|
|
|
More "Blunted" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... blunted, the hearing becomes dull, the eyes lose their luster, vivacity, and strength, and vision becomes in general shorter, less ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 620, November 19,1887 • Various
... near the bull's-eye, so to speak—as a vague automaton that worked when he pulled a bell-rope. Infinitely more important things were troubling him; the visit of Peter had somehow put a keener edge on his blunted self-confidence; he had started a grand opera, and worked at it furiously in all the intervals left him by his engrossing pursuit after a publisher. Sometimes he would look up from his hieroglyphics and see Mary Ann at his side surveying him curiously, and then he would start, and remember he had ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... were allowed to be made. Those who possessed them had to surrender them. This is true in a nobler and better sense regarding the Gospel Stronghold. There can be no deadly weapons forged there. Their edge is blunted: "There is now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus."[46] Satan's armoury has been plundered; the "Stronger than he" has "taken from him all his armour wherein he trusted, and ...
— The Cities of Refuge: or, The Name of Jesus - A Sunday book for the young • John Ross Macduff
... an encouraging sign. It shows that the vulgar ideals, the false moral measurements, the feverish social ambitions, the love of the ostentatious and the factitious, and the disdain for simple habits, pleasures, and characters so apparent in certain conspicuous sections of society, have not yet blunted the moral sense or perverted the moral perceptions of the great masses on either side of the Atlantic. To this type, indeed, we could scarcely find a more complete antithesis than in the life and character of the great Queen who has passed away. Nothing ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... for a long time to an unvarying round of employment, which affords neither scope nor stimulus for one half of his faculties, and, from want of education or society, has no external resources, his mental powers, for want of exercise to keep up due vitality in their cerebral organs, become blunted, and his perceptions slow and dull. Unusual subjects of thought become to him disagreeable and painful. The intellect and feelings not being provided with interests external to themselves, must ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... occupying the next shack to the gambling place. For convenience of service extra doors had been cut and a rough-boarded passageway erected between the two places. The fever of gambling provided thirsty customers for the liquor dealer, and the whisky blunted the wits of the gamblers and gave the dealers more than their customary percentage of odds in the favor of the house. It was a combination that worked both ways. Waiters impressed into service from camp followers, crudely took orders and delivered ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... Somewhat blunted by over-employment is another romantic instrument, eminently characteristic of Heine, namely, irony. Nothing could be more trenchant than his bland assumption of the point of view of the Jew-baiter, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... of published materials, and Sanskrit MSS. also are so easily obtained from India, that much might be done in England, or in France, or in Germany—much that would be of interest not only to Oriental scholars, but to all philosophers whose powers of independent appreciation are not entirely blunted by their study of Plato and Aristotle, of ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... keep the lists against Bradamante. He, we are told, defended successfully the cause of which he was the champion; but, before the fight began, exchanged Balisarda for a less deadly sword, of which he carefully blunted ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... matter. Or if it had been, the presence of the queen, Hamlet's mother, who was generally with the king, was a restraint upon his purpose, which he could not break through. Besides, the very circumstance that the usurper was his mother's husband filled him with some remorse, and still blunted the edge of his purpose. The mere act of putting a fellow-creature to death was in itself odious and terrible to a disposition naturally so gentle as Hamlet's was. His very melancholy, and the dejection of spirits ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... lifelong hatred, my cherished purpose. Blank amazement was in the gaze that he turned upon me. I feared that impending death had blunted his senses, and that he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... when the Fates lay their hand upon a man his senses are wont to be blunted and dimmed, so Gallus, being led on by these alluring persuasions to the expectation of a better fortune, quitted Antioch under the guidance of an unfriendly star, and hurried, as the old proverb has it, out of the smoke into the flame;[20] and having arrived at Constantinople ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... Margot dismally to herself, "some day I shall laugh over this!" For the present, however, her sense of humour was strangely blunted, and the handkerchiefs were needed for a very ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... yawned. "It depends on your funny bone. Mine's got blunted. I'm the lady that the Irish comedy guy slaps in the face with a bunch of lettuce. Say, there's something about you that makes a person get gabby and tell things. You'd ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... is an imitation of Plautus' Curculio, or the Forgery. The Parasite of Phaeaedromus, who gave his name to the piece, says (ii. 3):—"I am quite undone. I can hardly see; my mouth is bitter; my teeth are blunted; my jaws are clammy through fasting; with my entrails thus lank with abstinence from food, am I come... Let's cram down something first; the gammon, the udder, and the kernels; these are the foundations for the stomach, with head and roast-beef, a good-sized ...
— Sganarelle - or The Self-Deceived Husband • Moliere
... playing tricks worthy a whipping if not a hanging on respectable persons of limited capacity. His most notable victim is the purveyor of drink or victualler to the camp, a tun-bellied coward, proud of his pretended noble descent, a Falstaff grown old, whose wit has been blunted, who has ended by marrying Mistress Quickly, and has himself become tavern keeper in partnership with her. In old days he drank on credit: now the good fellows tipple at his expense. Such is the end of all the Falstaffs ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... the prince said, speaking for the first time, "It was but yesterday in the great hall downstairs he stood up with blunted swords against young Victor de Paulliac, who is nigh three years his senior. It was amusing to see how the little knaves fought against each other; and by my faith Gervaise held his own staunchly, in spite of Victor's superior height and ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... the taste of sweetness, whereof a little More than a little is by much too much. So, when he had occasion to be seen, He was but as the cuckoo is in June, Heard, not regarded; seen, but with such eyes As, sick and blunted with community, Afford no extraordinary gaze, Such as is bent on sun-like majesty When it shines seldom in admiring eyes; But rather drowsed, and hung their eyelids down, Slept in his face, and render'd such aspect As cloudy men use to their adversaries, Being with his presence glutted, ...
— King Henry IV, The First Part • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... placeman, man of mark and note, Worthy of honor from a feeble pen Blunted in service of all true, good men, You serve the Lord—in courses, table d'hote: Au, naturel, as well as a la Nick— "Eat and be thankful, though it ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... community, the nation, the society, and to the life and progress of the human race, than any which devolve on king or emperor, magistrate or legislator. We would not have their generous instincts repressed, their quick sensibilities blunted, or their warm, sympathetic nature chilled, nor even the lighter graces and accomplishments neglected; but we would have them all directed and harmonized by solid intellectual instruction, and moral and religious ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... condition showed no improvement on that of the savage warrior of two thousand years ago, except in that civilisation had developed finer weapons to kill with and be killed by. The finer instincts had been blunted by the naked and unashamed horrors of war. But the lessons taught him before war scourged the world came back to him on getting his first view of the Holy City. He felt that sense of emotion which makes one wish to be alone and think alone. He was on the ground ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... says of the great, of fashionable people and of women, his rude and cutting tone, provoke and irritate, but are not displeasing. On the contrary, after so many compliments, insipidities and petty versification all this quickens the blunted taste; it is the sensation of strong common wine after long indulgence in orgeat and preserved citron. Accordingly, his first discourse against art and literature "lifts one at once above the clouds." But his ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... another, a more mature, and heavier, but not less personable, couple, who proceeded to make love in their own somewhat different way. The lyrical notes seemed to be missing in them. But maturity, though it had stripped away magic, had not blunted their passion—had, rather, sharpened the edge of it, and made it a stronger and more formidable instrument. Throughout the evening, indeed, in the long succession that there was of amorous encounters, it seemed to be the encounters ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... by her previous agitation, she seems to have given way under this last shock, tenderly and carefully as Mr. Philip Nicholson broke the bad news to her. All her feelings appeared to be strangely blunted at the examination to-day. She answered the questions put to her quite correctly, but at the same time quite mechanically, with no change in her complexion, or in her tone of voice, or in her manner, from beginning to end. It is ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... butcher. And this worth in exchange not only absorbs a large quantity in that use,[35] but greatly increases the effect on the imagination of the quantity used in the arts. Thus, in brief, the force of the functions is increased, but their precision blunted, by their unison. ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... if the natural instincts of men and women will not guide aright in the selection of a consort, and my answer is yes, if the instincts of men and women were natural. But when we reflect that the sexual instincts of the present generation are blunted, warped and paralyzed by the sexual sins of a long line of ignorant and depraved ancestors, they cannot be trusted. But they can be educated, and every man of refined sensibilities can, by learning to recognize his true affinity, so educate his sexual instincts ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... ludicrous. And what shall we say to performances such as the explosion of nitro-glycerine? Much may be urged in extenuation of the offences of the German students in the seventeenth century. Their sensibilities were blunted by the horrors of a Thirty Years' War; they had been born and reared amid bloodshed and rapine; some of them must have served in the campaigns of Baner, Torstenson and Wrangel, where human life went for nothing, and honor for less than nothing. Some ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... his ascetic character. He had a hard pragmatic countenance, and one of those noses which though large and bony come suddenly short and blunted. His eyes, small, gray, and inscrutable, seemed unfriendly, so baffling, introspective, unnoting was their inattentiveness. His hair was of a sort of carrot tint, which color was reproduced in paler guise in his fringed buckskin shirt and leggings, worn on a sturdy ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... stoop to be a slave. Your rules will never do for me, I'd rather learn the rule of three— "And since I find it is the plan, To make me an automaton, I'll case my heart in triple mail, And fence it so completely round, That all this vaunted skill shall fail, Those blunted arrows back rebound; For know, usurper! from this hour, I scorn thy laws, abjure thy power! From this dear moment I despise The whole artillery of eyes; Reason alone shall be my guide, And Reason's voice shall ...
— Vignettes in Verse • Matilda Betham
... outline, the face of the mountain being precipitous with escarped cliffs. In other parts of the line, the summits were sharply serrated. Northward it was lost in the far distance among clouds and mist, but to the south-west of Monte Asto a similar, but more blunted peak towered above all the others. I observed on our maps that several of the summits in this range have the name of Monte Rosso; and the centre of the group was indented by a deep gorge richly wooded, ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... would have understood it, had she known to what base deeds a mind blunted by selfishness and ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... forever spoiled for him many pictures and books once cherished and dear. Approved by the mob, they began to reveal imperceptible defects to him, and he rejected them, wondering meanwhile if his perceptions were not growing blunted. ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... the presence of the queen, Hamlet's mother, who was generally with the king, was a restraint upon his purpose, which he could not break through. Besides, the very circumstance that the usurper was his mother's husband, filled him with some remorse and still blunted the edge of his purpose. The mere act of putting a fellow-creature to death was in itself odious and terrible to a disposition naturally so gentle as Hamlet's was. His very melancholy, and the dejection of spirits he had so long been ill, produced an irresoluteness and wavering ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... my bold Basque chattered as he stood at the bows and poled me with a blunted oar across the river shallows. He told me proudly that he had the three languages, that he was all at home with French and Spanish and Basque. He was intelligent within due limits; he at anyrate knew how to extract francs from an Englishman. That generosity ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... his hand. "I mustn't speak about it," he said. "Silence helps me to bear my misfortune as becomes a man. I have had some hard blows in my time: they don't seem to have blunted my sense of feeling as I thought they had. Thank God, she doesn't know how she has made me suffer! I want to ask her pardon for having forgotten myself yesterday. I spoke roughly to her, at one time. No: I won't intrude on her; I have ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... work, Harry," he said, "though we were only at it about a quarter of an hour, at a time. My wrists and arms and shoulders are aching, as if I had been beaten with sticks. Tomorrow I will take up a good supply of firewood. The chisels got blunted before we had worked an hour; and we should get on a deal faster, if we could sharpen ...
— On the Irrawaddy - A Story of the First Burmese War • G. A. Henty
... undergo intolerable insults. They are tarred and feathered and spat upon. Is it possible that Republicans, Democrats and Socialists clip the wings more than free spirits can allow? Is civilization perhaps too tightly organized? Have the irreconcilables a soul audacious and less blunted than our domesticated ones? To put it mildly, is it ever safe to ignore them entirely in ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... taught her to expect in Europe, but now her patriotic vanity feasted full. Fat highhotes of her own sex levelled their lorgnettes at Miss Triscoe all around the horseshoe, with critical glances which fell blunted from her complexion and costume; the house was brilliant with the military uniforms, which we have not yet to mingle with our unrivalled millinery, and the ardent gaze of the young officers dwelt on the perfect ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... President, this is how the matter stands. They imagine they can ruin England with their submarines—they 're probably wrong, but that's their notion—but if they give way to America this illegitimate weapon is blunted and they lose the war. Sooner than suffer that catastrophe they will defy America. And they don't believe as yet that America means what she says and is determined to fight rather than suffer these outrages to continue. The Germans will try to throw ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 21st, 1917 • Various
... family of Stephens, and Nathaniel represented Gloucestershire in Parliament at the time of the conviction of Charles I.: it is related that he was only persuaded to agree to the condemnation by the impetuous Ireton, who came there and sat up all night in urgent argument "to whet his almost blunted purpose." Stephens died in May, 1649, expressing regret for having participated in the execution of his sovereign. We are further told in the traditions of the house that when all the relatives were assembled for the ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... of experimental physiologists not blunted, they could not long continue the practice of vivisection. They are always ready to repudiate any implied want of tender feeling, but I must say that they seldom show much pity; on the contrary, in practice they frequently show the reverse. Hundreds of times I have seen, when an animal ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... the young lady, with a grateful eye-shot, vanished round the corner. But the force of her appeal had been a little blunted; for the young man was not only destitute of sisters, but of any female relative nearer than a great-aunt in Wales. Now he was alone, besides, the spell that he had hitherto obeyed began to weaken; he considered his behaviour with ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ask you, Roger, to try a bout of sword play with some of us; but I will not do so now. After what we have seen of the strength of your arm, I should be sorry, indeed, to stand up against you, even with blunted weapons or with sticks; for there would be no resisting a downright blow. The news came to us of the terrible blows struck by the Spaniards, and how they clove through sword, helmet, and head. I scarce credited them before, but now I can well believe ...
— By Right of Conquest - Or, With Cortez in Mexico • G. A. Henty
... ran, 'carrying so infectious a fear with them, that the whole body of troops was seized by it and fled.' Colonel Digby followed, with all the horse at his disposal, 'till,' says Clarendon complacently, 'their swords were blunted with slaughter.' Perhaps the Royalists were more anxious to impress a salutary warning against the sin of rebellion than to kill the fugitives, for Clarendon finishes the account by saying that the rebels 'were scattered and dispersed all over ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... supplications to God: that were a divine channel. Again, the marrow of other men's spirits is exhausted in the pursuit of things in the world. The edge of their desires is turned that way, and it must needs be blunted and dulled in spiritual things, that it cannot pierce into heaven, and prevail effectually. I am sure, many of us useth this excuse, who are so cold in it, that we do not warm ourselves. And how shall we think to prevail with God? Our spirits make little noise when we cry all the loudest. ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... all. He came into my old heart like a son. We are not all brute, gentlemen. I have waded in blood and plunder like the rest, but in every heart there is some spot that beats for things better. I divided my love between him and my captain. This man"—he pointed to his old master with his blunted finger, drawing himself up until he looked taller than he was, his one eye flashing with anger and hatred, as with a stern, rude eloquence he recited his wrongs, the grim indictment of a false friend—"this man betrayed us at Panama. With what he had robbed his ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... as it might have been under more fortunate circumstances, became indurated to harshness; and it is not they who strive to work upon the most solid marble who should complain if the chisel with which they pursue their purpose become blunted ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... her anxiety, moved into the range of the Maccabee's vision. The next instant he had thrown away his sword and had caught her in a crushing embrace to him. His voice, blunted and repressed as if something had him by the ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... fighting teeth are blunted runs from the field before his foe. With many an afterthought ran Gisli. Gone is ...
— Grettir The Strong - Grettir's Saga • Unknown
... his purpose. The wine made her rosy and pretty, and it also made her forget her poses and affectations. She was more charming to him than ever before, partly because of the change in her, and partly because his own critical faculties were blunted by alcohol. He was almost in love with her and he felt sure that he was about to win her. But presently she began wheedling him in the old vein. She wanted him to take her to the dance at ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... the enrichment of tawny wine or blood oranges, and the blue of peacocks or the sea. In short these people are artistic in the sense that used to be called aesthetic; and it is a nameless instinct that preserves these nameless tints. Like all such instincts, it can be blunted by a bullying rationalism; like all such children, these people do not know why they prefer the better, and can therefore be persuaded by sophists that they prefer the worst. But there are other elements emerging from the coloured crowd, which ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... one shoulder against the roof, reaching up into the hole he had made, still cutting away with this once keen knife, which was now dulled and blunted. ...
— Frank Merriwell's Pursuit - How to Win • Burt L. Standish
... of the American army. The Anarchiad was followed by the Echo and the Political Green House, written mostly by Alsop and Theodore Dwight, and similar in character and tendency to the earlier series. Time has greatly blunted the edge of these satires, but they were influential in their day, and are an important part of the literature of the ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... to the settle, and takes up her knitting. Maire takes her shawl off, and hangs it on the rack. Maire Hourican is over twenty. She is tall, and has easy, graceful movements; her features are fine and clear-cut; the nose is rather blunted, the mouth firm. Her gaze is direct and clear. She has heavy auburn hair, loose now, and falling. Maire comes down to the table, opens basket, and takes some flowers from top. She turns to dresser and arranges some of the ...
— Three Plays • Padraic Colum
... spread over so many years, did not vanish away as they were gathered in, and had not all been scattered and spent by the time that years had multiplied, wants, grown more numerous, eyes grown dim, and mind become blunted and worn."[239] This was his own case. His earnings were never thriftily husbanded. Diderot could not deny himself a book or an engraving that struck his fancy, though he was quite willing to make a ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... general public, I have no doubt that the feeling of shame and sympathy, are blunted by these repeated military calamities, and by Mr. ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... intimacy, the liaison takes a more serious character and there is a certain degree of affection or even love. However, all these concubinages are generally limited to a few weeks or months, so that the natural love of the woman becomes blunted by successive polyandry. It is always more or less a question of "an ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... thirty—no,—she is the woman of thirty. Balzac has written some admirable pages on this subject; my memory of them is vague and uncertain, although durable, as all memories of him must be. But that marvellous story, or rather study, has been blunted in my knowledge of this tiny face with the fine masses of hair drawn up from the neck and arranged elaborately on the crown. There is no fear of plagiary; he cannot have said all; he cannot have said what I want ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... it till after a few enjoyments had numbed and blunted the sense of the smart, and given me to feel the titillating inspersion of balsamic sweets, drew from me the delicious return, and brought down all my passion, that I arrived at excess of pleasure through excess of pain. ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... my dear, I don't know if they have or they haven't," a harassed grocer-woman acknowledged. Her conscience was becoming blunted in the stress and strain of business life. "She took a pound of it as usual, and that's all I can ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... iv. 6 postulates the exile,[1] and the prophecy of exile to Babylon, iv. 10, would be unnatural in Micah's time, when Assyria was the dominant power.[2] Again it is exceedingly improbable that Micah would have blunted the edge of his terrible threat in iii. 12 by following it up with so brilliant a promise as iv. 1-4, especially as not a word is said about the need of repentance. The story in Jeremiah xxvi. 17ff. raises the legitimate doubt whether Micah's prophecy, which was certainly one of threatening, iii. ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... Arab. "Jinn" spirit or energy of a man, which here corresponds with the Heb. "Aub"; so in the Hamasah the poet says, "My Jinn have not fled; my life is not blunted; my birds never drooped for fear," where, say commentators, the Arabs compare an energetic man with a Jinni or Shaytan. So the Prophet declared of Omar, "I never saw such an 'Abkari amongst men," 'Abkar, in Yamamah, like Yabrin and Wabar near Al-Yaman, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... about to round off his ultimatum with a spurt of tobacco-juice aimed at a passing cat, when he checked himself hastily at sight of a woman. What became of the tobacco-juice was a mystery or a conjuring trick, but the cat's somewhat blunted sensibilities, and the lady's—not ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... Captain ——, together with its floating pageantries of conquered flags, having awakened within me, in a form of peculiar solemnity, those patriotic remembrances of past glories, which all boys feel so much more vividly than men can do, in whom the sensibility to such impressions is blunted. Lord Howe, however, I was not destined to see; he had died about a year before. Another death there had been, and very recently, in the family, and under circumstances peculiarly startling; and the spirits ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... manufacturer ground, but not sharpened. As the student must in any case learn how to sharpen his tools, it will be just as well to get them in that way rather than ready for use. As this process of sharpening tools is a very important one, it must be reserved for another place. Should tools be seriously blunted or broken they must be reground. This can be done by the carver, either on a grindstone or a piece of gritty York stone, care being taken to repeat the original bevel; or they may be sent to a tool shop where they are in the habit ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... two years before the boy got any chance to "py" her for her kindness, and when the chance did come, he would have given his sturdy young life to avert it. By this time, much mixing with Canadians had blunted his London street-bred accent. To be sure he occasionally slipped an "h," or inserted one where it should not be, but he was fast swinging into line with the great young country he now called "home." He could eat Indian corn and maple syrup, he could skate, toboggan, and ply a paddle, ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... was so weary and sleepy that her curiosity and capacity for any other emotion was blunted. She had become simply a little, tired, sleepy animal. She let herself be undressed; she was not even moved to much self-pity when the lady discovered the cruel bruise on her delicate knee, and kissed it, and dressed it with a healing salve. She was put into a little night-gown which ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... flat in Half Moon Street, and high up in one of those tall, discreet-looking houses. The windows were wide open on this hot July afternoon, and the bourdon hum of London, where Piccadilly poured by at the street end, came in blended and blunted by distance, but with the suggestion of heat, of movement, of hurrying affairs. The room was very empty of furniture; there was a rug or two on the parquet floor, a long, low bookcase taking up the end near the door, a table, a sofa, three or four chairs, and a piano. Everything was ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... of the tomahawk and scalping knife; and in practising cruelties upon every thing that chanced to fall into his hands, which was susceptible of pain. In that way he learned to use his implements of war effectually, and at the same time blunted all those fine feelings and tender sympathies that are naturally excited, by hearing or seeing, a fellow being in distress. He could inflict the most excruciating tortures upon his enemies, and prided himself upon his fortitude, in having performed the most barbarous ceremonies and tortures, ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver
... divine passion in strong and tender natures. The calculating sensualist can never comprehend this swiftly exalted emotion, this immediate radiation of light through all life, which is like the sun breaking through clouds on a dark day. The sensualist has by self- indulgence, blunted the edge of feeling, and it is impossible for him to experience this delicate sensation of exquisite delight,— this marvellous assurance that here and now, face to face, stands the One for whom all time shall be merged into a Song of Love, and upon whom all the ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... king is no longer the warrior Thane whom we first encounter upon the 'blasted heath', and whom we afterwards see haunted by horrid visions of 'air-drawn daggers', as he turns his hand to crime. He has gotten far beyond all this. Murders to him are become but 'trifles light as air'; use has blunted his sensibility, and to bring back all that agony and horror needs a vastly stronger excitement than a mere deed of blood. We see this in the cool way he tells the murderer, 'There's blood upon thy face', as if it simply made ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... for a gift, then,' said Creighton, tossing it over. 'There is a good spirit in thee. Do not let it be blunted at St Xavier's. There are many boys there who ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... no particular joy in having your eyes hammered at by a blunted sharp instrument, like a herring-gull's beak, for instance, even if those eyes happen to be shut, as I think the skua's were, and the instrument wielded with the extreme clumsiness of the half-trained, ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... resistance, and having married, more or less improvidently, he turned his back on the visions that had haunted his youth: afterwards, the cares, great and small, that came in the train of the years, drove them ever further into the background. Want of sympathy in his home-life blunted the finer edges of his nature; of a gentle and yielding disposition, he took on the commonplace colour of his surroundings. After years of unhesitating toil, it is true, the most pressing material needs died ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... champion of the truth, as he had been taught to think himself, when bearing his first arms under his father in what was esteemed the Provencal Crusade. Alas, when honorable and devout minds have the fine edge of conscience blunted! Thus did the gallant and beloved "Sir Simon the Righteous" become a traitor ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... then what had caused the fire. It was stupid of Archie to understand her so badly—she was not blaming him for the fire. She turned her face again to the wall, but suddenly, as if a light had struck through her blurred and blunted consciousness ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... ox has pushed a man, by pushing has made known his vice, and he has not blunted his horn, has not shut up his ox, and that ox has gored a man of gentle birth and caused him to die, he shall pay ...
— The Oldest Code of Laws in the World - The code of laws promulgated by Hammurabi, King of Babylon - B.C. 2285-2242 • Hammurabi, King of Babylon
... may be said to be inseparable, and criteria of each other. Selfishness is the offspring of ignorance and mistake; it is the portion of unreflecting infancy, and savage solitude, or of those whom toil or evil occupations have blunted or rendered torpid; disinterested benevolence is the product of a cultivated imagination, and has an intimate connexion with all the arts which add ornament, or dignity, or power, or stability to the social state of man. Virtue is thus entirely a refinement of civilized life; a creation ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... holy feet devolv'd I cast me, praying him for pity's sake That he would open to me: but first fell Thrice on my bosom prostrate. Seven times The letter, that denotes the inward stain, He on my forehead with the blunted point Of his drawn sword inscrib'd. And "Look," he cried, "When enter'd, that thou ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... miscreants—fellows who hung on the skirts of the army, watching opportunities to plunder—made a dash at the camp, but the women defended it valiantly, and fairly beat them off. Of course feminine sensibility got a little blunted by a life of this kind, and it was rarely with very violent emotion that the ladies saw their husbands go into action. Persuaded of their invincibility, they looked upon success as certain, and if, unfortunately, the victory left them widows, they deemed a very short mourning necessary before ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... forget to feign surprise when the alarm of murder was raised was very natural, and so was the fact that a woman with a soul so blunted to all delicate instincts, and with a mind so intent upon perfecting the scheme entered into by the murderer of throwing the blame upon the man whose dagger had been made use of, should persist in visiting ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... they were friends; their relations changed wholly. He looked at her with all his eyes; hung upon her with all his ears. And she—she forgot that he was vulgar and a clown; such breathless pleasure, such a humble absorption in superior wisdom, would have blunted ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Milton, and with it another missile which often appears on these battle-fields—the epithets of 'blasphemer' and 'hater of the Lord.' Of course, in these days these weapons though often effective in disturbing the ease of good men and though often powerful in scaring women, are somewhat blunted. Indeed, they do not infrequently injure assailants more than assailed. So it was not in the days of Galileo. These weapons were then in all their sharpness and venom. The first champion who appears against him is Bellarmine, one of the ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... had become increasingly apparent in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education.[23-18] With that decision, the judicial branch finally lined up definitively with the executive in opposition to segregation. But the effect of this united opposition was blunted by the lack of a strong civil rights law, something that President Kennedy had not been able to wrestle from a reluctant legislative branch. The demands of the civil rights movement only underscored ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... Jerome, and other translators, is founded upon the erroneous derivation of the word from [Hebrew: qvh]. In the other passage (Prov. xxx. 17), where the LXX. translate, "the age of his mother," they have confounded the root [Hebrew: iqh] with [Hebrew: qhh], "to be blunted." ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... that the head of a family had a right to do what he liked with the members of his household. There were muttered protests from the few women and some of the older men who were present, but most of the young men, in whom a sense of chivalry had been blunted by hard lahour and penury, found a pleasure in goading the farmer on. No magistrate was at hand to put a stop to the traffic in human life, and the single policeman, realising that he had no written instructions to deal with such a case as this, had discreetly withdrawn ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman
... had found their way to the studies. The disgraceful and deadly habit of tippling had already told physically on both Eric and Wildney. The former felt painfully that he was losing his clear-headedness, and that his intellectual tastes were getting not only blunted but destroyed; and while he perceived in himself the terrible effects of his sinful indulgence, he saw them still more indisputably in the gradual coarseness which seemed to be spreading, like a grey lichen, over the countenance, the mind, and the manners of his younger companion. ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... before the North-Eastern Railway put their black lattice girder bridges across the mouth of each valley. But now that familiarity with these bridges, which are of the same pattern across every wooded ravine up the coast-line to Redcar, has blunted my impressions, I can think of the picturesqueness of East Row without remembering the railway. It was in this glen, where Lord Normanby's lovely woods make a background for the pretty tiled cottages, the mill, and the old stone bridge, which make up East Row, that ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... on, and he grew thicker and sturdier and more furry. He was never graceful, like his cousin the red vole, for his face was blunted, his eyes small, and his tail ridiculously insignificant. Nor could he cover the ground with the easy swinging jump that makes one suspect relationship between the red vole and the wood-mouse. Still for a common, vulgar, agrarian vole, he was passable enough, ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... the less divinely fair and kind. Her great love for her child had so moulded her that she seemed the very incarnation of motherhood. So might Ceres have appeared as she wandered forlornly in search of her lost Persephone, gentle, weary, her fineness a little blunted by her woes. ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... think of how I and my daughter might, in our sleep, have been attacked by these animals. It is not to be wondered at, when surrounded by myriads of obnoxious animals, how any tender feelings towards that part of creation become blunted. At the moment of which I speak, valuable books, dried plants, papers containing the data of scientific observations, concerning the survey of the river Gambia to a considerable distance, were destroyed during the illness of the ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... tapes, with the dull liver pain gnawing into his right side and his head throbbing and aching after Canteen? He thought over this for many nights, and the world became unprofitable to him. He even blunted his naturally fine appetite with beer and tobacco; and all the while the parrot talked at and made ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... a course against each other with blunted spears, since they won't grant us sharp ones, ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... was the evening, that the window remained open, until Ponto erected his crest as a footfall came steadily along, nearer and nearer. Uplifting one of his pendant lips, he gave a low growl through his blunted teeth, and listened again; but apparently satisfied that the step was familiar, he replaced his head on his crossed paws, and presently Robert Fulmort's head and the upper part of his person, in correct ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... off the steel head of the lance, and then handing to the mate the long iron rod remaining, bade him hold it upright, without its touching the deck. Then, with the maul, after repeatedly smiting the upper end of this iron rod, he placed the blunted needle endwise on the top of it, and less strongly hammered that, several times, the mate still holding the rod as before. Then going through some small strange motions with it—whether indispensable to the magnetizing of the steel, or merely intended to augment ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... a sneer of much bitterness, and pointing to the blunted and useless implements, "are the peetiful theengs on which hong the lives of our brave fallows. Nae doot the next dispotches will say a great deal aboot the eexcellent arrangements for attock; but if ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... loved, went like one in a dream. He hired a horse and a guide at the little hostelry, and rode swiftly towards the German frontier. But all was mechanical; his senses felt blunted; trees and houses and men moved by him like objects seen through a veil. His companions spoke to him twice, but he did not answer. Only once he cried out savagely, "Shall we never be ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... that on Mr. Kennedy announcing his decrees, Charley and Kate should hasten to some retired spot where they could commune in solitude; the effect of which communing was to reduce them to a somewhat calmer and rather happy state of mind. Charley's sorrow was blunted by sympathy with Kate's joy, and Kate's joy was subdued by sympathy with Charley's sorrow; so that, after the first effervescing burst, they settled down into a calm and comfortable state of flatness, with very red eyes and exceedingly pensive minds. We must, however, do Charley the justice ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... rather opposite character, the connoisseur noticing the manner of working over the surface by the old Italians as being different to that pursued now; the assistant sees nought but rough gougings and scratchings as with a notched or blunted tool, and concludes that the old makers were not as good workmen as the moderns. "Now, James," says the other, "you have been doing little else than repairing since you took up with this business, and have ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... holds a drowning fly Strong is the pine by Maine's ambrosial streams, But stronger augers pierce its thickest beams; No iron gate, no spiked and panelled door, Can keep out death, the postman, or the bore. Oh for a world where peace and silence reign, And blunted dulness verebrates in vain! —The door-bell jingles,—enter Richard Fox, And takes this letter from his ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... motion: it heaved and rolled in countless places. Rounded shapes in myriads were emerging. Plants—mushroom growths—poured up from the earth to drink in the sunshine of their brief summer. They burst the earth to show unfolding leaves or blunted, rounding heads, that grew before the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... commenced, innocently at first, with races on foot, on horseback, and in chariots; then followed a grand hunting of beasts turned loose in the arena; and next a sword dance. But after the sword dance came the arraying of swordsmen, with no blunted weapons, but with sharp spears and swords—a gladiator combat in full earnest. The people, enchanted, applauded with shouts of ecstasy this gratification of their savage tastes. Suddenly, however, there was an interruption. A rude, roughly robed man, bareheaded and barefooted, had sprung into ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was one of the first authors that taught the Dissenters to court attention by the graces of language. Whatever they had among them before, whether of learning or acuteness, was commonly obscured and blunted by coarseness and inelegance of style. He showed them that zeal and purity might be expressed and enforced by polished diction. He continued to the end of his life a teacher of a congregation, and no reader of ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... For baseness of the spirit scorns, Saint Priest, who every album's page With blunted pencil-point adorns. Another tribune of the ball Hung like a print against the wall, Pink as Palm Sunday cherubim,(84) Motionless, mute, tight-laced and trim. The traveller, bird of passage he, Stiff, overstarched and insolent, Awakens secret ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... related that Col. Tarlton once asked a lady in Charleston, the name of the Camomile blossom. "It is called," answered the noble woman, "the Rebel flower, because it flourishes best when most trampled on." The influence of woman prevailed, the sword seemed sharpened, instead of blunted by the blows it had taken, and the spirit of '76 again animated the soldiery. The arrival of Lafayette about this period, was most welcome: he brought encouraging news, and instilled into the colonists hopes which ...
— A sketch of the life and services of Otho Holland Williams • Osmond Tiffany
... when he said, "Except I see in His hand the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into His side, I will not believe"; and in so far as the world-spirit is permitted to hold sway within us, our powers of spiritual perception will be blunted, and become infected with the tendency to make our intellect or imagination our sole means of apprehending ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... of the old chap," laughed a sottish-looking man, whose age ought to have inspired him with some respect for the relation between father and son, and doubtless would, had not a long course of drinking and familiarity with debasing associates blunted his ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... as a right, have, even within my memory, blunted this open-heartedness, but none the less today, if you belong to the Inner Circle and are neither a Bear nor a Black Sheep, all houses are open to you, and our small world is very, very ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... way in which he mentioned each trifle concerning her. Little circumstances connected with her daily life were described as one would describe the traits of some rare animal. His career of degradation seemed to have blunted every idea of responsibility. He looked upon her as a superior being, and her adornment as a sacred duty. The richness of her toilet, the magnificence of her equipage, the glory of her beauty, became an inexhaustible ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... the other hand, grovels in the dust and never rises to higher thoughts or nobler aims. Men could, if they would, distinguish the worthy from the unworthy, just as with a healthy palate they can tell good food from bad. But men's moral discernment has been blunted by a life of sensuality and sin, just as the physical palate loses its power of tasting when in ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... was divided, when a great sea came and the vessel trembled from her keel to her truck, and all hands had to hold on for life. Down again came the axe, as the sea went by. But its edge was blunted and it cut slowly, as the wielder doubled his efforts in reply to the shouts, 'Cut the hawser, or ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... of his being thus employed were conveyed to the camp, when the Mungas, stout and fierce warriors, who never shrunk from an enemy, yielded to the power of superstition, and felt all their strength withered. It seemed to them that their arrows were blunted, their quivers broken, their hearts struck with sickness and fear, in short, that to oppose a sheik of the Koran, who could accomplish such wonders, was alike vain and impious. They came in by hundreds, bowing themselves to the ground, ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... little savings bank for the benefit of our employees which pays 3 per cent., yet I believe we have you not among our depositors." There was the slightest possible burr to his speech as though it were blunted by ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... feeling, which wears away after a time; but at last, your own sense of indignation becomes blunted, and becoming indifferent to it, you forget also that you wound the feelings of others, and carry the habit with you, to the great injury and disgrace of the service. But it's time to dress for dinner, so you'd better make yourself scarce, Peter, while I tidivate myself ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... supper, at the close of the day was a brief function, but brutal as it was brief. It was something of a shock, the first night we were in camp, but at the close of my first day's work I found myself on a level with the grossest. The finer instincts were blunted or gone and I was in the clutch of a hunger like that of the jungle, where might and cunning rule. At a signal from the cook, we rushed in, crushed by main force into a seat, seized whatever was nearest and began. Scarcely a word was spoken—heads down, hands and jaws at top ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... instinctively knelt while the child poured forth her humble adoration, and she prayed most earnestly, that the deep feeling of reverence she had just witnessed in her adopted one, might never be displaced or blunted by contact with an ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... affected by what passed before him, however dreadful, however sudden, however afflicting. Habitual danger, with unbounded confidence in his own strength and sagacity, had rendered him indifferent to fear, and the lawless and precarious life he led had blunted, though its dangers and errors had not destroyed, his feelings for others. And it was to be remembered that I had very lately seen the followers of this man commit a cruel slaughter on an ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... longer than any furnished by mere barbarians. According to Pliny, the touch of a menstruous woman turned wine to vinegar, blighted crops, killed seedlings, blasted gardens, brought down the fruit from trees, dimmed mirrors, blunted razors, rusted iron and brass (especially at the waning of the moon), killed bees, or at least drove them from their hives, caused mares to miscarry, and so forth.[244] Similarly, in various parts of Europe, ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... described was visible in his horror-stricken countenance. He had been formerly a man of a sordid worldly disposition and hard unyielding temper, on whom the mild Christian persuasions of Dr. Beaumont had occasionally made good impressions, though these were as often blunted by the power of long indulged habits. But when such a man was roused from his stupor by the cauteries of Calvinism, despair was more likely to take possession of his mind than the pious energy and humble hopes which follow true repentance. Priggins indeed boasted of Humphreys as a ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... know the name refers to you, not some one else, shows that that blunted memory of yours has begun to function in some degree. Now think. What do ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... "come, Sam, speak the truth now." Well, Squire, I only brag when I have a right to boast, though you do say I am always brim full of it, and I won't go for to deceive you or myself either, I know I couldn't, that's a fact. I have mixed too much with the world, my feelings have got blunted, and my heart ain't no longer as soft as it used to did to be. I can give, and give liberally, because I am able, but I give what I don't want and what I don't miss; but to give as this poor woman did all she had of these two indispensable articles, tea ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... Mr. Griffin's proposal that I should edit such a Cyclopaedia, I had it in my mind that I might make the scissors eminently effective. Alas! on narrowly examining our best Cyclopaedias, I found that the scissors had become blunted through too frequent and vigorous use. One great exception exists: viz., the Penny Cyclopaedia of Charles Knight.[470] The cheapest and the least pretending, it is really the most philosophical of our scientific dictionaries. It is not made up of a series of treatises, some good and ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... nodules there is a nucleus of whiter iron-earth surrounded by many concentric strata of darker and lighter iron-earth alternately. In one, which now lies before me, the nucleus is a prism of a triangular form with blunted angles, and about half an inch high, and an inch and half broad; on every side of this are concentric strata of similar iron-earth alternately browner and less brown; each stratum is about a tenth of an inch in thickness and there are ten of them ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... loved him best—fears for his eternal salvation, dread of the Divine wrath upon him. Of course, in these days these weapons, though often effective in vexing good men and in scaring good women, are somewhat blunted; indeed, they not infrequently injure the assailants more than the assailed. So it was not in the days of Galileo; they were then in all ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... knowledge of the under side of life—yes, but her father had a greater knowledge still. He had used his greater knowledge. Craftily and with a most ingenious subtlety he had destroyed her power, he had blunted her weapons. Hine was attracted by Sylvia, fascinated by her charm, her looks, and the gentle simplicity of her manner. Very well. On the other side Garratt Skinner had held out a lure of greater attractions, greater fascination; and ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... thronged with joyful faces; but the appearance of a stranger blunted many a gibe which had been prepared on Hobbie's lack of success in the deer-stalking. There was a little bustle among three handsome young women, each endeavouring to devolve upon another the task of ushering the stranger into the apartment, ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... landscape, the thousand phenomena, instruments and beauties connected with them. I should suffer a great diminution of the wonder and delight in attaining knowledge; also—more dreadful loss—my emotions would be blunted, so that I could not ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... well-shaped head, and the clipped beard glinted vividly when he passed across a narrow strip of sunlight, as if every hair in it had been a wavy and attenuated gold wire. His mouth was lost in the heavy moustache; his nose was straight, short, slightly blunted at the end; a broad band of deeper red stretched under the eyes, clung to the cheek bones. The eyes gave the face its remarkable expression. The eyebrows, darker than the hair, pencilled a straight line below the wide and unwrinkled brow much whiter ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... even if the worst penalties are escaped, indulgence brings at least satiety, the "heart high cloyed," a blunted capacity for enjoyment, ennui, restlessness, and depression of spirit. Keen as its zest may be at the outset, it is short-lived at best; and with the ensuing emotional fatigue, pleasures pall, life seems empty, robbed ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... yet look at him, he is the picture of health. Scoundrels are very often acquitted nowadays in Russia on grounds of abnormality and aberration, yet these acquittals, these unmistakable proofs of an indulgent attitude to crime, lead to no good. They demoralize the masses, the sense of justice is blunted in all as they become accustomed to seeing vice unpunished, and you know in our age one may boldly say in the words of Shakespeare that in our evil and corrupt age virtue ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... by my side, and even the prison was mingling with other memories as I drifted from earth and all its thorns and tears. All was blunted but the Christian's faith and trust ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... morning of Easter Eve we sallied up-stream again, snow falling and driving heavily, and the wind still strong but with yesterday's keen edge blunted. By the time we had beaten around the long bend up which we had fought our way the day before, the snow had ceased, and by noon the wind had dropped and the sun was shining, and in a few moments of his unobscured strength ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... "whatever debility of the constitution exists, it is to be cured by the usual medicinal means which are employed to restore weakened organs. But the great difficulty in these attempts to cure inebriety is in satisfying the mind, and in whetting the blunted resolutions of the patient; and this is, doubtless, more easily accomplished by a gradual ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 575 - 10 Nov 1832 • Various
... habituated and naturally vigorous, returns from his exercise draggled, faint, and exhausted, to begin the digestive labors of the day, and take his food with hunger rather than appetite. Abstinence has blunted the nicer perceptions of taste, and the jaded organs lose the power not only of discriminating flavors, but of knowing when to cry, "Enough!" "Brushing away the morning dew," like "love in a cottage," is very pretty in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... Paoli, and of Baylor on the Hudson,—the scenes of Germantown and Monmouth,—the reduction of the forts at Verplanck's Ferry, and the forays led against New Bedford and the Vineyard,—all these familiarized him with the bloody fruits of civil strife. But they never blunted for one moment the keenness of his humanity, or warped those sentiments of refinement and liberality that always distinguished him. Within the limited range of his narrow sphere, he was constantly found the friend and reliever of the wounded ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... we not a right to say in his defence, that the true lover of knowledge is always striving after being—that is his nature; he will not rest in the multiplicity of individuals which is an appearance only, but will go on—the keen edge will not be blunted, nor the force of his desire abate until he have attained the knowledge of the true nature of every essence by a sympathetic and kindred power in the soul, and by that power drawing near and mingling and becoming ...
— The Republic • Plato
... not without a pang that any one can be told that she who is of all the dearest has some other one who to her is the dearest. Such pain fathers and mothers have to bear; and though, I think, the arrow is never so blunted but that it leaves something of a wound behind, there is in most cases, if not a perfect salve, still an ample consolation. The mother knows that it is good that her child should love some man better than ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... police force appeared to prevent the possibility of accident or robbery. All gambling booths and thimble riggers had, of course, been necessarily excluded, but we fear it was not possible to shut out all those persons whose recollection of the laws of meum and tuum was somewhat blunted. We heard of numerous losses of small sums, and of handkerchiefs and other trifles, but, throughout the day, we gained no information of any robbery which was of sufficient extent to produce more than a temporary inconvenience to ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... entered the room she knew what awaited her; a merciful intuition had blunted the shock to her senses. Yet when she saw the Ry on his throne of death a moan broke from her lips like that of one who sees for the last time someone indelibly dear, and turns to face strange paths with uncertain ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of his wonderful career being morally blunted, but his own belief in the sanctity of the verbal arrangement was sound to the core, and he hazarded the opprobrium of our stern conventional system. To him, Lady Hamilton had an enduring charm which influenced ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... The contrast between the plain dealing of the North and the refined Machiavellism of the South, between Protestant earnestness in religion and Popish scepticism, between the homely virtues of England and the courtly libertinism of Venice or Florence, blunted the moral sense, while it stimulated the intellectual activity of the English travellers, and too often communicated a fatal shock to their principles. Inglese Italianato e un diavolo incarnato ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... powerfully attracted him.[2] To derive delight from what inflicts pain on any sentient creature revolted his conscience and offended his reason, because he perceived that the character which does not shrink from associating its own joy with the anguish of another, is either found or left mortally blunted to the finest impressions ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... during the secession war the cases of mark' d suffering or agony in extremis were very rare. (It is a curious suggestion of immortality that the mental and emotional powers remain to their clearest through all, while the senses of pain and flesh volition are blunted or even gone.) ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... daughters, kept her in occupation, and her days were passed in one perpetual, unceasing current of dissatisfaction and ill-temper with all around, that formed a heavy counterpoise to the fascinations of the young ladies. The repeated jiltings to which they had been subject had blunted any delicacy upon the score of their marriage; and if the newly-introduced cornet or ensign was not coming forward, as became him, at the end of the requisite number of days, he was sure of receiving a very palpable ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... the labours of spring and of autumn. In fact, it is "the backwoods," the listlessness of the backwoods, which, like the opposite extreme, the fatuity and blase life of a great metropolis, causes men to rush into insane extremes to avoid reflection. The mind is dulled and blunted. ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... this morning of his son. The tenacious old merchant was wondering whether he had done right in accepting the young man's sacrifice. In his disgust for the do-nothing, parasitic offspring about him, perhaps he had taken a delicate instrument and blunted it by setting it at coarse work. Well, it was not too ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... same, he was gone out of her life, and through the strain and the unconscious progress to other planes and phases of being, wrought by sickness and convalescence, her own passion for him even was now a changed and blunted thing. ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... her he loved, went like one in a dream. He hired a horse and a guide at the little hostelry, and rode swiftly towards the German frontier. But all was mechanical; his senses felt blunted; trees and houses and men moved by him like objects seen through a veil. His companions spoke to him twice, but he did not answer. Only once he cried out savagely, "Shall we never be out of ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... Sandy Grahame could spare time from his multifarious work, Archie practised with him, with sword and pike. At first he had but a wooden sword. Then, as his limbs grew stronger, he practised with a blunted sword; and now at the age of fifteen Sandy Grahame had as much as he could do to hold ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... souls! He hath bewitched our souls! Our spears were blunted by his magic! Our swords were turned by the wall of his soul! He ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... moon being red near midnight, with blunted corners or horns, portends mild weather that month. If the corners are white and sharp, there will be frosty ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various
... no longer the warrior Thane whom we first encounter upon the 'blasted heath', and whom we afterwards see haunted by horrid visions of 'air-drawn daggers', as he turns his hand to crime. He has gotten far beyond all this. Murders to him are become but 'trifles light as air'; use has blunted his sensibility, and to bring back all that agony and horror needs a vastly stronger excitement than a mere deed of blood. We see this in the cool way he tells the murderer, 'There's blood upon thy face', ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... self-preservation and co-operation, in order to make it of effective service. Here lies the heart of our difficulty. War is the most intensely derationalizing process, and the long steeping of European civilization in the boiling cauldron will have twisted and blunted the very instruments of thought. As Professor Murray points out in a powerful essay, war rapidly undoes the slow secular process by which liberty and capacity for individual thought have grown up, and plunges the personal judgement into the common trough of the herd-mind. It ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... another missile which often appears on these battle-fields—the epithets of 'blasphemer' and 'hater of the Lord.' Of course, in these days these weapons though often effective in disturbing the ease of good men and though often powerful in scaring women, are somewhat blunted. Indeed, they do not infrequently injure assailants more than assailed. So it was not in the days of Galileo. These weapons were then in all their sharpness and venom. The first champion who appears against him is Bellarmine, one of the greatest of theologians and one ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... love to little Winny and to marry her, if (and that was not by any means so certain) she would have him—no idea could well have agitated Ranny more. It blunted the fine razorlike edge of his appetite for Sunday supper. It obscured his interest in The Pink 'Un, which he had unearthed from under the sofa cushion in the back parlor, whither he had withdrawn himself to think of it. And thinking ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... sulphur whitening to ivory; and the recesses of the portals and the hollows behind the statues are lined with a black denser and more velvety than any effect of shadow to be obtained by sculptured relief. The interweaving of colour over the whole blunted bruised surface recalls the metallic tints, the peacock-and-pigeon iridescences, the incredible mingling of red, blue, umber and yellow of the rocks along the Gulf of AEgina. And the wonder of the ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... patience proved of no avail in this instance. The wreck was too complete to admit of repair. The poor creature occasionally struggled hard to do better; but her constitution was destroyed by vice and hardship; her feelings were blunted by suffering, and her naturally bright faculties were stupified by opium. After she left the Asylum, she lived with a family in the country for awhile; but the old habits returned, and destroyed what little strength she had left. The last I knew of her she was on Blackwell's Island; and she ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... Gordon not the slightest opening; and he continued uncomfortably on his way. There was a quality about that thick, black-clad figure which cast a shadow over the cloudless day, it blunted the anticipated pleasure of his meeting with Meta Beggs. There was about Merlier a smell of death like the smell of ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... unarmored body. The force of the contact tore the spear from his hand; but almost before it could drop, he had recovered it. And in that flashing instant Denny had darted in at the side of the thing and half disembowelled it with a thrust of the acid-blunted point of his three-foot bar, and a lightninglike wrench up and to ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... was never distinguished for ready perception of a joke. He regards those small, simultaneous replicas of himself with unqualified complacency, which shows his appreciation of comedy must be a bit blunted." ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... wear no robes, no stars, garters, collars, etc.; and it would, therefore, be in good taste in our women to cultivate simple styles of dress. Now I object to the present fashions, as adopted from France, that they are flashy and theatrical. Having their origin with a community whose senses are blunted, drugged, and deadened with dissipation and ostentation, they reject the simpler forms of beauty, and seek for startling effects, for odd and unexpected results. The contemplation of one of our fashionable churches, ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... and activity of Dick showed him that he was able to play the part of a man. He said little, but watched the boy closely, made him go through trials of strength with some of his troopers, and saw him practise with blunted swords with others. Dick did well in both trials, and the Rajah then requested Anwar, who was celebrated for his skill with the tulwar, to give him, daily, half-an-hour's sword play, after his riding lesson. He himself undertook to teach him to ...
— The Tiger of Mysore - A Story of the War with Tippoo Saib • G. A. Henty
... reasoning and subtlety. It was difficult to resist his corrupting influence. And as for Mme. Cantinet—a lean, sallow woman, with large teeth and thin lips—her intelligence, as so often happens with women of the people, had been blunted by a hard life, till she had come to look upon the slenderest daily wage as prosperity. She soon consented to take Mme. Sauvage with her as ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... so long. It would give him some time before returning to the house. When once he was in the street he walked fast. He had no consecutive ideas, but a sort of heavy, ceaseless throbbing in his head like the throb of neuralgia. His sensations were blunted, as though he were in a stupor. He saw nothing but the legs of people walking and the wheels of the carriages turning round. His head felt heavy and at the same time empty. As he saw other people ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... ought to know everything, Sancho," said Don Quixote; "for there were knights-errant in former times as well qualified to deliver a sermon or discourse in the middle of an encampment, as if they had graduated in the University of Paris; whereby we may see that the lance has never blunted the pen, nor the ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... were, for the most part, as completely out of my reach, as a crown and sceptre. There was, indeed, a resource; but the utmost caution and secrecy were necessary in applying to it. I beat out pieces of leather as smooth as possible, and wrought my problems on them with a blunted awl; for the rest my memory was tenacious, and I could multiply and divide by it to ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... large part in the restoration of white control, but it could not have been effective without some connivance from the North. Before 1872 the keenness of Northern radicalism was blunted. Thoughtful Republicans began to examine their work and criticize it. "We can never reconstruct the South," wrote Lowell, "except through its own leading men, nor ever hope to have them on our side till we make it for their interest and compatible with ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... persuasiveness even astonished us. We fancied we were standing before a rhetorical sophist, who for jest and practice knew how to give a fair appearance to the strangest things. Unfortunately this first impression became blunted but too soon; for at the end of every discourse, manage the thing as I would, the man came back again to the same theme. He was not to be held fast to older events, although they interested him,—although he had them present to his mind with their ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... whimsically rapid, compared with the gravity of his employ, that an observer would be tempted to quote again from the same scene, 'Ha! Old Truepenny, canst thou mole so fast i' the ground?' Here, however, the comparison ceased; for, when Sir Elijah made his visit to Lucknow 'to whet the almost blunted purpose' of the Nabob, his language was wholly different from that of the poet—for it would have been totally against his purpose ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... others speak, as she imagined everybody else would speak. Hers are not faults of temper. She would not voluntarily give unnecessary pain to any one, and though I may deceive myself, I cannot but think that for me, for my feelings, she would—Hers are faults of principle, Fanny; of blunted delicacy and a corrupted, vitiated mind. Perhaps it is best for me, since it leaves me so little to regret. Not so, however. Gladly would I submit to all the increased pain of losing her, rather than have to think of her as I ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... another battle—not a battle of flashing swords and clashing steel—but a moral warfare, a battle against ignorance, poverty, and low social condition. In physical warfare the keenest swords may be blunted and the loudest batteries hushed; but in the great conflict of moral and spiritual progress your weapons shall be brighter for their service and better for their use. In fighting truly and nobly for others you win ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... the hedge of foemen his blunted sword he threw, And, laid like the oars of a longship the level war-shafts pressed On 'gainst the unshielded elder, and clashed amidst his breast, And dead he fell, thrust backward, and rang on the dead men's gear: But still for a certain season durst no man draw anear. For ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... are, of animated beings," he exclaimed: "Gods, entirely differing from men in the infinite distance of their abode, since one part of them only is seen by our blunted vision—those mysterious stars!—in the eternity of their existence, in the perfection of their nature, infected by no contact with ourselves: and men, dwelling on the earth, with frivolous and anxious minds, with infirm and mortal members, with variable fortunes; labouring in vain; ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... Stephens, and Nathaniel represented Gloucestershire in Parliament at the time of the conviction of Charles I.: it is related that he was only persuaded to agree to the condemnation by the impetuous Ireton, who came there and sat up all night in urgent argument "to whet his almost blunted purpose." Stephens died in May, 1649, expressing regret for having participated in the execution of his sovereign. We are further told in the traditions of the house that when all the relatives were assembled for the funeral, and the courtyard was crowded with ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... course of these little events, or what objects and circumstances, in appearance the least important, lead to changes in fortune, there is not, to my mind, a deeper cause and opportunity for thought. For something in our ordinary actions resembles the little blunted arrows we shoot at targets; little by little we make of our successive deeds an abstract and regular entity that we call our prudence or our will. Then comes a gust of wind, and lo! the smallest of these arrows, the very lightest and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... that he had been witless indeed. The thought of raising the bid of five hundred gold to a thousand or more had bemused him, blunted ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... England and for her gallant Allies the point of the cartoon has been blunted, if not entirely destroyed, by subsequent events. But the lesson? It is not far to seek. Is it not that had "business as usual" not been so gladly adopted as the national creed in the early days of war, we might have been ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... every incident. There was something really touching in the abject way in which he mentioned each trifle concerning her. Little circumstances connected with her daily life were described as one would describe the traits of some rare animal. His career of degradation seemed to have blunted every idea of responsibility. He looked upon her as a superior being, and her adornment as a sacred duty. The richness of her toilet, the magnificence of her equipage, the glory of her beauty, became an inexhaustible surprise and delight. The ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... frown sublime, Mocking the blunted scythe of Time, Whence I would watch its lustre pale 100 Steal from the moon o'er yonder vale Thou rock, whose bosom black and vast, Bared to the stream's unceasing flow, Ever its giant shade doth cast On the tumultuous ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... last hour come, so they bore the body of the king within the wall. There they occupied a little mound in a sea of enemies, and there each man fought till he died, stabbing with his dagger when his sword was broken, and biting, and striking with the fist, when the dagger-point was blunted. Among them all, none made a better end than Eurytus. He was suffering from a disease of the eyes, but he bade them arm him, and lead him into the thick of the battle. Of another, Dieneces, it is told that hearing the arrows of the Persians ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... theologians with infinite stores of time and torture to draw upon, failed to wean men from sins which gave them a passing gratification, even when faith was incomparably stronger than it is now, or is likely to be again. One reason, doubtless, is that the conscience is as much blunted by the doctrines of repentance and absolution as it is stimulated by the threats of hell-fire. But is it not contrary to all common-sense to expect that the motive will retain any vital strength when the very people who rely upon it admit that it rests on the most shadowy ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... uplifts of trap and granite, over a comparatively level desert of sand and snowy alkali. The terrors of this journey, as performed by horse-carriage, have been fully depicted in our last April number. We may laugh at them now. The question which principally interests us, after we have blunted the first edge of our wonder at the sublime sterility of the Desert, is what conceivable use this waste can be made to subserve. Before the railroad, that question had but a single answer,—the inculcation of contentment, by contrast with the most disagreeable surroundings ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... I. The reason is, 'tis much easier to face a blunted lance, than one with a spear-head; and a man may practise the one and thrive in it, but not the other; for the best lance in the tournament is not always the best ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... thoroughly out of danger, Ned was resting again in his own berth, and Jack was dining with the rest in the cabin as if nothing whatever had occurred; the yacht many miles now from the island, which stood in the evening light like a blunted cone of perfect regularity resting upon the ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... this Cockney imagined that his condition showed no improvement on that of the savage warrior of two thousand years ago, except in that civilisation had developed finer weapons to kill with and be killed by. The finer instincts had been blunted by the naked and unashamed horrors of war. But the lessons taught him before war scourged the world came back to him on getting his first view of the Holy City. He felt that sense of emotion which makes one wish to be alone and think alone. He was on the ground where Sacred History ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... careful, Amy,' returned her sister. 'If you do such things by accident, you should be more careful. If I happened to have been born in a peculiar place, and under peculiar circumstances that blunted my knowledge of propriety, I fancy I should think myself bound to consider at every step, "Am I going, ignorantly, to compromise any near and dear relations?" That is what I fancy I should do, ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... dim, shallow, and ineffective feeling after the great truth, that the only normal state of society is that in which neither the love of virtue has been thrust far back into a secondary place by the love of knowledge, nor the active curiosity of the understanding dulled, blunted, and made ashamed by soft, lazy ideals of life as a life only of the affections. Rousseau now and always fell into the opposite extreme from that against which his whole work was a protest. We need not complain very loudly that while remonstrating against the restless intrepidity of ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... lovely in their silvery faint tints that they resemble gigantic roses, it is absolutely wicked to suffer those odious red ones to pervert one's taste; that a person who sees nothing but those every time he looks out of his window very quickly has his nice perception for true beauty blunted; that such a person would do well to visit my garden every day during the month of May, and so get himself cured by the sight of my peony bushes covered with huge scented white and blush flowers; and that he would, I was convinced, at the end of the cure, go home and pitch ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... further into the interior, and heavy burdens were daily bound on their shoulders, and the lash was frequently applied to urge them on, the keen sense of insult which had at first stirred them into wild anger became blunted, and at last they reached that condition of partial apathy which renders men almost indifferent to everything save rest and food. Even the submissive Stevenson was growing callous. In short, that process had begun which usually ends in making men ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... never do for me, I'd rather learn the rule of three— "And since I find it is the plan, To make me an automaton, I'll case my heart in triple mail, And fence it so completely round, That all this vaunted skill shall fail, Those blunted arrows back rebound; For know, usurper! from this hour, I scorn thy laws, abjure thy power! From this dear moment I despise The whole artillery of eyes; Reason alone shall be my guide, And Reason's voice shall win my bride. Some bonny ...
— Vignettes in Verse • Matilda Betham
... the influence of division of labor. While this takes away the last incentive to thought on the part of the workman, degrading him to a cunning but expensive machine, religion gives to him a new spring of thought, vivifies his blunted mind by the power of transformed affections, and makes him again ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... just alluded to, were the six muskets preserved in the Ti, and three or four similar implements of warfare hung up in other houses; some small canvas bags, partly filled with bullets and powder, and half a dozen old hatchet-heads, with the edges blunted and battered to such a degree as to render them utterly useless. These last seemed to be regarded as nearly worthless by the natives; and several times they held up, one of them before me, and throwing it aside with a gesture of disgust, manifested their contempt for anything that ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... never had he met a foe like this. The monster was so large and so scaly that he could not get round her, while his sword glanced, blunted, from off her skin. Blow after blow he struck, but they only served to increase her fury, till, gathering all her strength together, she wound her great tail about his body, pressing him ...
— The Red Romance Book • Various
... tobacco and snuff. We have been subjected to the annoyance of being stripped naked, a dozen men together, when a process of 'searching' takes place that is debasing to any human being, but perfectly revolting to men whose sensibilities have never been blunted by familiarity with crime—an ordeal of examination, and the coarse audacity with which it is perpetrated, as would make manhood blush, and which it would assuredly resent, as an outrage upon common decency, in any other place than a prison. And again, when the visiting justice ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... point, the emblem of peace and mercy. But in this he seems to have been partially mistaken. Henry was not created Prince of Wales till after his father's coronation, and he bore in right of the Duchy of Lancaster, and by command of the King, the blunted sword called Curtana, which belonged ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... is a new incident, Mr. Morton, that dead men should rise and push us from our stools. I must see that my blackguards grind their swords sharper; they used not to do their work so slovenly.—But we have had a busy day; they are tired, and their blades blunted with their bloody work; and I suppose you, Mr Morton, as well as I, are well disposed for ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... females who would kill a fowl or a lamb rather than go without it; but they are exceedingly rare. And who would not regard female character as tarnished by a familiarity with such scenes as those to which I have referred? But if the keen edge of female delicacy and sensibility would be blunted by scenes of bloodshed, are not the moral sensibilities of our own sex affected in a similar way? And must it not, then, have a ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... feet devolv'd I cast me, praying him for pity's sake That he would open to me: but first fell Thrice on my bosom prostrate. Seven times The letter, that denotes the inward stain, He on my forehead with the blunted point Of his drawn sword inscrib'd. And "Look," he cried, "When enter'd, that thou wash these ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... "One night my blunted steel struck on wood. I whetted the fragment of my blade and cut a hole; I crept on my belly like a serpent; I worked naked and mole-fashion, my hands in front of me, using the stone itself to gain a purchase. I was to appear ...
— Facino Cane • Honore de Balzac
... Anxley looked his ascetic character. He had a hard pragmatic countenance, and one of those noses which though large and bony come suddenly short and blunted. His eyes, small, gray, and inscrutable, seemed unfriendly, so baffling, introspective, unnoting was their inattentiveness. His hair was of a sort of carrot tint, which color was reproduced in paler guise in his fringed buckskin shirt and leggings, worn on a sturdy and powerful frame. His mouth ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... with growing earnestness. It was not reassuring to consider the possibility of his boy growing up with blunted ideals, with feeble convictions and a faint sense of the eternal difference between sharp cut right and wrong. The most sorrowful experience in Paul Douglas's life might be coming to him at this time if he should find ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... listening. He had even lost the sense of being watched in a sort of heavy tranquillity. His uneasiness, his exasperation, his scorn were blunted at last by all these trying hours. It seemed to him that now they were blunted for ever. "I am a match for them all," he thought, with a conviction too firm to be exulting. The woman revolutionist had ceased speaking; he was not looking at her; there was no one passing ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... hoped to rejoice the hearts of his wife and child, were utterly neglected. He let Isquay do what she pleased with them. The only thing that seemed to comfort him was the tobacco, for that, he found, when smoked to excess, blunted the edge of ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... the room she knew what awaited her; a merciful intuition had blunted the shock to her senses. Yet when she saw the Ry on his throne of death a moan broke from her lips like that of one who sees for the last time someone indelibly dear, and turns to face strange paths with uncertain feet. She did not go to the giant figure ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... married, more or less improvidently, he turned his back on the visions that had haunted his youth: afterwards, the cares, great and small, that came in the train of the years, drove them ever further into the background. Want of sympathy in his home-life blunted the finer edges of his nature; of a gentle and yielding disposition, he took on the commonplace colour of his surroundings. After years of unhesitating toil, it is true, the most pressing material needs ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... to obtain, Love secretly took up his bow again, As one who acts the cunning coward's part; My courage had retired within my heart, There to defend the pass bright eyes might gain; When his dread archery was pour'd amain Where blunted erst had fallen every dart. Scared at the sudden brisk attack, I found Nor time, nor vigour to repel the foe With weapons suited to the direful need; No kind protection of rough rising ground, Where from defeat ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... will now answer your sarcasm. There is some excuse for ignorant seamen before the mast, who enter on board of privateers: they are indifferent to blood and carnage, and their feelings are blunted—there is some excuse even for decayed gentlemen like me, Mr. Trevannion (for I am a gentleman born), who, to obtain a maintenance without labour, risk their lives and shed their blood; but there is no ...
— The Privateer's-Man - One hundred Years Ago • Frederick Marryat
... here to the last struggle. As science progresses, it prolongs the agony which is the most dreadful moment and the sharpest peak of human pain and horror, for the witnesses, at least; for, often, the sensibility of him who, in Bossuet's phrase, is "at bay with death," is already greatly blunted and perceives no more than the distant murmur of the sufferings which he seems to be enduring. All the doctors consider it their first duty to protract as long as possible even the most excruciating ...
— Death • Maurice Maeterlinck
... the Indians increased when they found that the door was closed. They attacked it with their tomahawks; but their weapons were blunted against the hard oak, clamped with iron as it was. By Tim's advice we still reserved our fire, as our stock of ammunition was small, and we might require it for ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston
... those things, while scenes that I have admired in my maturer years have been obliterated from my memory! Ah! the child's mind, like soft wax, is easily molded to sensations and impressions that never fade, while man's mind, blunted by the keenness of life's deceptions, can no longer receive and retain the imprints ...
— Acadian Reminiscences - The True Story of Evangeline • Felix Voorhies
... year before she could walk unsupported, and two years before she could sit up all day. It was now observed that her sense of smell was almost entirely destroyed; and, consequently, that her taste was much blunted. ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... clear pieces of soft wood, that his knife might not be blunted in cutting them; the Ryls kept him supplied with paints of all colors and brushes fashioned from the tips of timothy grasses; the Fairies discovered that the workman needed saws and chisels and hammers and nails, as well as knives, and brought him a goodly ...
— The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus • L. Frank Baum
... philosophical theories. Newman, who sometimes agreed with Doellinger in the letter, but seldom in the spirit, and who distrusted him as a man in whom the divine lived at the mercy of the scholar, and whose burden of superfluous learning blunted the point and the edge of his mind, so much liked what he heard of this book that, being unable to read it, he had it translated ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... of some who were once civil, smiling, wholesome men, whether the mischance of life-taking has fallen to them in their duty to society or in outlawed deeds. It plunges some into dark taciturnity and brooding coldness, as if they had eaten of some root which blunted them to all common ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... to be satisfied. Not only does this leave the majority no time for education, for learning, for contemplation; but by virtue of the hard and fast antagonism between muscles and mind, the intelligence is blunted by so much exhausting bodily labor, and becomes heavy, clumsy, awkward, and consequently incapable of grasping any other than quite simple situations. At least nine-tenths of the human race falls under this category. But still the ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Court Martial, and sentenced to be shot. But the Emperor, out of consideration for Kasghine's family, commuted the sentence to one of hard labour for life in the mines of Kara,—a cruel kindness. After eight years in the mines, with blunted faculties, broken health, disfigured by the loss of an eye, and already no doubt in some measure demoralised by the hardships he had suffered, he was pardoned,—another cruel kindness. He was pardoned on condition that he would ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... lethal weapons, are not afraid to bite into clay and gravel. They knead the excavated rubbish into pellets, take up the mass of earth and carry it outside. The rest follows naturally; it is the fangs that dig, delve and extract. How finely-tempered they must be, not to be blunted by this well-sinker's work and to do duty presently in the surgical operation ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... his tulwar, examined the edge to see that nothing had blunted its razor-like keenness, and then took his stand at the foot of the bed. Twice he raised his weapon; and then let it fall, with a drawing motion. The keen blade cut through the rug, as if it had been pasteboard; and, at the ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty
... nor stimulus for one half of his faculties, and, from want of education or society, has no external resources, his mental powers, for want of exercise to keep up due vitality in their cerebral organs, become blunted, and his perceptions slow and dull. Unusual subjects of thought become to him disagreeable and painful. The intellect and feelings not being provided with interests external to themselves, must either ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... Smith, and yet the glory of the case has rested with Mr. Webster and always will. He gained by his frank honesty and did not lose a whit. But in his latter days, when his sense of justice had grown somewhat blunted and his nature was perverted by the unmeasured adulation of the little immediate circle which then hung about him, he ceased to admit his obligations as in his earlier and better years. From no one did Mr. ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... he stretched out his square, sunburned hand, with its misshapen nails, he laughed aloud at the absurdity of those blunted hopes. To-day he stood six feet three inches from the ground, with muscles hard as steel and a chest that rang sound as a bell, yet how much nearer his purpose had he been as a little child! He remembered the day that he had hidden in the bushes with his squirrel gun ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... their young energy; nor had a single pleasure palled upon their appetite. Born, as it were, at the moment when desires and faculties are evenly balanced, when the perceptions are not blunted, nor the senses cloyed, opening their eyes for the first time on a world of wonder, these men of the Renaissance enjoyed what we may term the first transcendent springtide of the modern world. Nothing is more remarkable than ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... exercise the talents with which he was so liberally endowed for his own support and the benefit of mankind; had he some profession which compelled him to mingle in the world, till the too exquisite edge of his sensibilities were blunted by contact with firmer, rougher natures, what a blessing it would have been! With what pride would I have seen him go forth to his daily duties, sure that he was imparting and receiving good. With what rapture would I have ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... him, however dreadful, however sudden, however afflicting. Habitual danger, with unbounded confidence in his own strength and sagacity, had rendered him indifferent to fear, and the lawless and precarious life he led had blunted, though its dangers and errors had not destroyed, his feelings for others. And it was to be remembered that I had very lately seen the followers of this man commit a cruel slaughter on an unarmed ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... jumping, wheeling in retreat, throwing the horse. Orchan was a fumbler.... We took to bows next, twelve arrows each. At full speed he put two bolts in the target, and I twelve, all in the white ring.... Then spear against cimeter. I offered him choice, and he took the spear. In the first career, the blunted head of his weapon fell to the ground shorn off close behind the ferrule. The spectators cheered and laughed, and growing angry, Orchan shouted it was an accident, and challenged me to combat. I accepted, but His Majesty interposed—we might conclude with the spear and sword in tourney again.... ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... familiar old living-room. Adam was snoring with his head under the base burner, and Lizzie was clattering the dishes in the kitchen. Amos stood by the table, filling his pipe, and Lydia with her pile of text books had prepared for her evening of study. Amos' work-blunted fingers trembled as he tamped the tobacco into the bowl and Lydia knew that the ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... wings above dark seas seeking the golden clime it needs and instinctively knows of. But she did not repine. And she was able to fill her life, to be strongly interested in people and in events. She mellowed with her great sorrow instead of becoming blunted by it or withering under it. And so she drew people to her, and was drawn, in her ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... Stephen Alard, also Admiral, both curiously carved with grotesque heads. The roof beams of the church, timber from wrecked or broken ships, are of an integrity so thorough that a village carpenter who recently climbed up to test them blunted all his tools in ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... our borders, steady progress has been made in building a world of order. The people of West Berlin remain both free and secure. A settlement, though still precarious, has been reached in Laos. The spearpoint of aggression has been blunted in Viet-Nam. The end of agony may be in sight in the Congo. The doctrine of troika is dead. And, while danger continues, a deadly threat has been removed ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... the fourth day that wretchedness turned to bitter restlessness, and that to a sudden resolve. Not to write, not even to say she forgave, might make him think that her heart was still hardened against him. Her fear had blunted her imagination. Clearly now she saw, and with an anguish in the vision, that Augustine must be suffering too. Clearly she heard the love in his parting words. And she longed so to see, to hear that love again, that the longing, as if with sudden impatience of the hampering sense of sin, rushed ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... was not an amiable man, his training as buccaneer and slaver having possibly blunted his finer feelings, and his consciousness of present treachery probably increasing the irritability often succeeding to a ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... troubled glance at his wife, and saw that there was no help in her. Whether she was daunted and confused in her own conscience by the outcome, so evil and disastrous, of the reparation to Rogers which she had forced her husband to make, or whether her perceptions had been blunted and darkened by the appeals which Rogers had now used, it would be difficult to say. Probably there was a mixture of both causes in the effect which her husband felt in her, and from which he turned, girding himself anew, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... crucified Lord, he made himself a cross with thirty protruding iron needles and nails. This he bore on his bare back between his shoulders day and night. "The first time that he stretched out this cross upon his back his tender frame was struck with terror at it, and blunted the sharp nails slightly against a stone. But soon, repenting of this womanly cowardice, he pointed them all again with a file, and placed once more the cross upon him. It made his back, where the bones are, bloody and seared. Whenever he sat down or stood up, it was as if a hedgehog-skin were on ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... the Kurus and Pandus there was a great struggle between Bhagadatta and Arjuna. In this fight, Bhagadatta being invincible, and Arjuna vulnerable, the latter called Krishna to his aid, who, receiving the charge of Bhagadatta on his breast, blunted the force of the weapons.[7] In like manner, Satish Chandra having received these attacks on his face, peace was restored. But their peace and war was like the ...
— The Poison Tree - A Tale of Hindu Life in Bengal • Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
... last few months, the quiet dulness of the place was infinitely grateful to me. I was like a bruised swimmer, tossed upon a monotonous sandbank, who only asks to be left there in peace, until long repose has rested the aching limbs, and blunted the harrowing recollections of the shipwreck. The incessant excitement of Paris was intolerable to me, and scarcely less so the idea of revisiting its troops of sympathetic friends. They would proffer venal consolation for the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... son. The tenacious old merchant was wondering whether he had done right in accepting the young man's sacrifice. In his disgust for the do-nothing, parasitic offspring about him, perhaps he had taken a delicate instrument and blunted it by setting it at coarse work. Well, it was not too late to ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... been an indispensable article of wear at a party. The least of her smiles brought dimples into view, and her dimples seemed multitudinous, though there were really only three in her face and one of those irregular things called apple-seeds. Her agreeably blunted features and peachy roundness of cheek belonged to a good-humored, unimposing type, which took on a certain nobility in her case from being carried high on a strong, round neck over a splendid broad breast, partly bare this evening, and seen to be white ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... others, only a word or so, but there was amongst them an obvious haste to get away, of which Persimmon Sneed was cognizant, albeit his head was swimming, his breath short, his eyes dazzled by the fire which he feared. His understanding, however, was blunted in some sort, it seemed to him, for he could make no sense of Nick Peters's observation as he took him by the arm, although ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... thus ended her life. I will not say that this most horrid murder produced no sensation in the community. It did produce a sensation; but, incredible to tell, the moral sense of the community was blunted too entirely by the ordinary nature of slavery horrors, to bring the murderess to punishment. A warrant was issued for her arrest, but, for some reason or other, that warrant was never served. Thus did Mrs. Hicks not ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... two days since the fatal night, not suffering, for every nerve of suffering was blunted and destroyed. He lay, for the most part, in a quiet stupor; for the laws of a powerful and well-knit frame would not at once release the imprisoned spirit. By stealth, there had been there, in the darkness of the night, poor desolated creatures, who stole from their scanty ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... requires expanding a little, in order that it may become of any practical use.—By the "study of the Bible," I do not mean a chapter occasionally read with care: nor even a chapter regularly conned over at night; when a convivial meeting has blunted the edge of observation, or severe study has exhausted the powers of the brain. The devotional use of a portion of Holy Scripture is quite a distinct affair. Still less would the practice satisfy me of following the lessons in ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... concrete. He had been in the cement business before taking to the turf, and there were those who hinted that he still carried a massive sample of the old line above his shoulders. When cross-examined about the grey horse, he blunted every sharp inquiry with polite evasions, but he looked wiser than any human could possibly be, and the impression prevailed that he knew more than he would tell. Perhaps ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... review of a place which had been the residence of her parents, and the scene of her earliest delight, was mingled, after the first shock had subsided, a tender and undescribable pleasure. For time had so far blunted the acuteness of her grief, that she now courted every scene, that awakened the memory of her friends; in every room, where she had been accustomed to see them, they almost seemed to live again; and she felt that La Vallee was still her happiest home. One of the first ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... the original Bunkers, with others whom Tim had collected together, his conscience proved less troublesome. The first wrong step taken, the second follows with less compunction, and so on, till the moral sense is completely blunted. ...
— All Aboard; or, Life on the Lake - A Sequel to "The Boat Club" • Oliver Optic
... aspirations of the various states. Such a general preliminary treaty would have gone far towards restoring a basis for the resumption of normal political and economic activity; it would have permitted Wilson to return to the United States as the unquestioned leader of the world; it would have blunted the edge of senatorial opposition; and finally it might have enabled him to avoid the controversies with Allied leaders which compelled him to surrender much of his original programme in a ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... that the vichy had been "killed"; mentally his temper became more vicious than ever as he thought of Dumont's blunted wit at his expense—a wit with edge enough left to ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... maintain a common scale of prices. This condition of loose, irregular, and partial co-operation among competing industrial units is the characteristic condition of trade in such a commercial country as England to-day. Competitors give up the combat a outrance, and fight with blunted lances. ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... of Mr. Lee in this manner, even though he could claim disinterested motives, rather phased even the blunted spirit of Donald Pike. If he had dared to, he would have committed his story to writing, and so brought it to Lee's attention. But things that are written often have an unpleasant way of reappearing, to the discomfiture and undoing of ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... custom somewhat blunted his sense of the dishonesty, and he began to criticise the thing arithmetically instead of morally. That view once admitted, he was charmed with the ability and subtlety of his dignified sharper; and so the mole-catcher ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... to 'im!—Lend it to 'im, eh? Mercy knows, I wouldn't lend 'im a halter to hang himself, since he blunted my iron wedges, and broomed up my beetle so! And I guess, you wouldn't talk about lendin', if the chain had ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... Erie he approved the measure enabling corrupt operators to retain possession of the road for an indefinite period in defiance of the stockholders. It is probable that the real character and fatal tendency of his associates had not been revealed to him. Nevertheless, ambition seems to have blunted a strong, alert mind. The appointment of Ingraham, Cardozo, and Barnard to the General Term of the Supreme Court within the city of New York, if further evidence were needed, revealed the Governor's subserviency. To avoid the Tweed judges ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... have answered with the epigram of Canius when Caligula declared him to have been cognisant of a conspiracy against him. "If I had known," said he, "thou shouldst never have known." Grief hath not so blunted my perceptions in this matter that I should complain because impious wretches contrive their villainies against the virtuous, but at their achievement of their hopes I do exceedingly marvel. For evil purposes are, perchance, due to the imperfection of human nature; ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... with a dull and blunted perception that some great calamity had overtaken me. I was in my mother's dressing-room, and Julia was holding to my nostrils some sharp essence, which had penetrated to the brain and brought back consciousness. My father ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... exchange not only absorbs a large quantity in that use,[35] but greatly increases the effect on the imagination of the quantity used in the arts. Thus, in brief, the force of the functions is increased, but their precision blunted, by their unison. ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... furious at the escape of their victim, burned his dwelling to the ground. Drentell never forgot his ignominious repulse nor the wound he received at the hands of Haim Kusel. His own offence counted as naught, so blunted was his moral sense. To inflict misery upon a Jew was at all times considered meritorious, but for a Jew to so far forget himself as to assault an officer of the Czar, was a crime for which the whole race would one day ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... Her mood did not puzzle him, but how to keep from plunging her deeper into despair baffled him. He exhausted all his powers trying to do for her what he had been able to do for Ruth. Yet he failed. Something had blunted her. The shadow of that baneful trial hovered over her, and he came to sense a strange terror in her. It was mostly always present. Was she thinking of Jane Withersteen and Lassiter, left dead or imprisoned ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... Baltimore, and the snares of robbery laid for the unwary—and the method adopted to entrap a rich and unwary citizen. The revelations were truly startling, and displayed a painful instance of the "facilis descensus averni"—a father whose feelings were blunted, and hardly to be re-awakened even by the death of a beloved daughter. And this was but one instance out of thousands, in which the sum of $1200, $1500, and $2000 had been lost at various times, and a fatal, fascinating ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... after, and the sufferer who had been carried back received the first attention, the others all having their turn; and just as the last bandage had been applied, Sir Morton, who had been having a walk round, came upon the pikes, stained and blunted, leaning against a buttress of the wall. This brought him to the men's quarters, and in utter astonishment he stood gazing at ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... the horrors of which will never be known, five men with sabres, in the twilight, were seen to enter the room and close the door. There were wild cries and shrieks and groans. Three times a hacked and a blunted sabre was passed out of a window in exchange for a sharper one. Finally the groans and moans gradually ceased and all was still. The next morning a mass of mutilated remains were thrown ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... been arranged. You will advise him also that it is our royal will that this contest be not fought upon the bridge, since it is very clear that it must end in one or both going over into the river, but that he advance to the end of the bridge and fight upon the plain. You will tell him also that a blunted lance is sufficient for such an encounter, but that a hand-stroke or two with sword or mace may well be exchanged, if both riders should keep their saddles. A blast upon Raoul's horn shall ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... ... God! how he had loved her! ... And yet, latterly, how he had got to take his supreme possession of her as a matter of course; had allowed the joy of it to be blunted by depression and irritability over sordid station worries. He remembered with piercing remorse how often he had neglected the trivial courtesies to which he knew she attached importance. How he had been prone to sullen fits of moodiness; had ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... learned to write. The boy's wits, sharpened instead of blunted by repression, saw opportunities where more favored children could see none. He gave himself his first writing lesson in his master's shipyard, by copying from the various pieces of timber the letters with which they had been marked by the ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... yet towards—the outspread wings of the dove that lies brooding on the troubled waters. So long all is well,—all replete with instruction and example. In the fierce and inordinate I am made to know and be grateful for the clearer and purer radiance which shines on a Christian's paths, neither blunted by the preparatory veil, nor crimsoned in its struggle through the all- enwrapping mist of the world's ignorance: whilst in the self- oblivion of these heroes of the Old Testament, their elevation above all low and individual interests,—above all, in the ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... now abandoned by his false friends. Then he goes on: "As to the flatterers you speak of and their ingratitude, I shall deal with them another time, and they will meet with their due punishment as soon as I have had my thunderbolt repaired. The two largest darts of it were broken and blunted the other day when I got in a rage and flung it at the sophist Anaxagoras, who was trying to make his disciples believe that we gods do not exist at all. However, I missed him, for Pericles held his hand over him, ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... the year, Four varying seasons to one law conformed. If chilly showers e'er shut the farmer's door, Much that had soon with sunshine cried for haste, He may forestall; the ploughman batters keen His blunted share's hard tooth, scoops from a tree His troughs, or on the cattle stamps a brand, Or numbers on the corn-heaps; some make sharp The stakes and two-pronged forks, and willow-bands Amerian for the bending vine prepare. Now let the pliant basket ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... her ears with cotton, began to breast the slope with fearless heart and dauntless soul; and as soon as she had advanced a few steps a hubbub of voices broke out all around her, but she heard not a sound, by reason of her hearing being blunted by the cotton-wool. Then hideous cries arose with horrid din, still she heard them not; and at last they grew to a storm of shouts and shrieks and groans and moans flavoured with foul language such as shameless women use when railing one at other. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... stalwart frame. But, in front of the face, one forgot the framework. The speaking countenance, from which it was impossible to detach one's gaze, both charmed and fascinated the beholder. His hair floated over the forehead in large locks; his black eyes pierced like arrows blunted by benevolence; they entered yours confidently as if they were friends; his cheeks were full, rosy, and strongly coloured; the nose was well modelled, yet a trifle long; his lips, gracefully limned, ample and raised at the corners; his teeth, ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... which they cultivate upon the Chinese whom it demoralizes. Is this difference merely the difference between a pocket in a toga and one in the trousers? But a nerve from the moral sense does, nevertheless, spread into papilloe over the surface of the tighter pocket, not entirely blunted by yellow potations; so that the human as well as financial advantage of Jamaica emancipation is perceived. Should we expect this from the nation which undertook the destruction of the Danish fleet before Copenhagen in 1801, without ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... insensibly, sinking into her grave. No appetite, and indeed was threatened with atrophy at one time. But she was so surrounded with loving-kindness that her shame diminished, her pride rose, and at last her agony was blunted, and only a pensive languor remained to show that she had been crushed, and could not be again the bright, proud, high-spirited ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... hearing were somewhat blunted by age, and he was proceeding very slowly; for his horse was old and feeble, like his owner. He was suddenly disturbed by loud hurrahs from behind, and by a furious pelting of balls of snow and ice upon the top of ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... the general public, I have no doubt that the feeling of shame and sympathy, are blunted by these repeated military calamities, and ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... stay awake hour after hour, tossing and turning on the tapes, with the dull liver pain gnawing into his right side and his head throbbing and aching after Canteen? He thought over this for many, many nights, and the world became unprofitable to him. He even blunted his naturally fine appetite with beer and tobacco; and all the while the parrot talked at and made a mock ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... for Cecilia, was the most unfortunate that could have happened; the gentleness of Delvile was alone sufficient to melt her, since her pride had no subsistence when not fed by his own; and while his mildness had blunted her displeasure, his anguish had penetrated her heart. Lost in thought and in sadness, she continued fixed to her seat; and looking at the door through which he had passed, as if, with himself, he had shut out all for ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... conscience, though still felt, have become less keen. The offence is repeated, again and again, till conscience is almost seared over—and the omission of what had at first given great pain, almost ceases to be troublesome. And thus the conscience, having been blunted in one respect, is more liable to be so in others. Alas for the individual, who is thus, from day to day, growing worse, and yet from day to day becoming less sensible ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... and tried to stick it into the hippopotamus, but the skin was so tough the knife was blunted against it. Then he tried other means; but ...
— American Fairy Tales • L. Frank Baum
... witnessing the agony of her rival. Vane was dead and retribution had swiftly overtaken his assassin. What was left? Nothing. Sally had also found romance, and some tender womanly instinct—an instinct too often blunted by her life and temptations—sealed her lips. She had avenged the death of the only man she ever loved with anything like purity. Let ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... conscience-stricken, that, lapsed in time and passion, he has let go by the acting of its command; but he does not plead that his conscience stood in his way. The Ghost itself says that it comes to whet his 'almost blunted purpose'; and conscience may unsettle a purpose but does not blunt it. What natural explanation of all this can be given on the ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... that his mind was rigid and of a close fibre: it was a mind (to repeat the metaphor) out of which a strong graying-tool could be forged. Its blade would not be blunted: it could deal with its material. Of this character, which I take to be the first essential in his achievement, the few essays before us ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... I expected every day to receive an agonised message from Mrs. Boyce announcing his death. Then, as is the way of humans, the keenness of my apprehension grew blunted, until, at last, I took his continued existence as a matter of course. I wrote him a few friendly letters, to which he replied in the same strain. And so ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... country and in small towns people come face to face with life, especially women. It means marrying, child-bearing, household cares and burdens, neighbourhood gossip, sickness, death, burial, and whether the corpse appeared natural. But ever so much kindness goes with their disillusion; they are blunted, ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... the same day for a sufficient pretext. As the hour approached Fergus made the distressing discovery that his friend and host had anticipated the festivities with too free a hand. Macbean was not drunk, but he was perceptibly blunted and blurred, and Fergus had never seen the pale eyes so watery or the black skull-cap so much on one side of the venerable head. The lad was genuinely grieved. A whiskey bottle stood empty on the laden board, and he had the temerity to pocket the corkscrew ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... by attaining in this way whole half days of unconsciousness, from which she emerged only half awake, with benumbed intelligence, blunted perceptions, hands that did things by force of habit, the motions of a somnambulist, a body and a mind in which thought, will, memory seemed still to retain the drowsiness and vagueness of the confused waking hours ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... fellow does his best to find other hosts for them. As to those parasites, and the ingratitude they showed him, I will attend to them before long; they shall have their deserts as soon as I have got the thunderbolt in order again. Its two best spikes are broken and blunted; my zeal outran my discretion the other day when I took that shot at Anaxagoras the sophist; the Gods non-existent, indeed! that was what he was telling his disciples. However, I missed him (Pericles had held up his ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... joy receive, In the proud mansions of the rich and great? Or, tell me, can the wounded bosom heave With blunted anguish ...
— Poems • Matilda Betham
... incapable of mutually sustaining each other; for we all know that mere corporal employment lessens affliction, or enables us in a shorter time to forget it, whilst the acuteness of bodily suffering, on the other hand, is blunted by those pursuits which fill the mind with agreeable impressions. During the few days, therefore, that intervened between the last interview which Connor held with Nogher M'Cormick, and the day of his final departure he felt himself rather relieved ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... her satin-shod feet, to cling to her odorous hands, such hands as were never formed out of China, like petals of coral. Not only her bodily charm intoxicated him, but the thought of her subtle mind added its attraction, its shadows never to be pierced by the blunted Western instinct, the knowledge of pleasures like perfumes, the calm blend of the eight diagrams of Confucius, the stoicism of the Buddhistic soul revolving perpetually in the urn of Fate, and of the aloof ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... and though I have spared no pains to let her know how detestable I think her, it is all in vain; she remains as firmly entrenched in her own good opinion as folly and conceit can make her; and I have the despair of seeing all my buffetings fall blunted to the ground. She reminds me of some odious fairy or genii I have read of, who possessed such a power in their person that every hostile weapon levelled against them was immediately turned into some agreeable ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... itself. The crystals are generally half an inch long, but often less. The modifications of the above form, which are frequent in this species, strike one forcibly of the resemblance they bear to a broad stone spear head on a diminutive scale, with a blunted edge; their hardness is about 4, specific gravity 2.2, the color generally a pearly white or grayish. After a long boiling with nitric acid it gelatinizes, but it foams up and fuses to a transparent glass before the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... things of a maturer degree. One is often surprised at the juvenilities which grown people indulge in at sea, and the interest they take in them, and the consuming enjoyment they get out of them. This is on long voyages only. The mind gradually becomes inert, dull, blunted; it loses its accustomed interest in intellectual things; nothing but horse-play can rouse it, nothing but wild and foolish grotesqueries can entertain it. On short voyages it makes no such exposure of itself; it hasn't time to slump down to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... understood it, had she known to what base deeds a mind blunted by selfishness and vanity can ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org
|
|
|
