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More "Torpid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... plum-pudding; but he was an authority on diet, and told me that food if too nutritious was very bad for the brain. He could not, I thought, have imagined that our brains were worth much; for I must say that though he did not eat himself he gave us every chance of doing so, and if we had been the torpid, who breakfast and dine hugely, he could not have provided us with more food. Murray, who was one of many at this meal, seemed to be very interested in what Mr. Edwardes said about diet, and I told him afterwards ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... another example, if it is added that he took no interest in public affairs, truly speaking. He was a Democrat, but that does not fully account for his indifference to those philanthropies which his literary friends shared; for, as a party man, he was not zealous. His nature was torpid in all these ways; there was dullness of temperament, indifference to all except the one thing in which he truly lived, his artistic nature; and here he was an observer, using an objective method with as little ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... he thought: the same uncouth-looking effort of humanity that he had been at Yale. No wonder the Northern boys jeered him, with his sloth-ways, his mouthed English, torpid eyes, and brain shut up in that worst of mud-moulds,—belief in caste. Even now, going up and down the tan-bark, his step was dead, sodden, like that of a man in whose life God had not yet wakened the full live soul. It was wakening, though, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... among Iroquois to leave food at a feast. There were we with food enough to stuff the tribe torpid as winter toads. The padre was sent round to the lodges with a tom-tom to beat every soul to the feast. Chouart and a Dutch prisoner and I cooked like kings' scullions for ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... dull a spirit should be lodged in so goodly a form! Alas! that such an enterprise as the regeneration of England should turn on a hinge so imperfect! Wedded to Rowena, indeed, her nobler and more generous soul may yet awake the better nature which is torpid within him. Yet how should this be, while Rowena, Athelstane, and I myself, remain the prisoners of this brutal marauder and have been made so perhaps from a sense of the dangers which our liberty might bring to the usurped power of ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... silent, and all he saw in the old town struck him as strangely worn-out, torpid, and decayed; it seemed only fit to be left to ruin, while on the other side of the river, in the new town of Fostat, on all hands busy, eager, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... includes the process of digestion, the subsequent vital changes involved in the conversion of food into blood, and its final transformation into tissue, causes mental languor and dullness, as well as bodily exhaustion, is attested by universal experience. A torpid condition of the liver, one of the most inveterate of chronic derangements, is indicated by sullenness, melancholy, despondency, loss of interest in the affairs of life, sluggishness, etc., and the ultimate tendency of this morbid state is towards suicide. A broad ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... contract, the leaves wither, and are no longer able to perform their office of transpiration; and, as this secretion stops, the roots cease to absorb sap from the soil. If the plant be an annual, its life then terminates; if not, it remains in a state of torpid inaction during the winter; or the only internal motion that takes place is that of a small quantity of resinous juice, which slowly rises from the stem into the branches, and enlarges their buds during ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... six months, Evelyn. The woman was a saint—the kindliest, gentlest creature I have ever met. I told her that I was ill and in trouble, and wanted to rest, and she put me to bed and nursed me like a child. I was a long time in getting well. The very strings of my being seemed to have snapped. I lay torpid week after week, and the good soul took care of me and asked no questions. She was one of those rare spirits who pray to God to guide them day by day, and mean literally what they ask. God had sent me to her ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... melancholy gnaws the heart, when trouble poisons our solitude, when we are disgusted with the world, and a thousand worries oppress us, or when our energies are destroyed by over-exercise, the stage revives us, we dream of another sphere, we recover ourselves, our torpid nature is roused by noble passions, our blood circulates more healthily. The unhappy man forgets his tears in weeping for another. The happy man is calmed, the secure made provident. Effeminate natures are steeled, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... bright evening, but my depression has been growing so long and steadily that I can't seem to control it any more. There, Millie, the lady superintendent is looking for you. Don't worry. You medical and scientific people know that it is nothing but a torpid liver. Perhaps I may be ill enough to have a trained nurse. You see I am playing a deep game," and with an attempt at a hearty laugh he said good-night, and she was compelled to hasten away, but it was with ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... worms, and his one sun-baked flounder—you think he is going home—but no, he is merely going to another corner of the wharf, where he throws his line under a vessel's counter, and fishes on with the same deathlike patience as before. He seems not quiet so much as torpid,—not kindly nor unkindly feeling—but not to have anything to do with the rest of the world. He has no business, no amusement, but just to crawl to the end of Long Wharf, and throw his line over. He has no sort of skill in fishing, ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... of Lot, however, could not have been more torpid than the company in Palais Mortimer, especially when behind the first horse's head a second one appeared, and Madame Caraman ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... been materially worse. My feelings at intervals are of a deadly and torpid kind, or awakened to such a state of unnatural and keen excitement that, only to instance the organ of sight, I find the very blades of grass and the boughs of distant trees present themselves to me with microscopic ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... starvation, the thing confined in the hollow tube of this awful duplicate was become torpid. Otherwise, no power on earth could have saved me from the fate of Abel Slattin; for the creature was an ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... remarked that he prolonged his meals, which had hitherto been so simple and so short. He seemed desirous of stifling thought by repletion. He would then pass whole hours half reclined, and as if torpid, awaiting with a novel in his hand the catastrophe of his terrible history. In contemplating this obstinate and inflexible character thus struggling with impossibility, his officers would observe to each other that, having arrived at the summit of his glory, he no ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... resolved upon a silence which he only broke when he was alone. He voluntarily tied that tongue which Claude Frollo had taken so much pains to unloose. Hence, it came about, that when necessity constrained him to speak, his tongue was torpid, awkward, and like a door whose ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... to realize that this silent plain had once resounded with martial music and trembled to the tramp of armed men. It was hard to people this solitude with rushing columns of cavalry, and stir its torpid pulses with the shouts of victors, the shrieks of the wounded, and the flash of banner and steel above the surging billows of war. A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... it, made not the slightest impression upon Frank's torpid brain; but those words about the black stain and the bleaching caused by the scorching sun somehow suggested the risk he might run of being discovered, and that meant the frustration of his plans to rescue his brother. In a moment now ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... no more than the quantity extracted from the water. The temperature of water is maintained below the surface, and we know how that of the air varies, since a certain quantity of heat is necessary to the vital processes; reptiles, depending upon air for heat, hybernate or become torpid when the temperature falls below a certain point. The rapidity of all their vital actions will depend upon the state of the thermometer; they digest faster in the heat of summer than in the milder warmth of spring. Their secretions (as the poison of the adder) are in hot weather more ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... they pierced the fair and rounded arm, No crimson stream gush'd o'er its spotless snow; Vainly they sought the frozen heart to warm, And bid its chill'd and torpid currents flow; Vainly they practised every learned charm To call into the veins life's ruddy glow; Stirless, they laid her on that bridal bed, Stirless, she lay, all life ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... stifled scream! Agnes!—without there! She is full of fears. I am not free from them myself, but I will shake them off. This will divert their channel," continued she, drawing from her bosom the marriage certificate. "This will arouse the torpid current of my blood—'Piers Rookwood to Susan Bradley.' And by whom was it solemnized? The name is Checkley—Richard Checkley. Ha! I bethink me—a Papist priest—a recusant—who was for some time an inmate of the hall. I have heard of this man—he was afterwards ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... In this attempt they succeeded so far as to obtain all the information he could give concerning his fall; but he remembered nothing further than that Edith had been the means of bringing him to the snow-hut, where he lay in a deep, torpid slumber, until the voice and hand of Maximus awakened him. When Frank was told that Edith was lost, he sprang from his bed as if he had received an electric shock. The confusion of his faculties seemed ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... Antony—"Yes! often! Torpid or frantic, they dwell in my conscience. I crush them out; they spring up again, they stifle me; and sometimes I believe that I ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... pools or overwhelming torrents, inhabited by passive subjects or depredators. As in the Roman empire in the fourth century, in Italy in the seventeenth century, in the Turkish provinces in our own day, naught remains but an ill-conducted herd of stunted, torpid creatures, limited to their daily wants and animal instincts, indifferent to the public welfare and to their own prospective interests, so degenerate as to have lost sight of their own discoveries, unlearned ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the reply. "I see exactly what it is now: since the granulating process has been going on so beautifully in the side, his appetite has returned, and as he must not take any very active exercise just yet, the liver is getting torpid. I must throw in a little blue pill, and he'll be as good-tempered as an angel again; for, naturally, there is not a man breathing with a finer disposition, or a more excellent constitution, than ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... which he did not. He was helpless. In his bewildered state, seeing a squirrel cracking a nut on the branch of a hollow tree near him, he made a half-frenzied dart at the frightened animal, which ran away. But the same association of ideas in his torpid and confused brain impelled him to search for the squirrel's hoard in the hollow of the tree. He ate the few hazel-nuts he found there, ravenously. The purely animal instinct satisfied, he seemed to have borrowed from it a certain ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... sunshine, sunshine and clouds. So runs the world away. Equally necessary, sorrow and gladness are as the rains and sunbeams for the fruits of the earth. Were it all sadness the world would grow morose and torpid; were it all gladness men would be selfish ...
— Wilton School - or, Harry Campbell's Revenge • Fred E. Weatherly
... their torpid rocks array, But winter, lingering, chills the lap of May; No zephyr fondly sues the mountain's breast, But meteors glare, and ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... stools are present in chronic diarrhoea. Putty-like pasty passages are due to acidity curdling the milk or to torpid liver. {323} ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... If the torpid organism of the Roman polity could still of itself reach a crisis of wholesome reaction, that reaction could not but set in now, when, by one of the marvellous pieces of good fortune, in which the history of Rome is ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... with himself, trying to clear his torpid brain. Where was he? His dream-self was still roaming the Scout; his outer eye was bewildered by these alleys, these orange-trees, these ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... frost. The old knight gazed at it for a long while amid complete silence. Others looked at him, for it was known that he was like a father to Rotgier, and that he loved him. But he did not shed even a single tear, only his face looked more severe than usual, but there was depicted in it a kind of torpid calm. ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... the whole-heartedness of Don Quixote himself. He fancied himself by her side, and his heart leaped with joy of it. He thought no more of abandoned cricket matches and neglected house parties. A finger of fire had been laid upon his somewhat torpid ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... wanted to know which dress, my lady, this evening?—and got no answer. Her ladyship was listening to something at a distance; or, rather, having heard something at a distance, was listening for a repetition of it. "I wonder what that can have been?" said she. For fire-arms in July are torpid mostly, and this was ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... years to the day after I went to school there, and by my being married on April 19, 1855, at Harrow church, where my father and mother were married forty years before.' The marriage, he says, 'was a blessed revelation to me. It turned me from a rather heavy, torpid youth into the happiest of men, and, for many years, one of the most ardent and energetic. It was ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... been cold ever since he reached the Gulf of Lyons, and he wondered what could be the matter with him, for he never remembered to have felt like this before. He wondered miserably what could be the reason why he felt so torpid and shivery, disinclined to move, and yet so uncomfortable ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... there a landlord who is spending his money, not on pineries and hothouses, but on schools, and washhouses, and drains, who is less intent on the magnificence of his own grand house, than in providing cottages for his people where decency is possible; then let us not pass him by with a torpid wonder or a vanishing emotion of pleasure—rather let us seize him and raise him up upon a pinnacle, that other landlords may gaze upon him, if, perhaps, their hearts may prick them; and the world shall learn from what one man ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... Cantapresto was torpid after the feast, and Odo detected in him an air of guilty constraint. The boy was glad enough to keep silence, and they rolled on without speaking through the wide glowing landscape. Already the nearness of a great city began to make itself felt. The bright champaign was scattered ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... other hand, those steadfast natures which can better be depended upon, which in a battle are impregnable to fear and immovable, are equally immovable when there is anything to be learned; they are always in a torpid state, and are apt to yawn and go to ...
— The Republic • Plato
... presents fewer floral attractions than any other in the whole year. Everything is in a torpid state of existence, and the combined forces of frost, snow, wind, and rain render December unpleasant both indoors and out. The only kinds of vegetation which seem to flourish just now are the insignificant, but wonderfully ...
— Little Folks (December 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... smoke and stare at some object which his mind failed to register. Cash would sit and watch him furtively; but Bud was too engrossed with his own misery to notice it. Then, quite unexpectedly, reaction would come and leave Bud in a peace that was more than half a torpid refusal of his mind to worry ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... Levy is still Baron Levy the millionaire; but I doubt if at heart he be not more acutely miserable than Randal Leslie the usher. For Levy is a man who has admitted the fiercer passions into his philosophy of life; he has not the pale blood and torpid heart which allow the scotched adder to dose away its sense of pain. Just as old age began to creep upon the fashionable usurer, he fell in love with a young opera-dancer, whose light heels had turned the lighter heads of half the eligans of Paris and London. ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... good Earl William's sober train, As slow we linger'd on the seas, I inly blest each wayward breeze; For still the graceful knight was near, Prompt to discourse, relate, and hear: The spirit had that exercise, The fine perceptions' play, That perish with the worldly wise, The torpid, ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... swarm of gnats enveloped his head and he ducked under his blankets. No more was said, for Bill knew why the smoke was there. All three covered up their heads and were soon asleep. It got real cold in the middle of the night and the gnats became too torpid to move. The boys slept like logs for they were tired. It could not have been more than four o'clock when the cheery voice of Mr. Waterman ...
— Bob Hunt in Canada • George W. Orton
... with the Nkran, or enkran, [Footnote: Anglice the 'driver,' a small black formica which bites severely, clears out houses, destroys the smaller animals, and has, it is said, overpowered and destroyed hunters when, torpid with fatigue, they have fallen asleep in the bush. The same horrible end, being eaten alive, atom by atom, has befallen white traders whose sickness prevented their escape. 'Accra,' which calls itself Ga, is known to the Oji-speaking peoples as 'Enkran,' ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... rare summer days, the sun blazed down on the blue ice; skua gulls nestled in groups on the snow; sly penguins waddled along to inspect the building operations; seals basked in torpid slumber on the shore; out on the sapphire bay the milk-white bergs floated in the swell. We can all paint our own picture of the good times round the Benzine Hut. We worked hard, ate heartily ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... in a half torpid state during the winter, derive their nourishment from the same source. In other words, we may say the starving animal lives for a time upon itself, eating up, by internal absorption, such parts of the body as can be spared under urgent necessity, to feed those ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... in destructive epidemics. I am unable to speak with any degree of definiteness as to the death rate, since I had ceased to interest myself about the number dying each day. I had now been a prisoner a year, and had become so torpid and stupefied, mentally and physically, that I cared comparatively little for anything save the rations of food and of fuel. The difference of a few spoonfuls of meal, or a large splinter of wood in the daily issues to me, were of ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... sudden falls, that the influences of the Holy Ghost are undervalued and unsought? Pray for the outpouring of this blessed Agent for the world's renovation, and thine own. "I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh," is the precursor of millennial bliss. Jesus! draw near, in thy mercy, to this torpid heart, as thou didst of old to thy mourning disciples, and breathe upon it, and say, "Receive ye the Holy Ghost." It is the mightiest of all boons; but, like the sun in the heavens, it is the freest of all: "For if ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, ...
— The Faithful Promiser • John Ross Macduff
... the spirit which had animated the reply was fled,—the muscles relaxed, and I beheld the same unprotected look of distress which first won me to her interest: —melancholy! to see such sprightliness the prey of sorrow,—I pitied her from my soul; and though it may seem ridiculous enough to a torpid heart,—I could have taken her into my arms, and cherished her, though it was in the open ...
— A Sentimental Journey • Laurence Sterne
... The city, torpid and depopulated by winter, began to revive with hope of the near coming of Caesar. A solemn reception was in waiting for him. Meanwhile spring was there; the snow on the Alban Hills had vanished under the breath of winds from Africa. Grass-plots in the gardens were covered with violets. The ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... torpid fatuity of Voltaire's Biographers, says he never met with one Frenchman, even of the Literary classes, who could tell him whence this name VOLTAIRE originated. 'A PETITE TERRE, small family estate,' they said; and sent him hunting through Topographies, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... the room from which the ill-omening woman had issued, they found another, even her of whom they were in search, sitting by the fire, torpid and corpulent, to a degree which indicated that as it had been her trade to nurse others, she had not forgotten ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... suggested by Tooke's description of the winter-garden of the Taurida Palace: "The genial warmth, ... the voluptuous silence that reigns in this enchanting garden, lull the fancy into sweet romantic dreams: we think ourselves in the groves of Italy, while torpid nature, through the windows of this pavilion, announces the severity of a northern winter" (The ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... had carefully removed his gray hairs, but he could not rid himself of his wizened air. The puny little man of law, tightly buttoned into his clothes, reminded you of a torpid viper; for if hope had brought a spark of life into his magpie eyes, his face was icily rigid, and so well did he assume an air of gravity, that an ambitious public prosecutor could ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... I am sleepless; my legs grow weary with a very few steps, and the water breaks its boundaries in some degree. The asthma, however, has remitted; my breath is still much obstructed, but is more free than it was. Nights of watchfulness produce torpid days; I read very little, though I am alone; for I am tempted to supply in the day what I lost in bed. This is my history; like all other histories, a narrative of misery. Yet am I so much better than in the beginning ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... five pages drove together in an open carriage, and received quite an ovation from the crowd, but no one had thought of providing them with overcoats. Silk stockings, satin knee-breeches and lace ruffles are very inadequate protection against an Arctic blast, and we arrived at the Cathedral stiff and torpid with cold. From the colour of our faces, we might have been five little "Blue Noses" from Nova Scotia. The ceremony was very gorgeous and imposing, and I trust that the pages were not unduly clumsy. Every ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... overloaded circulation can be starved to a reduced quantity and to a less rich quality of blood by reducing the quantity of feed given to the patient. Feeds of easy digestion do not tire the already fatigued organs of an animal with a torpid digestive system. Nourishment will be taken by a suffering brute in the form of slops and cooling drinks when it would be totally refused if offered in its ordinary form, as hard oats or dry hay, requiring the labor of grinding between ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... meet together: An attack is half repulsed. Shafts of broken sunlight dissolving Convolutions of torpid cloud. ...
— Japanese Prints • John Gould Fletcher
... beyond the edge of the skin. These ulcers secrete milky or bloody-white liquid called ichor. When the ulcer is of an ashen or leaden color, with the bottom and sides formed of dense, hard connective tissue, which gives but little discharge and is not sensitive, it is termed callous, torpid, or indolent ulcer. ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... fleeced tenant of the wild to bleed A guileless votive to his harmless creed, Then gladly grateful at each rite fulfilled, Sought the cool shadow where the spring distilled, And lightly lab'rous thro' the torpid day, Whiled in sweet peace the sultry ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... turned without ceremony the sleeping infants out of the baskets, and cared not how the enraged mothers lacerated their faces in return. The scenes of horror changed so quickly, that you could not dwell more than half a minute upon any of them. The tenderest heart became torpid and insensible. One tale of woe followed on the heels of another,—"Such a person too has been plundered!—Such an one's house has been set on fire!—This man is cut in pieces; that has been transfixed with the bayonet!—Those poor creatures are seeking their children!"—These were ...
— Frederic Shoberl Narrative of the Most Remarkable Events Which Occurred In and Near Leipzig • Frederic Shoberl (1775-1853)
... themselves falling into these practices, driven by a tradition hardly distinguishable from instinct. In its periodic fury the spirit hurries them into wars and orgies, quite as it kindles sudden flaming visions in their brains, habitually so torpid. The spontaneous is the worst of tyrants, for it exercises a needless and fruitless tyranny in the guise of duty and inspiration. Without mitigating in the least the subjection to external forces under which man necessarily labours, it adds a new artificial subjection to ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... Victory, and Rule, of lordly Man; Far wider tracts within the Torrid Zone Own no such Lord: where Sol's intenser rays Create in bestial hearts more fervid fires, And deadlier poisons arm the Serpent's tooth; In gloomy shades, impassable to Man, Where matted foliage exclude the Sun, The torpid Birds that crawl from bough to bough Utter their notes of terror: while beneath Fury and Venom, couch'd in murky dens, Hissing and yelling, guard the hideous gloom. O'er dreary wastes, untrod by human feet, Without controul the lordly Lion ...
— An Essay on War, in Blank Verse; Honington Green, a Ballad; The - Culprit, an Elegy; and Other Poems, on Various Subjects • Nathaniel Bloomfield
... spirit, perfectly emancipated from prejudice and commonplace, regarding the ideal side of things in all its efforts for change, passionately despising half-measures and condescension to human folly and obstinacy,—with a bewildered, timid, torpid multitude behind,—conducts a country to the government of Herr von Bismarck. A nation regarding the practical side of things in its efforts for change, attacking not what is irrational, but what is pressingly inconvenient, and attacking this as one body, ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... remote. The ribbons of fiery smoke from their furnaces were the first signs of the city's awakening from its lethargic industrial sleep. The beast was beginning to move along its score of miles of length. But out here in the vacancies of the lake it seemed still torpid. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... weakness moved a circle of his friends to tears, and he sat amongst us insensible to all we could say to him, cowering down, or rather I might say collapsing into a shapeless heap upon his chair, deaf, blind, torpid, motionless,—even then I whispered to the others that I would engage that Kant should take his part in conversation with propriety and animation. This they found it difficult to believe. Upon which I drew close to his ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... all pale as ghosts. Unless upon rare occasions, they seldom come on deck to sun themselves. They may circumnavigate the world fifty times, and they see about as much of it as Jonah did in the whale's belly. They are a lazy, lumpish, torpid set; and when going ashore after a long cruise, come out into the day like terrapins from their caves, or bears in the spring, from tree-trunks. No one ever knows the names of these fellows; after a three years' voyage, they still remain strangers to you. In time of tempests, when all hands are ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... tide, where they are left to force themselves forward by their own labour, and to direct their passage by their own skill; and where, if they have not some internal principle of activity, they must be stranded upon shallows, or lie torpid in a perpetual calm. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... return to Paris from La Trappe he had fallen into a fearful state of spiritual anemia. His soul kept its room, rarely rose, lounged on a couch, was torpid with the tepid langour still lulled by the sleepy mutter of mere lip-service, and prayers reeled off as by a worn-out machine of which the spring releases itself, so that it works all alone with no result, and without ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... instantly corrected. Other modifications are more permanent. It was found by Himly that when the retina is overexcitable every stimulus is raised in the spectrum scale of colours. Thus, violet becomes red. An exactly opposite effect is observed when the retina is torpid.[35] Certain poisons are known to affect the quality of the colour-impression. Thus, santonin, when taken in any quantity, makes all colourless objects look yellow. Severe pathological disturbances are known to involve, in addition to hyperaesthesia ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... Vervain," said Ferris, smiling at her despair, "you push matters a little beyond—as a woman has a right to do, of course. I don't think their faces are bad, by any means. Some of them are dull and torpid, and some are frivolous, just like the faces of other people. But I've been noticing the number of good, kind, friendly faces, and they're in the majority, just as they are amongst other people; for there are very few souls ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... edifice, steering it prudently to its station in the stable yard. Then he went to find the defeated Starling Tucker. That stricken veteran sat alone amid the ruins of his toppled empire in the little office, slumped and torpid before the cold, rusty stove. He refused to be comforted by his devotee. He said he would never touch one of them things again, not for no man's money. The Darwinian hypothesis allows for no petty tact in the process of evolution. Starling Tucker was unfit to survive into the new ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... how irresistible is the influence of a mother's love and kindness! Her very name awakens the torpid streams of life, gives a fresh glow to the tablets of memory, and fills our hearts with a deep gush of ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... this point, Mr. Gradgrind's eye would fall upon her; and under the influence of that wintry piece of fact, she would become torpid again. ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... the pavement, where something lay huddled against the wall of the house, and the coachman, torpid on his box behind the fidgety horses, started at ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... a tribe of animals constantly around our country habitations, of underground and nocturnal habits, some of which become torpid in winter. All are timid and unobtrusive, and yet have great influence upon our welfare; for they check the rapid increase of those worms and insects which live and breed beneath the soil, and would destroy the crops which are necessary to our existence. There ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... of the first of the chill nights in autumn. There was a fire on the hearth, burning low. The air without was torpid and heavy; the wood, by an oversight, of ...
— I and My Chimney • Herman Melville
... plunge his weapon into the shark's body; but instead of that, what was his surprise to see him suddenly leap on its back and dig the fingers of one hand into its left eye. If the hammer-head had been torpid before, it now made ample amends by its sudden activity; off it darted along the surface, Nub holding up its head to prevent it from diving, while with his right hand he struck his knife with all his might sometimes before him and sometimes behind him, inflicting deep ...
— The South Sea Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... day; Should no false kindness lure to loose delight, Nor praise relax, nor difficulty fright; Should tempting novelty thy cell refrain, And sloth effuse her opiate fumes in vain; Should beauty blunt on fops her fatal dart, Nor claim the triumph of a lettered heart; Should no disease thy torpid veins invade, Nor melancholy's phantoms haunt thy shade; Yet hope not life from grief or danger free, Nor think the doom of man revers'd for thee. Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes, And pause a while from letters to ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... substance, and destruction of tissue. The normal sensibility of the part is also destroyed. No woman can ever forget the pain she endured when she first applied the corsets; but in time the compressed organs become torpid; the muscles lose their contractile power, and she feels dependent on the mechanical support of the corset. But the mischief is not limited to local weakness and insensibility. The general strength and general sensibility correspond with the breathing capacity. If she has ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... comfort in the house occupied the soul of lady Ann: it was that she heard nothing of the bookbinder fellow! She had grown so torpid, that while Danger was not flattening his nose against the window-pane, she was at peace. For the rest, a lawyer of her own had the will in his keeping, and she had come upon no ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... the bed and scream; so I didn't know what to do, for I can't handle those things like you, Ned, so I pushed its head down with my tooth brush and pinned up the pocket with my scarf pin. Then I waited a while for you, and I thought it had gone into a torpid condition like you read of, and Jack Dale came for me to go to see a Punch-and-Judy and when I got back the little deceitful beggar had cleared out! ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... sleep like all the rest; if there were a contending force anywhere; if we would let even that work instead of neglecting it, it would gain strength from hour to hour, and waken up, one at a time, each torpid and dishonoured faculty, till our whole nature became alive with strivings against self, and every avenue was open wide for God. Natural Law, Degeneration, ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... and the malice which before was torpid under a sullen exterior, was now active. It was perfectly unchanged in every other respect. This new energy was apparent in its activity and its looks, and ...
— Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... pre-existent to myself,—one Windsor Castle; and I was so delightful and so juvenile, that, without attending to any thing but my eyes, I stood full two hours and a half, and found that half my lameness consists in my indolence. Two Berrys, a Gothic chapel, and an historic castle, are anodynes to a torpid mind. I now fancy that old age was invented by the lazy. St. George's Chapel, that I always worshipped, though so dark and black that I could see nothing distinctly, is now being cleaned and decorated, a ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... our ideas from foreign sources 'enfeebles all internal strength of thought,' as a course of dram-drinking destroys the tone of the stomach. The faculties of the mind, when not exerted, or when cramped by custom and authority, become listless, torpid, and unfit for the purposes of thought or action. Can we wonder at the languor and lassitude which is thus produced by a life of learned sloth and ignorance; by poring over lines and syllables that excite little more idea or interest ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... intemperance pervaded the land, from the highest to the lowest classes of society. The Established Church was torpid, as far as it was not a scandal; but those who dissented from it came within the meshes of the Act of Uniformity, the Test Act, and the Corporation Act. By law, such a man as Priestley, being a Unitarian, could neither teach nor preach, and was liable to ruinous ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... the mass of half-dead humanity became so dense, so deaf, so torpid,—or perhaps it should be said so happy—that Marshal Victor, their heroic defender against twenty thousand Russians under Wittgenstein, was actually compelled to cut his way by force through this ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... requires, but, like all people who live at the extreme North, acquire tropical habits of indolence from the climate. During the tedious winters, when the days are but six hours long, all who can afford it become torpid, like frogs, and lie up in their houses till the summer sun thaws them out. Balls, parties, and sleigh-riding occasionally rouse them up, but lethargy is the general rule. The warm weather comes very suddenly, ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... had at once, and for the first time, acquired sense to comprehend her inexpressible calamity. These alternate feelings of embarrassment, wonder, and grief, seemed to succeed each other more than once upon her torpid features. But she spoke not a wordneither had she shed a tearnor did one of the family understand, either from look or expression, to what extent she comprehended the uncommon bustle around her. Thus she sat among the funeral assembly like a connecting link ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... was time to call her companion. She knew how hard he had worked during the day, and she resolved not to call him as long as she could keep awake herself. Her position was by the tree; but in order to rouse her torpid faculties, she took a walk around the island. When she reached the side of their narrow domain where they had landed in the morning, she was startled by what she thought was a slight splashing in the water, at a considerable distance from her. After the ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic
... harmless snake, Lying torpid, scarce awake, On a chilly morning, Is it well his life to ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... battle of Karbala; and the public funeral of the saints, represented, not by an effigy of their bodies, but by a model of their tombs. Loving spectacle and excitement, with the love of a rather idle and illiterate population whose daily life is dull and torpid, the people of India have very generally lost sight of the fasting and humiliation which are the real essence of the Moharram, and have turned it into a diversion and a show. But there was no show nor diversion ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... never wholly to be extinguished, break out afresh; let but the human creature be rouzed; whether he have lain heedless and torpid in religious or civil slavery—have languished under a thraldom, domestic or foreign, or under both these alternately—or have drifted about a helpless member of a clan of disjointed and feeble barbarians; let him rise and ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... golden grain of his thought falls, as in the parable, in all sorts of places; but, unlike some of the seed in the parable, it all leaves some trace behind. It stimulates reflection, it awakens life, it arouses the torpid soul, it shakes the drowsy soul, it shocks the pious soul, it frightens the timid soul, but it lifts them all, as it were, by main force, out of themselves, and makes healthful breezes blow, and refreshing showers fall ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... to nap, though between times they may be particularly wide awake. Later it would seem that less sleep is needed to sustain health, though it is especially profound. As regards the individual, the temperament probably largely influences this matter. The torpid generally are first made drowsy, and afterwards sleep well, the erethic or irritable are specially wakeful on arriving, and later their sleep is broken, exactly the reverse occurring on the sea shore. With respect to meteorological conditions, humidity undoubtedly ...
— The Truth About America • Edward Money
... Gardener and its larva in the silken cocoons of the Bombyx. I do not expect ever to make such a discovery. These cocoons are inhabited only in winter, when the Gardener is indifferent to food, and lies torpid in the earth. In April, however, when the processions of larvae are seeking a suitable site for burial and metamorphosis, the Gardener should profit largely by its good fortune should it by ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... his presence isn't always necessary; it must bother Mrs. Loring too; he's quite off his head about her if she only knew it. However, it's my last day very likely, and if I have to outwit Machiavelli I'll manage it somehow! Surely one lame old woman, and a torpid machine for knitting and writing notes like Miss Smeardon, can't want to be out of doors all day. Hang that boy, though! He'll come anywhere." Here he stopped and sat down suddenly at the dressing-table, covering his face with his hands in comic despair. "Mrs. Loring can't like ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... good man to retort on a slander, "I will have recourse to the only means that are congenial to guilt: I will compel you to be silent." Freedom in this matter, as in all others, will engender activity and fortitude; positive institution (Godwin's term for law and constraint) makes the mind torpid and lethargic. It is hardly necessary to reproduce Godwin's vigorous arguments for unfettered freedom in political and speculative discussion, against censorships and prosecutions for religious and political opinions. Even were we secure from the possibility ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... Stockton 6771, it said. A carpeted stair with a fine old mahogany balustrade rose into the dimness. Aubrey, who was thoroughly familiar with lodgings, knew instinctively that the fourth, ninth, tenth, and fourteenth steps would be creakers. A soft musk sweetened the warm, torpid air: he divined that someone was toasting marshmallows over a gas jet. He knew perfectly well that somewhere in the house would be a placard over a bathtub with the legend: Please leave this tub as you would wish to find it. Roger Mifflin would have said, ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... London—gambler, horse-racer, libertine, what not?—but in society charming, and his manners singularly elegant and winning. He never obtruded his vices in good company; in fact, you might dine with him all your life and not detect him. The young serpent was torpid in wine; but he came out, a bit at a time, in the sunshine ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... his employers remonstrated; and the same arguments they had used upon their former clerks were urged upon his consideration. Fearing the loss of situation, he repented, but it was only to fall again before the power of that appetite with which he had tampered as with a torpid viper, which now felt the warmth of his embrace, and became a living, craving creature within ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... globules appeared cleanly circular, flattened, biconcave, and without notches, indentations or spheroidal swellings. The white globules changed their shape, taking at intervals the spherical form, and varying their shapes again by delicate expansions. I was not deceived then, it was a torpid man that I had under my eyes, ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... My voice. Many listen more willingly to the world than to God, and more easily follow the appetite of the flesh than God's good pleasure. The world promises small and temporary things, and is served with great eagerness; I promise supreme and eternal things, but the hearts of mortals are torpid. Who serves and obeys Me in everything with so great care as the world and its lords are served? Men run a long way for a trifling reward, but for eternal life many scarcely lift a ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... just entered the room to inform her mistress that Aunt Judy was ready for her, stood in rigid uprightness, her torpid eyes settled upon the lady. "I reckon," so ran the thought within the mazes of her dark little interior, "dat Miss Rob's wuss disgruntled dan she was dat ebenin' when I make my cake, fur she got two dif'ent kinds ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... little in the sun. The balcony was undergoing repairs that day, and the travellers could not go out on it; but under the spell of the historic interest of the beautiful old Gothic place, they lingered in the interior till they were half-torpid with the cold. Then she abandoned to him the joint duty of viewing the cathedral, and hurried to their carriage where she basked in the sun till he came to her. He returned shivering, after a half-hour's absence, and pretended that she had missed the greatest thing in the world, but as he could never ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... ranger to ride back to his camp on the water hole. Before he mounted his horse he raised the slight form of Tonia with one arm high from the earth for a parting salute. The drowsy stillness of the torpid summer air still lay thick upon the dreaming afternoon. The smoke from the fire in the /jacal/, where the /frijoles/ blubbered in the iron pot, rose straight as a plumb-line above the clay-daubed chimney. No sound or movement disturbed the serenity ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... there as the diminutiveness of the cultivated ground surrounding each Indian hut.(222) But in these earthly paradises, where, as Byron said, even bread is gathered like fruit, the powers of man slumber as certainly as they grow torpid in polar deserts.(223) The sentence: "In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread," has been a blessing to mankind. Athens was not only the literary and political, but also the economic capital of Greece; and yet Attica ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... was need once more of a Divine Revelation to the torpid frivolous children of men, if they were not to sink altogether into the ape condition. And in that whirlwind of the Universe,—lights obliterated, and the torn wrecks of Earth and Hell hurled aloft into the Empyrean; black whirlwind, which made even apes serious, and drove ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... afterwards, when it now stopped their breath, nor suffered them to respire, they sat down for a little, with their backs to the wind. Then indeed the sky resounded with loud thunder, and the lightnings flashed between its terrific peals; all, bereft of sight and hearing, stood torpid with fear. At length, when the rain had spent itself, and the fury of the wind was on that account the more increased, it seemed necessary to pitch the camp in that very place where they had been overtaken by the storm. But ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... inscrutable, marking the even beat of light and darkness, and the beat of the life of the torpid creature dreaming in the depths of his cradle—his imperious needs, sorrowful or glad—so regular that the night and the day which bring them seem by them to ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... credible that she was kept in ignorance by the traitors and murderers who had enrolled themselves in her service—that one who pensioned the actual murderer of Murray and a would-be murderer of Elizabeth was incapable of approving what her keen and practised intelligence was too blunt and torpid to anticipate as inevitable and inseparable from the general design. In August the conspirators were netted, and Mary was arrested at the gate of Tixall Park, whither Paulet had taken her under pretence of a hunting-party. At Tixall she was ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... explained the captain. "She's only a little slow. Constitutionally torpid—if I may use the expression. I am merely loud with her (and I beg you will honor me by being loud, too) as a necessary stimulant to her ideas. Shout at her—and her mind comes up to time. Speak to her—and she drifts miles away from you ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... To leaven the virtue of these honest men! But the Devil remained till the Break of Day Blushed upon Sleep and Lord Castlereagh:[45] 170 Then up half the house got, and Satan got up With the drowsy to snore—or the hungry to sup:— But so torpid the power of some speakers, 't is said, That they sent even ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... not in more moral earnestness only, but in a more open intelligence; not merely in a more dogged resolution to work and be silent, but in a ready willingness to use the understanding. The poison of our sins, says Mr. Carlyle in his latest utterance, 'is not intellectual dimness chiefly, but torpid unveracity of heart.' Yes, but all unveracity, torpid or fervid, breeds intellectual dimness, and it is this last which prevents us from seeing a way out of the present ignoble situation. We need light more than ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... your varied powers Made only for life's gala bow'rs, To smooth Reflection's mentor-frown, Or Pillow joy on softer down.— Fools!—yon blest orb not only glows To chase the cloud, or paint the rose; These are the pastimes of his might, Earth's torpid bosom drinks his light; Find there his wondrous pow'r's true measure, Death turn'd to life, and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... her aspect, and the mere slave of discipline (he had pulled in the St. Catherine's second torpid), obeyed her command, and presently we ...
— HE • Andrew Lang
... seaward. They were not alone in this, for a little further up the beach the two Fiji Islanders sat huddled on their haunches, gazing stupidly first at the horizon and then at their white captors. It was the sight of these two worthies that spurred Mr. Gibney's torpid ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... efficiency of his troops either by haranguing or by drilling them. He did not keep himself in the public eye, but retired into the pleasant shade of his gardens, regarding past, present, and future with equal indifference, like one of those listless animals which lie sluggish, and torpid so long as you supply them with food. While he thus loitered languid and indolent in the woods of Aricia,[95] he received the startling news of Lucilius Bassus' treachery and the disaffection of the fleet ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... for freighting up the Yukon, are the only towns apparently assured of a prosperous future. Wrangell (formerly Fort St Dionysius, Fort Stikine and Fort Wrangell), founded in 1833, is a dilapidated and torpid little village, of some interest in Alaskan history, and of temporary importance from 1874 to 1877 as the gateway to the Cassiar mines in British Columbia. Its inhabitants are chiefly ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... under the snowy winding-sheet, the Spider goes up to her bound prisoner. She has a better weapon than the bestiarius' trident: she has her poison-fangs. She gnaws at the Locust, without undue persistence, and then withdraws, leaving the torpid ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... his poor Queen to her reflections, and taken into that sad line, in which by degrees he carried it so far. There are three of them, it seems;—the first female souls that could ever manage to kindle, into flame or into smoke: in this or any other kind, that poor torpid male soul: those Mailly Sisters, three in number (I am shocked to hear), successive, nay in part simultaneous! They are proud women, especially the two younger; with ambition in them, with a bravura magnanimity, of the theatrical or operatic kind; ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... whether the donation to the Curates' Aid Society did have much effect. It may perhaps have induced a resolution in some few to go to the poll whose minds were active in regard to religion and torpid as to politics. But the donation to St Fabricius certainly had results. It was taken up and made much of by the Roman Catholic party generally, till a report got itself spread abroad and almost believed that Mr Melmotte was going to join the Church ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... their fashion, and made some rude attempts at performing a sort of pantomime. I may now close this detail with observing that the natives of this mountainous region have stronger animal spirits than those of the plains, and pass their lives with more variety than the torpid inhabitants of the coast; that they breathe a spirit of independence, and being frequently engaged in warfare, village against village, they would be better prepared to resist any ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... Should no false kindness lure to loose delight, Nor praise relax, nor difficulty fright; Should tempting Novelty thy cell refrain, And Sloth effuse her opiate fumes in vain; Should beauty blunt on fops her fatal dart, Nor claim the triumph of a letter'd heart; Should no disease thy torpid veins invade, Nor Melancholy's phantoms haunt thy shade; Yet hope not life from grief or danger free, Nor think the doom of man revers'd for thee: Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes, And pause awhile from Letters, to be wise; There mark what ills the scholar's life assail, Toil, envy, ...
— English Satires • Various
... which he lifted only to drop it with a yell, for underneath it lay a torpid snake, doubtless one of those that had been used in ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... this ancient and embowered mansion! I had strongly felt the silence and vacancy of the depriving day on which you vanished. How prone are our hearts perversely to quarrel with the friendly coercion of employment at the very instant in which it is clearing the torpid and injurious mists of unavailing melancholy!' Then follows a sprightly attack before which Johnson may have quailed indeed. 'Is the Fe-fa-fum of literature that snuffs afar the fame of his brother authors, and thirsts ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... observe, that "winter lingering chills the lap of May." Sudden changes of temperature are experienced, which are governed very much by the course and changes of the wind. Nature appears suddenly to have been awakened from her torpid state. ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... become, save perhaps for my music, an automaton. But, although I did not improve in appearance, my health was completely restored, and when the war came I was in perfect condition for the arduous task I immediately undertook. Moreover, my mind, torpid for a year, was free and refreshed for those practical details it must grapple with at once. I turned the Zattiany palace in Buda Pesth into a hospital. And then for four years I was again an automaton, but ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... keeping company with your superiors. Madame Lambert tells her son, Let your connections be with people above you; by that means you will acquire a habit of respect and politeness. With one's equals, one is apt to become negligent, and the mind grows torpid. She advises him, too, to frequent those people, and to see their inside; In order to judge of men, one must be intimately connected; thus you see them without, a veil, and with their mere every-day merit. A happy ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... were inundating his white apron, the whole of his massive, torpid form quivered with grief. He seemed to be sinking, melting away. When he was at last able to speak, he stammered: "Oh, you don't know how good he was to me when we lived together in the Rue Royer-Collard! He did everything. He ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... Italian lake, and the waving pines, and our solitary home, and my babe's distant grave. Tell me," she cried, again starting up, "has he not spoken of me lately—has he not seen me in his dreams? have I not been present to his soul when the frame, torpid and locked, severed us no more, and, in the still hours, I charmed myself to his gaze? Tell me, has he not owned that Lucilla haunted his pillow? Tell me; and if I err, my spells are nothing, my power is vanity, and I am the helpless ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... keel and bring down its speed. Professional ecclesiastics in all ages have succumbed to the temptation of thinking that 'church property' was first of all to be used for their advantage, and, secondarily, for behoof of God's house. Eager zeal has in all ages to be yoked to torpid indifference, and to drag its unwilling companion along, like two dogs in a leash. Direct opposition is easier to bear than apparent assistance which tries to slow down to ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... was so feeble as to be quite unable to catch hold of my extemporised tinder. After prolonged and fruitless efforts the intense cold began to chill me, and being well aware of the great danger of getting benumbed, or of falling into that torpid state of indifference to life, coupled with intense desire for rest which precedes death from cold, I made up my mind at once, tired and hungry though I was, to turn round and walk ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... paradise of the man of law, and nine-tenths of the profession are bound sooner or later to regard themselves as shelved for good in the provinces. Wherefore, every Tribunal of First Instance and every Court-Royal is sharply divided in two. The first section has given up hope, and is either torpid or content; content with the excessive respect paid to office in a country town, or torpid with tranquillity. The second section is made up of the younger sort, in whom the desire of success is untempered as yet by disappointment, and of the really clever men urged on continually by ambition ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... rooms and gray corridors, with carpets that muffled the feet which at intervals passed along them. It was a house of silence, brooding within the high fence that shut it and the grounds from a landscape torpid under the hot sun of summer, and across which occasionally drifted the lonely, mournful whistle of a train on a nearby railroad. Inside the house there was always a hush, a heavy quiet—restful to ...
— Under Arctic Ice • H.G. Winter
... the door reply, The hall wake, yawn, and smile; the torpid stair Will grumble at our feet, the table cry: 'Fetch my belongings for me; I am bare.' A clatter! Something in the attic falls. A ghost has lifted up his robes and fled. The loitering shadows move along the walls; Then silence very slowly lifts his ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 • Various
... lasting as long as a week are by no means unknown. Within a short time of the onset the urine may be found to contain acetone bodies, the breath may smell distinctly of acetone, and the child may become torpid and drowsy or agitated and restless. At times there may be exaggerated and deepened respiratory movements—the so-called air hunger. In many cases, however, otherwise characteristic, these more severe manifestations are absent or but little ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... shaken" (Conimb. prob. 6. sec. 3. de som.) why they stutter or falter in their speech, Mercurialis and Montaltus, cap. 17. give like reasons out of Hippocrates, [2676]"dryness, which makes the nerves of the tongue torpid." Fast speaking (which is a symptom of some few) Aetius will have caused [2677] "from abundance of wind, and swiftness of imagination:" [2678]"baldness comes from excess of dryness," hirsuteness from a dry temperature. The cause of much waking in a dry brain, continual meditation, discontent, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... state of affairs at the Foss River Ranch when Lablache put into execution his threats against the Hon. Bunning-Ford. The settlement had returned to its customary torpid serenity. The round-up was over, and all the "hands" had returned to the various ranches to which they belonged. The little place had entered upon its period of placid sleep, which would last until the advent of the farmers to spend the proceeds of their garnered harvest. ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... wiry—have their histories also. But how rarely we see squirrels in winter! The naturalists say they are mostly torpid; yet evidently that little pocket-faced depredator, the chipmunk, was not carrying buckwheat for so many days to his hole for nothing: was he anticipating a state of torpidity, or providing against the demands of a very active appetite? Red and gray squirrels are more or less active ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... according to the primitive notions of the Shokas, that inside the earth lives in a torpid condition an evil spirit in the shape of a gigantic reptile. The rumbling preceding an earthquake is, to the Shoka mind, nothing else than the heavy breathing of the monster previous to waking, whereas the actual shock is caused by the brute stretching its limbs. When ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... him here torpid lies, That drew the essential forms of grace; Here closed in death the attentive eyes That saw ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... nothing Christian about it. It is merely sentimental slush, sloppy shirking of anything that compels national alertness, or effort, or self-discipline, or self-denial; a moral cowardice that pushes away any fact which disturbs a shallow, torpid, irresponsible, self-indulgent optimism. ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... into a beast of burden. I trudge on with my mind torpid—I take whatever comes to me, and go on mechanically. Oh it cows me, it wears me down! I have learned to bear anything—anything! A man might kick me ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... hastily to the chamber in which he left him, believing he had withdrawn too soon, and that the king, as he knew no other was present, was speaking to him: he soon drew near enough to hear what was said; and while he was standing torpid in suspense, dreading to be discovered, and not knowing how to retire, ALMORAN ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... intended and apparently capricious mingling of satirical and pathetic sentiment, but valuable for its vivid expression of Italian feeling toward the Austrians. These the Italians hated as part of a stupid and brutal oppression; they despised them somewhat as a torpid-witted folk, but individually liked them for their amiability and good nature, and in their better moments they pitied them as the victims of a common tyranny. I will not be so adventurous as to say how far the beautiful military ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... cradled rest, Was I not softly hush'd?—here fondly rear'd? Ah! is not this my country?—so endear'd By every filial tie! In whose lap shrouded both my parents lie! Oh! by this tender thought, Your torpid bosoms to compassion wrought, Look on the people's grief! Who, after God, of you expect relief; And if ye but relent, Virtue shall rouse her in embattled might, Against blind fury bent, Nor long shall doubtful hang the unequal fight; For no,—the ancient flame Is not ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... handclasp! Had that trembling been a weakness or a strength? For all time since—and increasingly during the later years—secret memories of it had wonderfully quickened a life that would otherwise have tended to fall dull, torpid, stubborn. It was not that their hands had met, but that they had trembled—those two strange hands that had both repelled and coerced each other—faltering at last into that long moment of ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... brink, sometimes sheltering himself behind a tuft of bushes, and trailing his line along the water, in hopes to catch a pickerel. But, taking the river for all in all, I can find nothing more fit to compare it with, than one of the half-torpid earth-worms which I dig up for bait. The worm is sluggish, and so is the river,—the river is muddy, and so is the worm. You hardly know whether either of them be alive or dead; but still, in the course of time, they both manage to creep away. The best aspect of the Concord is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... his friends; he might—he HAD—let her go easily, as one resigns his careless hold upon a paltry, unprized toy; but when her hand had rested thus in his, and his passionate regards penetrated her soul, he loved her, alone and entirely! She would fold this conviction to her torpid heart for a little while before she turned herself away finally from the memories of that love-summer and battle-autumn of her existence. If it aroused in the chilled thing some slight pangs of sentiency, it ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... this glass, which now I drain, By this spirit, which shall cheer you, As its fumes mount to my brain, From thy torpid ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... extinguish the last spark of rebellion in the Netherlands, was his secret thought, and yet it was very difficult to get fifty thousand dollars from him from month to month. Procrastinating and indolent himself, he was for ever rebuking the torpid movements ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... who emancipated the peasants of Prussia observed that Hungary was the only part of the Austrian dominions in which the peasant was not in a better condition than his fellows in North Germany; [9] and so torpid was the humanity of the Diet that until the year 1835 the prison and the flogging-board continued to form a part of every ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... laden with the perfume of pinks, carnations, and moss-roses in the garden below. Her garden! Is it possible? Something in the action reminds him of that bright, hopeful morning at Calais. Something in the scent of the flowers steals to his brain, half torpid and benumbed; his heart contracts with an agony of physical suffering. "My darling! my darling!" he murmurs, "shall I never see you tying those flowers again?" and turning from the window, he falls on his knees ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... rise to it. A swollen condition of the mucous membrane of that part of the bowel called the duodenum may produce jaundice, as that mechanically closes the orifice of the biliary duct. In constipation there is an inactive or torpid condition of the bowel, and the bile which passes into the intestine may be absorbed and cause the yellow staining of jaundice. Jaundice is one of the symptoms of Texas fever. It may also arise from the presence of parasites ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... state of bodily health continuing from infancy to old age; for the man who always retains a sound constitution and enjoys a continual freedom from sickness, feels his vigor unabated, while his fibres, nerves, muscles, and sinews, are neither torpid, relaxed, nor feeble, but retain the full strength of their powers: farewell." To this decision was subscribed ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... Ferris, smiling at her despair, "you push matters a little beyond—as a woman has a right to do, of course. I don't think their faces are bad, by any means. Some of them are dull and torpid, and some are frivolous, just like the faces of other people. But I've been noticing the number of good, kind, friendly faces, and they're in the majority, just as they are amongst other people; for there are ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... Summer. One evening, I sat upon our front step, in a kind of torpid state of mind through my refusal to contemplate the dismal future. My eye turned listlessly down the street. The only moving figure in it was that of a slender man approaching on the further side of the way. He carried two valises, one with each hand, and leaned a little forward as ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... our present life weighed also heavily upon me. The stirring events of a campaign—the march, the bivouac, the picket—call forth a certain physical exertion that never fails to react upon the torpid mind. ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... search, and I find within myself a great diversity. When I am deserted by Thee, my soul is like a sick man, whose taste is spoiled. Nothing pleases me, but all things disgust me. My body is torpid, my mind oppressed; within is dryness, without is sadness. All that I see or hear, however good in reality, is distasteful and hateful to me. I am easily led into sins; I am weak to resist my enemies; I am ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... He expected, in another moment, that he would plunge his weapon into the shark's body; but instead of that, what was his surprise to see him suddenly leap on its back and dig the fingers of one hand into its left eye. If the hammer-head had been torpid before, it now made ample amends by its sudden activity; off it darted along the surface, Nub holding up its head to prevent it from diving, while with his right hand he struck his knife with all his might sometimes before him and sometimes behind him, inflicting deep wounds ...
— The South Sea Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... month undoubtedly presents fewer floral attractions than any other in the whole year. Everything is in a torpid state of existence, and the combined forces of frost, snow, wind, and rain render December unpleasant both indoors and out. The only kinds of vegetation which seem to flourish just now are the insignificant, but wonderfully beautiful, mosses and lichens which everywhere ...
— Little Folks (December 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... table being small, and not suitable for the barricade, he had been left in possession of it. He was still in the same posture, with his breast bent over the table, his head lying flat on his arms, surrounded by glasses, beer-jugs and bottles. His was the overwhelming slumber of the torpid bear and the satiated leech. Nothing had had any effect upon it, neither the fusillade, nor the cannon-balls, nor the grape-shot which had made its way through the window into the room where he was. Nor the tremendous uproar of the assault. He merely replied ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... hands of that unjust steward she received two empty bird-cages, together with a detailed account of the manner in which the occupants had effected their escape, and a bullfinch that seemed to be suffering from torpid liver. The condition of the geraniums was ascribed to worms in the pots, ...
— Ship's Company, The Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... fifty trusty conspirators in all France; at least, as long as our armies are victorious, and organized in their present formidable manner. Should anything happen to our present chief, an impulse may be given to the minds now sunk down, and raise our characters from their present torpid state. But until such an event, we shall remain as we are, indolent but submissive, sacrificing our children and treasures for a cause we detest, and for a man we abhor. I am sorry to say it, but it certainly does, no honour to my nation when one million desperados of civil and ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... stood at the window looking down over the blistering plaza. Davao was torpid under the noonday heat. Three carabaos grazed undisturbed on the forbidden square: another of the awkward powerful brutes dawdled up the dusty road, hauling a decrepit two-wheeled cart on which a naked-backed, red-pantalooned native ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... realisation that they had strayed far out of the course and that his hands were not strong enough to guide them. Close to the Great Bear and the Little Bear they passed, and these were scorched with heat. The Serpent which, torpid, chilly and harmless, lies coiled round the North Pole, felt a warmth that made it grow fierce and harmful again. Downward, ever downward galloped the maddened horses, and soon Phaeton saw the sea as a shield of molten brass, and the ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... her arms round Ethel, and led her up to her sitting-room, where a book lay on the table. She said that her father had seemed weary and torpid, and had sat still until almost their late dinner- hour, when he seemed to bethink himself of dressing, and had risen. She thought he walked weakly, and rather tottering, and had run to make him lean on her, which he did, as far as his own room door. There he had kissed her, and thanked ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... recently felt the enervating effects of a burning sun, in the torrid regions of the west; he had now speedily to encounter the benumbing influence of a frozen atmosphere, in the torpid ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) • James Harrison
... comfort, made that mass of men inaccessible to every thought but that of rest. Though the artillery of the left wing of the Russians kept up a steady fire on this mass,—visible like a stain now black, now flaming, in the midst of the trackless snow,—this shot and shell seemed to the torpid creatures only one inconvenience the more. It was like a thunderstorm, despised by all because the lightning strikes so few; the balls struck only here and there, the dying, the sick, the dead sometimes! Stragglers arrived in groups continually; ...
— Adieu • Honore de Balzac
... 'enfeebles all internal strength of thought,' as a course of dram-drinking destroys the tone of the stomach. The faculties of the mind, when not exerted, or when cramped by custom and authority, become listless, torpid, and unfit for the purposes of thought or action. Can we wonder at the languor and lassitude which is thus produced by a life of learned sloth and ignorance; by poring over lines and syllables that excite little more idea or interest than if they were the characters of an unknown ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... to my son John my big bony frame and the slouching gait I acquired by carelessness, also my inherited tendency to consumption. To my daughter Mary I bequeath my sallow complexion and torpid liver, which are the result of my gross living; also my melancholy disposition and tendency to look on the dark side of life. To my son Samuel I give my love for alcoholic liquors and my irritable disposition; to my daughter ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... rusticae) being found in a torpid state during the winter in the Isle of Wight or any part of this country, I never heard any such account worth attending to. But a clergyman, of an inquisitive turn, assures me, that when he was a great boy, some workmen, in pulling down the battlements of a church ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... once "submerged" beneath the arenaceous "flood," a man loses the power to extricate himself. His energies are suspended, his senses become numbed and torpid—in short, he feels as one who goes to sleep in ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... therefrom is love, and the light wisdom (as shown in Part Second). Life, therefore, is from these two which go forth from the Lord as a sun. That love and wisdom from the Lord is life can be seen also from this, that man grows torpid as love recedes from him, and stupid as wisdom recedes from him, and that were they to recede altogether he would become extinct. There are many things pertaining to love which have received other ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... military successes of the British arms, the reign of George II was morally torpid. With the exception of a few public men like Pitt, the majority of the Whig party (S479) seemed animated by no higher motive than self-interest. It was an age whose want of faith, coarseness, and brutality were well protrayed by Hogarth's ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... for their special purpose. These graceful creatures (is it possible that a fine yacht can be counted as an inanimate thing?) reclined on the muddy bosom of the basin, but I would not put the Rob Roy there, it seemed so pent up and torpid a life, and with the curious always gazing down from the lofty quay right into your cabin, especially as next day I wished to ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... infirmity, they had evidently some talisman or other that kept death at bay. Two or three of their number, as I was assured, being gouty and rheumatic, or perhaps bedridden, never dreamed of making their appearance at the Custom-House, during a large part of the year; but, after a torpid winter, would creep out into the warm sunshine of May or June, go lazily about what they termed duty, and, at their own leisure and convenience, betake themselves to bed again. I must plead guilty to the charge of abbreviating the official breath of more than one of these venerable ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... there was virtuous truth in the eyes of any woman, it was now in Ruth Huckaback's: and my brain began very slowly to move, the heart being almost torpid from perpetual ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... always necessary; it must bother Mrs. Loring too; he's quite off his head about her if she only knew it. However, it's my last day very likely, and if I have to outwit Machiavelli I'll manage it somehow! Surely one lame old woman, and a torpid machine for knitting and writing notes like Miss Smeardon, can't want to be out of doors all day. Hang that boy, though! He'll come anywhere." Here he stopped and sat down suddenly at the dressing-table, covering his face with his hands in comic ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... gentle Lemmings. As for the German Hamster, he became so drowsy as the weather grew colder, that it became evident that he could sleep day and night upon boards, though he never fell into the perfectly torpid, almost dead state that he would have done, could he have been ...
— The Rambles of a Rat • A. L. O. E.
... stifling with its own rank maturity; when the long hillside ranks of wild oats, thickset and impassable, filled the air with the heated dust of germination. In this quickening irritation of life it would be strange if the unfortunate man's torpid intellect was not helped in its awakening, and he was allowed to ramble at will over the ranch; but with the instinct of a domestic animal he always returned to the house, and sat in the porch, where Josephine usually found him awaiting her when she herself returned ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... method in it. Tilton finally brought up in the almshouse, where he was allowed the liberty of roaming at will through the town. He loved the water-side as if he had had all his senses. Often he was seen to stand for hours with a sunny, torpid smile on his lips, gazing out upon the river where its azure ruffles itself into silver against the islands. He always wore stuck in his hat a few hen's feathers, perhaps with some vague idea of still associating himself with the birds of the air, if hens can come ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... eggs and worms, and by this means the brood suffers. Besides, they must always have a sufficient provision of honey left for winter, for although less is consumed during this season, they do consume some; because they are not torpid, as some authors have conceived.{N} Therefore if they have not enough, they must be supplied with it, which requires great exactness. I admit that in determining to what extent hives may be multiplied ...
— New observations on the natural history of bees • Francis Huber
... Taciturn, serious, and absorbed in himself; he assumes a sedate and mysterious air. When a person has resided but a short time in the Missions, and is but little familiarized with the aspect of the natives, he is led to mistake their indolence, and the torpid state of their faculties, for the expression of melancholy, and a meditative ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... confidingly responsive while commanding in originality. By the vivid intensity of her conceptions, she brought out in those around their own consciousness, and, by the glowing vigor of her intellect, roused into action their torpid powers. On the other hand, she reproduced a truth, whose germ had just been imbibed from others, moulded after her own image and quickened by her own life, with marvellous rapidity. And the presence of congenial minds so stimulated the prolific power of her imagination, that ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... her dead darling. How long it rested there she never knew. Earth seemed to pass away; darkness closed over her, and for a time she had no pain, no sorrow; she and Lilly were together. All was black, and she had no feeling. Then she was lifted, and the motion aroused her torpid faculties; she moaned and opened her eyes. Dr. Hartwell was placing her on a sofa, and Mrs. Grayson stood by the table with a handkerchief over her eyes. With returning consciousness came a raving despair; Beulah sprang from the strong ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... raced on toward the sea. It was a warm day, and a torpid peace began to settle down ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... so painfully slurred by a great many public speakers are four: ignorance of the elemental sounds; failure to discriminate between sounds nearly alike; a slovenly, lazy use of the vocal organs; and a torpid will. Anyone who is still master of himself will know how to handle each ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... question about his writing, but the subject was distasteful to him, and he turned the talk to a new book in which he had been interested. She knew enough of it to slip in the right word here and there; and thence they wandered on to kindred topics. Under the warmth of her attention his torpid ideas awoke again, and his eyes took their fill of pleasure as she leaned forward, her thin brown hands clasped on her knees and her eager ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... feet upon the table, began to read. In a few moments the same numbness stole into his head like a rising fog, a queer, tense feeling, growing at the back of his forehead and at the base of his skull, a dulness, a strange stupefying sensation as of some torpid, murky atmosphere. He looked about him quickly; all the objects in the range of his vision—the corner of the desk, the corduroy couch, the low bookcase with Flossie's yellow slipper and Barye's lioness upon it—seemed to move ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... There seems small blessing, in this overworked world, in a promise of more active exertion; but what an immense part of our nature lies dormant and torpid if we are not Christians! How much of the work that is done is dreary, wearisome, collar-work, against the grain. Do not the wheels of life often go slowly? Are you not often weary of the inexpressible monotony and fatigue? And do you not go ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... that my two dishes, and perhaps my hartshorn, were prepared for me; in which case it was more proper for their purpose, that they should help me, than that I should help myself. Ill before, I found myself still more and more disordered in my head; a heavy torpid pain increasing fast upon me. But I imputed it to ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... prognostic, augury, foretoken, adumbration, presage, indication. Simple, innocent, artless, unsophisticated, naive. Skilful, skilled, expert, adept, apt, proficient, adroit, dexterous, deft, clever, ingenious. Skin, hide, pelt, fell. Sleepy, drowsy, slumberous, somnolent, sluggish, torpid, dull, lethargic. Slovenly, slatternly, dowdy, frowsy, blowzy. Sly, crafty, cunning, subtle, wily, artful, politic, designing. Smile, smirk, grin. Solitary, lonely, lone, lonesome, desolate, deserted, uninhabited. ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... this little animal "the Sleeper," because he lies in a torpid state through the long winter and spring, until the weather becomes quite warm. He builds his nest in an old hollow tree, or beneath the bushes, and during the summer lays up a great quantity of nuts or ...
— Tame Animals • Anonymous
... perfectly true: it is a book that always has a very peculiar effect on me, not so much a mental effect as what, for want of a better word, I will call a spiritual effect. It sets my soul on flame. I feel as though I had drawn near to a spirit burning like a fiery lamp, and that my own torpid and inert spirit had been kindled at it. That flame will burn out again, as it has burnt out many times before; but while the fire still leaps and glances in my heart I will try to put down exactly what it makes me feel I believe there are few books that give one, in the first place, ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... four heads of the family knelt the two married sisters accompanied by their husbands, and three sons, stupefied with grief. Five little children on their knees, the oldest not seven years old, unable, no doubt, to understand what was happening, gazed and listened with the torpid curiosity that characterizes the peasantry, and is really the observation of physical things pushed to its highest limit. Lastly, the poor unmarried sister, imprisoned in the interests of justice, now released, a ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... seem held in light esteem by lizards. Their blood need not be highly oxygenated; it nourishes just as well when impure. In temperate climes lizards lie torpid and buried all winter; some species of the tropic deserts sleep peacefully all summer. Their anatomy includes no means for the continuous introduction and expulsion of air; reptilian lungs are little more than ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... arriving almost penniless on Nepenthe, might have passed a torpid month or two, then drifted into the Club-set and gone to the dogs altogether. Latin saved him. He took to studying those earlier local writers who often composed in that tongue. The Jesuitical smoothness, the saccharine felicity ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... gnats enveloped his head and he ducked under his blankets. No more was said, for Bill knew why the smoke was there. All three covered up their heads and were soon asleep. It got real cold in the middle of the night and the gnats became too torpid to move. The boys slept like logs for they were tired. It could not have been more than four o'clock when the cheery voice of Mr. Waterman was heard ...
— Bob Hunt in Canada • George W. Orton
... not so much fireworks for display. Baranof had his motive. To the sea-captains who feasted with him and drank themselves torpid under his table, he proposed a plan—he would supply the Aleut hunters for them to hunt on shares as far south as southern California. Always, too, he was an eager buyer of their goods, giving them in exchange ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... effects:—1st. The great disruption which took place in the Church of Scotland no doubt called forth an attention to the subject which stirred up the public, and made religion at any rate a topic of deep interest for discussion and partizanship. Men's minds were not allowed to remain in the torpid condition of a past generation. 2d. The aesthetic movement in religion, which some years since was made in England, has, of course, had its influence in Scotland; and many who showed little concern about religion, whilst it was merely a question ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... lay becalmed in the Bahama Channel, slumbering on the dead and glassy sea, torpid with the heats of a West-Indian August. Menendez called a council of the commanders. There was doubt and indecision. Perhaps Ribaut had already reached the French fort, and then to attack the united force would be a stroke of desperation. Far better ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... white horse jogged evenly along over the wooden pavement, its head down, the little bell at its neck jingling pleasantly as it went. The cocher, a torpid, purplish lump of gross flesh, pyramidal, pearlike, sat immobile in his place. The protuberant back gave him an extraordinary effect of being buttoned into his fawn-colored coat wrong side before. At intervals he jerked ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... ruled by the fashions of society. There is very little harmony or relation between the exquisite joints of a refined nature, the swift and flexible movements of an elegant organism, and the evolutions clumsily executed by torpid limbs, ankylosed, as it were, by labor at ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... a boat which has an open rail for a bulwark. The Reverend John Stuart was a Nonconformist minister from Birmingham—either a Presbyterian or a Congregationalist—a man of immense stoutness, slow and torpid in his ways, but blessed with a considerable fund of homely humour, which made him, I am told, a very favourite preacher, and an effective speaker from ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... from which the ill-omening woman had issued, they found another, even her of whom they were in search, sitting by the fire, torpid and corpulent, to a degree which indicated that as it had been her trade to nurse others, she had not forgotten herself in ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... and the gaining upon its deep and fresh waters of the lifeless, impassable, unvoyageable plain, how little could we have understood the purpose with which those islands were shaped out of the void, and the torpid waters enclosed with their desolate walls of sand! How little could we have known, any more than of what now seems to us most distressful, dark, and objectless, the glorious aim which was then in the mind of Him in whose hand are all the corners of the earth! ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... not wind up watches in these regions, and as time is arbitrarily marked off by the cries of the gastric juices, I cannot tell you how the hours were reckoned up that evening. I think we two humans verged into a semi-torpid condition after that barbaric meal. Repletion, heat, and fatigue were too strong a combination for complete wakefulness; and though perhaps not exactly asleep, we were, like hibernating animals, very dully conscious of passing events. Se's condition ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... Charley himself. Middle-age had passed over him like some fattening and solidifying process. He was healthy, he was corpulent, he was prosperous, conventional, and commonplace. If Gabriella had been seeking, with Hogarthian humour, to portray the evils of torpid and self-satisfied respectability, she could scarcely have found a better picture of the condition than Charley presented. And the more Charley expanded, the more bloodless and wan Jane appeared at his side. Her small, flat face with its yellowish and unhealthy tinge, its light melancholy eyes, ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... coming up the kitchen stairs, confirmed the statement. In pity for his torpid incredulity she begged him to examine her house from top to bottom, and herself conducted him to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... here torpid lies, That drew the essential forms of grace; Here closed in death the attentive eyes That saw the manners in ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... being dull. In every direction there is abundant opportunity for brave and thoughtful men to find the fullest occupation for whatever energy they may possess. There is work to be found everywhere in this sense, and none but the most torpid can find an excuse for joining the spiritually unemployed. The fields, surely, are white for the harvest, though there are weeds enough to be extirpated, and hard enough furrows to be ploughed. We know what has been done in the field of physical science. ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... says Smelfungus, one of my Antecessors, finishing his long narrative of it, "this Camp is Nothing; and after all this expense of King August's and mine, it flies away like a dream. But alas, were the Congresses of Cambrai and Soissons, was the life-long diplomacy of Kaiser Karl, or the History of torpid moribund Europe in those days, much of a Something? The Pragmatic Sanction, with all its protocolling, has fled, like the temporary Playhouse of King August erected there in the village of Strohme. Much talk, noise and ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... the torpid tide were creeping round that thing in red doublet and breeches, in high top boots, lace cuffs ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... illustrated, or in the sudden and tragic change of fortune recorded. Such changes, it is urged, are of rare occurrence; and, recurring too often, they impress a character of suspicious accuracy upon the narrative. Doubtless they do so, and reasonably, where the writer is pursuing the torpid current of circumstantial domestic annals. But, in the rapid abstract of Herodotus, where a century yields but a page or two, and considering that two slender octavos, on the particular scale adopted by Herodotus, embody the total ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... attendants refilling the pipes—similar to those used in China, a cane holder with earthenware pipe in which tiny pills of opium were inserted and consumed over the flame of a small lamp. Several of the men were in such a torpid state that they mechanically inhaled the opium smoke when the pipes were pressed to their lips, but were hardly cognizant of what went about around them. The opium-den keeper in the meantime did a roaring business, ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... in the intervals between his books, and in the hours in which he is not writing. He has got to take it easy somehow, and the question is what is he to do. He can't, as a rule, do much in the way of hard exercise. Violent exercise in the open air is pleasant enough, but it leaves the brain torpid and stagnant. A man who really makes a business of writing has got to live through ten or twelve hours of a day when he isn't writing. He can't afford to read very much—at least he can't afford to read authors whom he admires, because they affect his style. There is something ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... pride, or gentlemanly love of doing nothing, prevents him from using. This ill-will, to be sure, is mostly of a negative kind; its most common form of manifestation is in absence of speech or action, a sort of torpid and genteel ignoring all unpleasant neighbours; but really the whale-fisheries of Monkshaven had become so impertinently and obtrusively prosperous of late years at the time of which I write, the Monkshaven ship-owners ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... brightest apparel, the greenest of cloaks thrown over them, lifting up their heads and sharing in the general rejoicing, in the glory of their annual resurrection. Is it in summer, with its myriads of blooms, and its thousand thousand happy voices, the silent torpid river, basking in the light of the sun, and responding only to the fishes as they frisk near the surface? Or is it in the autumn, with its many shades, with its long avenues on which nature has lavished whole ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren
... lie,' cried Mrs. Darrell. 'Such things never die. They sleep, perhaps—like the creatures that hide themselves in the ground and lie torpid all the winter—but with one breath of the past ...
— Milly Darrell and Other Tales • M. E. Braddon
... kept it up from seven o'clock until two in the morning, and then we all went out on the Avenue and sat down in the middle of the street, where it was cool, to smoke and talk it over. That was Davidson's idea. It annoyed the cabmen and policemen horribly. They have such ready tempers and such torpid minds." ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... which dream, in other lands, the luxurious rich, little knowing of the dangers through which their luxury has come to them. Like the Bedouin of the desert who darts alone across the sands of Africa, the bird is neither seen nor heard; the torpid atmosphere, deprived of its electrical conditions, echoes neither the whirr of its wings nor its joyous notes. Besides, what human eye was strong enough to bear the glitter of those pinnacles adorned with sparkling crystals, or the sharp reflections of the snow, iridescent on the summits ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... animals which breathe very little are stifled in fixed air, but are not soon quite killed in it. Butterflies and flies of other kinds will generally become torpid, and seemingly dead, after being held a few minutes over the fermenting liquor; but they revive again after being brought into the fresh air. But there are very great varieties with respect to the time in which different kinds of ...
— Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air • Joseph Priestley
... in the ancient version Holofernes made a feast for Judith "and drank much more wine than he had drunk at any time in one day since he was born;" that he then lay down on his bed in a state of stupor, and that Judith, taking advantage of his torpid condition, "approached" and cut off his head at her leisure with his own "fauchion." The decency of this arrangement is easily apparent; it obviated the necessity for wanton allurements on the part of Judith and amorous ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various
... what one's physical troubles may be, deep breathing will help to overcome them. It will help to cure cold feet by bringing more oxygen into the blood. It will help to drive away constipation by giving internal massage to the bowels. It will help to overcome torpid liver by the exercise given that organ. It will help to cure rheumatism by producing enough oxygen to burn up some of the foreign deposits in various parts of the body. As an eye-opener deep breathing has alcohol distanced. It ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... his pursuit, no matter what his character, the subject I refer to is one of which he rarely ceases to think, and, if opportunity is offered, to talk. On this he is eloquent, if on nothing else. The slow of speech becomes fluent; the torpid listener becomes electric with vivacity, and alive all over ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... overlooked the possibility of disturbing a torpid rattler. He slid feet first into the cave, found that he could all but stand ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... within himself, nourished by his own substance, like some torpid creature which hibernates in caves. Solitude had reacted upon his brain like a narcotic. After having strained and enervated it, his mind had fallen victim to a sluggishness which annihilated his plans, broke his will power and invoked a cortege of vague reveries ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... her way to the pavement, where something lay huddled against the wall of the house, and the coachman, torpid on his box behind the fidgety horses, ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... cannon and the sword. Of the thousands and ten thousands, that perished in our late contests with France and Spain, a very small part ever felt the stroke of an enemy; the rest languished in tents and ships, amidst damps and putrefaction; pale, torpid, spiritless, and helpless; gasping and groaning, unpitied among men, made obdurate by long continuance of hopeless misery; and were, at last, whelmed in pits, or heaved into the ocean, without notice and without ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... some object which his mind failed to register. Cash would sit and watch him furtively; but Bud was too engrossed with his own misery to notice it. Then, quite unexpectedly, reaction would come and leave Bud in a peace that was more than half a torpid refusal of his mind to worry ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... exhibit more or less industry, and are acquainted with some of the arts; but barbarous nations are acquainted with none of the improvements that elevate society, and exhibit a state of lounging indolence and torpid inactivity. If there be noise, it is not the rattle and whirl of business, or the hum of industry; but the noise of giddy mirth, boisterous and unmeaning laughter, or fierce and angry contention. If there be stillness, it is not the peace and quiet ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble
... think of sending me The Jar of Honey. When I receive the book I will write to him. I cannot thank you sufficiently for your letters, and I can give you but a faint idea of the pleasure they afford me; they seem to introduce such light and life to the torpid retirement where we live like dormice. But, understand this distinctly, you must never write to me except when you have both leisure and inclination. I know your time is too fully occupied and too valuable to be often at the service ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... he a wet boy, and didn't his teeth chatter! In fact, all three of us were wet, for, in our excitement, Addison and I had gone in knee-deep, and the water had splashed over us. In that bitter cold wind we felt it keenly. Tom was nearly torpid; he seemed unable to speak, and we could hardly make him take a step. His ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... literary career exhibited, on a reduced scale, the whole history of the school to which he belonged,—the rudeness and extravagance of its infancy,—the propriety, the grace, the dignified good sense, the temperate splendour of its maturity. His imagination was torpid, till it was awakened by his judgment. He began with quaint parallels and empty mouthing. He gradually acquired the energy of the satirist, the gravity of the moralist, the rapture of the lyric poet. The revolution ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... before them all the power and grace of her art, and they looked on with motionless hands and silent lips! Ah! this humiliation would have killed me in Italy, because I love my people, and they understand and appreciate all that is rare and beautiful. My heart burns with scorn and contempt for these torpid Berliners." ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... said, to narrow the means of access to emoluments. As to the quiet of the nation being disturbed by innovation, he could not see such could be the result from granting the prayer of the petition. He added, if the repose of the nation partook at all of the torpid state of insensibility which Lord North's mandragora had diffused through the house, the sooner it was broken the better; it was an alarming symptom, which, instead of betokening health, was the forerunner of destruction. The house divided at midnight, when the petition ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... heads, Ootah could see the eyes of the musk-oxen—they were greenish and phosphorescent. Occasionally the creatures roared sullenly, but the fight was less exciting than it would have been had they been less torpid from hunger ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... picture of humanity apart from Jesus Christ, a darkness so intense, so tragic, that it is, as it were, the very shadow of the ultimate and essential darkness which is death, and in it men are sitting torpid, unable to find their way ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the gateway, they came to a bridge, which seemed to be built of iron. Pluto stopped the chariot, and bade Proserpina look at the stream which was gliding so lazily beneath it. Never in her life had she beheld so torpid, so black, so muddy-looking a stream: its waters reflected no images of anything that was on the banks, and it moved as sluggishly as if it had quite forgotten which way it ought to flow, and had rather stagnate than flow either one way ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... later with a live fish in each hand, while one of them had also a third fish in his mouth. The diving was repeated several times with varying results before I took my leave, and the captain assured me that this was a common sight on the Yangtse in winter, when the fish were probably lying in the mud torpid from the cold. ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... inflection in Winter's voice seemed to reach a rather torpid brain. Fenley looked ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... nearer to it. Instead, his horse seems stuck fast in the mud, and is making no effort to advance; but totters on his limbs as though about to lose them! And the youth appears to have lost all control not only of the animal but himself; all energy to act, sitting lollingly in his saddle, as if torpid, ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... be said: she was now disturbed out of her torpid indifference to her environment. As she fidgeted there, pale and frowning, in the noisy basket-chair, beneath George Cannon's eyes, she actually perceived again that romantic quality of existence which had always so powerfully presented itself to her in the past. She reflected: "How ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... return, Andrea began to attack Meyerbeer's work, in order to wake up Gambara, who sat sunk in the half-torpid state ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... for hours, after a terrible scene with her mother downstairs, and from acute distress she had passed into a state of torpid misery that enveloped her like a black cloud. She felt almost too exhausted, too numbed, to think. Her thoughts wandered drearily back and forth. She was sure she had been very greatly to blame, yet ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... in his ear from Fenellan, touching that man Blathenoy, set the wheels of Victor's brain at work upon his defences, for a minute, on the walk Westward. Who knew?—who did not know! He had a torpid consciousness that he cringed to the world, with an entreaty to the great monster to hold off in ignorance; and the next instant, he had caught its miserable spies by the lurcher neck and was towering. He dwelt on his contempt of them, to curtain ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... become the same. And to make it do so, you are the implement I have. Sorry for it, but there is no other handy. From this day your Churches also are closed, your Public Worship ceases, and furthermore your Revenues cease; and all makes dead halt, and falls torpid in respect of you. From this day; and so continues, till the day (may it be soon!) when the Heidelberg Church of the Holy Ghost is opened again, and right done in that question. Be it yours to speed such day: ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... sullen fringe of reeds. The river, which had been my day-long companion—a noisy stream flowing through breezy hills, and villages, and vineyards—having loitered to draw its circle about the city walls, had fallen under a spell. It met me here a featureless, brimming ditch, and wound away in torpid coils to the monotonous horizon. And now this shrunken city, its edges dead and fallen to decay, these naked levels, where not even a bittern's voice had courage to startle the stillness, filled me, in spite of myself, with a vague apprehensiveness. Just as one who is groping in profound darkness ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... circumstance would have appeared in the judgment of science. To the rustic, the limestone case is as stout a puzzle as the granite one; but a priori, the philosopher—taking into account the aqueous fluidity of such a matrix at a period when reptiles were abundant, the torpid qualities of the toad itself, and the fact that time is scarcely an element in the absence of air—arrives at an antecedent probability, which comforts his acceptance of the fact. The granite would have staggered his reason, even ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... preface, no softening of his message. His words are as if cut with steel on the rock. He brushes aside the promises of vulgar decorations and honours with undisguised contempt, and goes straight to his work of rousing a torpid conscience. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... that such an enterprise as the regeneration of England should turn on a hinge so imperfect! Wedded to Rowena, indeed, her nobler and more generous soul may yet awake the better nature which is torpid within him. Yet how should this be, while Rowena, Athelstane, and I myself, remain the prisoners of this brutal marauder and have been made so perhaps from a sense of the dangers which our liberty might bring to the usurped power of ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... hive, in which fix a piece of reed or hollow elder, and then cover the whole with dry earth. This will preserve a communication with the external air, and at the same time keep out the cold. The bees remaining in a torpid state during the winter, they require but little food; but as every sunny day revives and prompts them to exercise, a small supply is necessary on these occasions. Many hives of bees which are supposed to have died of cold, have in reality perished by famine, especially ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... requesting the patient to look at a distant object and immediately afterwards at the examiner's finger, placed close to his eye, or bringing him suddenly from semi-darkness into the light. If the pupil reacts very slightly to the light, it is called torpid: if it does not react at all, it is called rigid. Rigidity of the pupil always denotes some serious nervous disturbance. In certain diseases, especially tabes, the pupils do not respond to light stimuli, but accommodate ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... faster. But after a time her limbs became entirely numb. Then Stas, without reflection, took her in his arms and carried her. On the way he wanted to speak to her; he wanted to justify himself, but ideas were torpid, as if they were dead in his mind; so he only repeated in a circle, "Nell! Nell! Nell!" and he clasped her to his bosom, not being able to say anything more. After a few score paces Nell fell asleep in his arms from exhaustion; ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... the bravest of the Britons have long since fallen: the remaining number consists solely of the cowardly and spiritless; whom you see at length within your reach, not because they have stood their ground, but because they are overtaken. Torpid with fear, their bodies are fixed and chained down in yonder field, which to you will speedily be the scene of a glorious and memorable victory. Here bring your toils and services to a conclusion; ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... fix her eyes upon the bed which contained the coffin of her grandson, as if she had at once, and for the first time, acquired sense to comprehend her inexpressible calamity. These alternate feelings of embarrassment, wonder, and grief, seemed to succeed each other more than once upon her torpid features. But she spoke not a wordneither had she shed a tearnor did one of the family understand, either from look or expression, to what extent she comprehended the uncommon bustle around her. Thus she sat among the funeral ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... appear in any one period of the disease, or in one case, but at one time or other all of them, as well as those which follow: the flesh becomes cold to the touch, though the patient does not himself perceive it; the limbs grow numbed and torpid, the breathing dull and slow, and the voice hollow; and usually the appetite in this period declines, and comes almost to nothing: night sweats come on, black swellings appear on the veins, the flesh wastes and the breast becomes flat and hollow: the mouth is ...
— Hypochondriasis - A Practical Treatise (1766) • John Hill
... 16,000 have less than 500 inhabitants.[4224] Whoever has traveled over France, or lived in this country, sees at once what sort of men compose such purely rural groups; he has only to recall physiognomies and attitudes to know to what extent in these rude brains, rendered torpid by the routine of manual labor and oppressed by the cares of daily life, how narrow and obstructed are the inlets to the mind; how limited is their information in the way of facts; how, in the way of ideas, the acquisition of ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... a stercoraceous heap Impregnated with quick fermenting salts, And potent to resist the freezing blast. For ere the beech and elm have cast their leaf Deciduous, and when now November dark Checks vegetation in the torpid plant Exposed to his cold breath, the task begins. Warily therefore, and with prudent heed He seeks a favoured spot, that where he builds The agglomerated pile, his frame may front The sun's meridian disk, and at the back Enjoy close shelter, wall, or reeds, or ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... unlettered, a poor village girl unknown and without influence, found a great nation lying in chains, helpless and hopeless under an alien domination, its treasury bankrupt, its soldiers disheartened and dispersed, all spirit torpid, all courage dead in the hearts of the people through long years of foreign and domestic outrage and oppression, their King cowed, resigned to its fate, and preparing to fly the country; and she laid her hand upon this nation, this corpse, and it rose ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... is to dominate things, something must be dominant in him. We feel him to be great in that he clarifies and brings to expression something which was potential in the rest of us, but which with our burden of flesh and circumstance we were too torpid to utter. The great man is a spontaneous variation in humanity; but not in any direction. A spontaneous variation might be a mere madness or mutilation or monstrosity; in finding the variation admirable we evidently invoke some principle of order to which it ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... earlier than the females. With moths of the family of the Bombycidae, the sexes pair immediately after assuming the imago state; for they cannot feed, owing to the rudimentary condition of their mouths. The females, as several entomologists have remarked to me, lie in an almost torpid state, and appear not to evince the least choice in regard to their partners. This is the case with the common silk-moth (B. mori), as I have been told by some continental and English breeders. Dr. Wallace, ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... too, that not a spark of her old feeling remained. For the friend of her childhood, Vladimir Mihalovitch, or simply Volodya, with whom only the day before she had been madly, miserably in love, she now felt nothing but complete indifference. All that evening he had seemed to her spiritless, torpid, uninteresting, and insignificant, and the sangfroid with which he habitually avoided paying at restaurants on this occasion revolted her, and she had hardly been able to resist saying, "If you are poor, you should stay at home." The Colonel paid ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... from excessive and protracted fatigue. He pronounced it needless to send for a doctor: nature, he was sure, would manage best, left to herself. He said every nerve had been overstrained in some way, and the whole system must sleep torpid a while. There was no disease. He imagined my recovery would be rapid enough when once commenced. These opinions he delivered in a few words, in a quiet, low voice; and added, after a pause, in the tone of a man ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... parcel, which he lifted only to drop it with a yell, for underneath it lay a torpid snake, doubtless one of those that had been ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... return to that walk home for a moment—was of stepping on a snake, as there are a great many about, and one especial variety, a small poisonous brown adder, is of so torpid and lazy a nature that it will not glide out of your way, as other snakes do, but lets you tread on it and then bites you. It is very marvelous, considering how many snakes there are, that one hears of so few bad accidents. G—— is always poking about in likely places for them, as ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... all France; at least, as long as our armies are victorious, and organized in their present formidable manner. Should anything happen to our present chief, an impulse may be given to the minds now sunk down, and raise our characters from their present torpid state. But until such an event, we shall remain as we are, indolent but submissive, sacrificing our children and treasures for a cause we detest, and for a man we abhor. I am sorry to say it, but it certainly does, no honour ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... animal or vegetable life. Birds certainly are not so numerous as in the wet season, but some kinds remain and lay their eggs at this time—for instance, the ground doves (Chamaepelia). The trees retain their verdure throughout, and many of them flower in the dry months. Lizards do not become torpid, and insects are seen both in the larva and the perfect states, showing that the aridity of the climate has not a general influence on the development of the species. Some kinds of butterflies, ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... names of the British aristocracy can be traced back to strong ales or weak (Lucy) Waters. Even those who desire the abolition of the House of Peers, or look on it, with Bagehot, as "a vapid accumulation of torpid comfort," cannot deny that it is an institution that has grown up naturally with the country, and that it is only now (if even now) that it is felt with anything like universality to be an anomaly. The American society which is typified by the four hundred of New York, the society which ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... not a word, and met nobody's eye, but kept staring upward into the smoky vacancy towards the ceiling, where, it might be, he beheld a continual portraiture of his victim's horror-stricken agonies. I rather fancy, however, that his moral sense was yet too torpid to trouble him with such remorseful visions, and that, for his own part, he might have had very agreeable reminiscences of the soldier's death, if other eyes had not been bent reproachfully upon him and warned him that something was amiss. It was this reproach in other ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... movements of the bowels are promoted, and the circulation through the liver is more vigorous. More food is taken to supply the force necessary for the maintenance of the mechanical movements. Ample exercise also checks the tendency towards a torpid circulation in the larger digestive organs, as the stomach and the liver, so common with those who eat heartily, but lead sedentary lives. In short, exercise may be regarded as a great ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... at performing a sort of pantomime. I may now close this detail with observing that the natives of this mountainous region have stronger animal spirits than those of the plains, and pass their lives with more variety than the torpid inhabitants of the coast; that they breathe a spirit of independence, and being frequently engaged in warfare, village against village, they would be better prepared to resist any ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... women gazed in demoniac pleasure and excitement, had been condemned centuries before by the genius of Christianity. It was monstrous that an emperor calling himself a Christian should preside at such a spectacle. But the martyrdom of Telemachus at last touched the callous and torpid consciences of nominal Christians. Thenceforth the games of the amphitheatre were abolished. But it was too late for repentance. Alike "the incomparable wickedness and the incomparable splendor" of the Imperial City were doomed to destruction. Even the blood of a Christian martyr voluntarily ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... COLD AND DAMPNESS. Many colonies destroyed by extremes of weather. Evils of thin hives. Bees not torpid in Winter. When frozen are killed, 114. Take exercise to keep warm. Perish if unable to preserve suitable degree of warmth. Are often starved in the midst of plenty. Eat an extra quantity of food in thin, cold hives, 115. Muscular exertion occasions waste of muscular fiber. Bees need ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... Should tempting novelty thy cell refrain, And sloth effuse her opiate fumes in vain; Should beauty blunt on fops her fatal dart, Nor claim the triumph of a lettered heart; Should no disease thy torpid veins invade, Nor melancholy's phantoms haunt thy shade; Yet hope not life from grief or danger free, Nor think the doom of man reversed for thee: Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes, And pause awhile from letters, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... mere umbroe. These ghosts are described as being nearly as destitute of sensation as they are of strength. They are called "the inhabitants of the land of stillness." They exist in an inactive, partially torpid state, with a dreamy consciousness of past and present, neither suffering nor enjoying, and seldom moving. Herder says of the Hebrews, "The sad and mournful images of their ghostly realm disturbed them, and were too much for their self possession." Respecting ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... had set. In the distance bells were heard. They passed a little village as the inhabitants were lighting their lamps, and the sky became also illuminated by myriads of stars. Suddenly they saw behind a hill, through the branches of the fir trees, the moon rising, red and full as if it were torpid with sleep. ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... apparently has got quickly into his smoking-coat: at least he is here: he has heard all. Barbara and I crawl away with no more spring or backbone in us than a couple of torpid, wintery flies. ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... It has a tail longer than its body, which it bears erect. It kills beetles, toads, birds, and mice, but has a special dislike for the rattlesnake, and often meets him and beats him in fair combat. When it finds one sleeping or torpid it makes a circle of cactus thorns around him so he cannot escape—for "future reference," as ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... the thousands and ten thousands, that perished in our late contests with France and Spain, a very small part ever felt the stroke of an enemy; the rest languished in tents and ships, amidst damps and putrefaction; pale, torpid, spiritless, and helpless; gasping and groaning, unpitied among men, made obdurate by long continuance of hopeless misery; and were, at last, whelmed in pits, or heaved into the ocean, without notice and without remembrance. By incommodious encampments and unwholesome ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... this mysterious world is so inscrutable a mystery as the mind of early youth. It crawls, the beetle creature, in a hard shell, hiding the dim, inner struggle of its growing wings, moving numbly as if in a torpid dream. It has forgotten the lively grub stage of childhood, and it cannot foresee the dragon-fly adventure just ahead. This blind, dumb, numb, imprisoned thing, an irritation to the nerves of every one who has to deal with it, suffers. First it suffers ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... twenty feet through the fog the torpid tourists, their noses against the panes, the misses with curious little heads trimmed like those of boys, took this apparition for a cow, and then for a tinker ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... through which I can enjoy the other blessings. Friendship, taste, truth and beauty will produce a greater effect upon me when a continual succession of sweet, beneficent, domestic feelings attune me to joy and warm up my torpid being. ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... clouds. So runs the world away. Equally necessary, sorrow and gladness are as the rains and sunbeams for the fruits of the earth. Were it all sadness the world would grow morose and torpid; were it all gladness men would ...
— Wilton School - or, Harry Campbell's Revenge • Fred E. Weatherly
... it for a long while amid complete silence. Others looked at him, for it was known that he was like a father to Rotgier, and that he loved him. But he did not shed even a single tear, only his face looked more severe than usual, but there was depicted in it a kind of torpid calm. ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... upon the long-dormant energies of Boabdil. The counsels of Muza, the exhortations of the queen-mother, the enthusiasm of his mistress, Amine, uncounteracted by the arts of the magician, aroused the torpid lion of his nature. But still his army and his subjects murmured against him; and his appearance in the Vivarrambla might possibly be the signal of revolt. It was at this time that a most fortunate circumstance at once restored to him the confidence and ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book II. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... how it was. He said he was sometimes afraid to open my letters for fear that he should read that the baby was dead. The child knew Grayson's voice, his step. It would go to him from its own mother. When it was sickest and lying torpid it would move the instant he stepped into the room, and, when he spoke, would hold out its thin arms, without opening its eyes, and for hours Grayson would walk the floor with the troubled little baby over his shoulder. I thought several times it would die when, ...
— 'Hell fer Sartain' and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.
... enemy. Nero urged, not only by persuasion, but with the most earnest entreaties, "that they would not render rash by delay that measure of his which despatch had made safe. That Hannibal, who lay in a state of torpid inactivity in consequence of a delusion which would not continue long, had neither attacked his camp, left as it was without a leader, nor had directed his course in pursuit of him. That the army ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... had used upon their former clerks were urged upon his consideration. Fearing the loss of situation, he repented, but it was only to fall again before the power of that appetite with which he had tampered as with a torpid viper, which now felt the warmth of his embrace, and became a living, craving ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... career exhibited, on a reduced scale, the whole history of the school to which he belonged,—the rudeness and extravagance of its infancy,—the propriety, the grace, the dignified good sense, the temperate splendour of its maturity. His imagination was torpid, till it was awakened by his judgment. He began with quaint parallels and empty mouthing. He gradually acquired the energy of the satirist, the gravity of the moralist, the rapture of the lyric poet. The revolution through which English literature ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... "I bequeath to my son John my big bony frame and the slouching gait I acquired by carelessness, also my inherited tendency to consumption. To my daughter Mary I bequeath my sallow complexion and torpid liver, which are the result of my gross living; also my melancholy disposition and tendency to look on the dark side of life. To my son Samuel I give my love for alcoholic liquors and my irritable disposition; to my daughter Jane my ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... Youth, with joy, and beauty fair; Noon picturing Summer;—Summer's ardent sphere Manhood's gay portrait.—Eve, like Autumn, wan, Autumn resembling faded age in Man; Night, with its silence, and its darkness drear, Emblem of Winter's frore and gloomy reign, When torpid lie the vegetative Powers; Winter, so shrunk, so cold, reminds us plain Of the mute Grave, that o'er the dim Corse lours; There shall the Weary rest, nor ought remain To the pale Slumberer of ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... libertine, what not?—but in society charming, and his manners singularly elegant and winning. He never obtruded his vices in good company; in fact, you might dine with him all your life and not detect him. The young serpent was torpid in wine; but he came out, a bit at a time, ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... of great intellectual sensibility, Lamb responded to all impressions. To sympathize with Tragedy or Comedy only, argues a limited capacity. The mind thus constructed is partially lame or torpid. One ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... the double creationists or continental extensionists had here a complete victory. The few eggs which I have tried both sink and are killed. No one doubts that salt water would be eminently destructive to them; and I was really in despair, when I thought I would try them when torpid; and this day I have taken a lot out of the sea-water, after exactly seven days' immersion. (337/1. This method of dispersal is not given in the "Origin"; it seems, therefore, probable that further experiments upset ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... Emma of the Sandwich Isles, literally the Queen of the South, come to hear the wisdom of the Saint; and last of all, the friend and partner of his earlier work, the sharer in the revival of the Church from her torpid repose, John Henry Newman, who met Dr. Pusey there for one last day, fulfilling the ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... custom of Southern ladies, who shake hands on introduction, and forever after. The candid graciousness that marks the act is in happy contrast to the self-conscious agitation of the underbred and the torpid panic ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... seized the sacrificial knife, was just on the point of dealing the stroke. In what manner to express myself properly, I know not; he only would know, who did these things. For no language can describe how it happened that his hand did not become torpid, that the strength of his nerves did not relax, that the affecting sight of his son ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume I - Basil to Calvin • Various
... celebrated. Passing directly along the line of the sunken Tunnel, we landed in Wapping, which I should have presupposed to be the most tarry and pitchy spot on earth, swarming with old salts, and full of warm, bustling, coarse, homely, and cheerful life. Nevertheless, it turned out to be a cold and torpid neighborhood, mean, shabby, and unpicturesque, both as to its buildings and inhabitants: the latter comprising (so far as was visible to me) not a single unmistakable sailor, though plenty of land-sharks, who get a half-dishonest livelihood by business connected ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... almost torpid. The want of exhilarating exercise, the long dearth of companionship, the terrible monotony of her life, the restless nights, the dank gloomy atmosphere in which she had her perpetual being, were, she told herself dully, doing their work. And she ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... August, we again proceeded on our voyage. As the occurrences at this time bore some semblance to the transactions in our last visit, to avoid wounding the delicate, or satiating the licentious, we shall conclude in the torpid phraseology of the log, ...
— Voyage of H.M.S. Pandora - Despatched to Arrest the Mutineers of the 'Bounty' in the - South Seas, 1790-1791 • Edward Edwards
... forced to put them to death; to send them to their own place.... There are three grounds on which reason shows that heretics should be put to death: the first is, Lest the wicked should injure the righteous; second, That by the punishment of a few many may be reformed. For many who were made torpid by impunity, are roused by the fear of punishment; AND THIS WE DAILY SEE IS THE RESULT WHERE THE INQUISITION ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... a morass; and the river at Rose Hill is a creek of the harbour, which above high water mark would not in England be called even a brook. Whence the Hawkesbury, the only fresh water river known to exist in the country, derives its supplies, would puzzle a transient observer. He sees nothing but torpid unmeaning ponds (often stagnant and always still, unless agitated by heavy rains) which communicate with it. Doubtless the springs which arise in Carmarthen mountains may be said to constitute its source. To cultivate its banks within many miles of the ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... summoned by Corporal Bertrand from the barn where at full length we have already immobilized ourselves, and are growing torpid: "You must go and look for Volpatte ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... he sat close to the blaze, slowly massaging his torpid limbs, but did not dare strip off ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... answer, which betrayed a perfect insensibility, convinced me that intelligence resulting from methodical and practical study is preferable to the torpid ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... doubted whether the donation to the Curates' Aid Society did have much effect. It may perhaps have induced a resolution in some few to go to the poll whose minds were active in regard to religion and torpid as to politics. But the donation to St Fabricius certainly had results. It was taken up and made much of by the Roman Catholic party generally, till a report got itself spread abroad and almost believed ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... said no more, sure that she had roused him from his torpid condition. She wound Joe up to the starting-point, just as she did her kitchen-clock, and he kept upon his course as steadily as that ancient time-piece. She was just the wife for ease-loving Joe, whom her brisk ways never wounded, ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878 • Various
... with its heartiness. He hastened to remove the refulgent edifice, steering it prudently to its station in the stable yard. Then he went to find the defeated Starling Tucker. That stricken veteran sat alone amid the ruins of his toppled empire in the little office, slumped and torpid before the cold, rusty stove. He refused to be comforted by his devotee. He said he would never touch one of them things again, not for no man's money. The Darwinian hypothesis allows for no petty tact in the process of evolution. Starling Tucker was unfit to survive ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... occasional apparition that in a less enlightened age seemed to warrant the extraordinary belief, which still ekes out a precarious existence in misinformed circles, that these birds, instead of wintering abroad, retire in a torpid condition to the bottom of lakes and ponds. It cannot be denied that these waters have occasionally, when dredged or drained, yielded a stray skeleton of a swallow, but it should be evident to the most homely intelligence ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... listening to something at a distance; or, rather, having heard something at a distance, was listening for a repetition of it. "I wonder what that can have been?" said she. For fire-arms in July are torpid mostly, and this was ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... the king, too, and endeavored to persuade him to discard William. The king was now old and infirm, and was growing more and more inert and gloomy as he advanced in age. His mind was occupied altogether in ecclesiastical rites and observances, or plunged in a torpid and lifeless melancholy, which made him averse to giving any thought to the course which the affairs of his kingdom were to take after he was gone. He did not care whether Harold or William took ...
— William the Conqueror - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... money-making, which no hereditary pride, or gentlemanly love of doing nothing, prevents him from using. This ill-will, to be sure, is mostly of a negative kind; its most common form of manifestation is in absence of speech or action, a sort of torpid and genteel ignoring all unpleasant neighbours; but really the whale-fisheries of Monkshaven had become so impertinently and obtrusively prosperous of late years at the time of which I write, the Monkshaven ship-owners were growing so wealthy and consequential, that ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... good-sized wine-cellar, with very little wine in it; only one full bin could I discover. The bins themselves lined but two of the walls, and most of them were covered in with cobwebs, close-drawn like mosquito-curtains. The ceiling was all too low: torpid spiders hung in disreputable parlors, dead to the eye, but loathsomely alive at an involuntary touch. Rats scuttled when we entered, and I had not been long alone when they returned to bear me company. I am not a natural historian, ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... from La Trappe he had fallen into a fearful state of spiritual anemia. His soul kept its room, rarely rose, lounged on a couch, was torpid with the tepid langour still lulled by the sleepy mutter of mere lip-service, and prayers reeled off as by a worn-out machine of which the spring releases itself, so that it works all alone with no result, and without a ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... enough, as foggy as the day, sharpened by no sudden flashes of pain or pleasure.—I know: only the outline of a dull life, that long since, with thousands of dull lives like its own, was vainly lived and lost: thousands of them, massed, vile, slimy lives, like those of the torpid lizards in yonder stagnant water-butt.—Lost? There is a curious point for you to settle, my friend, who study psychology in a lazy, dilettante way. Stop a moment. I am going to be honest. This is what I want ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... that the unfeeling man who reported the Torpid races for "Bell's Life" had the unkindness to state in cold print; "Worcester succeeded in making the bump at the Cherwell, in consequence of No. 3 of the Brazenface boat suffering from fatigue." And ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... perfume of pinks, carnations, and moss-roses in the garden below. Her garden! Is it possible? Something in the action reminds him of that bright, hopeful morning at Calais. Something in the scent of the flowers steals to his brain, half torpid and benumbed; his heart contracts with an agony of physical suffering. "My darling! my darling!" he murmurs, "shall I never see you tying those flowers again?" and turning from the window, he falls on his knees by ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... Having thus prepared its mouthful, the anaconda begins at the tail and gradually engulfs its victim, while its elastic jaws, and throat, and stomach are distended sufficiently to let it in; after which it lies in a torpid state for many weeks, till the morsel is digested, when it is ready for another meal. A horse goes down entire, but a cow sticks at the horns, which the anaconda cannot swallow. They are allowed to protrude from its mouth until ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... on the thrones of France and of England, and to extinguish the last spark of rebellion in the Netherlands, was his secret thought, and yet it was very difficult to get fifty thousand dollars from him from month to month. Procrastinating and indolent himself, he was for ever rebuking the torpid movements of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... by his own substance, like some torpid creature which hibernates in caves. Solitude had reacted upon his brain like a narcotic. After having strained and enervated it, his mind had fallen victim to a sluggishness which annihilated his plans, broke his will power and invoked a cortege ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... blood the mosquito is harmless, and in the absence of the mosquito the yellow fever patient is harmless—as the experimental evidence now stands. Yellow fever epidemics are terminated by cold weather because the mosquitoes die or become torpid. The sanitary condition of our southern seaport cities is no better in winter than in summer, and if the infection attached to clothing and bedding it is difficult to understand why the first frosts of autumn should arrest the progress of an epidemic. But all this is explained now ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... Loring too; he's quite off his head about her if she only knew it. However, it's my last day very likely, and if I have to outwit Machiavelli I'll manage it somehow! Surely one lame old woman, and a torpid machine for knitting and writing notes like Miss Smeardon, can't want to be out of doors all day. Hang that boy, though! He'll come anywhere." Here he stopped and sat down suddenly at the dressing-table, covering his face with his hands ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... part of South America. When we first arrived at Bahia Blanca, September 7th, 1832, we thought nature had granted scarcely a living creature to this sandy and dry country. By digging, however, in the ground, several insects, large spiders, and lizards were found in a half-torpid state. On the 15th, a few animals began to appear, and by the 18th (three days from the equinox), everything announced the commencement of spring. The plains were ornamented by the flowers of a pink wood-sorrel, wild peas, cenotherae, ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... went back upstairs, she found Coupeau seated on the bed, in the torpid state induced by one of his attacks. He was looking at the window-panes with his dim expressionless eyes. She sat herself down on a chair, tired out, her hands hanging beside her dirty skirt; and for ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... people; while fine sculpture, requiring always submission to severe law, is an unfailing proof of their being in early and active progress. There is no instance of fine sculpture being produced by a nation either torpid, weak, or in decadence. Their drama may gain in grace and wit; but their sculpture, in days ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... the chief interest of this paper lies in the beautiful passage which ends it. "The world must go on its own way, for all that we can say against it. Beauty, though it beams over the organization of a doll, will have its hour of empire; the most torpid heiress will easily get herself married; but the wife whose sweet nature can kindle worthy delights is she that brings to her hearth a joyous, hopeful, ardent spirit, and that subtle power whose sources ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... numbered. Signs in heaven and on earth tell us that one of those movements has begun to be felt in the Northern mind, which perplex tyrannies everywhere with the fear of change. The insults and wrongs so long heaped upon the North by the South begin to be felt. The torpid giant moves uneasily beneath his mountain-load of indignities. The people of the North begin to feel that they support a government for the benefit of their natural enemies; for, of all antipathies, that of slave labor to free is the most deadly and irreconcilable. There never was a time ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... unexpected comfort, made that mass of men inaccessible to every thought but that of rest. Though the artillery of the left wing of the Russians kept up a steady fire on this mass,—visible like a stain now black, now flaming, in the midst of the trackless snow,—this shot and shell seemed to the torpid creatures only one inconvenience the more. It was like a thunderstorm, despised by all because the lightning strikes so few; the balls struck only here and there, the dying, the sick, the dead sometimes! ...
— Adieu • Honore de Balzac
... hard to realize that this silent plain had once resounded with martial music and trembled to the tramp of armed men. It was hard to people this solitude with rushing columns of cavalry, and stir its torpid pulses with the shouts of victors, the shrieks of the wounded, and the flash of banner and steel above the surging billows of war. A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... picture winter like old age, torpid, tedious, and uncheerful? Winter has its own delights: this is the time to instruct and mend the mind by reading and reflection. At this season, too, I often take my harp, and amuse myself by playing or singing the little favourite airs that remind me of the ...
— The Stranger - A Drama, in Five Acts • August von Kotzebue
... in exhalation, or the kidneys. If the colon is clogged, the penned-up acid permeations of the stomach and duodenum will have to seek other outlets, which is indicated by the putrid smell of the body and a foul breath with finally dyspepsia, and what is usually termed biliousness, torpid liver, etc. ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... of outlandishness to see the signs over the shop doors in a foreign tongue. If the cold had not been such as to dull my sense of novelty, and make all my perceptions torpid, I should have taken in a set of new impressions, and enjoyed them very much. As it was, I cared little for what I saw, but yet had life enough left to enjoy the Cathedral of Amiens, which has many features ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... between times they may be particularly wide awake. Later it would seem that less sleep is needed to sustain health, though it is especially profound. As regards the individual, the temperament probably largely influences this matter. The torpid generally are first made drowsy, and afterwards sleep well, the erethic or irritable are specially wakeful on arriving, and later their sleep is broken, exactly the reverse occurring on the sea shore. With respect to meteorological conditions, humidity undoubtedly is the first consideration, it ...
— The Truth About America • Edward Money
... (hirundines rusticae) being found in a torpid state during the winter in the Isle of Wight or any part of this country, I never heard any such account worth attending to. But a clergyman, of an inquisitive turn, assures me, that when he was a great boy, some workmen, ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... ceremony the sleeping infants out of the baskets, and cared not how the enraged mothers lacerated their faces in return. The scenes of horror changed so quickly, that you could not dwell more than half a minute upon any of them. The tenderest heart became torpid and insensible. One tale of woe followed on the heels of another,—"Such a person too has been plundered!—Such an one's house has been set on fire!—This man is cut in pieces; that has been transfixed with the bayonet!—Those poor creatures are seeking their children!"—These ...
— Frederic Shoberl Narrative of the Most Remarkable Events Which Occurred In and Near Leipzig • Frederic Shoberl (1775-1853)
... a beast of burden. I trudge on with my mind torpid—I take whatever comes to me, and go on mechanically. Oh it cows me, it wears me down! I have learned to bear anything—anything! A man might kick me and I would ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... aground as afloat. Had there been a more impetuous rush, a more absorbing passion of the narrative, I should the sooner have struggled out of its uneasy current, and have given myself up to the swell and subsidence of my thoughts. But, as it was, the torpid life of the book served as an unobtrusive accompaniment to the life within me and about me. At intervals, however, when its effect grew a little too soporific,—not for my patience, but for the possibility of keeping my eyes open, I bestirred myself, started from the rocking-chair, and looked ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... horned heads, Ootah could see the eyes of the musk-oxen—they were greenish and phosphorescent. Occasionally the creatures roared sullenly, but the fight was less exciting than it would have been had they been less torpid from hunger ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
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