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More "Enervating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... started, broke into another camp, a long line of steel and flame met him, staggering, and for a little while, stopping his advance. But his gallant corps was still too fresh for an enemy, not yet recovered from the enervating effects of surprise, to hold it back long. For a while it writhed and surged before the stern barrier suddenly erected in its front, and then, gathering itself, dashed irresistibly forward. The enemy was beaten back, ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... society against the charge of surpassing dulness. In an insular colony, under the enervating influence of a tropical climate, the pulse of intellectual life beats very faintly, at its strongest. Still, if whatever of education and refinement there is in Kingston would cordially combine it might make a pleasant society. But ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... contemplation of the beautiful. Indeed some of art's many non-aesthetic aims may themselves be foreign to elevation and purification, or even, as for instance the lewd or brutal subjects of some painting and poetry, and the nervous intoxication of certain music, exert a debasing or enervating influence. But, as the whole of this book has tried to establish, the contemplation of beautiful shapes involves perceptive processes in themselves mentally invigorating and refining, and a play of empathic feelings which realise the greatest desiderata ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... XII. of Sweden burst in upon the scene, like a meteor amidst the stars of midnight. A more bloody apparition never emerged from the sulphureous canopy of war. Having perfect contempt for all enervating pleasures, with an iron frame and the abstemious habits of a Spartan, he rushed through a career which has excited the wonder of the world. He joined the Austrian party; struck down Denmark at a blow; penetrated Russia in mid-winter, driving ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... position, in reach of the fine fresh sea air, seems to render it probable. To me, after the close atmosphere of Pau, it was peculiarly pleasant; and seemed to give new life, and restore the spirits, depressed by that enervating climate, where, except for invalids, a long residence is anything ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... counsels, ignorance of what others were doing, want of continuity and impatience of results. Many organisations, after winning some advantages,—over the railroads for instance,—fell into abeyance or even out of existence; others lapsed under the enervating influence of a little temporary prosperity, such as a few years of better prices. The truth is, American farmers have had the will to organise, but they have missed ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... after noontide on the Saturday of the first week, this being the only day and hour at which they could attend without 'losing a half' and therefore it was necessary to put up with the inconvenience of arriving at a crowded and enervating time. ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... Dr Barth, while for five years travelling many thousand miles, amidst hostile and savage tribes, in an enervating climate, frequently with unwholesome or insufficient food, having ever to keep his energies on the stretch to guard himself from the attacks of open foes or the treachery of pretended friends, have gained for him ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... men. By those who cling to prejudice and abandon self-restraint, extol enmity, and always proceed to the further step—the plea to wipe the enemy out: the counter plea for forbearance is always scorned as the enervating gospel of weakness and despair. Though we like to call ourselves Christian, we have no desire for—nay even make a jest of—that outstanding Christian virtue; yet men not held by Christian dogma have joyously surrendered ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... there were as yet but faint foreshadowings. Meanwhile, the force of the nations who were destined to achieve the coming transformation was unexhausted, their physical and mental faculties were unimpaired. No ages of enervating luxury, of intellectual endeavor, of life artificially preserved or ingeniously prolonged, had sapped the fibre of the men who were about to inaugurate the modern world. Severely nurtured, unused to delicate living, these giants of the Renaissance ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... here, and as the climate is influenced by that of Auvergne, it is less enervating by the Cele than in the neighbouring valley of the Lot. There, some twenty miles farther south, the grapes ripen two or three weeks sooner than they do upon these hillsides. But the vent d'autan—the wind from the south-east—is now blowing, and, although there is too much air, ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... sacrifice, while it opened to the eyes of men a dazzling and delightful perspective. The eighteenth century was, beyond all question, the most tempting and seductive of ages, for it promised to satisfy at once the strength and weakness of human nature; elevating and enervating the mind at the same time; flattering alternately the noblest sentiments and the most grovelling propensities; intoxicating with exalted hopes, and nursing with effeminate concessions. Thus it has produced, in pellmell confusion, utopians ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... this moral accountability which sits so heavily upon you. Here is a sensuous paradise, sweet and debilitating, offering varied delights to the eclecticism of personal taste. All angular and harsh things may be dissolved in copious floods of words, and washed into a ravishing, enervating Universe." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... doing nothing in the middle of flowers, and sea breezes, and beautiful views. To comprehend all the luxury of the bel far niente one must come to Naples, where idleness loses half its evil by losing all its enervating qualities; there is something in the air so elastic that I have never been at any place where I have felt as if I could make exertions so easily as here, and yet it is a great pleasure to sit and look at the Bay, the mountains, the islands, and the town, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... death. But I do not believe that any one dares contend that these men would have done what our soldiers are now doing, that they would have endured what is being endured all around us. Are we not entitled to conclude from this that civilization, contrary to what was feared, so far from enervating, depraving, weakening, lowering and dwarfing man, elevates him, purifies him, strengthens him, ennobles him, makes him capable of acts of sacrifice, generosity and courage which he did not know before? The fact is that civilization, ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... the first time they noticed the great difference that thirst produces between horses and cow cattle. The latter seemed to think that they could obtain relief by quietly yielding to the enervating effect of thirst, and travelling as slowly as their drivers would permit them. They were urged forward with much difficulty, and the Makololo were constantly wielding their huge jamboks to induce them ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... glowing with health and exercise, freshened by every breeze that blows, seated loftily and gracefully on her saddle, with plume on head, and hawk on hand, and her descendant of the present day, the pale victim of routs and ball-rooms, sunk languidly in one corner of an enervating carriage." ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... people on the weary treadmill of the established system, even while they feel its irksomeness almost as intolerable as we did. We had stepped down from the pulpit; we had flung aside the pen; we had shut up the ledger; we had thrown off that sweet, bewitching, enervating indolence, which is better, after all, than most of the enjoyments within mortal grasp. It was our purpose—a generous one, certainly, and absurd, no doubt, in full proportion with its generosity—to give up whatever we had heretofore attained, for the sake of showing mankind the example ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... are more dreary than those of summer and the workman's general outlook is different in winter than in summer. In the former season he goes back and forth to work in the dark, or at best, in the cold twilight. He is not only more depressed but he is clumsier in his heavier clothing. If the enervating influence of these factors is combined with a greater clumsiness due to cold and perhaps to colds, it is not difficult to account for this type of seasonal distribution of accidents. A study of the accidents of 1917 indicated that 13 per cent. occurred between ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... which were being made by the French forces at Arras and in Champagne, and—perhaps the most weighty consideration of all—the need of fostering the offensive spirit in the troops under my command after the trying and possibly enervating experiences which they had gone through of a severe ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... herself smiling at Brodrick's hat. She felt a sudden melting, enervating tenderness for Brodrick's hat. The passion which, in the circumstances, she could not permit herself to feel for Brodrick, she felt, ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... being so poor and enervating," Littimer said, cynically. "In other words, I suppose you have traced ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... country ecstasy, this season at once stimulating and enervating, tortured me. It disturbed my bibliophilist labors, and gave a twang of musty nausea even to the sweet scent of old binding-leather. I was as a man caught in the pangs of removing, unattached to either home; and I bent from my windows over the throngs of festal ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... open air, and each day she exulted over an increase of vigor. Almost everything favored her in her new home. When she was well enough to go out much the strangers had gone, and everything in the town was restful, yet not enervating. The Waylands, while on the best terms with other permanent residents, were not society people. Mrs. Wayland had become satisfied with that phase of life in her youth. Her husband was a reader, a student, ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... were correspondingly reduced. On continuing the journey with the weak and hungry mules, we found the ascent of the southern side of Barranca de Batopilas quite laborious; but on the crest we enjoyed the fresh breeze, the more gratefully after the enervating heat in the bottom of ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... the overflow of a robust system, or the outburst of restrained, pent-up, and ungratified passions. In the latter case, and when only occurring at long intervals, the emissions are not followed by any perceptible enervating or ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... love, the cultivated kind that bores into a woman's heart through silk and laces in a hot-house atmosphere and brings about all kinds of enervating reactions until operated upon by marriage; the other kind a field woman breathes into her lungs and it gets into her circulation and starts up the most awful and productive activity. I've had both kinds. I moped for months over Gale Beacon, and made him and Matthew and father completely unhappy, ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... a drink," said Hewson. Already he had had many. His face was relaxed, flushed, already showing signs of a flabby degeneration. In this man of iron sudden success was insidiously at work, enervating his powers. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... It is unfavorable to the growth of taste because its decorations and furniture are and must be ugly; they descend to the artistic standard of the vulgarest people in it, and have not even the merit of being the expression of any individuality at all. It is enervating because it favors the creation of a race that can do absolutely nothing for itself. It is unhealthy because it is sometimes less clean than it seems, and because often it forces its victims to eat ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... season (March to June); dry season (June to October); persistent high temperatures and humidity; particularly enervating climate astride the Equator ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... seem that the hope was vain, the promise illusive. When the terrace was reached it appeared not only to have caught and gathered all the heat of the valley below, but to have evolved a fire of its own from some hidden crater-like source unknown. Nevertheless, instead of prostrating and enervating man and beast, it was said to have induced the wildest exaltation. The heated air was filled and stifling with resinous exhalations. The delirious spices of balm, bay, spruce, juniper, yerba buena, wild syringa, and strange aromatic herbs as yet unclassified, ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... journalist's emphatic phrase, and cry, "Go North!" Well, we came thence! Our savage ancestors, peradventure, migrated from the immemorial East, and, in skins and breech-clouts, rocked the cradle of a supreme race in Scandinavian snows. It has travelled far to the enervating South since then; and, to preserve its hardihood and sway on this continent, must be recreated in the high latitudes which gave ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... moment. "Oh, nothing," he said. "What's the use of discussing what can't be helped?" How could he tell her that the greatest factor in his enervating environment was herself; that the strongest chains which held him in it were the chains which bound him to her? Indeed, was he not indulging in cowardly self-excuse in thinking that this was true? Had not his success, rather than his love, made ambition unfettered by ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... to marry and have children, and we are neglecting our duty, we are growing selfish! No longer are produced the glorious "quiverfuls" of old times! Our fathers married at twenty; we marry at thirty-five. Why? Because a gross and enervating luxury has overtaken us. What will become of England if this continues? There will be no England! Hence we must look to it! And so on, in ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... all the Australian colonies is Queensland (population 472,179), for it is a tropical country with a climate so salubrious that white people can live in it and be comfortable and healthy. The heat, instead of being enervating, is stimulating and bracing. A great portion of its soil is of unsurpassed fertility. The only drawback is the unequal distribution throughout the year of the rainfall. But wherever irrigation wells ...
— Up To Date Business - Home Study Circle Library Series (Volume II.) • Various
... built as part of the house. Father opened the window, eased out the suit-case, followed it, and gave his hand to Mother, who creakingly crawled out with her bundle. It was an early November evening, chilly, a mist in the air. After their day in the enervating furnace heat the breeze seemed biting, and the garage roof was perilously slippery. Mother slid and balanced and slid on the roof, irritably observing, "I declare to goodness I never thought that at my time of life I'd have to sneak out of a window ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... and, if he be so predisposed, causes rickets, and makes him crooked. A horse-hair mattress is the best for a child to lie on. The pillow, too, should be made of horse-hair. A feather pillow often causes the bead to be bathed in perspiration, thus enervating the child, and making him liable to catch cold. If he be at all rickety, if he be weak in the neck, if he be inclined to stoop, or if he be at all crooked, let him, by all means, lie without ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... renewed exertion and made them look steadily and unwaveringly at the true dangers that threatened them. The other gave them time to fold their hands and indulge in a complacency, ridiculous as it was enervating. ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... within the wall and the laying out of streets and alleys with regard to climatic conditions. They will be properly laid out if foresight is employed to exclude the winds from the alleys. Cold winds are disagreeable, hot winds enervating, moist winds unhealthy. We must, therefore, avoid mistakes in this matter and beware of the common experience of many communities. For example, Mytilene in the island of Lesbos is a town built with ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... thirteen years of age is bound to observe the usual fasts in full, i.e., throughout the whole day. A girl is bound to do so when only twelve. Rashi gives this as the reason:—A boy is supposed to be weaker than a girl on account of the enervating effect of much study. ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... likely to be impartial than any ruler personally interested in the old quarrels, but during his first term of office, the interdict with which Innocent III. had smitten England, hung like an Egyptian darkness over the Anglo-Norman power in Ireland. The native Irish, however, were exempt from its enervating effects, and Cathal O'Conor, by the time King John came over in person—in the year 1210—to endeavour to retrieve the English interest, had warred down all his enemies, and was of power sufficient to treat with the English sovereign as independently as Roderick had done ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... dulness with which it overcasts even the most active mind; the deep-drawn sighs it will elicit; and if there be one melancholy feeling which presses on the heart more heavily than another, it is the ample developement which it enjoys during the prevalence of this enervating breeze. It seldom, however, blows with force; it is rather an exhalation than a wind. It scarcely moves the leaves around the traveller, but it sinks heavily and damply in his heart. A stranger is at first unaware of the cause of the mental misery he endures; his ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction - Vol. X, No. 289., Saturday, December 22, 1827 • Various
... on the mighty arm of the Republic, his own proper strength departs from him. He loses, in an extent proportioned to the weakness or force of his original nature, the capability of self-support. If he possesses an unusual share of native energy, or the enervating magic of place do not operate too long upon him, his forfeited powers may be redeemable. The ejected officer—fortunate in the unkindly shove that sends him forth betimes, to struggle amid a struggling world—may return to himself, and become ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of producing something beautiful in literature you, also, take to nurturing these dreams, which are already enervating humanity to such a degree, already diverting people from the actualities of life! I do not like it at all. An unbeliever like you! One who is convinced, as I myself am convinced, that we are merely soap-bubbles ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... surface of the pools for grass. A great stillness reigned everywhere, and he failed to see any of the beasts that only a moment ago were prowling around the castle. As he walked on, the woods grew thicker, and the darkness more impenetrable. Warm winds, filled with enervating perfumes, caressed him; he sank into masses of dead leaves, and after a while he leaned against an oak-tree to rest and catch ...
— Three short works - The Dance of Death, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, A Simple Soul. • Gustave Flaubert
... drew. The quality of the air seemed to change, too, rendering it difficult to breathe, so that we found ourselves gasping for breath at frequent intervals, while perspiration poured from us in streams that we could distinctly feel trickling down our bodies and limbs. So enervating were the conditions that none of us cared to make the slightest unnecessary movement; yet the steady decline of the mercury was a warning that I dared not ignore. Accordingly, at eight bells in the afternoon watch, when Enderby took charge ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... scarcely doubt, implanted in the heart of man by God Himself. It is a remarkable fact that in many—some would say most—of the less civilised races of mankind we find these social virtues, which some would have us believe are degenerate features foisted on to the race by an enervating superstition. ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... that, although the room was oppressively hot and enervating. I had no doubt the search for me would now come in the right direction, and after a little, I dropped into a doze. How long I ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... a complaint might seem to their healthy environment,—their outdoor life, their daily exercise, the healing balsam of the mountain air, their enforced temperance in diet, and the absence of all enervating pleasures,—it was nevertheless the incontestable fact. Whether it was the result of the nervous, excitable temperament which had brought them together in this feverish hunt for gold; whether it was the quality of the tinned meats or half-cooked provisions they hastily bolted, begrudging the ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... blinding. Again, at St. Pierre it rains almost every twenty-four hours for a brief while, during at least the greater part of the year; at Grande Anse it rains more moderately and less often. The atmosphere at St. Pierre is always more or less impregnated with vapor, and usually an enervating heat prevails, which makes exertion unpleasant; at Grande Anse the warm wind keeps the skin comparatively dry, in spite of considerable exercise. It is quite rare to see a heavy surf at St, Pierre, but it is much rarer not to see it at ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... sworn his marriage vows 'before God,' whereas if he truly believed in God, such vows taken untruthfully were mere blasphemy;—and now she herself, a young thing tenderly brought up like a tropical flower in the enervating hot-house atmosphere of Court life, yet had such a pure, deep consciousness of God in her, that she actually could not pray with the slightest blur of a secret on ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... with her; and if I do not fall in the battlefield I will, when the war is over, seek a refuge among the Gauls, where, if the life is rough, it is at least free and independent, where courage and manliness and honour count for much, and where the enervating influence of wealth is as yet unknown. ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty
... sensation; and I found in the West Indies as well as in the East, although the wind in the latter is more dry and parching, that a current of heated air, if it be moderately dry, even with the thermometer at 95 in the shade, is really not so enervating or oppressive as I have found it in the stagnating atmosphere on the sunny side of Pall Mall, with the mercury barely at 75. A cargo of ice had a little before this arrived at Kingston, and at first all the inhabitants who could afford it iced ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... the State exists for its members, he holds that the enervating influences of authority are least powerful in popular governments, and that the tyranny of a public opinion not enforced by law need only be endured by voluntary slaves. Emerson confides in great men, "to educate whom the State exists"; but he regards them as inspired mouthpieces ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... the Burmese are pretty much what their country has made them. The land is so very fertile that almost anything will grow there, and Nature provides food for the people with the least possible effort on their own part. The climate is also damp, warm, and enervating, so that one would not expect to find among its inhabitants much energy or decision of character. Their beautiful religion also makes them kind and gentle, and their isolation, which, as I have pointed out, separates them from the neighbouring countries, has left them almost entirely undisturbed ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly
... continued, taking his hand and holding it tightly in her own. "Endure your woes, my friend, you will be great one day; your pain is the price of your immortality. If only I had a hard struggle before me! God preserve you from the enervating life without battles, in which the eagle's wings have no room to spread themselves. I envy you; for if you suffer, at least you live. You will put out your strength, you will feel the hope of victory; your strife will be glorious. And when you shall come to your kingdom, ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... Coast of Africa is a fresher field for the scribbling tourist, than most other parts of the world. Few visit it, unless driven by stern necessity; and still fewer are disposed to struggle against the enervating influence of the climate, and keep up even so much of intellectual activity as may suffice to fill a diurnal page of Journal or Commonplace Book. In his descriptions of the settlements of the various nations of Europe, along that coast, and of the native tribes, and their trade and intercourse ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... himself on Segrave. The elemental instinct of self-defense, of avenging a terrible insult by physical violence, rose within him, whispering of strength and power, of the freedom, muscle-giving life of the country as against the enervating, ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... the pruning-knife, you are indeed suggestive of hardy, cheerful industry, and a healthy life in the open air. Temperate, chaste fruit! you mean neither luxury nor sloth, neither satiety nor indolence, neither enervating heats nor the Frigid Zones. Uncloying fruit, fruit whose best sauce is the open air, whose finest flavors only he whose taste is sharpened by brisk work or walking knows; winter fruit, when the fire ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... definite amount of wealth. Any sum supplied to an individual which will so far satisfy him or her as to enable them to live without exertion may absolutely parasitise them; while vast wealth unhealthy as its effects generally tend to be) may, upon certain rare and noble natures, exert hardly any enervating or deleterious influence. An amusing illustration of the different points at which enervation is reached by different females came under our own observation. The wife of an American millionaire was visited by a woman, the daughter and also the widow of small professional ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... themselves against catching cold, by friction of the skin, cold bathing, etc. The use of a sponge-bath of cold salt and water to the upper parts of the body, especially the neck and chest, will prove valuable in many cases, but the enervating effects of hot water should be ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... duties, occupations, pleasures—all tedious alike—to which the artificial state of society limits a peaceful generation. The atmosphere of the camp and the smoke of the battle-field are morally invigorating; the hardy virtues flourish in them, the nonsense dies like a wilted weed. The enervating effects of centuries of civilization vanish at once, and leave these young men to enjoy a life of hardship, and the exhilarating sense of danger,—to kill men blamelessly, or to be killed gloriously,—and to be happy in following out their ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... time, please,' he said, lazily lighting another cigarette; 'this heat is so enervating, and I'm going to walk up to Black Hill. By the way, Mademoiselle,' he went on, as she opened the soda water, 'as I see there are two beds in my friend's room I will stay ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... his knee. He sat brooding: his hands upon the packets, his head bowed. One might have thought him a man overcome and dissolved by the enervating memories of passion; but in truth, he was gradually and steadily reacting against them; resuming, and this time finally, as far as Chloe Fairmile was concerned, a man's mastery of himself. He thought of her unkindness and cruelty—of the misery he had suffered—and now of the reckless caprice ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... being the elastic spirits, the simple, eager appetite, the sound sleep, of a little child. Hence, the rude huts and chalets of the peasant Priessnitz were crowded with battered dukes and princesses, and notables of every degree, who came from the hot, enervating luxury which had drained them of existence to find a keener pleasure in peasants' bread under peasants' roofs than in soft raiment and palaces. No arts of French cookery can possibly make anything taste ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... life anywhere without one. Bachelors are quickly restored by their antitoxin cheer, but there is a more dangerous bacillus hidden in this powerful living therapeutic agency which in afteryears works its damaging, enervating effect in the heart of a man. They save but to slay! Can there be no healing balm benign in a woman's tender sympathy? Cannot the microbe of remorse be isolated from this serum beautifully administered by melting eyes and graces so fair that we wonder to find them so near our bitterest experiences? ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... this end, so far as is practicable, all units are sent to the hills for the first hot weather after their arrival in India, and they are thus able to settle down to their new conditions of life without being immediately exposed to the trying and enervating environment of a plains station in the summer months. We also send as many soldiers as we can of the older residents from hot stations to summer ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... six men, etc.,—that is to say, they are lively images of shocking things. If you want a book, which is not occasionally to shock, you should not have thought of a tale which was so full of anthropophagi and wonders. I cannot alter these things without enervating the Book, and I will not alter them if the penalty should be that you and all the London booksellers should refuse it. But speaking as author to author, I must say that I think the terrible in those two passages seems to me so much to preponderate over the nauseous, as to make them rather fine ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Darien, divided, unsophisticated, and wonder-stricken, with their peoples bent their necks to the yoke and their backs to the lash almost without a struggle. Their moist tropical lands, near the coasts, were enervating, and no united organisation for defence against the enslaving intruders was possible to them. But here in the land of the Aztec federation three potent states, with vast dependencies from which countless hordes of warriors might be drawn, were ready to stand shoulder to shoulder and resist ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... reputation for beauty and fertility, which was subsequently found to be only comparative in relation to the barrenness of the rest of the Tibetan frontier. The summer months, though not hot, are relaxing and enervating. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... hotel manager interrupted a colloquy between the handsome Briton and the Doctor. "A mere syncope, my dear sir. Perhaps—even only the result of tight lacing, or inaction. Perhaps some sudden nerve crisis. These are the results of the easy luxury of an enervating high-life. All these social habits are weakening elements. Now, fortunately, your wife has a singularly strong vital nature. You may safely dismiss all your fears. Madame will be entirely herself in ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... the lodge that wintered him, The enervating fires, the blanket bed— The women's dulcet voices, for the grim Realities of ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... of June, and the weather, even at Skelwick, was hot and enervating. There was thunder about, and frequent rain. It was trying for everybody. The constant heavy showers necessitated carrying mackintoshes to school, as if it were winter; the lawn was too wet and sopping for tennis, and most outdoor plans had to be ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... all sound accountable in Edwards, who was so weak and soft; but Saurin, though vicious, was no fool, and such excessively absurd conduct may appear to you inconsistent with his character. But that is because you do not know the rapidly enervating and at the same time fascinating mastery which gambling has on the mind of one who gives way to it. It is a sort of demoniacal possession; the kind-hearted, amiable man becomes hard and selfish, the generous ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... that comparison is not a just one. In me it seems to be the body that seeks escape, if I may say so. Religion fills my soul, books and their riches occupy my mind. Why, then, do I desire some anguish which shall destroy the enervating peace ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... line of the Equator has had also something to do with staying the onward march of civilization from without. The world learned first to think only of the enervating influence of a torrid sun upon the inhabitants of the great continent, and this was ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... example, that no true happiness can be enjoyed, unless we feel for the misfortunes of others. It is the rich man's duty to relieve the distresses of the poor; and in this more solid pleasure is found, than can be expected from the enervating excesses ...
— The Looking-Glass for the Mind - or Intellectual Mirror • M. Berquin
... had discovered the only Climate in the World. It had Switzerland skinned and was not enervating, like Florida, for he had been sleeping like a Baby and felt like a 2-year-old every G.M., in spite of the fact that he could not get ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... warmly received and welcomed by our consul, Colonel Hamerton, an Irish gentleman, and one characterised by the true merry hospitality of his race. He had been a great sufferer, by the effects of the climate operating on him from too long a residence in these enervating regions; but he was, nevertheless, vivacious in temperament and full of amusing anecdotes, which kept the whole town alive. He gave us a share of his house, and what was more, made that house our homes. His generosity was boundless, and his influence so great, that he virtually ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... from disease germs which must have been plentiful among the continental savages and the man who rowed me back to England, I don't know, but that night I was seized with a violent chill, an aching head and a dry, enervating fever. I sent for the doctor and went to bed and it was a week before I was myself enough to be cognizant of what was going on ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... article, was no brain holiday. In Samoa, he enjoyed the purest of pleasures, gardening. "Nothing is so interesting," he says, in his VAILIMA LETTERS, "as weeding, clearing, and path-making. It does make you feel so well." But despite warring with weeds and forest rides, in an enervating country, he wrote persistently through the swooningly hot days ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson
... vertiginous speed and of absolute immobility succeeding each other with increasing swiftness merged at last into a bizarre state of headlong motion and profound peace. The darkness enfolded her like the enervating caress of a sombre universe. It was gentle and destructive. Its languor seduced her soul into surrender. Nothing existed and even all her memories vanished into space. She was content ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... subject: "I always find that people who read such books remember only what is bad in them." Her plain common sense hit the nail on the head, while transcendental folly hammered all around it in vain. We have spoken of Consuelo thus particularly because it is the best of its class: and of that enervating fiction we here record our deliberate opinion, that it will turn more than one foolish Miss into a strolling actress, under the insane and preposterous notion that it ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... of this fruitful land was salubrious without being enervating. The soil was capable of supporting a large population, which amounted, in the time of Herodotus, to seven millions. On the banks of the Nile were great cities, whose ruins still astonish travelers. The land, except that owned ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... not right with his fellow-men is not right and cannot be right with God. This is coming to be the clear-cut realisation of all progressive religious thought today. Since men are free from the trammels of an enervating dogma that through fear made them seek, or rather that made them contented with religion as primarily a system of rewards and punishments, they are now awakening to the fact that the logical carrying out of Jesus' teaching of the Kingdom is the establishing here on this earth of an ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... furnished the distraction which Lothair required It broke that absorbing spell of sentiment which is the delicious but enervating privilege of the youthful heart; yet, when Lothair woke in the morning from his well-earned slumbers, the charm returned, and he fell at once into a reverie of Belmont, and a speculation when he ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... there until the spring, and then removed to a house more immediately in the town, a charming old-fashioned mansion, once lived in by John de Witt, where he had a large library and every domestic comfort during the year of his sojourn. The incessant literary labor in an enervating climate with enfeebled health may have prepared the way for the first break in his constitution, which was to show itself soon after. There were many compensations in the life about him. He enjoyed the privilege of constant companionship with one of the warmest hearts and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... he never touched stimulants; he had an instinct against all things that were softening and enervating, all things that tempted and enslaved. For him was the morning-air, and the shock of cold water, and the hardness of the wild things of the open. Other people did not feel this way; other people pampered themselves and defiled themselves—and ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... capsizing the catboat or robbing a lobster-pot. He insisted we should go to the mountains, where we would meet what he always calls "our best people." In September, he explained, everybody goes to the mountains to recuperate after the enervating atmosphere of the sea-shore. To this I objected that the little sea air we had inhaled at Mrs. Shaw's basement dining-room and in the subway need cause us no anxiety. And so, along these lines, throughout ...
— Once Upon A Time • Richard Harding Davis
... archaic in flavour. The ancient heroic literature doubtless fostered his manly ideas, which, however, sprang from his own experience in life. One must, he felt, be hard on oneself, and on one's guard against the vanity of newfangled ideas and against the enervating effect of civilization. It is in the nature of things that with this farmer and father of a family of twelve, assiduity, prudence, and self- discipline should be among the highest virtues. This is notably apparent in The Old Hay (Gamla heyi), which ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... and a plain which extends from the sea-shore to the spurs of the mountains, are very fertile, and produce in great abundance all tropical plants. The climate is warm, but not enervating; the scenery is in many parts very beautiful. Thus the natives are tempted to lead an easy and idle life, exerting but little their physical and mental powers. It is, indeed, to their credit that they do not altogether abandon themselves to indolence. They are by nature constituted ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... seems to have been a hale and hearty man, in spite of the merciless inroads made upon his visage; for his cheeks are full, his hair is cropt and curly, and his shoulders have a breadth which shew that the unrolling of the HARLEIAN MSS. did not produce any enervating effluvia or mismata [Transcriber's Note: miasmata]. Our poet, Gay, in his epistle to Pope, ep. 18, thus hits off ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... One man went for the nearest woman, and the other drove to town for a doctor. They had help here almost as soon as you could. But, of course, the shock was a very dreadful thing, and the heat of the past few weeks has been enervating." ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... degenerated, by the time of the Mahomedan conquest, into mere self-torturing fakeers, like those who may be seen to this day in Hindostan. The salt lost its savour, and in due tune it was trampled under foot; and the armies of the Moslem swept out of the East a superstition which had ended by enervating instead ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... Cleigh had left in a state of growing hypnosis. She was able to act and think intelligently, but the spell lay like a fog upon her will, enervating it. She grasped the situation clearly enough; it was tremendous. She had heard of Anthony Cleigh. Who in America had not? Father and son, and they had passed each other without a nod! Had she not been a witness ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... for the venerable grandparents at home. For their sake she had conquered her dread of the lion in the pageant. Indeed she had found other lions in her path that she feared more—the glitter and gauds of her tinsel world, the enervating love of ease, the influence of sordid surroundings and ignoble ideals. But not one could withstand the simple goodness of the unsophisticated girl. They retreated before the power of her fireside traditions of right thinking ...
— Una Of The Hill Country - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... more powerful slave ants, poison or assassinate the queen, and establish themselves by sheer usurpation in the queenless nest. 'Gradually,' says Sir John Lubbock, 'even their bodily force dwindled away under the enervating influence to which they had subjected themselves, until they sank to their present degraded condition—weak in body and mind, few in numbers, and apparently nearly extinct, the miserable representatives of far superior ancestors maintaining a precarious existence as contemptible ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... came more and more frequently to see me. The thought of my physical depression, the revulsion of hopelessness over my changing lineaments made the love I bore her more painful and enervating. I tried hard to conceal my fears over my condition. But Miss Dodan had been observant. Her developing affections became daily more tender and delicate, and her solicitude evinced itself in many charming, thoughtful ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... boules of punch, (a liquor very strainge to me,)" says the Rev. Mr. Henry Teonge, in his Diary lately published. In a note on this passage, a reference is made to Fryer's Travels to the East Indies, 1672, who speaks of "that enervating liquor called Paunch, (which is Indostan for five,) from five ingredients." Made thus, it seems the medical men called it Diapente; if with four only, Diatessaron. No doubt, it was its Evangelical name that recommended it to the Rev. ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... "the warning comes rather late, and it would have answered the purpose better had I been allowed to continue in the narrow way of obscure poverty!" Now that the enervating influence of a more prosperous atmosphere had weakened his courage, and cooled the ardor of his piety, his faith began to totter like an old wall. His religious beliefs seemed to have been wrecked by the same storm which had destroyed his passionate hopes of love, and left ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... him to the palace of Lucif'era, where he encounters Sansjoy (canto 2). Duessa dresses the wounds of the Red Cross Knight, but places Sansjoy under the care of Escula'pius in the infernal regions (canto 4). The Red Cross Knight leaves the palace of Lucifera, and Duessa induces him to drink of the "Enervating Fountain;" Orgoglio then attacks him, and would have slain him if Duessa had not promised to be his bride. Having cast the Red Cross Knight into a dungeon, Orgoglio dresses his bride in most gorgeous array, puts ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... say to the Peloponnesians that the Athenians, whose maritime experience was of an older date than their own, only gave their men three obols, not so much from poverty as to prevent their seamen being corrupted by being too well off, and injuring their condition by spending money upon enervating indulgences, and also paid their crews irregularly in order to have a security against their deserting in the arrears which they would leave behind them. He also told Tissaphernes to bribe the captains and generals of the cities, and so to obtain their connivance—an expedient ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... the small measures in which retailers sell these liquors, will scarcely be perceived, and which, though it may enrich the government, will not impoverish the people, except by destroying their health, and enervating their limbs. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... soon as a man realises that he is primarily a spirit, having a body as an instrument through which to play, his point of view is entirely altered. The pursuit of mere physical enjoyment and luxury is recognised as having an enervating and blunting effect upon the finer spiritual faculties: it puts the instrument out of tune and spoils its tone. Money is seen as somewhat of a snare and a delusion, when valued for its own sake. The object of life is recognised as spiritual growth, and in that growth happiness is found. Quite ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... with a start that all but spilled the ink and cried in a voice heavily coloured with the enervating brogue ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... enterprise, except through beggary of the whites. As a class, the blacks are indolent, improvident, servile and licentious; and their inveterate habit of appealing to white benevolence or compassion whenever they realize a want or encounter a difficulty, is eminently baneful and enervating. If they could never more obtain a dollar until they shall have earned it, many of them would suffer, and some perhaps starve; but, on the whole, they would do better and improve faster than may ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... particularly those of Voltaire, who was his favorite among writers. This predilection was not likely to overcome the fierce temper of the king, who discovered his pursuits and flogged him unmercifully, thinking to cane all love for such enervating literature, as he deemed it, out of the boy's mind. In this he failed. Germany in that day had little that deserved the name of literature, and the expanding intellect of the active-minded youth turned irresistibly towards the tabooed ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... over their heads, and the Thermidorean weather which came in its wake seemed an effort on the part of Nature to match the state of hearts at Talbothays Dairy. The air of the place, so fresh in the spring and early summer, was stagnant and enervating now. Its heavy scents weighed upon them, and at mid-day the landscape seemed lying in a swoon. Ethiopic scorchings browned the upper slopes of the pastures, but there was still bright green herbage here where the watercourses purled. And as Clare was oppressed by the ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... he could not forget. So there he sat himself down under the garden wall, soothed by the cool night, and the holy silence, and the rich perfume of the thousand foreign flowers which filled the air with enervating balm. There he sat and watched, and watched, and watched in vain for some glimpse of his one object. Which of the houses was hers? Which was the window of her chamber! Did it look into the street? What business had his fancy with woman's chambers?.... But that one ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... thing there can be no doubt—it had a most salutary effect. It held up the mirror to weaknesses and deficiencies which, if Tennyson did not care to acknowledge to others, he must certainly have acknowledged to himself. It roused him and put him on his mettle. It was a wholesome antidote to the enervating flattery of coteries and "apostles" who were certainly talking a great deal of nonsense about him, as Arthur Hallam's essay in the 'Englishman' shows. During the next nine years he published nothing, with ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... about a subject, or to present what is said in such a way that the student thinks there is nothing more to be said, is to dwarf and stultify the mind. The inclination of most students is to depend upon the teacher with a helplessness that is as enervating as it is pitiable. Too many teachers, flattered by this attitude or possessed of a sentimental sympathy, encourage it. Thought, discretion, and courage are required to put a student on his own resources and compel him to stay there ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... Stroll out on to cliff. Beautiful air, not the least enervating. On the contrary, refreshing. Returning later on to dress, I see the salle a manger full to overflowing. The Medicals are all feeding well and wisely, as Medicals ought to do. A pleasant company. Only a few of the younger and idler spirits ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 8, 1891 • Various
... thousand people owned the whole civilized world, and their fortunes were spent in demoralizing it. What if their palaces were grand, and their villas beautiful, and their dresses magnificent, and their furniture costly, if their lives were spent in ignoble and enervating pleasures, as is generally admitted. There was a low religious life, almost no religion at all, and what there was was degrading by its superstition. Everywhere were seen the rites of magical incantations, the pretended virtue of amulets ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... surprised by gentlemen in interesting positions. Another lady, lying in a large bed, was teasing with her foot a little dog, lost in the sheets. One drawing showed four feet, bodies concealed behind a curtain. The large room, surrounded by soft couches, was entirely impregnated with that enervating and insipid odor which I had already noticed. There seemed to be something suspicious about the walls, the hangings, ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... year after his return home Mrs. Whitford saw nothing in her son to awaken uneasiness. His cultivated tastes and love of intellectual things held him above the enervating influences of the social life into which he was becoming more and more drawn. Her first feeling of uneasiness came when, at a large party given by one of her most intimate friends, she heard his ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... delightful spot;—but Cannes is also a place of languor and sloth, a lavender-water country. If you have the gout, if you are old and rich, if you have delicate lungs, go to Cannes, your life will be agreeable but enervating. ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... could give her son those advantages which he never could have in a heathen land. To adopt either the first or the last of these courses, she was urged by her natural disposition, which was singularly modest and retiring, her feeble health, the enervating influence of the climate, and above all by the strong tendency to self-indulgence which always accompanies a heart-rending sorrow. "But oh," she says in a letter to a friend, "these poor, inquiring and Christian Karens, and the school-boys, and the Burmese Christians" ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... led the enervating life of a fashionable swell—that was the word of the time—and had knocked about race-course stables from the age of nineteen to twenty-five. In circumstances like these, he could not forget that Enguerrand de Hardimont died of the plague ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... sweetness and constancy, for from the middle of March to mid-April there had been a series of days from which winter had definitely departed. In most years April produces two or three west-wind days of enervating and languorous heat, but then recollects itself and peppers the confiding Englishman with hail and snow, blown as out of a pea-shooter from the northeast, just to remind him that if he thinks that summer is going to begin just yet he is woefully mistaken. But this year the succession ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... the sublime hallelujah of the new era. First of all comes the chant of the pilgrims, the religious strain, calm, deep and slowly throbbing; then the voices of the sirens gradually drown it; the voluptuous pleasures of Venus, full of enervating delight and languor, grow more and more imperious and disorderly; and soon the sacred air gradually returns, like the aspiring voice of space, and seizes hold of all other strains and blends them in one supreme harmony, to waft them away on ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... the course of twelve years' wanderings, tried most of the South and East Coast watering-places, and found most of them a-wanting. If the atmosphere was bracing, the beach was shingle. If the beach was sandy, the atmosphere was enervating. ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... in the neighbourhood, had introduced a collection of octogenarian aunts to his household, and, when I was performing my afternoon beat, I was just in time to see the butcher's boy, assisted by the gardener, delivering what looked to be a baron of beef at Sir Meesly's back door. It was an enervating and disgusting spectacle, well calculated to upset the moral of the steadiest special in the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 11, 1917 • Various
... our modern world is concerned. We must seek to develop the power of appreciating that which is noble and beautiful primarily because the highest efficiency can be secured only by those who use their time in occupations which are truly recreative and not enervating. ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... with the overpowering heat. Half the distance to Amritza is hardly covered, and the riding time scarcely two hours, yet it finds me reclining beneath the shade of a roadside tree more used up than five times the distance would warrant in a less enervating climate. The greensward around me as I recline in the shade is teeming with busy insects, and the trees are swarming with the beautiful winged life of the tropical air. Flocks of paroquets with most gorgeous plumage—blue, red, green, gold, and every conceivable hue—flit hither and thither, or sweep ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... a very remarkable feature in the climate of this settlement. They are excessively violent, sometimes shaking the very house; hot, dry, from having already poured out their moisture, and enervating like the Italian sirocco. The fact seems to be, that the nor'-west winds come heated from the tropics, and charged with moisture from the ocean, and this is precipitated by the ice-fields of the mountains ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... employed has been of a quality unsuitable for such purposes. Besides the healthful and bracing temperature of this locality, when compared with Ohio and Pennsylvania, whose summers are found to be exceedingly enervating, especially to those employed in the manufacture of iron, affords advantages, and offers inducements which cannot be overlooked, since in the physical strength and comfort of the workmen, is involved the all-important question of economy. ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... clear vision of an unspoiled mind he had penetrated to the rotten core of the heart of the thing—the cowardly greed for peace and ease and the safe-guarding of property rights. That the fine things of life—art, music and literature—had thriven upon such enervating ideals he strenuously denied, insisting, rather, that they had endured in ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... fight ennui, and the despondency it brings with it, by taking the squadron about, showing fresh ground to my young fellows, and taking them into ports where I shall be able to send them ashore to amuse themselves, and thus break the enervating monotony of life on ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... more or less helpless family. As the season advances the vegetation increases and the fawn begins to eat grass. When the summer heat commences the little streams begin to dry up, and the animal once more has difficulty in supporting life because of the enervating heat, the effect of drought on the vegetation, and the distance which has to be traveled to get water; therefore, fully ten months in each year the deer has all he can do to live without extra exertion incident to rutting. Soon after the autumn rains commence ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... "He's had his turn. I must have mine now. I haven't had a day off from being a wife for ever so long. And it's a little enervating, you know. It spoils ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... over it. From the lofty mountains in the centre numerous rivers and streams flow down, and thoroughly irrigate the greater part of this lovely island: indeed, it may well be looked on as the Paradise of the East; for though, in the low country, the climate is relaxing and enervating to European constitutions, in the higher regions the air is bracing and exhilarating in ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... a servile mass of matter—and, Knowing such things, aspiring to such things, And science still beyond them, were chained down To the most gross and petty paltry wants, All foul and fulsome—and the very best Of thine enjoyments a sweet degradation, A most enervating and filthy cheat To lure thee on to the renewal of Fresh souls and bodies[112], all foredoomed to be As frail, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... self-defense they lost all consideration. The castles of the nobles were but the monuments of past taxation and servitude. With yells of hatred the infuriated populace razed them to the ground. The palaces of the kings, where, for uncounted centuries, dissolute monarchs had reveled in enervating and heaven-forbidden pleasures, were but national badges of the bondage of the people. The indignant throng swept through them, like a Mississippi inundation, leaving upon marble floors, and cartooned walls and ceilings, the impress of their rage. At one bound France ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... second prophet of Amon, alone seemed untouched alike by sorrow, anxiety, or the enervating atmosphere of the day; he greeted the warrior in the ante-room as vigorously and cheerily as ever, and assured him—though in the lowest whisper—that no one thought of holding him responsible for the misdeeds of his people. But when Hosea ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... culpable neglect of the child due not to poverty, but to the fact that the money which should go to the proper nutrition of the child is squandered in drink, or on other enervating pleasures, are therefore cases in which recourse must be had to measures which enforce upon the parent the obligation to feed and clothe his children. The really difficult question is as to the best means ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... unrest realized that it was just five months since he and Rosalind had met. Yet it was already hard for him to visualize the heart-whole boy who had stepped off the transport, passionately desiring the adventure of life. One night while the heat, overpowering and enervating, poured into the windows of his room he struggled for several hours in a vague effort to immortalize ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... girl of my age in the neighborhood, while really laying a foundation for many years of uninterrupted health, and a constitution to defy the change of climate for which I was destined; while it won me from the sickening, enervating habit of sedentary enjoyment over the pages of a book, which, added to the necessary studies and occupations, was relaxing alike the tone of the bodily and mental frame. From the polluted works of man, I was drawn to the glorious works of God; and never ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... in battle; but it is very remarkable how quickly one changes in this world. I have had some success in my work, and the higher I go, the better work I feel I can do in a quiet place and among less enervating surroundings. John and I were in college together, roommates, and no doubt he has told you that we graduated with the same class. He has found his location here and I would particularly enjoy having a home near him. They tell me there are well-trained servants to ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... individual improvement. It is none the less true that any success in the achievement of the national purpose will contribute positively to the liberation of the individual, both by diminishing his temptations, improving his opportunities, and by enveloping him in an invigorating rather than an enervating moral ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... well-developed women, and that counts a good deal in the race for beauty. If the five-mile walk is too exhausting, then take a longer time getting to the point, when it will be exhilarating instead of enervating. ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... moral clouds that have been hanging over the country for a period far beyond the memory of man! how black that dismal canopy which is only lit by fires that carry and shed around them disease, famine, crime, madness, bloodshed, and death. How hot, sultry, and enervating to the whole constitution of man, physically and mentally, is the atmosphere we have been breathing so long! The miasma of the swamp, the simoom of the desert, the merciless sirocco, are healthful when compared ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... slow, enervating, dull hours spent in idle and diffuse conversation in the dimly lighted verandah! Oh, the horrid peppered jam in the microscopic pots! In the middle of the town, enclosed by four walls, is this park of five yards square, with little lakes, little ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... were doing, want of continuity and impatience of results. Many organisations, after winning some advantages,—over the railroads for instance,—fell into abeyance or even out of existence; others lapsed under the enervating influence of a little temporary prosperity, such as a few years of better prices. The truth is, American farmers have had the will to organise, but they have ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... poor and enervating," Littimer said, cynically. "In other words, I suppose you have traced Rawlins ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... caterpillar tank charging in battle; but it is very remarkable how quickly one changes in this world. I have had some success in my work, and the higher I go, the better work I feel I can do in a quiet place and among less enervating surroundings. John and I were in college together, roommates, and no doubt he has told you that we graduated with the same class. He has found his location here and I would particularly enjoy having a home near him. They tell me there are well-trained servants ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... will doubtless apply to about one half of Illinois. This climate also is subject to sudden changes from heat to cold; from wet to dry, especially from November to May. The heat of the summer below the 40 deg. of latitude is more enervating, and the system becomes more easily debilitated than in the bracing atmosphere ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... this does look jolly!" cried the Inspector as he entered. "Cameron, you lucky dog, do you really imagine you know how jolly well off you are, coddled thus in the lap of comfort and surrounded with all the enervating luxuries of an effete and forgotten civilization? Come now, own up, you are beginning to take this thing ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... (March to June); dry season (June to October); persistent high temperatures and humidity; particularly enervating climate ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... his first missionaries, he sent them two by two. The real trial of the missionary is more mental than physical. He greatly needs companionship. Silence in the midst of the beating of heathen tom-toms becomes enervating and appalling; it may make a man insane. We are learning the value of team-work in missions. What one man alone could never accomplish, he can do with the help of others. The American Board in its mission at Madura, India, has acted upon this principle, and the result is seen in an aggregate ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... the immigrant, who thought he had left England forever, went home in a little while and is living there now in inglorious ease and somewhat enervating luxury, while Mr. Heathcote, who thought that he was coming out for a short visit and couldn't possibly live out of England, is already more than half an American, a successful, practical farmer, and, it may ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... Amon, alone seemed untouched alike by sorrow, anxiety, or the enervating atmosphere of the day; he greeted the warrior in the ante-room as vigorously and cheerily as ever, and assured him—though in the lowest whisper—that no one thought of holding him responsible for the misdeeds of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... blow with the hand that held the cue, and then with a great swing of his right arm brought his fist down on Lawson's ear. Lawson was four inches shorter than the American and he was slightly built, frail and weakened not only by illness and the enervating tropics, but by drink. He fell like a log and lay half dazed at the foot of the bar. Miller took off his spectacles and wiped them ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... eager appetite, the sound sleep, of a little child. Hence, the rude huts and chalets of the peasant Priessnitz were crowded with battered dukes and princesses, and notables of every degree, who came from the hot, enervating luxury which had drained them of existence to find a keener pleasure in peasants' bread under peasants' roofs than in soft raiment and palaces. No arts of French cookery can possibly make anything taste so well to a feeble ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... said Audrey. "He's had his turn. I must have mine now. I haven't had a day off from being a wife for ever so long. And it's a little enervating, you know. It spoils you ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... appears to be such as, when subdivided by the small measures in which retailers sell these liquors, will scarcely be perceived, and which, though it may enrich the government, will not impoverish the people, except by destroying their health, and enervating their limbs. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... plumage, glittering with purple and azure, and mingled their warbling with the harmony of a world teeming with life and motion. *f Underneath this brilliant exterior death was concealed. But the air of these climates had so enervating an influence that man, absorbed by present enjoyment, was rendered regardless ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... impenetrable beauty that lay deep down with hidden face. And the lights dispersed among them, gaining significance by their solitude, seemed to summon adventurous or romantic spirits to come to them by secret paths and learn their revelation. Over the sea lay a delicate warmth, not tropical, not enervating, but softly inspiring. And beyond the circling lamps of Naples Vesuvius lit up the firmament with a torrent of rose-colored fire that glowed and died, and glowed again, ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... deplore, if we think fit, as Erasmus deplored in the case of Luther, that the great change was not allowed to work itself out slowly, calmly, and without violence and disruption. These graceful regrets are powerless, and on the whole they are very enervating. Let us make our account with the actual, rather than seek excuses for self-indulgence in pensive preference of something that might have been. Practically in these great circles of affairs, what only might have been is as though it could not be; and to know this may well suffice ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... be a good wife or mother, the greater part of whose time is employed to guard against or endure sickness; nor can it be expected, that a woman will resolutely endeavour to strengthen her constitution and abstain from enervating indulgences, if artificial notions of beauty, and false descriptions of sensibility, have been early entangled with her motives of action. Most men are sometimes obliged to bear with bodily inconveniences, and to endure, occasionally, the inclemency of the elements; but genteel ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... For these twin boons we stand, Partaking thrice per diem Of their fulness out of hand; No enervating fashion Shall cheat us of our right To gratify our passion With a mouthful at a bite! We'll cut it square or bias, Or any way we please, And faith shall justify us When we carve our ...
— A Little Book of Western Verse • Eugene Field
... I must confess there seems to be little in life anywhere without one. Bachelors are quickly restored by their antitoxin cheer, but there is a more dangerous bacillus hidden in this powerful living therapeutic agency which in afteryears works its damaging, enervating effect in the heart of a man. They save but to slay! Can there be no healing balm benign in a woman's tender sympathy? Cannot the microbe of remorse be isolated from this serum beautifully administered by melting eyes and graces so fair ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... causes rickets, and makes him crooked. A horse-hair mattress is the best for a child to lie on. The pillow, too, should be made of horse-hair. A feather pillow often causes the bead to be bathed in perspiration, thus enervating the child, and making him liable to catch cold. If he be at all rickety, if he be weak in the neck, if he be inclined to stoop, or if he be at all crooked, let him, by all means, lie without ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... Europe falling in with the outbreak of the war, he hastened to offer his voluntary services to the army as surgeon. Owing to temperate habits and a strong physique, he had kept in good health, and no one would have dreamed that this strong, fifty-year-old man had passed so many years in an enervating tropical climate. The only signs it had left on his face were the dark, yellowish color of his skin, and the habit of keeping the eyes half-closed. The long years in India had also made a deep impression on his character, and many things about him would have appeared ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... this place is enervating,' replied Michael, jumping up from the parapet. 'I know people do not generally consider moorland air enervating; but mine is a peculiar constitution, and needs more bracing than other men's. Shall ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... reality was neither due to love of his personality nor any other dynastic cause, but to the purely egotistical wish not to get into disfavour themselves or expose themselves to unpleasantness; this unwholesome state must in the long run act on mind and body as an enervating poison. I readily believe that the Emperor William, unaccustomed to so great an extent to all criticism, did not make it easy for those about him to be open and frank. It was, nevertheless, true that the enervating atmosphere by which he was surrounded was the ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... way the Burmese are pretty much what their country has made them. The land is so very fertile that almost anything will grow there, and Nature provides food for the people with the least possible effort on their own part. The climate is also damp, warm, and enervating, so that one would not expect to find among its inhabitants much energy or decision of character. Their beautiful religion also makes them kind and gentle, and their isolation, which, as I have pointed out, separates them from the neighbouring ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly
... high-spirited dame of those days, glowing with health and exercise, freshened by every breeze that blows, seated loftily and gracefully on her saddle, with plume on head, and hawk on hand, and her descendant of the present day, the pale victim of routs and ball-rooms, sunk languidly in one corner of an enervating carriage." ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... northward bound for Kingston. Once again he beheld a tropical sun shimmer on hot brass-work and pitch boil up between bone-white deck-boards sluiced and resluiced by a half-naked crew. Once again he had to face an enervating equatorial heat that vitiated both mind and body. But he neither fretted nor complained. Some fixed inner purpose seemed to sustain him through every discomfort. Deep in that soul, merely filmed with its fixed equatorial calm, burned some dormant and crusader-like propulsion. And ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... a subject, or to present what is said in such a way that the student thinks there is nothing more to be said, is to dwarf and stultify the mind. The inclination of most students is to depend upon the teacher with a helplessness that is as enervating as it is pitiable. Too many teachers, flattered by this attitude or possessed of a sentimental sympathy, encourage it. Thought, discretion, and courage are required to put a student on his own resources and compel him to stay there until he ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... in a simple parable, what I think this war is doing for us? I know a valley in North Wales, between the mountains and the sea—a beautiful valley, snug, comfortable, sheltered by the mountains from all the bitter blasts. It was very enervating, and I remember how the boys were in the habit of climbing the hills above the village to have a glimpse of the great mountains in the distance, and to be stimulated and freshened by the breezes which, came from ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... comrade at last. Strange to say, the lounging impassive dandies who regard the universe with a yawn, and who sneer at the very notion of friendship, develop the kindly and manly virtues when they are removed from the enervating atmosphere of Society and forced to lead a hard life. A man to whom emotion, passion, self-sacrifice, are things to be mentioned with a curl of the lip, departs on a campaign, and amid squalor, peril, and grim horrors he becomes totally unselfish. Men ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... knee. He sat brooding: his hands upon the packets, his head bowed. One might have thought him a man overcome and dissolved by the enervating memories of passion; but in truth, he was gradually and steadily reacting against them; resuming, and this time finally, as far as Chloe Fairmile was concerned, a man's mastery of himself. He thought of her unkindness and cruelty—of the misery he had suffered—and now of the reckless ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... four hours already had he wandered about. He felt exhausted. He had not slept all night, nor eaten all day, but had struggled with the most enervating ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... is content with his own lot, and would not be free if he could, if any such there be, only gives evidence of the depth of his degradation; so the woman who is satisfied with her inferior condition, avering that she has all the rights she wants, does but exhibit the enervating effects of the wrongs to which ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... be much encouraged in developing feelings so dangerous to the real culture of man. At the risk of being hard and coarse, it will seem preferable to dispense with this dissolving force of the beautiful rather than see human nature a prey to its enervating influence, notwithstanding all its refining advantages. However, experience is perhaps not the proper tribunal at which to decide such a question; before giving so much weight to its testimony, it would be well to inquire ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... quality of the air seemed to change, too, rendering it difficult to breathe, so that we found ourselves gasping for breath at frequent intervals, while perspiration poured from us in streams that we could distinctly feel trickling down our bodies and limbs. So enervating were the conditions that none of us cared to make the slightest unnecessary movement; yet the steady decline of the mercury was a warning that I dared not ignore. Accordingly, at eight bells in the afternoon watch, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... even the most active mind; the deep-drawn sighs it will elicit; and if there be one melancholy feeling which presses on the heart more heavily than another, it is the ample developement which it enjoys during the prevalence of this enervating breeze. It seldom, however, blows with force; it is rather an exhalation than a wind. It scarcely moves the leaves around the traveller, but it sinks heavily and damply in his heart. A stranger is at first unaware of the cause of the mental misery he endures; his temper sours ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction - Vol. X, No. 289., Saturday, December 22, 1827 • Various
... advantages to favorites, and which, while encouraging our intercourse and trade with other nations, recognizes the fact that American self-reliance, thrift, and ingenuity can build up our country's industries and develop its resources more surely than enervating paternalism. ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... over her; his hands touched her face, her cheeks, her adorable little chin; her lips pressed against his fingers. She breathed warmly on his forehead and on his eyelids, while the odor of her hair, a charming feminine perfume, sweet, heavy, enervating, came to his nostrils, so penetrating, so delicious, that his flesh pricked and tingled with it; a veritable sensation of faintness passed over this huge, callous fellow, with his enormous bones and corded muscles. He drew a short breath through his nose; his jaws ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... of love, the cultivated kind that bores into a woman's heart through silk and laces in a hot-house atmosphere and brings about all kinds of enervating reactions until operated upon by marriage; the other kind a field woman breathes into her lungs and it gets into her circulation and starts up the most awful and productive activity. I've had both kinds. I moped for months over Gale Beacon, and made ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... felt the enervating influences let loose on her, in her lonely position, by her new train of thought. Little by little her heart began to sink under the stealthy chill of superstitious dread. Vaguely horrible presentiments throbbed ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... it would seem that the hope was vain, the promise illusive. When the terrace was reached it appeared not only to have caught and gathered all the heat of the valley below, but to have evolved a fire of its own from some hidden crater-like source unknown. Nevertheless, instead of prostrating and enervating man and beast, it was said to have induced the wildest exaltation. The heated air was filled and stifling with resinous exhalations. The delirious spices of balm, bay, spruce, juniper, yerba buena, wild syringa, and ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... drawing upon classic models for a portion of their beautiful figures and allegories. Unhappily, our desire to know them thoroughly and truly has only been awakened since their minds have been corrupted, and the strong traits of their character blunted by a participation in our enervating and demoralising comforts! They can now be studied only in the reports made of them by ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... the most virtuous and flourishing, other things being equal, in the days of their simplicity in regard to food, drink, etc.; and if we can, in every instance, connect the decline of a nation with the period of their departure, as a nation, into the maze of luxurious and enervating habits; and if this doctrine is, as a general rule, obviously applicable to smaller classes of men, down to single families, then is the argument we derive from it in its nature a moral one. Whatever really tends, ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... rather enervating, Hawthorne moved in November, 1851, to a temporary residence in West Newton, where he wrote "The Blithedale Romance," which was published in 1852. This novel, founded on his Brook Farm experience, is a study ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... has been required and what effort has been expended to complete the long and patient inquiries which he had hitherto accomplished; obliged, as he was, to allow himself to be interrupted at any moment, and to postpone his observations often at the most interesting moment, in order to undertake some enervating labour, or the disagreeable and mechanical duties of his profession. Remember that his first labours already dated from twenty-five years earlier, and at the moment when we observe him in his solitude at Srignan he had only just painfully gathered together the material for his first ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... bright spring day, of enervating softness; a fosie day—a day when the pores of everything seemed opened. People's brains felt pulpy, and they sniffed as with winter's colds. Peter Riney was opening a pit of potatoes in the big garden, shovelling aside the foot-deep mould, and tearing off the inner covering of ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... said nothing. He knew that the enervating climate of the Southern river city would never do for his wife. Change of climate might benefit her greatly; the doctors had all said so of ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... who is worshipped by happy France, are all easy reading to our bore's brother. And our bore is so provokingly self-denying about him! 'I don't pretend to more than a very general knowledge of these subjects myself,' says he, after enervating the intellects of several strong men, 'but these are my brother's opinions, and I believe he is known to ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... sum supplied to an individual which will so far satisfy him or her as to enable them to live without exertion may absolutely parasitise them; while vast wealth unhealthy as its effects generally tend to be) may, upon certain rare and noble natures, exert hardly any enervating or deleterious influence. An amusing illustration of the different points at which enervation is reached by different females came under our own observation. The wife of an American millionaire was visited by a woman, the daughter and also ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... alight upon the grave of Beatrice, the spark of ideal passion which has, in the noblest of our literature, made the desire of man for woman and of woman for man burn clear towards heaven, leaving behind the noisome ashes and soul-enervating ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... I have experienced this odor, but never could get used to it; the enervating sensation was always present. It made me hate war and wonder why such things were countenanced by civilisation, and all the spice and glory of the conflict would disappear, leaving the grim reality. But after leaving the spot and filling your ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey
... most ennobling ideas. Plato only recognizes the identity of pleasure and good when the pleasure is of the higher kind. He is the enemy of 'songs without words,' which he supposes to have some confusing or enervating effect on the mind of the hearer; and he is also opposed to the modern degeneracy of the drama, which he would probably have illustrated, like Aristophanes, from Euripides and Agathon. From this passage may be gathered a more perfect conception of art than ...
— Laws • Plato
... distance the sound of some rustic pipe (more common at that day than at this), mingled now and then with the bells of the lazy mules, broke the voluptuous silence,—the silence of declining noon on the shores of Naples; never, till you have enjoyed it, never, till you have felt its enervating but delicious charm, believe that you can comprehend all the meaning of the Dolce far niente (The pleasure of doing nothing.); and when that luxury has been known, when you have breathed that atmosphere of fairy-land, ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... ever attains to national consciousness without over-rating itself. The Germans are always in danger of enervating their nationality through possessing too little of this rugged pride.—H. v. TREITSCHKE, ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... voyager in the succession of discoverers: he had been brought up in the household of the King of Portugal, but nourished an ardent spirit of enterprise and thirst for glory, despite the enervating influences of a court. He sailed early in the year 1500, and pursued the track of John Cabot as far as the northern point of Newfoundland; to him is due the discovery of the Gulf of St. Lawrence,[56] and ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... fell under my observation not only produced such misery as to entail a loss of rest and of appetite, but even induced such a disturbance of assimilation and nutrition that the resulting hypochondriacal condition that developed from these enervating causes ran the patient into a low condition, ending in complete prostration of all vital powers and death, without the intervention of any other disease. The subject was a timid, retiring man of about fifty-five years, and this was the first and only time that the prepuce had ever caused ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... advisedly, because I am sure that if some music is good for man and elevates him, other melodies are equally bad and enervating. An experience far wider than any we yet possess is necessary to enable us to say how far this influence is capable of extension. How far, that is, the mind may be directed on the one hand to ascetic abnegation by the systematic use of certain music, ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... The military preparations were, however, continued. Vigorous measures were taken to restore the discipline of the Syrian legions, which had suffered through the long tranquillity of the East and the enervating influence of the climate. With the spring Trajan commenced his march. Ascending the Euphrates, to Samosata, and receiving as he advanced the submission of various semi-independent dynasts and princes, he took possession of Satala and Elegeia, Armenian ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... the two young men left. There was breakfast almost before it was light, and everybody got up to see them off. It was a most depressing morning. March had gone out like an idiotic lamb, and April came in in sapping rain and enervating mist. Ceaselessly the rain beat against the window-glass, and the wind had a desolate echo that sounded far more ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... clouds that have been hanging over the country for a period far beyond the memory of man! how black that dismal canopy which is only lit by fires that carry and shed around them disease, famine, crime, madness, bloodshed, and death. How hot, sultry, and enervating to the whole constitution of man, physically and mentally, is the atmosphere we have been breathing so long! The miasma of the swamp, the simoom of the desert, the merciless sirocco, are healthful when compared to such an atmosphere. And, hark! what formidable ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... it was a dark, quiet, nameless feeling, in no way partaking of the violence and irritation which I had before experienced. Was it that I had become more inured to adversity, more philosophical, more of a Christian? Or was it really that the extremely enervating heat of my dungeon had so prostrated my powers that I could no longer feel the pangs of excessive grief. Ah, no! for I can well recollect that I then felt it to my inmost soul; and, perhaps, more intensely from the want both of will ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... on), and sat there doing nothing in the middle of flowers, and sea breezes, and beautiful views. To comprehend all the luxury of the bel far niente one must come to Naples, where idleness loses half its evil by losing all its enervating qualities; there is something in the air so elastic that I have never been at any place where I have felt as if I could make exertions so easily as here, and yet it is a great pleasure to sit and look at the Bay, the mountains, the islands, and the town, and watch its amusing inhabitants. At least ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... Africa is a fresher field for the scribbling tourist, than most other parts of the world. Few visit it, unless driven by stern necessity; and still fewer are disposed to struggle against the enervating influence of the climate, and keep up even so much of intellectual activity as may suffice to fill a diurnal page of Journal or Commonplace Book. In his descriptions of the settlements of the various nations of Europe, along that coast, ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... Voltaire, who was his favorite among writers. This predilection was not likely to overcome the fierce temper of the king, who discovered his pursuits and flogged him unmercifully, thinking to cane all love for such enervating literature, as he deemed it, out of the boy's mind. In this he failed. Germany in that day had little that deserved the name of literature, and the expanding intellect of the active-minded youth turned irresistibly towards the ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... had branded himself inwardly as a liar and hypocrite when he had sworn his marriage vows 'before God,' whereas if he truly believed in God, such vows taken untruthfully were mere blasphemy;—and now she herself, a young thing tenderly brought up like a tropical flower in the enervating hot-house atmosphere of Court life, yet had such a pure, deep consciousness of God in her, that she actually could not pray with the slightest blur of a secret on her soul! ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... union with its Creator, and its perfectibility of human institutions and social conditions in this life under the leavening influence of Christian principle, although Mr. Mill may stigmatize them as grandiose and enervating dreams, to his beggarly improved substitute, which appeals neither to our common sense nor to our moral intuitions. Taking his own criterion, utility, as the test of truth, his religion of humanity fails to establish itself, for it postpones ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... sat Courtlandt could see down the main thoroughfare of the pretty village. There were other streets, to be sure, but courtesy and good nature alone permitted this misapplication of title: they were merely a series of torturous enervating stairways of stone, up and down which noisy wooden sandals clattered all the day long. Over the entrances to the shops the proprietors were dropping the white and brown awnings for the day. Very few people shopped ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... friend," said Moras with emotion, "you see my confidence in you! I have revealed to you weaknesses of which I am ashamed. Ah! why have I ever known any other feeling than that of friendship! Friendship alone returns as much as it receives; it fortifies instead of enervating; it is the only passion worthy of a man. Never forsake me, my friend; you will console ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... Virginia southward were different. Here was an unlimited supply of fertile lands which lent themselves readily to the unskillful and exhausting methods of slave labor. Here too was a warm climate congenial to the Negro, though enervating and often unhealthful for the white. The staples, such as the sugar cane, rice and later the cotton plant, were such as the unscientific slave labor might easily cultivate. All the conditions of profitable slave labor were present, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... part of the bowels. Diseases of this part of the bowels are liable to come at any time of the year; but in hot weather the tendency to fermentation is much greater than at other times of the year, and bodily resistance is reduced because of the enervating influence of the heat, of too long working hours, and of too short nights for sleep, and of the ever-present, omnipotent and omnivorous appetite which is taking into the stomach and bowels food beyond the digestive capacity both in quantity and quality; all these ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.
... interesting buildings and its pure exhilarating air, Ravello would seem to be an ideal spot wherein to linger, and it affords a most agreeable change in the later Spring months from the close atmosphere and enervating heat of Amalfi or the coast towns. Perched on this breezy hill-top, from the terrace of the hotel can be observed the whole circuit of the Bay of Salerno, whilst behind to the north and east the ring of enclosing mountains rises sharp and distinct ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... he became a more idle man. The rich enervating climate began to tell upon his mind, as it did upon Lucia's health. He missed that perpetual spur of nervous excitement, change of society, influx of ever-fresh objects, which makes London, after all, the best place in the world for hard working; and which makes even a walk along ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... Covey's had been of service to me. The things that would have seemed very hard, had I gone direct to Mr. Freeland's, from the home of Master Thomas, were now (after the hardships at Covey's) "trifles light as air." I was still a field hand, and had come to prefer the severe labor of the field, to the enervating duties of a house servant. I had become large and strong; and had begun to take pride in the fact, that I could do as much hard work as some of the older men. There is much rivalry among slaves, at times, as to which can do the most work, and ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... was anxious that the intellectual powers of the king should not be developed, for the cardinal desired to grasp the reins of government with his own hands. To do this, it was necessary that the king should be kept ignorant, and should be incited only to enervating indulgence. ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... Cuba, and of Darien, divided, unsophisticated, and wonder-stricken, with their peoples bent their necks to the yoke and their backs to the lash almost without a struggle. Their moist tropical lands, near the coasts, were enervating, and no united organisation for defence against the enslaving intruders was possible to them. But here in the land of the Aztec federation three potent states, with vast dependencies from which countless hordes of warriors might be drawn, ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... had learned how enervating were reminiscences of home; he resolutely put away the remembrance from him now, and walked on to chop the blaze on the next tree. Breast-high the mark was cut, and at one blaze another could ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... Arizona the heat, although sometimes great, is never oppressive or debilitating. It has its lazy people like any other country and for the same reason that there are always some who were born tired and never outgrow the tired feeling, but Arizona climate is more bracing than enervating. ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... renewed force for the future. The love of those we have lost may enable us to love better those who remain, and those who are to come. So used, it is an infinitely precious possession, and to be cherished with all our hearts. As it leads to vain regrets, it is at best an enervating enjoyment, and a needless pain. The figments of theology are a consecration of our delusive dreams; the teaching of the new faith should be the utilization of every emotion to the bettering of the world ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... 1825.—On the 17th of August next I shall be sixty-four years of age; and though I feel the enervating influence of the climate, and have lost something of my bodily activity, I labour as closely, and perhaps more so than I have ever done before. My Bengali Dictionary is finished at press. I intend to send you a copy of it by first opportunity, which I request you to accept as a token ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... on the South Carolina coast, about midway between Charleston and Savannah. No more beautiful region is to be found in the world. Far enough south to escape the rigors of the northern winters, and far enough north to be free from the enervating heat of the tropics; honeycombed by broad, salt-water lagoons, giving moisture and mildness to the air,—the country about Port Royal is like a great garden; and even to-day, ravaged though it was by ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... effort, she was able to give her suggestion its proper value. But somehow, for the rest of the ride, it seemed to her that the sun was less bright, the wind even had become chilly, and altogether there was a curious, enervating world-weariness hanging over everything. ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... himself and with the world, he was free from the sadness, the misgivings, and the enervating doubts which overrun so many morbid minds,—symptoms of moral weakness, and of the want of healthy occupation. Hence lady poets, more than all others, love to indulge in these feeble repinings, and take the privilege ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... open, grassy, sun-bathed plain, the long rich grass billowing to the sweep of a fresh breeze, and its wide stretches of level surface darkened here and there with the rich purple shadows of slow-moving clouds, promising a welcome change from the close, suffocating, enervating, insect-haunted atmosphere of the gorge. And as a background to this breezy, sunlit scene, there towered high into the air, at a distance of some ten miles, a magnificent sweep of lofty mountains, rugged and broken of outline, tree-clad to their ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... far as is practicable, all units are sent to the hills for the first hot weather after their arrival in India, and they are thus able to settle down to their new conditions of life without being immediately exposed to the trying and enervating environment of a plains station in the summer months. We also send as many soldiers as we can of the older residents from hot stations ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... "Enervating effect this voyage seems to be having upon you all," Quest grumbled. "Even Harris there looks far too well contented ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the railing of the porch, and watched for the coming of Malcom. She sighed as she looked at the bare brown earth of the large space that she purposed for strawberries, and work there and everywhere seemed repulsive. The sudden heat was enervating and gave her the feeling of luxurious languor that she longed to enjoy with a sense of security and freedom from care. But even as her eyelids drooped with momentary drowsiness, there was a consciousness, like a dull, half-recognized pain, of insecurity, ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... aloof both from nonsense and from enervating praise. Let him dream of great themes, and work for great things! Let him rely on more quiet friends who watch loyally, hope, encourage, inspire. By and by the scales drop from his eyes; he sees himself, not as one who has already achieved, but ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... perseverance of Dr Barth, while for five years travelling many thousand miles, amidst hostile and savage tribes, in an enervating climate, frequently with unwholesome or insufficient food, having ever to keep his energies on the stretch to guard himself from the attacks of open foes or the treachery of pretended friends, have gained for him the admiration of all who read his travels, and place him ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... Saturday of the first week, this being the only day and hour at which they could attend without 'losing a half' and therefore it was necessary to put up with the inconvenience of arriving at a crowded and enervating time. ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... more and more frequently to see me. The thought of my physical depression, the revulsion of hopelessness over my changing lineaments made the love I bore her more painful and enervating. I tried hard to conceal my fears over my condition. But Miss Dodan had been observant. Her developing affections became daily more tender and delicate, and her solicitude evinced itself in many charming, ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... them something to think about and look at. Give me leave to fight ennui, and the despondency it brings with it, by taking the squadron about, showing fresh ground to my young fellows, and taking them into ports where I shall be able to send them ashore to amuse themselves, and thus break the enervating monotony of ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... towns in the world, and one of the most powerful, for in its cedar groves stands a palace, and in the palace an Imperial throne. The Emperor is the King of England, whose power over India is entrusted to a Viceroy. In summer enervating heat prevails over the lowlands of India, and all Europeans who are not absolutely tied to their posts move up to the hills. The Viceroy and his staff, the government officials, the chief officers of the army, civil servants and military men all fly with their wives up to Simla, ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... made better—stronger for endurance, more fitted for the uses of the world, more sensitive to what is noble in nature—by its contemplation. At the best Correggio does but please us in our lighter moments, and we are apt to feel that the pleasure he has given is of an enervating kind. To expect obvious morality of any artist is confessedly absurd. It is not the artist's province to preach, or even to teach, except by remote suggestion. Yet the mind of the artist may be highly moralised, and then he takes rank not merely with the ministers to refined pleasure, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... servitude had slipped by in an enervating monotony. With his quiet ways, tactful temper and air of kindly aloofness, he was popular with the more sensible boys, while the others left him in peace, as he did them. But there was one exception; Henri de Grizolles, a handsome young savage, proud of his aristocratic name, which he ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... more important accomplishments. He who can effect this has surely done something. Is no useful end served by that writer whose works have soothed weeks of languor and sickness, have relieved the mind exhausted from the pressure of employment by an amusement which delights without enervating, which relaxes the tension of the powers without rendering them unfit for future exercise? I should not be surprised to see these observations refuted; and I shall not be sorry if they are so. I feel personally little ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... Carol owes much of its hilarity to our second source—the fact of its being a tale of winter and of a very wintry winter. There is much about comfort in the story; yet the comfort is never enervating: it is saved from that by a tingle of something bitter and bracing in the weather. Lastly, the story exemplifies throughout the power of the third principle—the kinship between gaiety and the grotesque. Everybody is happy because ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... demonstrated with equal clearness that it was much too far to the west. No sooner had my indignation died down at its angular and aggressive squareness than I was called up again to notice and condemn its enervating and sensual roundness. In case any reader has not come across the thing I mean, I will give such instances as I remember at random of this self-contradiction in the sceptical attack. I give four or five of them; ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... his folly now, his madness, in allowing himself to dally with a baseless hope, which, while never daring to own its own existence, had yet so mingled its enervating poison with every vein that he had now no strength left to endure the disappointment so certain and so near. At the very gate of his father's house he paused. A powerful impulse seized him to fly. It was not yet too late. ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... have done what our soldiers are now doing, that they would have endured what is being endured all around us. Are we not entitled to conclude from this that civilization, contrary to what was feared, so far from enervating, depraving, weakening, lowering and dwarfing man, elevates him, purifies him, strengthens him, ennobles him, makes him capable of acts of sacrifice, generosity and courage which he did not know before? ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... wished for excitement; one and all of them wanted a place, and one and all were shut out from politics and public life. Nearly all the "free-livers" were men of unusual mental powers; some held out against the enervating life, others were ruined by it. The most celebrated and the cleverest among them was Eugene Rastignac, who entered, with de Marsay's help, upon a political career, in which he has since distinguished himself. The practical jokes, in which the set indulged became ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... its pleasures, and it must not be supposed that all succumb to its enervating influences, or that any great number yield themselves entirely to its demoralizing effects. The period of military service among our volunteers is too short to permit its full influence to be experienced, and the connections of our ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... parching, enervating, sure precursor, if she had thought to remember, if she had been less engrossed in the bitterness of her ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... cheerfulness of society are chiefly due to women; and it is also true that the whole unwritten common-law of society is, in a great measure, under their control. The world is constantly encroaching here, enervating and corrupting social life. To oppose wisely, skillfully, and effectually these treacherous encroachments, these alluring temptations, is one of the most difficult tasks possible. To contribute her full share toward purifying and brightening ...
— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... arrested by one sweeping blast from the heavens—which walks peacefully and sullenly through the length and breadth of the land, breathing poison into every heart, and carrying havoc into every home—enervating all that is strong, defacing all that is beautiful, and casting its blight over the fairest and happiest scenes of human life—and which from day to day, and from year to year, with intolerant and interminable malignity, sends its thousands and tens of thousands ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... the sentimentalist; but it should not be forgotten that the same fitful intensity of emotion which makes them real as the means of elation, gives them substance also for torture. Too irritably jealous to endure the rude society of men, he steeped his senses in the enervating incense that women are only too ready to burn. If their friendship be a safeguard to the other sex, their homage is fatal to all but the strongest, and Rousseau was weak both by inheritance and early training. His father was one of those feeble ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... days in Spain are drawing near their end. I am ready to leave, though I shall cast many a lingering thought, many a fond recollection behind; and in future years, I shall sadly recall these hours, which, I fear, can never be recalled. But away with the enervating reflections of grief! Read nothing in the past but lessons for the future. When you think of its pleasures, think also of the cares they produced and the anxieties they cost you. Behold, they are ended, and forever. Have you reaped from ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... to argue that this is childish, that it mattered no whit though they kissed from now to doomsday. But only the reader who cannot feel its beauty is safe from the enervating narcotic of ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... his shoulders well set back and his head crested like that of a striking serpent. A rough and warlike life would have brought out his best points of endurance, capability to plan and strike quickly, and iron decision; but the want of opportunity and the enervating influences of civilized existence, made him a man of possibilities. When time, and place, and chance offered he could act the hero with the best; but lacking these things he remained innocuous like gunpowder which has ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... that has been said in regard to the enervating effects of a southern climate, the inhabitants of the state of Louisiana have shown a pertinacity in maintaining their levee system which is almost unexampled. They have always asserted their rights to the lowlands in which they live, and have under the most trying ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... somewhat enervating, and both enjoyed the relaxation in the cool shade. They sat for the most part in silence, smoking steadily, and turning over in their minds the problems with which they were faced. Before them the country ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... along through streets and squares in the midst of railways, under the enervating vibration of the electric wires, which ran like furrows across the sky. We crossed a bridge which shook under the light weight of the buggy. It was a suspension bridge. Finally we drew up at my friend's home. He introduced ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... pleasant enough, but in reality I was miserable. If it had not been for the tempest of misfortunes that very soon burst over my head, all good impulses must have perished, and evil would have triumphed in the struggle that went on within me; enervating self-indulgence would have destroyed the body, as the detestable habits of egotism exhausted the springs of the soul. But I was ruined financially. This ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... fortunate in being born at a reasonably comfortable stage of the world's history. He had a decent prospect as to clothing and shelter, and there was abundance of food for those brave enough or ingenious enough to win it. The climate was not enervating. There were cold times for the people of the epoch and, in their seasons, harsh and chilling winds swept over bare and chilling glaciers, though a semi-tropical landscape was all about. So suddenly had come the change from frigid cold ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... leave the lodge that wintered him, The enervating fires, the blanket bed— The women's dulcet voices, for the grim Realities of ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... upon the vitals of the Cardinal silently work its insidious way, and reveal its baneful power by sleepless nights, burning fever, and sharp bodily pain; but his powerful mind and insatiable ambition enabled him to strive successfully against these enervating influences; and Saint-Preuil was scarcely laid in his dishonoured grave ere the remorseless minister sought around him for more victims. The Comte de Soissons, who had been exiled from the Court for resenting the arrogance of the Cardinal, had found an asylum ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... infinite! The overture of "Tannhauser," ah! that's the sublime hallelujah of the new era. First of all comes the chant of the pilgrims, the religious strain, calm, deep and slowly throbbing; then the voices of the sirens gradually drown it; the voluptuous pleasures of Venus, full of enervating delight and languor, grow more and more imperious and disorderly; and soon the sacred air gradually returns, like the aspiring voice of space, and seizes hold of all other strains and blends them in one supreme harmony, to waft them away on the ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... superstition! that there should be a want of true modesty and cleanliness in the habits of her people! that an ignoble love of ease should still characterize her upper classes, while the lowest orders generally are steeped in ignorance and importunate mendicancy! and that enervating and dirty habits should be engendered in her people by their inveterate indulgence in the cheap wine and tobacco of the country!—though, in common fairness, I should add that it is as rare to see drunkenness in Italy as, unfortunately, it is ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... when they were consoled and elevated by beautiful music or by the sublimity of architecture or by the peacefulness of nature. Plato has himself admitted, in the earlier part of the Republic, that the arts might have the effect of harmonizing as well as of enervating the mind; but in the Tenth Book he regards them through a Stoic or Puritan medium. He asks only 'What good have they done?' and is not satisfied with the reply, that 'They have given innocent ...
— The Republic • Plato
... resisting those impulses, in the first case with remorse, in the second with dissatisfaction. In either case much of their lives, at the time when life is most vigorous, is wasted. With women, if they happen to be of strong passions and reckless impulses to abandonment, the results may be highly enervating, if not disastrous to the general psychic life. It is to this cause, indeed, that some have been inclined to attribute the frequent mediocrity of women's work in artistic and intellectual fields. Women of intellectual force are frequently if not ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... sold. The work has been on the market many years, and this continued popularity is indeed encouraging. It argues that the taste for the legitimate, the sane in literature, has not yet been drowned in the septic sea of fin de siecle slop—that, despite the enervating influence of an all- pervasive sensationalism, or sybaritism, there be still minds capable of relishing the rugged, strong enough to digest the mental pabulum furnished by a really masculine writer. Carlyle ranges like an archangel through the universe ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... dinner, and it had all come to nothing—worse than nothing. He walked right on into the Chase, glad to get out of the Grove, which surely was haunted by his evil genius. Those beeches and smooth limes—there was something enervating in the very sight of them; but the strong knotted old oaks had no bending languor in them—the sight of them would give a man some energy. Arthur lost himself among the narrow openings in the fern, winding about without seeking any issue, till the ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... discipline, technique, and preparedness, the main factor being, as indicated, the ability to throw the greater number of troops in the shortest possible time against the enemy at any given point, without exhausting man and beast unnecessarily and enervating the country to be traversed. It is therefore necessary to have numerous arteries of traffic at disposal. This will lead us later to the question of victualization, Germany following closely one of Moltke's axioms: "March separately, but ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... secret, but it cannot; it rapidly crystallizes into habit, and habit solidifies into circumstance. Bestial thoughts crystallize into habits of drunkenness and sensuality, which solidify into circumstances of destitution and disease: impure thoughts of every kind crystallize into enervating and confusing habits, which solidify into distracting and adverse circumstances: thoughts of fear, doubt, and indecision crystallize into weak, unmanly, and irresolute habits, which solidify into circumstances ...
— As a Man Thinketh • James Allen
... slave was none other than the renowned Heracles himself she at once gave him his liberty, and offered him her hand and kingdom. In her palace Heracles abandoned himself to all the enervating luxuries of an oriental life, and so completely was the great hero enthralled by the fascination which his mistress exercised over him, that whilst she playfully donned his lion's skin and helmet, he, attired in female garments, ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... "The enervating influences of wealth, the extreme conservatism thereby fostered, and the resulting disposition to accept any compromise rather than interfere with the free course of trade, may create conditions breeding hostilities. ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... human beings this sort of luxury, carried beyond the ordinary and familiar uses of menial service, has a speedily enervating effect. Thinking being the most onerous of all, they have it done, also. They sink into silliness and moral and mental sloth. They pass the time at foolish purposeless games indoors and out; or they wander aimlessly about the earth chattering with similar mental decrepits, much ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... develop the power of appreciating that which is noble and beautiful primarily because the highest efficiency can be secured only by those who use their time in occupations which are truly recreative and not enervating. ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... destroyed the lower civilization, or barbarism, with which it came in contact. In other cases, while superiority in culture gave its possessors at the beginning a marked military and governmental superiority over the neighboring peoples, yet sooner or later there accompanied it a certain softness or enervating quality which left the cultured folk at the mercy of the stark and greedy neighboring tribes, in whose savage souls cupidity gradually overcame terror and awe. Then the people that had been struggling upward would be engulfed, and the levelling waves of barbarism ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... varying and beautiful attitudes. The sweeping, music- evoking arm was beautiful to behold, and the music seemed to cry for love; all about him was shadow; only the light fell on the long throat, so like a fruit to the eye; the charm was enervating and nervous. Helen looked at him again, and shuddering, she ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... almost every twenty-four hours for a brief while, during at least the greater part of the year; at Grande Anse it rains more moderately and less often. The atmosphere at St. Pierre is always more or less impregnated with vapor, and usually an enervating heat prevails, which makes exertion unpleasant; at Grande Anse the warm wind keeps the skin comparatively dry, in spite of considerable exercise. It is quite rare to see a heavy surf at St, Pierre, but it is much rarer not to see it at Grande Anse.... A curious fact concerning custom is that few ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... that people who read such books remember only what is bad in them." Her plain common sense hit the nail on the head, while transcendental folly hammered all around it in vain. We have spoken of Consuelo thus particularly because it is the best of its class: and of that enervating fiction we here record our deliberate opinion, that it will turn more than one foolish Miss into a strolling actress, under the insane and preposterous notion ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... true in this country; it's not true in America," said Frank, "for there the man who doesn't earn money is looked upon as a muff, and is treated as such. A small inherited income is thought to be a trifle enervating. But there is a country of emotions, if you like. The American heart is worn upon the American sleeve, and the American mind is the most active thing in this world. That's why they grow old ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... tendency of Communism, and of proclaiming its supreme and impartial contempt of all class struggles. With very few exceptions, all the so-called Socialist and Communist publications that now (1847) circulate in Germany belong to the domain of this foul and enervating literature. ...
— The Communist Manifesto • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
... changed self to dread the enervating influence of delay. She determined to run the risk ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... in their improvidence, and in a debasing acquiescence in ills which they might well remedy; that the rewards were illusory and the result, after all, of luck, whose empire should be bounded by the grave; that its terrors were enervating and unjust; and that even the most blessed rising would be but the disturbing of a ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... for her. But she faced it with calmness. She was not bowed with sorrow. She did not nurse the idea that her life was at an end; on the contrary, she obstinately put it away from her, dwelling on Cyril. She did not indulge in the enervating voluptuousness of grief. She had begun in the first hours of bereavement by picturing herself as one marked out for the blows of fate. She had lost her father and her mother, and now her husband. Her career seemed to be punctuated by interments. But after a ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... a plain which extends from the sea-shore to the spurs of the mountains, are very fertile, and produce in great abundance all tropical plants. The climate is warm, but not enervating; the scenery is in many parts very beautiful. Thus the natives are tempted to lead an easy and idle life, exerting but little their physical and mental powers. It is, indeed, to their credit that they ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... system had become so weak that such unexpected news was really more than he could bear. Besides, as one of the Cambridge men of the party, a young medical student, remarked: the thin, cold air of these high mountains was extremely enervating. ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... left to themselves, a most kindly and law-abiding people. The Donegal peasants are the best in the country. You will see poverty, but the degradation of filthiness and laziness is not nearly so marked as in the South and West, where the climate is warm, moist, enervating. ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... the count, and they had entered the grotto before he perceived it. He felt a carpet under his feet, a door opened, perfumes surrounded him, and a brilliant light dazzled his eyes. Morrel hesitated to advance; he dreaded the enervating effect of all that he saw. Monte Cristo drew him in gently. "Why should we not spend the last three hours remaining to us of life, like those ancient Romans, who when condemned by Nero, their emperor and heir, sat down ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... to be hand picked, this working is tedious and laborious enough, and tires to the utmost the patience and endurance of the laborer. In fact, this is the worst period in the cultivation of the peanut crop. The weather is hot, close, and enervating; the frequent stooping and picking makes it doubly laborious; and, on account of the size the vines have attained, the plow must necessarily leave a wider surface for the hoe to go over. All this makes ...
— The Peanut Plant - Its Cultivation And Uses • B. W. Jones
... answered vigorously. "Two decades of puppet government are enervating, I admit, but they only pave the way more surely to the inevitable reaction. What is the matter with you, Brott? Are you ill? This is the great moment of our lives. You must speak at Manchester and Birmingham within this week. Glasgow is already ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Besides this, they are healthy, wholesome, well-developed women, and that counts a good deal in the race for beauty. If the five-mile walk is too exhausting, then take a longer time getting to the point, when it will be exhilarating instead of enervating. ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... without deepening the shadows that surround us. But where is the man who has lived who will deny woman's power over us, if he has ever taken leave of a beautiful dancer with trembling hands. If he has ever felt that indefinable enervating magnetism which, in the midst of the dance, under the influence of the sound of music, and the warmth that makes all else seem cold, that comes from a young woman, that electrifies her and leaps from her to him as the perfume of aloes ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
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