"Frigid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... expanding intelligence, the great system of exclusive manners and exclusive feelings in which he had been born and nurtured, began to tremble; the native generosity of his heart recoiled at a recurrence to that arrogant and frigid life, alike devoid of sympathy ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... acknowledged this information by a frigid bow, and addressed herself to the maid, waiting at the door: "Don't ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... I do, that you had staid there to-day, instead of coming ashore to dampen all our ardor and enthusiasm by your constant thin drizzle of scorn. One should suppose that in this idyllic region, some ray of poetic warmth must melt your frigid, scoffing soul. Daudet suits my sister far better than Theocritus," answered her brother, fastening a sprig of orange ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... assistant manager. There was only a sharp- featured lady sitting at the desk in loneliness, and she looked at me, as I stared round the hall, with obvious suspicion. Very politely I asked for my bag and rug, but the lady's air became more frigid when I explained that I had lost the cloak-room ticket and could not remember the number of the room I had occupied ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... pay no heed at all. Nevertheless, O hardy mariner! (A Snow-Bird brings this with our kindest love,) We're sorry you prefer Those frigid walks (ever so far above The 80th parallel, we guess!) To stocks, and tariffs, and domestic bliss; Yes, yes, Captain, we're sorry ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 5, April 30, 1870 • Various
... during the journey home through the fragrant September air, I paid as much attention to my role of calm friendliness as any actress would to a first night appearance. Remembering Lillian's advice to make the transition gradual from the frigid courtesy of my former meetings with Grace Draper to the friendly warmth we had planned for our campaign, I adopted the manner one would use to a casual ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... doctor, "that is the real danger, for we are now only at the beginning of November, and February is the coldest month in the frigid zone; still, if we can't get bear's grease, there's ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... With respect to animals, there are some which can bear the different varieties of climate, and even change of food. The horse, for instance, although originally indigenous to Arabia, lives as well in the Temperate, and even in the Frigid Zones it may be said, for they endure the hard winters of Russia and North America; so will domestic cattle, such as cows, sheep, pigs, &c. It is a curious fact that, during the winter in Canada, a large proportion of the food of cattle consists ...
— Masterman Ready • Captain Marryat
... altitude of 2200 feet (aner. 27.80); and, though the thermometer showed 66 F. at five p.m., fires inside and outside the mess-tent were required. A wester or sea-breeze, deflected by the ravines to a norther, was blowing; and in these regions, as in the sub-frigid zones of Europe, wind makes all the difference of temperature. During the evening we were visited by the Ma'zah Bedawin of a neighbouring encampment: they began to notice stolen camels and to wrangle over ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... my despair was uncontrollable. I found myself without support. My only adult relation was my stepmother, who was as frigid as ever towards me. I was attacked by that homesick yearning which makes exile more terrible than death. All the country around me was dull and sullen. I longed for the sunshine, the vine, the music, the sweet language of Italy. At twenty-one I had a right ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... house by means of the pass-key, which he had piously preserved through all his wanderings; he would throw down the borrowed money; there would be a reconciliation, the details of which he frequently arranged; and he saw himself, during the next month, made welcome in many stately houses at many frigid dinner-parties, taking his share in the conversation with the freedom of the man and the traveller, and laying down the law upon finance with the authority of the successful investor. But this ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was a good-looking, pleasant-spoken gentleman. The wife was a pretty, dark little woman, but I never liked her from the first; she was one of those perfectly proper, frigid women, who always give me the idea that they were born in a church, and have never got over the chill. However, she seemed very fond of him, and he of her; and they talked very prettily to each other—too prettily for it to be quite genuine, I should have said, ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... lover's arm, Pauline therefore easily found warmth and words with which to admire the landscape spread before her, for was she not soon to leave it, exchanging these frigid and glacial glories for life in a European capital, and, once for all, abandoning all ideas of a career and relegating everything at St. Ignace and Clairville to a place in her memory? Beautiful, then, she found it, and gaily proposing ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... avoid using jests ready prepared, such as do not arise out of the occasion, but are brought from home; for they are usually frigid. And he must spare friendships and dignities. He will avoid such insults as are not to be healed; he will only aim at his adversaries, and not even always at them, nor at all of them, nor in every manner. And with ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... mamma took me to the races at the Bois de Boulogne. We arrived, and there at once, two steps from me, I saw him. But no, it was no longer he; frigid greeting, frigid good-day, frigid hand-shake, frigid words, and very few of them—scarcely a few sentences, awkward and embarrassed. Then he was lost in the crowd, and that was all. He did not appear again. I ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... argumentative method, and a dull detail of proof and dry matters of fact; yet, surely, the Religion of the moderns abounds in topics so incomparably noble and exalted as might kindle the flames of genuine oratory in the most frigid and barren genius much more might this success be reasonably expected from such geniuses as Britain can enumerate; yet no piece of this sort, worthy applause or notice, has ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... continued to assemble round her the best society of London, it is probable that her kindness and courtesy would have done much to efface the unfavourable impression made by his stern and frigid demeanour. Unhappily his physical infirmities made it impossible for him to reside at Whitehall. The air of Westminster, mingled with the fog of the river which in spring tides overflowed the courts of his palace, with the smoke of seacoal from two hundred thousand chimneys, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... fallen man's best friend! With thee he speeds In frigid apathy along his way. And never does the tear of agony Burn down his scorching cheek; or the keen steel Of wounded feeling ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... which her heart craved from that of Ralph Colleton. The praise and the approval and the thanks of others might have given her pleasure, but these were not enough from him; and she sighed that he from whom alone love would be precious, had nothing less frigid than gratitude to offer. But even that was much, and she felt it deeply. His approbation was not a little to a spirit whose reference to him was perpetual; and when—her hand in his—he recounted the adventures of that night—when he dwelt upon her courage—upon ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... With frigid glance I pierced him through. He squirmed and changed his tune. Said he: "I will be frank with you: I lend it to ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... hardened with a frigid hatred as he spoke. He had only been paid for the work hitherto. ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... endeavoured, and would be foolish if it were possible. Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses, whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future, predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings. Far from me, and from my friends, be such frigid philosophy as may conduct us indifferent and unmoved over any ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery or virtue. That man is little to be envied, whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... became conscious of certain types. One was an elderly gentleman with a snow-white, short beard, pink, unwrinkled face and stony, sharp blue eyes, attired in the fashion of a gilded youth, who seemed to personify the city's wealth, ripeness and frigid unconcern. Another type was a woman, tall, beautiful, clear as a steel engraving, goddess-like, calm, clothed like the princesses of old, with eyes as coldly blue as the reflection of sunlight on ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... console oneself remembering the poor lady's ignorance of art. The truth might be that something was wrong with the pictures, which suspicion had driven the artist to go and have a dispassionate look at them in the frigid hour between twelve and one of the night. If a person is on the way to becoming a morbid ass he cannot find ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... clergyman,—a very interesting plain preacher. But when he got his chair, he had to preach a good deal in the college chapel; and by way of accommodating his discourses to an academic audience, he rewrote them carefully, rubbed off all the salient points, cooled down whatever warmth was in them to frigid accuracy, toned down everything striking. The result was that his sermons became eminently classical and elegant; only they became impossible to attend to, and impossible to remember; and when you heard the good man preach, you sighed for the rough and striking heartiness of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... to be very frigid, does it?" remarked the Colonel, and the boys, who, for the first time, felt that they had really invaded the "Terrible North" of the explorers, gazed with new interest on the lush green meadows of the shores and the foliage ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Yukon • Ralph Victor
... opal in a quaint and curious gold setting. She acknowledged my introduction to her with the slightest possible inclination of her head, and thereafter ignored my existence for the rest of the evening. And her brother's greeting of me was equally frigid. ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... huge ugly boxes of wood, sacred to preachers, frowning on the congregation in the place of the mysterious altar; and long cathedral aisles unused, railed off, like the tombs (as they were) of what had been and was not; and for orthodoxy, a frigid, unelastic, inconsistent, dull, helpless dogmatic, which could give no just account of itself, yet was intolerant of all teaching which contained a doctrine more or a doctrine less, and resented every attempt to give it a meaning."[46] The Catholic Church's ...
— Cardinal Newman as a Musician • Edward Bellasis
... from de sto'," she said with frigid dignity, "stop to de' rear do'. I has some corn bread an' bacon what you can carry 'long wid yo', an' an ole ironin' ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... her own swiftly gained wondrous happiness. The music, the dancers, the little crystal-laden supper-tables, the final romp all passed in a kaleidoscopic dream before her, and only the wintry night wind beating upon her in a frigid blast, as she stepped from the awninged passage-way to the limousine, awakened her to a sense ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... honor. He thought it evident that Jean Valjean had slain Javert, and had slain Monsieur Madeleine, whose fortune he has offered as Cossette's marriage portion. Poor Jean Valjean! You a murderer, a marauder—you! Marius acts with frigid honor. Valjean will not live with Marius and Cossette, being too sensitive therefor, perceiving himself distrusted by Marius, but comes to warm his hands and heart at the hearth of Cossette's presence; and he is stung when he sees no fire in the reception-room. ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... left on the mind of any observing student by too many of his fellows. They seem all frigid old men; and one pauses to think how such an unnatural state of matters is produced. We feel inclined to blame for it the unfortunate absence of University feeling which is so marked a characteristic of our Edinburgh students. Academical interests are so few and far between—students, as students, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... you want the gist of the matter go to Sappho, Catullus, Villon when he is in the vein, Gautier when he is not too frigid, or if yon have not the tongues seek out ...
— Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry • T.S. Eliot
... own sake, and not to take advantage of you as Madame Cassandra is doing. Please—remember that the best evidence of your normal condition is just what I find, that absence of love would be abnormal. My dear, you are what the psychologists call a consciously frigid, unconsciously passionate woman. Consciously you reject this Davies; unconsciously you accept him. And it is the more dangerous, although you do not know it, because some one else is watching. It was not one of his friends who told ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... to find that happiest spot below Who can direct, when all pretend to know? The shudd'ring tenant of the frigid zone 65 Boldly proclaims that happiest spot his own; Extols the treasures of his stormy seas, And his long nights of revelry and ease: The naked negro, panting at the line,[7] Boasts of his golden sands ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... sat there, frigid and unresponsive, her eyes fixed on the ground and her hands crossed, prepared to meet all the scorn she fancied Halvor ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... "How frigid and cold it seems here. Why, there is such a desolate, unsocial feeling I should not live out half my days if I had to remain in such a place. Have ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... wholesome protest against the devastating hurry and over-work elsewhere, which has shattered the nerves of the nation! "Far from me and from my friends" (to borrow the eloquent language of Doctor Johnson) "be such frigid enthusiasm as shall conduct us indifferent and unmoved" over the bridge by which you enter Sandwich, and pay a toll if you do it in a carriage. "That man is little to be envied (Doctor Johnson again) who can lose himself ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... Tounley turned first hot and then cold, and looked as if they wanted to fly away; and even Coke, penned helplessly in with this unpleasant incident, seemed to have a sudden attack of distress. The only frigid person was Coleman. He had made his declaration of independence, and he saw with glee that the victory was complete. Nora Black might storm and rage, but he had announced his position in an unconventional blunt way which nobody in the carriage could ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... never seem to strike it right. Now I admit it seems to me They show great inconsistency. But they imply I am to blame; Of course that makes my anger flame, And in a fiery fit of pique I stay at ninety for a week. Or sometimes in a dull despair, I give them just a frigid stare; And as upon their taunts I think My spirits down to zero sink. Mine is indeed a hopeless case; To strive to please ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... part of the war, a numerous one. In the earlier stages of Secession, when the chief question before one's thoughts was that of right, I think that comparatively few people sided with the South, though very many were lukewarm or frigid, or actually inimical towards the North. At that time party-spirit still respected the old-fashioned notions, that a self-governing nation must be ruled by its own majority, not minority; that a minority which cried out before it was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... of embroidery from her lap, Virginia met her friend's tearful caress with a frigid and distant manner. "There was nothing to tell. What do you mean?" ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... You may go. [Bewildered and not understanding, ANNIE exits through the portieres. In that same gentle tone, but carrying with it an almost frigid conviction.] You didn't have the nerve. I knew you wouldn't. For a moment you thought the only decent thing for you to do was to die, and yet you couldn't go through. I am sorry for you,—more sorry than I can tell. [He takes a step ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter
... arctic continental; winters vary from cool along Black Sea to frigid in Siberia; summers vary from hot in southern deserts to cool ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... almost longed for dinner-time, so that that meeting also should be over. 'She won't like him, I know,' she murmured, with a recollection of a scene at school when a visitor had been presuming in Horatia's opinion, and she had rather surprised her companions by the frigid air she assumed. 'He'll offend her, and she will say something, and, oh dear! I'm sure there will be a ...
— Sarah's School Friend • May Baldwin
... had felt at Mrs. Ashwood's frigid disposition of his wishes and his manuscript had benumbed him to any enjoyment or appreciation of the change in his fortune. He wandered out of the house and descended to the beach in a dazed, bewildered way, seeing only the ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... she waved one hand, both by way of adieu and to give Miss Sharp an opportunity of shaking one of the fingers of the hand, which was left out for that purpose. Miss Sharp only folded her own hands with a very frigid smile and bow, and quite declined to accept the proffered honor; on which Miss Pinkerton tossed up her turban more indignantly than ever. In fact, it was a little battle between the young lady and the old one, and ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... master, who can associate work and play, study and entertainment, is much more likely to register successes than the frigid dominie who will hear of nothing but a rigid attention to the tasks of the day. In the one case the lessons are presented in their most repellent form, in the other they are made part and parcel of each day's ...
— Stamp Collecting as a Pastime • Edward J. Nankivell
... night. Frost began to render the nights bitterly cold. The birds, having brought forth and brought up their young, were betaking themselves to more temperate regions, leaving only such creatures as bears, seals, walruses, foxes, wolves, and men, to enjoy, or endure, the regions of the frigid zone. ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... clothes here and his portmanteau when he goes away. Ah! George, George! One day will come when he won't go away," groaned Mountain, who, of course, always returned to the subject of which she was forbidden to speak. Meanwhile Mr. George adopted towards his mother's favourite a frigid courtesy, at which the honest gentleman chafed but did not care to remonstrate, or a stinging sarcasm, which he would break through as he would burst through so many brambles on those hunting excursions in which he and Harry Warrington rode so ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... part I believe it was the ship; and if you deride my belief, I shall guess you one of those who need a figure-head to remind them of a vessel's sex. There are minds which find a certain romance in figure-heads. To me they seem a frigid, unintelligent device, not to say idolatrous. I have known a crew to set so much store by one that they kept a tinsel locket and pair of ear-rings in the forecastle and duly adorned their darling when in port. But this is materialism. ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... his ride the next day, he found Leonore reading the papers in the big hall. She gave him a very frigid "good-morning," yet instantly relaxed a little in telling him there was another long telegram for him on the mantel. She said nothing of his reading the despatch to her, but opened a new sheet of paper, and began to read its columns with much ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... aspires to be A beacon light of charity, Regardless of the nursery Whereof she seems to tire, Who thinks her husband needs no care, But drives him wildly toward despair By meagre love, and frigid fare, ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... shapes the language of the imagination and the passions, of fancy and will. Nothing, therefore, can be more absurd than the outcry which has been sometimes raised by frigid and pedantic critics for reducing the language of poetry to the standard of common sense and reason; for the end and use of poetry, "both at the first and now, was and is to hold the mirror up to nature", seen through the medium of passion and ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... this brow Throned thee King Ferdinand and Tenerife; To be of sulphur grough and frigid snow ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... leave and all the available documents, about a truck-load, that he could lay hands on, and went down to Central India with his notion hot in his head. He began his book in the land he was writing of. Too much official correspondence had made him a frigid workman, and he must have guessed that he needed the white light of local color on his palette. This is a dangerous paint for ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... sat beside the fireplace in the great hall. Don Loris, jittering, shivered next to Hoddan's grandfather. The Lady Fani appeared, icy-cold and defiant. She walked with frigid dignity to a place beside her father. Hoddan's grandfather regarded her with a wicked, ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... For most such folk are gloomy and self-contained, with hearts that have turned to wood, and an outlook that ever reverts to the past; unless, indeed, they be folk of spurious good nature, an addition to talkativeness, and an apparent bonhomie which veils a frigid, grey interior, and conveys an impression of cruelty and greed ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... a laugh as he touched his hair upon gaining the stark publicity of his box, and the laugh changed to something of a cheer when he caught sight of the chairs of pomp, two of them in frigid isolation, elbowing out smaller human fry. All knew from his very attitude what was going to happen to those chairs. And it happened. The chairs vanished. Small chairs and more of them took their place, and the Prince sat with genial ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... the reception-room which was only a little less noisy than it was in the morning. Many candidates believed that they had been accepted; several had even received encouraging applause; others, who had been received in frigid silence, comforted themselves with the reflection that they had at least been allowed ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... all regions his vast reputation has flown, Through the torrid, the frigid, and temperate zone; The wretch, just expiring, springs healthy and strong From his bed at one touch of the ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... great piety, prudence, courage, and forbearance; of undoubted orthodoxy in their sentiments, and must enter with all their hearts into the spirit of their mission; they must be willing to leave all the comforts of life behind them, and to encounter all the hardships of a torrid, or a frigid climate, an uncomfortable manner of living, and every other inconvenience that can attend this undertaking. Clothing, a few knives, powder and shot, fishing-tackle, and the articles of husbandry above-mentioned, must be provided for them; and when ...
— An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens • William Carey
... hand in this answer, was bitterly mortified; and with some reason. She would have forgiven him, though, if he had died; but, as he lived, she thought she had a right to detest him, and did; and showed her sentiments like a lady, by never speaking to him, nor looking at him, but ignoring him with frigid magnificence on his ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... frigid dignity and politeness, stood at the large entrance doors, significantly holding aside one curtain. Craig rose, his face red. "Mrs. Severence isn't very well," said he noisily to the servant, as if he were on terms of closest intimacy with the family. "Tell Margaret I'll wait for her in the ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... frigid or temperate zone, he has to lie with his head northward; in the southern, southward; in the torrid zone, eastward— in order that the magnetic current may pass through him from head to foot without disturbance, as this is ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... said Mrs. Van Stuyler, bridling up into her most frigid dignity, "I am more than surprised to hear you talk in such a strain. Perfectly safe, indeed! Has it not struck you that we are absolutely at this man's—this Lord Redgrave's, mercy, that he can take us where he likes, and treat us just ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... Wednesday, September 19th, it was "appointed" that he should call on her at Brattleboro on the following Wednesday, and like a true knight he kept his tryst. That his reception was not frigid may be inferred from the record of the calls that followed in rapid succession, to-wit: Thursday afternoon; Monday, October 2d, evening; Tuesday afternoon and evening; Wednesday afternoon and evening; Wednesday (October 9th) afternoon and evening; Friday evening; Saturday evening, ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... I ran,' Polycarp remarked with frigid irony, 'and came into the flat with the intention of protecting me. May I ask ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... Davies in his Norfolk jacket and rusty flannels haranguing a frigid German in evening dress in a 'gorgeous' saloon ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... very cold, and they were glad to get ashore and build a roaring fire in a sheltered spot. Indeed, it was speedily determined that they would hug that same cheery blaze as long as the visitor from the frigid North remained. ...
— The Outdoor Chums on the Gulf • Captain Quincy Allen
... epigram; but Arthur, who made one of the group, maintained a frigid imperturbability in his quality of an English gentleman who takes gravity for the very basis of his being. D'Aiglemont's eccentric confidence, no doubt, had kindled some kind of hope in Arthur, for he stood patiently awaiting an opportunity ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... Tolerance, Emancipation, Reform, were so much noxious, sentimental rubbish to him, and he had never scrupled to say so. Ireland was a Colony, English colonists were robbers in Ireland, and robbers must be tyrants, or the robbed will come by their own again; that was his whole philosophy,[18] his frigid and final estimate of the tendencies of human nature, and his considered cure for them. Racial fusion was a crazy conception not worth argument. Wrong on one side, revenge on the other; policy, coercion. As he put it in his famous speech on the ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... set before me; and while I dined upon these, she sat opposite, watching me (as I thought) and endeavouring to sustain something like a conversation—consisting chiefly of a succession of commonplace remarks, expressed with frigid formality: but this might be more my fault than hers, for I really could NOT converse. In fact, my attention was almost wholly absorbed in my dinner: not from ravenous appetite, but from distress at the toughness of the beefsteaks, and the numbness ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... did as the French had done before. After the battle of Jena they took down the Column of Rossbach,[5] but that was erected to commemorate the victory, and this the death of the hero. I feel like Johnson—'far far from me and my friends be that frigid philosophy which can make us pass unmoved over any scenes which have been consecrated by virtue, by valour, or by wisdom'—and I strained the eyes of my imagination to see all the tumult of this famous battle, in which Bonaparte ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... de l'Estorade so completely docile to the advice, more clever than prudent, perhaps, of Madame de Camps, the reader, we think, can scarcely be surprised. A certain attraction has been evident for some time on the part of the frigid countess not only to the preserver of her daughter, but to the man who under such romantic and singular circumstances had come before her mind. Carefully considered, Madame de l'Estorade is seen to be far from one of those impassible natures which resist all ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... also 'endured fifty years of wretchedness with unshaken fortitude.' How grim was life to him; a sick prison-house and doubting-castle! 'His great business,' he would profess, 'was to escape from himself.' Yet towards all this he has taken his position and resolution; can dismiss it all 'with frigid indifference, having little to hope or to fear.' Friends are stupid, and pusillanimous, and parsimonious; 'wearied of his stay, yet offended at his departure;' it is the manner of the world. 'By popular delusion,' remarks he, with a gigantic ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... and maintained the conversation in frigid tones. The girls scarcely opened their lips, and the midshipmen sat apart, as silent as if they understood no word of what ...
— Jack Archer • G. A. Henty
... red on his white cheek. He saw Captain Pinckney's eyes upon it, and the faint, half-malicious, half-hysteric smile upon his lips. But without a start or gesture of surprise he locked the gate, and turning to him, said with frigid significance,— ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... what heavenly joy is they were allowed to feel it to such a degree that they could no longer bear it; and yet it was not angelic joy; it was scarcely in the least degree angelic, as I was permitted to perceive by sharing it, but was so slight as to be almost frigid; nevertheless they called it most heavenly, because to them it was an inmost joy. From this it was evident, not only that there are degrees of the joys of heaven, but also that the inmost joy of one scarcely reaches to the outmost or middle joy ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... purity of the religion, in preserving to what it had borrowed, symbolical allusions, and in forbidding the admixture of new gods and heterogeneous creeds. The more popular a religion, the more it seeks corporeal representations, and avoids the dim and frigid shadows of a ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a look of black hatred. This became a tense, silent plea for justice as it moved up for a moment to the Maestro's face, and then it settled back upon its first object in frigid accusation. ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... to what seemed like a distant past. My residence in Syria tended still further to obliterate my early recollections. The new sensations which I experienced there, the glimpses which I caught of a divine world, so different from our frigid and sombre countries, absorbed my whole being. My dreams were haunted for a time by the burnt-up mountain-chain of Galaad and the peak of Safed, where the Messiah was to appear, by Carmel and its beds of anemone sown by God, by the Gulf of Aphaca whence issues ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... to study telegraphy. When she returned, with a picture hat and a Boston accent, it was to preside at the telegraph instrument in the little room adjoining the post office at her father's store. When Issy bowed blushingly outside the window of the telegraph room, he received only the airiest of frigid nods. Was there what Lord Lyndhurst would have called "another"? It would seem not. Old Mr. Higgins, her father, encouraged no bows nor attentions from young men, and Gertie herself did not appear to desire them. So Issy gave up his tales of savage ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... life. At the same time, the Romans, being made for political activity, did not readily content themselves with the less exciting successes of literary life. The applause of the lecture-room was a poor substitute for the thunders of the assembly. Hence arose a declamatory tone, which strove by frigid and almost hysterical exaggeration to make up for the healthy stimulus afforded by daily contact with affairs. The vein of artificial rhetoric, antithesis, and epigram, which prevails from Lucan to Fronto, owes its origin to this forced contentment with an ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... anxious to learn what was new. That so many influences as we have seen in force should completely subdue orthodoxy is not wonderful, when we consider first the minds that originated them, and then the dull and frigid condition of ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... every act looking toward the advancement of women. The Free Press has perhaps had as many of the frowns of this "good gray poet" of the woman's cause as anybody. It has seen enough of them to know, however, that behind that somewhat frigid exterior is a sensitiveness which would well become a girl of sixteen rather than a lady of sixty-two and which shows that the woman is always the woman; and it wants to present its compliments to the bravest and grandest old lady within ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... of giving tension to what is quiescent! The Penseroso also sits and meditates, but every muscle of the reposing limbs is alert. So, too, in the Moses, with all its exaggeration and melodrama, with its aspect of frigid sensationalism, which led Thackeray to say he would not like to be left alone in the room with it, we find every motionless limb imbued with vitality and the essentials of movement. The Moses undoubtedly springs from the St. John, transcending it as Beethoven surpassed Haydn. In spite ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... grieve that it does not; and since selfishness and ill-will seem to him quite gratuitous, his ire is aroused; he thinks them unnatural and monstrous. He could not in the least understand evil, even when he did it himself; all villainy seemed to him wanton, all lust frigid, all hatred insane. All was an abomination alike that was not the lovely ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... marvellous escape, and no slight approval of the effect of the convent costume on the contour of her fine form and expressive features. My entrance produced a diversion in her favour; and I was showered with showy speeches from the seniors of the circle; the younger portion suddenly relapsing into that frigid propriety which the Mademoiselle retains until she becomes the Madame, and then flings off for ever like her girlish wardrobe. But their eyes took their full share, and if glances at the "Englishman" could have been transfered into words, I should have enjoyed a very animated ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... some, at least, of their verses to conventional love-making, are called the Cavalier Poets. Among the others Thomas Carew follows the classical principles of Jonson in lyrics which are facile, smooth, and sometimes a little frigid. Sir John Suckling, a handsome and capricious representative of all the extravagances of the Court set, with whom he was enormously popular, tossed off with affected carelessness a mass of slovenly lyrics of ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... them, because they had succeeded in bringing so much of home out here. There was even a mood like that of a lost, languid beach in the tropics. And how was that possible, with only a thin skin of stellene between them and frigid nothing? ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... contrasts of the two continents arise not so much from geological unlikeness as from their unsymmetrical situation with respect to the equator, whereby the northern one lies mostly in the temperate zone, while the southern one lies mostly in the torrid zone. North America is bathed in frigid waters around its broad northern shores; its mountains bear huge glaciers in the north-west; the outlying area of Greenland in the north-east is shrouded with ice; and in geologically recent times a vast ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the wings of Cupid, the wand of Mercury, the club of Hercules, and the spear of Mars; and so forth. Mithraism thus escaped the persecution which the essential exclusiveness of their Faith drew down upon Christians; gradually transforming by its deeper spirituality the more frigid cults of earlier Paganism, and making them its own. The little band of truly noble men and women who in the latter half of the 4th century made the last stand against the triumph of Christianity over the Roman world were almost all Mithraists. For a good sketch ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... insect); but he can understand a great deal of anthropology merely by being a man. He is himself the animal which he studies. Hence arises the fact which strikes the eye everywhere in the records of ethnology and folk-lore—the fact that the same frigid and detached spirit which leads to success in the study of astronomy or botany leads to disaster in the study of mythology or human origins. It is necessary to cease to be a man in order to do justice to a microbe; it is not necessary ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... in, his enthusiasm rather damped at this somewhat frigid greeting, and sorry in his heart he had not been allowed an opportunity of bidding farewell ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... to escape from the frigid courtesies of the Lorraine aristocracy, I also longed to have a short holiday, and to keep away from the Queen, as well for the sake of her peace of mind as for my own. My doctor forbade me to take the Spa waters, as they were too sulphurous; he ordered ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... full of graceful and profound apologies, and pleading an engagement that his honor would not let him break; for nothing short of that, said he, should have kept him from her side. There followed some lover's phrases, scantily worded, and frigid in an assumed passion. But Osra smiled graciously, and sent back a message, readily accepting all that the prince urged in excuse. And she told what had passed to the king, with her head high in the air, and a careless haughtiness, so that even the king did not rally her, nor ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... Beside these are vibrations with which I am persuaded your warm and kindred heart will more readily harmonize. In youth, we willingly obey impetuous sensations: but reluctantly listen to the slow and frigid deductions of reason, when they are in contradiction to our habits and prejudices. I therefore repeat, you are my friend and brother; and I conjure you, by those generous and magnanimous feelings of which your whole life proves you are so eminently susceptible, ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... peoples in every grade of civilization from absolute savages to the most complete and complex commercial and social organizations. It has every variety of climate from the tropical humidity along the southern coast to the frigid cold of the mountains; peaks of ice, reefs of coral, impenetrable jungles and bleak, treeless plains. One portion of its territory records the greatest rainfall of any spot on earth; another, of several ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... the neighborhood of Munich, I overtook a distinguished amateur of our society, whose name I shall conceal. This gentleman informed me that, finding himself wearied with the frigid pleasures (so he called them) of mere amateurship, he had quitted England for the continent—meaning to practise a little professionally. For this purpose he resorted to Germany, conceiving the police in that part of Europe to be more heavy and drowsy than elsewhere. His ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... failed in an attempt which no human powers have hitherto completed...." And so on to the close: "I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wish to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise." Yes, tranquillity; but not frigid! The whole passage, one of the finest in English prose, is marked by the heat of emotion. ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... fragile and delicate that you think they cannot stand anything, but they can stand pretty much everything, or at least everything they wish to. Throughout that week at Monte Carlo, while we cowered round our fires or went out into a frigid sunshine, the flowers smiled from every garden-ground in a gayety emulous of that of their sisters passing in white serge. So probably I gave less attention to the details of the scenery through which ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... the embargo, while the back country democracy had always looked upon him as an alien. But he was the section's only available man—indeed, the only promising candidate from any Northern State. His frigid manner was against him. But he had had a long and honorable diplomatic career; he was winning new distinction as Secretary of State; and he could expect to profit both by the feeling that the North was entitled to the presidency and by the fact that he was ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... meant to avoid them at first, but now his curiosity would not allow this, and he threw himself in their way, affecting an artless surprise and pleasure at being the first to welcome them back. Mark did not appear at all disconcerted to see him, and Mabel could not be frigid to anybody just then in the flush of happy expectation, which she did not try to conceal; altogether it was a ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... not a breath or murmur shall arise to disturb the prevailing quiescence or to rouse the feelings of indignation against such general, extensive, and complicated iniquity.—To what cause are we to impute this frigid silence—this torpid indifference—this cold inanimated conduct of the otherwise warm and generous Americans? Why do they remain inactive, amidst the groans of injured humanity, the shrill and distressing ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... before the fire, rather than face the stairs. Life at Mildenham was lonely, save for Winton's hunting cronies, and they but few, for his spiritual dandyism did not gladly suffer the average country gentleman and his frigid courtesy frightened women. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... when the traffic has died down, it waxes thunderous. He hears it through the window—hears it perforce, since the streets are ringing with that music, and you cannot close your ears. He listens, growing hotter and more restless every moment. He thinks.... That splash of waters! Those frigid wavelets and cascades! How delicious to bathe his limbs, if only for a moment, in their bubbling wetness; he is parched with heat, and at this hour of the night, he reflects, there will not be a soul abroad in the square. ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... placed the world at his feet. His sardonic and polished indifference, his professed code that there was no life worth caring for but his own life, his exemption from all cant, prejudice, and disguise, the frigid lubricity with which he glided out of the grasp of the Conventional, whenever it so pleased him, without shocking the Decorums whose sense is in their ear, and who are not roused by the deed but by the noise,—all this ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a week the breach between them remained unhealed. Trina only spoke to the dentist in monosyllables, while he, exasperated at her calmness and frigid reserve, sulked in his "Dental Parlors," muttering terrible things beneath his mustache, or finding solace in his concertina, playing his six lugubrious airs over and over again, or swearing frightful oaths at his canary. When Heise paid his bill, McTeague, in a fury, sent the amount ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... had won at last, and to-day in a large storage house in London stands the frigid form of one who will never again flood the house of Oglethorpe ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... smiling and confident—-or he seemed so. As for the rest of the fellows, the principal's frigid coolness was beginning to get on ...
— The High School Pitcher - Dick & Co. on the Gridley Diamond • H. Irving Hancock
... the advancing motion of the bands and alterations of the currents of air in the higher regions of the atmosphere. They occur when the air is extremely calm and the heavens are quite serene, and are much more common under the tropics than in the temperate and frigid zones. I have seen this phenomenon on the Andes, almost under the equator, at an elevation of 15,920 feet, and in Northern Asia, in the plains of Krasnojarski, south of Buchtarminsk, so similarly developed, that we must regard the influences ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... the hilltops with ruddy, golden hues. The frigid snow-caps no longer wore their sheen of alabaster. There was a golden radiance everywhere, a suggestion of a perfect peace, such as the woman felt could never again find ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... fluted ribbon of snow and ice, and where the spray tumbled before it froze, there are thousands of filmy rosettes iridescent in the sun's rays. The path is finished and Dr. Harmen is building a snow man. We are civilized aborigines gone mad with youth out here in the frigid zone, and anything as grown up as bridge has failed to interest us. From our home on the summit of "Kewanas Crag," Silver Lake looks like a stray turquoise below and the mysterious Black Hills around us catch glimpses of gold in the sunset hour, then dye themselves ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... walking together, at the moment of her appearance, and of course we both with one accord sprang forward and, cap in hand, proffered the support of our arms. She accepted that of the skipper with a graciousness of manner that was to be paralleled only by the frigid dignity with ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... where he partly threatened, and partly advised, every one, and told them that in case they would submit to Hyrcanus, they would live happily and peaceably, and enjoy what they possessed, and that with universal peace and quietness; but that in case they hearkened to such as had some frigid hopes by raising new troubles to get themselves some gain, they should then find him to be their lord instead of their procurator; and find Hyrcanus to be a tyrant instead of a king; and both the Romans ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... returns in gloomy silence, broken by the occasional hoot of the long-shore loafer, after issuing a bulletin which though it may enlighten the professional mind does not exhilarate the layman. Meantime the enemy triumphs, wirelessly, far and wide. A few frigid and perfunctory-seeming contradictions are put forward against his resounding claims; a Naval expert or two is heard talking "off"; the rest is silence. Anon, the enemy, after a prodigious amount of explanation which not even the ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling
... Wrath, wrath immeasurable, unimaginable, unmitigable, burned at my heart like a cancer. The worst had come. And the thing which kills a man for action —the living in two climates at once—a torrid and a frigid zone—of hope and fear—that was past. Weak—suppose I were for the moment: I felt that a day or two might bring back my strength. No miserable tremors of hope now shook my nerves: if they shook from that inevitable rocking of ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... Guatamala, in February 1835, as coming from south-west, whereas the true direction was about west south-west, and the trade wind below was about north. But do we deny that there is an interchange between the frigid and torrid zones? By no means; but we would show that the great controlling power is external to our atmosphere, and that the relative velocities of the earth and the atmosphere is not alone adequate to account for it. By this view the ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett |
