United States or Canada ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
But her husband still thought of her, although with a calm and quiet grief, in the silent watches of the night: and Mary would start from her hard-earned sleep, and think, in her half-dreamy, half-awakened state, she saw her mother stand by her bedside, as she used to do "in the days of long ago"; with a shaded candle and an expression of ineffable tenderness, while she looked on her sleeping child.
He turned, in a half-awakened way, without a wish or a purpose turned, and listlessly looked back. Two foot-passengers, dressed in mourning garments, were rapidly approaching him. One of them, as they came nearer, proved to be an aged woman. The other was a girl. He drew aside to let them pass. They looked at him with the lukewarm curiosity of strangers, as they went by.
Herrick seemed to view life, indeed, with a kind of large detachment, as though from the height of some soaring pinnacle one might watch, with only half-awakened interest, the doings of the dwellers on the plain; and Owen, who liked to be in the midst of things, to add his quota to the world's doings, found in this attitude of mind a pose, a half-insolent pretence at superiority, which was galling.
But she could not speak. The dream-gods kept their hold on the half-awakened mind, too old for any alacrity in shaking them off. The old voice wandered on, every word telling on its hearer and rousing a memory. "We must have been eight then.
The love and hope in her heart did not lift her above the depressing influence of that mournful last view of her home. Was the thing that she was going to do worth while? Was anything in life worth while? The little town had a half-awakened Monday-morning look. Every one seemed to be beginning another week with an "Oh, dear me!" sort of feeling.
Sometimes on the spring nights when the tender breezes let the half-awakened wistaria flutter outside her window, she would blow out all her candles and lean far across the sill and stare at her unfinished garden. And when the house was still, oh, heart-breakingly still, she would kneel beside the bed and whisper, "Let's pretend! Let's pretend we're back in your room, Maman!
But we are immersed in our bodies, entombed prisoners with whom it cannot communicate at will. It roams around the walls, it utters warning cries. It knocks at every door, but all that reaches us is a vague disquiet, an indistinct murmur that is sometimes translated to us by a half-awakened gaoler who, like ourselves, is a lifelong captive.
Wogan was lazily determining to speak to the landlord about it when his half-awakened mind was diverted by a curious phenomenon, a delusion of the eyes such as he had known to have befallen him before when he had stared for a long while on any particular object: the strip of black widened and widened. Wogan waited for it to contract, as it would be sure to do.
Suddenly, swiftly, with her head turned away from me, she opened the door of Philip's room and was gone. I looked round. There was only Maria in the lonely hall. Shall I try to tell you what my sensations were? It may sound strangely, but it is true I felt like a sleeper, who has half-awakened from a dream.
Word Of The Day