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More "Tedium" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... breadth of mind, those rare powers—fruit of nature and of our interchange of thought—treasures whence should issue a unique satisfaction for passion and desire, hours of poetry to outweigh years, joys to make a man serve a lifetime for one gracious gesture,—all this is to be buried in the tedium of a tame, commonplace marriage, to vanish in the emptiness of an existence which you will come to loath! I hate your children before they are ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... Shakespeare. I expected to receive a powerful esthetic pleasure, but having read, one after the other, works regarded as his best: "King Lear," "Romeo and Juliet," "Hamlet" and "Macbeth," not only did I feel no delight, but I felt an irresistible repulsion and tedium, and doubted as to whether I was senseless in feeling works regarded as the summit of perfection by the whole of the civilized world to be trivial and positively bad, or whether the significance which this civilized world attributes to the works ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... is to curse you for your tedium And frequent stops in search of wayside rest, Nor call you, through the morning papers' medium, A crying scandal and a public pest; I designate you, on the other hand, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 26, 1916 • Various
... to make the purchases; Mr. Pyecroft, under Jack's guidance, went below to forage for the anaesthetic of immediate crumbs; and Mary, tender-heartedly, remained behind to relieve the tedium of and give comfort to the invalid. She straightened up the room a bit; urged the patient to eat, to no avail; then went out of the room for a minute, and reappeared ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... unshaken. The interval between the expiry of the period (of three weeks) which with the collective wisdom of all the wizards we had decreed to be a synonym for the Siege's duration, and the morning of the pronouncement relative to the advance of the Column from Orange River, had had its tedium neutralised by a cheerful vituperation of Gladstone's defective statesmanship in the year of 'eighty-one and his wicked efforts at a later date to "give Ireland away too." The move from Orange River had occasioned general rejoicings. Unaccountable delay ensued. ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... loss. Men, not measures, were at stake in this campaign, for on the only national issue which they seemed to have discussed—Oregon—they were in practical agreement.[159] Both cultivated the little arts which relieve the tedium of politics. Douglas talked in heart to heart fashion with his "esteemed fellow-citizens," inquired for the health of their families, expressed grief when he learned that John had the measles and that Sally was down with the chills ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... "authorities" are quoted. Even the gaps are left unbridged by guesswork: whereas the historic and mythological problems perhaps involved are relinquished to those really thoroughgoing scholars whom erudition qualifies to deal with such topics, and tedium ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... familiarity with the properties of lines, angles, circles, spheres, cylinders, cubes, cones, and the conic sections will be acquired, which will give a life and reality to the geometrical studies which will occupy them in their school career. Dancing and singing will relieve the tedium of sitting, shake off the surplus energy, give rest to the body, and power, time, and tune to the voice. Models of houses, stores, workshops, kitchens, farms, and factories, which later on they will assist in making, will be a source ...
— The Philosophy of Teaching - The Teacher, The Pupil, The School • Nathaniel Sands
... the tedium of the lectures by doing most of the travelling in an automobile of my brother's, in which we lived, moved, and had our meals by the roadside. The lectures took us everywhere from the drawing-room of a border castle on the line of ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... began to sing in a sweet and melancholy voice the kundiman of her youth. The soldiers heard her and fell silent; those airs awoke old memories of the days before they had been corrupted. Dona Consolacion also heard them in her tedium, and on learning who it was that sang, after a few moments of meditation, ordered that Sisa be brought to her instantly. Something like a smile ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... in my book is Roderick Random, the cricketer. Dear Random, my contemporary, my form-fellow and house-fellow; partaker with me in the ignominy of Biceps's tea-tray and the tedium of Mr. Rhomboid's problems: my sympathetic companion in every amusement, and the pleasant drag on every intellectual effort—Random, who never knew a lesson, nor could answer a question; who never could get up in time for First ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... innumerable pinholes. And this is what the Troezenians say about that myrtle. Queen Phaedra, when she was in love with Hippolytos, used to recline idly all day long under this same tree. To beguile the tedium of her weary life she used to draw out the golden pin which held her fair locks, and pierce with it the leaves of the sweet-scented bush. All the leaves were riddled with holes. After she had ruined the poor ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... totally devoid of envy or jealousy. None more readily applauded genius or merit in others, or was more desirous on all occasions to bring it forward, and give it the due reward. No one recounted anecdotes with more vivacity, a happier effect, or less tedium. He knew that the close of all such narratives contains in general all that is pleasing in them; and therefore he hastened to arrive at it before the patience of his hearers could be exhausted. He had a perfect horror at long ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... injudiciously so. Although Bunyan's Pilgrim, Gessner's Death of Abel, Rowe's Letters, and one or two other books, which, for that reason, I still have a favor for, were admitted to relieve the gloom of one dull sermon succeeding to another—there was far too much tedium annexed to the duties of the day; and in the end it did none of ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... the abominable party caucus, which has never yet made me any the wiser, so that one does not get home all day. If I do not attend the caucus meetings, they all rail at me, for each one grudges the others any escape from the tedium. * * * Good-by, my heart. May God's hand be over you, and the children, and protect you from sickness and worry, but particularly you, the apple of my eye, whom Roeder envies me daily in the promenade, when the sunset makes him sentimental, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... in him now a craving he could not stay, to be brought near to her again, to know how her life was going. It had first raised its head in him since he knew that her existence and Wharton's were finally parted, and had but gathered strength from the self-critical loneliness and tedium of these ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... preparatory school there. It contains, just before the First Chapter of Genesis, a Chronological Map "with remarkable persons and events collaterally placed." I remember how I used to mitigate the tedium of divine service by reading to myself that the creation of the world occupied one of the weeks of the year 4004 B.C.; that Egypt was founded about 2190 B.C.; that Troy fell about 1180 B.C., seventy years or so before the birth of King David; and that Homer and Elijah flourished contemporaneously ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... live to appreciate Mr. Smith's name as one associated with kindly intent and generous aspirations in his behalf. A generation of bargemen who had a less uncompromising vocabulary of oaths, who could beguile some of the tedium of their voyaging with reading, and who in other important respects showed the influences of half-time, would be a smiling reward of philanthropy and an important addition to our civilisation. That Mr. Smith anticipates some such ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... and continued fine weather brought us rapidly on our way towards Brazil. Dolphins, flying-fish, and the large and beautiful gold-fish, called by the Spaniards bonito, constantly surrounded the ship, and formed by day a relief from the tedium of gazing on the unvarying billows, as did during the darkness of the night the innumerable phosphorescent animals of the muscle kind, which, studding the black ocean with sparks of fire, produced a dazzling and living ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... be perceived, that for the promotion of the course here recommended, it will be advisable to connect with our alphabetical and reading lessons, as much information as we possibly can. By so doing, the tedium of the task to the child will be considerably lessened, as well as much knowledge attained. The means of doing this in a variety of ways will, no doubt, suggest themselves to the intelligent teacher; but as an illustration of ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... is one thing to use existing romances in the embellishment of a poem, another to patch up the poem itself from such materials. What consistency of style and execution can be hoped for from such an attempt? or, rather, what bad taste and tedium will not be ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... in his library, and, visiting him, we duly admire his neat garden of potatoes and peas, beets and turnips. The reverend gentleman owns up to finding Norman lonely in winter and recalls with appreciation his last charge in the outports of Newfoundland, where the tedium was relieved by ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... exceptions to the general dreariness and unreadableness of controversial writings in the dialogistic form. The elegance and easiness of his style, and the freshness and beauty of his descriptions of natural scenery by which the tedium of the controversy is relieved, render this not only a readable, but a fascinating book, even to the modern reader who has no present interest in the controversial question. It is, however, by no means free from the graver errors ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... door, afraid to move, afraid to breathe, afraid to think of what must follow, racked by confinement and borne to the ground with tedium. This particular phase, he felt with gratitude, could not last for ever; whatever impended (even the gallows, he bitterly and perhaps erroneously reflected) could not fail to be a relief. To calculate cubes occurred to him as an ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... well that Sir Peregrine should preach his sermon, and well that Lucius should hear it; but for herself it would, she thought, have been more comfortable for her to eat her dinner alone. She felt, however, that she could not do so. Any amount of tedium would be better than the danger of offering a slight to Sir Peregrine, and therefore she wrote a pretty little note to say that both of them would be ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... that makes them a refuge from living! For in a book everything can be made to fit in, all tedium can be skipped over, and the intense moments can be made timeless and eternal, and as a poet who is too little known has well said in one of his unpublished lyrics, we, by ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... as this was ragged, there was quite a wild chase of shadow and moon-glimpse over the surface of the shuddering water. I had to hold my hat on, and was growing rather tired, and inclined to go back in disgust, when a little incident occurred to break the tedium. A sudden and violent squall of wind sundered the low underwood, and at the same time there came one of those brief discharges of moonlight, which leaped into the opening thus made, and showed me three girls in the prettiest flutter and disorder. It was as though they ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... upon the journey later, she never remembered its tedium. She was as one borne on the wings of love, and she scarcely noticed the ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... Russian officers, American Red Cross, and myself, slept where we could. The French also had their meals served to them separately. Nevertheless, we were a jolly company on board, and played an absurd wild game of solitaire each night, and the only tedium was the slow way we splashed like a lame duck up ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... Noon came. Nothing and nobody interested Zoe. She went to be measured for a gown and could not support the tedium of ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... never stints me in money; and, after all, I like for him to spend his money in his own way. It vexes me sometimes, he buys such wild brutes, and endangers his life with them. He rides miles and miles every year; and it relieves the tedium of his journeys to have horses ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... his devotion to the art of painting. Indeed, from that time forth, he would spend the best part of the day in the front balcony, like the attentive angler poring on his float; and the better to support the tedium, he would frequently console himself with his clay pipe. On several occasions, passers-by appeared to be arrested by the ticket, and on several others ladies and gentlemen drove to the very doorstep by ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... caused him to remain in bed an extra week, merely in order that he might keep her near him. But now the inevitable hour had come, and Adrian felt that it was incumbent upon him to lift the veil and let Elsa see some of the secret of his soul. He had prepared for the event; indeed the tedium of his confinement had been much relieved by the composition of lofty and heart-stirring addresses, in which he, the noble cavalier, laid his precious self and fortune at the feet of this undistinguished, ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... this Tammany Land, you can not with immunity give free and honest expression to your thoughts? Now, were you not summoned to the Shamrag's presence to answer for the crime of lese-majeste? And were you not, for your audacity, left to brood ten days and nights in gaol? And what tedium we have in Shakib's History about the charge on which he was arrested. It is unconscionable that Khalid should misappropriate Party funds. Indeed, he never even touched or saw any of it, excepting, ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... were lost in the confusion, in the darkness; what was seen of them seemed an encouragement to shout louder. And I give you my word that it was in no wise needed. All those Southerners, whose enthusiasm had been kept at fever heat since morning, excited still more by the tedium of the long wait and by the storm, gave all that they had of voice, of breath, of noisy energy, blending with the national hymn of Provence that oft-repeated cry, which broke in upon it like a refrain: "Vive le Bey!" The majority had no sort of idea what ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... dependent on him—Ann recognised that she might very well have been still pursuing the rather dull, uneventful life which obtained at Lovell Court, without the prospect of any vital change or happening to relieve its tedium, whereas the catastrophe which had once seemed to threaten chaos had actually opened the door of ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... the middle watch, when we had nearly run out the south-east trades, I went forward, looking for someone to talk to, or anything to relieve the tedium of my two hours on the lee side of the poop. I found Welsh John sitting on the main-hatch and disposed to yarn. He had been the most intimate with Duncan, harkening to his queer tales of the fairies in Knoidart when we others would scoff, and naturally the talk came round ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... subjective appreciation; but this must surely be an error, since our mental image of any period is determined by the character of its contents. Wundt says that when once a tedious waiting is over, it looks short because we instantly forget the feeling of tedium. My self-observation, as well as the interrogation of others, has satisfied me, on the contrary, that this feeling distinctly colours the retrospective appreciation. Thus, when waiting at a railway station for a ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... tie on James, and it was always the earnest object of his negotiations. But Spain sent him an amusing and literary ambassador, who kept him in play, year after year, with merry tales and bon mots.[231] These negotiations had languished through all the tedium of diplomacy; the amusing promises of the courtly Gondomar were sure, on return of the courier, to bring sudden difficulties from the subtle Olivarez. Buckingham meditated by a single blow to strike at the true secret, whether the Spanish ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... ease by the commissary's conduct toward her, Janice entered eagerly into the gaiety with which the army beguiled the tedium of winter quarters. Dislike of Clowes precluded Andre and Mobray from coming to the house, but they saw much of the maiden elsewhere. She and Peggy Chew had been made known to each other by Andre early in the British occupation, and ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... rescued herself from social obscurity by assuming the role of her husband's exponent and interpreter; and Dresham's leisure being devoted to the cultivation of remarkable women, his wife's attitude committed her to the public celebration of their remarkableness. For the conceivable tedium of this duty, Mrs. Dresham was repaid by the fact that there were people who took HER for a remarkable woman; and who in turn probably purchased similar distinction with the small change of her reflected importance. As to the other ladies ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... who took an immense deal of trouble to make everything go off properly, and were well rewarded by the universal appreciation of their exertions. I am sure that these amusements do good in relieving the unavoidable tedium and monotony of ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... exclaimed, rising, "I must write some letters at once." She sighed, as if in tedium. The fact that her fortune was vaguely threatened did not cause her anxiety: she scarcely realized it. What she saw was an opportunity to evade the immediate meeting with Edwin—the meeting which, a few minutes earlier, she had desired ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... acquaintance, he ranked high as a skilful surgeon on account of superior attainments, acquired partly through the German Universities and partly in the Austrian service, during the campaign of Magenta, Solferino, and the siege of Mantua. With a German's fondness for music, he beguiled the tedium of many a long winter evening. With his German education he had imbibed radicalism to its full extent. Thoroughly conversant with the Sacred Scriptures he was a doubter, if not a positive unbeliever, from the Pentateuch to Revelation. In addition to this, his flings at the Chaplain, ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... there was nothing to relieve the tedium of Hannah's life, and but for her trust in God her reason must have given way under the strain, for it was not only her own sorrow, but her father's as well, which she had to bear. With him there was no rest, ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... important activity and confronted by the sole prospect of having to drag out a humdrum existence, men began to reflect with a sort of sullen exultation upon the possibility of departing this life at will, and to find in this thought a scant amelioration of the ills and tedium of the times. This disposition was so general that "Werther" itself exerted a powerful influence, because it everywhere struck a responsive chord and publicly and tangibly exhibited the true inwardness of a morbid ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... happiness entirely and solely the essence of his material ease. This was his third morning out of doors, and on each of the two mornings that were gone Hortensia had borne him company, coming with the charitable intent of lightening his tedium by reading to him, but ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... graver occasions of life found him no less ready. Damilaville lost one of his children, and his wife was inconsolable. It was Diderot who was summoned, and who cheerfully went for days together to soothe and divert her mind. For his correspondent and for us he makes the tedium of his story beautiful by recalling the fine saying of a grief-stricken woman in Metastasio, when they tried to console her by the example of Abraham, who was ready even to slay his son at the command of God: Ah, God would never have given ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... retired, taking one of those ways which in the neighborhood of Amsterdam are simply called "the ways." That is all they are. Whoever walks there for pleasure must take a good stock of impressions with him, in order to escape tedium. ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... victory, eternal peace. Plenty of this is quite cynically deliberate. For the skilful propagandist knows that while you must start with a plausible analysis, you must not keep on analyzing, because the tedium of real political accomplishment will soon destroy interest. So the propagandist exhausts the interest in reality by a tolerably plausible beginning, and then stokes up energy for a long voyage by brandishing a passport ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... hold which might disturb his system, the first he discarded was the thought of marriage. He pitied himself too tenderly at the idea of losing the liberty of which he made such agreeable use; at the idea of taking on himself gratuitously the restraints, the tedium, the ridicule, and even the danger of a household. He shuddered at the bare thought of a community of goods and interest; and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... corner one might happen upon a man and a girl. They would be sitting very close together, and behaving... well, as men and maidens sometimes do, to beguile the tedium of ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... her. She knew it for discontent, and was the more miserable over her want of power to control it, because of the terror that hung over her lest repinings might bring on them all the judicial punishment of a terrible break-up of the home she loved, even while the tedium of the daily round oppressed her. Alternate plaintiveness and weary sharpness of course aggravated both Alda and Bernard, and they knew nothing of the repentant wretchedness that rather weakened ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... next had appeared. Romanticism, half lurid, half effeminate, yielded to a brutal pursuit of material truth, and a pious preference for modern and humble sentiment. This realism had a romantic vein in it, and studied vice and crime, tedium and despair, with a very genuine horrified sympathy. Some went in for a display of archaeological lore or for exotic motifs; others gave all their attention to rediscovering and emphasising abstract problems of execution, the ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... breath, the boss suddenly ducked, and disappeared from the half-curtained window altogether. A moment later, he appeared outside his swinging door, yawning and stretching himself, as one who, wearied with the tedium of life indoors, would see what beguilement ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... railway-carriage will often become better acquainted in three hours than they might as next-door neighbors in three years; and this was still more likely to happen in the old days of coach journeys, when the very tedium of the occasion served as an inducement to frank and friendly conversation. Pierce was the right man to bring Hawthorne out of his hard shell of Sebago seclusion. He had already been one year at Bowdoin, ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... the public with recreative reading. To the masses of the people—hard-worked and living humdrum lives—the novel comes as an open door to an ideal life, in the enjoyment of which one may forget, for a time, the hardships or the tedium of the real. One of the best functions of the public library is to raise this recreative reading of the community to higher and higher levels; to replace trash with literature ...
— A Library Primer • John Cotton Dana
... etiquet by giving him away. It is the nurse who gives the doctor away in private, because every nurse has some particular doctor whom she likes; and she usually assures her patients that all the others are disastrous noodles, and soothes the tedium of the sick-bed by gossip about their blunders. She will even give a doctor away for the sake of making the patient believe that she knows more than the doctor. But she dare not, for her livelihood, give ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... this hint that the Minister of War acted, executing a rare piece of drollery that so enlivened the tedium of executive session. ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... Ephrinell can very well live without me. I have been quite right in not reckoning on his company to charm away the tedium of the journey. The Yankee has completely "left" me—that is the word—for this angular daughter ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... that he bestowed it on the first child he met. Yoshida Kenko, who became a recluse in 1324, is counted among the "four kings" of Japanese poetry—Ton-a, Joben, Keiun, and Kenko. He has been called the "Horace of Japan." In his celebrated prose work, Weeds of Tedium (Tsure-zure-gusa), he seems to reveal a lurking love for the vices he satirizes. These three authors were all pessimistic. They reflected ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... admirers was a gentleman of sixty, who called upon me with a large roll of manuscript. He had retired from business two years before, so he informed me, and, having always been a great lover of poetry, he determined to fill up the tedium of his life of ease by writing some for himself. Now everybody knows that I am not a poet,—the few patriotic verses which I wrote during the war having simply been the result of excitement,—and why should he apply to me? O, there was a great deal of poetry in my ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... from this tedium by another summons to the office. Fortified with a glass of good wine, he returned to the encounter, inwardly calling upon his gods to direct him how to meet it. He found poor old Father Pennycuick aged ten years in the hour since he had seen him ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... at the lens, he dutifully replaced the chest and palm clamps and settled down to the tedium of patrol. ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll
... humorist of fifty years standing, and had become fixed in the habit of illustrating great truths by grotesque and familiar similes. His jokes, the circulating medium of Congress, were as helpful to the cause, as Jay's conscience or Adams' fire; they restored good humor, and relieved the tedium of delay, but were out of place in formal, exact and authoritative papers."—Parton's ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... their destination, but at least it was land; and although there were still dangers to be passed, in those days it was the broad stretch of the ocean which tried the seamen's nerves. They hailed with joy the first glimpse of the New World after the terrible tedium of the voyage. ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... the younger fashioned the islands and the sea. When the natives first saw a steamer on the horizon they thought it was Nemunemu's ship, and the smoke at the funnel they took to be the tobacco-smoke which he puffed to beguile the tedium of the voyage.[397] They are also great believers in magic and witchcraft, and cases of sickness and death, which are not attributed to the malignity of ghosts and spirits, are almost invariably set down to the machinations of sorcerers. Only ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... he had a little work to do, but he didn't mind that; it would help immensely to beguile the tedium of the voyage; and all he required in order to do it well was the moral courage to shut himself up for a few hours each day and to avoid as ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... friends know how to contribute as to your vanity and presumption, he was well aware. Indeed, he had been long an eloquent contributor to that scandal literature which amuses the leisure of fashion and helps on the tedium of an ordinary dinner. How Lady Maude would report the late scene in the garden to the Countess of Mecherscroft, who would tell it to her company at her country-house!—How the Lady Georginas would discuss it over luncheon, and the Lord Georges talk of it out shooting! What a host of pleasant anecdotes ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... well-to-do, honest, able to provide for a family. There was nothing presumptuous in his aspiring to the hand of the prettiest girl on Chaney Creek. In childhood he had trotted her to Banbury Cross and back a hundred times, beguiling the tedium of the journey with kisses and the music of bells. When the little girl was old enough to go to school, the big boy carried her books and gave her the rosiest apple out of his dinner-basket. He fought all her battles and ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... the top of the high pole he would cling protected, seemingly, by some force working in direct defiance of the law of gravity. And now and then, by way of brightening the tedium of their job, he and his gang would call to a girl passing in the ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... beauty, all the horrors of Weber without Weber's passion. Black woods, supernatural fireworks by night, enchantments, vampires, guns that went off by themselves—all this jugglery was fast being done to death, and what at first had been a nerve-shaking novelty was becoming a mere tedium. In opera The Castle of Otranto was played out. Into this region of inspissated gloom Richard burst with Rienzi, the brilliant, the fearless, the tragic hero; all was blazing light and colour; it sparkled; if the champagne ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... of the new garrison. He was received by the city authorities, and was at the same time, doubtless, greeted from balcony and window by multitudes of fair-haired Crefeld maidens, who looked with delightful anticipations on the gallant soldiers, who were to relieve the tedium of their evenings, riding by. "To-day," the Emperor told the assembled city fathers, "I have kept my word to the town of Crefeld, and when I make a promise I keep it too (stormy applause). I have brought the town its garrison and the young ladies ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... it is far more becoming than the ignoble European practice of tight-lacing among women. And now it has been found needful to forbid the art. Their songs and dances were numerous (and the law has had to abolish them by the dozen). They now face empty-handed the tedium of their uneventful days; and who shall pity them? The least rigorous will say that they were ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... recreations which relieved the tedium of garrison life, was an occasional wolf chase. I am too tender hearted to call it an amusement, but it was exceedingly exciting. The animal having been caught in a box-trap, and not maimed or crippled ...
— 'Three Score Years and Ten' - Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other - Parts of the West • Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve
... dwell on the picture which a crowd presents at a public execution;—much like a crowd, we may be sure, at any other public spectacle. Whatever the object which gathers together a mob of the lowest class, they will soon begin to relieve the tedium of expectation by coarse jests, drunkenness, and brawling. Yet these descriptive logicians are never weary of painting to us the grotesque and disgusting scenes which the mass of spectators exhibit on these occasions, as if this were quite decisive of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... Pastoral Sonnets, Elegies, and Amorous Delights (1593). Rosalynde, his best known work, and the source from which Shakespeare is said to have drawn As you like It, was written to beguile the tedium of a voyage to the Canaries. Robin the Divell and William Longbeard are historical romances. L. was also a voluminous translator. He was one of the founders of the regular English drama, but his own plays ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... Utopian plans, forgot the tedium of the trail. No person is so happy as when doing something to make some other person happy. And Bob was happy because he believed he was to be the means of bringing happiness to many. Making a comfortable living himself, he would make it possible for his neighbours to ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... to be a troubadour, or a trouvere, Frank; that was my true metier, to travel from castle to castle singing love songs and telling romantic stories to while away the tedium of the lives of the great. Fancy the reception they would have given me for bringing a new joy into their castled isolation, new ideas, new passions—a breath of gossip and scandal from the outside world to relieve the intolerable boredom of the middle ages. I should have been kept at the Court ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... nightingales beguiled the tedium of waiting, shut within a barrier, for the train from Knin, for one is not allowed to stray about until the train arrives. After a little further climbing, the summit of the range was pierced, and the lovely Riviera of the Castelli lay spread before us far below. The long island ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... shadow of a suspicion, I told him it would be a great relief from the tedium of the day to ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... and the criminal. Chance brings this young man Ronald to this lonely Norfolk inn, and sees to it that he is allowed to remain when the landlord wants to turn him away. Chance throws him into the society of a man of culture and education, who is only too glad of the opportunity of relieving the tedium of his surroundings in this rough uncultivated place by passing a few hours in the companionship of a man of his own rank of life. Chance contrives that this gentleman shall have in his possession a large sum of money which he shows to Ronald, who is greatly in need of money. Opportunity ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... complete packs were found wedged in an old cross-bow, for the purpose of securing the bow where it had worked loose in the head; they were of sixteenth century manufacture, and had doubtless been the means of relieving the tedium of many a weary watch or waiting, in field or fortress, before they found their resting-place of a couple of centuries in the obsolete missive ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Carlyle speaks. While this Accelerator will enable us to concentrate ourselves with tremendous impact upon any moment or occasion that demands our utmost sense and vigour, the Retarder will enable us to pass in passive tranquillity through infinite hardship and tedium. Perhaps I am a little optimistic about the Retarder, which has indeed still to be discovered, but about the Accelerator there is no possible sort of doubt whatever. Its appearance upon the market ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... of the day was passed in the same dreadful tedium and suspense. I laid the table for dinner, while Northmour and Clara prepared the meal together in the kitchen. I could hear their talk as I went to and fro, and was surprised to find it ran all the time upon myself. Northmour again bracketed us together, and rallied Clara ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... They praise you warmly. For whom but my brother would these poor men have worked as they did upon the Orange Room— and all to show their gratitude? But it appears the worst part of captivity is its tedium and the way it depresses the mind; one sees that it must be. They dread Sundays most of all. And I said I would speak to you, and if any way ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... among musty law books and threading legal intricacies, with occasional interruptions, caused by fits of impatience and disgust at the detail and tedium of study, until he had at length fought his way through and placed himself in the front rank of his profession. His brilliant achievement in the famous Jenkins case, in the outset of his career, had at once won for him a position ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... shamming, discovery overtook him with a certainty that wrote "finis" to his last hope. Nevertheless, for this ordeal, as for his earlier regulating at the rendezvous, the sailor who knew his book prepared himself with exacting care during the tedium of his voyage. ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... bloodthirsty man, who was steeled to endurance and delighted in deeds of cruelty. To find him a man capable of feelings and affections, with a heart open to the wants, and responsive to the ties of social life, was amazing. But the surprise reached its acme, when I found him whiling away a part of the tedium of his long winter evenings in relating tales and legends for the amusement of the lodge circle. These fictions were sometimes employed, I observed, to convey instruction, or impress examples of courage, daring, or right action. But ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... a page of titles (half a peck, five-and-twenty or more, of handles to his little name, if you should ever require it); who, finding matters so backward at Frankfurt, and nothing to do there, has been out, in the interim, touring to while away the tedium; and is here only as sequel and corroboration of Belleisle,—say as bottle-holder, or as high-wrought peacock's-tail, to Belleisle:—of the eminent Montijos I have to record next to nothing in the shape of negotiation ("Treaty" with ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the positive comforts and happiness that education affords. Neither books nor public questions will interest him; his leisure moments will be a time of idleness and unbearable tedium; a whole world—the world of the mind—will be closed to him, with its joys, pleasures and ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... the most stirring things of his life. He was not telling what he saw and remembered and felt and was now living through. Rather, he seemed to be going over a wearying, many-times-told tale that he had rehearsed to tedium. A sleeping man might have told it so. The jury was left entirely unconvinced, though puzzled by the ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... contributing to your pleasure or your happiness? This young Queen of Portugal, under the guise of good-humour, hides a violent and irascible temperament. I believe her to be thoroughly selfish; suppose that she neglects and despises you, after having profited by your company to while away the tedium of her journey? Take my word for it, madame, you had better stay here with us; for there is no real society but in France, no wit but in our great world, no real happiness but in Paris. Draw up another petition ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... it might not be seeing all I would like to see, it would be doing something to while away the tedium of waiting, and there seemed a little of the spice of adventure about it that pleased ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... the east in astonishing rapidity. The rain yet continued to beat against the eastern windows of the house with fury; in that direction the heavens were dark and gloomy. Frances was gazing at the scene with the desire of youth to escape from the tedium of confinement, when, as if by magic, all was still. The rushing winds had ceased, the pelting of the storm was over, and, springing to the window, with delight pictured in her face, she saw a glorious ray of sunshine lighting the opposite wood. The foliage glittered with the checkered beauties ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... not very fresh for the journey to be sure, for he had ridden upwards of thirty miles that day, so the merry whistle, which is so constantly heard from the lively Irish pedestrian, did not while away the tedium of his walk. It was night when Andy was breasting up a low ridge of hills, which lay between him and the end of his journey; and when in silence and darkness he topped the ascent, he threw himself on some heather to rest and take breath. His attention was suddenly caught by a small blue flame, ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... life a lack of courage to do justice and be generous to one another. But surely, in the interest of political, historical, and personal rectitude, the dying man's message to the world should absolve him from having his lucid, succinct conversations jargoned into a tattered tedium. It is either a perversion of understanding or a misanthropic egoism that can twist Napoleon's discourses on religious topics into meaning that he ever was seriously thinking of giving preference to the worship of the sun, or contemplating becoming a follower of Mohammed, or that he ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... as the American stepped inside the slow-going car, she answered his "good morning" with a respectful, "good morning, sir." Being a good traveller, it seemed to me wise to prepare to while away the tedium of the long easy journey to the fourth floor ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... bearing on the larger issues of the election. Within doors the telegraph operator was already installed at the ancient table which had graced the grand-paternal distillery, and William Irons was making good the tedium of a dreary day in the deserted office by goggling from the ticking instrument to a consignment of iced champagne just arrived from the ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... Mediums, with whom we held several seances, relieved the tedium of waiting for a slate-communication by writing in pencil on slips of paper, under Spirit control, as we were assured, communications from a succession of Spirits. The hand of these communications was good, and in each one different as it would appear from different ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... to time the tedium was dispelled by varied incidents; many that were entertaining and instructive, some ludicrous, some pathetic, and others profoundly tragic. Agreeable happenings predominated largely during the early stages, and those involving difficulties and of grave import were mainly ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... but joyous citizen of the world at large was Mr. Phelan Harrihan, as, with a soul wholly in tune with the finite, he half sat and half reclined on a baggage-truck at Lebanon Junction. He wag relieving the tedium of his waiting moments by entertaining a critical if ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... her work, and certainly nothing of the tender sentiment of Persuasion. It is unfair, however, to judge from the first draft of a few introductory chapters, written as they no doubt were to relieve the tedium of long hours of confinement, and written perhaps also to comfort her friends by letting them see that she was still able to work. It is probable, too, that a long step in the downward progress of her condition was taken in the course of the seven weeks during ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... and very deeply laden, making hardly four miles an hour; but she had few passengers, was capitally provisioned, and possessed an indefatigable and most obliging commander, so that the tedium consequent upon such a progress had at least no nuisance superadded to ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... in the West looked out eagerly for the Missouri, hoping to find the valley of the river rich in scenery which would relieve the tedium of the journey. But when we came out upon the river-bank and looked at the dull shores, and the sandy bed, which the scant stream does not cover, but through which it creeps, treacherous and slimy, in half a dozen channels, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... true bent either of their own language or their own powers. This is especially obvious in the longer poems of Ronsard—his Odes and his Franciade—where all the effort and skill of the poet have not been enough to save his verse from tedium and inflation. The Classics swam into the ken of these early discoverers in such a blaze of glory that their eyes were dazzled and their feet misled. It was owing to their very eagerness to imitate their great models exactly—to ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... the spirit waxes numb, Alien and strange these shows become, And stricken with life's tedium The streams run dry, The choric spheres themselves are dumb, And dead ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... sympathy which not only exalts and sustains their higher natures, but, I conscientiously believe, gratifies and pleases their lower ones. Why should you deny them this opportunity of indulging their twofold organisms, and beguiling the tedium of the voyage, merely because of some erroneous ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... he lunched alone, to relieve the tedium of the meal with the assistance of reading matter in the shape of one or more of the evening papers. Today, sitting down to a solitary repast at the Piccadilly grill-room, he had brought with him an early edition of the Evening News. And one of the first items which met his eye was the following, ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... the evening smoking and reading before her study fire or receiving her guests; it is the thought of the woman who, as legislator, may loll for perhaps six hours of the day on the padded seat of legislative bench, relieving the tedium now and then by a turn in the billiard- or refreshment-room, when she is not needed to vote or speak; it is the thought of the woman as Greek professor, with three or four hundred a year, who gives half a dozen lectures a ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... This is the opinion of those adventurers in whom defeat has generated a sense of injury and an instinct of antagonism. Others less fortunate still have found Landor a continent of dulness and futility—have come to consider the Seven Volumes as so many aggregations of tedium. Such experiences are one-sided and partial no doubt; and considered from a certain point of view they seem worthless enough. But they exist, and they are in some sort justified. Landor, when all is said, remains a writers' writer; and for my part I find ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... in the same tone of readiness with which he had responded to Huntington. By keeping his mouth shut, and never taking sides in any of the occasional disagreements and disputes that enlivened the tedium of life in that community, Thompson had established a reputation for neutrality and trustworthiness, and was permitted to be ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... were not at all unusual in the Club at Manila, for they presented the only antidote to the leaden, soul-killing tedium of the dull monotony of garrison duty. Since the new insurrection on Mindanao and in the whole southern portion of the archipelago, the question as to the actual causes of the uprising, or rather the ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... it harms all sorts of men; not only the heroic and self-reliant, but the obedient, cowlike squadrons. A man, by this doctrine, looks to consequences at the second, or third, or fiftieth turn. He chooses his end, and for that, with wily turns and through a great sea of tedium, steers this mortal bark. There may be political wisdom in such a view; but I am persuaded there can spring no great moral zeal. To look thus obliquely upon life is the very recipe for moral slumber. Our intention and endeavour should be directed, not on some ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... The streets, the shops remain, but old friends are gone." "I assure you" (he goes on) "no work is worse than overwork. The mind preys on itself— the most unwholesome food. I have ceased to care almost for anybody." To remedy this tedium, he tries visiting; for the houses of his old friends were always open to him, and he had a welcome everywhere. But this visiting will not revive him. His spirits descended to zero—below it. He is convinced that happiness is not to be found abroad. It is better to go "to my ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... memorize certain names and addresses, lest time be lost in looking them up, to familiarize herself with the ordinary run of his correspondence, to recall what letters were to be marked "personal," to anticipate matters of routine, in order that he might not have the tedium of repeating instructions; she acquired the faculty of keeping his engagements in her head; she came early to the office, remaining after hours, going through the files, becoming familiar with his system; and she learned to sort out ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... which they are beheld, materially assist this ocular deception; but the hint thus thrown out may serve as a convenient peg on which passengers may hang a theory of their own, and thus beguile the tedium of their journey in default of more exciting ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... but not tiresome. To the philosophic mind, Dr. Frampton, there should be no such thing as tedium, boredom, ennui, and I trust that mine is philosophic. You were much in my thoughts, sir, between the attacks of sea-sickness. By frequent perusal I had committed your two epistles to memory, and while silently rehearsing their well-turned sentences, in the words of Dr. Samuel Johnson ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of the dances by which Washington and his officers and their ladies helped to while away the tedium of long winters during the Revolution, but the story of these has been often told and besides lies outside the limits of this book, as does the dancing at New York ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... the subject of his operation, is exactly in the state to be most easily and pleasantly operated upon. The reason now why some teachers find their work delightful, and some find it wearisomeness and tedium itself, is that some do, and some do not take this view of their work. One instructer is like the engine-boy, turning without cessation or change, his everlasting stop-cock, in the same ceaseless, mechanical, and ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... knew that she was much on deck after midnight, he was studious to keep out of her way. The tedium of stopping in a stuffy stateroom, when the spell of restlessness was on him, waiting for the sounds of his neighbour's return before he might venture forth, was nothing; anything were preferable to figuring as the innocent bystander at another encounter between the ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... instructors, dismayed by the amount of knowledge lost by students, resort to dictation devices. Others, realizing the pedagogical weakness of such teaching, distribute mimeographed outlines of carefully prepared summaries of the lectures. Now the student is relieved of the tedium of note taking, but the temptation to let his mind wander afield is intensified. An outline, scanty of detail, but so devised as to keep the organization and sequence of subject matter clear in the minds of students, is, of course, helpful. But detailed outlines distributed among the students ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... relieved the tedium of the march, each after his own manner. In an hour the bunch of loose horses lost its early-morning good spirits and settled down to a steady plodding, that needed no supervision. Tom Rich led them, now, in silence, his time fully occupied in rolling Mexican ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... china or glass and bric-a-brac, if she is very ill, and you need space for necessary glasses or other articles. It will be a pleasant way of beguiling the tedium of some long day in her convalescence to bring forth and arrange them in their accustomed places. Be careful of books, table-covers, and all the articles of luxury and beauty you will find in many of our city houses. Remember that these things belong to some one else, though ...
— Making Good On Private Duty • Harriet Camp Lounsbery
... from among a little group of clerks with whom he had been indulging in a few jokes by way of relief from the tedium of business. "Come this way," he said to Ellen; and sauntering before her, with a rather dissatisfied air, led the way out of the entrance hall into another and much larger apartment. There were plenty of people here ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... ever thoughtful for others! I promised to read every one of the papers, and I was soon rewarded for the unparalleled tedium of these studies. ...
— Much Darker Days • Andrew Lang (AKA A. Huge Longway)
... think of leaving the cool, sparkling stream that has been my almost constant companion for nearly a hundred miles. It has always been at hand to quench my thirst or furnish a refreshing bath. More than once have I beguiled the tedium of some uninteresting part of the journey by racing with some trifling object hurried along on its rippling surface. I shall miss the murmuring music of its dancing waters as one would miss the ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... performed his duty by sitting on a fence and "righting up" his pockets, to beguile the tedium of his exile. Before his multitudinous possessions could be restored to their native sphere, Thorn was himself again, and ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... witness an entire rotation of Jupiter in the course of one night, but the beginning and end of the observation would be more or less interfered with by the effects of low altitude, to say nothing of the tedium of so long a vigil. But by looking at the planet for an hour at a time in the course of a few nights every side of it will have been presented to view. Suppose the first observation is made between nine and ten o'clock on any night which may have ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... of Therese Raquin, with M. Zola. Not that there is not a place and an hour for him, and others like him; but they are not, if you please, to have the whole world to themselves, and all the time, and all the praise; they are not to turn the world into a dissecting-room, time into tedium, and the laurels of Scott and Dumas into crowns ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... this tedium by another summons to the office. Fortified with a glass of good wine, he returned to the encounter, inwardly calling upon his gods to direct him how to meet it. He found poor old Father Pennycuick aged ten ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... the ordained Watchers and Interpreters of that same holy mystery, listened with un-affected tedium to his consultations, and advised him, as the solution of such doubts, to 'drink beer, and dance with the girls.' Blind leaders of the blind! For what end were their tithes levied and eaten; for what were their shovel-hats ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... are commonly papers laid about to beguile the tedium, and as the faint rustle of our heroine's petticoats is warning that George's assertion that he knew his luck is immediately to be disproved, let us make a tiny little paper on the ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... the "tediousness" of the journey has undoubtedly a great hand in making some half-in-earnest men sceptics, if not scoffers. Many of us here to-night who can never now take this miserable man's way out of the tedium of the Christian life, yet most bitterly feel it. Whether that tedium is inherent in that life, and inevitable to such men as we are who are attempting that life; how far that feature belongs to the very essence of the pilgrim life, and how far ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... full, "fast asleep," without the tremor of an eyelid, if I may so style a weather leach, or of any inch of the canvas, from the royals down to the courses. Every condition was as if arranged for a special occasion, or to recompense us for the tedium of the horse latitudes. The moon was big, and there was a clear sky, save for the narrow band of tiny clouds, massed like a flock of sheep, which ever fringes the horizon of the trades; always on the horizon, as you progress, yet never visible above when the horizon of this hour ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... together in a modern railway-carriage will often become better acquainted in three hours than they might as next-door neighbors in three years; and this was still more likely to happen in the old days of coach journeys, when the very tedium of the occasion served as an inducement to frank and friendly conversation. Pierce was the right man to bring Hawthorne out of his hard shell of Sebago seclusion. He had already been one year at Bowdoin, and at that time there was not the same caste ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... thoughtful for others! I promised to read every one of the papers, and I was soon rewarded for the unparalleled tedium of ...
— Much Darker Days • Andrew Lang (AKA A. Huge Longway)
... death there was nothing to relieve the tedium of Hannah's life, and but for her trust in God her reason must have given way under the strain, for it was not only her own sorrow, but her father's as well, which she had to bear. With him there was no rest, day or night, and ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... they were philosophers and seekers after the beauty that underlies the form of things, they made the picture express its own significance, and every song find echo in the souls of those that heard. You will find no tedium of repetition in all their poetry, no thin vein of thought beaten out over endless pages. The following extract from an ancient treatise on the art of poetry called 'Ming-Chung' sets forth most clearly certain ideals to ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... The monotonous tedium of routine slave-labor was very often broken by some scene of cruelty to one or another of the poor blacks, either by the master or his overseer; and woe unto the luckless one if the master should happen to be in a good mood to break bones. Although slaves were worth money in the South at that time, ...
— Biography of a Slave - Being the Experiences of Rev. Charles Thompson • Charles Thompson
... to curse you for your tedium And frequent stops in search of wayside rest, Nor call you, through the morning papers' medium, A crying scandal and a public pest; I designate you, on the other hand, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 26, 1916 • Various
... of Newcastle, New South Wales; of Sir John Herschel and Professor J. C. Adams; of William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, the opponents of the slave-trade. There is also a very beautiful sketch of the head of William Wordsworth; this study was made by Pickersgill to save the poet the tedium of long sittings for the portrait in the Hall. It was presented to the College by Miss Arundale, a descendant of the painter. The smaller Combination Room contains many engraved portraits of distinguished members ...
— St. John's College, Cambridge • Robert Forsyth Scott
... whispered jest and stealthy game, and all the noise and drawl of school; and in the midst of the din sat the poor schoolmaster, the very image of meekness and simplicity, vainly attempting to fix his mind upon the duties of the day, and to forget his little sick friend. But the tedium of his office reminded him more strongly of the willing scholar, and his thoughts were rambling from his pupils—it was plain. None knew this better than the idlest boys, who, growing bolder with impunity, waxed louder and more daring—eating apples under the master's eye, pinching ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... never go faster than a walk; a man on foot can outstrip them, as they rarely exceed three miles an hour. The tedium of a journey under such circumstances is something dreadful, and in the hot months one has to stop five or six hours in the middle of the day to avoid ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... him on the knowledge to be extracted from the wall-pictures and renewed his provision of meat and drink, after which he left him again to solitude. So whenever the youth was straitened in breast by the tedium and ennui of loneliness, he applied himself diligently to his object-lessons and mastered all the deductions therefrom. His governor seeing this turned his mind into other channel and taught him the inner meanings of the external objects; and in a ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... were strangers in the West looked out eagerly for the Missouri, hoping to find the valley of the river rich in scenery which would relieve the tedium of the journey. But when we came out upon the river-bank and looked at the dull shores, and the sandy bed, which the scant stream does not cover, but through which it creeps, treacherous and slimy, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... that Nero from tedium sought recreation in night attacks. Even Petronius took part in these amusements. Their main object was to seize women and toss each on a soldier's mantle till she fainted. Even Nero himself on occasions called these expeditions "pearl hunts," for it happened that in the ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... their individual salvation. The remainder followed Cabet to the deserted Mormon town of Nauvoo, Illinois, where vacant houses offered immediate shelter and where they enjoyed an interval of prosperity. The French genius for music, for theatricals, and for literature relieved them from the tedium that characterized most co-operative colonies. Soon their numbers increased to five hundred by accessions which, with few exceptions, ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... capital by pressing the need for uncommercial employment of capital at home: the only practicable alternative. It knows that war, on its romantic side, is "the sport of kings": and it concludes that we had better get rid of kings unless they can kill their tedium with more democratic amusements. It notes the fact that though the newspapers shout at us that these battles on fronts a hundred miles long, where the slain outnumber the total forces engaged in older campaigns, are the greatest battles known to history, such machine-carnages bore us so horribly ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... free and honest expression to your thoughts? Now, were you not summoned to the Shamrag's presence to answer for the crime of lese-majeste? And were you not, for your audacity, left to brood ten days and nights in gaol? And what tedium we have in Shakib's History about the charge on which he was arrested. It is unconscionable that Khalid should misappropriate Party funds. Indeed, he never even touched or saw any of it, excepting, of course, ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... asked Caper, 'are those of us who don't win the prize, going to do with paintings of such a size, left on our hands? Nobody, unless a steamboat captain, who wants to ornament his berths, just that size, and relieve the tedium of his passengers, would ever think of ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... prevents any thing like regular occupation. We do nothing all the day but wander restlessly about among the old haunts which were our favourites in the peaceful time of our early sojourn here. Max has endeavoured to relieve the tedium, and get up an interest of some sort, by renewing his attempts against the great eel. But the patriarch is as wary, and his stronghold beneath the roots of the buttress tree as impregnable as ever, and all efforts to his prejudice, whether ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... little work to do, but he didn't mind that; it would help immensely to beguile the tedium of the voyage; and all he required in order to do it well was the moral courage to shut himself up for a few hours each day and to avoid as far as possible ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... hear things expressed, put into words. Whilst the religious feelings were inside her they were passionately moving. In the mouth of the clergyman, they were false, indecent. She tried to read. But again the tedium and the sense of the falsity of the spoken word put her off. She went to stay with girl friends. At first she thought it splendid. But then the inner boredom came on, it seemed to her all nothingness. And she felt always ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... islands. He did not know them all; he had never been to Samos, famous for its wine and its women.... The wine cloyed the palate and no woman charmed him in the dance; and he sailed away wondering how he might relieve the tedium of life, until one day, after long voyaging, sufficiently recovered from his grief and himself, he leaned over the taffrail, this time lost in admiration of the rocks and summits above Syracuse, the Sicilian coasts carrying his thoughts out of the present into the past, to ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... clinging—anything confidential, any true spirit of comradeship! On the contrary, while she was still ill in bed, and almost absolutely dependent on what he might choose to do for her, she gibed and flouted him past bearing, mainly, no doubt, for the sake of breaking the tedium of her confinement a little. And when she was about again, and he was defending her weakness from Aunt Hannah, it seemed to him that she viewed his proceedings rather with a malicious than a grateful eye. It amused and excited ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sole judges when gods there were none, were unable to conceive any other. Accordingly, finding the painter's remarks somewhat overfull of fanaticism, and the Monk's of simplicity, to please his taste, this wise man, bent on squaring his behaviour with his views and relieving the tedium of waiting, drew from the bulging pocket of his plum-coloured coat his Lucretius, now as always his chiefest solace and faithful comforter. The binding of red morocco was chafed by hard wear, and the citoyen Brotteaux had judiciously erased the coat of arms that once embellished it,—three ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... am glad to be a writer or a reader in 1826, but I would be most interested in reading or relating what happened from half a century to a century before. We have the best of it. Scenes in which our ancestors thought deeply, acted fiercely, and died desperately, are to us tales to divert the tedium of a winter's evening, when we are engaged to no party, or beguile a summer's morning, when it is too scorching ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... he ascertained that he was to be kept a prisoner in the cottage until the return of the Wasp, he at once made up his mind to submit with a good grace to what could not be avoided. In order to prove that he was by no means cast down, as well as to lighten the tedium of his confinement, Jo entertained himself by singing snatches of sea songs—such as, "My tight little craft,"—"A life on the stormy sea,"—"Oh! for a draught of the howling blast," etcetera, all of which he delivered in a bass voice so powerful ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... hundred feet below her, the house making itself bright with candles, and this was a broad hint to her to hurry. For they were only kindled on a Sabbath night with a view to that family worship which rounded in the incomparable tedium of the day and brought on the relaxation of supper. Already she knew that Robert must be within-sides at the head of the table, "waling the portions"; for it was Robert in his quality of family priest and judge, not the ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and cartoons bearing on the larger issues of the election. Within doors the telegraph operator was already installed at the ancient table which had graced the grand-paternal distillery, and William Irons was making good the tedium of a dreary day in the deserted office by goggling from the ticking instrument to a consignment of iced champagne just arrived from the ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... we often exchanged significant looks, but never any words. Occasionally I had a visit from an officer; these gentlemen sitting down and conversing with me, on general topics, evidently to relieve the tedium of my confinement, without making any allusion to its cause. I cannot say that my health suffered, a circumstance that was probably owing to the cleanliness of the ship, and the admirable manner in which she ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... that he twice tries to commit suicide by throwing himself into the sea. The last act is spun out to three scenes in accordance with the demand for greater regularity of dramatic construction, but gains nothing but tedium thereby. The other play to be considered connects itself in plot rather with the Pastor fido. It is the Filli di Sciro, the work of Guidubaldo Bonarelli della Rovere. The poet's father enjoyed the protection ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... quiet and secluded fortress, away from the world, in which he might pursue an undisturbed and ordered life of solemnity and delicate impressions of a sacred sort of beauty. His desire for community life was caused by his decided dislike of the world, of fuss and tedium and conventional occupations. He was never in the least degree a typical person. He had no wish to be distinguished, or to influence other minds or lives, or to gain honour or consideration. These things simply appeared to him as not worth striving ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... by the amount of knowledge lost by students, resort to dictation devices. Others, realizing the pedagogical weakness of such teaching, distribute mimeographed outlines of carefully prepared summaries of the lectures. Now the student is relieved of the tedium of note taking, but the temptation to let his mind wander afield is intensified. An outline, scanty of detail, but so devised as to keep the organization and sequence of subject matter clear in the minds of students, is, ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... out of the blue. He could bear poverty, neglect, hardships, even death itself; but imprisonment, with a disgraceful execution as the only end of it, that he was not at first prepared to endure. He had tasted captivity in the Tower once before; he knew the intolerable tedium and fret of it; and the very prospect maddened him. Nor would his thoughts be only or mainly of himself. He would reflect that if he were once condemned, nothing but financial ruin and social obloquy would attend his wife and children; and this it was which inspired the ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... generous to one another. But surely, in the interest of political, historical, and personal rectitude, the dying man's message to the world should absolve him from having his lucid, succinct conversations jargoned into a tattered tedium. It is either a perversion of understanding or a misanthropic egoism that can twist Napoleon's discourses on religious topics into meaning that he ever was seriously thinking of giving preference to the worship of the sun, or contemplating becoming ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... invention of an astronomer, who lived more than 5,000 years ago, and was possessed of supernatural knowledge and acuteness. Greek historians assert that the game was invented by Palamedes to beguile the tedium of the siege of Troy. The Arab legend is that it was devised for the instruction of a young despot, by his father, a learned Brahman, to teach the youth that a king, no matter how powerful, was dependent upon his ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... something so implacable about this demand for food. If you skimped in the morning you must make amends at the next meal. He passed the time as on the previous day, a somewhat blase actor resting between pictures, and condescending to beguile the tedium by overlooking the efforts of his professional brethren. He could find no set that included a barber shop, although they were beds on every hand. He hoped for another night in the cabin, but if that were not to be, there was a bed easy of access ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... were. She is reading the mysterious letter, said he to himself. Just then it chanced that Signora Rovero spoke of Gaetano Brignoli, to whom she paid the greatest compliments. Aminta returned with an expression altogether changed. Her face was lit up with joy, as expressive and animated as the tedium and thoughtfulness which marked it had been profound. Maulear did not sympathize with her gayety, and she became every moment more moody and sombre. Under the pretext of a headache, he retired to his room. New thoughts assailed him. He looked out on the terrace where he had seen ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... Virginia, and help to build up a new English empire in the West; but all in vain. It was feared that his unexpired and dormant patent might interfere with the King's own Virginia charter. So Raleigh and Hariot worked on, but relieved the tedium by ever changing study. Every year or two, as long as he could command through himself or friends the resources, Raleigh sent privately a reconnoitring and intelligence ship to Guiana, to keep that pet enterprise alive. In this delicate matter ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... of pure tedium. After the first accelerating blasts, the rockets were silent. There was no weight. There was nothing to hear except the droning murmur of unresting electric fans, stirring the air ceaselessly so that excess moisture from breathing could be extracted ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... Archibald Roylance did not altogether believe Dickson's tale; it may be that he considered him an agreeable romancer, or a little mad, or no more than a relief to the tedium of a wet Sunday morning. But his incredulity did not survive one glance at Saskia as she stood in that bleak drawing-room among Victorian water-colours and faded chintzes. The young man's boyishness deserted him. ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... killing the time, and lightening the tedium of a sea passage to the refugees, we bethought us of getting up a play. This was managed by one of the lieutenants of marines, a fellow of great taste, and some one or two of the midshipmen, who pretended to skill in the Shakespearian art. What the piece was I do not recollect, ...
— The Surrender of Napoleon • Sir Frederick Lewis Maitland
... school is a joy, management is less of a burden, and learning is easier. Sometimes, perhaps, plays, games, and constructive occupations are resorted to only for these reasons, with emphasis upon relief from the tedium and strain of "regular" school work. There is no reason, however, for using them merely as agreeable diversions. Study of mental life has made evident the fundamental worth of native tendencies to explore, to manipulate tools and materials, ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... The tedium of meetings of the Cabinet was often relieved, and troublesome matters before it were illuminated, by some apt and pithy story. Secretary Welles tells of such an occasion when "Seward was embarrassed about the Dominican [sic] question. To move either way threatened ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... himself the Son of Fortune and listened with complacency to a foolish rhyme that ran: God only and the Moor foreknow the future safe and sure, he never acted without blundering, and lived to end his days in the intolerable tedium of imprisonment at Loches. He was a thoughtful and painstaking ruler; yet he so far failed to win the affection of his subjects that they tossed up their caps for joy at the first chance of getting ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... for his sins (or other people's), was confined in an underground dungeon containing sixty-four cells, all communicating with open doorways, as shown in our illustration. In order to reduce the tedium of his restricted life, he set himself various puzzles, and this is one of them. Starting from the cell in which he is shown, how could he visit every cell once, and only once, and make as many ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... spread from prisoner to prisoner with the speed of wings; every face was seen to be illuminated like those of the spectators at a horse-race; and indeed you must first have tasted the active life of a soldier, and then mouldered for a while in the tedium of a gaol, in order to understand, perhaps even to excuse, the delight of our companions. Goguelat and I slept in the same squad, which greatly simplified the business; and a committee of honour was accordingly formed of our shed-mates. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "spirit," entire high priest, entire perfection, promenades in his garden: he only wants pastime. Against tedium even Gods struggle in vain. What does he do? He contrives man—man is entertaining.... But behold, man also wants pastime. The pity of God for the only distress which belongs to all paradises has no bounds: he forthwith created other animals besides. The first mistake of God: man did not find ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... a totally different affair. It was a matter of spring and kisses and a perfect spiritual companionship.... As I have said, he gets into a terrible muddle. Anyhow, between the two conflicting ideals, he does not fall to the ground of vulgar amours. At the risk of tedium I feel bound to insist on this aspect of his life. For in the errant cosmopolitan world in which he, irresponsible and now well salaried bachelor had his being, he was thrown into the free and easy comradeship of hundreds of attractive women, as ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... least. Andy was not very fresh for the journey to be sure, for he had ridden upwards of thirty miles that day, so the merry whistle, which is so constantly heard from the lively Irish pedestrian, did not while away the tedium of his walk. It was night when Andy was breasting up a low ridge of hills, which lay between him and the end of his journey; and when in silence and darkness he topped the ascent, he threw himself on some heather to rest and take breath. His attention ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... the New Zealanders, the N.S. W. Lancers, some Rimington Guides, and the composite Household Regiment; his artillery, the R and O batteries of R.H.A., the 4th R.F.A., and a section of the 37th Howitzer Battery. At the risk of tedium I have repeated the units of this force, because there are no operations during the war, with the exception perhaps of those of the Rhodesian Column, concerning which it is so difficult to get a clear impression. The fluctuating forces, the vast range of country covered, and the petty ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... make him well acquainted with the dangers of the coast, he thought that, as Newton was fully equal to the charge of the vessel, he might as well indulge himself with an occasional glass or two, to while away the tedium of embarkation. A stone pitcher of liquor was now his constant attendant when he pulled on board to weigh his anchor; which said pitcher, for fear of accidents, he carried down into the cabin himself. As soon ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... disseminating his views, showing that the people would not be satisfied, or the ferment of parties subside, without the changes he proposed; and declared that if he were in the Signory, he would soon carry them into effect. In human affairs, delay causes tedium, and haste danger. To avoid what was tedious, Donato Acciajuoli resolved to attempt what involved danger. Michele Acciajuoli his relative, and Niccolo Ricoveri his friend, were of the Signory. This seemed to Donato a conjuncture of circumstances ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... feeling, at this period, among us, that the voyage had but now commenced. The labours of a bad summer, and the tedium of a long winter, were forgotten in a moment when we found ourselves upon ground not hitherto explored, and with every apparent prospect before us of making as rapid a progress as the nature of this navigation will permit towards the final accomplishment ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... Major Smith proposes to add to the College a Manual Labor Department, in which the elder boys shall acquire the rudiments of the arts and trades to which they are destined. This will alleviate the tedium of the College routine, assist the physical development of the boys, and send them forth prepared to render more desirable help to their employers. The present Board ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... unfavourable to the existing government and dynasty. He entered, therefore, without hesitation into the resentful feeling of the relations who had the best title to dictate his conduct, and not perhaps the less willingly when he remembered the tedium of his quarters, and the inferior figure which he had made among the officers of his regiment. If he could have had any doubt upon the subject it would have been decided by the following letter from ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... the constant intercourse with which they had flattered themselves—the only thing that made London endurable to poor Emma. She amused Violet with her lamentations over her gaieties, and her piteous accounts of the tedium of parties and balls; whereas Violet declared that she ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was his happiness entirely and solely the essence of his material ease. This was his third morning out of doors, and on each of the two mornings that were gone Hortensia had borne him company, coming with the charitable intent of lightening his tedium by reading to him, but remaining ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... favourite were as follows. He rose early, drove or rode for an hour, and after breakfast transacted business for a time. He then relieved the tedium of that time by witnessing exhibitions of skill and daring by his private matadors, after which he spent about three hours in the society of the Queen. He then devoted the same length of time to the conduct of public business with the King; and the day ended with dinner, fetes, the opera, ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... would have been much more of a man if he had thought less of being a gentleman. He had taken a liking to Donal, and having found in him a strong desire after every kind of knowledge of which he himself had any share, had sought to enliven the tedium of an existence rendered not a little flabby from want of sufficient work, by imparting to him of the treasures he had gathered. They were not great, and he could never have carried him far, for he was himself only a respectable student, not a little lacking in perseverance, ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... work embodying a multitude of useful hints and suggestions regarding the proper care of the person and the formation of refined habits and manners. The subject is treated with good sense and good taste, and is relieved from tedium by an abundance of entertaining anecdotes and historical incident. The author is thoroughly acquainted with the laws of hygiene, and wisely inculcates them while specifying the rules based upon them which regulate the civilities and ceremonies of ...
— Publisher's Advertising (1872) • Anonymous
... bare, he could not touch a toad. It was true that the beast had amused him, and that he had chatted to it; but after all, this was a piece of childish folly—an unmanly way, to say the least, of relieving the tedium of captivity. What was Monsieur Crapaud but a very ugly (and most people said a venomous) reptile? To what a folly he had been condescending! With these thoughts, Monsieur the Viscount steeled himself against the glances of his topaz-eyed ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... the first she had stimulated him; something in her personality invariably affected him. Now that he was feeling his way toward her voice, he found her more interesting than ever before. She lifted the tedium of the winter for him, gave him curious fancies and reveries. Musically, she was sympathetic to him. Why all this was true, he never asked himself. He had learned that one must take where and when one can the mysterious mental irritant that ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... ox-goads, who prodded the unwilling beasts along. On a curve I counted the wagons ahead and behind. I knew that there were forty of them, including our own; for often I had counted them before. And as I counted them now, as a child will to while away tedium, they were all there, forty of them, all canvas-topped, big and massive, crudely fashioned, pitching and lurching, grinding and jarring over sand and sage- brush ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... those which memory could supply; and therefore does not presume to think his volume proof against the rigid censor: but to liberal criticism he submits, with the confidence of a man conscious of having neither negligence nor presumption to impute to himself. He wrote to beguile the tedium of many a heavy hour; and when he wrote looked not beyond the satisfaction which at some future period might be afforded to a few friends, as well as to his own mind, by a review of those hardships which in common ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... do not like your look, Your brows are (see the poets) bent; You're biting hard on Tedium's hook, You're jaundiced, crumpled, footled, spent. What's worse, so mischievous your state You have no pluck to try and trick it. Here! Cram this cap upon your pate And come with me ...
— More Cricket Songs • Norman Gale
... our interchange of thought—treasures whence should issue a unique satisfaction for passion and desire, hours of poetry to outweigh years, joys to make a man serve a lifetime for one gracious gesture,—all this is to be buried in the tedium of a tame, commonplace marriage, to vanish in the emptiness of an existence which you will come to loath! I hate your children before they are ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... upon the highest truths of God. Good music, beautiful scenery, works of art, splendid architecture and fine clothing should not be pursued for their own sake, but only so far as they may be necessary to relieve the tedium and monotony of toil and labor, or as a curative measure to dispel gloom and low spirits or a tendency to melancholy. The same thing applies to the arts and sciences. Medicine is of assistance in maintaining bodily health and curing it of its ills. The ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... woman and placed a kiss on it, in the glances with which he seemed to tear her away from her shelter, in the intonation given to certain words, was attained the primitiveness of desire and conquest under cover of polished refinement. Amid the tedium and dissatisfaction of ordinary and exercised lovemakers this method seemed cynical, but bold and honest. It might have been compared to the shaggy head of a beast sticking out of a basket of heliotropes, which have ever the character ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... man two stanes. You can either get your "stanes" in England and travel out with them, or hire them in the locality. They make the most pleasant travelling companions and at times are the cause of many amusing incidents which beguile the tedium of the journey. Also they often lead to your picking up chance acquaintances. I have known one stone placed in a dimly lighted corridor of a train productive of much merriment and harmless banter. Being of considerable weight they do not readily respond to a playful kick, but having ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... months rolled by, with a trip abroad now and then to relieve the tedium of existence. For a woman to know that she comes to be tolerated only because she is decorative, is a consummating blow. Pell soon reached the point where he told Lucia he had bought her, body and soul. He had determined to win her love. When he saw ...
— The Bad Man • Charles Hanson Towne
... thereafter the long tedium of existence in the settlement began to be broken in earnest. Before they could digest the flavour of one event, something else happened. In the afternoon word came down to Stiffy and Mahooley that the bishop had ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... deem the story too long, and the characters too numerous, the Author can only beg their pardon for any tedium that they may have undergone before giving ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... the winter life up to date; no great excitements, nothing untoward, but a remarkable bonhomie obtaining in our little company despite the tedium of so many days of winter gloom. On June 27 Dr. Wilson with Bowers and Cherry-Garrard started on a remarkable journey to Cape Crozier, nearly seventy miles distant from Cape Evans, via Hut Point and the Barrier. The object of these ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... during this brief little talk. She found that Hammond could say better and more comprehensive things than even her dear old tutor, Mr. Hayes. Hammond was abreast of the present-day aspect of those things in which Prissie delighted. Her short talk with him made up for all the tedium of the rest of ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... has its feasts and its holidays. No where better than in arctic climates are these celebrated by persons of every age and sex. There are innumerable games and pastimes around the fire, where the wildest merriment drives away the tedium of the long wintry night. Stories are told, songs are sung, tricks are played. There is dancing in the lighted hall; there is love making in the dark corners; and to crown the festival there is a sleigh-ride under the cold moon, when the music of the bells, the tramping ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... pleasantly enough, with a young fellow who had certainly some reason to be satisfied with his own success thus far in life, and who could relieve the tedium of ship's duty in such society. I cannot say I was in love, though I often thought of Emily when she was not before my eyes, and actually dreamt of her three times, in the first fortnight after the re-capture of the ship. What was a little remarkable, as I conceive, I often ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... Boston is not entirely an experience of bitterness. On the contrary, there are many things besides the mutual amiability of these beautiful martyrs which relieve its tedium and horrors. A whole car-full of people, brought into the closest contact with one another, yet in the absence of introductions never exchanging a word, each being so sufficient to himself as to need no social stimulus whatever, is certainly an impressive ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... and plenty. They exult, they cannot contain the joy that is in them. They come and go aimlessly,—they whose every movement has always its precise and useful purpose—they depart and return, sally forth once again to see if the queen be ready, to excite their sisters, to beguile the tedium of waiting. They fly much higher than is their wont, and the leaves of the mighty trees round about all quiver responsive. They have left trouble behind, and care. They no longer are meddling and fierce, aggressive, suspicious, untamable, angry. Man—the unknown master whose sway they never acknowledge, ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... islands and the sea. When the natives first saw a steamer on the horizon they thought it was Nemunemu's ship, and the smoke at the funnel they took to be the tobacco-smoke which he puffed to beguile the tedium of the voyage.[397] They are also great believers in magic and witchcraft, and cases of sickness and death, which are not attributed to the malignity of ghosts and spirits, are almost invariably set down to the machinations of sorcerers. Only the deaths of decrepit old folks ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... this was ragged, there was quite a wild chase of shadow and moon-glimpse over the surface of the shuddering water. I had to hold my hat on, and was growing rather tired, and inclined to go back in disgust, when a little incident occurred to break the tedium. A sudden and violent squall of wind sundered the low underwood, and at the same time there came one of those brief discharges of moonlight, which leaped into the opening thus made, and showed me three girls in the prettiest flutter and disorder. It was as though ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... her, certainly; nevertheless during the heat and tedium of the days that followed, certain cadences of that dulcet voice returned to him like a haunting melody, suggesting visions of a garden, fresh with splashing fountains, where Bianca wandered in company with other fair women playing on the viol and ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... his head, for it did not seem to him to be his destiny to relieve the tedium of a yachting excursion in ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... should be a love at once sensual and divine, manifested with wit and poetry. Who says love says suffering; suffering from separation; suffering from disagreement. Love in itself is a sublime and pathetic drama. When happy, it is silent. Now, the cause of the tedium of Madame d'Arnim's book," he added, "is easily discoverable by a soul that loves. Goethe did not love Bellina. Put a big stone in Goethe's place—the Sphinx no power has ever been able to wrest from its desert sand—and Bellina's letters are understandable. Unlike Pygmalion's fable, the more ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... that Virgil who was called "The Maiden" as Milton was named "The Lady of Christ's." I don't know the archeology of it, perhaps it was a mere work of modern fancy, but the charm of this image, beheld daily, overcame even the tedium of short scraps of the "AEneid" daily parsed, not without stripes and anguish. So I retain a sentiment for Virgil, though I well perceive the many drawbacks ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... embroiled the village. Alone and having to live incessantly in such close contact, the women had come to hate each other as do passengers isolated on a boat for many months. Besides, their husbands had accustomed them to the use of coffee, the seaman's drink, and they tried to beguile their tedium with strong cups of the ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... who had the pleasure of knowing him. When the little seaside town was empty of visitors, and it was not time to pay Edinburgh visits for the season, in February and March, one kindness of his was very greatly prized by some of us who beguiled the tedium of the winter months by writing for and conducting an amateur magazine, called Ours. For this, in 1872 and 1873, Mr Stevenson gave us a short contribution, The Nun of Aberhuern, a trifle in his own graceful style, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... petted courtier of Elizabeth, fell on evil days after her death. On the charge of taking part in a conspiracy against the crown, he was sent to the Tower, where he was kept a prisoner for thirteen years. From the tedium of his long confinement, he found relief in the composition of a History of the World. ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... two invalids, Walter and Eden, recovered but slowly. But for the kindness of every one about them their hours would have passed very wearily in the sickroom. Their tedium was enlivened by constant visits from Henderson and Power, who never failed to interest Walter by their school news, and especially by telling of those numerous little incidents which tended to show that although after the late excitements there ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... the aristocratic compasses were again and again, with small reluctant extensions to successive greater distances, defining the scope of the knowledge proper for a man of his condition? It is a bad thing, is it, that he has a multiplicity of ideas to relieve the tedium incident to the sameness of his course of life; that, with many things which had else been but mere insignificant facts, or plain dry notions and principles, he has a variety of interesting associations; ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... present of an armadillo, or ant-eater, who is certainly a wonderful animal, and well worth studying, in the tedium of a calm between the tropics. The body proper is but about nine inches, but, when stretched at length, he covers an extent of two and a half feet, from head to tail, and is wholly fortified with ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... you have come, my dear niece," he said, "to relieve the tedium of our uneventful existence. You must let our Vermont air kiss the roses into bloom again in your pale cheeks. It has a world-wide reputation as a tonic. I hope you left our Marlborough relatives in a pleasant attitude of mind? It is one of the evidences ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... are equally constant in kind. In Kyd, in Greene still more, in Peele more still, in Marlowe most of all, phrases and passages of blinding and dazzling poetry flash out of the midst of the bombast and the tedium. Many of these are known, by the hundred books of extract which have followed Lamb's Specimens, to all readers. Such, for instance, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... yourself if you fell into a muddy pond. But I shouldn't like to stand on the bank and watch you doing it. I know what girls in the chorus have to go through. Hanging about for hours in draughts, doing nothing, while the principals go through their scenes, and yelled at if they try to relieve the tedium of captivity with a little light conversation ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... a farce, of course, but underneath the fantastic affectation there was a very real sentiment, that of the intolerable tedium of captivity. Raleigh had been living a life of exaggerated activity, never a month at rest, now at sea, now in Devonshire, now at Court, hurrying hither and thither, his horse and he one veritable centaur. Among the Euphuistic 'tears of fancy' ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... feet from the top of the high pole he would cling protected, seemingly, by some force working in direct defiance of the law of gravity. And now and then, by way of brightening the tedium of their job, he and his gang would call to a girl passing in the ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... pose; her eyes upon the point the artist had indicated; but—as the man, himself, was almost directly in her line of vision—it was easy for her to watch him at his work, when his eyes were on his canvas or palette. The arrangement was admirable in that it relieved the tedium of the hour for the sitter; and gave her face an expression of animated interest that, truthfully fixed upon the canvas, should insure the fame and future ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... survey of his realm, are hard if not weary reading; but the rest is a masterpiece of historic restoration. The introductory portion, leading us through one of the most tangled woods of genealogy and political adjustment, is relieved from tedium by the procession of the half-forgotten host of German worthies,—St. Adalbert and his mission; old Barbarossa; Leopold's mystery; Conrad and St. Elizabeth; Ptolemy Alphonso; Otto with the arrow; Margaret ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... of a cheerful disposition, though simple and easily cheated. When carrying palkis or litters at night they talk continually or sing monotonous songs to lighten the tedium of the way. In illustration of these qualities the following story is told: One day when Mahadeo and Parvati were travelling the goddess became very tired, so Mahadeo created four men from the dust, who bore her in a litter. On the way they talked and laughed, and Parvati ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... the house whatever, utterly ignored as existences. At present, half way on our pilgrimage through the nineteenth century, I reply to such a learned remonstrant—that it gives me pain to annoy him by superfluous explanations, but that, unhappily, this infliction of tedium upon him is inseparable from what has now become a duty to others. This being said, I now go on to inform the illiterate reader, that the earliest translation of the Hebrew Scriptures ever made was into ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... course, we were constantly compelled to turn and wind about in every direction—sometimes standing on for several hours at a stretch to the southward and eastward. These perpetual embarrassments became at length very wearying, and in order to relieve the tedium of our progress I requested the Doctor to remove one of my teeth. This he did with the greatest ability—a wrench to starboard,—another to port, and up it flew through the ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... of Crispin, leathern-capt, Prepared to buy a ballad, if one apt To move his fancy offers. Crispin's sons Have, from uncounted time, with ale and buns, Cherish'd the gift of Song, which sorrow quells; And, working single in their low-rooft cells, Oft cheat the tedium of a winter's night With anthems warbled in the Muses' spight.— Who now hath caught the alarm? the Servant Maid, Hath heard a buzz at distance; and, afraid To miss a note, with elbows red comes out. Leaving his forge to cool, ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... earnest coadjutor; but from a very different impulse. M. de Soissons panted for power, and loathed every impediment to the gratification of his ambition; while the young Prince, less firm of purpose, and more greedy of pleasure and ostentation, was wearied by the obscurity of his existence, and the tedium ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... occasionally prompt a smile to see his expedients, to relieve it. Finding little that was congenial to his tastes or his talents in the arts or the society of the place, he would sometimes seek to abridge the tedium and length of his stay at Rome, by episodes of lark-shooting at Subiaco, or by looking after wild-boars at Ostia; and some, to whom hunting was indispensable, would hire dogs and make them chase each other, while they harked on the ragged pack, on the best hacks they ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... it if they were Germans. The bestiality was there all right. But after the victory, eternal peace. Plenty of this is quite cynically deliberate. For the skilful propagandist knows that while you must start with a plausible analysis, you must not keep on analyzing, because the tedium of real political accomplishment will soon destroy interest. So the propagandist exhausts the interest in reality by a tolerably plausible beginning, and then stokes up energy for a long voyage by brandishing a ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... pathetic bells, or some figure coming athwart the fields, made picturesque by a gleaner's bundle or a woodman's fagot, there is no change, no variety, no beauty anywhere; and he who has dwelt upon the mountains or amidst the forests feels oppressed as by imprisonment with the tedium and the endlessness of that vast and dreary level. But it is green and very fertile, and it has wide horizons that have a certain charm of their own even in their dulness and monotony; and among the rushes by the water-side the flowers grow, and the trees rise tall and fresh where the barges glide ...
— A Dog of Flanders • Louisa de la Rame)
... discontent, and was the more miserable over her want of power to control it, because of the terror that hung over her lest repinings might bring on them all the judicial punishment of a terrible break-up of the home she loved, even while the tedium of the daily round oppressed her. Alternate plaintiveness and weary sharpness of course aggravated both Alda and Bernard, and they knew nothing of the repentant wretchedness that rather weakened than ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... brothers and sisters?' I asked; 'how hath this circumstance affected them?' The road was bleak and long, so that the old soldier's gossip was a welcome break to the tedium of ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Roberts's headquarters barely a month ago, and from which he had sent the summons to Johannesburg to surrender. All around, indeed, was the scene of recent fighting, and various polite transport officers tried to while away the tedium of our enforced delay by pointing out various faint ridges, and explaining that there the Gordons had made their splendid charge, or, again, that farther back General French had encountered such a stubborn resistance, and so on, ad libitum. In ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... 'Doubtless the tedium of such a state to a man of the temperament of the gallant commander,' etc., the termination of the article was indulgent. Rosamund recurred to the final paragraph for comfort, and though she loved Beauchamp, the test of her representative feminine sentiment regarding ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... proceeded in them both a great knowledge of truth and a defence of it, to the tedium of their friends: a demotion to the beauty of women and of this world; an outspoken hatred of certain things and men, and, alas! a permanent sadness also. All these things the gods gave them in the day when the decision was taken upon Olympus that these two men should not profit by any great good ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... trying to forget our tired limbs in a discussion of literary tastes and standards, our workmates had been relieving the treadmill tedium of the long afternoon by various expedients. The quartet at the table immediately in front of us had been making inane doggerel rhymes upon the names of their workmates, telling riddles, and exchanging nasty ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... have and to show the same interest oneself. For it is impossible to infect a man with interest when you have no interest to infect with. There is nothing more deadly or boresome than to see how witnesses are examined sleepily and with tedium, and how the witnesses, similarly infected, similarly answer. On the other hand, it is delightful to observe the surprising effect of questions asked and heard with interest. Then the sleepiest ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... had a strange weight of tedium in it, such as was specially perceptible after the joyous ease of the house in the High Street. No one was in the drawing-room, and Harry gazed round at the stiff, almost petrified, aspect of the correct and tasteful arrangement of the tables and furniture, put his hands in his pockets, and ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... not return with me to court," he said, "and relieve the tedium of old Dunstan's society? You cannot think what pleasures London affords; it is life there indeed—it is true there are no forests like these, but then, in the winter, when the country is so dreary, the town ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... especially, as this makes others jealous and displeases the entire society; it must always interest and include all members. The discussions at Mme. Necker's were literary and philosophical; and to prevent even the possibility of tedium, frequent readings were given ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... appreciation; sometimes the two ways of study are not combined, and while one man will be content with a cold and barren estimate of ge's and pon's derived from wading through the unutterable tedium of interminable German notes, of which the last always contradicted all the rest; another will content himself with eviscerating the general meaning of a passage, without any attempt to feel the ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... far better in {277} following the example of Clive and of Rumbold. He committed the one fault which the House of Commons never forgives, he wearied it. Such dramatic effect as he might have got out of his position as a proconsul arraigned before a senate he spoiled by the length and tedium of his harangue. He took two days to read a long and wordy defence, two days which he considered all too short, and which the House of Commons found all too long. It yawned while Hastings prosed. Accustomed to an average of eloquence of which the ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... nine days, face to face; and of being seen in a position which causes you to be acknowledged as a man of mark; but the intolerable stenches of the Court and its horrid heat come up to you there, no doubt, as powerfully as they fall on those below. And then the tedium of a prolonged trial, in which the points of interest are apt to be few and far between, grows upon you till you begin to feel that though the Prime Minister who is out should murder the Prime Minister who is in, and all the members of the two Cabinets were to ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... continued unshaken. The interval between the expiry of the period (of three weeks) which with the collective wisdom of all the wizards we had decreed to be a synonym for the Siege's duration, and the morning of the pronouncement relative to the advance of the Column from Orange River, had had its tedium neutralised by a cheerful vituperation of Gladstone's defective statesmanship in the year of 'eighty-one and his wicked efforts at a later date to "give Ireland away too." The move from Orange River had occasioned general rejoicings. ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... Sipsu? He had pleasured in camp-fire chats with her, not as a man who knew himself to be man and she woman, but as a man might with a child, and as a man of his make certainly would if for no other reason than to vary the tedium of a bleak existence. That was all. But there was a certain chivalric thrill of warm blood in him, despite his Yankee ancestry and New England upbringing, and he was so made that the commercial aspect of ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... easy to grasp at the first, thanks to the difficulty we found in following the unfamiliar names of the characters. Both these interests were dominated by the attraction of the admirable setting. Fortunately the scenes were numerous and brief, but we still suffered considerable tedium from the affected and drawling delivery of the heroine. The frequent assurances which we received as to the exceptional quality of Mameena's beauty, and the fact that, to our knowledge, she had three husbands in the ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 7, 1914 • Various
... determination, and in spite of one of Monsieur Lenotre's fascinating monographs on the French Revolution, on which I had counted to beguile the tedium of the journey, I could not get Anastasius Papadopoulos out of my head. He stayed with me the whole of a storm-tossed night, and all the next morning. He has haunted my brain ever since. I see him ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... way to London; so that they might avoid the crowd of people who would know them at the Cambridge station. As soon as they had got away from the door of Robert Bolton's house, the husband attempted to comfort his young wife. 'At any rate it is over,' he said, alluding of course to the tedium ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... head-dress, and his own half-crazed, half-cunning expression of countenance, sufficiently pointed him out as belonging to the race of domestic clowns or jesters, maintained in the houses of the wealthy, to help away the tedium of those lingering hours which they were obliged to spend within doors. He bore, like his companion, a scrip, attached to his belt, but had neither horn nor knife, being probably considered as belonging ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... billiard-table. At present he was expiating some heavy debts by a forced residence with his parents, and unwilling attention to the office, a most distasteful position, which he never attempted to improve, and which permitted him both the tedium of idleness and complaints against all the employment ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... young Virginian lay bound in a wigwam, guarded by a brace of old warriors, who occasionally varied the tedium of watching by stalking to the door, where, like yelping curs paying their respects to passers-by, they up-lifted their voices and vented a yell or two in testimony of their approbation of what was going on without. Now and then, also, they ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... that you had observed that rule in the case of the Louisiana and Carolina troops, and you will not fail to perceive that others find in the fact a reason for the like disposal of them. In the hour of sickness, and the tedium of waiting for spring, men from the same region will best console and relieve each other. The maintenance of our cause rests on the sentiments of the people. Letters from the camp, complaining of inequality and harshness in the ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... better than to say that pain is consciousness at once intense and empty, fixing attention on what contains no character, and arrests all satisfactions without offering anything in exchange. The horror of pain lies in its intolerable intensity and its intolerable tedium. It can accordingly be cured either by sleep or by entertainment. In itself it has no resource; its violence is quite helpless and its vacancy offers no expedients by which it might be ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... a couple of hours, during which Gammon sat in the room, bearing tedium as best he could. He was afraid to go away, lest an opportunity of learning something important should be lost; but never had time passed so slowly. Some neglect of business was involved, but fortunately he had no appointment ...
— The Town Traveller • George Gissing
... particularly Sunday sign), walking leisurely among the turves and furze-faggots they had cut during the week, and kicking them critically as if their use were unknown, was a fearful heaviness to her. To relieve the tedium of this untimely day she would overhaul the cupboards containing her grandfather's old charts and other rubbish, humming Saturday-night ballads of the country people the while. But on Saturday nights she would frequently sing a psalm, and it was ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... the Barotse, being a tribe of boatmen, have large, deeply-developed chests and shoulders, with indifferent lower extremities. They often engage in loud scolding of each other in order to relieve the tedium of their work. About eleven we land, and eat any meat which may have remained from the previous evening meal, or a biscuit with honey, and ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... indubitably require more than one (perhaps one hundred and eighty, but, for reasons already given, there should be no difficulty whatever in procuring them) endowed with the swift powers conferred by freedom from the dull tedium of responsibility, and not remarkable for religious temperament, were appointed, to whom all sermons and public addresses on religious subjects must be submitted before delivery, and whose duty after perusal ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... which the good man had written, either fewer in number or lighter in contents, and after dealing as well as he could with two important parts of Saint Pierre's works, he threw up the task.[260] It must not be supposed that Rousseau would allow that fatigue or tedium had anything to do with a resolve which really needed no better justification. As we have seen before, he had amazing skill in finding a certain ingeniously contrived largeness for his motives. Saint Pierre's ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... many other stories of the fish world the Pilot beguiled the tedium of the journey. He told about the famous Sucking-Fish, or Remora, which has a wonderful flat apparatus on its head by which it sticks to any object, fish, rock, or ship to which it attaches itself, and once fixed it is impossible to make it loose its hold. The natives in Africa ...
— How Sammy Went to Coral-Land • Emily Paret Atwater
... sees to it that he is allowed to remain when the landlord wants to turn him away. Chance throws him into the society of a man of culture and education, who is only too glad of the opportunity of relieving the tedium of his surroundings in this rough uncultivated place by passing a few hours in the companionship of a man of his own rank of life. Chance contrives that this gentleman shall have in his possession a large sum of money which he shows to Ronald, who is greatly in need of money. Opportunity suggests ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... crowd presents at a public execution;—much like a crowd, we may be sure, at any other public spectacle. Whatever the object which gathers together a mob of the lowest class, they will soon begin to relieve the tedium of expectation by coarse jests, drunkenness, and brawling. Yet these descriptive logicians are never weary of painting to us the grotesque and disgusting scenes which the mass of spectators exhibit on these occasions, as if this were quite decisive of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... day. But the Happy Valley had a cloud over it. Hepzibah troubled her auditor, moreover, by innumerable sins of emphasis, which he seemed to detect, without any reference to the meaning; nor, in fact, did he appear to take much note of the sense of what she read, but evidently felt the tedium of the lecture, without harvesting its profit. His sister's voice, too, naturally harsh, had, in the course of her sorrowful lifetime, contracted a kind of croak, which, when it once gets into the human throat, is as ineradicable as sin. In ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was seldom that she indulged herself in such lamentations, but the tedium was more than her high flow of spirits could well bear. Mrs. Campbell made a point of arranging the household, which gave her occupation, and Mary from natural disposition did not feel the confinement as much as Emma did; whenever, therefore, ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... taking one of those ways which in the neighborhood of Amsterdam are simply called "the ways." That is all they are. Whoever walks there for pleasure must take a good stock of impressions with him, in order to escape tedium. ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... which he and Lord Ballindine had been together to the lawyer's in Clare Street,—he started for home, by the Ballinasloe canal-boat, and reached that famous depot of the fleecy tribe without adventure. I will not attempt to describe the tedium of that horrid voyage, for it has been often described before; and to Martin, who was in no ways fastidious, it was not so unendurable as it must always be to those who have been accustomed to more rapid ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... a great deal of valuable professional information is conveyed, at the same time that the tedium of much study is relieved by the harmony. If poetry is yet to be found in our hospitals—a queer place certainly for her to dwell, unless in her present feeble state the frequenters of Parnassus have subscribed to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... reactionary tendencies among the men who had been trained in the pure Tuscan schools, which partly concealed, or adorned, the materialism of their advance; and Raphael himself, after profoundly studying the arabesques of Pompeii and of the palace of the Caesars, beguiled the tedium, and illustrated the spirituality of the converse of Moses and Elias with Christ concerning His decease which He should accomplish at Jerusalem, by placing them, above the Mount of Transfiguration, in the attitudes of two humming-birds on ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
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