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Dormant   /dˈɔrmənt/   Listen
Dormant

adjective
1.
In a condition of biological rest or suspended animation.  Synonyms: hibernating, torpid.  "A hibernating bear" , "Torpid frogs"
2.
(of e.g. volcanos) not erupting and not extinct.  Synonym: inactive.
3.
Lying with head on paws as if sleeping.  Synonym: sleeping.
4.
Inactive but capable of becoming active.  Synonym: abeyant.



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"Dormant" Quotes from Famous Books



... roi d'Yvetot Peu connu dans l'histoire Se levant tard se couchant tot Dormant fort bien sans gloire Et couronne par Jeanneton D'un simple ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook

... I never will consent to let these inventions lie dormant should my country at any time have need of them. Were you to grant me an annuity of twenty thousand pounds, I would sacrifice all to the safety and independence ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.

... recognize the volitional side of human nature. "With a man's will-power dormant, undeveloped, unknown, all attempt at really training and moulding the character is foolish because impossible. Man sometimes attempts it; God never does. He calls into activity first of all a man's will. He seeks to know what a man's own free choice is. Then he knows what ...
— The Defects of the Negro Church - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 10 • Orishatukeh Faduma

... while the tree is still dormant and, in the case of trees that the wounds bleed when the tree is cut, as do the English and Japan walnuts, under certain conditions, we must guard against cutting scions soon after severe freezing weather ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various

... Mr. Adams, and to awaken against him in the Northern States, where his strength lay, the dormant passions of former times, the name and influence of Mr. Jefferson were brought into the field. In December, 1825, a letter had been drawn from him, by William B. Giles, a devoted partisan of Jackson, and given to the public with appropriate commentaries and ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy

... delight which he took in the legends told him by his nurses, and the emotions which he experienced to a degree which made him lose all appetite, all rest, and all peace of mind; yet no one would have believed at that time that a gigantic poetical genius lay dormant in so active a nature. Soon, however, did his soul light up his intelligence, and obliged him to have recourse to his pen to pour out his feelings. From that moment his genius spread its roots in his heart, and Harrow became his ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli

... for fortune, thought I, my judgment consists in a perfect ignorance of the chances, and my coolness is merely a thorough indifference to success; whether it was now that the flattery had its effect upon me, or that the passion for play, so long dormant, had suddenly seized hold upon me, I know not, but my attention became from that moment rivetted upon the game, and I played every deal. Guy, who had been from the first betting with the indifferent success which I have ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)

... has made many an author. Failure often leads a man to success by arousing his latent energy, by firing a dormant purpose, by awakening powers which were sleeping. Men of mettle turn disappointments into helps as the oyster turns into pearls the sand ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden

... happily many and many a noble intellect and great heart, which have not shrunk from searching into the mysteries of life and death with all the powers and all the love of truth given them by God to be used, not to lie dormant or merely receive what other men teach, have risen from the search with a firmer faith than before in Christ and in the immortality which he brought to light. I believe that many of those who deem themselves sceptics or atheists retain, after all, enough ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell

... his nature which had lain dormant for so long had gone out to this woman, enfolding her, idealising her, until she became to him the completement of his being, the one incentive for all which was noble within him, the mainspring of his life, the lode-stone of his ambitions. To have ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott

... and entirely opposed to his calm, easy-going habits, had the effect of setting fire to her dormant ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie

... Drennen's quest for three men and one girl with grey eyes and a sweet body that was like a song, a girl who had awakened the old, dormant good in him and then had driven him so deep into the black chasm that no light entered ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory

... unconsciously. To do so intentionally, you go by the law of indirectness. For instance, take sight; concentrate your vision and your whole attention upon some object, real or imaginary, until soon the sense of HEARING becomes dormant. A little practice will enable you to study, think ...
— The Silence • David V. Bush

... to place a bundle of rags in the arms of a little girl, and to tell her to imagine it to be a baby. She would, if left to herself, with no other resource than her own invention, soon learn to exercise her dormant powers of ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst

... myself with any pleasure, hardly with a moment's endurance. This intellectual torpor applies more or less to every part of the four years during which I was under the Circean spells of opium. But for misery and suffering, I might, indeed, be said to have existed in a dormant state. I seldom could prevail on myself even to write a letter. The opium-eater loses none of his moral sensibilities or aspirations. He wishes and longs as earnestly as ever to realise what he believes possible, and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... life again her dormant feelings for the absent one. She trembled with the old sense of possession. She whispered his name and blessed him for his goodness. She called him to her, blushing breathlessly. No, nobody was like him! He did not wrong anybody. ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun

... long, and everybody 'wonders' how Melbourne will do it. He is certainly a queer fellow to be Prime Minister, and he and Brougham are two wild chaps to have the destinies of this country in their hands. I should not be surprised if Melbourne was to rouse his dormant energies and be excited by the greatness of his position to display the vigour and decision in which he is not deficient. Unfortunately his reputation is not particularly good; he is considered lax in morals, indifferent in religion, and very loose and pliant in politics. ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville

... young plants was killed to the ground. The lesson we learned from this is very important. It may be stated that vines full of sap and in growing condition can endure very little cold, but when the wood is ripe and dormant the vines will seldom be injured by sub-zero weather. This injury to vines from frost might have been averted at least in part by precautionary measures. In other countries people start smoldering fires, making much smoke in the vineyard so that the whole is covered with a cloud of smoke. This ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various

... still less was it sensual; for besides That he was not an ancient debauchee, (Who like sour fruit, to stir their veins' salt tides, As acids rouse a dormant alkali,)[kf] Although ('t will happen as our planet guides) His youth was not the chastest that might be, There was the purest Platonism at bottom Of all his ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... his maker. They exert their power often when least expected, and are ever stamped by the same indelible impression of their divine origin. Without these occasional glimpses at those qualities which are so apt to lie dormant, we might indeed despair of the destinies of our race. We are, however, in safe and merciful hands; and all the wonderful events that are at this moment developing themselves around us, are no other than the steps taken by Providence in the progress it is ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper

... the plu- [page 83] mules still enclosed within the tubes; and he remarks that if the plumules had been at once developed and had reached the surface (as occurred with our seeds which were exposed to a high temperature), they would surely have been killed by the frost. As it is, they lie dormant at some depth beneath the surface, and are thus protected from the cold; and the root-hairs on the petioles would supply them with sufficient moisture. We shall hereafter see that many seedlings are protected from frost, but by a widely different ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin

... of commons also corroborated, by a new precedent, the important power of impeachment, which, two years before, they had exercised in the case of Chancellor Bacon, and which had lain dormant for near two centuries, except when they served as instruments of royal vengeance. The earl of Middlesex had been raised, by Buckingham's interest, from the rank of a London merchant, to be treasurer of England; and, by his activity and address, seemed not unworthy of that preferment. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume

... did greatly. And his performance and example were greater still in respect of the quality which he infused into those best pieces of his work which have been examined here. It is hardly too much to say that this quality had been almost dormant—a sleeping beauty among the lively bevies of that literature's graces—ever since the Middle Ages, with some touches of waking—hardly more than motions in a dream—at the Renaissance. The comic Phantasy had been wakeful and active enough; the ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... coil of a magnet, the fact that electricity passed instantaneously through any known length of wire, and that its presence could be observed at any part of the line by breaking the circuit. Morse was, naturally, much interested and it was then that the inspiration, which had lain dormant in his brain for many years, suddenly came to him, and he said: "If the presence of electricity can be made visible in any part of the circuit, I see no reason why intelligence may not be transmitted ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse

... me. I don't stir myself up by walking; I am merely attempting, not very successfully, to walk my excitement off. Oh, Alice, what wild beasts we are at bottom! Prey! Prey! Prey! It is one of the instincts that we—you and I, nice women—are rarely conscious of; but I doubt whether it is ever quite dormant. Yes, that comes later; I will explain ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson

... the end? The doubt still assailed her. She had cut him deeply, hurt his amour propre and left him scowling in Arcadian resentment. Would the lesson last? Or must she seek further means to convince him of her indifference? Why had she provoked him? A whim—the dormant devil in her—to whom her better self must now pay in the ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs

... laid egg of some common animal, such as a salamander or newt. It is a minute spheroid in which the best microscope will reveal nothing but a structureless sac, enclosing a glairy fluid, holding granules in suspension. But strange possibilities lie dormant in that semi-fluid globule. Let a moderate supply of warmth reach its watery cradle, and the plastic matter undergoes changes so rapid, yet so steady and purposelike in their succession, that one can only compare them to those operated by a skilled modeller upon a formless lump of clay. ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley

... de devant Jehovah, Comme le soir tombait, l'homme sombre arriva Au bas d'une montagne en une grande plaine; Sa femme fatiguee et ses fils hors d'haleine Lui dirent:—Couchons-nous sur la terre, et dormons.— Cain, ne dormant pas, songeait au pied des monts Ayant leve la tete, au fond des cieux funebres Il vit un oeil, tout grand ouvert dans les tenebres, Et qui le regardait dans l'ombre fixement. —Je suis trop pres, dit-il avec un tremblement. ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo

... premise is the first to be found and in turn recalls the appropriate major premise. Finding the minor premise is a matter of observation, and if you fail to observe the significant fact about the problem, the really useful major premise may lie dormant, known and retained but not recalled, while false clues suggest inapplicable major premises and give birth to plenty of reasoning but all to no purpose. Some persons with abundant knowledge are ineffective reasoners from lack of ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth

... find that a two-year-old scion, if you can get a dormant bud coming, is better than the matured wood from last year. I'd just like to get an opinion from some of the growers what they use for topworking stocks ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various

... meaning they convey in words; painting and sculpture, upon the ideas or sentiments they suggest. In all four, however, and most decidedly in music unaccompanied by words, the appeal is frequently made almost exclusively to the aesthetic sense, the mind or intellect remaining almost dormant under the impression. Gems of rhythmical verse, such as Poe's "Bells," "The Raven," Whistler's "Symphonies in Color," nameless forms in statuary, expressionless save in the mere beauty of their proportions and curves, and, as has been stated, nearly the entire field of instrumental ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887 • Various

... ambidextrous, dexterity Dico speak, say abdicate, verdict *Dies day diary, quotidian Dignus worthy, fitting dignity, condign Do, datum give condone, data *Doceo, doctum teach document, doctor *Dominus lord dominion, danger *Domus house domicile, majordomo *Dormio sleep dormant, dormouse Duco lead traduce, deduction *Duo two dubious, duet Durus hard durable, obdurate Eo, itum go exit, initial Error, erratum wander erroneous, aberration Facio, feci, factum make, do manufacture, affect, sufficient, verify Fero, latum carry transfer, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... astonished; but right or wrong, there is no remedy. Crack, crack, we go incessant, through the slumbering City. Seldom, since Paris rose out of mud, or the Longhaired Kings went in bullock-carts, was there such a drive. Mortals on each hand of you, close by, stretched out horizontal, dormant; and we alive and quaking! Crack, crack, through the Rue de Grammont; across the Boulevard; up the Rue de la Chaussee d'Antin,—these windows, all silent, of Number 42, were Mirabeau's. Towards the Barrier, not of Saint-Martin, but of Clichy on the utmost north! Patience, ye royal Individuals; ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock

... therefore, was tolerably rapid, and in the course of an hour we found ourselves clear of the bush and standing upon the lower slopes of the mountain. And then we knew that the towering mass in front of us could be nothing else than a volcano, either dormant or extinct, for there was no sign of smoke rising from its summit, although the nature of the soil around us, consisting as it did of pumice stone, scoriae, and ancient lava, left no doubt as to the character ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood

... four years had taught me to know my own real character. My temperament, the nature of my imagination, my religious principles, which had not been eradicated, but had rather lain dormant; my turn of mind, my heart that only now began to make itself felt—everything within me led me to resolve to fill my life with the pleasures of affection, to replace a lawless love by family happiness—the truest happiness ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac

... fluttering just above his head, and gave himself up unreservedly to reflections evoked by a return, after some years at sea, to his native air. Every foot of the way eastward brought up memories long dormant beneath the swarms of alien impressions received since going to sea, impressions that ranged from the songs of an octaroon in a blind-tiger back of Oglethorpe Avenue in Savannah, to the mellow Boom-cling-clang of temple-bells heard in the flawless dawn from a verandah above the sampan-cluttered ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee

... we persist in sending all the sap and energy of our being into the money-making gland or faculty and letting the social faculty, the esthetic faculty, and all the finer, nobler faculties lie dormant, and even die, we certainly can not expect a well-rounded and symmetrical life, for only faculties that are used, brain cells that are exercised, grow; all others atrophy. If the finer instincts in man and the nobler qualities that live in the higher brain ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... In fact, Mordecai was undergoing that peculiar nervous perturbation only known to those whose minds, long and habitually moving with strong impetus in one current, are suddenly compelled into a new or reopened channel. Susceptible people, whose strength has been long absorbed by dormant bias, dread an interview that imperiously revives the past, as they would dread a threatening illness. Joy may be there, ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... way to help one to help himself than to bring him to a knowledge of himself. There is no better way to bring one to a knowledge of himself than to lead him to a knowledge of the powers that are lying dormant within his own soul. There is nothing that will enable him to come more readily or more completely into an awakened knowledge of the powers that are lying dormant within his own soul, than to bring him into the conscious, ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine

... light and life pleased the boy who had been so long in prison. These people were diverting themselves and they smiled and laughed. They seemed to have kindly feelings for everybody, but he remembered that cruel Spanish strain, often dormant, but always there, and ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler

... have answered you. He would not have heard. He is starting on a pilgrimage of manhood toward God. He saw the bishop; now he sees God, and here is hope; for so is God the secret of all good and worth, a thing to be set down as the axiom of religion and life. A conscience long dormant is now become regnant. Jean Valjean ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle

... the chart with a meticulous precision which seemed to me half pitiful and half absurd, since the next eye to behold that sheet of paper might be the eye of an exploring fish. One o'clock came, then two; the captain gloomed and chafed, as he held to the coaming of the house, and if ever I saw dormant murder in man's eye, it was in his. God help the man that should have ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... them; and who, whether in Sikkim, Birmah, Siam, Bhotan, or China, have too long been accustomed to see every article of our treaties contravened, with no worse consequences than a protest or a threat, which is never carried into execution till some fatal step calls forth the dormant power of the British Government.* [We forget that all our concessions to these people are interpreted into weakness; that they who cannot live on an amicable equality with one another, cannot be expected to do so with us; that all our talk of power and resources are mere boasts to habitual bullies, ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker

... some of the children get a grounding in how to develop their dormant brain power, by the time they're twenty, they'll be able to mold a new society, one geared to the present culture instead of the ...
— Stopover • William Gerken

... incoherently; his heart-beats trembled in his voice, which was persuasive and full of tenderness. She could see that all he wanted was to make her understand how unspeakably he loved her; how he had been conquered, subdued as never before. She must believe him; it had lain dormant and grown in his heart since the very first time he met her. He had fought and struggled to keep his feelings within bounds; but it was true—such a struggle was not very effective. It was too sweet to yield, and so one yielded. One fought on with a steadily slipping ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun

... be placed in such geographical conditions that a fortuitous variation on the part of one individual may prove of enormous value in the development of its civilization. Or fortunate geographical conditions may stimulate types of activity that lie dormant, although possible, among other races. Thus by some investigators the flexibility and emancipation of the Greek genius were attributed to their access to the sea and their constant intermingling with other ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman

... just where we stand most in need of its aid. Recollect, nobody else but you ever saw the murderer's face. Now, I'm going to presume you're answering me honestly, and try a bold means to arouse your dormant memory. Look hard, and hark back.—Is that the room you recollect? Is that the picture that still ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen

... savage semi-pandemonium entered one day, two unwonted visitors—the wives of miners who had come to join their husbands. Polite, kind, gentle, intelligent, and pious, their very presence seemed to change the moral atmosphere of the place. All the dormant chivalry of man's nature was awakened. Their appearance in the midst of that turbulent band was a sedative which soon allayed the chronic turmoil in which the settlement was embroiled. The reign of order commenced again: manners became softened, morals purified: the law ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler

... for family life, for a full and animated household, for the family table, for those evenings when one talks without fatigue with old friends, that desire for contact, for familiarity, for human intercourse, which dwells dormant in every human heart, and which every old bachelor carries from door to door to his friends, where he installs something of himself, added a strain of egoism to his sentiments of affection. In that house, where he was loved and spoiled, where he found everything, ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant

... was exquisite, and the last of unclouded happiness that she was to have for many months. Her anxiety about Helen's extraordinary absence was still dormant, and as for a possible brush with Miss Avery—that only gave zest to the expedition. She had also eluded Dolly's invitation to luncheon. Walking straight up from the station, she crossed the village green and entered the long chestnut avenue that connects it ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster

... Southern interests now raged with ominous and increasing force in all the Northern States. Public opinion became more and more inflamed. Passions became excited in cities and towns and villages which had been dormant since the Constitution had been adopted. The decree of the North went forth that there should be no more accession of slave territory; and, more than this, the population spread with unexampled rapidity ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord

... the air is refreshed and I have courage to resume my pen, which the sultry weather had forced to lie dormant so long. I like this odd town of Venice, and find every day some new amusement in rambling about its innumerable canals and alleys. Sometimes I go and pry about the great church of Saint Mark, and examine the ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford

... fail to assist the teacher in his instruction, is an ill-ordered school. It is not the subject, but the teacher who is uninteresting; he scolds, worries and punishes his pupils, when he himself is the fitter subject for the lash. He awakens the sense of fear which should lie dormant, while the other faculties of his pupils slumber ...
— The Philosophy of Teaching - The Teacher, The Pupil, The School • Nathaniel Sands

... was due to my bodily health. I had proudly thought myself seasoned by those hot Virginian summers, in which I had escaped all common ailments. But I had forgotten what old hunters had told me, that the hills will bring out a fever which is dormant in the plains. Anyhow, I now found that my head was dizzy and aching, and my limbs had a strange trembling. The fatigue of the past day had dragged me to the limits of my strength and made me an easy victim. My heart, too, was full of cares. The sight of Elspeth reminded me how ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan

... Ameni succeeded in persuading her to accompany him in her litter to his tent, where she would find her son. Pentaur was wonderfully like her lost husband, and the priest, experienced in humanity, thought that the sight of him would rouse the dormant powers of her mind. When she had arrived at his tent, he told her with kind precaution the whole history of the exchange of Paaker for Pentaur, and she followed the story with attention but with indifference, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... revived. Young men fasted and did penance, recited the hours of the Roman Breviary, and confessed their sins to Dr. Pusey. Nor was the movement confined to Oxford; it spread in widening circles through the parishes of England; the dormant devotion of the country was suddenly aroused. The new strange notion of taking Christianity literally was delightful to earnest minds; but it was also alarming. Really to mean every word you said, when you ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey

... grey eyes blinked, the lips moved, with greed; greed was the ruling passion; and though there was some good nature, some genuine kindliness, a true human touch, in the old toper, his greed was now so set afire by hope, that all other traits of character lay dormant. He sat there ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the required influence over the public mind, and to raise funds for the support of agitation. The "petition committee," as it was called, complained in a meeting, held on the 1st of July, that petitions came in slowly, and that the people of Ireland were dormant and dead to what ought to be now their feelings, of nationality. Under these circumstances it was deemed prudent to "recreate the active system of organization devised by Mr. O'Connell, with its weekly meetings," and other appliances. A "general association" ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... and ribbons of honour. Why they were gone they knew not very clearly, but their superiors affirmed that they were gone to make greater the greatness of France; and the folk of the Berceau believed it, having in a corner of their quiet hearts a certain vague, dormant, yet deep-rooted love, on which was written the name ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various

... that certain peculiarities often lie dormant for a generation or two and then reappear in subsequent progeny. Stockmen often speak of it as "breeding back," or "crying back." The cause of this phenomenon we may not fully understand. A late writer says, "it ...
— The Principles of Breeding • S. L. Goodale

... words—when my father died, and we were sometimes sorely short of comforts—which we shall never be now; you said brave, noble, trustful words then, mother, which I have never forgotten, though they may have lain dormant. Speak to me again in the old way, mother. Do not let us have to think that the world has too much hardened our hearts. If you would say the old good words, it would make me feel something of the pious simplicity of my childhood. I say them ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... you, all, do I not know what girls can be? Sometimes it seems as if no one knows girls EXCEPT me. If the world did but know you, if it knew what deeps are in you, what strength and salvation for the race lie dormant in your dormant powers, surely it would throw off the deference that masks contempt and give you the ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton

... clusters of dragon-flies, just emerged from their deformed chrysalis state, and still torpid and motionless from the wetness of their filmy wings. Half an hour later we returned to the spot and they were gone. We had seen them at the very moment when beauty was complete and animation dormant. I have since found nearly a similar account of this curious process in Mr. Bingley's very entertaining ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford

... sophisticated assault upon the ardent-voiced, red-haired political spitfire whom he called Matty. Alone in an old tavern room, he gave himself to the arrangements of words clamoring for utterance in his thought. Old words. Old ideas. Notions dormant since years ago. Phrases, ironies remembered out of conversations themselves forgotten. The book was finished towards the middle of March—a history of the post-war Germany; with a biography between the lines of Erik Dorn. Von Stinnes had forthwith ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht

... breathing, semi-dormant, scarcely sentient-seeming thing might indeed have been the reincarnation of what had in the past so peculiarly reached bodily perfection. Robin, who mysteriously knew every line and curve of the ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... of the Gospel. So they took him in hand, just as Paul had taken them. If I may use such a phrase, they did not know how large a fish they had caught. They had no idea what a mighty power for Christ was lying dormant in that young man from Alexandria who knew so much less than they did. They instructed Apollos, and Apollos became second only to Paul in the power of preaching the Gospel. So the circle widens and widens. God's grace ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren

... takes place in Lotte's drawing-room. She is sitting alone in deep thought. Werther's frequent and passionnate letters have {416} reawakened her dormant love for him and her sister, coming in laden with Christmas parcels, finds her in tears. Unable to console Lotte, Sophia takes her leave after inviting her to spend Christmas Eve at ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley

... old English quarrel between Church and State—which during the civil war had lain dormant—again rose, and was brought to a final issue. It is not unusual to hear that the English Reformation grew out of the ambition of a libidinous monarch. This is a coincidence rather than a cause. His lust and his marriages would have occurred had there ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... emotions, but also the unspoken thoughts, the mute feelings, the cloudy convictions of the simple multitude. He is their interpreter to themselves. The thought gave him reverence for that power which had lain long dormant in him until sorrow waked its noble harmonies. The ferment in the city astonished him. The very boys fought in the vacant lots, and reveled in the strategy of crooked streets and blind alleys. Kindly women, suddenly reminded that ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith

... Banter, who previous to his arrest had put his foot through several "forms" which it was inadvisable to let fall into the hands of the police, encumbered the floor. Everything was intensely chaotic and intensely dirty, from the type cases and the other scanty belongings to the dormant compositor. Armitage understood nothing of printing and I very little, and there we stood in the midst of a disorganised printing-office whence all had fled save only the unsavoury youth on the couch. I looked at Armitage and Armitage looked at me, and such was the helpless ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith

... know of His will, much less do it, and that if she intended to devote her life to seek and to save souls she must be prepared to suffer with her Lord. Far from repelling her, the challenge called up the reserves of love and courage that until now had lain dormant in her spirit, and once and for all she ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter

... Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, where the sentiment in favor of abolition had been favorable, there was a decided reaction which soon blighted their hopes.[3] In the Northern commonwealths, however, the sentiment in behalf of universal freedom, though at times dormant, was ever apparent despite the attachment to the South of the trading classes of northern cities, which profited by the slave trade and their commerce with the slaveholding States. The Northern States maintaining this liberal attitude developed, ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson

... begins to grow romantic, she often takes infinite pains to go round the back way to meet some one who is quite welcome at the front door. When young folks have not had a chance to do these things, and the motive for them lies dormant, heaven alone knows how or when it ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright

... the Peerage and Baronetage of the United Kingdom," "The Commoners of Great Britain," "A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the landed gentry of Great Britain and Ireland," "A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Extinct and Dormant Baronetcies of England," "A general Armoury of England, Scotland, and Ireland," republished under the title of "Burke's Encyclopaedia of Heraldry," "Heraldic Illustrations, comprising the Armorial ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... creature sobbing on the other side. The last tie? Ah, woe was she! The coming time brought into her desolate life the frail link she must now take up; and in the first bitter realization of her wronged womanhood, the mother-love lay dormant. ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts

... was as devoid of all romantic weakness as the propositions of Euclid, or the pages of Blackstone, but something in the beauty and helpless innocence of the sleeper appealed with unwonted power to his dormant sympathy, and, suspecting that lurking spectres crouched in her future, he mutely entered into a compact with his own soul, not to lose sight of, but to befriend her faithfully, ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... murdered at Sirhind by Aurangzeb's orders. The death of the emperor brought a temporary lull, and a year later Govind himself was assassinated while fighting the Marathas as an ally of Aurangzeb's successor. He did not live to see his ends accomplished, but he had roused the dormant spirit of the people, and the fire which he lit was only damped for a while. His chosen disciple Banda succeeded him in the leadership, though never recognised as guru. The internal commotions which followed upon the death of the emperor, Bahadur Shah, and the attacks ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell

... home after his own heart and image, like those mollusks that build a shell with the substance of their bodies so that it may serve both as a dwelling and a defense. There awakened in him that longing for show, for pompous, swaggering, amusing originality that lies dormant in the mind of every artist. At first he planned a reproduction of Rubens' palace in Antwerp, open loggie for studios, leafy gardens covered with flowers at all seasons, and in the paths, gazelles, giraffes, birds of bright plumage, ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... have grown too large to be accommodated in the sitting-room or conservatory; can be successfully wintered in any moderately dry, frost-proof cellar. After placing these large plants in the cellar, it will not be necessary to give them any water, the object being to keep them dormant all winter, which can be done by keeping the soil as dry as possible, but not so dry as to allow the plants to shrivel, or become withered. Large plants of the kinds mentioned, often form desirable ornaments during the summer time, but it is impracticable, in most cases, to bring them into ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan

... of the United States lays down. This could have been done effectually in but two ways: either by giving to Congress or to the President a veto upon State laws; or by leaving the right of control to lie dormant until a necessity for exercising it should arise, and then putting it in the hands of the judiciary. The latter method was clearly open to the least objection.[Footnote: See Hamilton's discussion on this point in ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD

... of all, whether as to boys or girls, I deprecate romances of every description. It is impossible that they can do any good, and they may do a great deal of harm. They excite passions that ought to lie dormant; they give the mind a taste for highly-seasoned matter; they make matters of real life insipid; every girl, addicted to them, sighs to be a SOPHIA WESTERN, and every boy, a TOM JONES. What girl is not in love with the wild ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett

... admitted to the University. This institution, which had been founded in 1477, through the persistent efforts of Archbishop Ulfsson, and of which the archbishop was chancellor, was at this time in a semi-dormant state. Scarce anything is known either about its professors or about the number of its students. It is probable, however, that Peder Galle, who was cantor of the Upsala Chapter so early as 1504,[12] and whose powers as a theological gladiator will become known ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson

... generous, so supple as they are at that time of life when they begin, according to your notion, to stiffen, to harden, to contract. We have in this very period formed a new taste—or taken a new lease of an old one—for reading history, which had been dormant all through our first and second youth. We expect to see the time when we shall read the Elizabethan dramatists with avidity. We may not improbably find a delight in statistics; there must be a hidden charm in them. We may even form a relish for ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells

... Blue Disease, but at any moment I may find myself a victim, and the fact does not disquiet me. For I am convinced that we are witnessing the sudden intrusion and the swift spread of an absolutely harmless organism—one that has been, perhaps, dormant for centuries in the soil, or has evolved to its present form in the deep waters of the Elan watershed by a process whose nature we can only dimly guess at. Some have suggested a meteoric origin, and it is true that some meteoric stones fell ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne

... dignity and position it was an advance, but at St. Petersburg he was away from the centre of political affairs. Russia had not yet recovered from the effects of the Crimean War; the Czar was chiefly occupied with internal reforms and the emancipation of the serfs. The Eastern Question was dormant, and Russia did not aim at keeping a leading part in the settlement of Italian affairs. Bismarck's immediate duties were not therefore important and he no longer had the opportunity of giving his advice to the Government upon the general practice. It is improbable ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam

... this, uttered in the sleepiest, gentlest of tones, her brown eyes open wide. What manner of young man was this who paid compliments while freezing with a broken leg? It was quite a new experience to her and amused her. It was an adventure, and excited all the romance dormant in her nature. ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming

... pure thought, by unknown lips let fall, Which grows, and bears abroad, rich truths for all, So fell a seed by Yerba Buena cove, And, like a giant young, who smiling lies, Nor heeds the dormant powers, so soon to rise— So lay this ...
— Within the Golden Gate - A Souvenir of San Fransisco Bay • Laura Young Pinney

... second. An unsuspected talent which has long lain dormant needs, when waked, a second or so to turn round in. At the end of that time I had made up my mind. I knew exactly what I would do. I would ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne

... possible that the workmen of the Toulon dockyard might fire up and work with energy provided an occasion arose to call forth their dormant energy. But without the aid of an almost universal introduction of self-acting tools in this sleepy establishment, to break, with the busy hum of active working machinery, the spell of indolence that seemed to pervade ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth

... not appear that sectional motives operated for or against the foregoing enactment; they were probably held in abeyance by other considerations. But it must not be inferred therefrom that the slavery question was absent or dormant in the country. There was already a North and a South. At that very time the constitutional convention was in session in Philadelphia. George Washington and his fellow delegates were grappling with the novel problems ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay

... sweeping failure of the proposal when it came before the public during the nineteenth century are worthy of study. There was no lack of enthusiasm among the promoters. Nor were their high hopes wrecked solely by public apathy. The public interest was never altogether dormant. More efficient causes of ruin were, firstly, the active hostility of some prominent writers and actors who declaimed against all outward and visible commemoration of Shakespeare; and secondly, divisions in the ranks of supporters ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee

... two small chairs to a large armchair by means of a ball of pink yarn. Outside, about a hundred yards away, she saw Mr. Hemphill irresolutely approaching the house. Miss Raleigh's mind, frequently dormant, was very brisk and lively when she had occasion to waken it. She made a dive toward ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton

... native air. Gracious seeds, which have never awaked, shall now unfold themselves, and "the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose." It was a saying of Huxley, that if our little island were to be invaded by tropical airs, tropical seeds which are now lying dormant in English gardens and fields would troop out of their graves in bewildering wealth and beauty! "Breathe ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett

... plunged against something gratefully solid. He was dashed forward, still battling with the raging turmoil of water, and a second time he felt the same firm yet smooth surface. His dormant faculties awoke. It was sand. With frenzied desperation, buoyed now by the inspiring hope of safety, he fought his way ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy

... dignity to her name. How pleased Aunt Debby would be! What a pleasure it would be to write! Perhaps in time she might be editor-in-chief. Then when she left school—at that instant a part of Hester Alden which had been dormant awoke. The desire for expression came to her. What beautiful glorious things she would write—some day! Just what they would be or when she would write them, she knew not. But they were so beautiful that the tears came to her eyes as she ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird

... feather boa, curled up at the bottom—soft, smooth, and long; a winding, coiling, serpentine boa. In a second, she had fallen upon it bodily with greedy hands, and was twisting it round her waist, and holding it high and low, and fighting fiercely at times, and figuring with it like a posturant. Some dormant impulse of her race seemed to stir in her blood, with frantic leaps and bounds, at its first conscious awakening. She gave herself up to it wildly now. She was mad. She was mad. She was glad. ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen

... sensations, old happenings which the conscious self has lost entirely and would scarcely recognize as its own. Many of these brain records, or neurograms, as Prince calls them, are never aroused from their dormant conditions. But others, aroused by emotion or association of ideas, may after years of inactivity, come forth again either as conscious memories or as subconscious forces, or even as physiological memories,—bodily repetitions of the pains, ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury

... it lay dormant for a few months before my uncle's death," said Jane, laughing; "but it came out stronger than ever afterwards. Francis is very grave to-day. I would not trust him with your verses, Elsie; his criticisms will be far too severe ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence

... strength of that party, and to the extent and the depth of its influence, that it should be found a powerful faction as late as the last quarter of Henry VIII.'s reign, fifty years after the Battle of Stoke. "The elements of the old factions were dormant," says Mr. Froude, "but still smouldering. Throughout Henry's reign a White-Rose agitation had been secretly fermenting; without open success, and without chance of success so long as Henry lived, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... as though something sluggish and viewless, dormant and deadly, had been suddenly upstirred to furious life by the wind of robes and tread of myriad dancing feet,—by the crash of cymbals and heavy vibration of drums! Within a few days there has been a frightful increase of the visitation, ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn

... hour's pleasure, let alone saving her from misery,—and perhaps from death!" he added to himself; for only he and the famous physician who had examined Melody at his instance knew that under all the joy and vigor of the child's simple, healthy life lay dormant a trouble of the heart, which would make any life of excitement or fatigue fatal to her in short space, though she might live in quiet many happy years. Yes, one other person knew this,—his friend Dr. Anthony, whose remonstrances against the wickedness of hiding ...
— Melody - The Story of a Child • Laura E. Richards

... that teaches them that they possess a rational and immortal spirit." In the address in behalf of the New York Institution before noted,[220] it is said of the deaf that the "powers of torpid and dormant intellects are resurrected from an eternal night of silence." The first report of the Minnesota School[221] refers to the deaf as "liberated from the winding sheets of silence and ignorance," and tells how "their souls vibrate with such joy as Lazarus felt when he stepped ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best

... was not altogether the desire for more wealth that prompted Harris, It was the call of new land; the call he had heard and answered in the early eighties; the old appetite that had lain dormant for a quarter of a century, but was still in his blood, waiting only a suggestion of the open spaces, a whiff from dry grass on the wind-swept plains, the zigzag of a wagon-trail streaking afar into the horizon, to set it tingling again. The thought of homesteading ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead

... thing that he has not begun to think of; the passion that rightly leads to it is yet dormant in him; to the proper charms of woman he is insensible, his heart being all set on other things. Then, again, he does not leave Helena as a profligate, but rather to escape from what is to him an unholy match, as being on his side without love; and his profligacy is not so much the cause as the ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson

... no business pleased my lovesick breast, my faculties became dormant, my mind torpid, and I lost my taste for poetry ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... the power which established a unity among the Western races which lay already dormant in them. We can trace this idea very clearly in Esto Perpetua, where he speaks repeatedly of the Berbers, as having fallen easily under the power of Rome because they are "of our own kind." We can trace it again inversely in The Path to Rome, ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell

... Association was conceived, the spirit of local pride was seemingly not present in the community. As a matter of fact, it was there as it is in practically every neighborhood; it was simply dormant; it had to be awakened, and its value brought ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok

... believes one syllable of the matter? And is any man worse received upon that score, or does he find his want of nominal faith a disadvantage to him in the pursuit of any civil or military employment? What if there be an old dormant statute or two against him, are they not now obsolete, to a degree, that Empsom and Dudley[8] themselves if they were now alive, would find it impossible to ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift

... "awfully nice man" was the Hon. J. Seed, formerly Secretary to the Customs and Marine Department of New Zealand; and it was from his conversation that the notion of the Samoan Islands as a place of refuge for the sick and world-worn first entered Stevenson's mind, to lie dormant (I never heard him speak of it) and be ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... expected to be able to communicate with my companions in the manner agreed upon. I therefore started back, choosing my course without any reference to the circuitous route by which I had come, and loading heavily and firing at intervals. I must have aroused many long-dormant echoes from a Rip Van Winkle sleep. As my powder got low, I fired and halloed alternately, till I cam near splitting both my throat and gun. Finally, after I had begun to have a very ugly feeling of alarm and disappointment, and to cast about vaguely for some course to pursue in an emergency ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs

... his head shaved, and locked himself up in a coal-cellar. Old F. Ah! he was perfectly right to lock himself up after having undergone such an operation as that. He certainly would have made rather an odd figure abroad. Tri. I think I see him now, awaking the dormant patriotism of his countrymen,—lightning in his eye, and thunder in his voice: he pours forth a torrent of eloquence, resistless in its force—the throne of Philip trembles while he speaks; he denounces, and indignation fills the bosom of his hearers; he exposes the impending danger, and every ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... at Florence, her only pleasure was to feel that he was near her, to hear him. He made life for her charming, diverse, animated, new. He revealed to her delicate joys and a delightful sadness; he awakened in her a voluptuousness which had been always dormant. Now she was determined never to give him up. But how? She foresaw difficulties; her lucid mind and her temperament presented them all to her. For a moment she tried to deceive herself; she reflected that perhaps he, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... insects, but as they inhabit a region where the equable temperature admits of the pursuit of their prey at all seasons of the year, unlike those of Europe, they never hybernate. A similar observation applies to bats, which are dormant during a northern winter when insects are rare, but never become torpid in any part of the tropics. The bear, in like manner, is nowhere deprived of its activity except when the rigour of severe frost ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent

... accident of falling in love is as beneficial as it is astonishing. It arrests the petrifying influence of years, disproves cold-blooded and cynical conclusions, and awakens dormant sensibilities. Hitherto the man had found it a good policy to disbelieve the existence of any enjoyment which was out of his reach; and thus he turned his back upon the strong sunny parts of nature, and accustomed himself to look exclusively on what was common and dull. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... wishes to do so, should be permitted to work for more than eight hours a day; or that a labourer should be exempted from persecution as a blackleg if he prefers to remain outside the fold of a trade union—are fired with a long-dormant zeal for individual liberty, if it is urged that a young man's citizenship is incomplete until he has been called and prepared to defend his home and his country ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw

... themselves upon parish relief, or seeking provision by means yet more desperate. The farming tenantry, though less immediately dependent, yet all partake, more or less, in the evil. The charities and hospitalities which belong to such a mansion lie dormant; the clergyman is no longer supported and aided in his important duties; the family pew in the church is closed; and the village churchyard ceases to be a place of pleasant meeting, where the peasant's heart is gladdened by the kindly ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 337, October 25, 1828. • Various

... who, at present, fulfils these duties has not been permitted to hold barren or dormant powers. In putting into effect that interference which his office exacts of him, he has been more than once terribly assaulted by whites, foiled in their plans, and exasperated by the agency that had stepped in for the baffling of their ill-formed designs. ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie

... to turn, and the next moment a loud and merry laugh roused the dormant echoes of the old chateau, whilst a pleasant, drawly voice said ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy

... the strength of his affections. He did not love Olivia the less, for maternity had crowned her wifehood with an added glory; but side by side with this old and tried attachment was a new passion, stirring up dormant hopes and kindling new desires. His regret had been more than personal at the thought that with himself an old name should be lost to the State; and now all the old pride of race, class, and family welled up anew, and swelled and quickened the ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt

... sake, and his one brief sight of his home had made him cling the closer to it, and stirred up in double force the affections for mother, brothers, and sisters, which, though never extinct, had been comparatively dormant while he was engaged in stirring scenes abroad. Now that he had once more seen the gentle loving countenance of his mother, and felt her tender, tearful caress, known that noble- minded Rose, and had a glimpse of those pretty little sisters, there was such a yearning for them ...
— The Pigeon Pie • Charlotte M. Yonge

... received Lord Panmure's letter of yesterday evening, and has signed the dormant Commission for Sir W. Codrington. A similar course was pursued with regard to Sir George Cathcart. The Queen hopes that General Simpson may still rally. He must be in a great state of helplessness at this moment, knowing that he wants, as everybody ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria

... ball-room, talk of beaux, love, and marriage,—that atmosphere of riper years which is so often and so injudiciously thrown around childhood,—all hasten the event which transforms the girl into the woman. A particular emphasis has been laid by some physicians on the power of music to awaken the dormant susceptibilities to passion, and on this account its too general or earnest cultivation by children has been objected to. Educators would do well to ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys

... dormant la main droite, lady and vis-a-vis gentleman cross, giving right hand, as in ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge

... consciousness and strength. In this great crisis there came to her the wisdom and forethought that lay dormant in her nature. She became a woman—one of those of whom the world contains few—at once gentle and strong, meek and fearless, patient to endure, ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)

... corduroy trousers, and brown shoes; they sit their ponies at a rocking-chair canter erect and easy; unkempt, rough, half-savage, their tanned faces and blue eyes express lazy good-nature, sluggish stubbornness, dormant fierceness. They ask the news in soft, lisping Dutch that might be a woman's; but the lazy imperiousness of their bearing stamps them as free men. A people hard to rouse, you say—and as ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens

... surely than she imagined, for in my heart had lain dormant for months the fear of what was to come, the shadow which was already creeping over our lives. Nevertheless, ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... but by absorbing its small bulk into the vaster bulk of Christian Science—Divine Science, The Holy Ghost, the Comforter—which was a quite different and sublimer force, and one which had long lain dormant and unemployed. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... profane man! I ask thee with what conscience Thou canst advance that idol against us, That have the seal? were not the shillings number'd, That made the pounds; were not the pounds told out, Upon the second day of the fourth week, In the eighth month, upon the table dormant, The year of the last patience of the ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson

... where the tuneful youth loitered was a path, leading down through the fields and into the highway. In this path walked lingeringly a man and a maid. Despite the peaceful, almost dormant life about them, the great event of their lives had just occurred, that which is at once a vast adventure and a simple testament of nature: they had been joined in marriage privately in the parish church of St. Michael's near by. As Shoreham's voice came down the cotil, the two looked up, then ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... similar historical study has, to our knowledge, ever been done in the same way. Mr. Eggleston is a reliable reporter of facts; but he is also an exceedingly keen critic. He writes history without the effort to merge the critic in the historian. His sense of humor is never dormant. He renders some of the dullest passages in colonial annals actually amusing by his witty treatment of them. He finds a laugh for his readers where most of his predecessors have found yawns. And with all this ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland

... Cyrus gave him, according to Oriental notions generally, a claim to succeed to the inheritance of the entire Babylonian empire; but the claim would remain dormant until it was enforced. The straggling character of the territory, which was shaped like a Greek {L}, ascending from Babylon along the course of the Euphrates to the Armenian mountains, and then descending along the line of the Mediterranean coast as far as Gaza or Raphia, ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson

... the aged man has talked in the forgotten language of infancy. Our best students of mental philosophy believe that no thought or feeling, no enmity or aspiration, is ever forgotten. The sentiments written on clay harden into granite. Dormant memories are not dead. At a touch they return in their old-time power and vigor. Science tells us that the flight of a bird, the falling of a leaf, the laughter of a child, the vibration of song, changes ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis

... smite the table top with one's fist every morning before breakfast. One must assume such an atmosphere that the whole community will be cognizant of one's presence, to-day, to-morrow, and all the time. One must assert one's personality. I have been asleep, stagnant, dormant, an Egyptian mummy. I have allowed others to take the cream while I have been passively contented with the whey. I have allowed others to elbow me to one side like a log languishing in the eddy of a river. ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)

... seasons of the year, So changed he his meat and soupere. Full many a fat patriarch had he in mew, And many a breme and many a luce in stew; Wo was his cook, but if his sauce were Poignant and sharp, and ready all his gere, His table dormant in his hall alway, Stood ready covered ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen

... boy Tycho, among others, watched for this eclipse on August 21st, 1560; and when it appeared at its appointed time, every instinct for the marvellous, dormant in his strong nature, awoke to strenuous life, and he determined to understand for himself a science permitting such wonderful possibilities of prediction. He was sent to Leipzig with a tutor to go on with his study of law, but he ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge

... recruiting into a scourge of the rayas and a continual offence to neighbouring states, and the supplementing of that system by acceptance of any and every alien outlaw who might offer himself for service: lastly, revival of the dormant crusading spirit of Europe, which reacted on the Osmanlis, begetting in them an Arabian fanaticism and disposing them to revert to the obscurantist spirit of the earliest Moslems. To sum the matter ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth

... subject, and though co-operation may be our final state, competition is our present. Here the competition is at least fair. There can hardly be any doubt that the prize system often calls into activity powers of doing good work which would otherwise have lain dormant, and if it does this it is useful to the community, though the individual needs to be on his guard against its drawbacks in himself. In reading the Life of Lord Althorp the other day I was struck with ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith

... fifteenth century the condition of the peasant was better than it has ever been, either before or since within historical times, in Northern and Western Europe. But with all this, the oppressive power of the lord of the soil was by no means dead. It was merely dormant, and was destined to spring into renewed activity the moment the lord's necessities supplied a sufficient incentive. From this time forward the element of territorial power, supported in its claims by the Roman law, with its basis of private property, continued to eat ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax

... meditates upon quail-shooting. His Excellency the Governor, questions the possibility of adding another despatch to the hundred and fifty already composed in illustration of the art of making despatches, as Soyer makes soup, out of nothing; and oppressed by the subject, becomes dormant in his chair of state; the clerks in the neighbouring offices no longer exhibit the uplifted countenance which, as justly observed by Sallust, distinguishes man from all other creatures; nothing is to be seen of them but masses of hair in wild profusion, and ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor

... from a preliminary attack of nervousness, the pretty young housemaid unexpectedly produced information that gave Creighton furiously to think, for he reawakened an idea that had been present, but dormant, in his brain since his talk with Copley. It reminded him of a chance remark made by Jason Bolt to the effect that Langhorn had accompanied Graham when the latter came to see Varr, for Betty described how in passing through the hall on her way to bed she had seen ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston

... others have it not. Where did you get your faith? You were not born with it, as you were with the natural, though dormant faculties of speech, reason, and free will. You received it through Baptism. You are a product of nature; therefore nature should limit your existence. But faith aspires to, and obtains, an end that is not natural but supernatural. It consequently must itself be supernatural, and cannot ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton

... unable to accomplish anything positive for good. My favorite quotation from Josh Billings again applies: It is so much easier to be a harmless dove than a wise serpent. My duty was to combine both idealism and efficiency. At that time the public conscience was still dormant as regards many species of political and business misconduct, as to which during the next decade it became sensitive. I had to work with the tools at hand and to take into account the feeling of the ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... Sydney by last mail that the Bishop is really desirous to revive the long dormant Board of Missions. He means to propose to send a priest and a deacon to every island ready for them, and to provide for them—if they are forthcoming, and funds. Of this latter I ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge

... dogmas, but full of life and exciting interest,—even as were the watchwords of Rousseau—"Liberty, Fraternity, Equality"—to Frenchmen, on the outbreak of their political revolution. And as those watchwords—abstractly true—roused the dormant energies of the French to a terrible conflict against feudalism and royalty, so those theses of Luther kindled Germany into a living flame. And why? Because they presented more cheerful and comforting grounds of justification ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord

... was the last straw; something seemed to give way in her, the excitement that had sustained her for the last two days while under the domination of her one fixed idea gave way to horror. It was the resurrection of the dormant woman in her; she burst into tears, and with a frenzied movement caught Charlot up and pressed him wildly to her heart. And she fled with him, running with distracted terror, unable to see or hear more, conscious of but one overmastering need, to find some secret ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... enough awake in a Man to undo him, the Flatterer stirs up that dormant Weakness, and inspires him with Merit enough to be a Coxcomb. But if Flattery be the most sordid Act that can be complied with, the Art of Praising justly is as commendable: For tis laudable to praise well; as Poets at one and the same time give ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... not belong to this gentleman, but was hired by him only yesterday, had already discovered that, with him on his back, his own judgment must lie dormant, so that he quietly whisked his tail and glanced with regret at the waste of his drip, and then, with a roundabout step, to prolong the pleasure of this little wade, sadly but steadily out he walked, and, after the necessary shake, ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore

... Indian war-clubs that the embryo colony was to owe its ruin. Within itself it carried its own destruction. The ill-assorted band of landsmen and sailors, surrounded by that influence of the wilderness which wakens the dormant savage in the breasts of men, soon fell into quarrels. Albert, a rude soldier, with a thousand leagues of ocean betwixt him and responsibility, grew harsh, domineering, and violent beyond endurance. None could question or oppose him without peril of death. He hanged a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various



Words linked to "Dormant" :   active, abeyant, heraldry, dormancy, dormant account, biology, unerect, asleep, quiescence, torpid, quiescency, quiescent, biological science, sleeping



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