"Torpor" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Scottish qualities, Mr. Gladstone was brought up at school and college among Englishmen, and received at Oxford, then lately awakened from a long torpor, a bias and tendency which never thereafter ceased to affect him. The so-called "Oxford Movement," which afterward obtained the name of Tractarianism and carried Dr. Newman, together with other less famous leaders, on to Rome, had not yet, in 1831, when Mr. Gladstone won his degree with ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... N'zige, as Speke had erroneously suggested. In crossing the Kafoor River on a bridge of floating weeds, Mrs. Baker had a sunstroke, fell through the weeds into deep water, and was rescued with great difficulty. For many days she remained in a deep torpor, and was carried on a litter while we marched through an awful broken country. The torpor was followed by brain fever, with its attendant horrors. The rain poured in torrents; and day after day we were forced to travel for want of provisions, as ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... king to entreat, and as useless for him to try to overcome her depression: the poor girl was completely overwhelmed,—the appearance of an angel would hardly have awakened her from her torpor. ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... lady; the wise man lays out his life as a gardener does a garden, on the principle of selection, of order, and with a view to the succession of the seasons. You all bemoan the dulness of life; you, in Paris, the torpor of ennui stifles you, you cry. On the contrary, I would wish the days were weeks, and the weeks months. And why? Simply because I have discovered the philosopher's stone. I have grasped the secret of my era. The comedy ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... to His 'who fainteth not, neither is weary.' All of which maturity and old age robbed us is given back in nobler form. All the limitation and weakness which they brought, the coldness, the monotony, the torpor, the weariness, will drop away. But we shall keep all the precious things which they brought us. None of the calm wisdom, the ripened knowledge, the full-summed experience, the powers of service acquired in life's long apprenticeship, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... nobility of Socrates' life, thus devoted to awakening them that sleep out of their moral torpor; the enmities that his keen and trenchant questionings of quacks and pretenders of every kind induced; the devotion of some of his friends, the unhappy falling away of others; the calumnies of ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... to Mrs. Lawrence, who still remained weak and nerveless and ill, and Anita was ready enough to do so. Mrs. Lawrence never mentioned Broussard's name and, in fact, spoke little at any time. A mental and bodily torpor seemed to possess her, and she was never able to do more than walk feebly, supported by Mrs. McGillicuddy's strong arm, to a bench, sit there for an hour or two, and return to her own two rooms. Occasionally she asked if she should give up her quarters, but as the surgeon and the chaplain and Mrs. ...
— Betty at Fort Blizzard • Molly Elliot Seawell
... low vitality. He had the bright-eyed pallor of the man knocked down into the abyss and now crawling up a few paces (only a few, tremulous, hesitating) to get his foothold on the ground again. He was largely silent, not, it sometimes seemed, from weakness, but the torpor of a tired mind. He was responsive to their care for him, ready with the fitting word and look and yet, underneath the good manners of ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... of torpor Blake sat in the shadowy hotel, watching the torrential rains that deluged the coast. Then, with the help of a cane, he hobbled from point to point about the town, quaveringly inquiring for any word of his lost partner. ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... that they would filter and disinfect the air. How was it that no one asked himself how it was possible that the plasmodia could enter the current of the blood from the air? What was the species of torpor which took possession of the intelligence of persons who had specialized in intellectual work? Here was a colossal sum ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... means that Parry established a character for ready and happy expedients, accompanied by a sound judgment, which kept alive the active powers of the mind, and prevented it from falling into the worst of all conditions,—a state of morbid torpor. His plan was completely successful, and the crew, as well as the officers, were as happy as, under the circumstances, ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... the general practice when the early publication of a piece is deemed a matter of importance, before the composition was finished. When Mary had arrived at about the middle of her work, she was seized with a temporary fit of torpor and indolence, and began to repent of her undertaking. In this state of mind, she called, one evening, as she was in the practice of doing, upon her publisher, for the purpose of relieving herself by an ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... struck the water, disturbing its torpor, and a long track of foam like the froth of champagne remained in the wake of the boat, reaching as far as the eye could see. Jeanne drank in with delight the odor of the salt mist that seemed to go to the very tips of her fingers. Everywhere the sea. But ahead of them there was something ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... it," she wept. "It is all a riddle to me, and can you guess it all? My faculties are benumbed, I have no ideas, I can scarcely see at all. I am weighed down by vague dread, which freezes me till I cannot feel, and keeps me in continual torpor. I have no voice with which to pity myself, no words to express my trouble. I suffer, and I am ashamed to suffer when Victor ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... terrible cold weather. This began at the solstice, on the 22nd of December, on which day the thermometer fell to thirty-five degrees below zero. The men experienced pain in their ears, noses, and the extremities of their bodies. They were seized with a mortal torpor combined with headache, and their breathing became ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... decay of his strength as he pales and sickens in the autumn, and at last his restoration to youth and vigor after he has passed the Waters of Death—Winter, the death of the year, the season of nature's deathlike torpor, out of which the sun has not strength sufficient to rouse her, until spring comes back and the circle begins again. An examination of the Accadian calendar, adopted by the more scientifically inclined Semites, ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... my father. But thou, Juan, What was my sin to thee, save too much love? Oh, would to God my back were crooked with age, My smooth cheek seamed with wrinkles, my bright hair Hoary with years, and my quick blood impeded By sluggish torpor, so were I near the end Of woes that seem eternal! I am strong— Death will not rescue me. Within my veins I feel the vigorous pulses of young life, Refusing my release. My heart at times Rebels against the habit of despair, And, ere I am aware, has wandered back, Among forbidden ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... passed in a kind of peaceful monotony, broken by the frequent visits of Nurse Brown and the house surgeon, with his grave face and preoccupied air; and for some time Ida lay in a kind of semi-torpor, feeling that everything that was going on around her were the unreal actions in a dream; but as she grew stronger she began to take an interest in the life of the great ward and her fellow-patients; and on the second day after her return to consciousness, began a conversation with her next-door ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... forest exercised an influence over them, and hours passed in silence, during which, allowing themselves to yield to the lulling effects of springs, they remained as it were sunk in the torpor of a calm intoxication. With his arm around her waist, he listened to her talking while the birds were warbling, noticed with the same glance the black grapes on her bonnet and the juniper-berries, the draperies of her veil, and the spiral forms assumed ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... my labors in the evasion of cacophon. Phil. has a general dislike to the Puseyites, though he is too learned to be ignorant, (as are often the Low-Church, or Evangelical, party in England,) that, in many of their supposed innovations, the Puseyites were really only restoring what the torpor of the eighteenth century had suffered to go into disuse. They were reforming the Church in the sense sometimes belonging to the particle re, viz., retroforming it, moulding it back into compliance with its original form and model. It is true that this effort for quickening the Church, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... political events of this period were not without their effect on Schlegel's mind, and in 1813 he came forward as a political writer, when his powerful pen was not without its effect in rousing the German mind from the torpor into which it had sunk beneath the victorious military despotism of France. But he was called upon to take a more active part in the measures of these stirring times, and in this year entered the service of the Crown Prince of Sweden, as secretary and counsellor at head quarters. For this Prince ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... event, day after day. The fever never ran as high as in Philip's case, and there was no delirium. There was almost constant torpor, but when for any short space he was thoroughly awakened, his mind was perfectly clear, though he spoke little, and then only on the subject immediately presented to him. There he lay for one quiet ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... all against this classic torpor was a tall, joyous Frenchman who gestured not only with his hands but with his eloquent knees as well. His subject was French literature, but from this at a moment's notice he would dart off into every phase of ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... until for an act of highway robbery he was sent to the penitentiary. The reader will observe the general activity of the intellect and the adjacent social sentiments indicated by the translucency, and the general torpor, indicated by the opacity in the regions of Religion, Hope, Reverence, Love, Conscientiousness, Industry, Cheerfulness, Love of Approbation, Sense of Honor, and Self-respect. Secretiveness shows ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... her to her despair, which had passed into a sort of torpor by the following night, when Dr. Morrell came again, out of what she knew must be mere humanity; he could not respect her any longer. He told her, as if for her comfort, that Putney had gone to the depot to meet Mr. Peck, who was expected ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... profound, practical, poetic, superstitious, but it is singularly stagnant. The cycle of natural changes goes its perpetual round and the ploughman's mind, caught in that narrow vortex, plods and plods after the seasons. Apart from an occasional flood, drought, or pestilence, nothing breaks his laborious torpor. The most cursory inspection of field and sky yields him information enough for his needs. Practical knowledge with him is all instinct and tradition. His mythology can for that very reason ride on nature with a looser rein. ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... which, loathsome as it is to look upon, yet brings with it a callousness to endure all inflictions, and a recklessness that can seize with avidity whatever coarse fragments of pleasure the day or the hour may afford. But this poverty applies itself to nerves strung for the subtlest happiness. No torpor here; no moments of rash and unscrupulous gratification—unreflected on, unrepented of—which being often repeated make, in the end, a large sum of human life; but the heart incessantly demands a genuine and enduring happiness, and is incessantly denied. It is a poverty ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... famine and anarchy. The madness of the monks and the folly of the king expelled the Moors in 1609, and the loss of a million of the best mechanics and farmers of Spain struck the nation with a torpor like that of death. In 1650 Sir Edward Hyde wrote that "affairs were in huge disorder." People murdered each other for a loaf of bread. The marine perished for want of sailors. In the stricken land nothing flourished but the rabble of monks and ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... he reviveth and at times he relapseth; and whenever he reviveth he nameth thee, and saith, 'Needs must ye bring him to me, though but for the twinkling of an eye;' and then he sinketh back into his torpor.' Accordingly" (continued the jeweller) "I accompanied the slave and went in to Ali bin Bakkar; and, finding him unable to speak, sat down at his head, whereupon he opened his eyes and seeing me, wept and said, 'Welcome and well come!' I raised ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... and the wound in his shoulder was stiff and painful. For hours on end he lay flat on his back, staring at the dim illuminations of the windows and listening to the faint out-of-door noises or the sharper borings of insects in the logs of the structure. His mind was not active. He lay in a semi-torpor, whose most vivid consciousness was that of mental discomfort and ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... is not so. The wild goats that leap along those rocks have as much passion of joy in all that fair work of God as the men that toil among them. Perhaps more. Enter the street of one of those villages, and you will find it foul with that gloomy foulness that is suffered only by torpor, or by anguish of soul. Here, it is torpor—not absolute suffering,—not starvation or disease, but darkness of calm enduring; the spring known only as the time of the scythe, and the autumn as the time of the ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... conditions among which you must choose pass before you. If you drift along in your torpor and your heedlessness, all the evils of slavery await you—deprivations, humiliations, the scorn and arrogance of the conqueror; you will be pushed about from pillar to post, because you have never found your proper niche, until, through the sacrifice of your ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... the rapid Easton eschewed water entirely, except for drinking purposes. He had had enough of it, he said. I did bathe my hands and face occasionally, particularly in the morning, to rouse me from the torpor of the always heavy sleep of night. What savages men will revert into when they are buried for a long period in the wilderness and shake off the trammels and customs of the conventionalism of civilization! It does ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... and being permitted to carry my own chair into the room, I put it by the western window, which looked across two miles of meadows waving in buckwheat, in clover and grass, and sat there in a curious torpor of spirit. I was glad to be alone, for I had discovered a new idea—the idea of sin. I wished to be left to myself till I could think out what it meant. I believed I could do that by night, and, after I had got to the root of ...
— Painted Windows • Elia W. Peattie
... the form of a state of torpor that kept him asleep until the next morning. He awoke, however, in excellent condition, but with an immense longing for solitude. In reality, he shrank from finding himself in the presence of ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... regularity in our newspapers and comic journals, and they have become endeared to us by a lifetime of intimacy. The salient characteristics of our great cities, the accepted traditions of our mining-camps, the contrast between East and West, the still more familiar contrast between the torpor of Philadelphia and Brooklyn ("In the midst of life," says Mr. Oliver Herford, "we are—in Brooklyn") and the uneasy speed of New York,—these things furnish abundant material for everyday American humour. There is, for example, ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... the battle. The ponderous pericranium of General Jan Risingh sank upon his breast; his knees tottered under him; a deathlike torpor seized upon his frame, and he tumbled to the earth with such violence that old Pluto started with affright, lest he should have broken through the ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... grope if they arose, and so with folded hands they sit like the Buddha, which one great section of heathenism has taken as being the true emblem and ideal of the noblest life. Absolute passivity lays hold upon them all—torpor, stagnation, no dream of advance or progress. The sheep are dejected, despairing, anarchic, disintegrated, lacerated, guideless, and shepherdless—away from Christ. So He thought them. God give you and me grace, dear brethren, to see, as Christ saw, the condition ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... quickly, and staggered a little, as though he had been set down after a rush through space. He leaned his back against the balustrade and faced a disordered array of long cane chairs. The bodies prone in them seemed startled out of their torpor by his movement. One or two sat up as if alarmed; here and there a cigar glowed yet; Marlow looked at them all with the eyes of a man returning from the excessive remoteness of a dream. A throat was cleared; a calm voice ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... depend on the mind's decree. But, as to the first point, I ask such objectors, whether experience does not also teach, that if the body be inactive the mind is simultaneously unfitted for thinking? For when the body is at rest in sleep, the mind simultaneously is in a state of torpor also, and has no power of thinking, such as it possesses when the body is awake. Again, I think everyone's experience will confirm the statement, that the mind is not at all times equally fit for thinking on a given subject, but according as the body is more or less fitted for being stimulated ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... tell me what must happen outside, during the winter. Ensconced in the crannies of the rockwork, in the sunniest places, the young Empusae wait, in a state of torpor, for the return of the hot weather. Notwithstanding the shelter of a heap of stones, there must be painful moments when the frost is prolonged and the snow penetrates little by little into the best-protected crevices. No matter: ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... new poem,—the Second Part. He is there introduced sleeping, as if burying in torpor the lusts and crimes and sorrows of his past career. Pitying spirits are about him, to heal his woes and promote his return ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... and benumbed, her lips blue, her flesh gray. It was plain to him that she had reached the limit of endurance, that she was ready to sink into the last torpor. He ripped open his overcoat and shook the snow from it, then gathered her close so that she might get the warmth of his body. The rugs from the automobile he ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... I was sunk in this torpor I cannot estimate; but when I awoke, it seemed as if the sun were settling toward the horizon. Captain Nemo was already up, and I had started to stretch my limbs, when an unexpected apparition brought me sharply to ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... against the Swiss. The encounter took place (June 21, 1476) at Morat and once more the chivalry of Burgundy suffered complete defeat. Charles fled from the field, half insane with rage and disappointment, when the news that Duke Rene had reconquered Lorraine roused him from his torpor. He hastily gathered together a fresh army and laid siege to Nancy. But in siege operations he had no skill, and in the depth of winter (January 5, 1477) he was attacked by the Swiss and Lorrainers outside the walls of the town. A panic seized the ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... the gnawing worm intrudes. And then my thoughts wandered away into the vagueness and mystery of eternity, I was rushing uncalled for into the presence of a just and pure God, with a spirit unrepenting, unannealed! And I tried to pray and could not; for a heaviness, a dull strange torpor crept over me. Consciousness went out slowly. 'This is death,' thought I; yet I felt no pain, nothing save a weary drowsiness, against which I struggled ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... in regularly formed shafts, until, at a great height, their branches shot forth horizontal limbs, that were covered with the meagre foliage of an evergreen, affording a melancholy contrast to the torpor of nature below. To the travellers there seemed to be no wind; but these pines waved majestically at their topmost boughs, sending forth a dull, plaintive sound that was quite in consonance with the rest of ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... perfect state this winged jumping insect makes havoc of the rising plant of Turnips, but the crop is only in danger while in the seed-leaf stage. It is in the spring and early summer chiefly that the ravages of these insects occasion perplexity, for they awaken from their winter torpor active and hungry, and have a ready appetite for almost any cruciferous plant. Hence we see the leaves of Radishes pierced by them, and all such weeds as Charlock, Cuckoo Flower, Hedge Garlic, and Water Cress serve ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... still in the torpor that follows rest after exhaustion. The warm July sun, the breeze from the Lake, the flash of light from the roadside water, these were all he had room for among his perceptions. He was content to enjoy them, and to anticipate drowsily the keen pleasure of seeing Carroll ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... creed which they had outgrown. Such an attempt was, however, being made, backed by all the weight of a bigoted king with a powerful and wealthy Church as his ally. In three years the nation would understand it, and the King would be flying from his angry people; but at present, sunk in a torpor after the long civil wars and the corrupt reign of Charles, they failed to see what was at stake, and turned against those who would warn them, as a hasty man turns on the messenger who is the bearer of evil tidings. Is it not strange, my dears, how ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... returned to see how Leo was getting on, Billali saying that he must now wait upon She, and hear her commands. On reaching Leo's room we found the poor boy in a very bad way. He had woke up from his torpor, and was altogether off his head, babbling about some boat-race on the Cam, and was inclined to be violent. Indeed, when we entered the room Ustane was holding him down. I spoke to him, and my voice seemed to soothe him; at any rate he grew much quieter, and ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... study in natural history. During the open season on superintendents, some three months in duration, he does not sleep at all. For one month after the first snowfall he digs a hole beneath a rock, somewhere above timberline, and falls into a torpor, using no food for thirty days. Then he goes to Washington to meet the Director of Parks, after which he gets no more sleep until next fall. It is this perpetual insomnia which gives a park superintendent his haunted look. He knows he ought ...
— Maw's Vacation - The Story of a Human Being in the Yellowstone • Emerson Hough
... advent of many other diseases is announced by a languid indifference to surroundings, and a slow response to the customary stimuli. The child's brain seems clouded, and a light form of torpor invades the whole body. The child, who is usually active and interested in things about him, but who loses his activity and becomes dull and irresponsive, should be carefully watched. It may be that he is ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... length a dust cloud moved, a tarnishing spot on the afternoon's hard brightness. This spot was the one point of energy in the universal torpor. From it came the rhythmic beat of flying hoofs and the jingle of harness. It was the Rocky Bar stage, up from Shilo through Plymouth, across the Mother Lode and then in a steep, straining grade on to Antelope and Rocky Bar, camps nestling in the mountain ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... the afternoon of the third day, there was some unusual activity on board the ship, which roused our hero from his torpor. The bell in the bows rang out... the heavy boots of the sailors could be heard running on the deck... "Engine ahead!... engine astern!." Shouted the hoarse voice of ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... had been wrought in Europe. The Crusades had opened a channel through which flowed from the East reviving streams of ancient knowledge and culture over the arid waste of mediaevalism. France and England had awakened from their long mental torpor, Paris was become the center of an intellectual revival. In England, Roger Bacon, in his "Opus Majus," was systematizing all existing knowledge and laying a foundation for a more advanced science and philosophy for the people, ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele
... hideously frightful than the face of Ferrand, who was then plunged into that torpor which ordinarily succeeds violent attacks. Of a mortal pallor, strongly relieved by the shadows of the alcove, his face, streaming with a cold sweat, announced the last stage of consumption; his closed eyelids ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... ceased to fall; his body lost all feeling as his legs became cramped, and he fell into unconsciousness. Suddenly he was aroused from his torpor by angry voices. Far away they sounded, but still they penetrated to his dulled and aching brain. He could hear a high-pitched, shrill, screaming sound that struck on his almost senseless ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... the Universities of England, they will pronounce that the true policy to be observed there would be simply to let the schools of Theology alone. Most unfortunate it is that they have been roused from the state of decadence and torpor in which they lay some twenty or thirty years ago. Up to that time, a routine lecture, delivered once to successive batches of young men destined for the Protestant Ministry, not during their residence, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... mind now noting minute things and now clouded with torpor, did not at first hear a voice that was quakingly lifted up over by the forecastle—a voice that drew nearer, to an accompaniment ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... be. The shutters and blinds were closed, and Clara met them at the door, her pale face and streaming eyes forestalling the tidings. The frame, hitherto so vigorous and active, had been spared long or weary decay; and tranquil torpor had mildly conducted the happy, gentle spirit to full repose. She had slumbered away without revival or suffering, as one who did 'rest from her labours,' and her eyes had been ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... dirty gin-sodden bundle of rags on the floor in the corner with its head on a candle box, and covered by a horse rug—old Boozer Smith is supposed to have been dead to the universe for hours past, but the chorus must have disturbed his torpor; for, with a suddenness and unexpectedness that makes the next man jump, there comes a bellow from under the ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson
... determined in its necessarily oblique way? How much earthly ballast must it carry, to keep it sufficiently steady, and how little, that it may not be weighed down with materialistic heaviness? How much certainty must it have of its course, and how much uncertainty, that it may shun the "torpor of assurance", *1* and not lose the vigor which comes of a dubious and obstructed road, "which who stands upon is apt to doubt if it's indeed a road." *2* "Pure faith indeed," says Bishop Blougram, to Gigadibs, the literary man, "you know not what you ask! naked belief in God the Omnipotent, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... other diseases combined. They are distinguished from inflammatory affections by the pyrexial symptoms not being strongly marked, or marked at all—by the puffy or bloated appearance of the face and lips—by the slavering mouth—the highly charged tongue—and by the torpor of mind and body. In a word, all the symptoms point to a deficient aeration of the blood, or a kind of half way asphyxia. A torpid state of the system, listlessness and inactivity almost approaching to asphyxia from the diminished quantity of oxygen ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... neither is imitated by the next, who attacks elsewhere. This one injures the cephalic centres and produces death; that one respects them and produces paralysis. Some squeeze the cervical ganglia to obtain a temporary torpor; others know nothing of the effects of compressing the brain. A few make the prey disgorge, lest its honey should poison the offspring; the majority do not resort to preventive manipulations. Here are some that first disarm the foe, who carries poisoned ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... him. Fatigued and appeased, he sank into a sort of gentle and uncertain torpor. As he fell asleep, he decided he would await a favourable opportunity, and his thoughts, fleeting further and further away, lulled him to ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... doubt whether these instantaneous logical refutations are such fatal ways, after all, of killing off live mental attitudes. General scepticism is the live mental attitude of refusing to conclude. It is a permanent torpor of the will, renewing itself in detail towards each successive thesis that offers, and you can no more kill it off by logic than yon can kill off obstinacy or practical joking. This is why it is so irritating. Your consistent sceptic never puts his scepticism into a formal proposition,—he ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... approaching death. The head, indeed, becomes less hot, the flush of the face grows slighter and less constant; but the countenance is heavy and anxious, the indifference to surrounding objects increases, and the child lies in a state of torpor or drowsiness, from which indeed it can at first be roused to complete consciousness The manner on being roused is always fretful, but, if old enough to talk, the child's answers are natural, though generally very ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... heads and heavy eyes at morning. You cannot sleep; well, I can best explain my state thus: I cannot wake. Sleep, like the lees of a posset, lingers all day, lead-heavy, in my knees and ankles. Weight on the shoulders, torpor on the brain. And there is more than too much of that from an ungrateful hound who is now enjoying his first decently competent and peaceful weeks for close upon two years; happy in a big brown moor behind him, and an incomparable burn by his side; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and eyelids, and to maintain a steady fixed stare, there comes on in a few seconds a very singular condition, characterized by muscular rigidity and inability to move, with a strange exaltation of most of the senses, and generally a closure of the eyelids,—this condition being followed by torpor. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... hard to obtain fresh ones and the delay was longer than the general had intended. Nevertheless his troops profited by it. They had not realized until they stopped how near they too had come to utter exhaustion, and for several days they were in a kind of physical torpor while their ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... formerly and dreadfully red on the slightest exertion particularly after eating I well know when it takes the form of a rash, it might have been and was not through the interruption of parents and mental torpor succeeded until the mysterious clue was held by Mr F. still I would not be ungenerous to either and I heartily ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... came to nothing. The battle of Culloden annihilated the Jacobite party. The death of Prince Frederic dissolved the faction which, under his guidance, had feebly striven to annoy his father's government. His chief followers hastened to make their peace with the ministry; and the political torpor ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... had reached him at five o'clock, as he was on the point of donning his coat. From five to six, he had remained in a torpor of disappointment, continually wondering whether Phil's sister would care. At six, his own boarding house being closed for the recess, he had trudged through the snow to a restaurant in the square, and had dined miserably on lukewarm turkey and lumpy mashed potatoes. ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... this day would make it worse. An intolerable weight oppressed me. Towards three o'clock in the evening this feeling rose to a violent degree. Yawns dislocated my jaws. My lungs panted as they inhaled this burning fluid, which became rarefied more and more. A moral torpor took hold of me. I was powerless, almost unconscious. My brave Conseil, though exhibiting the same symptoms and suffering in the same manner, never left me. He took my hand and encouraged me, and I heard ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... traditionally come to be regarded as unpleasant and "play" as pleasant is not because the former is activity and the second is torpor. Leisure does not necessarily mean laziness. Many a vacation, a camping party, a walking expedition, is literally more strenuous than the work an individual normally does. But work means human energy expended for the sole purpose of accomplishing some end. And an end ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... woke, and, shaking off the torpor of sleep, remembered his pledge, he thought of buckling on his armour. But, seeing that a little of the darkness of night yet remained, and wishing to wait for the hour of dawn, he began to ponder the perilous business at hand, when sleep stole on him and sweetly seized ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... place in all the world where the pulse of human life beat strongest. There a man could store his mind better than anywhere else: there he could not only live but grow: there more than anywhere else he might escape the self-complacency which leads to intellectual and moral torpor, because there he would be certain to meet not only with his equals but with his superiors. These were grave grounds which he could use in an argument: but a man needs no arguments in justification of the things he likes, and Johnson liked London because it was the home of the intellectual ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... over whom a momentary physical torpor appeared to have passed. "Go you, Corny," she said; "a man may easily save himself; and you are an only child—the sole ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... sang froid[Fr]; stoicism, imperturbation &c. (inexcitability) 826[obs3]; nonchalance, unconcern, dry eyes; insouciance &c. (indifference) 866; recklessness &c. 863; callousness; heart of stone, stock and stone, marble, deadness. torpor, torpidity; obstupefaction|, lethargy, coma, trance, vegetative state; sleep &c. 683; suspended animation; stupor, stupefaction; paralysis, palsy; numbness &c. (physical insensibility) 376. neutrality; quietism, vegetation. V. be insensible &c. adj.; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... one else could. Adolescence had turned his desire to play into a fury of passion for his art: he practised on single passages for ten or twelve hours a day, and would often sink in a swoon from sheer exhaustion. This deep, torpor-like sleep saved him from complete collapse, just as it saved Mendelssohn, and he would arise to go ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... torpor, at present," she said; "and may so lie for two or three days; but so long as there is no fever he will, I hope, know you when he opens his eyes. There is nought to do but to keep wet cloths round his head, and to put on a fresh poultice ...
— Both Sides the Border - A Tale of Hotspur and Glendower • G. A. Henty
... the baleful crust of egotism gone, with every nerve of life exposed, with conscience struggling to its feet from the torpor of thirty-odd vacant years, he was as two men in one, with different lives and different souls, yet as inseparable in their misery as those poor victims of Gallic tyranny, chained back to back and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... to whatever instruction of hope, illusion, or revenge is carried to him on the air. As I write, the flames of Russian Bolshevism seem, for the moment at least, to have burnt themselves out, and the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe are held in a dreadful torpor. The lately gathered harvest keeps off the worst privations, and Peace has been declared at Paris. But winter approaches. Men will have nothing to look forward to or to nourish hopes on. There will be little fuel to moderate the rigors ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... come to Beryl activity of those artistic instincts, which for a time, had slumbered in the torpor of despair; and when her daily task of work had been accomplished, the prisoner leaned with folded arms on the stone ledge of the window, and studied every changing aspect of earth and atmosphere. By degrees the old ambition stirred, and she began to sketch ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... confusion that stole over him then was welcome; and, weak from the agony he had suffered, he made an effort to rouse himself from the torpor that, Nature-sent, was lulling the pangs in his injured limb, but let his eyelids droop lower and lower till the distant light was shut out, and then cold, misery, and despair passed ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... fortune of the French was now neutralized by the same languor which had marked the movements of Philip after the victory of Saint Quentin. The time, which might have been usefully employed in following up his success, was now wasted by the Duke in trivial business, or in absolute torpor. This may have been the result of a treacherous understanding with Spain, and the first fruits of the interview at Peronne. Whatever the cause, however, the immediate consequences were disaster to the French nation, and humiliation to ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... and such-like; we wrote stupid, nonsensical themes, so that in any well-directed school we should have been a wretched fourth class. I was never at the bottom; emulation spurred me on until I surpassed or equalled the head boy; but as soon as I reached the top, I fell back into a state of torpor. I was perhaps to be excused, as nothing could equal the dryness and insipidity of our studies. It is true that we translated Cornelius Nepos; but none of us, probably not even the master himself, knew who the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... as a cardiac stimulant; it fell into disuse, but in recent years its use in asthenic states has been revived, and excellent results, it has been claimed, have followed its administration in cases of collapse from Asiatic cholera. For sexual torpor in women it still has (like vanilla and sandal) a certain degree of reputation, though it is not often used, and some of the old Arabian physicians (especially Avicenna) recommended it, with castoreum and myrrh, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... alms were the only worship which God required. A marvellous and mighty work, says Mr. Muir, had been wrought by these few precepts. From time beyond memory Mecca and the whole peninsula had been steeped in spiritual torpor. The influences of Judaism, Christianity, and philosophy had been feeble and transient. Dark superstitions prevailed, the mothers of dark vices. And now, in thirteen years of preaching, a body of men and women had risen, who rejected idolatry; worshipped the one great God; lived lives ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... domestic slave-trade, and in the abuse of the power of admitting "new states" into the Union. Kentucky made application in 1792, with a slave-holding Constitution in her hand.—With what a mere technicality Congress suffered itself to be drugged into torpor:—She was part of one of the "Original States"—and therefore ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... drifting women's tresses. As night advanced, a puffing something ascended the broad, black aisle of this forest river, and slowly the Norfolk steamboat rumbled past, with passengers for the Philadelphia stage. Then silence drew a sheet of fog around herself and passed into a cold torpor of repose, affected only by the waves that licked the shores with ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... sleep. Must not excite yourself." I kept muttering those words for hours, serving them up in my mind with a spice of bitter thought. At last torpor, or weakness, overcame me, and I fell into a kind of net of bad dreams which, thank Heaven! I have now forgotten. Yet when certain events happened subsequently I always thought, and indeed still ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... transfixed his heart; his throat closed convulsively; half fainting, he leaned against the window-frame, his eyes closed, his ears stopped, to shut out all sights or sounds, longing only for oblivion and complete torpor of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... and the appliances of Nature have been made to minister to the wants of man. But these are nothing when compared to the bold, decisive, statesmanlike measures which have been taken in hand for the intellectual, the moral and the political regeneration of my countrymen. Under English influences the torpor of ages has been dissipated; the pulsations of a new life have been communicated to the people; an inspiriting sense of public duty has been evolved, the spirit of curiosity has been stirred and a moral revolution, the ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... in their plan to pin Delarey and Beyers on to the wall of the Magaliesberg, the Boer leaders were compelled to separate. Their brilliant and brief co-operation did much to awake the British nation out of its torpor. There was no longer any talk of reducing the Army of occupation by one-half at the end of the year, and still more during the New Year; or of quenching the smouldering embers of the war with Baden-Powell's ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... have. You've been in a torpor, haven't you? Well, to be in a torpor, is to torp. Now I'm going to do it all over again, and if you interrupt this time, I'll ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... life have in a sense become commonplace to our experience, it is but in an external torpor; the true sentiment slumbers within us; and we have but to reflect on ourselves or our surroundings to rekindle our astonishment. No length of habit can blunt our first surprise. Of the world I have but little to say in this connection; a few strokes shall suffice. We ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sleep more like the torpor of lethargy than natural slumber, fell on me at once. I neither stirred nor heard any thing till near two o'clock, when a piercing shriek from the deck aroused me. The moon had set, but there was light enough to show the decks abaft filled with ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... on the other hand it is a subtle, very difficult and hence very charming art, like writing fugues or mixing mayonnaise. I do not go to poets to be taught anything, or to be heated up to indignation, or to have my conscience blasted out of its torpor, but to be soothed and caressed, to be lulled with sweet sounds, to be wooed into forgetfulness, to be tickled under the metaphysical chin. My favorite poem is Lizette Woodworth Reese's "Tears," which, as a statement of fact, seems to me to be as idiotic as ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... assuredly, on that same day when the Irish peasants, either from their own sagacity, or from newspapers, discover that they have been used as a property by Mr O'Connell, for purposes in which their own interest is hard to be deciphered, indifference and torpor will succeed. For this once, the nationality of Ireland has been too frantically stimulated for the toleration of new delays. Mr O'Connell is at last the martyr of his own success. Should the priestly order refuse to advance further on a road ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... in gloom without relief. Stella, his life-long friend, died. That left him forlorn and desolate. Then, as the years passed, darker and darker gloom settled upon his spirit. Disease crept over both mind and body, he was tortured by pain, and when at length the pain left him he sank into torpor. It was not madness that had come upon him, but a dumb stupor. For more than two years he lived, but it was a living death. Without memory, without hope, the great genius had become the voiceless ruin of a man. But at length a merciful end came. On an October day in 1745 Swift died. He who had ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... low whisper; but every word was distinctly understood and burned into her heart's core, drying her tears and hardening her into a block of marble. She knew that Guy had not done her justice, and this helped to increase the torpor stealing over her. Still she did not lose a syllable of what was saying in the back office, and her lip curled scornfully when she heard Guy remark: "I pity her; she is so young, and evidently takes it so hard. Maybe she's as good as they average. ...
— Aikenside • Mary J. Holmes
... her friends. That he could know anything that would throw light on the evil mystery did not seem possible. She was then too miserable and depressed to do much more than wait, in a sort of stunned torpor, for what might next occur. Mechanically she answered such questions as were put to her in order that a record of the case might be made, and then was led to the cells below. She shuddered as she saw the dimly lighted stairway, and it seemed to her morbid fancy that she was to ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... side of his mind there was no torpor. He loved to explain the sense of the prayers to his willing pupil, and to tell him the Gospel story, dwelling on whatever could waken or carry on the Christian life; and between the tiltyard and the oratory Hal spent a ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... thro' the phosphorescent light Unto the headland of the West, Where pageantries of warriors bold Scyle crafty sins and purple lusts Until the peaks and portals bright, Where buried kings are tombed at rest, Sweat odours dank with Torpor's cold; Infernal paeons shake the busts Of idols planted in the light. And, ere immewed gyres froth black mists Unto all ghauts and splinter'd domes That cypher signs of dungeoned dell, A turgid dawn arrays this vale, Each dysodile scavenger sits On a tomb and fondles gray bones; An eyeless ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... by a sign or a grunt, their surprise at not being beaten, or made to carry their captors. Some, however, caught sight of the little calabashes of coca which the English carried. That woke them from their torpor, and they began coaxing abjectly (and not in vain) for a taste of that miraculous herb, which would not only make food unnecessary, and enable their panting lungs to endure that keen mountain air, but would rid them, for awhile at least, of the fallen Indian's most unpitying foe, ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... than sleep where he did. The place was alive with a squirming mass of hideous reptiles, hissing and gliding about at being disturbed. They were probably in their winter quarters and the fire had roused them from their torpor. Quickly throwing the burning wood amongst them, he dropped the planks and seizing the Baby, quitted the den and was in the water like a flash. Many miles below, in a sharp bend that headed him toward the northwest again, he saw a column of smoke standing straight ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... notable oculist, Himly, was the first to have made the observation that in the diseased excitability of the retina every color is a tone higher. Luminous black looks blue, blue looks violet, violet looks red, red looks yellow. Torpor of the retina inverts ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... been about eleven o'clock. Dick Sand then felt that a kind of torpor, if not a true sleep, was going to overcome him. It would, however, be rest. But, just as he was yielding to it, the thought came to him that, by the settling of the clay, washed in, the lower orifice was likely to be obstructed. All passage for the outer air would be closed. Within, the ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... a chronicle of the old times "before the war." It was some time before he could get into the regular track of gossip, or could be made to comprehend the strange events that had taken place during his torpor. How that there had been a revolutionary war—that the country had thrown off the yoke of old England—and that, instead of being a subject of his Majesty George the Third, he was now a free citizen of the ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... again among the Shawnees. Again, kneeling to drink at the clear pool, he saw in the water the shadow of the triumphant warrior holding the tomahawk above him. One after another the most critical periods of his life were lived over again, and then he sank into a deep torpor, from which he did not rouse himself until far into ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the hall, my heart pounding, but my purpose very steady, and passed silently through passages and corridors where here and there lay one in besotted sleep, until at last I came out in a little court by the postern. The warders were long since guzzled to a torpor in their quarters, so there was neither let nor hindrance when I slid the bolt and welcomed in Avenging Justice in the shape of him who stood without, my old lord of Aragon, uncle and protector to my lady. We met with silent greeting as his picked ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... gazing at its reflection in the dull waters of a still canal: round about it were monotonous fields, plowed fields, meadows, little rivers, woods, and again monotonous fields.... No scenery, no monuments, no memories. Nothing attractive. It is all dull and oppressive. In its drowsy torpor is a hidden force. The soul tasting it for the first time suffers and revolts against it. But those who have lived with it for generations cannot break free: it eats into their very bones: and the stillness of it, ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... from that absorbing torpor by my poor horse, who was busy licking my ears. The faithful animal suspected something was wrong, for usually at such a time I would sing Spanish ditties or some Indian war-songs. Sunset was also the time when I brushed and patted him. The intelligent brute knew that I suffered, and, in its ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... physiognomy and the genius of each region are studied as if each were a separate living creature, and the character of France itself is discovered in the cohesion or the unity of its various parts. Reaching the tenth and eleventh centuries, he feels the sadness of their torpor and their violence; yet humanity was living, and soon in the enthusiasm of Gothic art and the enthusiasm of the Crusades the sacred aspirations of the soul had their manifestation. At the close of the mediaeval period everything seems to droop and decay: no! it was then, during ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... never seen his wife so completely overwhelmed with grief; and that she who has always shown herself full of strong and manly courage in adversity, is now utterly broken down. On hearing this, Lodovico roused himself from the torpor of his grief to try and comfort his sister-in-law, and sent her an affectionate letter by one of his secretaries, begging her to seek the consolation which he himself could not find, and telling her how much he thought of her, even though his own grief and bitterness of soul ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... sun shone down upon the fields covered with yellow grain. Far in the distance carriage-wheels softly slipped along the road. There was a torpor in the air—not a bird's cry, not an insect's hum. Gorju cut himself a switch ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert |
