though degraded from his dignity, and even lessened in the public opinion by his spiritless conduct, still enjoyed a considerable share of popularity, he determined to ruin the man whom he regarded as the chief obstacle to the attainment of his hopes. The alliance which had been contracted between the families had produced no cordial union, and only enabled ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... have been for us to move to Guilford Street. Occasionally in the spiritless tones in which they now spoke on all subjects save the one, my mother and father would discuss the project; but always into the conversation would fall, sooner or later, some loosened thought to stir ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... magnificent creature at the Prodigal's left hand is a wondrous piece of drawing. It is thrown back against him and from the spectator, in order that she may look up into his face—at the moment a dissipated, spiritless face, without even the flush of the wine which dyes her's so rosily—a face at once weak and weary, and yet revealing a possible intensity, indeed, the face of a French woman who "has lived," rather than that ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... of each rising thought Are swept by a hand unseen; And I glide, and glide, With my music bride, Where few spiritless souls have been; And I soar afar on wings of sound, With ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... another. This was more than she could bear. Pepe's death, she felt, would have caused her a pain far less poignant—for she herself easily could have died, too. But Pepe lost to her arms, and won to the arms of such a poor, spiritless creature as this Pancha, was an insult that made greater the injury done her a thousand-fold. Her fierce love was turned in a moment to fiercer hate; and from hate is but a single ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... seemed spiritless, and the charming face held a gravity that was quite foreign to it. In the searching winter sunlight he could even discern one or two faint lines about the violet-blue eyes, while the curving mouth, with its provocative ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... but fumbling with a glass of port before me, scarcely with the half-crown in my pocket which must carry me over another week's house-keeping, all of a sudden the man inside me rose in revolt. I felt such poverty as mine to be unendurable, and that I was a slave, a spiritless fool, to put up with it. There must be hundreds of good, Christian folk in the world who had only to know to stretch out a hand of help and gladly, as I would have helped such a case in the days of my own prosperity. Remember, I am not putting this forward as a sober ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... declaration of a life's ambition be more explicit? It seems impossible for human ambition to stand still. Either a man loses all stimulus of self and becomes as spiritless as a fagged animal or ambition drives him always on—he is never content with any success achieved. The millionaire to whom the first million, when he was a boy, seemed the extreme limit of human wealth and desire, presses on insatiably with the first million in his pocket, more restless, ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... standing-point in the invisible world. Besides which, the deep, loving loyalty which he felt for his old leader made the shock intensely painful. It was the first great wrench of his life, the first gap which the angel Death had made in his circle, and he felt numbed, and beaten down, and spiritless. Well, well! I believe it was good for him and for many others in like case, who had to learn by that loss that the soul of man cannot stand or lean upon any human prop, however strong, and wise, and good; but that He upon whom alone it can stand and lean will knock away all ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... object has been and is to place Germany completely hors de combat. Her mortal enemy is in her power. France's first desire is not money or territory, but just security. France does not fear Germany in her present spiritless, unarmed state. France does not fear Germany at all. But the fruit of victory which she desires is that she should put it entirely out of the power of Germany to return to the struggle. The League of Nations is being arranged to stop warfare among all races. France does not believe ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... which require treatment and spacious expansion, inevitably dry up and perish. The State requires a taxpaying machine in which there is no hitch, an exchequer in which there is never a deficit, and a public, monotonous, obedient, colorless, spiritless, moving humbly like a flock of sheep along a straight high road ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... keep my house. I lead the life you see—a spiritless, womanish life, most men would account it—holding converse with Philosophy, with Plato, with Truth. From my high seat in this vast theatre, I look down on the scene beneath me; a scene calculated to afford much entertainment; calculated also to ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... bucks—the fellow on whose steaks we had already made an inroad, having been left as fat Tom's portion—securely corded down upon a pile of straw, with their sublime and antlered crests drooping all spiritless and humble over the backboard, toward the frozen soil which crashed and rattled under the ponderous hoofs of the magnificent roan horse—Tom's special favorite—which, though full seventeen hands high, and heavy in proportion; ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... child. Mrs. Blake donned one of the girl's divided skirts and took her first lesson in riding astride. There was no sidesaddle at the ranch, but there was a surefooted old cow pony too wise and spiritless for tricks, and therefore safe even for a less experienced horsewoman than was ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... silent for a long while; the child was afraid to speak. Both looked at the lights on the Christmas tree. "Let us sing something," said Philippina. She began with a hoarse, bass voice, "Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht," and Agnes joined in with her high, spiritless notes. ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... at the open door of the room beyond. The somber light from the two tall windows fell upon the figure of the girl. She was sitting before Andrew Bolton's desk, her head upon her folded arms. Something in the spiritless droop of her shoulders and the soft dishevelment of her fair hair suggested weariness—sleep, perhaps. But as the young man hesitated on the threshold the sound of a muffled sob escaped the quiet figure. He turned noiselessly ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... of Sight. This is abridging them of their natural Extent of Power, to put them upon a Level with their Pictures at Kneller's. How much nobler is the Contemplation of Beauty heighten'd by Virtue, and commanding our Esteem and Love, while it draws our Observation? How faint and spiritless are the Charms of a Coquet, when compar'd with the real Loveliness of Sophronia's Innocence, Piety, good Humour and Truth; Virtues which add a new Softness to her Sex, and even beautify her Beauty! That Agreeableness, which must otherwise ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... conviction; and with this corroboration of it he grew so spiritless that he could offer no retort. He slid to a despondent sitting posture upon the door sill and gazed wretchedly upon the ground, while his companion went to replenish the licorice water at the hydrant—enfeebling the potency of the liquor ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... in the high circles which her beauty and agreeable qualities so well fitted her to adorn. Ere long, however, it was surmised that Victorine found herself not quite so happy in her union with the object of her first affection as she had anticipated she should be; she was pale, spiritless, and absent; sometimes started when addressed, as if only accustomed to the accents of authority unmingled with kindness; her cheeks were hollow, her eyes sunken and ray-less, and her smile was the very mockery of mirth; evidently she was not happy, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 489, Saturday, May 14, 1831 • Various
... was his final determination. He rang for paper and a messenger, and wrote: "Madame Angot. There is a letter for you in the mail-department of this office." This time his initials were not necessary. Once the message was on its way, he sought Merrihew, whom he found knocking the balls about in a spiritless manner. ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... with no real interest in the lapse of time. For the house, with its round-shouldered Jacobean gables, its stone-cropped roof, lichen-spotted plaster, and ill-kept yew hedge, has an air of resignation to decay, well-bred but spiritless, and communicates it to the whole of its small landscape. Our old builders chose their sites for shelter rather than for view; and this—and perhaps a well of exquisite water bubbling by the garden gate on the very lip of the brook—must explain the situation of the Old ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... front ranks, the most furious and ungovernable of any. I think even a female conscription might be advisable in the present condition of France, if I may judge of her soldiers from the specimens I saw. Small, spiritless, inferior-looking men, all of them. They were like Number Three mackerel or the last run of shad, as doubtless they were,—the last pickings and resiftings of ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... at Bryngelly, and Elizabeth still held her hand. Beatrice, pale and spiritless, went about her duties as usual. Elizabeth never spoke to her in any sense that could awaken her suspicions, and the ghost story was, or appeared to be, pretty well forgotten. But at last an event occurred that caused Elizabeth to take the field. One ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... looked upon me as a connoisseur in beauty. They would have been proud of engaging my attention, as such: but so affected, so flimsy-witted, mere skin-deep beauties!—They had looked no farther into themselves than what their glasses were flattering-glasses too; for I thought them passive-faced, and spiritless; with eyes, however, upon the hunt for conquests, and bespeaking the attention of others, in order to countenance their own. ——I believe I could, with a little pains, have given them life and soul, and to every feature of their faces sparkling ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... a firm heart, not permitting his tongue to accuse himself or any one else. And so at length, without having either made any confession, or being convicted of anything, he was condemned to death with the spiritless partner of his sufferings. He was then led away to death, protesting against the iniquity of the times; imitating in his conduct the celebrated Stoic of old, Zeno, who, after he had been long subjected to torture in order to extract from him some false confession, tore ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... with a certain back-country expertness. The road bent to show us its source. We were abreast of the forlorn little shack of a dry-farmer, weathered and patched, set a dozen yards from the road and surrounded by hard-packed earth. Before the open door basked children and pigs and a few spiritless chickens. ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... not look unfavorably on me, but I was no more than another to them. In intervals among the occupations of the rest-camp, I wandered spiritless, blotted out by the common soldiers' miserable uniform, familiarly addressed by any one and every one, and stopping no glance from a woman, by ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... rancheria, Butbut by name, in a corner of the hills, the people of which had been assembled for the "Commission." These were the only physically degraded-looking people we saw on the trip; small of stature, feeble-looking and spiritless. The reason was not far to seek: it is probable that they live hungry, through lack of suitable ground for rice-cultivation, and because their neighbors are hostile. Now, I take it on myself to say that it is just this sort of thing that will come to an end if Mr. Worcester ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... she had been to me; how she had made my great loneliness endurable; how, with her innocent, fearless nature, she had tried to rouse me from spiritless and unmanly dejection. And I could never hope to please her now by proving that I had learnt the lesson; she had gone from me to some world infinitely removed, in which I was forgotten, and my pitiful trials and struggles could be nothing to her ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... world. Metellus is an excellent consul, and much attached to me, but he has lowered his influence by promulgating (though only for form's sake) an identical bill about Clodius. But the son of Aulus,[119] God in heaven! What a cowardly and spiritless fellow for a soldier! How well he deserves to be exposed, as he is, day after day to the abuse of Palicanus![120] Farther, an agrarian law has been promulgated by Flavius, a poor production enough, almost identical with that of Plotius. But ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... this her only son and his possessions. So she took counsel with herself to leave the inhabited country, and to flee to the deserts and unfrequented wildernesses. And she permitted none to bear her company thither but women and boys, and spiritless men, who were both unaccustomed and unequal to war and fighting. And none dared to bring either horses or arms where her son was, lest he should set his mind upon them. And the youth went daily to divert himself in the forest, by flinging sticks ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... rivers east and Ugogo the first plateau west—a distance of one hundred miles. Here water is obtainable throughout the year, and where slave hunts do not disturb the industry of the people, cultivation thrives, but these troubles constantly occur, and the meagre looking wretches, spiritless and shy, retreat to the hill tops at the sight of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... the official residences of the Governor and Colonial Secretary are built, is covered in many places with the deserted nests of the white ants (termites), and these are the favourite retreats of the sluggish and spiritless cobra, which watches from their apertures the toads and lizards on which it preys. Here, when I have repeatedly come upon them, their only impulse was concealment; and on one occasion, when a cobra of considerable length could not escape, owing to the bank being nearly precipitous on both sides ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... haply if thy call Rouse up the slumbering tribe, with heavy eyes Glazed, lifeless, dull, downward they drop their tails Inverted; high on their bent backs erect Their pointed bristles stare, or 'mong the tufts Of ranker weeds, each stomach-healing plant Curious they crop, sick, spiritless, forlorn. These inauspicious days, on other cares 380 Employ thy precious hours; the improving friend With open arms embrace, and from his lips Glean science, seasoned with good-natured wit. But if the inclement skies and ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... and the women squabble terribly over their warrants of precedence: the gradations thereof would puzzle even the chamberlain of some petty German court. The Anglo-Indian ladies of Bombay struck me for the most part as spiritless. They had a faded, washed-out look; and I do not wonder at it, considering the life they lead. They get up about nine, breakfast and pay or receive visits, then tiffen, siesta, a drive to the Apollo Bunder, to hear the band, or to meet their ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... philosophy in Europe (unless, as he himself would have wished, we give that honour to Plato), mapped out the upward road as follows:—At the bottom of the hill is the sphere of the "merely many"—of material objects viewed in disconnection, dull, and spiritless. This is a world which has no real existence; it may best be called "not-being" ("ein lauteres Nichts," as Eckhart says), and as the indeterminate, it can only be apprehended by a corresponding indeterminateness in the soul. The soul, however, always adds some form and determination ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... of your ways down South. I have heerd they're a pack of spiritless, down-trodden men; welly clemmed to death; too much dazed wi' clemming to know when they're put upon. Now, it's not so here. We known when we're put upon; and we'en too much blood in us to stand it. We ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... still, probably, from exposure to fatigue and cold, and from falls among the rocks and glaciers, and diseases produced by destitution and misery. The remnant of the army which was left on reaching the plain were emaciated, sickly, ragged, and spiritless; far more inclined to lie down and die, than to go on and undertake the conquest of ...
— Hannibal - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... reverting to her, I thought suddenly of what a neighbor had once said to my father, "Selma Perkins used to be the prettiest girl in school. She was like the first arbutus flowers." Surely this woman with her pallid skin and her faded spiritless eyes could not have been the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... delights As dear to thee as once? And have thy joys Lost nothing by comparison with ours? Rude as thou art (for we returned thee rude And ignorant, except of outward show), I cannot think thee yet so dull of heart And spiritless, as never to regret Sweets tasted here, and left as soon as known. Methinks I see thee straying on the beach, And asking of the surge that bathes the foot If ever it has washed our distant shore. I see thee weep, and thine ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... that I should scarcely have known her for the same person; it seemed incredible that three days could make such a difference in a bright, healthy, vigorous girl. All her youthful vivacity was gone; she was pale and spiritless with deep rings beneath her eyes and the lids red with crying. After the services were over, I approached her a moment as she stood in her black dress aloof from the others at the edge of the little family burying-ground. She ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... scot-free, nobody did; and upon occasion her name is amply vilified by her foes. There are some eight ungenerous lines with a side reference to the 'Conquests she had won' in Buckingham's A Trial of the Poets for the Bays, and a page or two of insipid spiritless rhymes, The Female Laureat, find a place in State Poems. The same collection contains A Satyr on the Modern Translators. 'Odi Imitatores servum pecus,' &c. By Mr. P——r,[54] 1684. It ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... much, and yet doing more killing in war-time and shedding more blood than even the fiercest lion on his cruelest days. Which would perplex a gentlemanly super-cat spectator the more, our habits of wholesale slaughter in the field, or our spiritless making a fetish of ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... interrogates, and doubts, and is caustic; in a word, he thinks he converses while he is at his studies. Sometimes, apparently a complacent listener, we are mortified by detecting the absent man: now he appears humbled and spiritless, ruminating over some failure which probably may be only known to himself; and now haughty and hardy for a triumph he has obtained, which yet remains a secret to the world. No man is so apt to indulge the extremes of the most opposite feelings: he is sometimes ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... it remained at the close of the day. But we were afflicted on the following day with the most violent complaint of the stomach and bowels, which reduced us exceedingly, and left us languid and spiritless, insomuch that we ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... tolerate that dull, spiritless creature? I never sat by his side for five minutes, without ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... Mgeta rivers east and Ugogo the first plateau west—a distance of one hundred miles. Here water is obtainable throughout the year, and where slave hunts do not disturb the industry of the people, cultivation thrives, but these troubles constantly occur, and the meagre looking wretches, spiritless and shy, retreat to the hill tops at the sight ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... bristling with barricades around the entrances, and everything ran with a last desperate restlessness, as if there would be no tomorrow. The operators all swore that Wayne would be elected, but seemed to fear a miracle. On the poorer section of the beat, there was a spiritless hope that Nolan might come in with his reform program. Men who would normally have been punctilious about their payments were avoiding Bruce Gordon, if in hope that, by putting it off a day or so, they could run into ...
— Police Your Planet • Lester del Rey
... money-loving, deaf to counsel, false of faith, Thoughtless, spiritless, or careless, changing course with every breath, Or the man who scorns his rival—if a prince should choose a foe, Ripe for meeting and defeating, certes he would choose ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... now with my hands empty and my mind fairly made up. Everything depended on a new theory, which I was about to test, a mere Chinese theory concerning eunuchs—that their mutilation makes them bestial, but also downtrodden and quite spiritless and peculiarly weak. That is why the old Empress could thrash them to death whenever they displeased her, without their daring to raise their hands or make one single struggle. Now, as I walked forward, I could see my old Chinese teacher, who had taught ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... irrecoverably. You are too spiritless a wife—A mournful tale, mixt with a few kind words, will steal away your soul. The world's too subtle for such goodness. Had I been by, he should have asked your life sooner ...
— The Gamester (1753) • Edward Moore
... must be a living ghost—a ghost we can respect, a ghost we can listen to. The poor spiritless addle-headed ghost that has hitherto haunted our blue chambers is of no use to us. I remember a thoughtful man once remarking during argument that if he believed in ghosts—the silly, childish spooks about which we had been telling ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... Richard to his father, containing observations on the phenomena of London; remarks (mainly cynical) on the speeches and acts of Parliament; and reasons for not having yet been able to call on the Grandisons. They were certainly rather monotonous and spiritless. The baronet did not complain. That cold dutiful tone assured him there was no internal trouble or distraction. "The letters of a healthful physique!" he said to Lady Blandish, with sure insight. Complacently he sat and smiled, little witting that his son's ordeal was imminent, and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... young, and weak, and foolish. Because it is right that they who are frail, and timid, and spiritless, should be made subject to those who are strong and able to hold dominion and to exact obedience." Linda did not at all like being told that she was spiritless. She thought that she might be able to show spirit enough were it not for the duty that she owed to her aunt. And as for obedience, ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... was fancy, but I thought that in the look of mingled surprise and something like reproach which he gave me there was also a trace of grateful pleasure. But he said, in that tone of spiritless humility these poor souls ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... imaginative—for argument is a different thing—it seems to me that the sun leaves the landscape, that I think away the whole vivacity and spirit of my original conception, and that the results are cold, tame, and spiritless." ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the unbelievable change in him, upsetting all her preconceived notions of the man, appalled her. There had been times in the past when they had clashed, but he had never really matched his will with hers, and she had judged him weak and spiritless. Now, therefore, failing to dominate him as usual, she was filled with a strange feeling of helplessness ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... that she clutched Jem's hand. The clock ticked noisily as a half-hour went by; the fire burned lower and dark. The dog came back at last, dragging his feet heavily, came up close to her, and crouched down with a half human moan. After a long time he got up, went out into the wash-kitchen in a spiritless way, and did not return again that night. She did not move. It seemed a long time to the child before she turned, her face wet with tears, and took him up in her arms, chafing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... his elbows leaned on the table before him, his hand passed through his ruffled hair, and his gray eyes straying abstractedly away from the neglected page before him. I see him before he sees me. I have time to take in all the dejection of his attitude, all its spiritless idleness. At the slight noise my skirts make, he looks up. I stop ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... and dejected, thro' the evening dusk, She now went slowly to that small kiosk, Where, pondering alone his impious schemes, MOKANNA waited her—too wrapt in dreams Of the fair-ripening future's rich success, To heed the sorrow, pale and spiritless, That sat upon his victim's downcast brow, Or mark how slow her step, how altered now From the quick, ardent Priestess, whose light bound Came like a spirit's o'er the unechoing ground,— From that wild ZELICA ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... only smiled absently at that worthy man. Sam Ogilvy and Harry Annan attempted to goad her into one of those lively exchanges of banter in which Rita was entirely capable of taking care of herself. But her smile was spiritless and non-combative; and finally they let her alone and concentrated their torment upon Valerie, who endured it with equanimity and dangerously sparkling eyes, and an occasional lightening retort which kept those young men busy, especially when the epigram was in Latin—which ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... was aware of but he did not see what had happened when the red headed woman started to give the alarm. The Senorita da Cordova was not a cowed and spiritless girl and in spite of the terror of her situation, when she saw the intention of her jailer she glided the length of the cell with remarkable swiftness and caught the arm of the woman. The senorita was not a delicate creature either, and in spite of her apparent pallor, she showed a lithe agility ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... coffee," said the young lady in a spiritless tone; and then she leaned her arm and head against the kitchen mantelpiece, and hung listlessly ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... reverend father in God began, and with him very unexpectedly began my dissatisfaction. His voice was thick, his delivery spiritless, and his candences ridiculous. His soul was so overlaid with brawn and dignity that, though it heaved, panted, and struggled, it could never once get vent. Speaking through his apoplectic organs, I could not understand myself: it was a mumbling hubbub, the drone of a bagpipe, and the tantalizing ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... wouldst not call me prudent were I to strive with thee for cowering mortals, who like leaves sometimes are full of fire, then again waste away spiritless. Let us make an end of our quarrel; let men fight it ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... hundred yards from the spot where I lay; yet, such had been the fate of Murad the Unlucky, that he missed the reality, whilst he had been hours in pursuit of the phantom. Feeble and spiritless as I was, I sent forth as loud a cry as I could, in hopes of obtaining assistance; and I endeavoured to crawl to the place from which the voices appeared to come. The caravan rested for a considerable time whilst the slaves filled the skins with ...
— Murad the Unlucky and Other Tales • Maria Edgeworth
... idea of Nina Gordon's brains. She seemed to have no mind of her own; a good thing, perhaps, in some cases, but a more spiritless person to talk to never vexed the heart of man or woman either. She had no answer for the simplest question without first asking it from her mother, and away from her mother's side she ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... the first time, this room was neither hideous nor depressing. It seemed years since she had seen it. She was a different girl from the spiritless slave who had crept out after luncheon, in the wake of her mistress: that short, shapeless form with a large head set on a short neck, and a trailing, ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... into the ladies' saloon, as in spiritless quest of somebody; but, after some disappointed glances about him, seats himself upon a sofa with an air of ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... masses, while in his rapid emotions he interrogates, and doubts, and is caustic; in a word, he thinks he converses while he is at his studies. Sometimes, apparently a complacent listener, we are mortified by detecting the absent man: now he appears humbled and spiritless, ruminating over some failure which probably may be only known to himself; and now haughty and hardy for a triumph he has obtained, which yet remains a secret to the world. No man is so apt to indulge the extremes ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... Richmond, Pope's defeat at the second Bull Run, McClellan's neglect to follow up the drawn battle of Antietam with energetic operations, the gradual change of early Western victories to a cessation of all effort to open the Mississippi, and the scattering of the Western forces to the spiritless routine of repairing and guarding long railroad lines, all operated together practically to stop volunteering and enlistment ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... therefore, that gathered hopelessly at the call of Van Deventer's watchmen were dazed and spiritless. Their excitement after Arthur's first attempt to explain the situation to them had evaporated. They were no longer keyed up to a high pitch by the startling thing ...
— The Runaway Skyscraper • Murray Leinster
... found the assembled company sitting vapidly about among mosquitoes and beetles, already looking bored to death, and I soon perceived that it was expected of me to provide amusement and entertainment for the crowd. I tried to rally, therefore, and proposed a few games, which went off in a spiritless manner enough, and apparently in consequence I began to be assailed with questions and remarks ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... impulse of the moment, wherever his spirit might lead him. A similar remark I heard made by a distinguished scholar of the Methodist connexion, who urged, what is universally asserted by those who have tried this method with any success, that what has been written is found to be tame and spiritless, in comparison with the animated glow of that which springs from ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware
... one another, but in strikes, or when work is slack, it is considered "fair" for them to descend and take away the work of the common laborers. And take it away they do; for, as a matter of fact, a well-fed, ambitious machinist or a core-maker will transiently shovel coal better than an ill-fed, spiritless laborer. ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... door of the room beyond. The somber light from the two tall windows fell upon the figure of the girl. She was sitting before Andrew Bolton's desk, her head upon her folded arms. Something in the spiritless droop of her shoulders and the soft dishevelment of her fair hair suggested weariness—sleep, perhaps. But as the young man hesitated on the threshold the sound of a muffled sob escaped the quiet figure. He turned noiselessly and went away, sorry ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... know, my dear, is in some sense a superior; while the upbraided, if with reason upbraided, must make a figure as spiritless ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... Utopian happiness. The poems of Muller, the painter, are full of latent warmth. Burger, Pfeffel, the blind poet, and Claudius, gave utterance, in Schubart's coarse manner, to a few trite truisms. Musaeus was greatly admired for his amusing popular stories. As for the rest, it seemed as though the spiritless writers of that day had found it more convenient to be violent and savage in their endless chivalric pieces and romances than, like Schiller, steadily and courageously to attack the vices and evils of their age. Their fire but ended ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... with aching heads, foul breaths, bad tasting mouths on rising, clogged secretions, sense of inability to exertion, furred or yellow tongues, and the like, absolutely need the Tonic-Regulator, and not Blue Mass or Anti-Bilious Pills. Weak, nervous, spiritless, exhausted, debilitated, pale, ambitionless, easily tired, prone to become short of breath and have pain in side on running, who find it hard to get sleep, are restless, brood over their troubles, real or imaginary, ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... wondering about Antha," replied Katherine. "Now we've got Anthony where we understand him; but Antha is still the spiritless cry baby she was when she came. She hasn't a particle of backbone. I'm getting discouraged about her." She pulled a patch of moss from the rock beside her and tore ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... after the supreme indignity and outrage we had suffered, would have been to provoke every further wrong, and to furnish the means for its commission. It would have been to placard ourselves on the walls of the shattered fort, as the spiritless race the proud labor-thieves called us. It would have been to die as a nation of freemen, and to have given all we had left of our rights into the hands of alien tyrants in league ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... teacher who is uninteresting; he scolds, worries and punishes his pupils, when he himself is the fitter subject for the lash. He awakens the sense of fear which should lie dormant, while the other faculties of his pupils slumber in spiritless inactivity. ...
— The Philosophy of Teaching - The Teacher, The Pupil, The School • Nathaniel Sands
... prescription seizes upon the custom as soon as it gains a vogue, and incorporates it in the accredited standard of decency. The next step is to make this standard of decency the point of departure for a new move in advance in the same direction—for there is no merit in simple spiritless conformity to a standard of dissipation that is lived up to as a matter of course ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... dull, spiritless resignation settled down upon the remainder. The most mutinous were quelled, and accepted their unspeakable lot with the tragic fortitude ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... a deliberate manner, consonant with the dignity of the English character. It was, therefore, taken at half its original temps; it ceased to be the giddy, intoxicating whirl in which the Germans delight, and subsided into the comparatively insipid and spiritless affair known thirty years ago ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... like hinds' feet,' what he is thinking about is that light and easy, springing, elastic gait, that swiftness of advance. What a contrast that is to the way in which most of us get through our day's work! Plod, plod, plod, in a heavy-footed, spiritless grind, like that with which the ploughman toils down the sticky furrows of a field, with a pound of clay at each heel; or like that with which a man goes wearied home from his work at night. The monotony of trivial, constantly recurring doings, the fluctuations in the thermometer of our ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... of disappointment and wounded self-love, he had flung from him, had departed the marvelous stoutness of heart and strength of limb he had felt while his feet were in them. And now, all weak and spiritless, was he left to shift for himself, with such resources only as a bare-footed boy, alone in the midst of a vast wilderness, might be supposed to have at his command. Sitting thus, he began gradually taking in some idea of the sad condition to which he had brought himself by his vanity and disobedience, ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... which he was called upon to plumb. Assigned to a miserable stateroom in an uncomfortable part of the ship, he suffered horribly from seasickness, and for the first half of the voyage lay foodless and spiritless in his bunk, indifferent to his environment or to his fate. His sole friend was his batman, Harry Hobbs, but, of course, he could not confide to Harry the misery of his body, or the deeper misery of ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... his deed with a shout, but it was a weak and spiritless one, for it was scarcely safe to make fun of the Medici then in Florence, and cowards, you know, ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... crushed, so utterly unlike any Priscilla of any one of her moods that he had ever seen before. Her eyes were red, her eyelids heavy with tears, her face was pinched and narrower, the corners of her mouth had a most piteous droop, her very hair, pushed back off her forehead, seemed sad, and hung in spiritless masses about her neck and ears. "Mein liebes Kind," stammered poor Fritzing; and his hand shook so that he upset some of ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... in his letter, that they might expect to see their father at home on the following day, which was Saturday. Rendered spiritless by the ill-success of all their endeavours, he had yielded to his brother-in-law's entreaty that he would return to his family, and leave it to him to do whatever occasion might suggest to be advisable ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... prospect of another one hundred mile stage without water, and the full knowledge that retreat was impossible. Their horses, in consequence of the repeated sufferings from thirst that they had been forced to undergo, were so spiritless and reduced that they could travel scarcely any distance without giving in, and yet the worst was to come. For some time the black boys had been very sullen and discontented, the constant hardships and fatigue, added to what they well-knew lay before them, told upon their spirits. Once they ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... plucked it. Some few rain-drops just then fell; the sky, from a bright day, became overcast; and I was a type of our first parents, after eating of that fatal fruit. I felt myself naked and ashamed, stripped of my virtue, spiritless. The downy fruit, whose sight rather than savor had tempted me, dropped from my hand, never to be tasted. All the commentators in the world cannot persuade me but that the Hebrew word, in the second chapter of Genesis, translated ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... his face, a tremulous, suppressed tenderness in the commonplace question, a look in his eyes that had no business in the eyes of another young lady's betrothed. But Edith felt too fagged and spiritless just at ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... name of the reactionary movement in literature and art at the close of last century and at the beginning of this against the cold and spiritless formalism and pseudo-classicism that then prevailed, and was more regardful of correctness of expression than truth of feeling and the claims of the emotional nature; has been defined as the "reproduction in modern art and literature of the life and ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... concerned. "And of these Frandj," said he, "what hast thou to tell me?" "They are a people," answered Moussa, "very many in number and abundantly provided with everything, brave and impetuous in attack, but spiritless and timid under reverses." "And how went the war betwixt them and thee?" added Abdelmelek: "was it favorable to thee or the contrary?" "The contrary! Nay, by Allah and the Prophet; never was my army vanquished; never was a battalion ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... decency, Aphra Behn does not come off scot-free, nobody did; and upon occasion her name is amply vilified by her foes. There are some eight ungenerous lines with a side reference to the 'Conquests she had won' in Buckingham's A Trial of the Poets for the Bays, and a page or two of insipid spiritless rhymes, The Female Laureat, find a place in State Poems. The same collection contains A Satyr on the Modern Translators. 'Odi Imitatores servum pecus,' &c. By Mr. P——r,[54] 1684. It begins ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... expedition of William the Conqueror, is curious and valuable as an historical monument, though it cannot be proved to be contemporary. As a work of art it is singularly spiritless, and devoid of merit of any kind. One of the fancy figures on the border reveals the indelicacy of the ladies (a queen, perhaps, and her handmaidens) who wrought it in a way which would be startling to any one who had taken ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... cry "Hurrah!" and wave their hats after Howard should finish his oration. That he made standing on a table. He expatiated on the beauty of liberty and the soul-inspiring feeling of independence, and became quite eloquent. They cheered in a spiritless and cheerless manner. For them liberty was a high-sounding word which meant nothing. An enlightened government provided them with all they needed. Why have the bother to choose your doctor or your priest when all that is done for you? Only to pay ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... of Attila. That Gunnar should first detect the imposture, and should then recognise the heart of his brother, is a fine piece of heroic imagination of a primitive kind. It would have been wholly inept and spiritless to transfer this from Gunnar to Attila. The poet of Atlaml shows that he understands what he is about. The more his work is scrutinised, the more evident becomes the sobriety of his judgment. His dexterity in the disposing ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... By this time the Count had gained possession of Diane's hand; it felt cold and spiritless. The beautiful hand, with all the treasures in its grasp, might have been supple wood; there was nothing of Diane in it; he had taken it, it had not been given to him. As for Victurnien, the spirit had ebbed out of his frame, he had ceased to think. ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... artificiality and silken softness of aristocratic existence. Her style also possesses the needful lightness and grace, and she accordingly succeeds admirably in her sketches of high life, with all its elegant nullities and spiritless pomp. One of her best works is the romance of Cousinerna, (The Cousins,) which, as well as the other works of Knorring, Bremer, and Flygare, has been placed before the German public by ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... followed in the lives of sick folk. A year or two ago and the wounded soldiery of mankind were all shut up together in some basking angle of the Riviera, walking a dusty promenade or sitting in dusty olive-yards within earshot of the interminable and unchanging surf—idle among spiritless idlers not perhaps dying, yet hardly living either, and aspiring, sometimes fiercely, after livelier weather and some vivifying change. These were certainly beautiful places to live in, and the climate was wooing in its softness. Yet there ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... practised by poets. Thus, to take a few examples from the Divorce pamphlets, a wife, who should be "an intimate and speaking help," "a ready and reviving associate," to comfort "the misinformed and wearied life of man" with "a sweet and gladsome society," is too often "a mute and spiritless mate," united to her husband in "a disconsolate and unenjoined matrimony," whereby the blessing that was expected with her is changed "into a familiar and coinhabiting mischief, at least into a ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... their long tresses and their light bulging garments flutter around them, whilst with wild gesticulations they dance the most audacious of dances, compared with whose voluptuous movements the passion of the fiercest Spanish bailarina is almost tame and spiritless. ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai
... smooth, narrow forehead beneath the fringe of hair brushed low, those long, wide-open eyes of a deep blue, an abysmal blue, that mouth which ceased to smile only to relax its classic outline in a weary, spiritless expression. All in all, the somewhat haughty ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... would bring her to the point of consent, then they would slip away to Nevada; he would marry her there and they would go on to New York. It ought not to take more than a week, at the longest ten days. If he had had any other woman to deal with—not this spiritless fool of a girl—he could manage it in a much shorter time. All he had to do was to make a last trip to Sacramento and get what was left of the money and that could be ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... did its best to place the peccant husband above the suffering wife. Some called her a poor spiritless thing, and declared, that, with a little of her sister's spirit, she might have brought to reason any Sir Philip whatsoever, were it the termagant Falconbridge himself. But the greater part of their acquaintance affected candour, and saw faults on both sides; though, in fact, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... better medicine was found than that of absence, and deferring this undertaking to another time. The assistance from Tydore was of no consequence. They proved lukewarm friends, and all the rest was spiritless. Heaven knows the other reasons. There must have been some stronger ones; for, in reality, the camp was raised, and after embarking returned to Manila, without having had any greater effect than to increase the ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVI, 1609 • H.E. Blair
... that the majority of the women were dressed in black. Some of them were poor, sad, spiritless-looking creatures who would make any person sorry for them; and others I saw whose faces were as hard as the men's. The majority of them, however, seemed to be quite indifferent; they showed neither ...
— Three Times and Out • Nellie L. McClung
... these schools, to establish better schools for daughters of their own. These modest, retiring Sisters and Nuns, who have no new theories and schemes of social reform, and upon whom a certain class of women look down with haughty contempt, as weak, spiritless, and narrow-minded, have chosen the better part, and are doing infinitely more to raise woman to her true dignity, and for the political and social, as well as for the moral and religious, progress of the country, ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... fiddle, they kept the house in a constant uproar, and we were all so happy. Now, it isn't once a month that we hear the sound of the fiddle in the house. He never sings, and he never dances, and he never plays, and what little he lets us see of him, is always so sad and so spiritless that I feel heartsick whenever I look upon him. Oh! Brother Stevens, if you could only find out what's the matter, and tell us what to do, it would be the most blessed kindness, and I'd never forget it, or forget you, to my ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... work: it is useless for you to defend yourself," said she, tossing away her husband's hat from the arm-chair, and then throwing herself in a spiritless manner ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... barrenness, is want of love between man and wife. Love is that vivid principle that ought to inspire each organ in the act of generation, or else it will be spiritless and dull; for if their hearts be not united in love, how should their seed unite to cause Conception? And this is sufficiently evinced, in that there never follows conception on a rape. Therefore, if men and women ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... kept the hunger wolf at bay, their strength gradually gave out under their unhealthy diet, and when they were ready to travel, they were in a pitiful condition to endure its fatigues. Their horses were even worse off than themselves. Worn with privation to skeletons, they were drooping and spiritless; and had not the wanderers used great exertion to collect the young grass for them, they would have perished, for they were too ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... felt for his old leader made the shock intensely painful. It was the first great wrench of his life, the first gap which the angel Death had made in his circle, and he felt numbed, and beaten down, and spiritless. Well, well! I believe it was good for him and for many others in like case, who had to learn by that loss that the soul of man cannot stand or lean upon any human prop, however strong, and wise, and good; but that He upon whom alone it can stand and lean will knock away all such ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... your honour's health in A pot of beer, if you will give me sixpence, But for my part I never love to meddle With politics, Sir. Friend of Humanity. I give thee sixpence! I will see thee d——d first! Wretch! whom no sense of wrong can rouse to vengeance! Sordid! unfeeling! reprobate! degraded! Spiritless outcast! ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... care of me for the sake of his bird! That smiling, spiritless, indolent-minded man would rule Egypt! Am I then so much wiser than other folks, or do none but fools come to consult Hekt? But Rameses chose Ani to represent him! perhaps because he thinks that those who are not particularly clever are not particularly dangerous. If that is what ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and much attached to me, but he has lowered his influence by promulgating (though only for form's sake) an identical bill about Clodius. But the son of Aulus,[119] God in heaven! What a cowardly and spiritless fellow for a soldier! How well he deserves to be exposed, as he is, day after day to the abuse of Palicanus![120] Farther, an agrarian law has been promulgated by Flavius, a poor production enough, almost identical with that of Plotius. ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... among the sands The gembok nations, snuffing up the wind, Drawn by the scent of water—and the bands Of tawny-bearded lions pacing, blind With the sun-dazzle in their midst, opprest With prey, and spiritless for lack ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... Petrovitch had at the same time become a patriot, at least he called himself a patriot, though he knew Russia little, had not retained a single Russian habit, and expressed himself in Russian rather queerly; in ordinary conversation, his language was spiritless and inanimate and ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... from the idea of property, that he comes habitually to look upon it as a thing from which he is warned by the laws of the great proprietors, and becomes in consequence spiritless, purposeless." ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... leap from the car with the spring of anticipation that Bob did, and noticing his spiritless step his friend ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett
... desultory, however, and spiritless, like everything else about the place that night, greeted us as Mrs. Ashley opened the door leading directly into ...
— The House in the Mist • Anna Katharine Green
... experience, as the first deep wave of the Revolution sinks into us, an aristocratic, dynastic, and plutocratic Romanticism, a yearning for the colour and glitter of the time of glory, a revolt against the spiritless, mechanical philanthrophy of unemployed orators of about fourth-form standard intellectually; against the monotonous and insincere tirades of paid agitators and their restless disciples; against laziness; ignorance, greed, and exaggeration masquerading as popular scientific ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... Is as the voice of destiny to thee. Doubtless the course is safer far, to range 285 Our numerous host, and if a man have dared Dispute thy will, to rob him of his prize. King! over whom? Women and spiritless— Whom therefore thou devourest; else themselves Would stop that mouth that it should scoff no more. 290 But hearken. I shall swear a solemn oath. By this same sceptre,[22] which shall never bud, Nor boughs bring forth as once, which ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... certainly have fewer judgments correct *objectively; but they would be so, SUBJECTIVELY, at least; that is, they would contain in themselves the exact relation between the person giving the judgment and the object. We can perceive this by observing how modestly subdued, even spiritless and desponding, is the opinion passed upon the results of untoward events by those who have been eye-witnesses, but especially if they have been parties concerned. This is, according to our view, a criterion of the influence which bodily fatigue exercises, and of ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... and I sit down, with unspeakable alacrity, to a business that tires my muscles, sets a gnawer at work upon my lungs, fatigues my brain, and leaves me listless and spiritless. ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... was willing to undertake, was better than to aid an opposition utterly nerveless and servile and altogether devoid of so much as the desire for efficient action. It was no time to stay with the party of weakness; it was right to strengthen rather than to hamper a man so pacific and spiritless as Mr. Jefferson; to show a readiness to forward even his imperfect expedients; to display a united and indignant, if not quite a hostile front to Great Britain, rather (p. 055) than to exhibit a tame and friendly feeling towards her. ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... purpose of winning her over he should not speak to her for three days, but the followers of Babhravya are of opinion that if the man does not speak with her for three days, the girl may be discouraged by seeing him spiritless like a pillar, and, becoming dejected, she may begin to despise him as an eunuch. Vatsyayana says that the man should begin to win her over, and to create confidence in her, but should abstain at first ...
— The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - Translated From The Sanscrit In Seven Parts With Preface, - Introduction and Concluding Remarks • Vatsyayana
... a prodigious stir. Dead France woke suddenly to life, wherever the great news traveled. Whereas before, the spiritless and cowed people hung their heads and slunk away if one mentioned war to them, now they came clamoring to be enlisted under the banner of the Maid of Vaucouleurs, and the roaring of war-songs and the thundering ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... B. Viljoen and Muller had been quiescent throughout the summer. The former lay usually at Pilgrim's Rest; the latter haunted the hilly country west and S.W. of Lydenburg; neither leader being able to get much work out of passive and spiritless followers. When Schalk Burger, the Acting President of the Transvaal, and the rest of the Government were driven across the Delagoa Bay Railway by Bruce Hamilton in December, Park, who was in command ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... and attacked them en route, they made no other stand until General Miles headed them off near Bear Paw Mountain in Northern Montana, and captured nearly all their horses. Then they were compelled to fight or surrender. They made a four days' fight, but it was a spiritless one, and finally succumbed to the inevitable, ...
— The Battle of the Big Hole • G. O. Shields
... I beheld the man who "drew Priam's curtain in the dead of night." That messenger, I am sure, could not have presented a visage more pale, more spiritless than my Helvetian. Recollecting that he had served in the Swiss guards, I was the less at a loss to account for his extreme agitation. "In what part of the chateau were you, Jean," said I, "when these balls were aimed at the windows?"——"There was my post," ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... summer among these mountains and lakes, sketching and painting the transcendently beautiful views they everywhere present. There is nothing like them on all this continent. We talk about the scenery of Lake George. It is all tame and spiritless compared with what may be seen here; it possesses not a tithe of the variety, the bold and grand, the placid and beautiful, all mingled, and changing always, as you pass from point to point along these lakes. Why do not the artists whose business it is to make the "canvas ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... thought her tame and spiritless in her disposition; and her father cherished as much affection for her as he was capable of feeling for any one ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... vain; at length her mother laughingly cried out—"Nonsense, Effie, no one would sooner resent neglect from a lover than yourself. True love, as you call it, would never make such a spiritless, meek creature out of the material of which ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... on at a pace almost marvelous, constantly stimulated to greater efforts by the coarse shouts of the masculine audience, who evidently took the same sort of interest in the proceeding that they would in a dog race or a cock fight. The other was pale and spiritless, and it seemed with difficulty that she dragged herself along to keep upon the track until the last. At times she seemed to be almost fainting, as the result of the long-continued excitement and fatigue; but she managed to keep going until nine minutes before the slow moving ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... you let that bow-legged cross between a bulldog and a flamin' red sunset tromp on you so? It looks to me like you're plumb spiritless." ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... ways, by general report, that the riflemen had behaved badly, and quailed as the filibusters had scarcely done before; though, after all, it will seem unreasonable to blame these two hundred or less, disease-worn and spiritless men, for not whipping ten hundred out of a barricaded town. It may be worth saying here, that, seeing things in Nicaragua from a common soldier's befogged view-point, and having only general rumor, or the tales of privates like myself, for parts of an engagement ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... sickening shock again visited her, it was, however, because a revealing flash of thought told her that it was not alone Lassiter who was thrillingly welcome, but also his fatal weapons. They meant so much. How she had fallen—how broken and spiritless must she be—to have still the same old horror of Lassiter's guns and his name, yet feel somehow a cold, shrinking protection in their ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... and adorn the banquets of the great public assemblies, the Olympic and other games, and scarcely a social or public gathering can be mentioned that would not have appeared to the ardent Grecians cold and spiritless without ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... in spiritless fashion. "It will be better than a music hall, at any rate. I am not at all sure, Seaman, that the hardest part of my task over here will not be this ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... time, then the reaction came. A black melancholy fell upon her, and energy deserted soul and body. She found it a weariness to get up in the morning and weariness to lie down at night. She no longer cared even to seem cheerful, owned that she was spiritless, hoped she should be ill, and did not care if she died to-morrow. When this dark mood seemed about to become chronic she began to mend, for youth is wonderfully recuperative, and the deepest wounds soon heal even against the sufferer's will. ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... and made his way to the livery-stable, where he hired a saddle horse. His idea was merely to be alone. The reins hung on the neck of his spiritless mount and the roads he went were the roads it took of its own ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... He knew the Silver Fleece—his and Zora's—must be ruined. It was the first great sorrow of his life; it was not so much the loss of the cotton itself—but the fantasy, the hopes, the dreams built around it. If it failed, would not they fail? Was not this angry beating rain, this dull spiritless drizzle, this wild war of air and earth, but foretaste and prophecy of ruin and discouragement, of the utter futility of striving? But if his own despair was great his pain at the plight of Zora made it almost unbearable. He did not see her in these seven days. He pictured her huddled there ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... a detachment of veteran infantry, the recruits so turbulent at noon were spiritless now in every sense of the word. Turning over his charge, as well as his account of their conduct and of his own, to the commander of the escort, Captain Muffet remained at department head-quarters long enough to impress the officials ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... will see thee damned first— Wretch! whom no sense of wrongs can rouse to vengeance— Sordid, unfeeling, reprobate, degraded, Spiritless outcast!" ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... too for a while in raising the more than equivocal character of his hero, by placing him in the picture-gallery of the Queen of Carthage, and giving him leisure to contemplate and to criticise, and poetically to describe to his silent and spiritless lounger-friend many noble and many touching works. In this passage we also obtain the great Latin poet's opinion of the ameliorating effect of "collections." The hero of the AEneid knew immediately he was among an amiable ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... maintaining such liberality and munificence, a fund is furnished by continual wars and plunder. Nor could you so easily persuade them to cultivate the ground, or to await the return of the seasons and produce of the year, as to provoke the foe and to risk wounds and death: since stupid and spiritless they account it, to acquire by their sweat what they can gain by ...
— Tacitus on Germany • Tacitus
... the hand of time for those fruits of generosity and courtship, which he since often reproached himself with having gathered much too green, when, yielding to the inability to resist him, and overborne by desires, he had wreaked his passion on a mere lifeless, spiritless body, dead to all purpose of joy, since taking none, it ought to be supposed incapable of giving any. This is, however, certain; my heart never thoroughly forgave him the manner in which I had fallen to him, although, in point of interest, I had fallen to him, I had reason to be pleased that he found, ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... very unequal in point of merit; some of them appearing harsh and crude, and others flat and spiritless, when compared with similar products by the old Italian ...
— John Baptist Jackson - 18th-Century Master of the Color Woodcut • Jacob Kainen
... the rain, I went into a church. The evening service had only just begun, there were very few people; I looked round me, and suddenly, near a window, caught sight of a familiar profile. For the first instant, I did not recognise it: that pale face, that spiritless glance, those sunken cheeks—could it be the same Liza I had seen a fortnight before? Wrapped in a cloak, without a hat on, with the cold light from the broad white window falling on her from one side, she was gazing fixedly at the holy image, and seemed striving ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... broken by fatigue, and trembled with emotion. An instant after, Fouquet called Gourville, who crossed the gallery amidst the universal expectation. At length, he himself re-appeared among his guests; but it was no longer the same pale, spiritless countenance they had beheld when he left them; from pale he had become livid; and from spiritless, annihilated. A breathing, living specter, he advanced with his arms stretched out, his mouth parched, like a shade that comes ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... sacrifice and first in danger. France's object has been and is to place Germany completely hors de combat. Her mortal enemy is in her power. France's first desire is not money or territory, but just security. France does not fear Germany in her present spiritless, unarmed state. France does not fear Germany at all. But the fruit of victory which she desires is that she should put it entirely out of the power of Germany to return to the struggle. The League of Nations is being ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... his face a look of weakness which betrayed the want of real inner strength. How many faces one sees which, in ordinary circumstances, are comfortable, self-asserting, sufficient, and even bold; the lines of which, under difficulties, collapse and become mean, spiritless, and insignificant. There are faces which, in their usual form, seem to bluster with prosperity, but which the loss of a dozen points at whist will reduce to that currish aspect which reminds one of a dog-whip. Mr. Camperdown's countenance, when Lord Fawn and Mr. Eustace left him, ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... If ne'er he knew the nobler state, The birk-clad brae, the roaring spate, The tod's dark lair, Too spiritless to grin at ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 13, 1914 • Various
... choose rather to defend than correct a fault, he spent not a word more nor fruitless labor, but you alone might be fond of yourself and your own works, without a rival. A good and sensible man will censure spiritless verses, he will condemn the rugged, on the incorrect he will draw across a black stroke with his pen; he will lop off ambitious [and redundant] ornaments; he will make him throw light on the parts that are not perspicuous; he will arraign what is expressed ambiguously; ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... now four years and more since the friends had met; and each secretly wondered how they had ever come to be friends. Sylvia had a country, raw, spiritless look to Mrs. Brunton's eye; Molly was loud and talkative, and altogether distasteful to Sylvia, trained in daily companionship with Hester to appreciate soft slow speech, ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... have a tree in every ward to-morrow," said Ailsa, turning toward Hallam. Her eyes smiled, but her voice was spiritless. A tinge of sadness had somehow settled over the festivity; Hammond was staring at the fire, chin in hand; West sipped his wine reflectively; Letty's idle fingers touched her guitar at intervals, as her dark eyes rested ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... And for the moment one would hardly have recognized the sallow, spiritless face, that with all the delicacy of boyhood still, at times looked so exceedingly old. "No, no, Mr. Halifax, who ever heard of a man beginning life ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... understand, by the way, the pleasure of the jockey in setting up the tail of the horse artificially. If I had a horse with a tail not able to sit up, I should feed the horse, and curry him into good spirits, and let him set up his own tail. When I see a poor, spiritless horse going by with an artificially set-up tail, it is only a signal of distress. I desire to be surrounded only by healthy, vigorous plants and trees, which require constant cutting-in and management. Merely to cut away dead branches is like perpetual attendance at a funeral, and puts one in ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... had lost all its pride and dignity, and seemed a poor, reeling, spiritless thing. The deck was deserted save for the little group about the hatch who strove with might and main to launch this last poor medium of rescue. The abrupt pitch of the deck made their frantic efforts seem all but hopeless, and ...
— Tom Slade with the Colors • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... pear flowers away be blown; Yet peach and pear will, when next year returns, burst out again in bloom, But can it e'er be told who will next year dwell in the inner room? What time the third moon comes, the scented nests have been already built. And on the beams the swallows perch, excessive spiritless and staid; Next year, when the flowers bud, they may, it's true, have ample to feed on: But they know not that when I'm gone beams will be vacant and nests fall! In a whole year, which doth consist of three hundred and sixty days, Winds sharp as swords and frost ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... then that the size of a unit was immaterial, and indeed, given the manpower that the Army received from reenlistments and Selective Service, any black unit, no matter its size, would almost assuredly be an inefficient, spiritless group of predominately Class IV and V men. For in addition to its educational limitations, the typical black unit suffered a further handicap in the vital matter of motivation. The Gillem Board disregarded this fact, but it was rarely overlooked by the black soldier: he was called upon to serve as ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... in Bremner's collection of Scotch songs, which begins "To Fanny fair could I impart," &c., it is most exact measure, and yet, let them both be sung before a real critic, one above the biases of prejudice, but a thorough judge of nature,—how flat and spiritless will the last appear, how trite, and lamely methodical, compared with the wild warbling cadence, the heart-moving melody of the first!—This is particularly the case with all those airs which end with a hypermetrical ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... breath and beckoned to him a droopy-mustached, droopy-shouldered rider who was circling the herd in a droopy, spiritless manner and ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... was weary of the spiritless West, and who was as sick of Europe as I then was, this fragment of the East which moved cheerfully and changingly before my eyes was a refreshing solace; my heart enjoyed at least a few drops of that draught which I had so often tasted in gloomy ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Surface, that we perceive how imperfect may be the first lineaments, that Time and Taste contrive to mould gradually into beauty. The following is the scene that introduces him to the audience, and no one ought to be disheartened by the failure of a first attempt after reading it. The spiritless language—the awkward introduction of the sister into the plot—the antiquated expedient [Footnote: This objection seems to have occurred to himself; for one of his memorandums is—"Not to drop the letter, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
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