"Limbo" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to continue the work of God upon earth, and we are pledged to assist her by laboring for the education of youth. The Blessed Virgin prayed for the accomplishment of the prophesies, and the deliverance of the holy souls, who in limbo awaited the coming of the Just One, and we are bound to make fervent prayer for the conversion of sinners, and the souls in purgatory. The Blessed Virgin entered the temple, at the age of three years, to perfect herself in that school of virtue; the daughters of the Congregation, ...
— The Life of Venerable Sister Margaret Bourgeois • Anon.
... until "Donder and Blitzen" pranced into the foreground as Santa Claus' steeds, there was nothing in American nursery literature of any lasting fame. Thereafter, as the custom of observing Christmas Day gradually became popular, the perennial small child felt—until automobiles sent reindeer to the limbo of bygone things—the thrill of delight and fear over the annual visit of Santa Claus that the bigger child experiences in exploding fire-crackers on the Fourth of July. There are possibilities in both excitements which appeal to one of the child's ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... of magic," he pursued, "you would know that thought is dynamic, and that it may call into existence forms and pictures that may well exist for hundreds of years. For, not far removed from the region of our human life, is another region where floats the waste and drift of all the centuries, the limbo of the shells of the dead; a densely populated region crammed with horror and abomination of all descriptions, and sometimes galvanized into active life again by the will of a trained manipulator, a mind versed in the practices of lower magic. That this woman understood its vile ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... golden weather things were going badly with the unsuccessful parent. For weeks now his life had been in ferment, his moods as freakish as the wind. What little regularity his life had known departed to that limbo that had claimed his peace of mind. That he felt himself abnormally methodic lay entirely in the fact that he watered the fern each day. It had for him a morbid fascination. Incomprehensible forces were sapping his faith in himself and the future; and viciously ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... whether the fetich be the image of a saint or the Virgin, or a verse of the Bible found at random and used much as is a penny-toss to decide minor actions. Or, to look farther south, what means the rabbit's foot carried in the pocket or the various articles of faith now hanging in the limbo between religion and folk-lore in various parts of ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... century in perfect peace with his neighbors, and who, although contemporary with Sargon, Sennacherib, Esar-haddon, and As-shur-bani-pal—all kings more or less connected with Media—is never heard of in any of their annals, must be relegated to the historical limbo in which repose so many "shades of mighty names;" and the Herodotean list of Median kings must at any rate, be thus far reduced. Nothing is more evident than that during the flourishing period of Assyria under the ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... editorials on light or picturesque topics, and with satisfying though not equal results, for here he occasionally stumbled upon the hard-rooted prejudices of the Inside Office, and beheld his efforts vanish into the irreclaimable limbo of the scrap-basket. Nevertheless, at ten dollars per column for this kind of writing, he continued to make a decent space bill, and clear himself of the doldrums where the waning of the city desk's favor had left him. All that he ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... women, as he illustrated, by means of a wineglass, two knives, and a saltspoon, his new invention for having one's boots fastened by electricity, which was to do for Marconigrams, expose radium as a foolish fraud, and consign clock-work to limbo. "You don't touch the buttons and the invention does the ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... is trained to be a self-respecting member of the body politic might in time share on equal terms the chance of the poor boy to become a man of genuine influence and importance on his own account, just as now by the neglect, or worse, of his parents the very rich boy is apt to be relegated to the limbo of curiosities, ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... Martin consign the boatswain to the limbo of memory. He was inside the street-car, so he did not see the automobile, driven by a figure in a gray overcoat and cap, that drew up at the curb beside the boatswain. Nor did he observe that automobile's consequent strange behavior ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... they said, had been well known in Paris, in the days when she was still some one—had dismissed her from her position in his household. That was natural enough, and there was no further reason for remembering her. Having disappeared into the limbo of the unfortunate, she was as far beyond the mental range of those who retained their blessings as souls that have passed are out of sight of men and women who still walk the earth. For this very reason she called out in Mrs. Wappinger ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... and how darkly do his own petty interests overshadow the giant things of life. Thrones may totter and fall, monarchs pass to the limbo of memories, whilst we wrestle with an intractable collar-stud. Had another than Inspector Sheffield been driving to Buckingham Palace that day, he might have found his soul attuned to the martial ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... he spoke with an emphasis, and looked down on Embro with a bright vivacity of eye, which forewarned the circle of one of his eloquent flashes: a smile of expectant enjoyment passed round,—"hallucination is the dust-heap and limbo of the meanly-equipped man of science to-day, just as witchcraft was a few hundred years ago. The poor creature of science long ago, when he came upon any pathological or psychological manifestation he did not understand, ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... the screech of rubber on concrete knifed through two seconds of time before snapping, like a celery stalk of sound, into aching silence. The silence of limbo, called into being for the space of a slow heartbeat. Then the thud of running feet, the rising hubbub ...
— The Cuckoo Clock • Wesley Barefoot
... sometimes picked up as much as two pounds a-day, for weeks running; as it is, I averages from fifteen shillings to a pound. Now, as you helped me away from that land shark, who would soon have found out that I had two legs, and have put me into limbo as an impostor, I will teach you to arn your livelihood after my fashion. You shall work with me until you are fit to start alone, and then there's plenty of room in England for both of us; but mind, never tell any one what you pick up, or every mumper in the island ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... of a Letter sent from the roaring Boyes in Elizium, to the two arrant Knights of the Grape in Limbo, Alderman Abel and M. Kilvert, the two projectors for wine; with their portraits. 5 ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... if her small body was trying to push through me and come out the other side. I hung on tight. Miellyn knew what she was doing in the transmitter; I was just along for the ride and I didn't relish the thought of being dropped off somewhere in that black limbo we traversed. ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... the limbo where lost roses go The place we may not see, With all its petals sweet and half-ablow, One rose ...
— The Miracle and Other Poems • Virna Sheard
... act upon his own dictum when, in the preface to The Satire, he observed, and with truth, that had he originally "written with the grave decorum of a secluded moralist, he would" by this time "have gone down into the limbo of ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 24, 1891. • Various
... be harangued confidently by a woman—they who were used to watching women carry loads. There was something revolutionary about it that took their breath away, and swept their own determination into limbo. ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... raises the axe to chop the offender's head off, thinks better of it, twirls Picard swiftly around, and using the flat of the chopper spanks the rear of the Picard anatomy, sending him sprawling into the limbo. ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... things constitute the general identity of old castles; and when one has wandered through a good many, with due discretion of step and protrusion of head, one ceases very much to distinguish and remember, and contents one's self with consigning them to the honourable limbo of the romantic. I must add that this reflection did not in the least deter me from crossing the bridge which connects ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... made the sign, suddenly filled me with a sense of the absurdity of the entire feeling. It may not even then have seemed as absurd as it really was, but at least it seemed enough so to collapse or to pass into the limbo of ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... friends in limbo," returned Harry. "You will find it no holiday affair to keep a house for the purpose of murder and robbery. Never mind, you need say nothing, for it will not better matters in the least. Come;" and Harry Bernard led the old ...
— Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective - Or, The Crime of the Midnight Express • Frank Pinkerton
... is called being happy," he used to say to himself. And being happy gave him the impression of a limbo; he felt as though his old personality was dying within him. He could no longer recover his former way of life; all his disquietudes had vanished. He felt that he was balanced, lacking those alternations of courage and cowardice which had previously formed the characteristic thing in him. ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... (n.s.) Oe. flavo-nitida antennis obscuris, fronte puncto atro-nitido impresso, thorace lunula utrinque atro-nitida impresso, scutello flavo, elytris nigro-fuscis limbo et sutura testaceis, ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... of rest; Condemn'd, this week, rash rancour to instil, Or thrown aside, the next, for one who will: Alike undone or if he praise or rail (For this affects his safety, that his sale), He sinks at last, in luckless limbo set, If loud for libel, and if dumb ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... of his class he knew nothing more of his origin than the preceding two generations. The family was lost in the vague limbo of "back East somewheres." Yet he was proud that the Clarks had come from the East and were among the first Americans to enter the golden land of opportunity. And he apologized for the failure of his ancestors to attach to themselves a ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... why—for what had it to do with this musical narration of a tragic Italian tale!—the days when, in the first flush of their wedded life, they had set a seal of devotion and loyalty and love upon their arms, which, long ago, had gone to the limbo of lost jewels, with the chaste, fresh desires of worshipping hearts. Young egotists, supremely happy and defiant in the pride of the fact that they loved each other, and that it mattered little what the rest of the world enjoyed, suffered, and endured—these ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... quiverings of the flesh within its coat, corresponding with its good-will,[47] told him, that his fall was not owing to the fruit which he tasted, but to the violation of the injunction not to taste it; that he remained in the Limbo on hell-borders upwards of five thousand years; and that the language he spoke had become obsolete before the ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... will carry him, and to do on trust what else may be necessary to free them from Purgatory. And hark ye, as they were just living people, and free from all heresy, it may be that they are well nigh out of limbo already, so that a little matter may have them free of the fetlocks; and in that case, look ye, ye will say I desire to take out the balance of the gold in curses upon a generation called the Ogilvies of Angus Shire, in what way soever ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... the memory of his loved ones fades slowly away, he becomes more willing to speak of them, and thus their rude names may sometimes be rescued by the philosophic enquirer before they have vanished, like autumn leaves or winter snows, into the vast undistinguished limbo of the past. In some of the Victorian tribes the prohibition to mention the names of the dead remained in force only during the period of mourning; in the Port Lincoln tribe of South Australia it lasted many years. Among the Chinook Indians of North America "custom forbids the mention of ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... enough," said old Bob, "and, provided we keep their arms lashed behind their backs, and their legs in limbo, they'll not escape ...
— Adventures in Australia • W.H.G. Kingston
... pipe was by this time keeping pace with that of his new friend. "The case is as clear as mud. Here's how it is. Gascoyne is in limbo; well, we are out of limbo. Good. Then, all we've got for to do is to break into limbo and shove Gascoyne out of limbo, and help him to escape. It's all square, ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... was still there. She continued—"En purgatorio, ah Dios, tu quedas en purgatorio," as if the fly had represented the unhappy young pirate's soul in limbo. Oh, let no one smile at the quaintness of the dying fancy of the poor heart—crushed girl. The weather began to lower again, the wind came past us moaningly—the sun was obscured large drops of rain fell heavily into the room—a sudden dazzling flash of lightning took place, and the dragonfly ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... the region in which he should pass his inner life there would be no occupant but himself. From the world where men and women had ties of love and pity and mutual regard they had cast him out, forcing him into a spiritual limbo where none of these things obtained. It was only lawful that he should make use of such advantages as his ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... was a notion to the effect that women dressed to please men, but that idea has long since been relegated to the limbo of forgotten things. ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... ridge of Mount St. Jean; and the name of Waterloo appears in the tepid records of 1794 at the head of a plan for arranging the stages of the retreat (5th July) which the nervousness of Coburg soon condemned to the limbo of unfulfilled promises.[353] Is it surprising that, two days later, the Duke of York declared to him that the British were "betrayed and sold to the enemy"? Worse still, the garrisons of Valenciennes, Conde, Quesnoy, ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... what you meant," said Sir Mortimer, and sitting down at the table, shaded his eyes with his hand. "Of all my needs the least is now a friend. Go your ways to the town and be merry there, forgetting this limbo and me, who wander to and fro in its shadows." Suddenly he struck his hand with force against the table and started to his feet, pushing from him with a grating sound the heavy oaken settle. "Go!" he cried. "The players and mummers are there. Go sit upon the stage, ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... God; now, the vision was over, the desert was dull and dry, the bush burned no more, the glowing lava had cooled to unsightly stone! There was no God, nor any man more! Time had closed and swept the world into the limbo of vanity! For a time she sat without thought, as it were in a mental sleep. She opened her eyes, and the blank of creation stared into the very heart of her. The emptiness and loneliness overpowered her. Hardly aware of what she was ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... far afflicted, that we live Desiring without hope." So grief assail'd My heart at hearing this, for well I knew Suspended in that Limbo many a soul Of mighty worth. "O tell me, sire rever'd! Tell me, my master!" I began through wish Of full assurance in that holy faith, Which vanquishes all error; "say, did e'er Any, or through his own or other's merit, Come forth from ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... new feats Of strength,—shall somebody as sure push down, Consign him dispossessed of sceptre, crown, And orb imperial—whereto?—Never dream That what once lived shall ever die! They seem Dead—do they? lapsed things lost in limbo? Bring Our life to kindle theirs, and straight each king Starts, you shall see, stands up, from head to foot No inch that is not Purcell! Wherefore? (Suit Measure to subject, first—no marching on Yet in thy bold C Major, ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... the obloquy it seemed to suffer. He lived, in his best hours, in a world of subjects and situations; he wrote another play and made it as different from its predecessor as such a very good thing could be. It might be a very good thing, but when he had committed it to the theatrical limbo indiscriminating fate took no account of the difference. He was at last able to leave England for three or four months; he went to Germany to pay a visit long deferred to his mother ...
— Nona Vincent • Henry James
... large and nervous party of fugitives of mixed nationalities and professions—consuls, charges, attaches, and innocent, agitated citizens—was summarily grabbed and ordered into indefinite limbo. ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... with an adequate punishment in derision; such, as in a scheme of poetical justice, would be aptly requited by assigning to the agents, when they quit this lower world, a station in that not uncomfortable limbo—the Paradise of Fools! But, assuredly, we shall have here another proof that ridicule is not the test of truth, if it prevent us from perceiving, that depravity has no ally more active, more inveterate, nor, from the difficulty of divining ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... clouds of spray-white pigeons, faintly edged with pink against an azure sky; then ceased as suddenly. The news was known. Whatever Antioch knew, bored it. Nine days' wonders were departed long ago into the limbo of the days of Xerxes. Nine hours had come to be the limit of men's interest—nine minutes the crucial phase of excitement, during which the balance of emotion ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... amongst us are entitled to some compensation. Why, sir, seeing that serious politicians do not propose to suppress licences for the sale of poisons without giving compensations, surely we, who have done much and suffered much, ought not to be put into limbo without some recognition of our services. I remain, ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... with life: they can only bear to see it through the veil of visions spun by the backward movement of time, and hear it in the echo which sends back and distorts the dead words of those who were once alive.—Christophe's friendship gradually dragged Olivier out of this Limbo of art. The sun's rays pierced through to the innermost recesses of his soul in which ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... them, or what they could still do for him. Probably he sincerely means both, but the latter much more than the former; he laments the breaking of the tools of Mammon much more than the breaking of the images of God. It would be almost impossible to grope in the limbo of what he does think; but we can assert that there is one thing he doesn't think. He doesn't think, "This man might be as jolly as I am, if he need not come to me for work ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... his wrinkles, nor conceal his wrath at interruption by the best, if their conversation do not fit his impertinency,—here is he to afflict us with his personalities. 'Tis incident to scholars, that each of them fancies he is pointedly odious in his community. Draw him out of this limbo of irritability. Cleanse with healthy blood his parchment skin. You restore to him his eyes which he left in pledge at Mimir's spring. If you are the victim of your doing, who cares what you do? We can spare your ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... tail were long ago gone to that undiscovered limbo where all things lost, broken, vanished, and destroyed; things that lose themselves—for servants are too honest to steal; things that break themselves—for servants are too careful to break; find ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... endure through a few years of sickly existence, and then to pass away. The Federalists, the National Republicans, the Antimasons, the Whigs, and the Know-Nothings have each appeared, flourished for a short time, and then passed to the limbo of factions lost to earth. This discipline of the Democracy has not been without its uses, and the country occasionally has profited from it; but now it is to be abused, through application to the service of the Great Anarch at Richmond. The Rebel power, which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... the other priest; "reason is always reasonable, even in the last limbo, in the lost borderland of things. I know that people charge the Church with lowering reason, but it is just the other way. Alone on earth, the Church makes reason really supreme. Alone on earth, the Church affirms that God himself is bound ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... off his hands, and then to let fly. Evie's marriage was its last appearance in public. As soon as a tenant was found, it became a house for which he never had had much use, and had less now, and, like Howards End, faded into Limbo. ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... one, with little of the crudeness so generally characteristic of first ventures,—not more than enough to augur richer maturity hereafter. Dead-ripeness in a first book is a fatal symptom, sure sign that the writer is doomed forever to that pale limbo of faultlessness from which there is no escape upwards ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... their beauty upon him, so unconsciously impressed, for the health of their power and sweetness still living in his blood—for these does that chase seem alone of worth, when the dusty entomological relic thereof is in limbo. And so that long and costly shelf, groaning beneath the weight of Grose and Dugdale, and many a mighty slab of topographical prose; those pilgrimages to remote parish churches, with all their attendant ardours of careful 'rubbings'; those notebooks, ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... sorry for it, for raw rats are not very good eating. I went home again, and I hadn't been on shore more than two hours, when who should I see but my first wife, Bet, with a robin-redbreast in tow. "That's he!" says she. I gave fight, but was nabbed and put into limbo, to be tried for what they call biggery, or having ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... circumstances that accompany this story. I will say nothing of there being therein a good number of horses, of the casting of lots by the servants of the court for the garments of Christ, of the raising of the Holy Fathers from the Limbo of Hell, and of all the other well-conceived inventions, which belong not so much to a master of that age as to the most excellent of the moderns; inasmuch as, taking up the whole walls, with very diligent judgment he ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari
... of the Olympian dynasty, the subdued Titan rebels had been set to ornament a palace for Jove, they would have brought in some such tremendous work: or suppose that Michael descended to the Shades, and brought up this picture out of the halls of Limbo. I like a thousand and a thousand times better to think of Raphael's loving spirit. As he looked at women and children, his beautiful face must have shone like sunshine: his kind hand must have caressed the ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... if you did n't exist, there could be no question of my cousin. No earthly consideration could induce me to make any sort of terms with that branch of my family—let alone a marriage. So!" A wave of the hand dismissed his cousin for ever to Crack-limbo. "But as you do exist, and as I happen to love you, and as I happen to have discovered—what I could never wildly have dared to hope—that you are not utterly indifferent to me, I may tell you that I intend to marry you—you—you. ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... morning, betwixt the moss And gum that locked our friend in limbo, A spider had spun his web across, And sat in the midst with arms akimbo: So, I took pity, for learning's sake, And, de profundis, accentibus laetis, Cantate! quoth I, as I got a rake; And up I fished ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... prese al cuor quando lo 'ntesi, Perocche gente di molto valore Conobbi che 'n quel limbo ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to keep an apprentice busy, but where would he find a lad sufficiently behind the times to learn a humble trade now banished to the limbo of superseded, ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... of poverty was early relegated to the limbo of neglect. Only a few years after the founding of Manila royal decrees began to issue on the subject of complaints received by the King over the usurpation of lands on the part of the priests. Using the same methods so familiar in the heyday of the institution of monasticism in ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... occurs the name of a saint who was destined to be famous in the story of the town from its earliest days of civic life until the chaos of the Revolution, in which the old order fell to pieces and carried so many picturesque and harmless ceremonies into the limbo where it swept away the ancient abuses of despotic monarchy. For with the name of St. Romain, who enlarged St. Mellon's primitive "cathedral" even more than St. Victrice had done, is connected one of the most ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... compelled to leave the Church of England (a contingency which from the growth of heresy in that Church he distinctly contemplated) to go not into the communion of the Church of Rome but out of all communion whatever. He would have gone we suppose into some limbo like the phantom Church of the Nonjurors. It is difficult to see how such a course can have logically commended itself to the mind of any member of the theological school which held that the individual reason afforded no sort of standing ground and ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... ecstasies of imagination and intellect, undistracted by the cares of a vulgar life, or the appetites of the common clay. Far from descending to the assistance of a fiend, theirs was but the august ambition to approach nearer to the Fount of Good; the more they emancipated themselves from this limbo of the planets, the more they were penetrated by the splendour and beneficence of God. And if they sought, and at last discovered, how to the eye of the Spirit all the subtler modifications of being ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... barberic joy. As he worked, inspired by the curly, flowing glossy locks which, to his eye, called inarticulately for the tools of his trade, his undulating monologue welled forth until Coleridge might have envied him. Helwyse heard the sound, but let the words go by to that unknown limbo whither all sounds, good or bad, have been flying since ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... reformer. 'The Coming Man.'" The appropriateness and elegance of which commentary will be manifest to all readers familiar with the allusion. In the Fourth Canto, where Virgil speaks of the condition of the souls in limbo, our professed translator says: "Dante says this in bitter irony. He ill brooks the narrow bigotry of the Church," etc. etc., showing an utter ignorance of Dante's real adherence to the doctrine of the Church. He has here read Dr. Carlyle's note with less ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... devious air: Then might ye see Cowls, hoods, and habits, with their wearers, tost And fluttered into rags; then reliques, beads, Indulgences, dispenses, pardons, bulls, The sport of winds: All these, upwhirled aloft, Fly o'er the backside of the world far off Into a Limbo large and broad, since called The Paradise of Fools, to few unknown Long after; now unpeopled, and untrod. All this dark globe the Fiend found as he passed, And long he wandered, till at last a gleam Of dawning light turned thither-ward in ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... buried beside the body; and the aitu rested. The rite was practised beyond doubt in simple piety; the repose of the soul was its object: its motive, reverent affection. The present king disowns indeed all knowledge of a dangerous aitu; he declares the souls of the unburied were only wanderers in limbo, lacking an entrance to the proper country of the dead, unhappy, nowise hurtful. And this severely classic opinion doubtless represents the views of the enlightened. But the flight of my Lafaele marks the grosser terrors of ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... week, and before being banished to the limbo of forgotten and unconsidered trifles, the business was a subject for intermittent conversation and a certain amount of conjecture. Then it was forgotten, and it is doubtful if it will ever be resurrected in any naval ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... controversy. The ugly traits of Mary's character, while we cannot say that they are concealed with partisan intent, are so wrought into the picture that they do not impress the imagination as ugly at all. They are consigned to the dim limbo of the past and have the effect of winning for her that sympathy which human nature is always ready to bestow, in art if not in life, upon the Magdalen type. On the other hand, the ignoble traits of Queen Elizabeth are ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... out of limbo, with a warning, and a hint that Boston-town was a good place for him to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... writer was not called a historian unless he had considerable pretensions to style. Thus, men who could write, and had written, in an informal way, excellent historical accounts, were not studied by their countrymen as historians. Their writings were relegated to the limbo of antiquarian remains. The habit of writing notes of their campaigns, memoranda of their public conduct, copies of their speeches, &c. had for some time been usual among the abler or more ambitious nobles. ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... movement; he has left the natural without reaching the spiritual. He has set forth from the shore, but has not gained the further verge of the river. He is borne along by the stream, with no foothold on either shore. Leaving the actual, he has fallen short of the real, caught in the limbo of vanities and delusions. The cause of this aberrant phantasm is always the worship of a false, vain self, the lord of dreams, within one's own breast. This is the psychic man, lord of delusive and bewildering ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... these things. He was a sincere Liberal in the non-party sense of that very elastic word. So was I. That is to say, there was a time when we both thought ourselves good mid-Victorian Liberals—a school of politicians whose ideas have now been swept into the limbo of forgotten things, the only surviving principles of that age being apparently those associated with a faint and somewhat fantastic cult of the primrose. In 1866 he wrote to his sister—and I cannot but smile on reading the letter—"I am more and more Radical every year"; and he expressed regret ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... from within; and Richard, turning at the voice, beheld the blind man sitting up on his pallet with arms outstretched. "My child!—My Father! hast thou brought her to visit me in limbo?" he cried. ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the mount of revelations, for this was an age in which Rome was growing proud of her history. But to do this he must have a mythos which assumed that souls lived before their earthly existence. A Homeric limbo of departed souls did not suffice (though Vergil also availed himself of that in order to recall the friends of the early books). With this in view he builds his home of the dead out of what Servius calls much sapientia, ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... labor I was following upward the swift spirits, when Virgil began, "Love kindled by virtue always kindles another, provided that its flame appear outwardly; wherefore from the hour when amid us Juvenal descended into the limbo of Hell, and made known to me thy affection, my own good will toward thee was such that more never bound one to an unseen person; so that these stairs will now seem short to me. But tell me (and as a friend pardon me, if too great confidence let loose ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 2, Purgatory [Purgatorio] • Dante Alighieri
... can appreciate them. We have had Mr. Pickwick in England and we can imagine him in France. We have had Mrs. Lirriper in France and we can imagine her in Mesopotamia or in heaven. The subtle character in the modern novels we cannot really imagine anywhere except in the suburbs or in Limbo. ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... Edgworth devoted himself to the subject for many years, he failed in securing the adoption of his sailing carriage. It is indeed quite clear that a power so uncertain as wind could never be relied on for ordinary traffic, and Mr. Edgworth's project was consequently left to repose in the limbo of the Patent Office, with thousands of other ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... spirit with the gloomier facts of life. Its title, The Unclassed,[3] excited a little curiosity, but the author was careful to explain that he had not in view the declasses but rather those persons who live in a limbo external to society, and refuse the statistic badge. The central figure Osmond Waymark is of course Gissing himself. Like his creator, raving at intervals under the vile restraints of Philistine surroundings and with no money for dissipation, Osmond gives up teaching to pursue ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... other esteemed characters,—though Willelmus Sacrista, of the red nose, too is one. These shall proceed straightway to Waltham; and there elect the Abbot as they may and can. Monks are sworn to obedience; must not speak too loud, under penalty of foot-gyves, limbo, and bread-and-water: yet monks too would know what it is they are obeying. The St. Edmundsbury Community has no hustings, ballot-box, indeed no open voting: yet by various vague manipulations, pulse-feelings, we struggle to ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... fields of La Crau, near Mariannes, there rained stones (they are there to this day) to help Hercules, who otherwise wanted wherewithal to fight Neptune's two bastards. But whither are we bound? Are we a-going to the little children's limbo? By Pluto, they'll bepaw and conskite us all. Or are we going to hell for orders? By cob's body, I'll hamper, bethwack, and belabour all the devils, now I have some vine-leaves in my shoes. Thou shalt see me lay about me like mad, old boy. Which ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... suppose," said the keeper. "Poor fellow! He came into limbo in a crazy condition, and has been a burden on my hands ever since. After lingering along for some time, he was at last kind enough to give us the slip. It is just a week since he drank his last ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... from seven to nine knots, with torpedoes ready for use in the tubes and guns of effective caliber mounted on deck. It has, indeed, been asserted that the airplane and the submarine have relegated the battleship to the limbo of desuetude: but as to that the continued control of the seas by Great Britain with her immense battle-fleet, supplemented by our tremendous engines of war, certainly argues for no such theory. What the future may bring forth in the way ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... Habits with thir wearers tost 490 And flutterd into Raggs, then Reliques, Beads, Indulgences, Dispenses, Pardons, Bulls, The sport of Winds: all these upwhirld aloft Fly o're the backside of the World farr off Into a Limbo large and broad, since calld The Paradise of Fools, to few unknown Long after, now unpeopl'd, and untrod; All this dark Globe the Fiend found as he pass'd, And long he wanderd, till at last a gleame Of dawning light turnd thither-ward in haste 500 His travell'd steps; farr ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... obscurity was expelled to the Limbo of Dead Stupidities when Mr. Swinburne, in periods as resplendent as the whirling wheels of Phoebus Apollo's chariot, wrote his famous incidental passage in his ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... Pride forbade his giving Cary reason to surmise that he had hit the truth. Rand was willing to believe that many of the shafts were chance-sent. The reflection hardly lessened his anger, but it enabled him to thrust the matter behind him to the limbo of old scores. ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... the swamp underfoot had given place to firmer ground, and the character of the trees themselves had changed. Evidently, the trail had its ending at that screen of vineleaves draped between two giant gumbo-limbo trees at ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... stumbled into the trap which was Limbo, and had had a very definite part in breaking up that devilish installation, the crew of the Solar Queen had claimed as their reward the trading rights of Traxt Cam in default of legal heirs. And so here they were on Sargol ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... pick his channel, and to make sure that there was smooth water below. They had been told that there was no rapid immediately above the falls, that the water slipped over without giving warning, but Stonor dismissed this into the limbo of red-skin romancing. He did not believe it possible for a river to go over a fall without ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... something too much in that kind. What with criticizing style and correcting exercises, we college tutors perhaps may be likely, in the heat of composition, to lose sight of realities, and pass into the limbo of the factitious,—especially when the thing must be done at odd times, in any case, and, if at all, quickly. But if I have been obliged to write hurriedly, believe me, I have obliged myself to think not hastily. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... chimera, which could but superinduce the purest visionary picture of his condition under the operation of the gift. Some might be found, as well, to discredit the notion that there would supervene, on the consigning to the limbo of inutile political systems of the disabling regime that now governs, an epoch, which would witness the shaking off, by the heavy, phlegmatic red man of the present, of his dull lethargy, with the casting behind him of former inaction ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... military service. Moreover, he requested his hearers to repeat his words and to let people know the motives which impelled him thus to set his face against a reform, which, not having secured his approval, must remain in the limbo of fantastic schemes. ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... did all round him, "Thou art a cunning rogue enough, whoever thou art. Go into limbo, and behave thyself ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... paid my respects to Master Holbrook, after a week's absence, my finger is still in limbo as you may see by the writeing. I have not paid my compliments to Madam Smith,[44] for, altho' I can drive the goos quill a bit, I cannot so well manage the needle. So I will lay my hand to the distaff, as the virtuous woman did of ...
— Diary of Anna Green Winslow - A Boston School Girl of 1771 • Anna Green Winslow
... that Assembly. These arguments convinced his Majesty's Government that it would be necessary to annul the Letters Patent issued on March 31, 1905, and make an end of the Lyttelton Constitution. That Constitution now passes away into the never-never land, into a sort of chilly limbo that is reserved for the disowned or abortive political progeny of ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... Cannakin, smuggler o' the wine, At mess between guns, lad in jovial recline: "In Limbo our Jack he would chirrup up a cheer, The martinet there find a chaffing mutineer; From a thousand fathoms down under hatches o' your Hades, He'd ascend in love-ditty, kissing ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... learning of Christ, and be very poor and weak. But I say there is no standing room, no reality of reason, between absolute faith and absolute unbelief. Either not a sparrow falls to the ground without Him, or there is no God, and we are fatherless children. Those who attempt to live in such a limbo as lies between the two, are only driven of the ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... roaring, anon rushing about with whitened faces, indescribably contorted, and again bellowing forth this order or that curse with savage energy and wildest gesture. The puny speculators had long since uttered their doleful squeak and plunged down into the limbo of ruin, completely engulfed; only the big speculators, or their commission men, remained in the arena, and many of these like trapped rats scurried about from pillar to post. The little fountain in the "Gold Room" serenely ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... evacuation of the forts early in April. Even after these staggering blows at the Confederacy, Carleton expatiated on the mighty work that yet remained to be done before Secessia should become one of the curiosities of history in the limbo of ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... the deep perplexity of his mind, moved hope and a shadowed joy. Within him arose again the vision of happiness once pictured and prayed for, once revived, never quite banished to the grey limbo of ambitions beyond fulfilment. Now realities saddened the thought of it and brought ambition within a new environment less splendid than the old. But, despite clouds, hope shone fairly forth at last. So a planet, that the eye has followed at twilight and ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... given time I make no doubt. I have known too many of them. No ship is wholly bad; and now that their bodies that had braved so many tempests have been blown off the face of the sea by a puff of steam, the evil and the good together into the limbo of things that have served their time, there can be no harm in affirming that in these vanished generations of willing servants there never has been one utterly ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad |
