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More "Turgid" Quotes from Famous Books



... sneeringly suggested that the Unionist leaders would be "unspeakably shocked and frightened" if anything came of their "foolish and wicked words." The letter was lengthy, and contained some telling phrases such as Mr. Churchill has always been skilful in coining; but the "turgid homily—a mixture of sophistry, insult, and menace," as The Times not unfairly described it, was less effective than the terse and simple rejoinder in which Mr. Bonar Law pointed out that Mr. Churchill's ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill

... advancing years, it brings discomforts, disadvantages, and oftentimes fatal diseases, among which are Apoplexy, Fatty Liver, Diabetes, Bright's Disease and Fatty Heart. The sanguine or entonic variety is distinguished by florid skin, full strong pulse, turgid veins, with firm and vigorous muscular fibres, and the serous or atonic, is denoted by a full, but frequent and feeble pulse, smooth and soft skin, plump but inexpressive figure, and general languor or debility ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell

... the carotid arteries was uncommonly strong; the radial arteries seemed ready to burst from their sheaths; the veins, especially the jugulars, in which there was often a pulsatory motion, were every where turgid with blood. The countenance was high coloured, and commonly exhibited the appearance of great health; but, when he was indisposed from catarrh, this florid red changed to a livid colour; which also, after an attack ...
— Cases of Organic Diseases of the Heart • John Collins Warren

... after Coleridge's way, not quite equal to that exordium, is an example of strong national sentiment, partly in indignant reaction against his own earlier sympathy with the French Republic, inspiring a composition which, in spite of some turgid lines, really justifies itself as poetry, and has that true unity of effect which the ode requires. Liberty, after all his hopes of young France, is only to be found ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater

... pronounce judgment on the point will be inclined to deprecate its severity. Nay, in order to get done with fault-finding as soon as possible, it must perhaps be added that the admitted turgidness of the poems is often something more than a mere defect of style, and that the verse is turgid because the feeling which it expresses is exaggerated. The "youthful bard unknown to fame" who, in the Songs of the Pixies, is made to "heave the gentle misery of a sigh," is only doing a natural thing described in ludicrously and unnaturally stilted terms; but the young admirer of the Robbers, ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill

... spirits—the rapid crescendo of the hissing steam, the gleaming boiler-dome that might be the fruitful mother of all the helmets that hang about her skirts, the sudden leaping of the whole from the turgid opacity behind and equally sudden disappearance into the void beyond, the vanishing "Fire!" cry from which all consonants have gone, leaving only a sound of terror, all confirm her view of the fog as a lark. For, you see, Sally believed the Major might ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan

... the blank-verse reads like that of one accustomed to rhyme, and unable to get out of his wonted rut. And the versification runs, throughout, in a stilted monotony, the style being made thick and turgid with high-sounding epithets; while we have a perfect flux of learned impertinence. As for truth, nature, character, poetry, we look for them in vain; though there is much, in the stage noise and parade, that might keep the multitude from ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson

... 3, 4. Four CHIVES two long and two short. TIPS at first large, turgid, oval, touching at bottom, of a yellowish colour, and often spotted; lastly changing both their form and situation ...
— An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses - With Practical Remarks on Dropsy and Other Diseases • William Withering

... strange goddess, Des," he said, his weary eyes roving out over the turgid, yellow stream, "and she has been kind to you, though, God knows, you have played a man's part in all this. She has placed in your possession something for which at least five men have died in vain, something that has filled my thoughts, ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams

... all the wather?" exclaimed Jimmie, as they passed the mouth of the Ohio, and could see the great flood of turgid water that was pouring into the Mississippi, there having evidently been something of a rain to ...
— Motor Boat Boys Mississippi Cruise - or, The Dash for Dixie • Louis Arundel

... past the Fleet Market, over Blackfriars Bridge, and so, turning sharp to the right, along a somewhat narrow and very grimy street between rows of dirty, tumble-down houses, with, upon the right hand, numerous narrow courts and alley-ways that gave upon the turgid river. Down one of these alleys the fluttering cloak turned suddenly, yet when Barnabas reached the corner, behold the alley was quite deserted, save for a small and pallid urchin who sat upon a rotting ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al

... enough and white; the high hat that was pushed far on the back of his head was highly polished. Opulence, self-indulgence, good-nature, and a certain element of fanatical fire mingled in the atmosphere of the postmaster's office, and made it somewhat turgid. ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall

... seaside, the springs, the summer mountains, the cataracts, the theatres, the panoramas of islet-fondled rivers speeding by strange cities. I was condemned to look upon them all with mercenary eyes, to turn their gladness into torpid prose, and speak their praises in turgid columns. Never nepenthe, never abandonne, always wide-awake, and watching for saliences, I had gone abroad like a falcon, and roamed at home like a hungry jackal. Six fingers on my hand, one long and pointed, ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend

... in date is MNASALCAS of Plataeae, near Sicyon, on whom Theodorides wrote an epitaph (/Anth. Pal./ xiii. 21), which speaks of him as imitating Simonides, and criticises his style as turgid. This criticism is not born out by his eighteen extant epigrams in the Palatine Anthology, which are in the best manner, with something of the simplicity of his great model, and even a slight austerity of style which takes us back to Greece Proper. The /Garland/ of Meleager ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail

... trick of tongues rather strangely developed—but I like the feeling of human beings around me. I like the smell and sound and atmosphere of a great city. Then all my senses are awake, but life becomes almost turgid in my veins during the dreary hours of passing from ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... preacher, he calls them "preaching shops," and speaks with pity of those who occupy their pulpits: "That must be a dreadful life—dreadful, oh, quite dreadful!" Yet he has a lasting admiration for the sermons of Charles Spurgeon. As to Jeremy Taylor, "I confess that all that turgid rhetoric wearies me." ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie

... burden of a discussion over the cups one night at the canteen, soon after Gard's arrival, when the possibility of his being a married man had been mooted and had remained in Tom's turgid brain ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham

... that burned with an unsteady yellow ray and seemed close by. This, John Woolfolk thought, was strange. He concentrated a frowning gaze upon it—perhaps in falling into the soiled atmosphere of the earth it had lost its crystal gleam and burned with a turgid light. ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer

... traveler dropped down into the wide valley, in the midst of which he first came into touch with the higher reaches of Suffering Creek. Here it flowed a sluggish, turgid stream, so sullen, so heavy. It was narrow, and at points curiously black in tone. There was none of the freshness, the rushing, tumultuous flow of a mountain torrent about it here. Its banks were marshy with a wide spread of ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum

... thirty-five and forty years of age. I sized him up. In the corners of his eyes I saw humor and laughter and kindliness. As for the rest of him, he was a brute-beast, wholly unmoral, and with all the passion and turgid violence of the brute-beast. What saved him, what made him possible for me, were those corners of his eyes—the humor and laughter and kindliness of ...
— The Road • Jack London

... at his sonorous commonplaces uttered below Gangway, took a pretty revenge. Out of oration of fifty-five minutes duration, he appropriated twenty-five to general observations prefacing exposition of clauses of Bill. Just the same kind of pompous platitude conveyed in turgid phraseology, at which, in old times, Members used to laugh and run away. But CHAPLIN had them now. Like the wedding guest whom the Ancient Mariner button-holed—though as PLUNKET reminds me, the A.M. was meagre in frame, and CHAPLIN is not—the House could not help but hear. Once, when the orator ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 5, 1892 • Various

... stood ankle deep in the turgid little rivulet, a tightness clutching at his chest, and with his head whirling. At his feet his antagonist lay motionless. He stepped out of the water, putting his foot into a tiny grove of trees that bent and crackled like twigs under his tread. He wondered if he would faint; he knew he must ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings

... of his writings, aside from their historical interest, there is not much to be said, though Mr. Madison always wrote, even in his letters, as if writing for posterity. He was not felicitous in the use of language; the style is turgid, heavy with resounding words of many syllables, unillumined by any ray of imagination, any flash of wit or of humor; and the sentences are often involved and badly put together. But there is a genuineness, an evident sincerity of purpose, in all he wrote, and occasionally an expression of ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay

... name of the river, which, rising at the head of Glenartney, passes the graveyard of Tullichettle and falls into the Earn at the village of Comrie. It is compounded of two Gaelic words—ruadh (red), and tuill (flood). Ruadhthuill, therefore, is the red flood, and any one who has seen the red turgid waters of the Ruchill in time of flood will see that the name is significant of the thing itself. The word occurs in a shorter form—Ruel, a river in Argyllshire, which gives its name to the valley through which ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various

... following words and use them in sentences: railed, maundered, coxcomb, parasite, conclave, turgid, ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely

... dignity of legal professors, by furnishing a rich client with subtleties to confound the plainest truths, and with arguments to color the most unjustifiable pretensions. The splendid and popular class was composed of the advocates, who filled the Forum with the sound of their turgid and loquacious rhetoric. Careless of fame and of justice, they are described, for the most part, as ignorant and rapacious guides, who conducted their clients through a maze of expense, of delay, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon

... attracting notice by his personal beauty and by the rather turgid eloquence which was his chief talent. In 1342 he took the most prominent part in an embassy from the citizens to Clement VI; and though he failed to induce the Pope to return to Rome, which at that time he seems to have ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... book' (the 'Meditations'); 'he treated it with ridicule, and parodied it in a "Meditation on a Pudding."'[794] Most modern readers will be surprised that any sensible people could think otherwise than Dr. Johnson did of such a farrago of highflown sentiment clothed in the most turgid language. ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton

... overthrown every hope that Macpherson's Ossian might prove the translation of a series of poems complete in themselves; but while the imposture is discovered, the merit of the work remains undisputed, though not without faults—particularly, in some parts, turgid and ...
— Fragments Of Ancient Poetry • James MacPherson

... among the withered brown stubbles, does animal life abound in India; but the rivers, lakes, and creeks teem with fish of every conceivable size, shape, and colour. The varieties are legion. From the huge black porpoise, tumbling through the turgid stream of the Ganges, to the bright, sparkling, silvery shoals of delicate chillooahs or poteeahs, which one sees darting in and out among the rice stubbles in every paddy field during the rains. Here a huge bhowarree (pike), or ravenous ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis

... is far too long, and its scope too vast for even a genius of much higher and riper gifts than Bailey's. It is turgid, untechnical in verse, wordy, and involved. Had Bailey written at fifty instead of at twenty, it might have shown a necessary balance and felicity of style. But, with all these shortcomings, it is not to be relegated ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... Now first has passed the seed (engendered Within their members by the ripened days) Are in their sleep confronted from without By idol-images of some fair form— Tidings of glorious face and lovely bloom, Which stir and goad the regions turgid now With seed abundant; so that, as it were With all the matter acted duly out, They pour the billows of a potent stream ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius

... woman are multiple, and to the clitoris must be added the nipples, the vulva, and even, it is said, the neck of the womb. In man the parts round the anus may also, besides the glans penis, form an excitable region. At the acme of erection the glans is turgid, and is applied directly against the neck of the womb (Fig. 18). In this way the sperm is ejaculated directly against ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel

... with an intensity of gaze which, in that same one mad moment, revealed to him the depths of her love. Then the second's weakness was gone; he was once more quiet, firm, the man of action, accustomed to meet danger boldly, to rule and to subdue the most turgid mob. ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... A construction popularized among hackers by the infamous {CPU Wars} comic; supposedly derive from a famously turgid line in a WWII-era anti-Nazi propaganda comic that ran "Eat flaming death, non-Aryan mongrels!" or something of the sort (however, it is also reported that the Firesign Theater's 1975 album "In The Next World, You're On Your Own" included the ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0

... That reticence upon the vital point was characteristically English. The excitable Gaul would have wept, kneaded his manly bosom, and alluded to his mother; the stolid Muscovite would have wept also, referring to his Little Father, the Czar; the Teuton would have poured forth oceans of turgid sentiment about the Fatherland; the dignified Spaniard would have recognised himself as a warrior upon the verge of a Homeric struggle, and said so candidly; the hysterical American would have sung "Hail, Columbia!" and waved pocket-handkerchief-sized ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... the body had been growing back to childlike health again, and Nature had been pouring into his sick senses her healing balm; while the medicaments of peace and sleep and quiet labour had been having their way with him, he had been reorganised, renewed, flushed of the turgid silt of dissipation. For his sins and weaknesses there had been no gall and vinegar ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... to respond. On her side, such contact is often instinctively desired. Just as the sexual disturbance of pregnancy is accompanied by a sympathetic disturbance in the breasts, so the sexual excitement produced by the lover's proximity reacts on the breasts; the nipple becomes turgid and erect in sympathy with the clitoris; the woman craves to place her lover in the place of the child, and experiences a sensation in which these two supreme objects of ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... before and above us there hung in mid-air a vast sheet of water which the howling wind flapped to and fro in the gorge terrifically; while the blinding lightning and crashing thunder seemed to issue together from the mountain itself. The creek, before clear and placid, quickly became turgid and agitated. It began to creep up the banks. Presently a dark, strange-looking mass came floating down—it was a soldier's knapsack! The rain fell, if possible, in increased torrents. The stream continued to rise rapidly. Other knapsacks came floating down. It was not long before the water stood ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood

... To-day, my son, Two turgid years ago, Your father battled with the Hun At five A.M. or so; This was the day (if I exclude A year of painful servitude Under the Ministry of Food) ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various

... forward! while the crashing thunder pealed above his head; he shook his impious hand against the sky, and still darted onward, till the horse stopped, snorting on the beach; and there as the great sea, rolled in foaming and turgid, there, he saw it plain in yon glare of livid lightning, on the crest of every curling wave, a dark haired lady lay, glaring at him with eyes that looked like coals of fire; a monster wave came rolling in, and the frightened horse turned, and seizing the bit between his teeth sped homeward, ...
— Edward Barnett; a Neglected Child of South Carolina, Who Rose to Be a Peer of Great Britain,—and the Stormy Life of His Grandfather, Captain Williams • Tobias Aconite

... has been censured by some shallow criticks as involved and turgid, and abounding with antiquated and hard words. So ill-founded is the first part of this objection, that I will challenge all who may honour this book with a perusal, to point out any English writer whose language conveys his meaning with equal force and ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell

... "Sons of Liberty," and by other equally high-sounding names, which they adopted and discarded in turn, as one after the other was discovered and brought into undesired prominence. The titles and grips and passwords of these secret military organizations, the turgid eloquence of their meetings, and the clandestine drill of their oath-bound members, doubtless exercised quite as much fascination on such followers as their unlawful object of aiding and abetting the Southern cause. The number of men thus enlisted ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay

... in the clearest point of view whatever would bear the light, was incomparable. His style must be praised with some reservation. It was in general forcible, pure, and polished; but it was sometimes, though not often, turgid, and, on one or two occasions, even bombastic. Perhaps the fondness of Hastings for Persian literature may have ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... tribes which had terrorized his people of Kentucky. From the ramparts of Fort Chartres (once one of the mighty chain of strongholds to protect a new France, and now deserted like Massacre), I gazed for the first time in awe at the turgid flood of the Mississippi, and at the lands of the Spanish king beyond. With never ceasing fury the river tore at his clay banks and worried the green islands that braved his charge. And my boyish fancy pictured to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... former. The merit of these works may be ascertained in some measure, by the rules we have already established. We need only to add further on this head, that among many beauties we meet with examples of the turgid and bombast in the work of Ariosto; from which that of the Greek Poet is wholly free. The two first lines of ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie

... full as it could be stuft, the stomach and guts were as full as they could hold; the peristaltick motion of the gut grew quick, and the justling motion of II accordingly; multitudes of milk-white vessels seem'd quickly filled, and turgid, which were perhaps the veins and arteries and the Creature was so greedy, that though it could not contain more, yet it continued sucking as fast as ever, and as fast emptying it self behind: the digestion of this Creature must needs be very quick, for though I perceiv'd the blood ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke

... last two papers as against a D earlier in the year. The professor himself did not know that these same papers were a good part Katharine Graham, who had suggested the ideas to Pellams and had then stood over him while he put them into his own turgid but interesting English. ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field

... to the terrific roar of the explosion, I do not think I heard it. But the form of the rocks completely changed in my eyes—they seemed to be drawn aside like a curtain. I saw a fathomless, a bottomless abyss, which yawned beneath the turgid waves. The sea, which seemed suddenly to have gone mad, then became one great mountainous mass, upon the top of ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne

... silence him, but Thaddeus insisted on his right to appreciate the fair sex away from home. He had a turgid, sentimental wife, always weeping and cramming her religious notions down ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux

... now rumpled and broken into lumpy waves, like mud on a road, and the waves broke into dull yellow foam caps. There was not a light gleam on the whole surface, and dark shadows seemed to crawl and twist about in the very substance of the heavy and turgid waters. ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears

... was even as Mr. Baptiste had said. The 'long-shoremen, the cotton-yardmen, and the stevedores had gone out on a strike. The levee lay hot and unsheltered under the glare of a noonday sun. The turgid Mississippi scarce seemed to flow, but gave forth a brazen gleam from its yellow bosom. Great vessels lay against the wharf, silent and unpopulated. Excited groups of men clustered here and there among bales of uncompressed cotton, lying about in disorderly profusion. ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar

... foremost man in the Republican party not by consistency in the stand that he made, but by his mastery of New York political machinery; Sumner of Massachusetts, the friend of John Bright, kept up a continual protest for freedom in turgid, scholarly harangues, which caught the spirit of Cicero's Philippics most successfully in their personal offensiveness. Powerful voices in literature and the Press were heard upon the same side—the New York Tribune, edited by Horace Greeley, acquired, as ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood

... of 1899-1900, if you had watched these turgid waters flow by, your eyes would have seen tinges of red like blood; and following the stain of red, gashed lifeless things, which had been torn from the ranks ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... representing young love springing up fiercely, exuberantly, against a lovely background congenial to the human mood. He has not known, however, how to keep up that difficult equilibrium between artifice and simplicity which the idyl demands. His later books tend to be turgid, oppressive, cloying with sentimentalism and amorous obsessions in their graver moments, and in their lighter moments to fall flat from a lack of the true ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren

... cast them from me. I neglected my hair. I avoided my playmates. I frowned abstractedly. I didn't eat as much as was good for me. I took lonely walks. I brooded in solitude. I not only committed to memory the more turgid poems of the late Lord Byron—"Fare thee well, and if forever," &c.—but I became a despondent poet on my own account, and composed a string of "Stanzas to One who will understand them." I think I was a trifle too hopeful on that point; for I came across the verses several years afterwards, and ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... have our little weaknesses. That of Ludwig of Bavaria was that he was a poet. He was so sure of this that he not only produced yards of turgid verse, defying every law of construction and metre, but he even had some of it printed. A volume of selections from his Muse, entitled Walhalla's Genossen, was published for him by Baron Cotta, ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham

... Madame de Berny to the position of an ordinary friend, and felt the delightful agitation, followed by bitter mortification, of his intercourse with Madame de Castries, we must remember that from time to time he received a flowery epistle from Russia, written in the turgid and rather bombastic style peculiar to ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars

... quite comfortable at this biography. He glanced nervously at me and was going to begin some kind of explanation, when Miss Doria cut him short. 'Remember our rule, Launcelot. No turgid war controversy within ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan

... without violating any rule of our common grammars. For example, I may say of somebody, "This very superficial grammatist, supposing empty criticism about the adoption of proper phraseology to be a show of extraordinary erudition, was displaying, in spite of ridicule, a very boastful turgid argument concerning the correction of false syntax, and about the detection of false logic in debate." Now, in what other language than ours, can a string of words anything like the following, come ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... Turgid Talmage must likewise unload; Talmage, who presumes to teach not only theology but political economy; who interlards his sermons with strange visions of Heaven, dreams of Hell, and still more wonderful hints on how to make a people terrestrially prosperous. He, like thousands ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... attention, but her active 'public form' was even more torturing to the fastidious feminine sense than her 'stylish' appearance. For her language, flowery and grandiloquent, was excruciatingly genteel, one moment conveyed by minced words through a pursed mouth, and the next carried away on a turgid tide of rhetoric—the swimmer in this sea of sentiment flinging out braceleted arms, and bawling appeals to the 'Wim—men—nof—Vinglund!' The crowd howled with ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins

... see the gun. In his madness he tried to move, to reach her, but he could not; he was sinking. His legs sagged under him, let him down to his knees, and but for the wall he would have fallen. Then a change transformed him. The black, turgid, convulsed face grew white and ghastly, with beads of clammy sweat and lines of torture. His strange eyes showed swiftly ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey

... perplexity of posterity, and not only to read and admire but to imitate. My letters to Nettie, after one or two genuinely intended displays of perfervid tenderness, broke out toward theology, sociology, and the cosmos in turgid and startling expressions. No doubt they ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells

... centre spreads a branching bay, Full sails ascend and golden rivers stray; Bright palaces arise relieved in gold, And gates and streets the crossing lines unfold. James furrows o'er the plate with turgid tide, Young Richmond roughens on his masted side; Reviving Norfolk from her ashes springs, A golden phoenix on refulgent wings; Potowmak's yellow waves reluctant spread, And Vernon rears his rich and radiant head, Tis here the chief his pointed graver stays, The bank to burnish with a ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow

... comparison of his, the fleet has no definite port, but plies stemming nightly toward the pole in a wide ocean of conjecture. He generalizes always instead of specifying,—the true secret of the ideal treatment in which he is without peer, and, though everywhere grandiose, he is never turgid. ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell

... came out of course under every disadvantage, and could only reach the hands of learned persons, and those to whom they were really of interest, by the merest chance. Further, Froebel, as has already abundantly appeared, was but a poor author. His stiff, turgid style makes his works in many places most difficult to understand, as the present translators have found to their cost, and he was therefore practically unreadable to the general public. In his usual self-absorbed fashion, he did not perceive these deficiencies of his, nor could he be ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel

... groped as if she were trying to realize something. The room was growing greyer as she read on through the turgid catalogue of the heathen gods, so packed with stories and pictures, so unaccountably glorious. At last the light failed, and Mrs. Wheeler closed ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather

... rose at seven and went to work at once on his play. He chose the one that had the greatest emotional possibilities. Gora Dwight had told him that he must learn to "externalize his emotions," and he felt that here was the supreme opportunity. Never would he have more turgid, pent-up, tearing emotions to get rid of than now. He wrote until one o'clock, then, after lunch and two hours on his column, went out and took a long walk; but lighter of heart than since he had met Mary Zattiany. He also reflected with no little satisfaction ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... afternoon, and the latter had more than once brushed accidentally with the back of her head against the front of her father's trousers, and on the last occasion distinctly felt his prick, which was evidently in a slightly turgid state, and his trousers also slightly projected in ...
— The Power of Mesmerism - A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts and Fancies • Anonymous

... accounted for by furloughs granted them so soon as they reached the provost-marshal's office. Just before leaving Point Lookout Jack received a much-directed letter that gave signs of having been in every mail-bag in the Army of the Potomac. It was from Barney Moore, bristling with wonder and turgid with woful lamentation at Jack's coldness in not writing him. He had been sent by mistake to Ship Island, near New Orleans, to join his regiment, and had only at the writing of the letter reached Washington, where the Caribees were expected every day to move to ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan

... Relatio de Standardo. This last is an account of the Battle of the Standard (1138), better blown than the similar account by Richard of Hexham, but less trustworthy, and in places obscured by a peculiarly turgid rhetoric. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... which followed, Marishka was barely conscious. She was pushed roughly back into the turgid crowd and would have fallen had not an arm sustained her. Men seized the assassin and hurried him away. There were hoarse shouts, glimpses of soldiers, as the machine of death pushed its way through the mass of people, and always the strong arm sustained her, pushing her, leading her away into ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs

... elegantly diversified with woodlands, prairies, and rich bottoms, and the banks are lined with a luxuriant growth of plants and flowers. Before reaching the Missouri, the water of the Mississippi is perfectly limpid; but, from the mouth of that river it becomes turgid and muddy—flows through a flat, inundated country, and seems more like an immense flood, than an old and deep-channelled river. As far as great things can be compared to small, it much resembles, within its banks, the Rhone when flooded, as it sweeps through the department ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall

... fact. And, above all, he has preached the gospel of work, and as potently as Carlyle ever preached. For he has preached it not only to those in the high places, but to the common men, to the great sweating thong of common men who hear and understand yet stand agape at Carlyle's turgid utterance. Do the thing to your hand, and do it with all your might. Never mind what the thing is; so long as it is something. Do it. Do it and remember Tomlinson, sexless and soulless Tomlinson, who was denied at ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London

... rarefy, inflate, puff, blow up, stuff, pad, cram; exaggerate; fatten. Adj. expanded, &c v.; larger, &c (large) &c 192; swollen; expansive; wide open, wide spread; flabelliform^; overgrown, exaggerated, bloated, fat, turgid, tumid, hypertrophied, dropsical; pot bellied, swag bellied^; edematous, oedematous^, obese, puffy, pursy^, blowzy, bigswoln^, distended; patulous; bulbous &c (convex) 250; full blown, full grown, full formed; big &c 192; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... and concave, inserted in the calyx, clawed, sometimes notched and even lobed; stamens long as petals, inserted in throat of calyx, stout, green changing to pink; anthers large and brick red when young; styles massive, joining close together, turgid, nearly long as stamens, and pale green; stigmas, simple, beardless, turning to a red colour; calyx bell-shaped, five-parted, wrinkled; segments slightly reflexed and conniving or joining; scapes 4in. to 6in. high, stout and smooth, excepting solitary hairs; bracts, ...
— Hardy Perennials and Old Fashioned Flowers - Describing the Most Desirable Plants, for Borders, - Rockeries, and Shrubberies. • John Wood

... greatness, taught by political opinions to say to the vain pomp and glory of the world, "I hate ye," seeing the path of classical and artificial poetry blocked up by the cumbrous ornaments of style and turgid common-places, so that nothing more could be achieved in that direction but by the most ridiculous bombast or the tamest servility; he has turned back partly from the bias of his mind, partly perhaps from a judicious policy—has struck into the sequestered vale of humble life, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... visitor's while to walk by the broad muddy Rhone, and observe the clumsy picturesque vessels moored there, or gliding down the turgid stream. So clumsy is the construction that some are provided with two rudders, one being found insufficient to direct the ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould

... action, which was the peculiarity of Daedalus—the general adoption of this action in the early ages—the traits of savage nature in the face and figure, expressed with little knowledge, but strong feeling—by the narrow loins, turgid muscles of the breast, thighs, and calves of the legs, will all find reason to believe they are copied from the above-mentioned statue." Greece, it must be owned, possessed musicians long anterior to Homer: Chiron the Centaur, regarded by the ancients as one ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various

... He felt an awful, enjoyable power over her, an instinctive cherishing very near to cruelty. For she was a victim. He felt that she was in his power, and he was generous. The electricity was turgid and voluptuously rich, in his limbs. He would be able to destroy her utterly in the strength of his discharge. But she was waiting in her ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... I would like to write some servant girl novels. I believe I could do it. My love-making would either be rather tame and stiff or too intensely early Victorian. But I should like to swing off into an ecstasy of large turgid words and let my mind hear the mushy housemaid cry, "Isn't ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane

... proof of the charms of harmonious elocution, than the many, even unnatural scenes and flights of the false sublime it has lifted into applause. In what raptures have I seen an audience, at the furious fustian and turgid rants in Nat. Lee's Alexander the Great! for though I can allow this play a few great beauties, yet it is not without its extravagant blemishes. Every play of the same author has more or less of them. Let me give you a sample ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold

... a short and chopping sea. A turgid sea indicates its constraint. Even in a fog the entrance into a strait may be known by the boiling-like appearance of the waves. And thus it was, for they were unconsciously coasting Aurigny. Between the west of Ortach and the Caskets and ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... man, these words sounded unusually ominous and grave. I had heard enough revolutionary talk among my workmen fellow-passengers; but most of it was hot and turgid, and fell discredited from the lips of unsuccessful men. This man was calm; he had attained prosperity and ease; he disapproved the policy which had been pursued by labour in the past; and yet this was his panacea,—to rend the old country from end to end, and from top to bottom, and in ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the dramatic achievement of the Romantic School was the least valuable part of their work. Hernani, the first performance of which marked the turning-point of the movement, is a piece of bombastic melodrama, full of the stagiest clap-trap and the most turgid declamation. Victor Hugo imagined when he wrote it that he was inspired by Shakespeare; if he was inspired by anyone it was by Voltaire. His drama is the old drama of the eighteenth century, repainted ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey

... Florida felt the impact of this revolutionary spirit, but it lacked natural unity and a dominant Spanish population. The province was in fact merely a strip of coast extending from the Perdido River to the Mississippi, indented with bays into which great rivers from the north discharged their turgid waters. Along these bays and rivers were scattered the inhabitants, numbering less than one hundred thousand, of whom a considerable portion had come from the States. There, as always on the frontier, land had been a lodestone attracting both ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson

... on rewards and punishments, on the poor laws, on education, on law reform, on the codification of laws, on special legislative measures, on a vast variety of subjects. His style, at first simple and direct, became turgid, involved, and obscure. He was in the habit of beginning the same work independently many times, and usually drove several horses abreast. He was very severe in his strictures upon persons in authority, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner

... and heroes only—Jupiter, Neptune, Hercules, and several heroic characters, had the self-same face, figure, and action; the same narrow eyes, thin lips, with the corners of the mouth turned upwards; the pointed chin, narrow loins, turgid muscles; the same advancing position of the lower limbs; the right hand raised beside the head, and the left extended. Their only distinctions were that Jupiter held the thunderbolt, Neptune the trident, and Hercules a palm branch or bow. The female divinities were clothed in draperies divided ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... lawyer bent on acting within and up to the measure of the law as well as pleading eloquently. The desire to wing a telegram to her he thought it wise to repress, and he found himself in consequence composing verses, turgid enough, even to his own judgement. Poets would have failed at such a time, and he was not one, but an orator enamoured. He was a wild man, cased in the knowledge of jurisprudence, and wishing to enter the ranks of the soberly blissful. These he could imagine ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... At this season of the year the climate and the soil were persistent foes. The roads were mere tracks, channels which served as drains for the interminable forest. The deep meadows, fresh and green to the eye, were damp and unwholesome camping-grounds. Turgid streams, like the Chickahominy and its affluents, winding sluggishly through rank jungles, spread in swamp and morass across the valleys, and the languid atmosphere, surcharged with vapour, was ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson

... liberty of his fancy may as well shew the want of it in its confinement." [Footnote: Preface to Four New Plays: ib. 498.] Besides, he adds in effect on the next page, so far from "confining the fancy" rhyme is apt to lead to turgid and stilted writing. ...
— English literary criticism • Various

... and remains of Hallam throw no light on the hypnotic effect he produced; they are turgid, elaborate, and wholly uninteresting; nor does he seem to have been entirely amiable. Lord Dudley told Francis Hare that he had dined with Henry Hallam, the historian, who was Arthur Hallam's father, in the company of the son, in Italy, adding, "It did my heart good to sit by and hear how ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson

... loss of power in fighting with their rivals. The males of very many species do not assume their ornamental dress until they arrive at maturity, or they assume it only during the breeding-season, or the tints then become more vivid. Certain ornamental appendages become enlarged, turgid, and brightly coloured during the act of courtship. The males display their charms with elaborate care and to the best effect; and this is done in the presence of the females. The courtship is sometimes ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... Philistines), it would have taken root all over Germany, and put Wagner back many years. At the death of Mendelssohn, the Philistines heralded the coming of a new German national school, founded on his principles (formalism), one that would clarify the artistic atmosphere of the turgid and anarchistic excesses of Wagner and Berlioz and their followers. These critics found already that Beethoven's melodies were too long and his instrumentation too involved. They declared that the further music departed from its ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell

... the turgid heart of the fens at their feet Turbidly fall and dance sheet upon sheet To the measureless measure of the wind's ...
— Sandhya - Songs of Twilight • Dhan Gopal Mukerji

... struck us that our clothes would have to conform to the "demands of more Occidental civilisation," as Tom put it, and also that unless we intended to be medical students for ever it was necessary to become medical men. Lastly, it began to dawn upon Tom that "Francesca: a Tragedy" was a somewhat turgid performance, and on me that a holiday on Sunday was demanded by six ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... needs of life itself invents on his rude musical instrument a mighty rhythm. Or, he must have been like a powerful and excited steed, chafing his bit, mad to give his energy rein. His blood must forever have been craving the liberation of turgid and angular and irregular beats, must forever have been crowding his imagination with new and compelling combinations, impelling him to the movements of leaping and marching. For he seems to have found in profusion the ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld

... They had arrived at the upper edge of a bank overlooking a hill stream which was pouring noisily down in a flood made turgid by the rain, and the "rough bit of bog and boulder" was a sort of natural bridge across the torrent, formed by heaps of earth and rock, out of which masses of wet fern and plumy meadow-sweet sprang in tall ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli

... moderately tight ligature renders the veins turgid and distended, and the whole hand full of blood, I ask, whence is this? Does the blood accumulate below the ligature coming through the veins, or through the arteries, or passing by certain hidden porosities? Through the veins it ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various

... experienced finger; and that is, the coat of the artery in inflammatory fevers, both those attended with strength of pulsation, and these with weak pulsation, feels harder, or more like a cord; for the coats of the arteries in these fevers are themselves inflamed, and are consequently turgid with blood, and thence are less easily compressed, though their pulsations are nevertheless weak: when the artery is large or full with an inflamed coat, it is called hard; and when small or empty with an inflamed coat, it is ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... thicket. Behind him the sun, sinking low over the crest of a far-off ridge, sent flaming banners across the smoke cloud. The sky above was all curdled with gold and crimson, while the smoke cloud below was a turgid black shot through with ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower

... yourself to be dazzled by their coruscations of meaning, and you immediately see you are watching a stylistic prestidigitator. The later, more orderly dignity of Dr. Johnson's exquisitely chosen diction is likewise ingeniously studied and self-conscious. When Gray soared into the somewhat turgid pindaric tradition of his day, he too was slaking a thirst for rhetorical complexities. But in the "Elegy" we have none of that. Nor do we have artifices like the "chaste Eve" or the "meek-eyed maiden" apostrophized ...
— An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) and The Eton College Manuscript • Thomas Gray

... his material from a Saxon Chronicle, like that of Winchester, but he has also matter peculiar to himself; and this raises a question whether he took such matter from a Saxon Chronicle now lost. He is grandiloquent and turgid to an extent which often obscures his meaning. In him we perceive all the word-eloquence of Saxon poetry, striving to utter itself through the medium of a Latinity at ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle

... now to MY notion, it is very much in the turgid, in the Asiatic. It gives me dominions from river to river, and from the mountains to the great sea, like Tamerlane or Ghengis Khan; or like George III. 'by the grace of God, king of Great Britain, FRANCE,' &c. &c. whereas, poor George dares not set a foot there, ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems

... long-closed passage which wore on Ross's nerves, made Karara suddenly reach out and clasp fingers about the wrists of the two men she walked between; it was a crushing sensation of age, of a toll of years so long, so heavy, as to make time itself into a turgid flood which tugged at their bodies, mired their feet as they trudged after the Foanna. This sense of age, of a dead and heavy past, was so stifling that all three ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton

... assumption of an heroic attitude recurs with sufficient frequency to stamp it as a staple of comic effect. Many passages would become tiresome and meaningless instead of amusing unless so interpreted. The soliloquy of Mnesilochus in Bac. 500 ff. could be made interesting only by turgid ranting. Similarly in Bac. ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke

... generation in the male are the penis and the testicles, the latter being contained in a pouch called the scrotum. The penis is the organ of urination as well as copulation. Its structure is cellular, and it contains a vast number of minute coils of blood-vessels which become turgid with blood under the influence of sexual excitement, producing distention and erection of the organ. A canal passes through its entire length, called the urethra, which conveys both the urine and the seminal fluid. The ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg

... must stand back, leave her intact, alone. For it was the old grief come back in her, the old loss, the pain of the old life, the dead husband, the dead children. This was sacred to her, and he must not violate her with his comfort. For what she wanted she would come to him. He stood aloof with turgid heart. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

... his country's shame and prophesying disaster to Europe. Yet do you not feel with me that while Shakespeare, using great words on the lowlier subject, contrives to make them appropriate, with Burke, writing on the loftier subject, the same or similar words have become tumid, turgid? ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... in representing the superhuman, in depicting demigods and heroes, and in tracing the irresistible march of fate. His style resembles the ideas which it clothes: it is bold, sublime, and full of gorgeous imagery, but sometimes borders on the turgid. ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith

... The turgid lip, the piggish eye, The nose in form of hook, The rings, the pins, you tell them by, The vulgar ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... beetle, the Prionus, which is peculiar to the warm latitudes of America. With the exception of a slight similarity about the region of the head, the worm bears no resemblance to the parent beetle. When full-grown, it is about 3-1/2 inches in length, having the body large and turgid, and increasing in circumference from the head towards the opposite extremity. The head is of a corneous, opaque substance. It has neither eyes nor the rudiments of the antennae which distinguish the beetle tribe. It is, however, provided with the mandibles and other oral apparatus ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various

... huge, bulky, massive, immense, gross, voluminous, capacious, extensive; pregnant; arrogant, overbearing, lordly, magisterial, pompous; bombastic, grandiose, grandiloquent, highflown, sesquipedalian, inflated, turgid. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... of Beethoven's last works will be found of interest and value, though written in that turgid, vague, confused style—"words, words, words"—which the Germans denominate by the expressive term, Geschtwtz. This is especially the case with his essays upon the great "Missa Solemnis," ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various

... story of Buddha's life. It reads much better in the eloquent pages of M. Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire, than in the turgid language of the Buddhists. If a critical historian, with the materials we possess, entered at all on the process of separating truth from falsehood, he would probably cut off much of what our biographer has left. Professor Wilson, in his Essay on Buddha and Buddhism, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller

... from Saltley to Tyburn, two and a half miles, and who have now to deal with the sewage brought there from 188 miles of main sewers, extending as far as King's Norton and Selly Oak, Harborne, Smethwick, &c. The whole of the black and turgid stream of liquid filth brought down by the sewers is utilised upon the farm, some 200 cubic yards of mud being lifted daily from the settling tanks, to be dug in, while the overflow is taken by carriers ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell

... air, Spreads as a flame, and leaves a ruin there. Too dearly generous and too warmly true,[19] The simple black wears out the fatal clew,— From barter flies to trade; from trade to wants; From wants to interests and derided haunts; Thence, rolls from off the once-sequestered shore, The turgid tide of havoc and of war; No warning ringing from the red adunes, No prophets rising, and no Laocoons, Remotest tribes the baleful influence own; Feel to extremes, and at their centres groan. Now laughs the stranger at their anguished throes,[20] Feeds on their ills, and battens on their ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various

... lives, and what his posthumous papers may say for him, I cannot say; but I know him well, and consequently expect nothing. As a lawyer, he was mediocre; as a statesman, vacillating and without any fixed principles; as an orator, (for some had claimed him to be such,) he was turgid and verbose—sometimes he was sarcastic, but only when the malignity of his nature found vent in the bitterness of words. His private conduct has, in every situation, been bad. He was one of the Lee and Gates faction to displace Washington from the command ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks

... There was a roar higher up the ravine, and a turgid flood, streaked with frothy lines, came pouring down the new channel, bearing with it small nut bushes and great clumps of matted grass. By degrees it subsided, and the men, gathering about the edge of the muskeg, hot and splashed with mire, lay down to smoke and wait, while the ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss

... becomes of all the wather?" exclaimed Jimmie, as they passed the mouth of the Ohio, and could see the great flood of turgid water that was pouring into the Mississippi, there having evidently been something of a rain ...
— Motor Boat Boys Mississippi Cruise - or, The Dash for Dixie • Louis Arundel

... gaze which, in that same one mad moment, revealed to him the depths of her love. Then the second's weakness was gone; he was once more quiet, firm, the man of action, accustomed to meet danger boldly, to rule and to subdue the most turgid mob. ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... Meningitis has set in and it won't be long now, before we'll have another empty bed. Yellow foam flows down his nose, thick yellow foam, bubbles of it, bursting, bubbling yellow foam. It humps up under his nose, up and up, in bubbles, and the bubbles burst and run in turgid streams down upon his shaggy beard. On the wall, above his bed, hang his medals. They are hung up, high up, so he can see them. He can't see them today, because now he is unconscious, but yesterday and the day before, before he got as bad as this, he could see them and it made ...
— The Backwash of War - The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an - American Hospital Nurse • Ellen N. La Motte

... not assume their ornamental dress until they arrive at maturity, or they assume it only during the breeding-season, or the tints then become more vivid. Certain ornamental appendages become enlarged, turgid, and brightly coloured during the act of courtship. The males display their charms with elaborate care and to the best effect; and this is done in the presence of the females. The courtship is sometimes a prolonged affair, and many males ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... not an active participant in her father's crime, she still felt herself in a measure responsible for it. He had determined to grow rich and powerful for her sake. More than once, in the empty rambling talk which he poured forth in a turgid stream during their infrequent meetings, he had told her so, with extravagant phrase and gesture. And so, at last, she had come to share his punishment in a hundred secret, unconfessed ways. She ate scant food, slept on the hardest of beds, labored unceasingly, with the great, impossible ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley

... rich client with subtleties to confound the plainest truth, and with arguments to color the most unjustifiable pretensions. The splendid and popular class was composed of the advocates, who filled the Forum with the sound of their turgid and loquacious rhetoric. Careless of fame and of justice, they are described for the most part, as ignorant and rapacious guides, who conducted their clients through a maze of expense, of delay, and of ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood

... be florid. At the same time, never be dry. Be clear; be pointed; be luminous. I remember having heard both sides of a case argued before an eminent Federal Judge. One of the lawyers made a long, turgid, "profound"—and musty—argument; proceeding like a draft-horse from mile-post to mile-post, until the alert mind of the judge was ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge

... pasture neither among them nor among those writers who are peculiarly the delight of the spuriously literate: Sallust, who is less colorless than the others; sentimental and pompous Titus Livius; turgid and lurid Seneca; watery and larval Suetonius; Tacitus who, in his studied conciseness, is the keenest, most wiry and muscular of them all. In poetry, he was untouched by Juvenal, despite some roughshod ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... Eagle took, now swinging far to the west to avoid a ranch, now circling east along a water-course, again doubling back around the base of a mesa, but in the main going steadily northward. Up past the brown Maricopas they worked, across the turgid Gila, skirting Lone Butte desert; up, up and on until in the distance glistened the ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford

... he was gone, slamming the door behind him. His blood was up-a turgid, angry flood almost bursting his veins. He now made his way to the house of the Methodist minister. There he announced that if he was disciplined at Quarterly Meeting, as was talked about in the streets, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... On the other hand, when you release the vein the heart immediately regains its color and dimensions. After that, if you leave the vein free and tie and compress the arteries at some distance from the heart, you will see, on the contrary, their included portion grow excessively turgid, the heart becoming so beyond measure, assuming a dark-red color, even to lividity, and at length so overloaded with blood as to seem in danger of suffocation; but when the obstruction is removed it returns to its normal condition, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... Gerald strongly. He felt an awful, enjoyable power over her, an instinctive cherishing very near to cruelty. For she was a victim. He felt that she was in his power, and he was generous. The electricity was turgid and voluptuously rich, in his limbs. He would be able to destroy her utterly in the strength of his discharge. But she was waiting in her ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... suddenly-thought-of burden of a discussion over the cups one night at the canteen, soon after Gard's arrival, when the possibility of his being a married man had been mooted and had remained in Tom's turgid brain as a fact. ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham

... particular afternoon, and the latter had more than once brushed accidentally with the back of her head against the front of her father's trousers, and on the last occasion distinctly felt his prick, which was evidently in a slightly turgid state, and his trousers also slightly projected in the ...
— The Power of Mesmerism - A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts and Fancies • Anonymous

... that after the little Fire of the Mind has disengaged itself from the Vapours, it may have sound and fit Organs to make Use of. As often as you hear your Child crying, think this with yourself, he calls for this from me. When you look upon your Breasts, those two little Fountains, turgid, and of their own Accord streaming out a milky Juice, remember Nature puts you in Mind of your Duty: Or else, when your Infant shall begin to speak, and with his pretty Stammering shall call you Mammy, How can you hear it without blushing? ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus

... through the flood. The turgid stream was not wide and it was not a long fight. But there was the peril of mules, wagon and man being swept out into the main stream of the flood and carried over ...
— Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill • Alice B. Emerson

... any better, I'd like to know? I've always used to get up with the lark, till I came under the petrifying influence of your turgid intellect." ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... between thirty-five and forty years of age. I sized him up. In the corners of his eyes I saw humor and laughter and kindliness. As for the rest of him, he was a brute-beast, wholly unmoral, and with all the passion and turgid violence of the brute-beast. What saved him, what made him possible for me, were those corners of his eyes—the humor and laughter and kindliness of ...
— The Road • Jack London

... early sixties a trail led from the broad Missouri, swirling yellow and turgid between its green-groved borders, for miles and miles out upon the grassy Nebraska plains, turning westward over the undulating prairie, with its swales and billows and long, winding lines of cottonwoods, ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey

... Catullan age from which he was emerging. In a curious passage written not many years after this, Horace, when grouping the poets according to their styles and departments,[4] places Vergil in a class apart. He mentions first a turgid epic poet for whom he has no regard. Then there are Varius and Pollio, in epic and tragedy respectively, of whose forceful directness he does approve. In comedy, his friend, Fundanius, represents a homely plainness which he commends, while ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank

... founded in the nature of our passions and affections, yet it has its ornaments and modes of address which are merely arbitrary. What is approved in the Eastern nations as grand and majestic, would be considered by the Greeks and Romans as turgid and inflated; and they, in return, would be thought by the Orientals to express themselves in a cold and ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds

... turned deaf ears to others— Me you shall hear. Out of the mouths of turbines, Out of the turgid throats of engines, Over the whistling steam, You shall hear me shrilly piping. Your mills I shall enter like the wind, And blow upon your hearts, Kindling ...
— Sun-Up and Other Poems • Lola Ridge

... unattended and unafraid, to the council of the savage tribes which had terrorized his people of Kentucky. From the ramparts of Fort Chartres (once one of the mighty chain of strongholds to protect a new France, and now deserted like Massacre), I gazed for the first time in awe at the turgid flood of the Mississippi, and at the lands of the Spanish king beyond. With never ceasing fury the river tore at his clay banks and worried the green islands that braved his charge. And my boyish fancy pictured to itself the monsters ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... must be added the nipples, the vulva, and even, it is said, the neck of the womb. In man the parts round the anus may also, besides the glans penis, form an excitable region. At the acme of erection the glans is turgid, and is applied directly against the neck of the womb (Fig. 18). In this way the sperm is ejaculated directly against ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel

... as Carlyle ever preached. For he has preached it not only to those in the high places, but to the common men, to the great sweating thong of common men who hear and understand yet stand agape at Carlyle's turgid utterance. Do the thing to your hand, and do it with all your might. Never mind what the thing is; so long as it is something. Do it. Do it and remember Tomlinson, sexless and soulless Tomlinson, who ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London

... graveyard of Tullichettle and falls into the Earn at the village of Comrie. It is compounded of two Gaelic words—ruadh (red), and tuill (flood). Ruadhthuill, therefore, is the red flood, and any one who has seen the red turgid waters of the Ruchill in time of flood will see that the name is significant of the thing itself. The word occurs in a shorter form—Ruel, a river in Argyllshire, which gives its name to the valley through which it ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various

... too great an accumulation comes, with advancing years, it brings discomforts, disadvantages, and oftentimes fatal diseases, among which are Apoplexy, Fatty Liver, Diabetes, Bright's Disease and Fatty Heart. The sanguine or entonic variety is distinguished by florid skin, full strong pulse, turgid veins, with firm and vigorous muscular fibres, and the serous or atonic, is denoted by a full, but frequent and feeble pulse, smooth and soft skin, plump but inexpressive figure, and general languor or debility of ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell

... pedantic and stammering fashion, to imitate the high artistic culture of the neighbouring people. The wide deviations from the original have arisen not from the freedom, but from the rudeness of the imitation; the treatment is sometimes insipid, sometimes turgid, the language harsh and quaint.(9) We have no difficulty in believing the statement of the old critics of art, that, apart from the compulsory reading at school, none of the poems of Livius were taken up a second time. Yet these labours were in various respects norms for succeeding times. ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... thence to the banks of Egypt's Nile, and heard the lamentations of priests and wailing of women as a black ox, flower bedecked and wearing a collar encrusted with gems, was drowned in the turgid stream. Time and space ceased to exist for him. Through the murk of cavernous passages he paced, pausing before a pit in which reposed a sarcophagus of huge dimensions; and when the dim company and he had paid tribute to that which ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer

... withered brown stubbles, does animal life abound in India; but the rivers, lakes, and creeks teem with fish of every conceivable size, shape, and colour. The varieties are legion. From the huge black porpoise, tumbling through the turgid stream of the Ganges, to the bright, sparkling, silvery shoals of delicate chillooahs or poteeahs, which one sees darting in and out among the rice stubbles in every paddy field during the rains. Here a huge bhowarree ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis

... There is evidence and to spare of the way in which he allowed the spirit of party to cloud his judgment. His relations with Lord Chatham give lamentable proof of the violence of his personal antipathies. As an orator, his speeches are often turgid, wanting in self-control, and full of those ample digressions in which Mr. Gladstone delighted to obscure his principles. Yet the irritation did not conceal a magnificent loyalty to his friends, and it was in his days of comparative poverty that he shared his means with Barry and with ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski

... it was even as Mr. Baptiste had said. The 'long-shoremen, the cotton-yardmen, and the stevedores had gone out on a strike. The levee lay hot and unsheltered under the glare of a noonday sun. The turgid Mississippi scarce seemed to flow, but gave forth a brazen gleam from its yellow bosom. Great vessels lay against the wharf, silent and unpopulated. Excited groups of men clustered here and there among bales of uncompressed cotton, lying about ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar

... between the genius which created Andrugio and the genius which created Vindice is at least as wide as the points of resemblance or affinity between them are vivid and distinct. While Marston's imaginative and tragic power was at its highest, his style was crude and quaint, turgid and eccentric; when he had cured and purified it—perhaps, as Gifford suggests, in consequence of Ben Jonson's unmerciful but salutary ridicule—he approved himself a far abler writer of comedy or tragicomedy than before, but ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... of the Swiss republics. My ancient habits, and the presence of Deyverdun, encouraged me to write in French for the continent of Europe; but I was conscious myself that my style, above prose and below poetry, degenerated into a verbose and turgid declamation. Perhaps I may impute the failure to the injudicious choice of a foreign language. Perhaps I may suspect that the language itself is ill adapted to sustain the vigour and dignity of an important narrative. But if France, so rich in literary merit, had produced ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon

... shimmering, polished floor, was now rumpled and broken into lumpy waves, like mud on a road, and the waves broke into dull yellow foam caps. There was not a light gleam on the whole surface, and dark shadows seemed to crawl and twist about in the very substance of the heavy and turgid waters. ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears

... the stubborn hindrance, the river grows black and turgid. It rumbles and threatens as if confident of an access of strength that laughs at resistance. From far up the hillside comes a sound, at first soft and soothing as the fountains of Lindaraxa, then rolling onward it takes the ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker

... artificial nursing, written from Jenkins' notes, which were recognizable by certain grandiloquent phrases of the sort that the Irishman affected: "the long martyrology of infancy—the venality of the breast—the goat, the beneficent nurse,"—and concluding, after a turgid description of the magnificent establishment at Nanterre, with a eulogy of Jenkins and the glorification of Jansoulet: "O Bernard Jansoulet, ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet

... goddess, Des," he said, his weary eyes roving out over the turgid, yellow stream, "and she has been kind to you, though, God knows, you have played a man's part in all this. She has placed in your possession something for which at least five men have died in vain, something that has filled my thoughts, sleeping and waking, for more than half a ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams

... of finding something rich and strange. A gradual stultitia seizes them. They take to drink; they beat their wives; they despair of literature. Worst, and most preposterous, they one and all nourish secret hopes of successful authorship. You might think that the interminable flow of turgid blockish fiction that passes beneath their weary eyes would justly sicken them of the abominable gymnastic of writing. But no: the venom is ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley

... to assume, and I proceeded to cast them from me. I neglected my hair. I avoided my playmates. I frowned abstractedly. I didn't eat as much as was good for me. I took lonely walks. I brooded in solitude. I not only committed to memory the more turgid poems of the late Lord Byron—"Fare thee well, and if forever," &c.—but I became a despondent poet on my own account, and composed a string of "Stanzas to One who will understand them." I think I was a trifle too hopeful on that point; for I came across the verses ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... frequency to stamp it as a staple of comic effect. Many passages would become tiresome and meaningless instead of amusing unless so interpreted. The soliloquy of Mnesilochus in Bac. 500 ff. could be made interesting only by turgid ranting. Similarly in Bac. 530 ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke

... disaster to Europe. Yet do you not feel with me that while Shakespeare, using great words on the lowlier subject, contrives to make them appropriate, with Burke, writing on the loftier subject, the same or similar words have become tumid, turgid? ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... de Standardo. This last is an account of the Battle of the Standard (1138), better blown than the similar account by Richard of Hexham, but less trustworthy, and in places obscured by a peculiarly turgid rhetoric. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... the former. The merit of these works may be ascertained in some measure, by the rules we have already established. We need only to add further on this head, that among many beauties we meet with examples of the turgid and bombast in the work of Ariosto; from which that of the Greek Poet is wholly free. The two first ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie

... word for the better. Another party, not less numerous, vehemently accused him of having corrupted the purity of the English tongue. The best critics admitted that his diction was too monotonous, too obviously artificial, and now and then turgid even to absurdity. But they did justice to the acuteness of his observations on morals and manners, to the constant precision and frequent brilliancy of his language, to the weighty and magnificent eloquence of many serious passages, and to the ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... though, after Coleridge's way, not quite equal to that exordium, is an example of strong national sentiment, partly in indignant reaction against his own earlier sympathy with the French Republic, inspiring a composition which, in spite of some turgid lines, really justifies itself as poetry, and has that true unity of effect which the ode requires. Liberty, after all his hopes of young France, is only to ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater

... be made exactly in the median line of the neck, from a little below the cricoid cartilage, almost to the upper edge of the sternum; at first it should be through skin only, then the veins will be seen, probably turgid with dark blood; the larger ones should be drawn aside, if necessary divided, the bleeding stopped by gentle pressure. The deep fascia must then be cautiously divided, great care being taken to keep exactly in the middle line, ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell

... Paul was an anonymous contributor to its pages. This journal was called the Barfield Advertiser, and Quarry-moor, Church Vale, and Heydon Hay Gazette; but it was satirically known in the Armstrong household as the Crusher, and its leading articles (which were certainly rather turgid and pompous) were food for weekly mirth. But ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray

... in attracting notice by his personal beauty and by the rather turgid eloquence which was his chief talent. In 1342 he took the most prominent part in an embassy from the citizens to Clement VI; and though he failed to induce the Pope to return to Rome, which at that time he seems to have regarded as the panacea for the evils of the time, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... hesitate to touch it with lips that were not pure—but as certainly one sees that, if hand and lip are clean, and one may raise it to oneself, there is intoxication within that cup. Though its brilliant walls are white, they are not so because they hold thin water or turgid milk or yet vacancy. Of the nature of porcelain, they are clear and brilliant, for as such they left the potter's hands; but that faint flush stealing through them tells us that that within is wine. And as the purity of a cup like this is different from that of a clean, thick, ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross

... to be. No more convictions could be obtained. In February of 1693, Parris was banished from Salem; others, except Stoughton, who remained obdurate, made public confession of error. But Cotton Mather, the soul of the whole iniquity, shrouded himself in a cuttle-fish cloud of turgid rhetoric, and escaped scot-free. So great was the power of theological prestige in New ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne

... the pain of the old life, the dead husband, the dead children. This was sacred to her, and he must not violate her with his comfort. For what she wanted she would come to him. He stood aloof with turgid heart. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

... be pretty sure that very few will grasp the fact that an iron bridge or a railway engine may be artistically done—these will not be "art" objects, but hostile novelties. And, on the other hand, we can pretty confidently foretell a spacious future and much amplification for that turgid, costly, and deliberately anti-contemporary group of styles of which William Morris and his associates have been the fortunate pioneers. And the same principles will apply to costume. A non-functional ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... moral, physical anguish permeate in every part. I rally my self-reverence, my nobility of soul. I make efforts. By day I visit spots of natural beauty and objects of art. But these refuse to gratify me. My thought is too turgid to receive the impress of them. Concentration is impossible to me. Feverish agitation perverts my imagination. My ideas are fugitive. I endure a chronic delirium. This by day," he extended one hand with a despairing ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... it—seems to have had some success already, in fact. It quite puts Sally in spirits—the rapid crescendo of the hissing steam, the gleaming boiler-dome that might be the fruitful mother of all the helmets that hang about her skirts, the sudden leaping of the whole from the turgid opacity behind and equally sudden disappearance into the void beyond, the vanishing "Fire!" cry from which all consonants have gone, leaving only a sound of terror, all confirm her view of the fog as a lark. For, you see, ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan

... or, at least, became remarkably evident. The pulsation of the carotid arteries was uncommonly strong; the radial arteries seemed ready to burst from their sheaths; the veins, especially the jugulars, in which there was often a pulsatory motion, were every where turgid with blood. The countenance was high coloured, and commonly exhibited the appearance of great health; but, when he was indisposed from catarrh, this florid red changed to a livid colour; which also, after an attack of epilepsy, was observable for two or three days on the face and hands. This ...
— Cases of Organic Diseases of the Heart • John Collins Warren

... slave a freeman. 'Tis a change That turns to ridicule the turgid speech And stately tone of moralists, who boast, As if, like him of fabulous renown, They had indeed ability to smooth The shag of savage nature, and were each An Orpheus and omnipotent in song. But transformation ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper

... was wondrous bad, and he paused at all the specially turgid sentences, expecting a little approval; for he was proud of those sentences, as I knew ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling

... the Indians and other nations have done on their palmes; and trees of several kinds, to their great emolument. The mystery is no more than this: About the beginning of March (when the buds begin to be proud and turgid, and before they explain into leaves) with a chizel and a mallet, cut a slit almost as deep as the very pith, under some bough or branch of a well-spreading birch; cut it oblique, and not long-ways (as a good chirurgion would make his orifice in a vein) inserting a small stone or chip, ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn

... actor to him. In L'Auberge des Adrets, known in England as Robert Macaire, Frederic Lemaitre put the author under an immense debt, perhaps without earning his gratitude, by deliberately converting a turgid, inept, hopeless melodrama into an almost immortal lucrative burlesque. In Our American Cousin Sothern worked up a minor part, that of Dundreary, into something like the whole play, with the result that a piece which might have died in a ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"

... back in his chair and stared at the turgid, bulging forehead and hard eyes before him. What could be behind them? Had the war brought out a twist in his father's brain? Why were Germans ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey

... in less momentous hours. The porter let him out: and the bountiful, cold air of the night and the pure glory of the stars received him on the threshold. He looked round him, breathing deep of earth's plain fragrance; he looked up into the great array of heaven, and was quieted. His little turgid life dwindled to its true proportions; and he saw himself (that great flame-hearted martyr!) stand like a speck under the cool cupola of the night. Thus he felt his careless injuries already soothed; the live air of out-of-doors, the quiet of the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... proportionate? Is the light he brings commensurate with the darkness? What could he know? What does he tell? He tells so little that the question as to the value of his authorities is reduced to nearly nothing; and, of that little which we learn from his wordy and turgid pages, the smallest fraction only is of any ethnological interest. Indeed, Gildas is most worth notice for what he leaves unsaid. The rebellion of Maximus he mentions; but he is not answerable for the migration from Britain to Brittany, on which (as already stated) so ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham

... contained in a pouch called the scrotum. The penis is the organ of urination as well as copulation. Its structure is cellular, and it contains a vast number of minute coils of blood-vessels which become turgid with blood under the influence of sexual excitement, producing distention and erection of the organ. A canal passes through its entire length, called the urethra, which conveys both the urine and the seminal fluid. The organ is protected by a loose ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg

... buoyancy of spirits had suddenly left him. He cursed the imagination which lifted his feet from the white decks and dragged his eyes from the sparkling blue sea to the rain-soaked, smut-blackened fields riven by that long thread of bleak, turgid water. The horrors of a murderous passion beat upon his brain. He saw himself hastening, grim and blind, on his devil-sped mission. Then the haze faded from before his eyes. Somehow or other he accomplished his errand. He was in the library, standing in front of those many sheets of typewritten ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... turn of mind, the author must look for the ten admirers who, as he says, would satisfy his ambition; but whether they could have the qualities of taste and genius, which he requires, is with us a matter of doubt. Turgid obscurity is the general character of the composition, with now and then a gleam of genuine poetry, irradiating the dark profound. The effect of the perusal is to give a kind of whirl to the brain, more like distraction than pleasure; and something analogous to the sensation ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney

... crisped the balsam thicket. Behind him the sun, sinking low over the crest of a far-off ridge, sent flaming banners across the smoke cloud. The sky above was all curdled with gold and crimson, while the smoke cloud below was a turgid black shot through with ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower

... 4. Nayunáni, again on the other side, i.e., across two valleys. 2. Biçè, his horns; iltsos, slender; biçèïltsos, slender horns, i.e., the deer, by metonomy. 3, 6. Biqolçègo, it is becoming to him. 5. Biçè, his horns; nackòj, turgid, filled out, stuffed; biçènackòji, turgid horns—metonymically, the mountain sheep, Ovis montana. The refrain, tcènia, he appears, he ...
— The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony • Washington Matthews

... brain. It has been shown by Mosso, and many others, that in men with defects of the cranial wall the volume of the brain decreases during sleep. At the same time, the volume of any limb increases as the peripheral parts of the body become turgid with blood. In dogs, the brain has been exposed, and the cortex of that organ has been observed to become anaemic during sleep. It is a matter of ordinary observation that in infants, during sleep, the volume of the brain becomes less, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various

... at me. Her eyes narrowed to slits and stabbed me with their spite. Her dark face grew turgid with impotent anger. As I stood there she was like to have killed me. Then like a flash her expression changed. With a dirty bejewelled hand she smoothed her tousled hair. Her coarse white teeth gleamed in a gold-capped smile. There was ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service

... silver armour. Might silver the hair a little—not too much. Play it as a spiritual character, but not solemn. Wouldn't make it turgid; keep it light. Have the whole play spiritual but light. For instance, have room in it for a religious ingenue part—make her a younger sister of Mary Magdalene, say, with St. Paul becoming converted for her sake after he'd been a Roman General. ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington

... of the book, which occasionally rises into real and 'unaffected eloquence' where the subject inspires him to make an appeal to the hearts of his readers, presents a striking and favourable contrast to the obscure and turgid phraseology in which the perverted taste of the times caused him ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)

... passed the seed (engendered Within their members by the ripened days) Are in their sleep confronted from without By idol-images of some fair form— Tidings of glorious face and lovely bloom, Which stir and goad the regions turgid now With seed abundant; so that, as it were With all the matter acted duly out, They pour the billows of a potent stream And ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius

... and "De Montfort" are her best plays, and are well termed by Sir Walter Scott a revival of the great Bard of Avon. Forcible and energetic in style, her strain never becomes turgid or diverges into commonplace. She is masculine, but graceful; and powerful without any ostentation of strength. Her personal history was the counterpart of her writings. Gentle in manners and affable in conversation, she was a model of ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... and a sense of humour; but, as these qualities were as out of place in the Randall family as a hornpipe at a funeral, Dermod lives under a perpetual cloud of unmerited suspicion. How he is compressed into a life groove, of which an ineffably turgid respectability provides the chronic atmosphere, is the theme of Grand Chain. And because the author possesses a wonderfully delicate gift of satire and a power of character delineation that never gets out of hand, she has written a novel deserving of more praise than the usual reviewer, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various

... the surging music, saw all the lights and flowers, Flowers and lights and crystal cups, whereof the price for each Might have brought back from Potter's Field some bloodless, starving baby. I heard the Leaders' speeches, the turgid oratory, The well-turned phrases of the Captains, the rotund babble of prosperity, (Prosperity for whom? Nay, ask not troublesome questions!) The Captains' vaunting I heard, their boasts of glory and victory, While red, red, red their hands dripped ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England

... paid official, it was his duty to obey and to be silent; and all the blood of this poor, proud, and falling man must have rushed to his head at the humiliation. His letter to Mr. Erskine, subsequently Earl of Mar, testifies, in its turgid, turbulent phrases, to a perfect passion of alarmed self- respect and vanity. He had been muzzled, and muzzled, when all was said, by his paltry salary as an exciseman; alas! had he not a family to keep? Already, he wrote, he looked ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the moderately tight ligature renders the veins turgid and distended, and the whole hand full of blood, I ask, whence is this? Does the blood accumulate below the ligature coming through the veins, or through the arteries, or passing by certain hidden porosities? Through the veins it cannot come; ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various

... provost-marshal's office. Just before leaving Point Lookout Jack received a much-directed letter that gave signs of having been in every mail-bag in the Army of the Potomac. It was from Barney Moore, bristling with wonder and turgid with woful lamentation at Jack's coldness in not writing him. He had been sent by mistake to Ship Island, near New Orleans, to join his regiment, and had only at the writing of the letter reached Washington, where the Caribees were expected ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan

... buskins. AEschylus excels in representing the superhuman, in depicting demigods and heroes, and in tracing the irresistible march of fate. His style resembles the ideas which it clothes: it is bold, sublime, and full of gorgeous imagery, but sometimes borders on the turgid. ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith

... Whose daily tempest overwhelms my soul! From shame, I in Heaven's light my grief control; Thou art its fountain, which each night o'erflows. My couch! that oft hath woo'd me to repose, 'Mid sorrows vast—Love's iv'ried hand hath stole Griefs turgid stream, which o'er thee it doth roll, That hand which good on all but me bestows. Not only quiet and sweet rest I fly, But from myself and thought, whose vain pursuit On pinion'd fancy doth my soul transport: The multitude I did so long defy, Now as my hope and refuge ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch

... cases of Koltzov, Nikitin, and Shevchenko, the great glory of southern Russia; sometimes, perhaps, a man whose abilities have been overrated as in the instance of Slepoushkin. Lemonosov is more praised than read by his countrymen. His turgid odes, stuffed with classical allusions, in praise of Anne and Elizabeth, are still committed to memory by pupils at educational establishments. His panegyrics are certainly fulsome, but probably no worse than those of Boileau in praise of Louis XIV., who grovelled ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various

... character of the two. He speaks exceedingly well—clear, methodical, and argumentative; but his eloquence, like himself, is not so graceful as it is upon the whole manly; and there is a little tendency to verbosity in his language, as there is to corpulency in his figure; but nothing turgid, while it is entirely free from affectation. The character of respectable is very legibly impressed, in everything about the mind and manner of his lordship. I should, now that I have seen ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt

... shew the want of it in its confinement." [Footnote: Preface to Four New Plays: ib. 498.] Besides, he adds in effect on the next page, so far from "confining the fancy" rhyme is apt to lead to turgid and ...
— English literary criticism • Various

... gentle Coleridge pass unnoticed here, To turgid ode and tumid stanza dear? Though themes of innocence amuse him best, Yet still obscurity's a welcome guest. If inspiration should her aid refuse To him who takes a Pixy for a muse, Yet none in lofty numbers can surpass The bard ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter

... cock-horse in my plays, by Zeus, no goat-stag there you'll see, Such figures as are blazoned forth in Median tapestry. When first I took the art from you, bloated and swoln, poor thing, With turgid gasconading words and heavy dieting, First I reduced and toned her down, and made her slim and neat With wordlets and with exercise and poultices of beet, And next a dose of chatterjuice, distilled from books, I gave her, And monodies she took, with sharp Cephisophon for flavour. ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes

... full arch of sky visible through the curving panels of the dome, thinking the turgid thoughts that always came when action was near. His chest was full of the familiar weakness—not fear exactly, but a tight, helpless feeling that grew and ...
— Slingshot • Irving W. Lande

... between the eleventh and twelfth ribs of the right side. Complete motor and sensory paralysis, with absence of reflexes from mid-dorsal region downwards. Upper intercostals working. Retention of urine, penis turgid. Sensation perfect to lower extremity of sternum. Early trophic sacral bed-sores developed and steadily increased in depth and extent, slighter ones developed on the heels. The paralysis was flaccid throughout. The patient gradually emaciated with fever, and ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins

... there is a texture of colouring, a style in Literature, and an appropriate technique for harmony in every branch of Art, just as there is an harmonic scheme in Music. This may be airy, light, and gossamer, or turgid and obscure: it may be commonplace or ponderous. Like Nature, it may have a thousand or a myriad shades to mirror as many moods and tenses. It may have the misty filminess of steam, the limpid deeps of water, or the cold weight and ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt

... revolutionary spirit, but it lacked natural unity and a dominant Spanish population. The province was in fact merely a strip of coast extending from the Perdido River to the Mississippi, indented with bays into which great rivers from the north discharged their turgid waters. Along these bays and rivers were scattered the inhabitants, numbering less than one hundred thousand, of whom a considerable portion had come from the States. There, as always on the frontier, land had been a lodestone ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson

... Days of 1899-1900, if you had watched these turgid waters flow by, your eyes would have seen tinges of red like blood; and following the stain of red, gashed lifeless things, which had been torn from the ranks of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... against one of the rails and he slipped and fell to his knees. In the intervals of his own labored breathing, he heard the flow of the river, a dull ceaseless roar, and saw the flashing silver of the moon's rays as they touched the water's turgid surface. Langham no longer sought to force him from the bridge, but bent every effort to thrust him down between the ties to a swift ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester

... with suspended respiration or very difficult breathing. After a few respirations it cries out and then falls asleep quietly, or the attack may last an hour or so, when the face will become pale, veins in the neck become turgid and feet and hands contract spasmodically. In mild cases the attacks will only occur once during the night, but may ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis

... true. They had arrived at the upper edge of a bank overlooking a hill stream which was pouring noisily down in a flood made turgid by the rain, and the "rough bit of bog and boulder" was a sort of natural bridge across the torrent, formed by heaps of earth and rock, out of which masses of wet fern and plumy meadow-sweet sprang in tall tufts and garlands, which though beautiful to the eyes in day-time, were apt to entangle ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli

... And at his feet The world passed on—the surging crowd Of men and women, passionate, turgid, dense, Keenly alert, lethargic, or obese. ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... Cooeperation, two volumes. This is the classical work on the subject, but its plan is so confused, its style so turgid, and its information so scattered, that, however amusing it may be, it is more interesting and valuable as a history of the period than as a clear account of the movement for which it is named. Mr. Holyoake has written two other books on the same subject: ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney

... vinifera. GRAPE VINE. Raisins and different Wines. L. E.— These are to cheer the spirits, warm the habit, promote perspiration, render the vessels full and turgid, raise the pulse, and quicken the circulation. The effects of the full-bodied wines are much more durable than those of the thinner; all sweet wines, as Canary, abound with a glutinous nutritious substance; whilst the others ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury

... heart he tried to relegate Madame de Berny to the position of an ordinary friend, and felt the delightful agitation, followed by bitter mortification, of his intercourse with Madame de Castries, we must remember that from time to time he received a flowery epistle from Russia, written in the turgid and rather bombastic ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars

... Ebionites to reject all St. Paul's Epistles? Despair. For while those Letters kept their credit, the custom of circumcision, which these men had reintroduced, was set aside as an anachronism. What induced that crime-laden apostate Luther to call the Epistle of James contentious, turgid, arid, a thing of straw, and unworthy of the Apostolic spirit? Despair. For by this writing the wretched man's argument of righteousness consisting in faith alone was stabbed through and rent assunder. What induced ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion

... shall disdain to cull my phrases or polish my style—I aim at being useful, and sincerity will render me unaffected; for wishing rather to persuade by the force of my arguments, than dazzle by the elegance of my language, I shall not waste my time in rounding periods, nor in fabricating the turgid bombast of artificial feelings, which, coming from the head, never reach the heart. I shall be employed about things, not words! and, anxious to render my sex more respectable members of society, I shall try to avoid that flowery diction which has slided from essays ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]

... appears sprightly and agreeable; while the Man of Resolution and true Gallantry is overlooked and disregarded, if not despised. There is a Propriety in all things; and I believe what you Scholars call just and sublime, in opposition to turgid and bombast Expression, may give you an Idea of what I mean, when I say Modesty is the certain Indication of a great Spirit, and Impudence the Affectation of it. He that writes with Judgment, and ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... ambition. Prevented by native pride and indolence from climbing the ascent of learning or greatness, taught by political opinions to say to the vain pomp and glory of the world, "I hate ye," seeing the path of classical and artificial poetry blocked up by the cumbrous ornaments of style and turgid common-places, so that nothing more could be achieved in that direction but by the most ridiculous bombast or the tamest servility; he has turned back partly from the bias of his mind, partly perhaps from ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt

... son, Two turgid years ago, Your father battled with the Hun At five A.M. or so; This was the day (if I exclude A year of painful servitude Under the Ministry of Food) ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various

... stronger proof of the charms of harmonious elocution, than the many, even unnatural scenes and flights of the false sublime it has lifted into applause. In what raptures have I seen an audience, at the furious fustian and turgid rants in Nat. Lee's Alexander the Great! for though I can allow this play a few great beauties, yet it is not without its extravagant blemishes. Every play of the same author has more or less of them. Let me give you a sample from this. Alexander, in a full crowd of courtiers, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold

... volume, The Star in the East, is of a more ambitious and less pleasing character. Although in blank verse, it is, in fact, a lyrical effusion; an ode on the rapid progress and final triumph of the Gospel. It looks like the composition of a young man: harsh and turgid in parts, but interspersed with some rather beautiful touches. The opening lines ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various

... friendship into the Apocrypha. We shall sniff at the highly colored intercourse of Richter's men, for it is often more than we can do to really love a woman. We shall pronounce the relation affected, and the expression of it turgid, even nauseous. But there is a genuine noble pulse in the German heart, which beats to the rhythm of two men's heroic attachment, and can expand till all the blood that flows through Richter's style is welcomed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... Loyola lie enshrined in lazulite and gold. Sculpture, painting, poetry, and eloquence were employed to compliment the strangers: but all these arts had sunk into deep degeneracy. There was a great display of turgid and impure Latinity unworthy of so erudite an order; and some of the inscriptions which adorned the walls had a fault more serious than even a bad style. It was said in one place that James had sent his brother as his messenger to heaven, and in another that James had furnished the wings with ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... happen in a day. Clothed in the purple, Karl—Peter Van Dorn, he was, now—expanded. Turgid emotions surged through his new being. He was a new man. In his rightful place. He was delighted with the companionship of his new friend of the purple, Leon Lemaire. An euphonious name! A fine fellow! Fool ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various

... that? As to the terrific roar of the explosion, I do not think I heard it. But the form of the rocks completely changed in my eyes—they seemed to be drawn aside like a curtain. I saw a fathomless, a bottomless abyss, which yawned beneath the turgid waves. The sea, which seemed suddenly to have gone mad, then became one great mountainous mass, upon the top of which the raft ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne

... in Switzerland, and he was a lawyer bent on acting within and up to the measure of the law as well as pleading eloquently. The desire to wing a telegram to her he thought it wise to repress, and he found himself in consequence composing verses, turgid enough, even to his own judgement. Poets would have failed at such a time, and he was not one, but an orator enamoured. He was a wild man, cased in the knowledge of jurisprudence, and wishing to enter the ranks of the soberly blissful. These he could imagine that ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... his lightning. Even the blank-verse reads like that of one accustomed to rhyme, and unable to get out of his wonted rut. And the versification runs, throughout, in a stilted monotony, the style being made thick and turgid with high-sounding epithets; while we have a perfect flux of learned impertinence. As for truth, nature, character, poetry, we look for them in vain; though there is much, in the stage noise and parade, that might keep the multitude from perceiving ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson

... figures known And rich with fruits, lay bounded for his own; Deep thro the centre spreads a branching bay, Full sails ascend and golden rivers stray; Bright palaces arise relieved in gold, And gates and streets the crossing lines unfold. James furrows o'er the plate with turgid tide, Young Richmond roughens on his masted side; Reviving Norfolk from her ashes springs, A golden phoenix on refulgent wings; Potowmak's yellow waves reluctant spread, And Vernon rears his rich and radiant head, Tis here the chief his ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow

... hall of the ducal palace—two or four hexameters, setting forth the most noteworthy facts in the government of each. In addition to this, the tombs of the Doges in the fourteenth century bore short inscriptions in prose, recording merely facts, and beside them turgid hexameters or leonine verses. In the fifteenth century more care was taken with the style; in the sixteenth century it is seen at its best; and then coon after came pointless antithesis, prosopopceia, false pathos, praise of abstract ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... violating any rule of our common grammars. For example, I may say of somebody, "This very superficial grammatist, supposing empty criticism about the adoption of proper phraseology to be a show of extraordinary erudition, was displaying, in spite of ridicule, a very boastful turgid argument concerning the correction of false syntax, and about the detection of false logic in debate." Now, in what other language than ours, can a string of words anything like the following, come so near ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... weary to care for or even to think of anything, she went upstairs, to find Mrs. Ede painting her son's chest and back with iodine. He had a bad attack, which was beginning to subside. His face was haggard, his eyes turgid, and the two women talked together. Mrs. Ede was indignant, and told of all her trouble with the dinner. She had to fetch cigars and drinks. Kate listened, watching her husband all the while. He began to get a little better, and Mrs. Ede ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore

... waterfalls. Nearly thirty miles wide toward the mouth, its muddy current discolors the ocean's blue forty miles out in the Pacific, I am told. In fact, I think {139} it must have been that distance that I last saw the great turgid stream off the Shanghai harbor. Even as far up as Hankow the river becomes very rough on windy days. Consequently, when I wished to go across to Wuchang, I found that the motor boat couldn't go, so tempestuous were the waves, but a rather rickety ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe

... this treasury of dainties; and then what a rare array of disintegrated meals intoxicated the vision! There was the Athlete of the Dairy, commonly called Fresh Butter, in his gay yellow jacket, looking wore to the knife. There was turgid old Brown Sugar, who had evidently heard the advice, go to the ant, thou sluggard! and, and mistaking the last word for Sugared, was going as deliberately as possible. There was the vivacious Cheese, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various

... "Correspondence." The writers, like Dawson, can probably talk vividly and forcibly, using strong nervous vernacular English, but the moment they take the pen all thought and individual character become swamped in a flood of turgid, commonplace jargon. I was disappointed with Dawson's letters, and I am sure that he will be even more disappointed when he finds none of them made immortal in this book. His purpose in sending them to me ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone

... penny-a-liners columns pour Of turgid efflorescence, Describe in language that would floor Our Cayleys, Rouths, and Besants, How Oxford oars as levers move, While Cambridge mathematics, Though excellent in theory, prove Unstable ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling

... which led each man to seek the thing that pleased him best, the trail forked for a time. One was caught in the turgid whirlpool which was the sporting element of the town, and would not leave it. Him the games and the women and the fighting drew irresistibly. The other sickened of the place, and one day when all the grassy hillsides shone with the golden glow of poppies to prove ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower

... fleet has no definite port, but plies stemming nightly toward the pole in a wide ocean of conjecture. He generalizes always instead of specifying,—the true secret of the ideal treatment in which he is without peer, and, though everywhere grandiose, he is never turgid. ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell

... the hills, flowed a tortuous stream, by courtesy called a river. It sometimes rose in a turgid flood, but more often it sank and delivered up its ghost to such an extent that a man could have held it in his hat. Nevertheless some ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels

... Dr. Burney has here fallen into a most extraordinary mistake. In the very page to which he refers, Elmham, in his turgid manner, assures us that at Henry's coronation the tumultuous clang of so many trumpets made the heavens resound with the roar of thunder. He then describes the sweet strings of the harps soothing the souls ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler

... of this admired book' (the 'Meditations'); 'he treated it with ridicule, and parodied it in a "Meditation on a Pudding."'[794] Most modern readers will be surprised that any sensible people could think otherwise than Dr. Johnson did of such a farrago of highflown sentiment clothed in the most turgid language. ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton

... would like to write some servant girl novels. I believe I could do it. My love-making would either be rather tame and stiff or too intensely early Victorian. But I should like to swing off into an ecstasy of large turgid words and let my mind hear the mushy housemaid cry, "Isn't that just ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane

... excitable Gaul would have wept, kneaded his manly bosom, and alluded to his mother; the stolid Muscovite would have wept also, referring to his Little Father, the Czar; the Teuton would have poured forth oceans of turgid sentiment about the Fatherland; the dignified Spaniard would have recognised himself as a warrior upon the verge of a Homeric struggle, and said so candidly; the hysterical American would have sung "Hail, Columbia!" and waved ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... banks. I sought them and I found them, and finding them I found a danger even greater than my loss in that desolate plain. For in the grey smoke of mist those treacherous pools crept noiselessly to my feet, and once I had almost walked blindly into an ice-clear turgid little lake. My foot sank in the mire of it almost up to the knees ere I jumped to the nature of my neighbourhood, and with an effort little short of miraculous in the state of my body, threw myself back on the safe ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro

... volumes. It covers a thousand years of the world's history, it is full and good and accurate, its standpoint is broadly philosophic, its style dignified. With our more elastic methods we may consider his manner pompous, but he lived in an age when Johnson's turgid periods had corrupted our literature. For my own part I do not dislike Gibbon's pomposity. A paragraph should be measured and sonorous if it ventures to describe the advance of a Roman legion, or the debate of a Greek Senate. You ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle

... of "Mademoiselle Marni" Miss Bingham herself must have spent an enormous sum that she would probably have hesitated to invest in some enterprise sane or possible. The play was a turgid coagulation of illogical episodes lacking in all plausibility. This particular actress is generally happy when she can select for herself a character that is beloved by all the masculine members of the cast. Apparently, she "sees" herself in this role. She likes to appear as the personification ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various

... in mid-air a vast sheet of water which the howling wind flapped to and fro in the gorge terrifically; while the blinding lightning and crashing thunder seemed to issue together from the mountain itself. The creek, before clear and placid, quickly became turgid and agitated. It began to creep up the banks. Presently a dark, strange-looking mass came floating down—it was a soldier's knapsack! The rain fell, if possible, in increased torrents. The stream continued to rise rapidly. Other knapsacks came floating down. It was not long ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood

... hissed over the precipice, in a small transparent ribbon of clear glass—green, sprinkled with white foam, and then threaded its way round the large rocks in its capacious channel, like a silver eel twisting through a dry desert, now changed in a moment to a dark turgid chocolate colour; and even as we stood and looked, lo! a column of water from the mountains pitched in thunder over the face of the precipice, making the earth tremble, and driving up from the rugged ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott

... knew nothing about such things. Her prodigious innocence appalled him, freezing on his lips all ardors of speech, and convincing him, in spite of himself, of his own unworthiness. Also he was handicapped in another way. He had himself never been in love before. He had liked women in that turgid past of his, and been fascinated by some of them, but he had not known what it was to love them. He had whistled in a masterful, careless way, and they had come to him. They had been diversions, ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London

... an upright position half choked and half blinded with dust, turgid and bursting with the rush of blood to his head, but clear and collected in mind, and unremorsefully triumphant. Unconscious of the real extent of Seth's catastrophe he groped for and seized his gun, examined the cap ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte

... money to our treasury, which is the consummation most devoutly to be wished. It is nothing more than an interesting melodrama, with the advantage of being written in gentlemanly (noblemanly?) blank verse instead of turgid prose, and being acted by the principal instead of the secondary members of the company. This will suffice to make you appreciate my satisfaction, when I am complimented upon my acting in it, and you will sympathize with the shout of laughter my father and myself indulged in in the park the ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... hags, Spanish grandees, shipwrecks, caverns, Donna Claras and Donna Isidoras, all opposed to each other in glaring and violent contrast, and all their adventures narrated with the same undeviating display of turgid, vehement, and painfully elaborated language. Such are the materials, and the style of this expanded nightmare: And as we can plainly perceive, among a certain class of writers, a disposition to haunt us with similar apparitions, and to describe ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... is peculiar to the warm latitudes of America. With the exception of a slight similarity about the region of the head, the worm bears no resemblance to the parent beetle. When full-grown, it is about 3-1/2 inches in length, having the body large and turgid, and increasing in circumference from the head towards the opposite extremity. The head is of a corneous, opaque substance. It has neither eyes nor the rudiments of the antennae which distinguish the beetle tribe. It is, however, provided with the mandibles ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various

... note on his Ossianic imitation, Byron said that Mr. Laing had proved Ossian an impostor, but that the merit of MacPherson's work remained, although in parts his diction was turgid and bombastic.[27] A poem in the "Hours of Idleness," upon the Scotch mountain "Lachin Y Gair," has two ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... the merit of the compositions. The style is nervous and replete with beauties, but, according to the corrupted taste of the time in which they were written, abounds too much with ornament, is often turgid and inflated. Those tragedies, however, contain much good morality, conveyed in brilliant sentences and illustrated by ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various

... the value of the alliance, and mismanaged it badly. He knew that there was a Whig dogma against letting England be taken in tow by Hanover. The great propounder of the doctrine was William Pitt, who now rose to power. Frederic did not know that this turgid declaimer was as able, as powerful, as ambitious as himself, and did not divine that he would make the German quarrel and the compulsory defence of Hanover the means of occupying the military forces of France ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton

... popular preacher, he calls them "preaching shops," and speaks with pity of those who occupy their pulpits: "That must be a dreadful life—dreadful, oh, quite dreadful!" Yet he has a lasting admiration for the sermons of Charles Spurgeon. As to Jeremy Taylor, "I confess that all that turgid rhetoric wearies me." ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie

... The light in the east was a pale gold under a steely green-blue sky. All the abyss of the Canyon was soft, gray, transparent, and the belt of gold broadened downward, making shadows on the west slopes of the mesas and escarpments. Far down in the shadows she discerned the river, yellow, turgid, palely gleaming. By straining her ears Carley heard a low dull roar as of distant storm. She stood fearfully at the extreme edge of a stupendous cliff, where it sheered dark and forbidding, down and ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey

... work at once on his play. He chose the one that had the greatest emotional possibilities. Gora Dwight had told him that he must learn to "externalize his emotions," and he felt that here was the supreme opportunity. Never would he have more turgid, pent-up, tearing emotions to get rid of than now. He wrote until one o'clock, then, after lunch and two hours on his column, went out and took a long walk; but lighter of heart than since he had met Mary Zattiany. He also reflected with no little satisfaction that when ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... vacant space, unbuilt upon as yet, was becoming an immense human reservoir, into which turgid streams with threatening sounds were surging from the south. His eyes could separate the tumultuous atoms into ragged forms, unkempt heads, inflamed faces, animated by some powerful destructive impulse. Arms of every description ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe

... She led him down Holborn Hill past the Fleet Market, over Blackfriars Bridge, and so, turning sharp to the right, along a somewhat narrow and very grimy street between rows of dirty, tumble-down houses, with, upon the right hand, numerous narrow courts and alley-ways that gave upon the turgid river. Down one of these alleys the fluttering cloak turned suddenly, yet when Barnabas reached the corner, behold the alley was quite deserted, save for a small and pallid urchin who sat upon a rotting stump, staring at the river, with a ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al

... a different attitude toward the unhappy passage in his life wherein Mercy Fisher was chiefly concerned. What his feeling was before Mr. Bonnithorne's revelation, we have already seen. Now the sentiment that made much of such an "accident" was fit only for a "turgid melodrama," and the idea of "atonement" by "marriage" was the mock heroic of those "great lovers of noble histories," the spectators who applaud ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine

... up to see my patient. He had been lifted from the floor, and was now lying upon the bed. Sure enough, his face was purple and his breathing laboured, but somehow the symptoms did not indicate apoplexy. Every vein in his head and face was turgid, and he lay perfectly stupid, but still I saw no clear indications of an actual or ...
— Off-Hand Sketches - a Little Dashed with Humor • T. S. Arthur









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