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More "Dullness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... their reliability. Naturally all departments unite to develop character in the students, but the Academic Department feels this to be a special aim. Pleasure in the subject of instruction, followed by mental and moral improvement, has indicated clearly that the academic dullness which is shown at entrance comes frequently from lack of motive in former studies. The interest is all the more encouraging as there are many handicaps in the teaching, for the students enter at any time, ...
— The Making of a Trade School • Mary Schenck Woolman
... water; the patter of musketry came creeping out to sea; we are in for it now; the machine guns muttered as through chattering teeth—up to our necks in it now. But would we be out of it? No; not one of us; not for five hundred years stuffed full of dullness and routine. ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... it is a little dull, Donald," Minnie said, "but not being a man, I suppose desires like yours would seem improper When you go," and her voice trembled a little, "I will feel the dullness all the more keenly." ...
— The Hunted Outlaw - Donald Morrison, The Canadian Rob Roy • Anonymous
... that his choruses at times stray from rhetoric into poetry of a high order, there is in them a still more deadly monotony than in his iambics. The chorus are devoid of life; they are there partly as a concession to convention, but mainly to supply incidental music. Their inherent dullness is not relieved by the metre. Of strophic arrangement there is no clear trace; in a large proportion of cases the choruses are written in one fixed and rigid metre admitting of no variety: even where different metres alternate, the relaxation is but small, for the same monotony ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... President very well, and had access to his presence when officials were kept cooling their heels in the Waiting-room. The President liked to hear the Colonel talk, his voluble ease was a refreshment after the decorous dullness of men who only talked business and government, and everlastingly expounded their notions of justice and the distribution of patronage. The Colonel was as much a lover of farming and of horses as Thomas ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... WE COME TO MEETING? Reluctantly? No. Burdened by a feeling of obligation to attend? No. Expecting something dull and tedious? No! If a meeting evokes only dullness in its members it is a dead meeting and ought to be laid down. A live meeting evokes life. Just the prospect of attending such a meeting should quicken us. It were better to come alive doing housework than to become deadened in ...
— An Interpretation of Friends Worship • N. Jean Toomer
... be young, to bubble with springs of mirth and tenderness and folly, and to live in perpetual contact with decay and pain—to look persistently into the grey face of death without having lifted even a corner of life's veil! Now and then, when she felt her youth flame through the sheath of dullness which was gradually enclosing it, she rebelled at the conditions that tied a spirit like hers to its monotonous task, while others, without a quiver of wings on their dull shoulders, or a note of music in their hearts, had the whole wide world to range through, and saw in it no more than ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... is your first appearance in the theater? . . ." he asked. "No doubt it's a case of the family opposing . . . inflexible determination on your part . . . the isolation and dullness of the countryside . . . your first appearance as an amateur . . . stage fright . . . success . . . the recognition of the divine spark within yourself . . . your dreams of the real stage . . . tears . . . sleepless nights . . . a struggle with an adverse environment . . ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... the bolt hole. The beach of gravel-sand had vanished save for a narrow ribbon of land just at the foot of the cliffs, where the water curled in white lace about the barrier of boulders. There was no change in the dullness of the sky; no sun broke through the thick lid of clouds. And the green of the sea was ashened to gray which matched that overcast until one could strain one's eyes trying to find the horizon, unable to mark the dividing line here between air ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... out upon a stormy sea. It does look a bit mad, doesn't it? And yet it only looks mad because of our blindness and dullness and stupid unbelief. What did Peter have under him when he was in the ship? Upon what were his fellow disciples trusting to keep them from the bottom of the sea? Just two or three planks, that is all. Upon what ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... was quite disappointed by the dullness of Sylvia's perceptions during that momentous first trip, which she had looked forward to as an occasion for widening the girls' horizon to new interests. Oddly enough it was Judith, usually so much less quick than Sylvia, ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... animal has a constitutional dislike for dullness and will seize upon almost any device which promises to lift him out of what he considers the monotony of daily grind. An elaborate essay might be written on the means which human beings have taken to create the sense of aliveness which they so much crave. Some of them—we call them savages—have ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... which to their smell are more fragrant than thyme. The approach and touch of these close up the interiors of their mind, and open the exteriors pertaining to the body, from which come their quickness in worldly things and their dullness in spiritual things. ...
— Spiritual Life and the Word of God • Emanuel Swedenborg
... with regret country gentlemen, in their country-houses, reduced to the dullness of a domestic circle, and nearly led to commit suicide in the month of November, or, what is more melancholy, to invite the ancient and neighboring families of the Tags, the Rags and the Bobtails, has opened an office in Spring Gardens for the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... large classroom downstairs the other thirty pupils were enjoying themselves with a zest all the greater for the dullness of the weeks which had gone before. The floor had been sponged with milk until it was quite smooth and slippery, a table supplied with such refreshments as lemonade, ginger-beer, and sweet biscuits, ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... sole cause of its present form; otherwise, I should be content to let it die an easy death in the columns of the journal which first had the temerity to publish it. If the world could always know, as it may in this case, why a book is printed, it would look with kindlier eyes on dullness bound in muslin. It would say, with honest Sancho Panza: "Let us not look the ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... no time for dullness. Every hour had its duty, and these soon became second nature to the zealous young warriors. Such rivalry to best master the manual, to hold the most soldierly stature in the ranks, to detect the drill-sergeant when, to test their attention, he gave a false command! And then the coronal joy of a ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... an adjoining room, which the danseuse filled with complaints at this prolonged detention. Copplestone remained behind. His dullness and immobility had ...
— The Crooked House • Brandon Fleming
... that will not, there are also two sorts. For the first there are the sort who are so drowned in sorrow that they fall into a careless deadly dullness, regarding nothing, thinking almost of nothing, no more than if they lay in a lethargy. With them it may so befall that wit and remembrance will wear away and fall even fair from them. And this comfortless kind of heaviness ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... dullness settled on the room, Master Joel was wont to cry, "Halt!" then sit down at the melodeon and play some school song as lively as the instrument admitted of, and set us all singing for five or ten minutes, chanting the multiplication tables, the names ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... shores—Nelson, Collingwood, Cornwallis, Calder—were on the alert. Yet while England's very existence as a Nation hung in the balance, in the gay world of London those who represented the ton danced and flirted, attended routs and assemblies, complaining fretfully of the unwonted dullness of the town, or in their drawing-rooms discussed the topics of the hour—the acting of the wonder-child Roscius; the lamentable scandal relating to Lord Melville; or, ever and again—with a tremor—the possibilities ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... and she bit her lip. Her dullness in not suspecting the identity of this spy, her lover, pained her acutely. She had thought to read the Sphynx, and it had its paw upon her. Her exasperation was so keen that she determined to be revenged ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... however, the countenances were not so gloomy. There a real or affected joy seemed to enliven the usual dullness of these parties; some actors were repeating patriotic verses in honour of the victor; while others were singing airs or vaudevilles, to inspire our warriors with as much hatred towards your nation as gratitude towards our Emperor. It is certainly ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... during the night, and I came to my room and lay down in the dullness of the dawn. But now I am sorry that I allowed her to do so, for I did not sleep, and grandfather appears to have been troubled with dreams. I fancied he shuddered a little as I left them together, and more than once through the wall I heard him cry, 'Bring him ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... vent. It was not lighted without a purpose. The peasant had a son, to whom the flame had been passed on; for he aimed at the priesthood. This has ever been a refuge of ambitious minds that cannot rise by any other means above the dullness of the peasant's life, which is the more endurable the more the man is able to place himself upon the animal level of his plodding ox. The son was being educated in a seminary, but he was now home for the holidays. Presently he appeared. He was a youth of about nineteen, wearing a blouse ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... couldn't have asked a better foil; yet I'm sure she never consciously used his dullness to relieve her brilliancy. She may have felt that the case spoke for itself. But I believe her reserve was rather due to a lively sense of justice, and to the rare habit (you said she was rare) of looking at facts as they are, without ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... brocade and purple velvet and silvery fur enshrine many a blend of villainies and brutal stupidities. What is more cruelly realistic than the leer of the satyr clothed as Francis, King of France; than the bovine dullness of Charles V and the lizard-like dullness of his son; or than that strange combination of wolfish cunning and swinish bestiality with human thought and self-command that fascinates in Raphael's portrait of Leo X and ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... to cure our dullness. Tell us a story, monsieur, if you will neither sing nor play. We love a ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... eloquent and inspiring, but he expected and exacted rather too much work from the average student. His own ready and affluent mind sympathized keenly with the apt, bright scholar, to whom his praise was warmly given, but he scarcely made sufficient allowance for the dullness or lack of previous preparation which failed to keep pace with him in his long and rapid strides; hence his censures were occasionally severe. His methods of examination furnished the very best kind of mental discipline, fitted alike to cultivate the memory and to ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... their meaning. Whether he did or not I cannot tell. I am afraid he did. He used to turn silent and quiet—sullen and sulky, my father thought it: stupid, aunt Fanny used to call it. But every one said he was stupid and dull, and this stupidity and dullness grew upon him. He would sit without speaking a word, sometimes, for hours; then my father would bid him rise and do some piece of work, maybe, about the farm. And he would take three or four tellings before he would go. When we were sent to school, it was all the same. ...
— The Half-Brothers • Elizabeth Gaskell
... chamber, the dullness of her mind diminished and finally cleared away like a fog in a wind. Her dear, kind, blue-eyed father was dead, and she was virtually a prisoner, and Winnie was all alone. A queen! They were mad, or she was in the midst of some hideous nightmare. Mad, mad, mad! She began to ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... cable to-night, and in a few days we'll have some news. I'm a graybeard, an old bachelor; so I am accorded certain privileges. Sometimes I am frightfully busy; and then there will be periods of dullness. I have a few regular patients, and I take care of them in the morning. Every afternoon, from now on, I will teach you a little about life—I mean the worldly points of view you're likely to meet. ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... my friend. Indeed, he was always nice, with the niceness of people whose hearts are genuinely humane. But this time it cost him an effort. His attempts at general conversation broke down into dullness. It occurred to me he might have been indisposed. But before I could frame the ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... would be taken, or more than once it seemed to Murray that they completely retraced their steps; but after a time a feeling of dullness akin to despair came over the lad, and he resigned himself to his fate, satisfying himself that Roberts was being carefully carried, and then plodding on and on, plunging as it seemed to him in a state of torpidity or stupid sleep in which he kept on dreaming about ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... noblest possibilities of life are never realized without marriage. Yes, I can think of nothing finer than to have a lot of manly boys and sweet girls growing up around one. But when I marry it shall be so as to give completeness and expansion to life, not narrowness and dullness. I shall never marry and settle down. Settle down! What a damnable expression that is! A man ought to settle up. I mean to have my fling first, too. I should like to gamble a bit at Baden-Baden. I should like to go out to Colorado ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... pilot, and was accepted by his old chief, Bixby, as full partner on an important boat. In Life on the Mississippi Mark Twain makes the period of his study from two to two and a half years, but this is merely an attempt to magnify his dullness. He was, in fact, an apt pupil and a pilot of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... for Marie to enter. When she came, he was struck, not having seen her since the birth of the third baby, by the further alteration in her. How thin she was! And quiet! With that dullness which, in his judgment, too much domesticity always brought to women. Like most ultra-modern men, while secretly making a fetish of the softer virtues in woman, he wanted them expressed somehow in an up-to-the-minute ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... was opened—out she went—walked along the pavement, turned down the close, and put the sun, I believe, into her pocket when she disappeared, so suddenly did dullness and darkness sink down on the square, when she was no longer visible. I stood for a moment as if I had been senseless, not recollecting what a fund of entertainment I must have supplied to our watchful friends on the other side of the green. ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... after screen of brown camouflage which hid the little railway line from the watchful gaze of Kemmel, he seemed to be passing through some mysterious land. By day it was hideous enough; but in the dusk the flat dullness of it was transfigured. Each pond with the shadows lying black on its unruffled surface seemed a fairy lake; each gaunt and stunted tree seemed to clothe itself again with rustling leaves. The night was silent; only the rattle of the little train, as it rumbled over bridges which ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... grumbled because she had to rise at four that morning, get breakfast, milk the cows, bake bread, prepare seven children for school, get dinner, preserve twenty quarts of strawberries, get tea, and milk the cows again. All her days were alike as far as hard work and dullness went, but she accepted them cheerfully and uncomplainingly. But she did resent having to look after the baby when she ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of schools, and churches, and libraries, and meetings for young people, you would make country life a paradise, and I tell you what you would do, too; you would empty the slums of the cities. It is the slowness and dullness of country life, and not their poverty alone, that keep the poor in dirty lanes and tenement houses. They want stir and amusement, too, poor souls, when their day's work is over. I believe they would come to the country if it were made more pleasant ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... says (Moral. ii, 26) that "the Holy Ghost gives wisdom against folly, understanding against dullness, counsel against rashness, fortitude against fears, knowledge against ignorance, piety against hardness of our heart, and fear against pride." But a sufficient remedy for all these things is to be found in the virtues. Therefore the gifts are not necessary ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... therein it may perhaps lay claim to have recognized what Bagehot called the vital principle of representative government. Few discussions of the sphere of government have been so productive as that in which Adam Smith gave a new basis to economic science. Few controversies have, despite its dullness, so carefully investigated the eternal problem of Church and State as that to which Hoadly's bishopric contributed its name. De Lolme is the real parent of that interpretative analysis which has, in Bagehot's hands, ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... brushed, she oiled, she perfumed the flowing locks and the long silky beard of Miserrimus Dexter with the strangest mixture of dullness and dexterity that I ever saw. Done in brute silence, with a lumpish look and a clumsy gait, the work was perfectly well done nevertheless. The imp in the chair superintended the whole proceeding critically by means of his hand-mirror. He was too deeply interested in this occupation to ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... boys, who, discontented at home, leave it for something more congenial to their feelings and tastes, do so simply because of the excessive dullness, and want of interest in objects to attract them there, and keep them contented. Boys, in America at least, are apt to be smart. So their parents think, at all events; and too smart they prove, to stay at home, and follow the beaten track of their fathers, as their continual migration ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... But the dullness of such a life as this is fully atoned for by the excitement of that which follows it in London. The men of the Internal Navigation are known to be fast, nay, almost furious in their pace of living; not that they are extravagant in any great degree, ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... complete," she said. "Listen to me, all you girls, for I haven't too long in which to tell you; that horrid bell will ring us back to lessons and dullness in less than no time. The most wonderful, delightful chance is offered to us. I met her yesterday, and she decided to do it. She is a brick of bricks. She will make the most tremendous difference in our lives. You know, although you ...
— The Rebel of the School • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... crochet,—which she hated, because she said it was like everlastingly poking one's finger after a sliver,—and had caught now and then, over the still air, the laughter and bird-notes that came together from among the pines. One of the Miss Haughtleys had sat with them; but that only "stiffened out the dullness," as Etty had declared, the instant the young lady ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... Homer all the deities are in armour, even Venus; so in Shakspeare all the characters are strong. Hence real folly and dullness are made by him the vehicles of wisdom. There is no difficulty for one being a fool to imitate a fool; but to be, remain, and speak like a wise man and a great wit, and yet so as to give a vivid representation of a ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... fortunate, are happy, that the best of life has been given to them. We have faith in the power of money, in its sovereign efficacy to save us not only from beggary, from sneers and insults, but we believe that it can transform us, and take away the poverty of mind, the narrowness of heart, the dullness of imagination, which make us weak, hard, and common. Even our hatred of the rich is but another form of the worship of money. The poor think they are wretched, because they think money the chief good; and if they are right, then ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... far as they knew how. The old fellows in spectacles came and looked at us proudly twice a day and saw that we had the proper food to eat, the right amount of light and that the water was not too hot or too cold. But oh, the dullness of that life! It seemed we were a kind of a show. At a certain hour every morning the big doors of the house were thrown open and everybody in the city who had nothing special to do came in and looked at us. There were other tanks filled with different kinds of fishes all round the walls ...
— The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... A life where spins the sun from year to year, And where each day is ever like the next— A beauteous but unending sameness, is For woman only, but for manly souls, And most for thine, it's quiet, weary dullness. Thou thrivest best where storms are raging round. On foaming pacers o'er the heaving sea, And on thy tossing plank, come life or death, Thou mayest fight with peril for thine honor. The beauteous desert thou dost paint, would be A grave for high achievements, not yet born; And like ...
— Fridthjof's Saga • Esaias Tegner
... wooden-sworded vices that create true comedy; they belong to the realm of farce. Yet they continued to flourish long after Heywood had set another example, and with them the cuffing of ears and drunken gambolling which we may see, in the works of other men, trying to rescue prosy scenes from dullness. In Johan Johan is simple comedy, the comedy of laughter-raising dialogue and 'asides'. We do not say it is perfect comedy, far from it; but it is comedy cleared of its former alloys. It is the comedy which Shakespeare refined for his own use ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... by the oddity and justness of his remarks upon the many strange sights which a voyage of this kind brought before him. The Nemesis steamer under weigh puzzled him at first—he then thought it was "all same big cart, only got him shingles** on wheels!" He always expressed great contempt for the dullness of comprehension of his countrymen, "big fools they," he used often to say, "blackfellow no good." Even Malays, Chinamen, and the natives of India, he counted as nothing in his increasing admiration of Europeans, until he ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... cries all about from people who once were fond of theater and music hall that there is an inconceivable dullness pervading the stage; the habitual patron can no longer endure the offerings of the present time with a degree of pleasure, much less with ease. It has ceased to be what it once was, what its name implies. If the old school inclined toward the rough too much, then ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... this gas that is produced by burning charcoal in a confined portion of common air. Its effect upon the system is well known to every reader of our newspapers. It causes dimness of sight, weakness, dullness, a difficulty of breathing, and ultimately ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... no one else, and frequently she had technical German translations in the evenings, for which she got nothing extra. Her chief did not know German, and thought she did the translations as easily as she wrote shorthand. Her whole work was moderately interesting, but the dullness of her life became insupportable. Another private secretary at the end of fifteen years in an ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... servant of a real white man. We brought him down with us to Para, but he showed no emotion at any of the strange sights of the capital— the steam-vessels, large ships and houses, horses and carriages, the pomp of church ceremonies, and so forth. In this he exhibited the usual dullness of feeling and poverty of thought of the Indian; he had, nevertheless, very keen perceptions, and was quick at learning any mechanical art. Jose, who had resumed, some time before I left the country, his old trade of goldsmith, made him his apprentice, ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... would die of dullness if I did! You'd be positively bored to tears. No, we all have our talents, and I consider my mission in life is to keep things humming and cheer you all up. I may do it ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... were sitting on a bench halfway down the slope, where the path to the landing was broken. The view from here, showing the bend of the river, was very restful. The water was growing darker, heavier, gradually assuming a leadlike dullness. ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... motion, and expose it so little on their surfaces, that we cannot perceive the changes they undergo. All that appears to us to be at rest, does not, however, remain one instant in the same state. All beings are continually breeding, increasing, decreasing, or dispersing, with more or less dullness or rapidity. The insect called EPHEMERON, is produced and perishes in the same day; of consequence, it experiences the greatest changes of its being very rapidly, in our eyes. Those combinations which form the most solid bodies, which appear to enjoy the most perfect repose, are nevertheless ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... to the scene of her former triumphs with an innocent young daughter and an infamous name. Nor, apparently, had she carried it to Rouen after she had manifestly foresworn vice for the sake of her child, even to the length of resigning herself to the dullness ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... astonished—if you were young or had anything of the genius which is always young—at Birns Castle, which is greatly to be preferred to living in Birns Castle and having nothing to be astonished at, as has been remarked by a high authority in connection with another castle. There was no dullness in this house, although only four people lived in it, but they were all busy always. It was surrounded by a wall which enclosed not only the house, but a garden, a miniature courtyard and a stable: the premises were small, but complete and compact, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... particular time the young men had been going through dull days. Beyond the fact of the mere presence of the heavily charged torpedoes at the shipyard there had been nothing like excitement, for some time. This dullness, however, was destined to turn, suddenly, into the most intense and ...
— The Submarine Boys' Lightning Cruise - The Young Kings of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... a hospital at the front is a curious mixture of excitement and dullness. One week cases will be pouring in, the operating theatre will be working day and night, and everyone will have to do their utmost to keep abreast of the rush; next week there will be nothing to do, and everyone will mope about the building, ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... autumn, Calcutta is a very gay place, and makes up for its dullness during the summer. This is the season for horse-racing, hunting, shooting, and theatrical amusements, into which the numerous indigo-planters who come to town from their plantations about this time, enter with spirit, if the crops have been good ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson
... the vision is introduced, as at Zechariah i. 9, 19, by the Prophet's question of its meaning. His angelic teacher is astonished at his dullness, as indeed heavenly eyes must often be at ours, and asks if he does not know so familiar an object. The Prophet's 'No, my Lord,' brings full explanation. Ingenuously acknowledged ignorance never asks Heaven for ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... girl, sitting very upright in her chair, "I confess to loneliness. The sameness of life in this castle oppresses me, and in its continuous dullness I grow old before my time. I wish to enjoy a month or two in Frankfort, and, as doubtless you have guessed, I send you forth as my ambassador to ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... sighing. 'Only fools are favored by the gods; and I am filled with wisdom from my wig to my two naked heels. If in my heart a grain of dullness lurks, it is perhaps my inability to squander, and I should not even know how to set about a work ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... boy came to me at thirteen. He was always a conscientious and amiable boy, but was nervous and dull. By fifteen his dullness had increased, and he complained of brain-strain and poorness of memory. Finally he began to develop St. Vitus's dance. I sent him to our school doctor, who returned him with a note saying that his condition was serious—that he must stop all work, &c. &c. I was in ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly
... rid ourselves once and for ever of this outrageous calumny upon Shakspeare's memory, we shall pursue the story to its final stage. Even Malone has been thoughtless enough to accredit this closing chapter, which contains, in fact, such a superfetation of folly as the annals of human dullness do not exceed. Let us recapitulate the points of the story. A baronet, who has no deer and no park, is supposed to persecute a poet for stealing these aerial deer out of this aerial park, both lying in nephelococcygia. ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... of concentrating on that faint, but infinitely important sound, and the need of maintaining a semblance of weary dullness was trying Brent's soul. He thanked Heaven for the taciturnity ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... these great names in letters, it was an age generally of contented dullness, well represented in the good-natured mediocrity of Queen Anne herself. During her reign the first daily newspaper (SS422, 443) appeared in England,—the Daily Courant (1703); it was a dingy, badly printed little sheet, ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... his tools and ran out. That was the last I ever saw of him in his right mind. He was brought in again by midnight, nearly dead, with his poor head all bruised and cut. The fever passed off in time, but never the dullness—THAT grew worse every day. ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... in radiance which the slightest pressure might disengage in silvery profusion like water wrung from a sea-maid's hair. Bright they are as a young man's visions, and, like them, would be realized in dullness, obscurity and tears. I will look on them ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... spite of its dullness, Mrs. Lansing's house was a comfortable and secure retreat. She would have to go back to it presently, and it was desirable that she should avoid any cause of ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... was there,—she started, looked alarmed at me, then at the earth, as if her eyes were asking for my shadow;—all her emotions were painted so faithfully on her countenance, that I should have burst into a loud laugh, had I not felt an icy dullness creeping ...
— Peter Schlemihl • Adelbert von Chamisso
... I slept all the morning, but I'm not suffering from dullness. I'm imagining things. I'm imagining how much worse off we'd be if we didn't have flint and steel. I can always find ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... noble blood; and a healthy robust appearance is so disgraceful in a man of quality, that the world concludes his real father to have been a groom or a coachman. The imperfections of his mind run parallel with those of his body, being a composition of spleen, dullness, ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... Broek, men as well as cattle flied into the church, which lies so much higher and remained quite free of water. By the exhalations of the cows, the cow-damp, has the wood been blemished and made dull at many places, chamois nor polish could help, the dullness remained." The church has beauties to set against the phenomenon of cow-damp, and among them a very elaborate carved pulpit in various preclious woods, and some ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... he wished that he could be with Eleanor and watch the gradual growth of the baby into a recognising being. His work at the Sensation office had become mechanical, and he worked at the table in the sub-editors' room without any consciousness of it; but he consoled himself for the fatigue and the dullness by promising himself a swift and brilliant release from Fleet Street when his second book was published. Even if his book were not to make money, it would establish his reputation, and when that was done, he could surely persuade Eleanor to believe that his life must be lived elsewhere than ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... my dear Sir, conceive you to be of that sophistical, captious spirit, or of that uncandid dullness, as to require, for every general observation or sentiment, an explicit detail of the correctives and exceptions which reason will presume to be included in all the general propositions which come from reasonable men. You do not imagine that I wish to confine ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Clara because she was rich, but it was something to his credit that she had not suspected this. Clara was dull, and her dullness often ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... sure I wish he could! Anything to relieve this hideous dullness. What's the matter with ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... whose recreation is reading and whose intellectual sport is controversy. They banish the Bible from their houses, and sometimes put into the hands of their unfortunate children Ethical and Rationalist tracts of the deadliest dullness, compelling these wretched infants to sit out the discourses of Secularist lecturers (I have delivered some of them myself), who bore them at a length now forbidden by custom in the established pulpit. Our minds have reacted so violently towards provable logical theorems and demonstrable ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... Princess, or how her loveliness put to shame all the sparkling jewels and magnificent luxury that surrounded her in this her royal palace. Whatever else was beautiful or dainty or delightful of itself faded to dullness when contrasted with Ozma's bewitching face, and it has often been said by those who know that no other ruler in all the world can ever hope to equal the gracious charm of ...
— The Road to Oz • L. Frank Baum
... Manet, knew (two of them happily know it still) the moment they left off arguing and bolted the studio door on that brilliant theorist, Claude Monet. Some of them, to be sure, turned out polychromatic charts of desolating dullness—Monet towards the end, for instance. The Neo-Impressionists—Seurat, Signac, and Cross—have produced little else. And any Impressionist, under the influence of Monet and Watteau, was capable of making a poor, soft, formless thing. But more often ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... law are partly due to the system of courts and partly to the dullness of court procedure. The inefficiency of the system of courts and judicial procedure is shown in the practical workings of the civil courts of New York City. The antiquated organization of all the courts is like a patchwork quilt where ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... peaks were visible. These rooms Aurora seldom left, but their airy spaces, the brilliant landscape and sky, the plentiful sunlight, the musical instruments, books, pictures, curiosities, with the company of Watho, who made herself charming, precluded all dullness. She had venison and feathered game to eat, milk and pale ...
— Harper's Young People, December 2, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... "System of Nature" is a book of which Dugald Stewart speaks, as "the boldest, if not the ablest work of the Parisian Atheists," and it has undoubtedly obtained great popularity. Voltaire, who has written against the "System of Nature" in a tone of bitter sarcasm, and who complains of its general dullness and prolixity, yet admits that it is "often humorous, sometimes eloquent." It certainly is not written in that lively, but rather superficial style, which has characterized many of the French writers, ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... though they had been selected by Fate to play strenuous parts—whether Columbine, clown or star. Something is always happening to them. Wherever they appear, they seem to hold the centre of the stage, and when they disappear a dullness falls and life seems flat for a time. You think of them more often than you realize, perhaps with a smile, perhaps with a frown, and generally you dismiss them from your mind with some such thought as this—"He'll ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... In this hour of dullness, many are reflecting on the repose and abundance they enjoyed once in the Union. But there are more acts in this drama! And the bell may ring any moment for the curtain ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... presents a constant temptation to seize every advantage, fair or unfair, which promises immediate profit. It is unfortunately true that the successful cleverness which sacrifices honor to gain is more easily condoned by public opinion than honest dullness which is caught in the snares laid for it by the cunning manipulators of speculation. The man who fails to deliver what he has bought, to meet his paper at maturity and make good the certifications ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... rest and took the path she well remembered, through the woods. The excessive hilarity of the morning had faded from her spirits. There was something indescribable about Mittie that annoyed and pained her. The gleam of kindness with which she had greeted her had all gone out, and left dullness and darkness in its stead. She could not get near her heart. At every avenue it seemed closed against her, and resisted the golden key of affection as effectually as the wrench ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... with Baron Sonnino and the Premier. What were they offering? We know now that at this last moment of the eleventh hour Austria had wakened to the real gravity of the situation, and with Teutonic pertinacity and Teutonic dullness of perception made her first real offer—the immediate cession and occupation of the ceded territories she had set as her maximum, a thing she had refused all along to consider, insisting that the transfer be deferred to the vague settlement time of the "Peace." I do not know ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... synonym for dullness. The theaters offer nothing of importance; only trivialities are to be found on "the trestles." Musical directors appeal only to the ears—chiefly the long ears mentioned by Mozart. Bookstores offer "best sellers," ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... wit had begun to pall upon the tastes of people who found themselves face to face with problems so grave and issues so vital. There was a slight reaction towards nature and simplicity. "They may be growing wiser," said Walpole, "but the intermediate change is dullness." For nearly half a century learned men and clever women had been amusing themselves with utopian theories, a few through conviction, the majority through fashion, or egotism, or the vanity of saying new things, just as the world is doing ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... worn old bench at the side of Ba'tiste's cabin and picked thorns from the palm of his hand,—thorns from the stems of wild roses which she had brought him! The enigma was too great for Houston. He could only gasp with the suddenness of it and sink back into a dullness of outlook and viewpoint which he had lost momentarily. It was thus that old friends had passed him by in Boston; it was thus that men who had been glad to borrow money from him in other days had looked the other way when the clouds had come. A ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... have been almost frantically resolved to keep the empire of the sea. But have we really done all that could have been done? I ask it with all diffidence, but has our naval preparation been free from a sort of noisy violence, a certain massive dullness of conception? Have we really made anything like a sane use of our resources? I do not mean of our resources in money or stuff. It is manifest that the next naval war will be beyond all precedent a war of mechanisms, giving such scope for invention and scientifically ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... Life, having for a little while drifted perilously near to the shores of dullness, again bobbed merrily on the waters of farce. What a lot of funny things there were, all waiting to be done! This that Urquhart suggested should certainly, if ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... alone in attacking. If I had talked about "true Imperialism," or "our loyalty to our gallant leader," you might have thought you knew what I meant; because I meant nothing. But I do mean something; and I do want you to understand what I mean. I will, therefore, state it with total dullness, in separate paragraphs; and I will ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... some Fortunatus' gift Is lying there within his hand, More costly than a pot of pearls, His dullness does not understand. ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... luxurious room. There came to her, like a dullness from a drug, the fancy that this world had no existence except that with which her credulity had endowed it. "All my life I have been dreaming this dream in which Lawrence and David, Hamoud and Anna Zanidov, America and Africa, are figments. Presently I shall wake and wonder why all these figments ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... commonplace authors are never more than half-conscious when they write, would be enough to account for their dullness of mind and the tedious things they produce. I say they are only half-conscious, because they really do not themselves understand the meaning of the words they use: they take words ready-made and commit them to memory. Hence when they write, it is not ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... looseness of the organization was fatal. With a more compact and energetic administration, either the dissatisfied elements would have been eliminated quietly, or the causes of dissatisfaction, mainly, as far as I could understand, the dullness of the life and the lack of amusements, would have been removed. But with a loose organization there appears to have been, what is not unnatural, rigidity of discipline. There was no power any where to make changes. "The discontented ones wanted a change, but no change was possible: ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... that afternoon with a droop to his head, and a dullness about his dark eyes, which Jim noticed with vague discomfort, and which made him wish heartily that he had not confided to the postmaster the story of Billings and the brake. He had quarreled with Gertrude—everything else seemed insignificant to Allison beside that. He had quarreled ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... suspense. She was now as much concerned to escape the ordeal of Mr. Pomeroy's visit as she had been earlier in the day to see him. And she had her wish. He did not come; she fancied he might be willing to let the dullness and loneliness, the monotony and silence of her prison, work their effect ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... the antiquary endeavors to decipher the mutilated inscription on some old monument, you build up a history on a gesture or on a word! These are the stirring sports of the mind, which finds in fiction a relief from the wearisome dullness of the actual. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... will the sweetest delight of gardens afford much comfort in sleep; wherein the dullness of that sense shakes hands with delectable odours; and though in the bed of Cleopatra, can hardly with any delight raise up the ghost ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... that it might be so. It would be rare sport to hunt the old rat out of his hole, or, better still, burn him in it. It would be a pleasant change from the dullness of mounting eternal guard, marching and countermarching every day, and all to what purpose? For my part I am tired of it, and long for a little more of the sport we had in dear Paris. Ah! it was worth living for, to see fifty or sixty of the ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... Josie's intimates had often wondered at her histrionic powers when she pretended to be stupid, which was her usual way of disarming persons who might have been suspicious of her. She had found out much about those archvillains Felix and Hortense Markle by an assumption of supreme dullness. But no one of her acquaintances had ever seen Josie assume the role of a skittish, dressed-up miss, painted and brazen, ...
— Mary Louise and Josie O'Gorman • Emma Speed Sampson
... came near to anticipating the greenwood scenes of Ivanhoe. The decking and trappings of chivalry filled him with boyish delight, and he found in the glitter and colour of the middle ages a refuge from the prosaic dullness of the eighteenth century. A visit from "a Luxembourg, a Lusignan and a Montfort" awoke in his whimsical fancy a mental image of himself in the guise of a mediaeval baron: "I never felt myself so much in The Castle of Otranto. ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... the anthropologists being a bete noire to scientific men, I am not surprised, for I have just skimmed through the last "Anthrop. Journal," and it shows, especially the long attack on the British Association, a curious spirit of insolence, conceit, dullness, and vulgarity. I have read with uncommon interest Travers' short paper on the Chatham Islands. (362/1. See Travers, H.H., "Notes on the Chatham Islands," "Linn. Soc. Journ." IX., October 1865. Mr. Travers says he picked up a seed of ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... in revelling roundelays, Belched out with hickups at bacchanal Go, Bellowed, till heaven's high concave rebound the lays, Are all for college carousals too low. Of dullness quite tired, with merriment fired, And fully inspired with amity's glow, With hate-drowning wine, boys, and punch all divine, boys, The Juniors combine, boys, in friendly HIGH-GO. Glossology, by William Biglow, inserted in Buckingham's ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... nature. It was an embodiment of all that was skillful and beautiful in manly action. It was a compendium of biologic research but more important still, it brought to our ears the latest band pieces and taught us the most popular songs. It furnished us with jokes. It relieved our dullness. It gave ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... rather shabby clerks who passed along with their out-of-fashion chimney-pot and badly rolled umbrella; his gait was that of a man who takes no exercise beyond the daily walk to and from his desk; the casual glance could see nothing in his features but patient dullness tending to good humour. He might be thirty, he might be forty—impossible to decide. Yet when a ray of sunshine fell upon him, and he lifted his eyes to the eastward promise, there shone in his countenance something one might vainly have sought through the streaming concourse ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... by amateurs who regard the Orlando Furioso as the perfection of poetic art. In a word, he hopes to produce something midway between the strict heroic epic, which had failed in Trissino's Italia Liberata through dullness, and the genuine romantic epic, which in Ariosto's masterpiece diverged too widely from the rules of classical pure taste. This new species, combining the attractions of romance with the simplicity of epic poetry, was the gift which Tasso at the age of eighteen sought to ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... turned his eyes toward the object, which certainly was moving slowly, as though tired, and, as the boys watched, sure enough, began to resolve itself into the shape of a dog. Here at last was something happening to break the dullness of the day. A strange dog twenty-five miles from any place in which ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... vision of the encounter of True and False Wit," he discovers, "in a very dark grove, a monstrous fabric, built after the Gothic manner and covered with innumerable devices in that barbarous kind of sculpture." This temple is consecrated to the God of Dullness, who is "dressed in the habit of a monk." In his essay "On Taste" (No. 409) he says, "I have endeavored, in several of my speculations, to banish this Gothic taste which ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... such a basis. If we can imagine an artist confining himself to this single issue, relying on no finenesses outside it, then we might have a work of art which men and women, representing in other respects any degree of imagination and dullness, might all almost equally enjoy. In practice it is seldom that an artist is content to confine himself so exclusively to this issue; it is not in the nature of the imaginative temperament to limit itself in that way. But I think we have an example approximating to the supposed type in Emily Bronte's ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... hear a woman's fretful voice, and the impatient jerk and jar of kitchen things, indicative of ill temper or worry. The longer he stood absorbing this farm scene, with all its sordidness, dullness, triviality, and its endless drudgeries, the lower his heart sank. All the joy of the homecoming was gone, when the figure arose from the cow and approached the gate, and put the pail of milk down on the platform ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... and volumes heap, Our dullness we no more betray; To know the stars, or shear a sheep— To live on air, or polo play; The trick is ours, or we may stray Beneath the seas, with science cooks, And sprint by some reflected ray The easy ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... heartier squeeze. I was at a loss to explain this sudden friendship; for I was pretty sure this exceedingly agreeable gentleman had never seen me till that moment. How long this might have lasted I know not, had not a person in the dogana, compassionating my dullness, stepped up to me, and whispered into my ear to give the searcher a few paulos. I was a little scandalized at this proposal to bribe his Holiness's servant; but I could see no chance otherwise of having the iron gate opened. Accordingly, I got ready the requisite douceur; and, waiting his ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... next day. Sybil keeps on as she began, on the night when she listened to her father and husband, while they held council in her mother's room. She is full of energy and nervous excitement always, and the old stupor of dullness, and apathetic killing of time, never once returns. But Mrs. Lamotte likes this last state not much better than the first; neither does Constance; but they say nothing, for the reason that it would be useless, as they know too well. Sybil goes out oftener, sits with the ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... though something of a poet at heart, he was much more of a cynic. He was too deeply imbued with modern fashionable atheism to think seriously about angels or Resurrection trumps, but there was a certain love of mysticism and romance in his nature, which not even his Oxford experiences and the chilly dullness of English materialism had been able to eradicate. And there was something impressive in the sight of the majestic orb holding such imperial revel at midnight,—something almost unearthly in the light and life of the heavens, ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... inside four walls: and turning up his coat collar, he began to walk slowly along the curved GRIMMAISCHESTRASSE. But the streets were by this time black with people, most of whom came hurrying towards him, brisk and bustling, and gay, in spite of the prevailing dullness, at the prospect of the warm, familiar evening. He was continually obliged to step off the pavement into the road, to allow a bunch of merry, chattering girls, their cheeks coloured by the wind beneath the dark fur of their hats, or a line of gaudy capped, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... put an end to her suspense. She was now as much concerned to escape the ordeal of Mr. Pomeroy's visit as she had been earlier in the day to see him. And she had her wish. He did not come; she fancied he might be willing to let the dullness and loneliness, the monotony and silence of her prison, work their effect ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... different condition from that existing all over Europe, where the phrase was coined. There, the phrase, and the condition it describes, mean a dull content, an incapacity to rise, a happy indifference to all other conditions, a dullness that does not desire to learn, to change, to think. To respectable poverty in other civilizations there are strong local associations like those of a cat, not arising to the dignity of love of country. In the United States, ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... sympathies are entirely enlisted for this soldier; he has neither the joy of being acquitted, nor the excitement of being tried. He is quite a sizable man by himself, but Payne overhangs him, and the dullness of the trial quite stultifies him. The few points of law which are admitted here are not so evident to this soldier as the point of his bayonet. ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... be careful of getting weary and missing the best through the need of rest. Intensify my desire for the songs and glorious ways, that I may not settle into dullness and slumber, while others pass on in the light. I pray for a keener sense of the possessions made possible by the deeds and cares of ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... rejected because they are physically unfit; and the shameful condition of the children of the poor. More than one-third of the children of the working classes in London have some sort of mental or physical defect; defects in development; defects of eyesight; abnormal nervousness; rickets, and mental dullness. The difference in height and weight and general condition of the children in poor schools and the children of the so-called better classes, constitutes a crime that calls aloud to Heaven for vengeance upon those who are ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... is a clock, with its ponderous embowelments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn dullness of communication, compared with the simple altar-like structure and silent heart-language of the old dial! It stood as the garden god of Christian gardens. Why is ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... I wish he could! Anything to relieve this hideous dullness. What's the matter with ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... foiled, or if he had found her at once, he would never have desired her so fiercely. Now, for the first time in his life impassioned, he felt something mysterious and unwelcome to him begin to mingle with his desire. Above all, life without her meant dullness, lack of vitality, the swift onset of middle-age. He saw this with shrinking. He walked wearily, looking older than he was in the ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... look duller than the future of this second-hand and multiplying world. Men need not be common merely because they are many; but the infection of commonness once begun in the many, what dullness in their future! To the eye that has reluctantly discovered this truth—that the vulgarized are not un-civilized, and that there is no growth for them—it does not look like a future at all. More ballad-concerts, more quaint English, more robustious ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... eyes, and convincing sceptics that this cloud, now resting on the tabernacle, and now, signal for the host to march, floating upward in the morning air, was not akin to such as are born of swamps or sea; and which, as emblems of our mortality, after changing from rosy beauty into leaden dullness, melt into air, leaving the place that once knew them to know them no more for ever. This symbol and token of the Divine presence was of all the types and figures of Jesus Christ in some respects both ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... quarrel with its government, leaving his son behind him. Jean Jacques was first put under the care of a minister in a neighboring village; then passed two or three years with an uncle in the town. At the age of eleven he was sent to a notary's office, whence he was dismissed for dullness and inaptitude. He was next apprenticed to an engraver, a man of violent temper, who by his cruelty brought out the meanness inherent in the boy's weak nature. Rousseau had not been incapable of generosity; perhaps he never quite became so. But, with a cowardly temperament, ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... feeling Even themselves or for themselves. Dullness best solves The tease and doubt of shelling, And Chance's strange arithmetic Comes simpler than the reckoning of their shilling. They keep no check ...
— Poems • Wilfred Owen
... people were no improvement on the Drews, none whatever. There was no effect of a beneficial replacement of passive unintelligent people by active intelligent ones. One felt that a smaller but more enterprising and intensely undignified variety of stupidity had replaced the large dullness of the old gentry, and that was all. Bladesover, I thought, had undergone just the same change between the seventies and the new century that had overtaken the dear old Times, and heaven knows how much more of the decorous British fabric. ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... November 4th, 1812. He passed his boyhood on his father's farm, amid the grand scenery of the valley of the Adige, which deeply impressed itself on his youthful imagination and left its traces in all his verse. He went to school at Verona, where for his dullness he was nick-named the "mole," and afterwards he passed on to the University of Padua to study law, apparently to please his father, for in the charming autobiography prefixed to his collected poems he quotes his father as ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... isn't teaching to-day," remarked the substitute, in the patient tone which the enlightened have for dullness. "She is ill and I am teacher here. ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... the thoughtful mind of Euripides; and hence that art which in Sophocles was learned in more miscellaneous and active circles, and moulded by a more powerful imagination, in Euripides often sickens us with the tricks of a pleader, the quibbles of a schoolman, or the dullness of a moralizing declaimer. But as, in the peculiar attributes and character of his writings, Euripides somewhat forestalled his age—as his example had a very important influence upon his successors—as he ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... simple truths? Well, as simple as they seem to you, reader, you shall yet see others which surpass them in dullness and simplicity. For our course is the reverse of that of the geometricians: with them, the farther they advance, the more difficult their problems become; we, on the contrary, after having commenced with the most abstruse propositions, shall end ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... the province of woman; minor annoyances her burden. Dullness, bad temper, mal-adroitness, are to her the cause of a thousand petty rubs, which too often spoil the euphony of a silver voice, and discompose the symmetry of fair features. But the confidence which reposes on divine affection, and the charity which covers human ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady
... death. That tomb you led me to, of which I knew nothing—as I know nothing, or scarcely anything, concerning her whom it covers—brought back to me emotions which were unique in my life, and which seem in the dullness of that life like some light gleaming upon a dark road. The light recedes farther and farther away as the journey lengthens; I have now almost reached the bottom of the last slope; and, nevertheless, each time I turn to look back I see the ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... fun of me," she said. In reality there was a part of Bauer's nature which was unexpected. His quiet habits and his slow speech were apt to give an impression of dullness of intellect and lack of mental quickness. Helen was finding out that Bauer was in many ways the quickest of all her acquaintances. And he had a fund of smileless humour that came as a surprise even to those who thought they ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... moment now. A slender column of smoke had been floating above the chimney of Can Mallorqui for half an hour. He imagined Pep's daughter flitting from place to place preparing his noonday meal, followed by the glances of her mother, a poor peasant woman, silent in her dullness, who did not venture to set her hand to anything pertaining to ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... about the future, it would be rest rather than dullness,' said John; 'but I think a good deal of his trouble is caused by Manby's verdict, and for that perhaps the best cure would be letting him ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... growth, Which to remember only, my dismay Renews, in bitterness not far from death. Yet to discourse of what there good befell, All else will I relate discover'd there. How first I enter'd it I scarce can say, Such sleepy dullness in that instant weigh'd My senses down, when the true path I left, But when a mountain's foot I reach'd, where clos'd The valley, that had pierc'd my heart with dread, I look'd aloft, and saw his shoulders broad Already vested with that planet's beam, ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... discussion that followed this breach of discipline began on the arrival of the saleratus, and lasted through supper; and Rose went to bed almost immediately afterward for very dullness and apathy. Her life stretched out before her in the most aimless and monotonous fashion. She saw nothing but heartache in the future; and that she richly deserved it made it none ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... and, if left to their own impulses, the characters of their mind will show themselves; wit will flash, and thought will answer thought spontaneously; but every effort to make the stupid agreeable, by giving a direction of a pretending intellectual nature to their efforts, is only rendering dullness more conspicuous by exhibiting it in contrast with what it ought to be to be clever, as a bad picture is rendered the more conspicuous by an ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... this play, you shall be greatly rewarded so that few shall hold their heads higher than you in the land. Ye know how I befriend my friends. But know too this: that if this scheme miscarry, either of your fault or another's, either through inattention or ill chance, either through treason or dullness of the brain of man, down to the least pin of it, ye shall not this night sleep in your bed, nor ever more shall you be seen in daylight above the earth.' He pointed suddenly from the window to the low sun. 'Have a care that ye so act as ye ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... cases which I saw with Mr Girdwood, one, who has not been labouring for some years as a moulder, occasionally expectorated black matter, and in the other two, there was general dullness of both lungs; and, I doubt ...
— An Investigation into the Nature of Black Phthisis • Archibald Makellar
... certain quiet evenings when Miranda went to prayer meeting; evenings when Rebecca would read aloud Hiawatha or Barbara Frietchie, The Bugle Song, or The Brook. Her narrow, humdrum existence bloomed under the dews that fell from this fresh spirit; her dullness brightened under the kindling touch of the younger mind, took fire from the "vital spark of heavenly flame" that seemed always to radiate ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... drifted. That last part of Gulliver is only a consequence of what has gone before; and the worthlessness of all mankind, the pettiness, cruelty, pride, imbecility, the general vanity, the foolish pretension, the mock greatness, the pompous dullness, the mean aims, the base successes—all these were present to him; it was with the din of these curses of the world, blasphemies against Heaven, shrieking in his ears, that he began to write his dreadful ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... dressing-room, she said nothing, but, Molly, you know, and hastened to her chariot. What I am to know is yet a secret; but if I do not know before she comes back, what I yet have no means of discovering, she will make my dullness a pretence for a fortnight's ill humour, treat me as a creature devoid of the faculties necessary to the common duties of life, and perhaps give the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... her influence, they still would have missed her bright presence sorely. The months still glided on; how, it seemed impossible for the inhabitants of the living tomb to say. There was a dead level of dullness. ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... sailed in the direction of New Orleans, late in November. The wives of many of the officers accompanied them, for not a man doubted that the speedy conquest of Louisiana would be the result of the expedition. The dullness of the voyage was enlightened by music and dancing, and all anticipated exquisite pleasures to be found in the paradise before them. It is said that the British officers had promised their soldiers the privilege of the city, when captured, ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... symptoms of adenoids are mouth breathing, restlessness at night, snoring, recurring colds, nasal discharge, swelling of the glands of the neck, poor nutrition, loss of appetite, bed wetting, impaired hearing, lack of attention, and mental dullness. The removal of adenoids is neither a serious or difficult procedure, and they may safely be removed at ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... found themselves face to face with problems so grave and issues so vital. There was a slight reaction towards nature and simplicity. "They may be growing wiser," said Walpole, "but the intermediate change is dullness." For nearly half a century learned men and clever women had been amusing themselves with utopian theories, a few through conviction, the majority through fashion, or egotism, or the vanity of saying new things, just as the world is doing today. The doctrines put ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... play, to see "The Generall;" which is so dull and so ill-acted, that I think it is the worst I ever saw or heard in all my days. I happened to sit near to Sir Charles Sedley: who I find a very witty man, and he did at every line take notice of the dullness of the poet and badness of the action, that most pertinently; which I ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... bad guinea, and proclaimed the success of their device. When the chimney-sweeper's boy met his death by falling from a high gallery to the floor of the court-house at the York Assizes, whilst Sir Thomas Davenport was speaking, it was John Scott who—arguing that the orator's dullness had sent the boy to sleep, and so caused his fatal fall—prosecuted Sir Thomas for murder in the High Court, alleging in the indictment that the death was produced by a "certain blunt instrument of no value, called a long speech." The records of the Northern Circuit abound with testimony ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... influence of the speeches. His shrewdness showed him the shallows, the currents, and the reefs. Day after day he saw a great many promising plans, like full-sailed ships, ground upon the flats of dullness, strike rocks of prejudice, or whirl in the currents of crudity, until they broke up and ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... everlastingly poking one's finger after a sliver,—and had caught now and then, over the still air, the laughter and bird-notes that came together from among the pines. One of the Miss Haughtleys had sat with them; but that only "stiffened out the dullness," as Etty had declared, the instant the young lady ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... faced with the certainty of his son's return. She would have to stop her ridiculous imaginings, she must pretend she had never had them for, when she saw him as flesh and blood, her game would be ruined and she would be shamed. The imminence of his arrival reminded her of his dullness, his handsome, sullen face and, more tenderly, of those tears which had put her so oddly in his debt. But she had no difficulty in casting away the false image she had made. She was, she found, glad to be rid of it; she liked ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... did not mean to allow his light to remain hidden, as May apparently intended it should be; consequently, dinner had scarcely begun before she started to draw him out scientifically, and, after the dullness of the last few days, her guest was not loath to talk. He was always interesting, but this time he was almost brilliant; and when Ethel gave the signal to the other ladies, she left the room feeling that she had scored ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... the voluntary muscles, particularly the extensors, followed by a slight giddiness and slight feeling of exhaustion. If repeated several times in the course of a single day the acts are followed by dullness and lassitude; otherwise the feeling of exhaustion passes away quickly and a sense of relief and quiet takes its place. So natural or rather habitual has this resort to masturbation as a means of relief from ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... THE ESTIMATION OF INTELLIGENCE. Another source of error in the teacher's judgment comes from the difficulty in distinguishing genuine dullness from the mental condition which results sometimes from unfavorable social environment or ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... the steerage might do. Curious social phenomenon, the steerage! In the saloon there runs a code, the only possible code, the final code; and it is observed. If it is not observed, the infraction causes pain, distress. Another marked characteristic is its gigantic temperamental dullness, unresponsiveness to external suggestion, a lack of humour—in short, a heavy and half-honest stupidity: ultimate product of gross prosperity, too much exercise, too much sleep. Then I notice a grim ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... as the night had passed. Save for an occasional halt to rest his horse and refresh his body with food, nothing broke the dullness of the journey. The wolves alone were silent, waiting for the night. As the afternoon wore on Sigurd could see their gaunt forms skulking among the trees, casting many a hungry sidelong glance that way, and licking their cruel jaws as ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... in a state of restlessness and dullness, complaining of difficulty in swallowing. Mrs. Martin was uneasy lest there should be something malignant about the attack; but to Phillida the case seemed an ordinary one, not likely to prove serious. She held Tommy in her arms for a while and this was a solace to the little fellow. ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... influence on the great events of the time. Trumbull was a tutor in Yale College, and attempted to introduce an improved course of study and discipline into the institution, which met with much opposition. His most finished poem, "The Progress of Dullness," was hardly less serviceable to the cause of education than his McFingal was to that of liberty. Francis Hopkinson (1738-1791), another wit of the Revolution, may be ranked beside Trumbull for his efficiency in the ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... is recorded of the infancy of Chatterton, parents may be satisfied that an inaptness to learn in childhood, is far from being a prognostic of future dullness. At the age of five years, he was sent to the school of which his father had been master, and was found so incorrigibly stupid, that he was rejected by the teacher, whose name was Love, as incapable of profiting by his instruction. His mother, as ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... the key in my hand, and turned away with a sigh. I trembled at my own audacity. I had never forced myself into his presence, for the dullness of his vow was upon me, and the hand that would have removed the icy barrier he had raised between us was numbed by ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... delight of gardens afford much comfort in sleep; wherein the dullness of that sense shakes hands with delectable odours; and though in the bed of Cleopatra, can hardly with any delight raise up the ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... Phocis is Boeotia, which is a large hollow basin, enclosed on every side by mountains, which prevent the waters from flowing into the sea. Hence the atmosphere was damp and thick, to which circumstance the witty Athenians attributed the dullness of the inhabitants. Thebes was the chief city of Boeotia. South of Boeotia lies ATTICA, which is in the form of a triangle, having two of its sides washed by the sea and its base united to the land. Its soil is light ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... and she might have been upstairs. "Yes sir." "Did she say when she would return?" "No sir, but it will be I dare say about the usual time." "When is that?" "Half-past five, or six o'clock, perhaps later." I again turned down the garden, and as that did not relieve my dullness, returned to the house. I could not read though I tried, sat down on a chair by the dining-room table, laid my head on my hands upon it, and thought of my unhappy home ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... farmer's boys, who, discontented at home, leave it for something more congenial to their feelings and tastes, do so simply because of the excessive dullness, and want of interest in objects to attract them there, and keep them contented. Boys, in America at least, are apt to be smart. So their parents think, at all events; and too smart they prove, to stay at home, ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... headlines "The Intolerable Dullness of Country Life in Ireland." And Irene wonders ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... supremely; when he embraced the cross joyfully and penitently; when he held intimate communion with Christ, and loved his neighbor as himself But he was always in terror, lest under the force of temptation, all this should give place to deadness and dullness, when he should chafe and rebel in the hour of trial, and judge his fellow-man with a harsh and bitter judgment, and give way to angry, passionate emotions. But these fluctuations cease, after a time, to disturb his peace. Love to Christ becomes the abiding, inmost principle of ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... another engaged young lady whom I did not avoid; but you are distressing yourself quite unnecessarily about me. When I look tired, for instance, you may take it as a sure sign that I am bored; nothing ever really makes me feel ill except dullness.' ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... to admit that one has hardly ever been unhappy for a long time before this war. The year my brother died, the year one went through a tragedy, the year of deadly dullness in the country—but now it isn't so much a personal matter. War and the sound of guns, and the sense of destruction and death abroad, the solitude of it, and the disappointing people! Oh, and the poor wounded—the poor, smelly, dirty ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... and at most would merely send her to sleep. The only thing that could be said against it was that the author's dread of inspiration had made it grievously dull, but it was the publisher's opinion that after a glut of sensational fiction the six-shilling public had come to regard dullness as the hall-mark of literary merit. He had no illusions as to its possible success, but, on the other hand, he knew that he could not lose any money on it, so he wrote a letter to the author ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... each other until death; and in thousands of cases where they did, they did not want to. Quickness of mind, subtlety of idea, fortuitousness of opportunity, made it possible for some people to right their matrimonial and social infelicities; whereas for others, because of dullness of wit, thickness of comprehension, poverty, and lack of charm, there was no escape from the slough of their despond. They were compelled by some devilish accident of birth or lack of force or resourcefulness to stew in their own juice of wretchedness, or to shuffle off this mortal coil—which ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... Cumming's forces, closely opposed to my own position at Bull Run. He himself was instantly killed, and his son Harry, practically at his side, seriously, possibly fatally wounded, was now in hospital at Richmond. Even by this time we were learning the dullness to surprise and shock which war always brings. We had not ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... required. Margaret, with her bigness of nature, had insisted upon the girl retaining the post in the wards and letting things go on as they were. Her "bit" was very, very dull, but it was her "bit," and nothing she did, she knew, could in any way compare in dullness to the lives of the boys in the trenches. So she worked and endured, and found the necessary change of scene in the mixed company of her ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... and that he drove his reverend preceptors to the desperate course of advising his removal. They told his father he would make a good farmer, but a scholar, never. They nicknamed him the mole, for his dullness; but, in the mean time, he was making underground progress of his own, and he came to the surface one day, a mole no longer, to everybody's amazement, but a thing of such flight and song as they had never seen before,—in fine, ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... expressed the depths of its degradation? They did not appear the works of a self-taught child. In that case, in spite of the caricature of drawing, a sharp distinction would have manifested itself. But here were visible only simple dullness, steady-going incapacity, which stood, through self-will, in the ranks of art, while its true place was among the lowest trades. The same colours, the same manner, the same practised hand, belonging rather to a manufacturing automaton than ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... imperfect disclosures mean, and, as the antiquary endeavors to decipher the mutilated inscription on some old monument, you build up a history on a gesture or on a word! These are the stirring sports of the mind, which finds in fiction a relief from the wearisome dullness of ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... herself of dullness in not having thought earlier of the photograph gallery. Her father must have been conducting himself very quietly there or she would have heard him before. It had been a bright day and he had undoubtedly been taking advantage of the sun to do his printing. She had ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... work that afternoon with a droop to his head, and a dullness about his dark eyes, which Jim noticed with vague discomfort, and which made him wish heartily that he had not confided to the postmaster the story of Billings and the brake. He had quarreled with Gertrude—everything else seemed insignificant to Allison beside ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... light-winged toys Of feathered Cupid seel with wanton dullness My speculative and officed instruments, That my disports corrupt and taint my business, Let housewives make a skillet of my helm, And all indign and base adversities ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... impression it all makes on me is beyond description. I want to see a better thing made of Chicago. I really hate it here, all this striving for money—but of course no place can beat Chicago for that—but also the idlers here, the worship of Mammon, the dullness and the gloom of elegant people, the extravagant dressing, the liveried servants, all this imitation. And all this talk here of America being the only religious, free, and enlightened people in the world. Why, they are not free at all. The mind must be free ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... great danger of wounding the sensibilities of a timid, retiring child. It requires great forbearance and discrimination on the part of parents and teachers, in their endeavors to develop the latent faculties of the minds of such children, (whether this dullness is natural, or the effect of untoward circumstances,) without injuring the ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... down on one's head does not make for comfort. In addition there is the monotony of the harvesting. As I told you before, this has to be done by hand—there is no escape from that; and since it must be, the dullness of the task is an ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... party; on the contrary, everybody appeared to be so determined not to say the wrong thing, that they remained silent; the dullness of the meal was only broken at long intervals by such carefully expressed sentiments as "I'll trouble you to pass the salt, if you please," or "Will you kindly ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... breathed. Then, in a moment, the paralysis fell from her. The dullness of her eyes gave place to a sheen of excitement, and her perfect cheeks assumed a ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... Art is nothing—genius is nothing—but no! that is blasphemous. It is we that are nothing—if not stupid. Dullness is the universe. The grasshoppers are too faint to sing, the birds sit still on the boughs, waiting for the leaves to fan them. Children are wilted into silence and slumberous nonentity; boys do not bathe to-day—they welter, hour after hour, ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... surroundings on this occasion should lead us to humble recognition of the providence of God in all that has made us a great nation. From our beginning as a people our course has been marked by concurrences and incidents so striking, so significant and so constant, that only superstitious dullness or intellectual blindness will place them to the credit of ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... he found his mind dwelling on him as a sort of habit. But for this one man he would have lived a squalid life among his people at Janney's Mills—squalid because he had not the elasticity to rise above its narrow, uneducated dullness. The squalor so far as he himself was concerned was not physical. His own small, plain home was as neat as it was simple, but he had not the temperament which makes a man friends. Baird possessed this temperament, and his home was a centre of all that was most living. It was not the ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... to grow very impatient of remaining at school, to be flogged for things that I did not like. I longed for variety, especially now that I had not my uncle's to resort to, by way of diversifying the dullness of school with the dreariness of his country seat. I was now turned of sixteen; tall for my age, and full of idle fancies. I had a roving, inextinguishable desire to see different kinds of life, and different orders of society; and this vagrant humor had been fostered ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... of the dullness of the early autumn in London without Aylmer. This sudden mania for long journeys on Aylmer's part was a most annoying hobby. He would never get such a pleasant friend as Aylmer again. ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... life.' He expressed himself to the same purpose concerning another law-Lord, who, it seems, once took a fancy to associate with the wits of London; but with so little success, that Foote said, 'What can he mean by coming among us? He is not only dull himself, but the cause of dullness in others[557].' Trying him by the test of his colloquial powers, Johnson had found him very defective. He once said to Sir Joshua Reynolds, 'This man now has been ten years about town, and has made nothing of it;' meaning as a companion[558]. He said to me, 'I never ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... seem to be wandering from my story, let me say here that my father had been in treaty with this Mr. Peter Walpole concerning my apprenticeship to him in Norwich. After moping a long time at the dullness of my life in Brandon I had plucked up courage to tell my father that I would fain be abroad. He heard me less unkindly than I had feared, and contrived this plan for settling me away from home for a few ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... the charged battery to generate the current. Interest begets interest. It is as contagious as whooping cough—if a class is exposed it is sure to catch it. The teacher who constantly complains of a dull class, very likely is simply facing a reaction to his own dullness or disagreeableness. "Blue Monday" isn't properly so named merely because of the drowsy pupil. The teacher inevitably sets the pace and determines the tone of his class. Many a teacher when tired, or out of patience, has concluded a recitation feeling that ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... esteemed the strongest that binds society together, and let me depart as a sort of outcast from his family, that strangely lessened my self-confidence. The Muse, too,—the very coquette that had led me into this wilderness—deserted me, and I should have been reduced to an uncomfortable state of dullness had it not been for the conversation of strangers who chanced to pass the same way. One poor man with whom I travelled a day and a half, and whose name was Morris, afforded me most amusement. He had upon his pillion a very small, but apparently a very weighty portmanteau, which he would never ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... symbol of the storms that might come beneath the firmament; the purple and gold and crimson of nature's gala dress seemed to fling their soft luxury around the beholder, enfolding him, as it were, from all the dust and the dimness and the dullness of this world's working days for evermore. So it was to Diana; and all the miles of that long drive, joggingly pulled along by Prince, she rode in a chariot of the imagination, traversing fields of thought and of space, now to Evan and now with him; and in her ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... sentiment was highly characteristic of the mental calibre and associations of the speaker; and certainly the habitual talk—for it is not conversation—of that section of society which calls itself "smart" seems to touch the lowest depth of spiteful and sordid dullness. But still, when the mischiefs of habitual personality have been admitted to the uttermost, there remains something to be said on the other side. We are not inhabitants of Jupiter or Saturn, but human beings to whom nothing that is human ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... one capital way to get out of commonplace,' he said; 'but it isn't play, my dear. If you set about doing what God would have you to do with yourself, there will be no dullness in your life, and no ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... appearance fulfilled the promise of his voice over the telephone. A sort of nervous dullness wrapped him about like ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... includes the process of digestion, the subsequent vital changes involved in the conversion of food into blood, and its final transformation into tissue, causes mental languor and dullness, as well as bodily exhaustion, is attested by universal experience. A torpid condition of the liver, one of the most inveterate of chronic derangements, is indicated by sullenness, melancholy, despondency, loss of ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... Carden out," he wrote about this time, "he's a slow-minded, unimaginative, commercial Briton, with as much nimbleness as an elephant. British commerce is his deity, British advantage his duty and mission; and he goes about his work with blunt dullness and ineptitude. That's his mental calibre as I read ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... of Filippo's dullness. He soon learned all that the painter-monks could teach him, and as years passed on the prior would rub his hands in delight to think that here was an artist, one of themselves, who would soon be able to paint the walls of the ...
— Knights of Art - Stories of the Italian Painters • Amy Steedman
... the good woman suffered such a disillusionment. Allie, she soon discovered, was anything but a child, or rather she was an amazing and contradictory combination of child and adult. What Mrs. Ring had taken to be mental apathy, inherent dullness, was in reality caution, diffidence, the shyness ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... intimates had often wondered at her histrionic powers when she pretended to be stupid, which was her usual way of disarming persons who might have been suspicious of her. She had found out much about those archvillains Felix and Hortense Markle by an assumption of supreme dullness. But no one of her acquaintances had ever seen Josie assume the role of a skittish, dressed-up miss, painted and ...
— Mary Louise and Josie O'Gorman • Emma Speed Sampson
... he was, that Mr. Malcolm MacPherson! Such songs as he sang, such stories as he told, such a breezy, unconventional atmosphere as he brought into that prim little house, where stagnant dullness had reigned for years! He worshipped Aunt Olivia, and his worship took the concrete form of presents galore. He brought her a present almost every visit—generally some article of jewelry. Bracelets, rings, chains, ear-drops, lockets, ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... that. To be sure, on the first face and blush of it, Durant had wondered how on earth Mrs. Fazakerly could tolerate the Colonel; but, when he came to think of it, there was no reason why she should not go a great deal farther than that. The Colonel's dullness would not depress her, she having such an eternal spring of gaiety in herself. She might even find it "soothing," like the neighboring landscape. And as she loved her laughter, it was not improbable that she loved its cause. Then she had the inestimable advantage of knowing the worst ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... she bit her lip. Her dullness in not suspecting the identity of this spy, her lover, pained her acutely. She had thought to read the Sphynx, and it had its paw upon her. Her exasperation was so keen that she determined to be revenged on both ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... wallowing swine. This is the reason that several of their old men recommend, and say, that formerly their greatest chieftains observed a constant rule in their diet, and seldom ate of any animal of a gross quality, or heavy motion of body, fancying it conveyed a dullness through the whole system, and disabled them from exerting themselves with proper vigour in their martial, civil, and religious duties." The Zaparo Indians of Ecuador "will, unless from necessity, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... and the scene in which Lady Teazle, Mrs. Candour, and the rest of the scandalous college sit in a semicircle and cap malicious similes, came to be regarded as an unapproachable model of comedy dialogue. The convention maintained itself firmly down to the days of Money and London Assurance, the dullness of the intervening period being due, not to any change of theory, but to sheer impotence of practice. T.W. Robertson, as above mentioned, attempted a return to nature, with occasional and very partial ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... Why not? Some women ought to be stupid. What you call dullness I call repose. Give me a calm woman, a slow woman,—a lazy, majestic woman. Show me a gracious virgin bearing a lily; not a leering giggler frisking a rattle. A lively woman would be the death of me.... Why shouldn't the Sherrick ...
— What Great Men Have Said About Women - Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 77 • Various
... fate. Higher and higher went the price of food, and lower and lower sank the hopes of her people. Their momentary joy under the influence of such events as the Morgan reception was like the result of a stimulant or narcotic, quickly over and leaving the body lethargic and dull. But this dullness had in ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... a month in futile searching for employment, and finally obtained a position as a stock girl in a Sixth Avenue suit store at $4 a week, a sum less than the wage for which she had begun work five years before. Within a few weeks, dullness of trade had caused her dismissal. She was again facing ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt
... as 'teapoy'; it is NOT 'teapot' and it means a three-legged table. 'Dullness' was consistently spelled 'dulness' and is left thus. 'Decrepit' was consistently spelled 'decrepid' and is left thus. 'Dote, dotes,' etc. was consistently spelled 'doat, doats,' etc. and is left thus. 'License' is spelled once thus and once 'licence.' The word 'speciality' ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... she confessed one day, "he kisses it! I know by the dullness on the glass when I rub it." She did not add that she rubbed it viciously. "I tell you," she insisted, almost with a groan, "he lives with her. She is with him in this house in spite of us; she talks with him; his ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... feasts on holy-days and high-days, rich and succulent.—And in this last connection, as he reflected, much was to be said for the geographical position of Marychurch; since if river mists and white dullness of sea fog, drifting in from the Channel, were to hand, so, also, in their season, were fresh run salmon, snipe, wood-cock, flocks of wild duck, of plover and ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... literary career by advertising for hack work in London, being in all a confused mass of impossible detail, loose notes and disconnected opinion, which contemporary English reviews stigmatize as manifestly spurious, "an infamous attempt to palm the united effusions of dullness and indecency upon the world as the genuine production of the late ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... expect. The parishioners of Givens seldom had sight of her, and set it down to pride and contempt of her husband's origin. (He had been a weaver's son from Falkirk, who either had won his way to the Marischal College of Aberdeen by strength of will and in defiance of natural dullness, or else had started with wits but blunted them in carving his way thither.) She rarely set foot beyond the manse garden, the most of her time being spent in a roomy garret under the slates, where she spun a fine yarn and worked it into thread of the kind which is yet known as "Balgarnock ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... boy entered Harrow school and was put in a class beyond his years, wherein all the other boys had the advantage of previous instruction. His master used to reprove his dullness, but all his efforts could not raise him from the lowest place in the class. The boy finally procured the elementary books which the other boys had studied. He devoted the hours of play and many of the hours of sleep to mastering the elementary principles of ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... face, with its stain of blood over the white forehead, had drawn forth his deepest pity, and roused him to some approach to tenderness. But with the occasion the feeling had passed; and the tenderness, born of so piteous a sight, returned no more. Her own dullness afterward deprived him even of the chance of finding her an agreeable companion. He saw that she was deeply melancholy. Yet what could he do? Even if he had wished it he could not have forced himself to love this woman, notwithstanding her devotion to himself. And ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... his eyes toward the object, which certainly was moving slowly, as though tired, and, as the boys watched, sure enough, began to resolve itself into the shape of a dog. Here at last was something happening to break the dullness of the day. A strange dog twenty-five miles from any place in which ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... are to be seen hawking at insects; they are distinguishable from adults by the dullness of the plumage and the fact that the median tail feathers are ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... the bay are treated to a blow or two from the north, which is about as serious weather as the inhabitant of that favored clime ever experiences. After a night whose sleep has been broken by shrieks of the wind and the rattling of doors and windows, I wake with a dullness of head and sensitiveness of nerve that alone would be sufficient to tell me that the north wind had risen like a thief in the night, and had not, according to the manner of that class, stolen away before morning. On the contrary, he seems to ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... the time of the Union with Scotland, the counsellors of Queen Anne utterly failed to touch the hearts of the Scots; and it was left to commerce sluggishly and partially to mingle the two peoples. In contrast with this dullness, how inspiring are the annals of France in the early and best days of the Revolution. Then the separatist Provincial System vanished as a miasma; and amidst the eager hopes and class renunciations of that ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... vital, the present dead! Life in Surrey must be dull. How could I forget or enjoy? I put the curtains down, and told Temperance, who was wandering about, not to call me to dinner. I determined, if possible, to surpass my dullness by indulgence. But underneath it all I could not deny that there was a specter, whose aimless movements kept me from stagnating. I determined to drag it up and ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... through screen after screen of brown camouflage which hid the little railway line from the watchful gaze of Kemmel, he seemed to be passing through some mysterious land. By day it was hideous enough; but in the dusk the flat dullness of it was transfigured. Each pond with the shadows lying black on its unruffled surface seemed a fairy lake; each gaunt and stunted tree seemed to clothe itself again with rustling leaves. The night was silent; only the ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... capital description and all good things; though without any compliment I am sure you would write a better than I shall. But you see the original fault in me is that I choose to be in such a place as this at all; that argues certainly a talent for dullness which no situation nor intercourse of men could much improve. It is true; I really do like to sit in this doleful place with a good fire, a cat and dog on the rug, and an old woman in the kitchen. This is all my live stock. The house is yet damp as last year; and ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... northerly winds still higher torosses were heaped up round the vessel, and larger and larger snow masses were collected between it and the land, and on the heights along the coast. All hopes or fears of an early release were again given up, and a perceptible dullness began to make itself felt after the bustle and festrvities of the Christmas holidays. Instead there was now arranged a series of popular lectures which were held in the lower deck, and treated of the history of the North-East Passage, the first ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... his chair on the balcony to think it over. At four o'clock that afternoon he had grumbled of dullness. He lit a pipe, and contemplated the soft and delicate blues of earth and heaven, the silvery flashes on the lake, and the slim violet threads of smoke which wavered about his head. It was late. Now and then the sound of a galloping horse was borne up by the breeze, and presently Maurice ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... call depth in a book is often obscurity; and an author whose meaning is got at only by severe mental exertion, and a straining of the mind's eye, is generally weak in the backbone of him. Occasionally it is the dullness of the reader, but oftener ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... enforcement of words and music. And the words owe a courtesy to the music; for if a balance be struck between the words and music of hymns, it will be found to be heavily in favour of the musicians, whose fine work has been unscrupulously altered and reduced to dullness by english compilers, with the object of conforming it in rhythm to words that are unworthy of any music whatever. The chief offenders here are the protestant reformers, whose metrical psalms, which the ...
— A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn-Singing • Robert Bridges
... known by the name of The Greatest Happiness Principle. Another article in the Westminster Review followed; and a surrejoinder by Macaulay in the Edinburgh Review of October, 1829. Macaulay was irritated at what he conceived to be either extreme dullness or gross unfairness on the part of his unknown antagonist, and struck as hard as he could; and ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... agreeable rake, a man of pleasure." Do not think that this means debauchery and profligacy; nothing like it. It means, at most, the accidental and unfrequent irregularities of youth and vivacity, in opposition to dullness, formality, and want of spirit. A 'commerce galant', insensibly formed with a woman of fashion; a glass of wine or two too much, unwarily taken in the warmth and joy of good company; or some innocent frolic, by ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... nervously ran over his conversational ammunition. There was of course Maude Adams to begin with. He tried hard to think of some book he had read—some work of sufficient dullness to serve up ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... daughter pined for neither society nor scandal: she had plenty of interest in her life, and in pleasing other people, whenever she could do it with pleasure to herself, and that was nearly always. Her present ailment was not languor, weariness, or dullness, but rather the want of such things; which we long for when they happen to be scarce, and declare them to be our first need, under ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... between the jaw bones are very slightly, if at all, enlarged; they are loose, not hard and knotty, as in glanders. This ailment, which is apt to persist for months, unless properly treated, may leave an animal in an unthrifty state, with a staring coat, disturbed appetite, dullness at work, cough and discharge from one or both nostrils; but there are no pustules or ragged sores or ulcers within the nose, as in glanders. Chronic nasal gleet, however, is apt to run into glanders; and, as there is no telling when the beginning is, such a horse, with ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... minister's custom to so infringe on the sleeping hours of Saturday night—time which had been given to his body, in order that it might be vigorous, instead of clogging the soul with the dullness of its weight. But there are special hours in the life of most men, and this Saturday evening was a special time to him. He felt like wrestling for the blessing—felt in a faint degree some of the persistency of the servant of old who said: "I will not let thee go, except ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... that the Romping Betsy drove steadily on her way into the west, either battered by storm, or idly drifting in calm, while life on board became a tiresome routine. The dullness and ill treatment led to trouble below, to dissatisfaction and angry outbreaks of temper. The prisoners grew quarrelsome among themselves, and mutinous toward their guards. I took no part in these affairs, ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... Rickie, if you knew the deathly dullness of Sawston—every one saying the proper thing at the proper time, I so proper, Herbert so proper! Why, weirdness is the one thing I long ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... least follow that the darkest spots should be the purest; still less so that the lightest should be the purest. Very often the two gradations more or less cross each other, one passing in one direction from paleness to darkness, another in another direction from purity to dullness, but there will almost always be both of them, however reconciled; and you must never be satisfied with a piece of color until you have got both: that is to say, every piece of blue that you lay on must be quite blue only at some given spot, nor that a large spot; and must be gradated ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... Elizabeth, 'do not, for pity's sake, make me discontented; here am I in Abbeychurch, and must make the best of it. I must be as polite and hypocritical as I can make myself. I must waste my time and endure dullness.' ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sensation was that of dullness and damp, accompanied by a mouldering vapour, like that from the charnel-house or the grave. Their way was down a winding and broken staircase; at the bottom a straight passage led them on to a considerable ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... me during the night, and I came to my room and lay down in the dullness of the dawn. But now I am sorry that I allowed her to do so, for I did not sleep, and grandfather appears to have been troubled with dreams. I fancied he shuddered a little as I left them together, and more than once through the wall I heard him cry, 'Bring him back!' in the toneless voice ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... Dimokrat to Dimokrats; and it wuz appreciated. Strippin off all uv the disguise he hed bin a wearin for four years,—washin off, in rage and whisky, the varnish and putty with wich he hed shined up his dullness, and filled up the cracks and cavities wich hed alluz troubled him,—he stood forth ez we knowd him—Androo Johnson! How he did froth and foam! How he did lash his late associates! and how those Dimokrats who kum to Washinton ...
— "Swingin Round the Cirkle." • Petroleum V. Nasby
... drooping heart began to revive, and I turned to listen to the long harangue of my good friend with more interest and attention, especially, as Charlotte's small white hand remained firmly clasped in mine, to repay me for its dullness and prolixity. ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... or metaphor is from the material to the immaterial, or vice versa, the analogy should be more complete than when it is between two things on the same plane: when they are on different planes there is less dullness (that is, less failure to produce consciousness), and the greater mental effort required of ...
— Tract XI: Three Articles on Metaphor • Society for Pure English
... lad," said Mr. Gilbert, "you will be sorry to learn that he was charged with dishonesty. It was a very respectable lady who made the charge. It is only fair to say that the boy denied it, and that, personally, we found him faithful and trusty. But as the dullness of trade compelled us to discharge some of our cash-boys, we naturally discharged him among the number, without, however, judging ...
— The Cash Boy • Horatio Alger Jr.
... in Winesburg was not a success. The dullness of the passing hours led to his drinking harder than ever. But he did succeed in doing something. He gave a name rich with meaning to Tom ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... upon me with a rush. It almost appeared as though some malicious influence was at work to prevent my escape, as though fate was against me! Yet, after all, it was not fate that was to blame, but my own dullness in not perceiving my chance and availing myself of it the moment that it presented itself. If instead of vacillating, as I had done, I had promptly taken the plunge, I should have accomplished my short ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... what books should be "crowned," as he called it, and what not. And then he had another case, called "The Inferno." I wish there was space to give a list of this department. Some were damned for dullness and some for coarseness. Miss Edgeworth's Moral Tales, Darwin's Botanic Garden, Rollin's Ancient History, and a hideously illustrated copy of the Book of Martyrs were in the First-class, Don Juan and some French novels in the second. Tupper, Swinburne, ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... stood the crust had caved, giving the fire air to hasten its ravages. The mass of slow-moving fire glowed red and intense, covered in places by its own ashes, now sending up sudden clouds of smoke as an indraft of air livened the combustion, now smoldering in sullen dullness, throwing off a heat that made ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... Shackford house had reduced itself to half a dozen idlers, and the less frequented streets had resumed their normal aspect of dullness, there was a strange, electric quality in the atmosphere. The community was in that state of suppressed agitation and suspicion which no word adequately describes. The slightest circumstance would have swayed it to the belief in any man's guilt; ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... as important as the quality. Appetite would be a sure guide in both respects were it not so often perverted and diseased. As a general rule, we eat too much. It is better to err in the other direction. An uncomfortable feeling of fullness, or of dullness and stupor after a meal is a sure sign of over-eating, so whatever and whenever you eat, eat slowly, masticate your food well, and DO NOT EAT ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... history with whom a high-spirited person can have much sympathy. They wanted a specific thing; they were ready to go forward for it, and so they were also ready to go back for it. But modern Tories have only the dullness of defending situations that they had not the excitement of creating. Revolutionists make a reform, Conservatives only conserve the reform. They never reform the reform, which is often very much wanted. Just as ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... converts the upper waste into a garden. Just so at her words and her look his heart suddenly filled, as if it came from afar, with the youthful passion he had felt toward Miss Bood, but which, he knew not exactly when or how, had been gradually overgrown with the dullness of familiarity and had lapsed into an indolent affectionate habit. The warm, voluptuous pulse of this new feeling—new, and yet instantly recognized as old—brought with it a flood of youthful associations, and commingled the far past with the present in a confusion ...
— A Summer Evening's Dream - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... or actually arrest digestion, for after eating heartily, the vital forces of the body are called upon to help the stomach digest its food. If our bodily energies are compelled, in addition to this, to help the muscles or brain, digestion is retarded, and a feeling of dullness and heaviness follows. Fermentative changes, instead of the normal digestive changes, are apt to take place ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... separateness in the universe; yet man's moral defection and his responsibility for it which makes him know that separateness; man's shame and helplessness under it. Over against the denial or evasion of moral values by the naturalist and the dullness to the sense of moral helplessness by the humanist, there stands the sense of moral difference, the sense of sin, of penitence and confession. No preaching not founded on these things can ever be called religious or can ever stir those ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... utterly weary of the dullness of Rohar, she had gone to Poona to spend part of the festive and fashionable season there and was now revelling in the many dances, dinners, theatricals and other gaieties of the lively station. Everybody was very kind to her, especially the men. She was invited ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... may have felt, the first effect of this shock upon his son produced only a dullness of comprehension — a sort of hazy inability to grasp the missile or realize the blow. Yet he realized that to his father it was likely to be fatal. The chances were great that the whole family would turn round and go home within a few weeks. ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... on account of it—and in eminent spirits. I have not seen her in such spirits for very, very long. And there she is, down at Torquay, with the Hedleys and Butlers, making quite a colony of it, and everybody, in each several letter, grumbling in an undertone at the dullness of the place. What would I give to see the waves once more! But perhaps if I were there, I should grumble too. It is a happiness to them to be together, and that, I ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... memory, the impress of the town-life, even at its best and highest individual quality and impressiveness, as in the work of a great master, the observation and memory of which may long give his stamp to the work of his followers. The fading of this into dullness, yet the fixing of it as a convention, is familiar to all in arts and crafts, but is no less real in the general lapse of appreciation of environment. Most serious of all is the fixation of habit and custom, so that at length "custom lies upon us with ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... purpose of the poem, Browning said: "Yes, just about that." With constancy to an ideal as the central purpose, the details of this poem, without being minutely interpreted, may yet serve as a representation of the depression, the hopelessness, the dullness and deadness of soul, the doubt and terror even of the man who travels the last stages of a difficult journey to a long-sought but unknown goal. His victory consists in the unfaltering persistence of his search. The "squat ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... remain aloof from people, and like their good parts, without being eternally troubled with the dull process of their everyday lives.... All I can say is that standing at Charing Cross, and looking East, West, North and South, I can see nothing but dullness." ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
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