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More "Stolid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... arrangement of holy names and texts in triangles, and the stigmatized hands of St. Francis, and a variety of other devices, for the purpose, as is explained in a special notice, of baffling the Evil One, and preventing his entrance into that building? Had you seen Dionea, and the stolid, contemptuous way in which she took, without attempting to refute, the various shocking allegations against her, your Excellency would have reflected, as I did, that the door in question must have been accidentally ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... effect, the whole European situation was changed completely since the death of Leo X. in 1521. His successor Adrian was a man of good intentions but limited purview; the great issues at stake were beyond his grasp, and his attempts at disciplinary reforms were made nugatory by the stolid immobility of the hierarchy. After a brief reign he was succeeded by Clement VII., a man of considerable talent and inconsiderable ability: a man shifty and fearful, not fitted to cope with the stubborn ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... fawn-coloured ass. It roared and pulled at the golden chains by which the knot of men held it. Many ladies shrieked out, but the men dragged the lion into the open space before the dais where the Queen sat unmoved and stolid. ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... Beneath the stolid exteriors of these two there was much that was fine and forceful. Emma Byers's thoughtful forehead and intelligent eyes would have revealed that in her. Her mother was dead. She kept house for her father and brother. She was known ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... it is accustomed. The ways of the place suited him; the climate, the soil, the whole conditions of life were exactly what he would have them to be. He lived up to the age of fifty-four a contented, stolid, happy, dissolute Elector of Hanover; and it was a complete disturbance to all his habits and his predilections when the expected death of Anne compelled him to turn his ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... entered the wood with the two sisters the drivers removed the horses from the carriages and went away, led off by the man who had driven the ladies. This was the man whose stolid face had seemed likely to belong to an honest man, but who now was shown to belong to the opposite class. These men went down the road over which they had come, leaving the carriages there with the ladies ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... would not respond. And Darius from prudence did not insist, for he had arrived at chapel unthinkably late—during the second chant—and Clara was capable of audacious remarks upon occasions. The silence grew stolid. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... astonishing how the port from which we sail partakes of our sailing sentiments. It's a "jolly good place" or a "dull old hole," just according to who is on the deck or who is on the dock. Handkerchiefs flutter gayly in the stolid face of Hoboken every day of the year, and many beside Marie Stuart have wept themselves out of sight of sunny France. It isn't the place that counts when the anchor goes down or up, it's the Who and the When; and in view of what has filled all the foregoing pages I trust that the reader ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... The stolid boatman gave the command; the man at the bow paddled one way, while the man at the stern paddled another, and the canoe swung ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... interested him immensely, and that was the grist mill, composed of the two stones, and when the water wheel was set in motion and the upper stone began to whirr, he stood with mouth and eyes open, and watched the meal running from the spout like one entranced. Usually these people are too stolid to pay attention to such things, but his intense interest was so pronounced that it attracted ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... further interference. And yet this teaching, as Luther knew better than anyone, had not yet succeeded, in spite of all its popularity, in penetrating the souls of men. To a large extent, the masses seemed to be still stolid and indifferent. Even among the clergy, many were so unstable, so obscure, and so incompetent, that they failed to make any progress with their congregations. There were even some among them who were ready, according to circumstances, to ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... acquaintances. There was the stalwart frame of Bruce, the Roman face of Arthur, the bright eyes of Bart, the slender frame of Phil, and the earnest glance of Tom. There, too, was Pat's merry smile, and the stolid look of Bogud, and the meditative solemnity of Jiggins, not to speak of others whose names need not be mentioned. Amid the crowd the face of Captain Corbet was conspicuous, and the dark visage of Solomon, while that of the mate was distinguishable in the distance. To all these ...
— Lost in the Fog • James De Mille
... his skins he invested in "Indian Goods"—colored cloth, beads, blankets, knives, axes, and musical instruments. His was the first store in New York that carried a stock of musical instruments. These he sold to the savages, and also he supplied the stolid Dutch the best of everything in this particular line, from a ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... of spending so many persons' energies upon such a stolid, indifferent, intractable people? They were wedded to their idols, why not leave them alone? Why should they cast ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... and stood staring, the teamsters jumped as if they had been shot. But Billy only turned a stolid ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... such an anxious intonation, such a perturbed air, that the stolid domestic, accustomed to behold only the conventional composure which allows no pulse to betray its beating, was moved out of the even tenor of ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... started violently. She turned pale, then she flushed; she cast a strange glance at her husband, who was regarding both women with a sort of stolid keenness. ...
— The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural • Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
... inhabitants of which, having been alarmed by the report of an attack on the king's life, now pressed forward to see the supposed traitor. Amid the confusion of the moment, he could descry the face of the victualler, arrested into a stare of stolid wonder, and that of the barber grinning betwixt horror and eager curiosity. He thought that he also had a glimpse of his waterman in ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... at all. But I had given much to know whether my stolid manner disconcerted him. Unconsciously I sought the bluff face above the chimney, depicted in all its ruggedness by the painter of King Charles's day, and contrasted with the bundle of finery at my side. Dr. Courtenay certainly caught the look. He opened his snuff-box, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... give us of France, England, or Russia?" continued Servadac, perfectly unconscious of the stolid rigidity with which his advances were received. "We are anxious to hear anything you can tell us. Have you had communications with Europe? ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... eyes that warned against jesting on that subject, and Little stepped aside with a shrug and watched Vandersee as that stolid worthy piloted the ship up to the ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... around, eager to help, hot and panting, with cotton sleeves well tucked up above the dimpled elbows, and giggling over some private jokes of their own, whenever Miss Sally's back was turned for a moment. And old Jemima, stolid in temper and solid in bulk, kept up a long and subdued grumble, while she stirred the stock-pot methodically ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... old Dugro's stolid face appeared at the door and summoned another man to his inner office—"the chamber of horrors"—where the lambs are sheared. The story was always the same. The customer squirmed and asked for a little more time to watch the market. ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... Once in a year on the boards moves thy great soul, harness-clad." "Doubtless 'tis well! Philosophy now has refined your sensations, And from the humor so bright fly the affections so black."— "Ay, there is nothing that beats a jest that is stolid and barren, But then e'en sorrow can please, if 'tis sufficiently moist." "But do ye also exhibit the graceful dance of Thalia, Joined to the solemn step with which Melpomene moves?"— "Neither! For naught we love but what is Christian and moral; ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... judges for a moment, then smote the desk before him. "No evidence. The prisoner is discharged. Adjourn the court," he exclaimed. And for once in the history of Puerto Principe the law had been prompt. The accused, who had been stolid and dull throughout the trial, now smiled cunningly to himself, and saying no word to any one, but with a sidelong look at the lawyers, left the building without loss of time, and after investing a few coppers in bad brandy at the least inviting groggery in town, disappeared down the road leading ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... he recognized Herbert, he looked surprised and disconcerted. But he had plenty of assurance, and quickly determined upon his course. Assuming a stolid look, he said: "Well, my lad, who are you; and what ...
— Try and Trust • Horatio Alger
... paradox, that it was huge because it was petty, getting a miserable sour sustenance out of his consciousness of the position it explained. Great enemies, great undertakings, would have revived him as they had always revived and fortified. But here was a stolid small obstacle, scarce assailable on its own level; and he had chosen that it should be attacked through its own laws and forms. By shutting a door, by withholding an answer to his knocks, the thing ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... war they had endured and then some truth would burst upon him. It was there in the restless steps, in the prone forms, in the sunken, glaring eyes. What soldiers, what men, what giants! Three and a half years of unnamable and indescribable fury of action and strife of thought! Not dead, nor stolid like oxen, were these soldiers of France. They had a simplicity that seemed appalling. We have given all; we have stood in the way, borne the brunt, saved you—this was flung at Dorn, not out of their thought, but from their ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... Majesty Pinus I., three half-centuries old, having reigned fifty years high above all his race. A little fellow with a little weapon has dethroned the quiet old king. Pinus I was very strong at bottom, but the little revolutionist was stronger at top. Brains without much trouble had their will of stolid matter. The tree fallen, its branches are lopped, its purple trunk is shortened into lengths. The teamster arrives with oxen in full steam, and rimy with frozen breath about their indignant nostrils. As he comes and goes, he talks to his team ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... have been sixteen, gave Jane a stolid, incurious look and shuffled down the hall, closing the door on a portion ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... my dear. What a day! Did you remember to send that grocery list to Shaw's? Did Jenny come? Oh, yes. There she is. How do you do, Jenny?" greeting Edna's cook, whose stolid rosy face gazed from the chair opposite the one to which ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... innocence of racecourses, and the perfect purity of that smoky atmosphere peculiar to tavern parlours. Georgy's suspicions were too vague for refutation; but they were nevertheless sufficient ground for all the alternations of temper—from stolid sulkiness to peevish whining, from murmured lamentations to loud hysterics—to which ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... workshop. As they disappear, JOHN MURRAY, sweating and angry looking, comes through from the yard followed by BROWN. JOHN is a tall, stout man, with a rather dour countenance and somewhat stolid expression. He is a year or so the elder of Dan in age. He goes to the dresser, puts his hand on the top shelf, takes down a spanner and throws it down angrily ...
— The Drone - A Play in Three Acts • Rutherford Mayne
... and students of modern literature know how the ass has been treated by poets and romancers. The stolid animal has generally been made the subject of comedy. Drunken and impotent Silenus, in the Pagan mythology, joins in the professions of Bacchus on a sober ass, and the patient animal staggers beneath the heavy burden of a fat-paunched ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... in the very cell beside her own, the atheist Nicot sits stolid amidst the darkness, and hugs the thought of Danton, that death is nothingness. ("Ma demeure sera bientot LE NEANT" (My abode will soon be nothingness), said Danton before his judges.)) His, no spectacle of an appalled and perturbed conscience! Remorse is the echo of a lost virtue, ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... wholly marred by his disdainful manners, curt speech, and contemptuous treatment of foreigners. Clearly here was a cold, sternly objective nature like that of Bonaparte. He was a good representative of the stolid Turk of the provinces, who, far from the debasing influence of the Court, retains the fanaticism and love of war on behalf of his creed that make his people terrible even in the days ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... Such a boat the settler would fill with household goods and farm stock, and commit himself to the current at Pittsburg. From the roof of the cabin that housed his family, cocks crew and hens cackled, while the stolid eyes of cattle peered over the high parapet of logs built about the edge for protection against the arrow or bullet of the wandering redskin. Sometimes several families would combine to build one ark. Drifting slowly down the river—the voyage from ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... Welsh, LL.A., thus describes the household: "Jean, the ever-cheerful and willing helper; Annie the drawer of water and hewer of wood, kind willing worker; Mary the smart, handsome favourite; Alice the stolid dependable little body, and Maggie the fusionless, Dannie the imp, and Asoquoe who looked with his big innocent eyes a wee angel, and who yet was in constant trouble, chiefly for insisting on sharing the cat's meals. Then there were the babies—a lovely wee twin-girl, ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... harness it in silence, moving about it, slowly and lazily, with short, irresolute steps, and when the horse, annoyed by his manner, would begin to frolic, to become capricious, he would beat it in silence with a heavy whip. He would beat it cruelly, with stolid, angry persistency, and when this happened at a time when he was suffering from the aftereffects of a carouse, he would work himself into a frenzy. At such times the crack of the whip could be heard in the house, with the ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... hearty wind was calling to me companionably from where he swung and bellowed in the tree-tops. "Take me for guide to-day," he seemed to plead. "Other holidays you have tramped it in the track of the stolid, unswerving sun; a belated truant, you have dragged a weary foot homeward with only a pale, expressionless moon for company. To-day why not I, the trickster, the hypocrite? I, who whip round corners and bluster, relapse and evade, ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... us to go with himself and wife to a meeting at a theatre three miles off. The Rev. Mr. Graham preached. It was an interesting, but touching and saddening sight to look upon the congregation; to wonder why they came, and whether they would come again, and whether under those stolid and hardened faces there yet lay humanity. Many came with babies in their arms, who made themselves very much at home; some were in dirty week-day clothes; "some in rags and some in jags." Coming home we passed the spot where John Rogers was burned, and that where in time of the ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... bone, and all showed signs of brutal ill-treatment, their backs bearing great festering sores caused by the lashes of their pitiless captors. The majority of them had, I ascertained, been captured in the forest wilds beyond the Niger, and all preserved a stolid indifference, for they knew their terrible doom. They were being hurried on to Kumassi to be sold to King ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... Gulden, huge, stolid, gloomy, was entering the cabin. The man fell into the circle and faced Kell with the fire-light dancing in his ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... the terrible thoughts which were working, beneath that stolid face, in that always eager-working brain. They never fancied what a terrible demon now occupied that fiery heart which they supposed was wholly surrendered to the consciousness of shame. Could they have heard that voice of the fiend ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... but something was handed down from the days of comparative Celtic purity which welded different social elements into a common type, found often where no Celtic tongue is now spoken. It emerges where we least expect it, and the stolid Anglo-Saxon may suddenly awaken to something in himself due to a forgotten Celtic strain ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... heh," creaked an old skin-and-bones, with one tooth visible, which shook as the laugh emerged. Stolid ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... party is as iconoclastic as the Republican is reverential. The former loves to pick flaws in its idols and dash them to pieces; the latter, with stolid conservatism, clings loyally to its mediocrities. The latter could have elected Bryan, the former could not; the Democratic stomach is freaky and very squeamish; it swallows many things but digests few; the ostrich-like Republican ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... beyond both, in that he had an even nobler conception of Literature than either. That he would have put her even too high, would have assigned to her functions which she is unable to discharge, is true enough; but this is at least no vulgar error. Against ignoble neglect, against stolid misunderstanding, against mushroom rivalry, he championed her alike. And it was most certainly from no base motive. If he wanted an English Academy, I am quite sure it was not from any desire for a canary ribbon or a sixteen-pointed star. Yet, after Southey himself in the first ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... already taken the measure of the quiet, stolid-looking Englishman. She had seen him long before Sylvia had done so, and had watched him with some attention, guessing almost at once that he must be the man for whom Mrs. ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... ignorance of crops and cattle before we had traveled ten yards on our journey. Ambrose Meadowcroft cast about for another topic, and failed to find it. Upon this I cast about on my side, and asked, at a venture, if I had chosen a convenient time for my visit The young farmer's stolid brown face instantly brightened. I had evidently hit, hap-hazard, ...
— The Dead Alive • Wilkie Collins
... mile farther, where a byroad turned off towards Fairfield, the riders came upon a remarkable group in high debate over a donkey—Lady Latimer, Gampling the tinker, and the rural policeman. My lady instantly summoned Mr. Carnegie to her succor in the fray, which, to judge from her countenance and the stolid visage of the emissary of the law, was obstinate. It appeared that the policeman claimed to arrest the donkey and convey him to the pound. The dry and hungry beast had been tethered by his master in the early morning where a hedge and margin of sward bordered ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... friend plum-pudding; but so revolting was its dark, bilious-looking exterior that we felt its claim to be accounted a compatriot almost insulting. And it was with secret gratification that towards the close of January we saw the same stolid, unhappy blocks awaiting purchasers. ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... task of going out to collect pence in the streets. Joe had been offered a three or four days' job; he had accepted it gratefully because it was only for three or four days, and for that period he would be the sober, stolid, British workman. The pleasures of the pot-house would claim him on Saturday, when he would have money in his pockets and the appetite that comes ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... as if under that rude exterior there dwelt a very seraph. Then again he is so sly and still, so imperturbably saturnine; shows such indifference, malign coolness towards all that men strive after; and ever with some half-visible wrinkle of a bitter sardonic humour, if indeed it be not mere stolid callousness,—that you look on him almost with a shudder, as on some incarnate Mephistopheles, to whom this great terrestrial and celestial Round, after all, were but some huge foolish Whirligig, where kings ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... with rifles and equipment of all kinds, shell-cases and caps, and ammunition clips. The rifles were all collected and the bolts removed to prevent their being used again. Some of the Turks were lying right on our trenches, almost in some of them. The Turkish sentries were peaceable-looking men, stolid in type and of the peasant class mostly. We fraternised with them and gave them cigarettes and tobacco. Some Germans were there, but they viewed us with malignant eyes. When I talked to Colonel Pope about it afterwards ...
— Five Months at Anzac • Joseph Lievesley Beeston
... The men, stolid, after their kind, seemed to have become reconciled to their fate. Nevertheless, Paul did not mean to relax his vigilance in the least degree. He knew very well that such cunning characters would be ready to take advantage of the least ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren
... without haste and without enthusiasm. There was neither pity nor passion in his face, but rather the patient, stolid look of one who has certain work to do ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... pounder guns on the quarter-deck. With the greatest equanimity they accepted several little presents made them, nor deigned thanks of any sort for benefits received, stuffing the different articles into their wide girdles with a stolid indifference which was enlivened by a smile once only. This was at a case of needles given to the leading Datto or chief, which, through the interpreter, we told him were for the wives of his bosom; whereupon they ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... lace from his sleeves, and the gorget and sash from his uniform, so that he might pass as a simple trooper. He explained to his men what it was that was expected of them, and though they did not raise a cry or wave their weapons as mine might have done, there was an expression upon their stolid and clean-shaven faces which filled me with confidence. Their tunics were left unbuttoned, their scabbards and helmets stained with dirt, and their harness badly fastened, so that they might look the part of ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... state.] and the Portrait of this Irish fellow-citizen himself, who is by no means a beautiful man. Indeed, they are all portrayed; all the privates of this distinguished Regiment are, if anybody cared to look at them—Redivanoff from Moscow seems of far better bone than Kirkman, though still more stolid of aspect. One Hohmann, a born Prussian, was so tall, you could not, though yourself tall, touch his bare crown with your hand; August the Strong of Poland tried, on one occasion, and could not. Before Hohmann turned up, there had been "Jonas the Norwegian Blacksmith,", also a dreadfully ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... shocking indeed to be fastened speechless upon a rack, and to be charged by uncomprehending souls with counterfeiting emotion. She was so constituted that she could not help laying up this speech of her husband's against him as one of many stolid misdoings which justified both contempt and aversion. In fact, his inability or unwillingness to comprehend her had always been, in her searching and sensitive eyes, his chief crime. To be understood, to be ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... he was in khaki, but the contrast between the two officers was very striking. The one was lean and athletic in every line of his figure, with laughing grey eyes in a handsome face; the other, a stolid, fair-haired Fleming, whose square visage would have been rather colourless and commonplace but for the pleasant smile ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... cried Sally, hoarsely and breathlessly. "Let me be." She did not scream. She was too impressed by his exhibition of strength. He continued to hold her, and they stood breast to breast, Sally panting, and Toby with a kind of stolid determination. ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... man. He is entirely safe, and I have sent for him. Now I imagine that the Duke will wish our new secretary to live still at the 'Brand'—he preferred it in your case, as you will remember. Our new secretary is going to be my nephew. He is very stolid and honest, and fortunately not a chatterbox. He is going to be the nominal secretary, but I want you to be the one who ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... appeal, Marguerite looked round from one face to the other: but each looked absolutely impassive and stolid, quite uninterested in this little scene, the exact counterpart of a dozen others, enacted on this very spot ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... this wealth of light and color that the gaze rested in the fullest astonishment and delight. It was upon two figures seated in the midst of these palm-trees and cacti, whose faces, turned the one towards the other, made a picture of love and joy that the coldest heart must feel, and the most stolid view with delight. It was the bridegroom and his bride, Mr. Harrington and the beautiful ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... and snatched a bite, while Amalia and Larry slung the bags of food and the water on the mule and made all ready for the start. As he ate, he tried to arouse and encourage the mother, but she remained stolid until they were in the saddle, when she rose and followed them a few steps, and said in her deep voice: "Yes, I ask a thing. You will find Paul, my 'usband. Tell him to come to me—it is best—no more,—I cannot in English." ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... the foot of the bed, where he regarded his mother with stolid eyes, and beat a tattoo on the bed-rail with ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... whereat our Shakespeare drank! Through him the loves of all are linked to thee, By Romeo's ardour, Juliet's constancy He sets the peasant in the royal rank, Shows, under mask and paint, Kinship of knave and saint And plays on stolid man with ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... like Brutus, concealed a scheming heart under a stolid guise. The apprehension of the noted Lovett had become a matter of serious desire; the police was no longer to be bribed, nay, they were now eager to bribe. MacGrawler had watched his time, sold his chief, and was now on the road ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... ready and waiting for the departure of the youngest Schoenmaker. Would he disappoint us and remain at home that day? Had any suspicions been awakened in the stolid breasts of these men, that would serve to make them more watchful than usual against running unnecessary risks? No; at or near the time for the clock to strike two, their door opened and the tread of a lumbering foot ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green
... subtle suggestion has the villa to do, but with such stolid, intellectual fare as corresponds to its material wants. The villa has not time to think, the villa is the working bee. The tavern is the drone. It has no boys to put to school, no neighbours to study, and is therefore ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... "What a stolid old beggar you are. To you, she's just the same little girl that used to run about here in short frocks. If she were a horse you'd have a catalogue ...
— Viviette • William J. Locke
... enough to cause suspicion. One would not have imagined, on looking at Mr. O'Dwyer, that he was a very crafty person, or one of whose finesse in affairs of the world it would be necessary to stand much in awe. He seemed to be thick, and stolid, and incapable of deep inquiry; but, nevertheless, he was as fond of his neighbour's affairs as another, and knew as much about the affairs of his neighbours at Kanturk as any man ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... comforted, that a famous professor should take them so seriously; and they began to feel that after all to have only one leg, or one hand, or one eye, or to have three, might be in itself no less beauteous than to have just two, like the stolid majority. Thus William James became the friend and helper of those groping, nervous, half-educated, spiritually disinherited, passionately hungry individuals of which America is full. He became, at the same time, their spokesman and representative before the learned world; and he made it a chief ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... up his papers and whispering a few words to the stolid secretary he left the room and went clanking down the corridor. The officer who remained seemed principally concerned in driving the flies from his bald head and from the documents he compiled so laboriously. Stopping from time to time to shape a quill pen to his ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... Docteur," answered Jeanne-Marie with a sort of stolid defiance, "I called you in to tell me what to do for the child, not to put me through a catechism. She fainted away this morning, and when she came to herself again, she began to rave and talk nonsense, so I sent for you. Now tell me what is to ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... people no longer regarded her as an Indian, but referred to her now as "that Russian governess," nevertheless she could retreat behind a baffling air of stolidity—almost of sullenness—when she chose, and that was precisely the mask she wore for Bill. In reality she was far from stolid and ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... rose above his ears, and frowning forth immitigably at any Englishman who might happen to cross the threshold. I am afraid, however, that the truculence of the old General's expression was utterly thrown away on this stolid and obdurate race of men; for, when they occasionally inquired whom this work of art represented, I was mortified to find that the younger ones had never heard of the battle of New Orleans, and that their elders had either forgotten it altogether, ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in which they were, swept steadily and smoothly across the central sunlit plain of England, passing canals and brooks and cottages and churches—silent and stolid in that English stupidity that he was criticizing. And Hilda saw of George Cannon all that was French in him. She saw him quite anew, as something rather exotic and entirely marvellous. She thought: "When I first met him, I said to myself he was a most extraordinary ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... youngest hound. I remember seeing a similar case in Scotland, where a minister was preaching before "the Men" who were appointed to judge of his qualifications. Right in front of him, on a low bench, sat the awful Three, silent, stolid, and stern. His best rounded periods, his neatest imagery, his aptest quotations, brought no light into their vacant gray eyes: perhaps they were looking beyond all these, straight at the doctrine. The breeze blew freshly from the German Ocean, over the purple hills; but it brought ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... tickled Barty that he forgot his manners and went into peals of laughter. And from that moment I ceased to exist as the bright particular star in Mr. Gibson's firmament of eligible young men: for in spite of the kink in my nose, and my stolid gravity, which was really and merely the result of my shyness, he had always looked upon me as an exceptionally presentable, proper, and goodly youth, and a most exemplary—that is, if my sister was to be trusted in the matter; for ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... only thing about man that is really substantial. And now," she added, "for the faces of our spirits. What gives to our natural faces their form, beauty and expression? Is it not the soul-face within? Remove that by death, and all life, thought and feeling are gone from the stolid effigy. And so you see, Mr. Delancy, that our minds must be formed of spiritual substance, and that our bodies are but the outward material clothing which the soul puts on for action and use in this world ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... results of his wide experience, informs me that with idiots laughter is the most prevalent and frequent of all the emotional expressions. Many idiots are morose, passionate, restless, in a painful state of mind, or utterly stolid, and these never laugh. Others frequently laugh in a quite senseless manner. Thus an idiot boy, incapable of speech, complained to Dr. Browne, by the aid of signs, that another boy in the asylum had given him a black eye; and this was accompanied by "explosions of laughter and with ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... almost suspect so much." He said it so quaintly that a smile went round. Caw alone preserved a stolid expression. ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... were filled with tears; the sight of them put out the flame that had leapt for once from stolid Hugh, and he took her hand in his ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... a rather comical aspect. You will find them inquisitive, too. Put your finger in front of their tank, and they will all flock to see what it is. On the contrary, other fishes, such as the pike and carp, will remain stolid and indifferent to any movement you may make, and some, like the timorous trout—for which Isaak Walton loved to angle above any fish,—will be so dreadfully upset at the appearance of your digit that they will dart off in ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... civilized warfare, of the issue between smooth and twist. How the conoidal bullet and rifled barrel, opposed at Inkermann to the antiquated Russian musket, tore through the dense columns which had forced their way to the brow of the plateau, driving the stolid Muscovites, "incapable of panic," back into the ravine pell-mell—how, at many periods of the siege of Sebastopol, the rifle-pits did more to cripple the defence than did the mortars and battering-guns—we need not recount. These pits, and the rope mantlets wherewith ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... days he was in a state of the greatest excitement, and on Friday at twelve o'clock he drove down to the Buckingham to wait for news. All the afternoon the stolid hall-porter kept posting up telegrams from various parts of the country giving the results of horse-races, the verdicts in divorce suits, the state of the weather, and the like, while the tape ticked out wearisome details about an all-night sitting in the House of Commons, and a small panic on ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... eyes of Andreas would kindle into something like intelligence, and a flush would warm his stolid countenance. He was a fair-haired young giant, white-skinned and well-featured, but dull, looking, with cold, hard eyes suggesting the barbarian that he was considered by the cultured Neapolitans, and that he certainly looked by contrast with them. Friar Robert supporting the Duke ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... to her, with a shriek of delight; and immediately she was hugged rapturously and kissed all over by little Jeannie, whose movements, as they ever were—so agile, so quick, so Protean—appeared to her, now that she was stolid with despair, as the postures and gestures of a creature ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... that was not in his mother, to reinforce his own. Mr. Copperhead stared at his son with that look of authority, half-imperious, half-brutal, with which he was in the habit of crushing all who resisted him; but Clarence did not quail. He stood dull and immovable, his eyes contracted, his face stolid, and void of all expression but that of resistance. He was not much more than a fool, but just by so much as his father was more reasonable, more clear-sighted than himself, was Clarence stronger than his father. He held Phoebe by the sleeve, ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... only amusing herself. See how stolid that creature looks that she is wasting all her ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... stood my boy, a stout, square-shouldered lad, with heavy cowhide boots and dull, honest eyes—eyes that looked into mine as if with a question they were about to put, and then gave it up, gazing straight ahead, stolid, impassive. It struck me that I had seen that face before, and I found out immediately where. The officer of the Children's Aid Society who had brought him explained that Frands—that was his name—had been in the society's care five months ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... strength, and too much meat and drink and too little both alike destroy the health, but the fitting amount produces and preserves them.... So, too, the man who takes his fill of every pleasure and abstains from none becomes a profligate; while he who shuns all becomes stolid ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... their shoulders, they saw that the heavy, stolid Cossacks were losing ground. And ahead, tauntingly near now, loomed a thickly-wooded slope that meant the beginning of big ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... rig, or of almost anything else connected with the affairs of the sea. It happened that I used to know this fellow. I had even been quite chummy with him in the old days—that is, to the extent of drinking too many beers with him in certain hot-country ports. I remembered him as a stolid and deliberate sort of a person, with an amazing hodge-podge of learning, a stamp collection, and a theory about the effects of tropical sunshine on the Caucasian race, to which I have listened half of more than one night, stretched out naked on a ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... as usual, but her face was flushed, and she looked at me uneasily, as though she feared that I had overheard Leah's speech. I thought Leah looked sullen and stolid as she waited upon me. It was a most forbidding face. I was glad when Miss Darrell dismissed her on some ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... feeling with a sense of self-satisfaction, which he is at no pains to hide, that he aimed at winning honour for his country as well as for himself. In a letter which he wrote to his guardian, Chevalier Gherardo Compagni, he alludes to the stolid indifference of the English people and philosophers to the brilliant achievements in aeronautics which had been made and so much belauded on the Continent. He proclaims the rivalry as regards science ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... thousand-tongued fear that would babble at his back and cause him to flee, while others were going coolly about their country's business. He admitted that he would not be able to cope with this monster. He felt that every nerve in his body would be an ear to hear the voices, while other men would remain stolid and deaf. ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... gray tents, ranged behind a flight of wooden steps leading up to an open gallery hung with advertisements of the many attractions within—came the hideous laughter of a hyena, and the sullen roar of a lion weary of the rows of stolid English faces staring daily, hourly, between the bars of his foul and narrow cage, heart-sick with longing for sight of the open, starlit heaven and the white-domed, Moslem tombs amid the prickly, desert thickets and plains of clean, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... soldierly figure standing in the sunlit field watching us with a curiously intent look on his face. There was something to me incongruous, yet distinctly pathetic, in the man's efforts to meet all far-fetched explanations of the mystery with contempt, and at the same time in his stolid, unswerving investigation of it all. He nodded at me and made a gesture of farewell with his hand. That picture of him, standing in the sunshine with his big dogs, steadily watching us, remains ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... shells there is imagination that has been nurtured in long, long thoughts. In the calms under starlit skies, in the black darkness when tossing surges swing beneath the keel, in the glimmering vistas of sun-lighted seas, sailors ponder while their more stolid brothers on land ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... depart. The stolid Minky, too, followed them with his eyes. But as they disappeared through the doorway he turned to the gambler, and, in surprise, discovered that he was reclining in a chair, stretched out in an attitude of repose, with his shrewd eyes tightly closed. He was about to speak ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... gratefully, and sat in silence while he served the meat, wondering at the odd character of the man, and striving to determine how best to win his confidence. I was hungry, and, not knowing what to say, fell to work with some zest, insisting on his doing likewise. Yet even as I disposed of the food that stolid face opposite fascinated me, and held my gaze. The fellow was not so big a fool as he looked, for while the features remained expressionless and vacant, there was a sly glimmer to the eye, betraying an active, observant mind behind ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... simply grew in her place, concerning herself no more about her own mind, body or future than the larch yonder did about its roots or leaves, and who took praise and blame as indifferently as the tree, the sun or rain, roused in her a feeling of active dislike. She called Jane stolid to other people, but she was by no means satisfied that she was stolid. She was often sorry that she had brought herself measurably under the protection of Captain Swendon and his daughter by renting two of the rooms in their house, though she had ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... denied to him. He was told that Mrs. Ayrton had lived there, but had left, and her present address was unknown. He asked to be allowed to speak a word to the man who had just entered the house. No one had entered for the last two hours, was the reply. Robert had an impulse to rush by the stolid little female liar, but Percy's recent lesson to him acted as a restraint; though, had it been a brawny woman or a lacquey in his path, he would certainly have followed his natural counsel. He turned away, lingering outside till it was dusk and the bruise ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... into the bar could see old Simon—a stolid, fat man, with a sleepy-looking face, always in his shirt sleeves, and wearing a white apron, sitting in a chair at the end, while his daughter, a sharp, red-nosed damsel, who was thirty-five years of age, and confessed to twenty-two, ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... yield to no man in solemn fidelity to truth, I want to be sure that what I accept as such, is not merely old error under new garbs, only a change of disguising terms. Science has its fetich, as well has superstition, and abstruse terminology does not always conceal its stolid gross proportions. The complete overthrow and annihilation of the belief in a personal, governing, prayer-answering God, is the end and aim of the gathering cohorts of science, and the sooner masking technicalities are ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... "what is really wanted, is to light up the spirit that is within a boy." In some sense, and in some degree, there is in every boy the material for doing good work in the world; not only in those who are brilliant and quick, but even in those who are stolid ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... Apart, stolid and silent, but interested spectators, lounged the dusky redmen, forever sucking at their pwoighun-ahsin (stone pipes) and making tobacco from the inner bark of red-willow wands, watching and wondering. The foot soldiers carried fire-locks, flints ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... I exchanged a long stare, I choking down my temper, he smooth and placid, to outward seeming, as the idol he resembled. The resolution with which he stuck to his silly pose was, in its way, a rogue's masterpiece; nothing more exasperating than this stolid effrontery was ever devised. The scoundrel feared, and yet knew he had, in a sense, the better of me; the helpless old man between us ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... is appalling in its concentrated stolidity. They do not intend wrong—they intend rightly: in truth, they work against the entire human race. So wedded and so confirmed is the world in its narrow groove of self, so stolid and so complacent under the immense weight of misery, so callous to its own possibilities, and so grown to its chains, that I almost despair to see it awakened. Cemeteries are often placed on hillsides, and the white stones are visible far off. If the whole of the dead in a hillside ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... benches were filled with the congregation, young and old, wearing their hats, and with a stolid, drowsy look upon their faces. Over a high wooden partition the old women in the gallery, but not the young women on the floor of the house, could be seen. Two stoves, with interminable lengths ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... seemed far off, than many who lived in its full blaze and never cared for it? Will it be only Christ's contemporaries who will be condemned by heathen seekers after God, or will there be many of ourselves, convicted of stolid indifference to the Christ who has been beside us all our lives, and has prayed us 'with much entreaty' and in vain, to ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... might have touched either of its occupants with his rawhide quirt, rode the Mexican. When they discovered him he was leaning forward, his half-closed eyes mere slits with pin-points of black fire to mark them, and his repulsive face a stolid mask. Ford's hand went instinctively to the whip: it was the only available weapon. But the Mexican merely touched his flapping sombrero and rode on at ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... the surgeon's fingers first touched him, then relapsed into the spluttering, labored respiration of a man in liquor or in heavy pain. A stolid young man who carried the case of instruments freshly steaming from their antiseptic bath made an observation which the surgeon apparently did not hear. He was thinking, now, his thin face set in a frown, the upper teeth biting hard over the under lip and drawing up the pointed beard. While ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... Taylor in white with a pistol, and Miss Peck in white, staring and stolid. But no Tommy. Noise prevailed without, shots by the stable and shots by the creek. The two cow-punchers dismounted and joined Taylor. Maniac delight seized me, and I, too, rushed about with them, helping ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... savage can drink and dance through the night with as lusty a zeal as his white neighbour; the song, the jest, the merry tale, are as dear to his imagination; and in the retirement of his own village, feeling no longer the restraint of stolid gravity,—assumed in the haunts of the white man, less to play the part of a hero than to cover the nakedness of his own inferiority,—he can give himself up to wild indulgence, the sport of whim and frolic; and, when the ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... the sofa, breathing hard, and moaning just a little. The shock had been almost too much even for her stolid nerves. Presently she turned ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... begged her mother's help. Together they fitted them to the five smallest Indian children. Trading ceased for a moment, while all eyes turned to the funny sight of these wild little creatures in English clothing. The settlers and seamen laughed aloud, while even the stolid faces of the old warriors ...
— Some Three Hundred Years Ago • Edith Gilman Brewster
... after some fifteen minutes of exhausting labour on the one hand, opposed to stolid dogged resistance on the other, the monster reptile was dragged so close to the surface that the point of its snout was actually raised above the level or the water, and the whole of the gigantic body, ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... to see a Hercules, a fiery-faced, fierce-eyed man. This was merely a broad-shouldered, well-built, well-groomed youth, about twenty-three years of age; his face was square and rather stolid, clean-shaven, brown-complexioned, with honest eyes and a firm-set mouth. As he stood at the door he adopted the wooden expression that a University man always wears in the presence of strangers. He said nothing on being introduced to Pinnock; and when ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... himself at the outer window, and in a space of time so short that the excellence of the gray car's accelerator was amply demonstrated, the pursuer swung into sight. A stolid-faced chauffeur at the wheel did not appear discomfited at coming on his quarry thus unexpectedly. He whirled past, seemingly quite oblivious of Theydon's fixed stare. Though the weather was mild he ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... off the end of a fresh cigar and smoked it in stolid silence. He was a person of one idea. If he couldn't talk about the play, he couldn't talk at all. He meditated, considering his characters, his situations, his partner's and his own position, in a mental jumble that had lately become habitual ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... presence they soon forgot entirely. Kirby drew out a newspaper from his pocket and read aloud some article, which they discussed eagerly. At every sentence, Wolfe listened more and more like a dumb, hopeless animal, with a duller, more stolid look creeping over his face, glancing now and then at Mitchell, marking acutely every smallest sign of refinement, then back to himself, seeing as in a mirror his filthy body, his more ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... apprehensively at Great-aunt Eliza; but she was gazing intently at a picture of Aunt Janet's sister's twins, a most stolid, uninteresting pair; but evidently Great-aunt Eliza found them amusing for she was smiling ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... a moment, disdaining formality, and to the, accompaniment of the polite jeers of two long-suffering friends, I proclaimed "Here shall I live! On this spot shall stand the probationary palace!" and so saying fired my rifle at a tree a few yard's off. But the stolid tree—a bloodwood, all bone, toughened by death, a few ruby crystals in sparse antra all that remained significant of past life—afforded but meagre ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... little woman. What do you think of such a marriage as that? To those who know society such things are common enough; a well-assorted marriage is the exception. Nevertheless, I have come to see how it is that this slender little creature handles her bobbins in a way to lead this heavy, solid, stolid general precisely as he himself used ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... with blunt, wistful ruminations upon her indistinct image. Jacob Sowerby's accusation, and several kindred innuendoes let fall by his mother, left him coolly incredulous; the girl still seemed to him altogether distant; but from the first sight of her face he had evolved a stolid, unfaltering conception of her difference from the ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... boat the settler would fill with household goods and farm stock, and commit himself to the current at Pittsburg. From the roof of the cabin that housed his family, cocks crew and hens cackled, while the stolid eyes of cattle peered over the high parapet of logs built about the edge for protection against the arrow or bullet of the wandering redskin. Sometimes several families would combine to build one ark. ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... no very favourable impression by his actions. There seemed to be much that was forced about them, that was more incriminating than a stolid silence ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... dating from the first visit to Augsburg, is the half-length of the Elector John Frederick of Saxony, now in the Imperial Gallery at Vienna. He sits obese and stolid, yet not without the dignity that belongs to absolute simplicity, showing on his left cheek the wound received at the battle of Muehlberg. The picture has, as a portrait by Titian, no very commanding merit, ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... marked the capture of a paleface. Some of the old squaws looked up from their work round the campfires and steaming kettles and grinned as the prisoner passed. The braves who were sitting upon their blankets and smoking their long pipes, or lounging before the warm blazes maintained a stolid indifference; the dusky maidens smiled shyly, and the little Indian boys, with whom Isaac had always been a great favorite, manifested their joy by yelling and running after him. One youngster grasped Isaac round the leg and held on ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... "You see that veteran In the straw hat, and the young man beside him: Father and son are they. Old Lothian, Five months ago, was high among the trusted Of our chief bankers; Charles, his only son, By a maternal uncle's death enriched, Kept out of Wall Street; turned a stolid ear To all high-mounting schemes for doubling wealth, His taste inclining him to art and letters. But Lothian had a partner, Judd,—a scamp, As the result made evident; and Judd One day was missing; bonds, securities, And bills, ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... right," was the stolid asseveration of the German. "The home is sacred." The speaker's tone was so malevolent that Hamilton was impressed, in spite of himself. And then, suddenly, a suspicion upreared itself in his brain—a suspicion ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... minutes, a stolid, stocky figure in the midst of a storm of congratulatory comment. They forgot all about Happy Jack, asleep inside the house, and so their voices were not hushed. Indeed, Big Medicine's bull-like remarks boomed full-throated across the coulee and were flung back mockingly by the ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... won. At the left hand of our hostess stood a stolid man holding a small shovel with which he gathered in the winnings. All around were faces as of souls in torture; even the features of the winners (and these were few enough) scarcely expressed a trace of satisfaction, but seemed rather cast ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... little breathless. "It is yes! young Luigi!" The prisoner, silent till then, stirred and made some little noise of acquiescence. Behind him, still holding to the cord that bound his wrists, his two stolid guards stared uncomprehendingly; the old sergeant, his face one wrinkled mass of bland knowingness, stood with his thumbs in his belt and his short, fat legs astraddle. She leaned forward she seemed to sway like a wind-blown stalk and stared at the prisoner's quiet face. Jovannic saw her lips ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... the poet, who was not only placed under the surveillance of the police, but expelled from the Foreign Office by express order of the Tsar "for bad conduct." A letter on this subject, addressed by Count Vorontsoff to Count Nesselrode, is an amusing instance of the arrogance with which stolid mediocrity frequently passes judgment on rising genius. I ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... the quaint beliefs of savage tribes make no particular impression upon him, except a passing spasm of disgust at anybody having different superstitions from his own; and, being in the main a good-natured animal in a stolid way of his own, he is able to make use even of popish priests if they will help to found a new market for his commerce. The portrait is not the less effective because the artist was so far from intending it that he could not even conceive of ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... exploit, feeling with a sense of self-satisfaction, which he is at no pains to hide, that he aimed at winning honour for his country as well as for himself. In a letter which he wrote to his guardian, Chevalier Gherardo Compagni, he alludes to the stolid indifference of the English people and philosophers to the brilliant achievements in aeronautics which had been made and so much belauded on the Continent. He proclaims the rivalry as regards science and ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... pointed out a massive stone archway where she must enter, and passing here, beside a stolid soldier in his sentry box, she came presently to a black iron door in front of which were waiting two yellow-and-black prison vans, windowless. In this prison door were four glass-covered observation holes, and through these Alice saw a guard ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... quietly followed him down the lane. The sight of the millionaire climbing the railings had put him on his mettle, and the result was the ignominious capture of Racksole. In vain Theodore expostulated, explained, anathematized. Only one thing would satisfy the stolid policeman—namely, that Racksole should return with him to the hotel and there establish his identity. If Racksole then proved to be Racksole, owner of the Grand Babylon, well and good—the policeman promised to ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... the effect that, 'the last campaign, when they had a fort, how had the enemy fired then?—stabbed them, speared them, &c. &c.; and without a fort, assaulting!—how could it be expected they should succeed? how unreasonable they should go at all!' But even his stolid head seemed to comprehend the sarcasm when I asked him how many men had been killed during all this severe fighting. However, it was clear that it was no battle. We were all very savage, and I intimated how useless my being with them was, if they intended to ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... Stolid and unshaven fishermen, in drab scows, along the canoe's route, looked up from their lines, in bovine wonder at the vision of loveliness which swept resonantly past them. For the quartet were warbling. They were also doing ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... and saw hidden within its stolid heart lessons which have not yet ceased to move men's lives. Beecher stood for hours before the window of a jewelry store thinking out analogies between jewels and the souls of men. Gough saw in a single drop of water enough truth wherewith to quench the thirst of five thousand souls. ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... enemy swept forward toward the canal, with companies of British sappers bearing scaling ladders and fascines of sugar cane. They moved with stolid unconcern, but the American cannon burst forth and slew them until the ditch ran red with blood. With cheers the invincible British infantry tossed aside its heavy knapsacks, scrambled over the ditch, and broke into a run to reach the earthworks along which flamed the sparse line of American ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... manners in your bill. But to ignore the point of view of those whose country you govern may let loose a red torrent of tragedy. Such a temper of mind may, at the first touch of resistance, transform your stolid, laudable, laughable Englishman into the beastliest of tyrants. It may drive him into a delirium of cruelty and injustice. It may sweep away, in one ruin of war, wealth, culture, and the whole fabric of civilisation. It may darken ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... disquieted, Let stolid people think who do not see What the point is beyond which I ...
— Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell • Dante Alighieri
... are of varying degrees of intelligence; but most of them belong to the peasant class of Germany, and were originally farmers, weavers, or mechanics. They are quiet, a little stolid, and very well satisfied with their life. Here, as in other communistic societies, the brains seem to come easily to the top. The leading men with whom I conversed appeared to me to be thoroughly trained business men in the German fashion; men ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... a sudden return to a theory of her which he had already entertained, that she had not done so. But she went lightly by him, where he stood stolid, and picked it up; and now he suspected that she had dropped ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... strides! In astronomy, what perturbations and changes! In history, what do we not owe to the amiable authors who, dipping their pens in whitewash, have reversed the judgments of ages on Nero and Henry VIII.! In genealogy, what thanks must we pay to Darwin! Geographical Science alone, stolid in its insolent fixity, has not moved: the location of Thebes and Memphis is what it was in the days of Cheops and Rameses. And so poor in intellect are our professors of geodesic lore that London continues to be, just as it ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... We noticed more than one stolid face darkling as they glanced aside. Schenke had the name of a "hard case." "Schweinehunden," he said again. "Dey dond't like de hard vork, Cabtin. . . . Dey dond't like it—but ve takes der Coop, all de same! Dey pulls goot und strong, oder"—he rasped a short sentence in rapid ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... conspicuous) before finding one who knew its whereabouts; in another city I inquired in vain of a conductor who passed the building every few hours in his car. In the latter case the library was a beautiful structure calculated to move the curiosity of a less stolid citizen. In New York inquiry would probably cause you to reach the nearest branch library, anything more remote than that being beyond the local intelligence. Sometimes I think we had better drop all our far-reaching plans for ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... in a speech whose vigor, logic and eloquence were accentuated in the minds of the hearers by the thought that for more than thirty years she had made these pleas before congressional committees, only to be received with stolid indifference or open hostility. She began by saying: "In closing I would like to give a little object lesson of the two methods of gaining the suffrage. By one it is insisted that we shall carry our question to what is termed a popular vote ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... which Fitzjames most cordially despised. The morality was that of Dickens's 'Christmas Carol,' and the political aim that of sentimental socialism. Thus, though all three candidates promised to support Mr. Gladstone's Government, one of Fitzjames's rivals represented the stolid middle-class prejudices, and a second the unctuous philanthropic enthusiasm, which he had denounced with his whole force in 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.' No combination could have been contrived which would have set before him more clearly the characteristics ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... account of how it had been at first intended that Oberon should be represented by little Sir Adrian, with his Bexley cousin, Pearl Underwood, for his Titania; but though she was fairy enough for anything, he turned out so stolid, and uttered 'Well met by moonlight, proud Titania,' the only lines he ever learnt, exactly like a lesson, besides crying whenever asked to study his part, that the attempt had to be given up, and the fairy sovereigns had to be of large size, Mr. Grinstead pronouncing ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... concerning herself no more about her own mind, body or future than the larch yonder did about its roots or leaves, and who took praise and blame as indifferently as the tree, the sun or rain, roused in her a feeling of active dislike. She called Jane stolid to other people, but she was by no means satisfied that she was stolid. She was often sorry that she had brought herself measurably under the protection of Captain Swendon and his daughter by renting two of the rooms in their house, though she had planned and manoeuvred ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... surgeon's fingers first touched him, then relapsed into the spluttering, labored respiration of a man in liquor or in heavy pain. A stolid young man who carried the case of instruments freshly steaming from their antiseptic bath made an observation which the surgeon apparently did not hear. He was thinking, now, his thin face set in a frown, the upper ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... with the ordinary teacher (in an extraordinary state of coma) behind it; and rather rude desks and seats for the children, but not a single ornament, picture, map, or case of objects and specimens around the room. The children were nice, clean, pleasant, stolid little things with braided hair and pinafores. The sole decoration of the apartment was a highly-coloured chart that we had noticed on the walls of all the other schoolrooms. Feeling that this must be a sacred relic, and that it probably illustrated some of the Pestalozzian foundation ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... should like thy opinion upon her, and—she hath a secret, as the Duke there can testify." Buckingham started, but met the King's glance with a stolid countenance. ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... tremendous exceptions. In the first place, Lycaste Skinneri alba, the pure white variety, beggars all description. Its great flower seems to be sculptured in the snowiest of transparent marble. That stolid pretentious air which offends one—offends me, at least—in the coloured examples, becomes virginal dignity in this case. Then, of the normal type there are more than a hundred variations recognized, some with lips as deep in tone, and as smooth in texture, as velvet, of all shades from maroon ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... search before we found him. Then it was nearly noon, and we lunched in his hut, a square building of split logs, with bare earth floor, and roof of clap-boards and bark. Our lunch consisted of goat's meat and pan de mais. The Mexican, a broad-chested man with a stolid Indian face, was evidently quite a sportsman, and had two or three half-starved hounds, besides the funny, hairless little house dogs, of which Mexicans seem ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... smattering of several Indian dialects, which he turned upon Long-Hair to the best of his ability, but apparently without effect. Nevertheless he babbled at intervals, always upon the same subject and always endeavoring to influence that huge, stolid, heartless savage in the direction of letting him see again the child face ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... spiritual and physical well-being, but in spite of her best endeavors there were times when she despaired of the tremendous task she had undertaken. Phoebe's spirit tingled with the divine, poetic appreciation of all things beautiful. A vivid imagination carried the child into realms where the stolid aunt could not follow, realms of whose existence the ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... proffered assistance of myself and three other gentlemen, mounted the ladder with charming hesitation. Some delay in getting off was caused by our low comedian, who twice, making believe to miss his footing, slid down again into the arms of the stolid door-keeper. The crowd, composed for the most part of small boys approving the endeavour to amuse them, laughed and applauded. Our low comedian thus encouraged, made a third attempt upon his hands and knees, and, gaining the roof, sat down upon the ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... President." It was the Blunderbuss, and her stolid face grew hot and red in the darkness, as she wondered if any one who knew that she didn't belong to 19— now would question her right to take part in the meeting. "But I was bound to do it," she ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... boy magnifies his office, swaggering with legs wide apart. Even the feather in his cap bristles with importance. This bit of comedy contrasts with the almost tragic expression of the wounded man. The stolid fellow who lifts him seems to hurt him very much, and he clasps his hands in an agony of pain. He seems to be telling the gentleman at the window ...
— Rembrandt - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... saw a thin flying shadow coming up to her, with a shriek of delight; and immediately she was hugged rapturously and kissed all over by little Jeannie, whose movements, as they ever were—so agile, so quick, so Protean—appeared to her, now that she was stolid with despair, as the postures and gestures of a ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... surprised look at the Yorkshireman's stolid face, elevated his well-marked eyebrows and shook his head. Then he edged his chair nearer to the table ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... kind of a man I like? Really like? I like a man that a woman can't bend in a thousand different ways in five minutes. He must have some steel in him. He obliges me to admire him the most when he remains stolid; stolid to me lures. Ah, that is the only kind of a man who cap ever break a heart among us women of the world. His stolidity is not real; no; it is mere art, but it is a highly finished art and often ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... lapel of his coat, nonchalantly twirled his mustache, his shoulders straining in tension. A Parisienne, with bleached hair and penciled eyebrows, leaned over her companion's arm. There was also a flashily dressed negro, evidently a Haytian, who sat motionless at the far end, as stolid as a boiler, only the steam-gauge of his ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... underbred-looking pony, was to convey them over the first stages of their journey. Then came more adieus, some hand-clasping, old Jimmy Robinson looking very serious just at the last, Mrs. Jimmy, stout, stolid, betraying nothing of visible emotion, and then the pony, rough-shod and shaggy, trudged on, while mutual hand-waves were kept up until the old Hudson Bay Post dropped out of sight, and the buckboard with its lightsome load of hearts deliriously happy, ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... in the interior of the limousine, with the arc light playing through the thousand raindrops on the window pane spotting a face lined with the strength of a stolid old maid, had finished her narrative, there was no sound but that of the storm mourning down the avenue. Estabrook sat with his forehead in his hands. I had had enough experience in my practice with those who are struggling to overcome a great shock, not to speak until ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... Gimpke, standing in the shadows of the darkened dining room, was not too stupid to understand what was said about her. And into her stolid brain came dreams that night of a fair face with soft golden brown hair and kindly eyes of deep, tender blue. Stupid as she was, the woman's instinct in her told her in her dreams that the handsome young son of her employer might not always look his thoughts nor dance earliest ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... street—as the greeting of acquaintances, or the exchange of civilities. The good sense of this view is apparent. A hat held in the hand in a crowded elevator is sure to be in the way, and liable to be crushed. A gentleman who wishes to compromise between stolid ignoring of the ladies who are strangers, and superfluous recognition of their presence, may lift his hat and replace it immediately, when a lady enters the elevator, or when he enters an elevator where ladies already are. ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... a stolid-seeming nod. "He give it up clean. Why, now I come to think on it, I don't believe he iver touched the music—" She paused in some confusion, and to cover this feigned to consider. "Let me see. He give up the music just about the time ...
— Aunt Rachel • David Christie Murray
... her alarm, Lady Louisa implored him to sell the property and buy one in Ireland, which was Lady Craikshaw's native country; and the list she contrived to run up of the drawbacks to the Ammaby estate would have driven a temper less stolid than her husband's ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... that he forgot his manners and went into peals of laughter. And from that moment I ceased to exist as the bright particular star in Mr. Gibson's firmament of eligible young men: for in spite of the kink in my nose, and my stolid gravity, which was really and merely the result of my shyness, he had always looked upon me as an exceptionally presentable, proper, and goodly youth, and a most exemplary—that is, if my sister was to be trusted in the matter; for ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... bouleversement of the veracious sense—similar to certain perversions of the insane mind, and then other faculties of his nature are liable to share in the alteration. If the man was previously to the highest degree merciful and sympathizing, he may become stolid to human suffering as any infant who laughs at its mother's funeral, not from wickedness of disposition but absence of the faculty which appreciates woe, and I doubt not that this change goes far to explain the ghastly unfeelingness of many a Turkish and Chinese despot whose ingeniously ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... his daughter, as if deprecating that stolid expression of hers, which would have been eminently appropriate to the funeral of an indifferent acquaintance,—a total absence of all feeling, ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... is all very well for a wedding or a funeral or a great public festivity of any sort," said the baroness, with a harmless, light manner of talking of grave subjects which is a closed book to the ordinary stolid British mind; "but when one has a prayer, there is nowhere like St. Germain en Pre, which is old and simple and dirty, so that one feels like a poor woman. I shall put on ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... about the wedding! An Ardayre married to an Ardayre! Good blood on both sides and everything suitable and rich and prosperous, and just as it should be! And there stood her handsome, stolid bridegroom, serenely calm—and the white flowers, and the Bishop—and her silver brocade train—and the pages, and the bridesmaids. Oh! yes, a wedding ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... secret-service men were down on their knees before piles of clothes, going over the seams, emptying the pockets, unfolding handkerchiefs, tapping the heels of shoes; every scrap of paper was passed over to the chief, who tucked it into his portfolio. I watched him, hating his square, stolid body that filled out his uniform smoothly. His eyes were long and watchful like a cat's, and his fair mustache was turned up at the ends, German fashion; in fact, there was something very German about his thick thighs and shaved head ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... had hoped so long, and on the night that faithful spies had brought her thirtieth wreath, Andelsprutz went suddenly mad. All the bells clanged hideously in the belfries, horses bolted in the streets, the dogs all howled, the stolid conquerors awoke and turned in their beds and slept again; and I saw the grey shadowy form of Andelsprutz rise up, decking her hair with the phantasms of cathedrals, and stride away from her city. And the great shadowy form that was the soul of Andelsprutz went away ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... Herrschaften!" roused them from their lethargy. Ices and beer and cherries and peaches successively filled up the weary hours until "the tocsin of the soul, the dinner bell," carried joy to their hearts. I can never forget the rapturous look of anticipation and satisfaction which those stolid middle-class Teutonic countenances wore when "Mittagsessen" was announced. They shook off their normal and habitual torpidity, and cheerfully elbowed their neighbours, nearly tumbling down the companion-ladder in their eagerness to be first in the field. ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... replied the sergeant. "I'm only acting upon orders"; and he spoke humbly, apologetically. Even at that moment a passing stranger could not have helped noticing the difference between the men. The policemen were stolid, commonplace, the mere creatures of formula; the young man whom they had come to apprehend was, to the most casual observer, a man of mark. Neither of them could help feeling it. Pale of face, clear-cut ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... there, with something of an expectant air in their stolid faces. All these were in uniform of some description; one stood a little in advance of the rest and held a paper in ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... sight to see that gentle child, with eyes blue as the heavens, whose pure and lovely spirit they seemed to mirror, gazing up at the dark boy as though she hoped to catch some ray of the awakening spirit flitting over the handsome but stolid features. Sometimes she would sit beside him, take his hand in hers, or stroke gently the dark locks that began again to hang in neglected curls around his face, and speak to him in the tenderest accents, saying, "I love you very much, pretty boy, and my father loves you too, and we ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... his own. Mr. Copperhead stared at his son with that look of authority, half-imperious, half-brutal, with which he was in the habit of crushing all who resisted him; but Clarence did not quail. He stood dull and immovable, his eyes contracted, his face stolid, and void of all expression but that of resistance. He was not much more than a fool, but just by so much as his father was more reasonable, more clear-sighted than himself, was Clarence stronger than ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... at the table, rang for the stolid maid. Her voice was carefully calm as she gave orders for the evening meal. If she was thinking of Giovanni Celleni, his brute face filled with semi-madness; if she was thinking of a burned baby, sobbing alone in a darkened ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... matter, our eyes are gladdened with that of the converse operation, of the transmutation of matter into mind. And on no account is this metamorphosis to be mistaken for annihilation of matter, whose stolid grossness has vanished, not in order to give place to empty nominalism or to a thin mist of mere mental perceptions existing only in virtue of being perceived, but in order to reappear gloriously etherealised into living energy. By the change that has taken place, ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... an expression of stolid stupidity on his countenance, which was powerfully suggestive of a ship's figurehead— Tommy with an air of meekness that was almost ...
— The Garret and the Garden • R.M. Ballantyne
... task to be performed, that the men got perfectly discouraged, and had to bespoken to sharply before they set to work. By the time I reached Msuwa there was nobody with me and the ten donkeys I drove but Mabruk the Little, who, though generally stolid, stood to his work like a man. Bombay and Uledi were far behind, with the most jaded donkeys. Shaw was in charge of the cart, and his experiences were most bitter, as he informed me he had expended a whole vocabulary of stormy abuse known to sailors, and a new one which he had invented ex tempore. ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... was for the open air, sky, continent; Philip was for the cloister, and spent his life immured as if he had been a monk. In Charles was bravado, impudence, intolerable egotism, atrocious lack of honor, but there was a dash about him as about Marshal Ney or Prince Joachin Murat; Philip was stolid, vindictive, incapable of enthusiasm or friendship. Charles ruled Spain as a principality; Philip held the world as a principality of Spain. As has been indicated, Charles was Spanish in relationship and not in disposition; Philip ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... gathered at Hendricks' store. Ramos and Tiflin, two wild characters with seldom-cut hair and pipe stem pants, who didn't look as if they could be trusted with a delicate unpacking operation, broke the Archer out with a care born of love, there in Paul Hendricks' big backroom shop, while the more stolid members—and old Paul, silent in his swivel chair—watched ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... sympathy; and if they were not healed, at least they were comforted, that a famous professor should take them so seriously; and they began to feel that after all to have only one leg, or one hand, or one eye, or to have three, might be in itself no less beauteous than to have just two, like the stolid majority. Thus William James became the friend and helper of those groping, nervous, half-educated, spiritually disinherited, passionately hungry individuals of which America is full. He became, at the same time, their spokesman and representative before the learned world; and he made it ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... middle-class seem able to wallow without suffering asphyxia; but I am only mournful because I have seen the plight of so many and many after their dip in the sinister depths of the pool. I envy those stolid people who can talk so contemptuously of frailty—I mean I envy them their self-mastery; I quite understand the temperament of those who can be content with a slight exhilaration, and who fiercely contemn the crackbrain who does not know when to stop. No doubt it ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... slowly and thoughtfully returned to his quarters after witnessing the departure of his son, he found sitting on the doorstep, and patiently awaiting his coming, a Canadian woman. Beside her stood her stolid-looking husband, whom the major recognized as a well-to-do farmer of the settlement, to whom he had granted some trifling favors while in ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... not intense in other situations was strong here. It tugged at his coat and lifted it. We are mostly accustomed to look upon all opposition which is not animate, as that of the stolid, inexorable hand of indifference, which wears out the patience more than the strength. Here, at any rate, hostility did not assume that slow and sickening form. It was a cosmic agency, active, lashing, eager for ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... he was whipping the pool with long, graceful drops of the fly. He proved to be adept. Thorpe and Injin Charley stopped work to watch him. At first the Indian's stolid countenance seemed a trifle doubtful. After a time ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... him directly from both, and he plunged into his business at once; but as he went on, the smiles died out, and all he said was received in a dull, stolid way. Neither Jack nor his wife would understand what he meant—their denseness ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... their self-willed offspring to a more retired position than he chose to occupy. With genuine "Young America" spirit he scorned the conservatism of his elders. Though both parents hovered about him, coaxing, warning, perhaps threatening, not a feather stirred; stolid and wide-eyed he stood, while the father flitted about the bush in great excitement, jerking his body this way and that, flirting his wings, now perking his tail up like that of a wren, again opening and closing it like a fan in the hands of an embarrassed girl, and the mother added her entreaties ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... sun will come out strong by and by, and the longer we tarry here, the heavier the snow will be for our stretch to the Citadel. Up, there! leve-toi, cochon!" shouted I, in the elegant terms of address which experience had taught me were the only ones that had any effect upon the stolid sensibilities of the half-breed,—at the same time administering to him a kick that produced a thud and a grunt, as if actually bestowed on the unclean quadruped to which I had just likened him. The ragamuffin was very slow this time in getting the traps together ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... were tanned by the sun to the same brown hue as his face and bare throat; his feet were sandalled, and just above one of his ankles, a soiled bandage, apparently concealing a wound, was wrapped. A broad-brimmed felt hat shaded his half-closed eyes and dull stolid countenance, and the only thing that in any way distinguished him from the generality of peasants was his hair, which was cut short behind, instead of hanging, according to the usual custom of the province, in long ragged locks ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... men of high attainments, unless their coffers brim with lucre, affect him no more than the company of the most unlettered oaf. He becomes, in other words, the typical Wall Street man, and he becomes this with a stolid indifference to all ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... is Washington! And here at dinner are the diplomatic representatives of all the nations. That is the British ambassador, that stolid-faced, distinguished-looking, elderly man; and this is the French ambassador, dapper, volatile, plus-correct; here Russia's highest representative wags a huge, blond beard; and yonder is the phlegmatic ...
— Elusive Isabel • Jacques Futrelle
... unsteadily over the rough stones. Now and then a mild-looking string of Chinamen stole along, clad in their dull-hued blue blouses, either chattering shrilly, like a lot of parrots, or moving silently down the alley with a stolid Oriental apathy on their yellow faces. Here and there came a stream of warm light through an open door, and within, the Mongolians were gathered round the gambling-tables, playing fan-tan, or leaving the seductions of their favourite pastime, to glide soft-footed to the many cook-shops, ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... blue-jackets had evidently been piped up, for they lay there in a sort of serried disorder, to the number of two hundred and seventy-five. Nothing could be of suggestion more tragic than the wasted and helpless power of this poor wandering vessel, around whose stolid mass myriads of wavelets, busy as aspen-leaves, bickered with a continual weltering splash that was quite loud to hear. I sat a good time that afternoon in one of her steely port main-deck casemates on a gun-carriage, my head sunken on my breast, furtively ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... has brought forth this most perfect embodiment of purity among the nations. This is of itself one of those miracles which captivate the mind and charm the imagination, the living paradox in which the soul delights. How did she come out of that stolid peasant race, out of that distracted and ignoble age, out of riot and license and the fierce thirst for gain, and failure of every noble faculty? Who can tell? By the grace of God, by the inspiration of heaven, the only origins in which the student of nature, which is over nature, can put ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... speech with her, and especially at such an untimely hour, was sufficient to re-awaken all her unformed fears into full activity. Her lips blanched and a look of terror leapt into her eyes as she sprang to her feet, regarding the somewhat stolid Lucy as though the latter were some apparition ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... come orders to "Stand-to" in full marching order, to evacuate; at which all ranks expostulated angrily. And then perhaps another order—to stick it another day; at which we cheered and slapped one another boisterously on the back so that the stolid Germans over yonder must have wondered, knowing what they ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... came into the office—a stolid-faced, quiet-mannered, soberly attired person, who might have been a respectable tradesman out for a stroll, and who gave the inspector a sidelong nod as he approached his desk, at the same time extending ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher
... waited outside the station, and she had a momentary fear lest she should receive deferential recognition from the chauffeur. But he was as solid and stolid as any other portion of the car, and paid no more attention to her than he did to her baggage. The one was a nurse; the other, a box, both common nouns, and merely articles to be conveyed to Gleneesh according to ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... look doubly spectral; low-browed, sallow, bearded Russians; brawny English sailors, looking down with a grand, indulgent contempt upon those unhappy beings whom an inscrutable Providence has doomed to be "foreigners;" stolid Turks, tramping onward in silent defiance of the fierce looks cast at them from every side; sinewy Dalmatians, with close-cropped black hair; dapper Frenchmen, with well-trimmed moustaches, casting annihilating glances at the few ladies who happen to be abroad; and barefooted Greeks, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... the full measure of the peril menacing our dear lady, there was need for swift determination and a blow as swift and sure; a coup de main which should atone in one shrewd push for the sleeveless failure of the night. So we would grip hands around, even to the stolid Indian, and swear a solemn oath to cut the women out or else to leave our bones to whiten in the ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... arms across his massive chest and stood for a long time in silence. His eyes were upon the ground, and his stolid features were without show of emotion. His people had suffered wrongs at the hands of the white men; but in this one he had ever found an ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... of them in all, slouched over to the rail and stood looking down into the life-boat with an air of stolid indifference, as she rose and fell alongside. Then they turned and looked inboard at the long-boat, which stood upright in chocks, on top of the main hatch, with the jolly-boat stowed, keel-up, inside her. ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... in our arrival. Men and women were haunched about the fire, above which simmered several pots with the savory odor of cooking meat. I do not think a soul of the company as much as turned a head on our approach. Though they saw us plainly, they sat stolid and imperturbable, after the manner of their race, waiting for us to announce ourselves. Some of the squaws and half-breed women were heaping bark on the fire. Indians sat straight-backed round the circle. White men, vagabond trappers from anywhere and everywhere, ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... wore the stolid impassive faces of their tribe; but when this bright young creature questioned them, brimming over with ardour and joy, their countenances fell and they hung ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... and the two bright black eyes, which look as if they were "stuck on," give them a rather comical aspect. You will find them inquisitive, too. Put your finger in front of their tank, and they will all flock to see what it is. On the contrary, other fishes, such as the pike and carp, will remain stolid and indifferent to any movement you may make, and some, like the timorous trout—for which Isaak Walton loved to angle above any fish,—will be so dreadfully upset at the appearance of your digit that they will dart ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... the Englishman, showed by contrast his American origin. His chin was all that Peter had said an American's chin ought to be, and he had keen, brilliant blue eyes. Hannaford, though taller than he, was stouter as well as older, and therefore appeared less tall. He was of a more stolid type, and it seemed incredible that such an adventure as that sketched by Madame d'Ambre could approach such a man. Yet for once, gossip and truth were one. The thing had happened. Hannaford had lately retired from the ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... there present, I was surprised at seeing so few with red or fair hair. I noticed this to my companion. He had never observed it before, but said it was strange. The convicts were mostly of a dull grey complexion, large eyed, stolid looking men, or with very black hair, ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... house she paused, for a man was riding down the creek. At sight of him the face of the mountain woman in the doorway assumed a stolid, almost hard, look, as if life had already brought to her all the misery and trouble it could, and there was nothing now ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... by a forced and perpetual conformity to nature lift yourself above all vicissitudes. Those tender and tentative ideals which nature really breeds, and which fill her with imperfect but genuine excellences, you will be too stolid to perceive or ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... almost ready to clear out!" But Germinie would look up at her with a smile, a smile so sad and sweet that it checked the impatient exclamation on the old maid's lips. And so she stayed on with her, going about with a sort of fascinated, divinely stolid air, in the impassibility of profound adoration, buried in ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... merely from the general aspect of the population and such objects as may be seen in the streets, more resembles an Inferno than any other we have yet visited. The people are more crowded together, and the stamp of squalid, stolid misery and degradation more obvious and appalling. The English and Scotch do not take kindly to poverty, like those of sunnier climes; it makes them fierce or stupid, and, life presenting no other cheap pleasure, they ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... parents. Sheila is the first-born. Norah decided that she should be an Irish beauty, and bestowed upon her a name that reeks of the bogs. Whereupon Sheila, at the age of six, is as flaxen-haired and blue-eyed and stolid a little German madchen as ever fooled her parents, and she is a feminine reproduction of her German Dad. Two years later came a sturdy boy, and they named him Hans, in a flaunt of defiance. Hans is black-haired, gray-eyed ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... the hour, and how she turned the wrong way, in a manner which might have puzzled the quickest brain; but Moore did not show any surprise. That would come later when he had arranged his ideas a little; at present his face was perfectly stolid as he said: ...
— A Pair of Clogs • Amy Walton
... assertion, that there exists absolutely no moral sense among the workers. In general, he found that the children neither recognised duties to their parents nor felt any affection for them. They were so little capable of thinking of what they said, so stolid, so hopelessly stupid, that they often asserted that they were well treated, were coming on famously, when they were forced to work twelve to fourteen hours, were clad in rags, did not get enough to eat, ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... a saw. The Chinese depend upon the shrieks of the wheel to tell them how the axle is wearing, but the disconsolate foreigner finds that his nerves wear out much faster than the wooden axle. In Tsing- tau, that agonizing screech proved too much even for the stolid Germans and they posted an ordinance to the effect that all barrow axles must be greased. The Chinese demurred, but a few arrests taught them obedience, so that now the streets of the German metropolis no longer resound with the hysterical wails and moans ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... How can he give his neighbour the real ground, His own conviction? Ardent as he is— Call his great truth a lie, why, still the old "Be it as God please" reassureth him. I probed the sore as thy disciple should: 220 "How, beast," said I, "this stolid carelessness Sufficeth thee, when Rome is on her march To stamp out like a little spark thy town, Thy tribe, thy crazy tale and thee at once?" He merely looked with his large eyes on me, The man is apathetic, you ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... reckoning. Although his character is a strong mixture of courage and ferocity, the Apache is gentle and affectionate toward those of his own flesh and blood, particularly his children. Fear, to him, is unknown. Death he faces with stolid indifference; yet Apache men have been known to grieve so deeply over the loss of a friend as to end their ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... on the great, stolid, comfortable class which forms the backbone of the novel-reading public. The best novelists do not find their material in this class. Thomas Hardy never. H.G. Wells, almost never; now and then he glances at it ironically, in an episodic manner. ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... The crowd having dispersed, buffalo-robes were spread on the ground, and Marquette and Joliet spent the night on the scene of the late festivity. In the morning, the chief, with some six hundred of his tribesmen, escorted them to their canoes, and bade them, after their stolid fashion, ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... from the studio of design and the rooms where the looms stand stolid, is a laboratory of dyes, a place which looks like a farmhouse kitchen on preserving day. You sniff the air as you go in, the air that is swaying long bunches of pendulous colour, and it smells warm and moist and full of the ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... accompany his mother in her visits to the cottages, and had thereby made acquaintance with many of the village boys of his own age. There was Job Rudkin, son of widow Rudkin, the most bustling woman in the parish. How she could ever have had such a stolid boy as Job for a child must always remain a mystery. The first time Tom went to their cottage with his mother, Job was not indoors; but he entered soon after, and stood with both hands in his pockets, staring at Tom. Widow Rudkin, who would have had to cross madam ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... take to their heels. Mr. Marcoy, feeling unable to do justice to the case of the nephew, turned him over to Perez, whose undisguised dislike made the work of correction at once grateful and thorough. Marcoy himself confronted the stolid and sullen Pepe Garcia, insisting upon the example he owed to the Indian porters and the responsibility of his Caucasian blood. The half-breed listened for a minute, his eyes fixed upon the ground: he then shook himself, looked an instant at his employer, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... line. They simply stood and waited. In truth there is nothing about the survivors of the disaster that strikes one so forcibly as their evident inability to comprehend their misfortune and the absence of sympathetic expressions among them. It is not because they are naturally stolid, but the whole thing is so vast and bears upon them so heavily they ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... even by the possession of the two thousand dollars her mother had reported. He was still "funny and sort of scary," not like the overpowering Southern gentlemen she supposed she remembered. Also, she was hungry. She listened with stolid glumness to Mr. Wrenn's observation that that was "an awful big hat the lady with the funny guy ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... pomaded Parleyvoo Will air his sweetest airs And quote the highest rates when you "Comme bien" for his wares; And, though the German stolid be, His so-called heart of steel Becomes as soft as wax when he Detects the words ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... Rosendo sat stolid, buried in thought. Jose reached out through the dim light and grasped his black hand. His eyes were lucent, his heart burned with the fire of an unknown enthusiasm, and speech stumbled across ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... thoughts which were working, beneath that stolid face, in that always eager-working brain. They never fancied what a terrible demon now occupied that fiery heart which they supposed was wholly surrendered to the consciousness of shame. Could they have heard that voice of the fiend whispering in her ears, while they whispered to one ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... a shocking outrage, the captain of U.S.S. Adirondack concurred, and so the cruiser, with the injured, stolid-faced 'Reo on board, steamed off to Leone Bay and gave the astounded natives twelve hours to make up their minds as to which they would do—pay 'Reo one thousand dollars in cash or have their town burnt. ...
— The Colonial Mortuary Bard; "'Reo," The Fisherman; and The Black Bream Of Australia - 1901 • Louis Becke
... in Stampede's face, and the stolid effort he was making to say something which it was difficult for him to put into words, did not excite Alan as he waited for his companion's promised disclosure. Instead of suspense he felt rather a sense of anticipation ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... people of both sexes who were neither Hindoos nor Mohammedans, but bore a strong resemblance to the Chinese. The men were short, stout and muscular, and their faces wore a stolid and almost stupid look, which was not at all improved by their long black hair or by their filthy garments and persons. The women, however, were rather good-looking, not concealing the face as in the plains. These people were natives ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... life do not surpass those of untutored nature, that neither concedes nor claims a superiority to others. She was altogether of a different stamp from her sister, who was a common-looking person, and resembled the ordinary females to be found in savage life. Stout, strong, and rather stolid, accustomed to drudge and to obey, rather than to be petted and rule; to receive and not to give orders, and to submit from habit and choice. One seemed far above, and the other as much below, the station of their father. Jessie, ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... Leader-of-the-Opposition Bebel, the Prince said, "One thing at least, the Emperor is no Philistine," and proceeded to explain, rather negatively and disappointingly, that the Emperor possesses what the Greeks call megalopsychia—a great soul. One knows but too well the English Philistine, that stolid, solid, self-sufficient bulwark of the British Constitution. The German Philistine is his twin brother, the narrow-minded, conservative burgher. Other epithets the Prince applied to the imperial character were "simple," "natural," "hearty," "magnanimous," "clear-headed," ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... completed when the gong rang for supper. There were not more than a dozen men at mess. Most were of stolid English navvy type, dirty uncouth men whose gross irregular features told of low birth and evil life. The foreign element comprised an Irishman named Mike Hogan and the Frenchman whom the boys had met when they ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... in life is one of the supreme essentials of all successful living. We must work, for we must have bread. We require other things than bread. They are not only valuable, comfortable, but necessary. It is a dumb, stolid being, however, who does not realize that life consists of more than these. They spell mere existence, not ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... penetrate farther than the parlor, the very fact of his presence sent a thrill of excitement through the house. An English milord, a heretic, the grandfather of "cette chere Lisa," whom they were to lose so soon! No wonder the most placid of the nuns, the most stolid of the lay-sisters, tingled ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... seemed to be more completely master of himself. The drink had brightened his eyes, brought a warm flush to the sun-bronze of his cheek, lent swiftness to his tongue. He was talking brilliantly, matching epigrams with the Great Gaines, shrewdly poking good-natured fun at the stolid and stupid mayor, holding his and the near-by tables in spell with reminiscences in which so many of them shared. Some wondered how he would have anything ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... incarnate. Blue beads and amulets to ward off evil! No eye's more evil than a camel's eye. The elephant is quite a comely brute, Compared with Satan camel,—trunk and all, His floppy ears, and his inconsequent tail. He's stolid, but at least a gentleman. It doesn't hurt my pride to valet him, And bring his shaving-water. He's a lord. Only the bluest blood that has come down Through generations from the mastodon Could carry off that tail with dignity, That tail and trunk. He cannot ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... decidedly sulky as she twitched round on her seat, and resumed her stolid staring into space. Again there was silence, till a hand stretched out to clasp her arm, and a voice spoke ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... A stolid, ignorant, and densely superstitious people was at war with a rejuvenated nation keenly alive to the power of education. That is the secret. Man for man, Russia would have won. But the resourcefulness ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... fit to 'go on the land'. The place was only fit for some stolid German, or Scotsman, or even Englishman and his wife, who had no ambition but to bullock and make a farm of the place. I had only drifted here through ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... involuntary appeals, in those brief glances. Far from me and from my friends be the misfortune of meeting such looks in reply to pain of our inflicting. To be clever and sensitive and to hurt the foolish and the stolid—"wouldst thou do such a deed for all ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... safe, and I have sent for him. Now I imagine that the Duke will wish our new secretary to live still at the 'Brand'—he preferred it in your case, as you will remember. Our new secretary is going to be my nephew. He is very stolid and honest, and fortunately not a chatterbox. He is going to be the nominal secretary, but I want you to be the one ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Some hundreds, indeed, had passed the night there in prayer, or in sheer terror of the catastrophe which could not fail to ensue, and they were kneeling in groups, groaning, weeping, and cursing, or squatting in stolid resignation, weary, crushed and hopeless. It was a heart-rending sight, and neither Dada—who till this moment had been dreading Dame Herse's scolding tongue far more than the destruction of the world—nor her companion could forbear joining in the wail that rose ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... seated—a hardy race, reared on the hills, and disciplined in the straitest of creeds. Stolid and self-complacent, theirs was an unquestioning faith, accepting, as they did, the Divine decrees as a Mohamedan accepts his fate. What was, was right—all as it should be; elect, or non-elect, according to ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
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