"Torpid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mind became like a machine out of work—rusty, creaking, difficult to set going. If she had half an hour of leisure she could not fix her attention to anything. She, who in her grandmother's time had been so keen and alert, seemed to have drifted, in Mrs. Alwynn's society, into a torpid state, from which she made vain attempts to emerge, ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... we are all dreaming? My sleep is torpid, stubborn, accursed, but the dawn is here, and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... doubt, in many cases, the freedom and natural movement of the thoughts. My reason, however, for noticing this peculiarity in Isocrates, is by way of fixing the attention upon the superiority, even artificial ornaments, of downright practical business and the realities of political strife, over the torpid atmosphere of a study or a school. Cicero, long after, had the same passion for numerositas, and the full, pompous rotundity of cadence. But in Cicero, all habits and all faculties were nursed by the daily practice of life and its impassioned ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... Spain,"—exclaims proudly an eminent Spanish writer. Spectacles like that which we have just seen were one of the elements which in a barbarous and unenlightened age contributed strongly to the consolidation of that unthinking and ardent faith which has fused the nation into one torpid and homogeneous mass of superstition. No better means could have been devised for the purpose. Leaving out of view the sublime teachings of the large and tolerant morality of Jesus, the clergy made his personality the sole object of worship and reverence. ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... bells were heard. They passed a little village as the inhabitants were lighting their lamps, and the sky became also illuminated by myriads of stars. Suddenly they saw behind a hill, through the branches of the fir trees, the moon rising, red and full as if it were torpid with sleep. ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... plum-pudding; but he was an authority on diet, and told me that food if too nutritious was very bad for the brain. He could not, I thought, have imagined that our brains were worth much; for I must say that though he did not eat himself he gave us every chance of doing so, and if we had been the torpid, who breakfast and dine hugely, he could not have provided us with more food. Murray, who was one of many at this meal, seemed to be very interested in what Mr. Edwardes said about diet, and I told him afterwards ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... another example, if it is added that he took no interest in public affairs, truly speaking. He was a Democrat, but that does not fully account for his indifference to those philanthropies which his literary friends shared; for, as a party man, he was not zealous. His nature was torpid in all these ways; there was dullness of temperament, indifference to all except the one thing in which he truly lived, his artistic nature; and here he was an observer, using an objective method with as little ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... he thought: the same uncouth-looking effort of humanity that he had been at Yale. No wonder the Northern boys jeered him, with his sloth-ways, his mouthed English, torpid eyes, and brain shut up in that worst of mud-moulds,—belief in caste. Even now, going up and down the tan-bark, his step was dead, sodden, like that of a man in whose life God had not yet wakened the full live soul. It was wakening, though, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... among Iroquois to leave food at a feast. There were we with food enough to stuff the tribe torpid as winter toads. The padre was sent round to the lodges with a tom-tom to beat every soul to the feast. Chouart and a Dutch prisoner and I cooked like kings' scullions for ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... dull a spirit should be lodged in so goodly a form! Alas! that such an enterprise as the regeneration of England should turn on a hinge so imperfect! Wedded to Rowena, indeed, her nobler and more generous soul may yet awake the better nature which is torpid within him. Yet how should this be, while Rowena, Athelstane, and I myself, remain the prisoners of this brutal marauder and have been made so perhaps from a sense of the dangers which our liberty might bring to the usurped power of ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... silent, and all he saw in the old town struck him as strangely worn-out, torpid, and decayed; it seemed only fit to be left to ruin, while on the other side of the river, in the new town of Fostat, on all hands busy, eager, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... includes the process of digestion, the subsequent vital changes involved in the conversion of food into blood, and its final transformation into tissue, causes mental languor and dullness, as well as bodily exhaustion, is attested by universal experience. A torpid condition of the liver, one of the most inveterate of chronic derangements, is indicated by sullenness, melancholy, despondency, loss of interest in the affairs of life, sluggishness, etc., and the ultimate tendency of this morbid state is towards suicide. A broad ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... contract, the leaves wither, and are no longer able to perform their office of transpiration; and, as this secretion stops, the roots cease to absorb sap from the soil. If the plant be an annual, its life then terminates; if not, it remains in a state of torpid inaction during the winter; or the only internal motion that takes place is that of a small quantity of resinous juice, which slowly rises from the stem into the branches, and enlarges their buds during ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... six months, Evelyn. The woman was a saint—the kindliest, gentlest creature I have ever met. I told her that I was ill and in trouble, and wanted to rest, and she put me to bed and nursed me like a child. I was a long time in getting well. The very strings of my being seemed to have snapped. I lay torpid week after week, and the good soul took care of me and asked no questions. She was one of those rare spirits who pray to God to guide them day by day, and mean literally what they ask. God had sent me to her ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... melancholy gnaws the heart, when trouble poisons our solitude, when we are disgusted with the world, and a thousand worries oppress us, or when our energies are destroyed by over-exercise, the stage revives us, we dream of another sphere, we recover ourselves, our torpid nature is roused by noble passions, our blood circulates more healthily. The unhappy man forgets his tears in weeping for another. The happy man is calmed, the secure made provident. Effeminate natures are steeled, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... bright evening, but my depression has been growing so long and steadily that I can't seem to control it any more. There, Millie, the lady superintendent is looking for you. Don't worry. You medical and scientific people know that it is nothing but a torpid liver. Perhaps I may be ill enough to have a trained nurse. You see I am playing a deep game," and with an attempt at a hearty laugh he said good-night, and she was compelled to hasten away, but it was with ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... worms, and his one sun-baked flounder—you think he is going home—but no, he is merely going to another corner of the wharf, where he throws his line under a vessel's counter, and fishes on with the same deathlike patience as before. He seems not quiet so much as torpid,—not kindly nor unkindly feeling—but not to have anything to do with the rest of the world. He has no business, no amusement, but just to crawl to the end of Long Wharf, and throw his line over. He has no sort of skill in fishing, ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... of Lot, however, could not have been more torpid than the company in Palais Mortimer, especially when behind the first horse's head a second one appeared, and Madame Caraman ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... been materially worse. My feelings at intervals are of a deadly and torpid kind, or awakened to such a state of unnatural and keen excitement that, only to instance the organ of sight, I find the very blades of grass and the boughs of distant trees present themselves to me with microscopic ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... starvation, the thing confined in the hollow tube of this awful duplicate was become torpid. Otherwise, no power on earth could have saved me from the fate of Abel Slattin; for the creature was an ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... remarked that he prolonged his meals, which had hitherto been so simple and so short. He seemed desirous of stifling thought by repletion. He would then pass whole hours half reclined, and as if torpid, awaiting with a novel in his hand the catastrophe of his terrible history. In contemplating this obstinate and inflexible character thus struggling with impossibility, his officers would observe to each other that, having arrived at the summit of his glory, he no ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... resolved upon a silence which he only broke when he was alone. He voluntarily tied that tongue which Claude Frollo had taken so much pains to unloose. Hence, it came about, that when necessity constrained him to speak, his tongue was torpid, awkward, and like a door whose ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... to realize that this silent plain had once resounded with martial music and trembled to the tramp of armed men. It was hard to people this solitude with rushing columns of cavalry, and stir its torpid pulses with the shouts of victors, the shrieks of the wounded, and the flash of banner and steel above the surging billows of war. A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... it, made not the slightest impression upon Frank's torpid brain; but those words about the black stain and the bleaching caused by the scorching sun somehow suggested the risk he might run of being discovered, and that meant the frustration of his plans to rescue his brother. In a moment now ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... no more than the quantity extracted from the water. The temperature of water is maintained below the surface, and we know how that of the air varies, since a certain quantity of heat is necessary to the vital processes; reptiles, depending upon air for heat, hybernate or become torpid when the temperature falls below a certain point. The rapidity of all their vital actions will depend upon the state of the thermometer; they digest faster in the heat of summer than in the milder warmth of spring. Their secretions (as the poison of the adder) are in hot weather more ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... they pierced the fair and rounded arm, No crimson stream gush'd o'er its spotless snow; Vainly they sought the frozen heart to warm, And bid its chill'd and torpid currents flow; Vainly they practised every learned charm To call into the veins life's ruddy glow; Stirless, they laid her on that bridal bed, Stirless, she lay, all life ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... stifled scream! Agnes!—without there! She is full of fears. I am not free from them myself, but I will shake them off. This will divert their channel," continued she, drawing from her bosom the marriage certificate. "This will arouse the torpid current of my blood—'Piers Rookwood to Susan Bradley.' And by whom was it solemnized? The name is Checkley—Richard Checkley. Ha! I bethink me—a Papist priest—a recusant—who was for some time an inmate of the hall. I have heard of this man—he was afterwards ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... In this attempt they succeeded so far as to obtain all the information he could give concerning his fall; but he remembered nothing further than that Edith had been the means of bringing him to the snow-hut, where he lay in a deep, torpid slumber, until the voice and hand of Maximus awakened him. When Frank was told that Edith was lost, he sprang from his bed as if he had received an electric shock. The confusion of his faculties seemed ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... Antony—"Yes! often! Torpid or frantic, they dwell in my conscience. I crush them out; they spring up again, they stifle me; and sometimes I believe that I ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... pools or overwhelming torrents, inhabited by passive subjects or depredators. As in the Roman empire in the fourth century, in Italy in the seventeenth century, in the Turkish provinces in our own day, naught remains but an ill-conducted herd of stunted, torpid creatures, limited to their daily wants and animal instincts, indifferent to the public welfare and to their own prospective interests, so degenerate as to have lost sight of their own discoveries, unlearned ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the reply. "I see exactly what it is now: since the granulating process has been going on so beautifully in the side, his appetite has returned, and as he must not take any very active exercise just yet, the liver is getting torpid. I must throw in a little blue pill, and he'll be as good-tempered as an angel again; for, naturally, there is not a man breathing with a finer disposition, or a more excellent constitution, than ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... which he did not. He was helpless. In his bewildered state, seeing a squirrel cracking a nut on the branch of a hollow tree near him, he made a half-frenzied dart at the frightened animal, which ran away. But the same association of ideas in his torpid and confused brain impelled him to search for the squirrel's hoard in the hollow of the tree. He ate the few hazel-nuts he found there, ravenously. The purely animal instinct satisfied, he seemed to have borrowed from it a certain ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... sunshine, sunshine and clouds. So runs the world away. Equally necessary, sorrow and gladness are as the rains and sunbeams for the fruits of the earth. Were it all sadness the world would grow morose and torpid; were it all gladness men would be selfish ...
— Wilton School - or, Harry Campbell's Revenge • Fred E. Weatherly
... their torpid rocks array, But winter, lingering, chills the lap of May; No zephyr fondly sues the mountain's breast, But meteors glare, and ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... stools are present in chronic diarrhoea. Putty-like pasty passages are due to acidity curdling the milk or to torpid liver. {323} ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... If the torpid organism of the Roman polity could still of itself reach a crisis of wholesome reaction, that reaction could not but set in now, when, by one of the marvellous pieces of good fortune, in which the history of Rome is ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... with himself, trying to clear his torpid brain. Where was he? His dream-self was still roaming the Scout; his outer eye was bewildered by these alleys, these orange-trees, these ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... frost. The old knight gazed at it for a long while amid complete silence. Others looked at him, for it was known that he was like a father to Rotgier, and that he loved him. But he did not shed even a single tear, only his face looked more severe than usual, but there was depicted in it a kind of torpid calm. ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... the whole-heartedness of Don Quixote himself. He fancied himself by her side, and his heart leaped with joy of it. He thought no more of abandoned cricket matches and neglected house parties. A finger of fire had been laid upon his somewhat torpid ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... wanted to know which dress, my lady, this evening?—and got no answer. Her ladyship was listening to something at a distance; or, rather, having heard something at a distance, was listening for a repetition of it. "I wonder what that can have been?" said she. For fire-arms in July are torpid mostly, and this was ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... years to the day after I went to school there, and by my being married on April 19, 1855, at Harrow church, where my father and mother were married forty years before.' The marriage, he says, 'was a blessed revelation to me. It turned me from a rather heavy, torpid youth into the happiest of men, and, for many years, one of the most ardent and energetic. It was ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... been cold ever since he reached the Gulf of Lyons, and he wondered what could be the matter with him, for he never remembered to have felt like this before. He wondered miserably what could be the reason why he felt so torpid and shivery, disinclined to move, and yet so uncomfortable ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... there a landlord who is spending his money, not on pineries and hothouses, but on schools, and washhouses, and drains, who is less intent on the magnificence of his own grand house, than in providing cottages for his people where decency is possible; then let us not pass him by with a torpid wonder or a vanishing emotion of pleasure—rather let us seize him and raise him up upon a pinnacle, that other landlords may gaze upon him, if, perhaps, their hearts may prick them; and the world shall learn from what one man ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... Cantapresto was torpid after the feast, and Odo detected in him an air of guilty constraint. The boy was glad enough to keep silence, and they rolled on without speaking through the wide glowing landscape. Already the nearness of a great city began to make itself felt. The bright champaign was scattered ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... other hand, those steadfast natures which can better be depended upon, which in a battle are impregnable to fear and immovable, are equally immovable when there is anything to be learned; they are always in a torpid state, and are apt to yawn and go to ...
— The Republic • Plato
... presents fewer floral attractions than any other in the whole year. Everything is in a torpid state of existence, and the combined forces of frost, snow, wind, and rain render December unpleasant both indoors and out. The only kinds of vegetation which seem to flourish just now are the insignificant, but wonderfully ...
— Little Folks (December 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... smoke and stare at some object which his mind failed to register. Cash would sit and watch him furtively; but Bud was too engrossed with his own misery to notice it. Then, quite unexpectedly, reaction would come and leave Bud in a peace that was more than half a torpid refusal of his mind to worry ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... Levy is still Baron Levy the millionaire; but I doubt if at heart he be not more acutely miserable than Randal Leslie the usher. For Levy is a man who has admitted the fiercer passions into his philosophy of life; he has not the pale blood and torpid heart which allow the scotched adder to dose away its sense of pain. Just as old age began to creep upon the fashionable usurer, he fell in love with a young opera-dancer, whose light heels had turned the lighter heads of half the eligans of Paris and London. ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... good Earl William's sober train, As slow we linger'd on the seas, I inly blest each wayward breeze; For still the graceful knight was near, Prompt to discourse, relate, and hear: The spirit had that exercise, The fine perceptions' play, That perish with the worldly wise, The torpid, ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... swarm of gnats enveloped his head and he ducked under his blankets. No more was said, for Bill knew why the smoke was there. All three covered up their heads and were soon asleep. It got real cold in the middle of the night and the gnats became too torpid to move. The boys slept like logs for they were tired. It could not have been more than four o'clock when the cheery voice of Mr. Waterman ...
— Bob Hunt in Canada • George W. Orton
... with the Nkran, or enkran, [Footnote: Anglice the 'driver,' a small black formica which bites severely, clears out houses, destroys the smaller animals, and has, it is said, overpowered and destroyed hunters when, torpid with fatigue, they have fallen asleep in the bush. The same horrible end, being eaten alive, atom by atom, has befallen white traders whose sickness prevented their escape. 'Accra,' which calls itself Ga, is known to the Oji-speaking peoples as 'Enkran,' ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... rare summer days, the sun blazed down on the blue ice; skua gulls nestled in groups on the snow; sly penguins waddled along to inspect the building operations; seals basked in torpid slumber on the shore; out on the sapphire bay the milk-white bergs floated in the swell. We can all paint our own picture of the good times round the Benzine Hut. We worked hard, ate heartily ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... in a half torpid state during the winter, derive their nourishment from the same source. In other words, we may say the starving animal lives for a time upon itself, eating up, by internal absorption, such parts of the body as can be spared under urgent necessity, to feed those ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... in destructive epidemics. I am unable to speak with any degree of definiteness as to the death rate, since I had ceased to interest myself about the number dying each day. I had now been a prisoner a year, and had become so torpid and stupefied, mentally and physically, that I cared comparatively little for anything save the rations of food and of fuel. The difference of a few spoonfuls of meal, or a large splinter of wood in the daily issues to me, were of ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... sudden falls, that the influences of the Holy Ghost are undervalued and unsought? Pray for the outpouring of this blessed Agent for the world's renovation, and thine own. "I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh," is the precursor of millennial bliss. Jesus! draw near, in thy mercy, to this torpid heart, as thou didst of old to thy mourning disciples, and breathe upon it, and say, "Receive ye the Holy Ghost." It is the mightiest of all boons; but, like the sun in the heavens, it is the freest of all: "For if ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, ...
— The Faithful Promiser • John Ross Macduff
... the spirit which had animated the reply was fled,—the muscles relaxed, and I beheld the same unprotected look of distress which first won me to her interest: —melancholy! to see such sprightliness the prey of sorrow,—I pitied her from my soul; and though it may seem ridiculous enough to a torpid heart,—I could have taken her into my arms, and cherished her, though it was in the open ...
— A Sentimental Journey • Laurence Sterne
... The city, torpid and depopulated by winter, began to revive with hope of the near coming of Caesar. A solemn reception was in waiting for him. Meanwhile spring was there; the snow on the Alban Hills had vanished under the breath of winds from Africa. Grass-plots in the gardens were covered with violets. The ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... torpid fatuity of Voltaire's Biographers, says he never met with one Frenchman, even of the Literary classes, who could tell him whence this name VOLTAIRE originated. 'A PETITE TERRE, small family estate,' they said; and sent him hunting through Topographies, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... the room from which the ill-omening woman had issued, they found another, even her of whom they were in search, sitting by the fire, torpid and corpulent, to a degree which indicated that as it had been her trade to nurse others, she had not forgotten ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... suggested by Tooke's description of the winter-garden of the Taurida Palace: "The genial warmth, ... the voluptuous silence that reigns in this enchanting garden, lull the fancy into sweet romantic dreams: we think ourselves in the groves of Italy, while torpid nature, through the windows of this pavilion, announces the severity of a northern winter" (The ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... had carefully removed his gray hairs, but he could not rid himself of his wizened air. The puny little man of law, tightly buttoned into his clothes, reminded you of a torpid viper; for if hope had brought a spark of life into his magpie eyes, his face was icily rigid, and so well did he assume an air of gravity, that an ambitious public prosecutor could ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... I am sleepless; my legs grow weary with a very few steps, and the water breaks its boundaries in some degree. The asthma, however, has remitted; my breath is still much obstructed, but is more free than it was. Nights of watchfulness produce torpid days; I read very little, though I am alone; for I am tempted to supply in the day what I lost in bed. This is my history; like all other histories, a narrative of misery. Yet am I so much better than in the beginning ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... five pages drove together in an open carriage, and received quite an ovation from the crowd, but no one had thought of providing them with overcoats. Silk stockings, satin knee-breeches and lace ruffles are very inadequate protection against an Arctic blast, and we arrived at the Cathedral stiff and torpid with cold. From the colour of our faces, we might have been five little "Blue Noses" from Nova Scotia. The ceremony was very gorgeous and imposing, and I trust that the pages were not unduly clumsy. Every ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... overloaded circulation can be starved to a reduced quantity and to a less rich quality of blood by reducing the quantity of feed given to the patient. Feeds of easy digestion do not tire the already fatigued organs of an animal with a torpid digestive system. Nourishment will be taken by a suffering brute in the form of slops and cooling drinks when it would be totally refused if offered in its ordinary form, as hard oats or dry hay, requiring the labor of grinding between ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... meet together: An attack is half repulsed. Shafts of broken sunlight dissolving Convolutions of torpid cloud. ...
— Japanese Prints • John Gould Fletcher
... beyond the edge of the skin. These ulcers secrete milky or bloody-white liquid called ichor. When the ulcer is of an ashen or leaden color, with the bottom and sides formed of dense, hard connective tissue, which gives but little discharge and is not sensitive, it is termed callous, torpid, or indolent ulcer. ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... fleeced tenant of the wild to bleed A guileless votive to his harmless creed, Then gladly grateful at each rite fulfilled, Sought the cool shadow where the spring distilled, And lightly lab'rous thro' the torpid day, Whiled in sweet peace the sultry ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... turned without ceremony the sleeping infants out of the baskets, and cared not how the enraged mothers lacerated their faces in return. The scenes of horror changed so quickly, that you could not dwell more than half a minute upon any of them. The tenderest heart became torpid and insensible. One tale of woe followed on the heels of another,—"Such a person too has been plundered!—Such an one's house has been set on fire!—This man is cut in pieces; that has been transfixed with the bayonet!—Those poor creatures are seeking their children!"—These were ...
— Frederic Shoberl Narrative of the Most Remarkable Events Which Occurred In and Near Leipzig • Frederic Shoberl (1775-1853)
... themselves falling into these practices, driven by a tradition hardly distinguishable from instinct. In its periodic fury the spirit hurries them into wars and orgies, quite as it kindles sudden flaming visions in their brains, habitually so torpid. The spontaneous is the worst of tyrants, for it exercises a needless and fruitless tyranny in the guise of duty and inspiration. Without mitigating in the least the subjection to external forces under which man necessarily labours, it adds a new artificial subjection to ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... Victory, and Rule, of lordly Man; Far wider tracts within the Torrid Zone Own no such Lord: where Sol's intenser rays Create in bestial hearts more fervid fires, And deadlier poisons arm the Serpent's tooth; In gloomy shades, impassable to Man, Where matted foliage exclude the Sun, The torpid Birds that crawl from bough to bough Utter their notes of terror: while beneath Fury and Venom, couch'd in murky dens, Hissing and yelling, guard the hideous gloom. O'er dreary wastes, untrod by human feet, Without controul the lordly Lion ...
— An Essay on War, in Blank Verse; Honington Green, a Ballad; The - Culprit, an Elegy; and Other Poems, on Various Subjects • Nathaniel Bloomfield
... spirit, perfectly emancipated from prejudice and commonplace, regarding the ideal side of things in all its efforts for change, passionately despising half-measures and condescension to human folly and obstinacy,—with a bewildered, timid, torpid multitude behind,—conducts a country to the government of Herr von Bismarck. A nation regarding the practical side of things in its efforts for change, attacking not what is irrational, but what is pressingly inconvenient, and attacking this as one body, ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... remote. The ribbons of fiery smoke from their furnaces were the first signs of the city's awakening from its lethargic industrial sleep. The beast was beginning to move along its score of miles of length. But out here in the vacancies of the lake it seemed still torpid. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... torpid. The want of exhilarating exercise, the long dearth of companionship, the terrible monotony of her life, the restless nights, the dank gloomy atmosphere in which she had her perpetual being, were, she told herself dully, doing their work. And she did not care. But ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... weakness moved a circle of his friends to tears, and he sat amongst us insensible to all we could say to him, cowering down, or rather I might say collapsing into a shapeless heap upon his chair, deaf, blind, torpid, motionless,—even then I whispered to the others that I would engage that Kant should take his part in conversation with propriety and animation. This they found it difficult to believe. Upon which I drew close to his ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... all pale as ghosts. Unless upon rare occasions, they seldom come on deck to sun themselves. They may circumnavigate the world fifty times, and they see about as much of it as Jonah did in the whale's belly. They are a lazy, lumpish, torpid set; and when going ashore after a long cruise, come out into the day like terrapins from their caves, or bears in the spring, from tree-trunks. No one ever knows the names of these fellows; after a three years' voyage, they still remain strangers to you. In time of tempests, when all hands are ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... tide, where they are left to force themselves forward by their own labour, and to direct their passage by their own skill; and where, if they have not some internal principle of activity, they must be stranded upon shallows, or lie torpid in a perpetual calm. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... return to Paris from La Trappe he had fallen into a fearful state of spiritual anemia. His soul kept its room, rarely rose, lounged on a couch, was torpid with the tepid langour still lulled by the sleepy mutter of mere lip-service, and prayers reeled off as by a worn-out machine of which the spring releases itself, so that it works all alone with no result, and without ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... instantly corrected. Other modifications are more permanent. It was found by Himly that when the retina is overexcitable every stimulus is raised in the spectrum scale of colours. Thus, violet becomes red. An exactly opposite effect is observed when the retina is torpid.[35] Certain poisons are known to affect the quality of the colour-impression. Thus, santonin, when taken in any quantity, makes all colourless objects look yellow. Severe pathological disturbances are known to involve, in addition to hyperaesthesia ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... Vervain," said Ferris, smiling at her despair, "you push matters a little beyond—as a woman has a right to do, of course. I don't think their faces are bad, by any means. Some of them are dull and torpid, and some are frivolous, just like the faces of other people. But I've been noticing the number of good, kind, friendly faces, and they're in the majority, just as they are amongst other people; for there are very few souls ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... edifice, steering it prudently to its station in the stable yard. Then he went to find the defeated Starling Tucker. That stricken veteran sat alone amid the ruins of his toppled empire in the little office, slumped and torpid before the cold, rusty stove. He refused to be comforted by his devotee. He said he would never touch one of them things again, not for no man's money. The Darwinian hypothesis allows for no petty tact in the process of evolution. Starling Tucker was unfit to survive into the new ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... how irresistible is the influence of a mother's love and kindness! Her very name awakens the torpid streams of life, gives a fresh glow to the tablets of memory, and fills our hearts with a deep gush of ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... this point, Mr. Gradgrind's eye would fall upon her; and under the influence of that wintry piece of fact, she would become torpid again. ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... the pavement, where something lay huddled against the wall of the house, and the coachman, torpid on his box behind the fidgety horses, started at ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... a tribe of animals constantly around our country habitations, of underground and nocturnal habits, some of which become torpid in winter. All are timid and unobtrusive, and yet have great influence upon our welfare; for they check the rapid increase of those worms and insects which live and breed beneath the soil, and would destroy the crops which are necessary to our existence. There ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... of the first of the chill nights in autumn. There was a fire on the hearth, burning low. The air without was torpid and heavy; the wood, by an oversight, of ...
— I and My Chimney • Herman Melville
... plunge his weapon into the shark's body; but instead of that, what was his surprise to see him suddenly leap on its back and dig the fingers of one hand into its left eye. If the hammer-head had been torpid before, it now made ample amends by its sudden activity; off it darted along the surface, Nub holding up its head to prevent it from diving, while with his right hand he struck his knife with all his might sometimes before him and sometimes behind him, inflicting deep ...
— The South Sea Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... day; Should no false kindness lure to loose delight, Nor praise relax, nor difficulty fright; Should tempting novelty thy cell refrain, And sloth effuse her opiate fumes in vain; Should beauty blunt on fops her fatal dart, Nor claim the triumph of a lettered heart; Should no disease thy torpid veins invade, Nor melancholy's phantoms haunt thy shade; Yet hope not life from grief or danger free, Nor think the doom of man revers'd for thee. Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes, And pause a while from letters to ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... substance, and destruction of tissue. The normal sensibility of the part is also destroyed. No woman can ever forget the pain she endured when she first applied the corsets; but in time the compressed organs become torpid; the muscles lose their contractile power, and she feels dependent on the mechanical support of the corset. But the mischief is not limited to local weakness and insensibility. The general strength and general sensibility correspond with the breathing capacity. If she has ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... comfort in the house occupied the soul of lady Ann: it was that she heard nothing of the bookbinder fellow! She had grown so torpid, that while Danger was not flattening his nose against the window-pane, she was at peace. For the rest, a lawyer of her own had the will in his keeping, and she had come upon no ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... the bed and scream; so I didn't know what to do, for I can't handle those things like you, Ned, so I pushed its head down with my tooth brush and pinned up the pocket with my scarf pin. Then I waited a while for you, and I thought it had gone into a torpid condition like you read of, and Jack Dale came for me to go to see a Punch-and-Judy and when I got back the little deceitful beggar had cleared out! ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... sleep like all the rest; if there were a contending force anywhere; if we would let even that work instead of neglecting it, it would gain strength from hour to hour, and waken up, one at a time, each torpid and dishonoured faculty, till our whole nature became alive with strivings against self, and every avenue was open wide for God. Natural Law, Degeneration, ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... and the malice which before was torpid under a sullen exterior, was now active. It was perfectly unchanged in every other respect. This new energy was apparent in its activity and its looks, and ...
— Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... pre-existent to myself,—one Windsor Castle; and I was so delightful and so juvenile, that, without attending to any thing but my eyes, I stood full two hours and a half, and found that half my lameness consists in my indolence. Two Berrys, a Gothic chapel, and an historic castle, are anodynes to a torpid mind. I now fancy that old age was invented by the lazy. St. George's Chapel, that I always worshipped, though so dark and black that I could see nothing distinctly, is now being cleaned and decorated, a ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... our ideas from foreign sources 'enfeebles all internal strength of thought,' as a course of dram-drinking destroys the tone of the stomach. The faculties of the mind, when not exerted, or when cramped by custom and authority, become listless, torpid, and unfit for the purposes of thought or action. Can we wonder at the languor and lassitude which is thus produced by a life of learned sloth and ignorance; by poring over lines and syllables that excite little more idea or interest ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... intemperance pervaded the land, from the highest to the lowest classes of society. The Established Church was torpid, as far as it was not a scandal; but those who dissented from it came within the meshes of the Act of Uniformity, the Test Act, and the Corporation Act. By law, such a man as Priestley, being a Unitarian, could neither teach nor preach, and was liable to ruinous ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... the mass of half-dead humanity became so dense, so deaf, so torpid,—or perhaps it should be said so happy—that Marshal Victor, their heroic defender against twenty thousand Russians under Wittgenstein, was actually compelled to cut his way by force through this ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... requires, but, like all people who live at the extreme North, acquire tropical habits of indolence from the climate. During the tedious winters, when the days are but six hours long, all who can afford it become torpid, like frogs, and lie up in their houses till the summer sun thaws them out. Balls, parties, and sleigh-riding occasionally rouse them up, but lethargy is the general rule. The warm weather comes very suddenly, ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... had at once, and for the first time, acquired sense to comprehend her inexpressible calamity. These alternate feelings of embarrassment, wonder, and grief, seemed to succeed each other more than once upon her torpid features. But she spoke not a wordneither had she shed a tearnor did one of the family understand, either from look or expression, to what extent she comprehended the uncommon bustle around her. Thus she sat among the funeral assembly like a connecting link ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... was time to call her companion. She knew how hard he had worked during the day, and she resolved not to call him as long as she could keep awake herself. Her position was by the tree; but in order to rouse her torpid faculties, she took a walk around the island. When she reached the side of their narrow domain where they had landed in the morning, she was startled by what she thought was a slight splashing in the water, at a considerable distance from her. After the ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic
... harmless snake, Lying torpid, scarce awake, On a chilly morning, Is it well his life to ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... battle of Karbala; and the public funeral of the saints, represented, not by an effigy of their bodies, but by a model of their tombs. Loving spectacle and excitement, with the love of a rather idle and illiterate population whose daily life is dull and torpid, the people of India have very generally lost sight of the fasting and humiliation which are the real essence of the Moharram, and have turned it into a diversion and a show. But there was no show nor diversion ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... never wholly to be extinguished, break out afresh; let but the human creature be rouzed; whether he have lain heedless and torpid in religious or civil slavery—have languished under a thraldom, domestic or foreign, or under both these alternately—or have drifted about a helpless member of a clan of disjointed and feeble barbarians; let him rise and ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... golden grain of his thought falls, as in the parable, in all sorts of places; but, unlike some of the seed in the parable, it all leaves some trace behind. It stimulates reflection, it awakens life, it arouses the torpid soul, it shakes the drowsy soul, it shocks the pious soul, it frightens the timid soul, but it lifts them all, as it were, by main force, out of themselves, and makes healthful breezes blow, and refreshing showers fall ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... to nap, though between times they may be particularly wide awake. Later it would seem that less sleep is needed to sustain health, though it is especially profound. As regards the individual, the temperament probably largely influences this matter. The torpid generally are first made drowsy, and afterwards sleep well, the erethic or irritable are specially wakeful on arriving, and later their sleep is broken, exactly the reverse occurring on the sea shore. With respect to meteorological conditions, humidity undoubtedly ...
— The Truth About America • Edward Money
... Gardener and its larva in the silken cocoons of the Bombyx. I do not expect ever to make such a discovery. These cocoons are inhabited only in winter, when the Gardener is indifferent to food, and lies torpid in the earth. In April, however, when the processions of larvae are seeking a suitable site for burial and metamorphosis, the Gardener should profit largely by its good fortune should it by ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... his presence isn't always necessary; it must bother Mrs. Loring too; he's quite off his head about her if she only knew it. However, it's my last day very likely, and if I have to outwit Machiavelli I'll manage it somehow! Surely one lame old woman, and a torpid machine for knitting and writing notes like Miss Smeardon, can't want to be out of doors all day. Hang that boy, though! He'll come anywhere." Here he stopped and sat down suddenly at the dressing-table, covering his face with his hands in comic despair. "Mrs. Loring can't like ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... good man to retort on a slander, "I will have recourse to the only means that are congenial to guilt: I will compel you to be silent." Freedom in this matter, as in all others, will engender activity and fortitude; positive institution (Godwin's term for law and constraint) makes the mind torpid and lethargic. It is hardly necessary to reproduce Godwin's vigorous arguments for unfettered freedom in political and speculative discussion, against censorships and prosecutions for religious and political opinions. Even were we secure from the possibility ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... Stockton 6771, it said. A carpeted stair with a fine old mahogany balustrade rose into the dimness. Aubrey, who was thoroughly familiar with lodgings, knew instinctively that the fourth, ninth, tenth, and fourteenth steps would be creakers. A soft musk sweetened the warm, torpid air: he divined that someone was toasting marshmallows over a gas jet. He knew perfectly well that somewhere in the house would be a placard over a bathtub with the legend: Please leave this tub as you would wish to find it. Roger Mifflin would have said, ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... London—gambler, horse-racer, libertine, what not?—but in society charming, and his manners singularly elegant and winning. He never obtruded his vices in good company; in fact, you might dine with him all your life and not detect him. The young serpent was torpid in wine; but he came out, a bit at a time, in the sunshine ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... his employers remonstrated; and the same arguments they had used upon their former clerks were urged upon his consideration. Fearing the loss of situation, he repented, but it was only to fall again before the power of that appetite with which he had tampered as with a torpid viper, which now felt the warmth of his embrace, and became a living, craving creature within ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... globules appeared cleanly circular, flattened, biconcave, and without notches, indentations or spheroidal swellings. The white globules changed their shape, taking at intervals the spherical form, and varying their shapes again by delicate expansions. I was not deceived then, it was a torpid man that I had under my eyes, ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... My voice. Many listen more willingly to the world than to God, and more easily follow the appetite of the flesh than God's good pleasure. The world promises small and temporary things, and is served with great eagerness; I promise supreme and eternal things, but the hearts of mortals are torpid. Who serves and obeys Me in everything with so great care as the world and its lords are served? Men run a long way for a trifling reward, but for eternal life many scarcely lift a ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... just entered the room to inform her mistress that Aunt Judy was ready for her, stood in rigid uprightness, her torpid eyes settled upon the lady. "I reckon," so ran the thought within the mazes of her dark little interior, "dat Miss Rob's wuss disgruntled dan she was dat ebenin' when I make my cake, fur she got two dif'ent kinds ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... little in the sun. The balcony was undergoing repairs that day, and the travellers could not go out on it; but under the spell of the historic interest of the beautiful old Gothic place, they lingered in the interior till they were half-torpid with the cold. Then she abandoned to him the joint duty of viewing the cathedral, and hurried to their carriage where she basked in the sun till he came to her. He returned shivering, after a half-hour's absence, and pretended that she had missed the greatest thing in the world, but as he could never ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... ranger to ride back to his camp on the water hole. Before he mounted his horse he raised the slight form of Tonia with one arm high from the earth for a parting salute. The drowsy stillness of the torpid summer air still lay thick upon the dreaming afternoon. The smoke from the fire in the /jacal/, where the /frijoles/ blubbered in the iron pot, rose straight as a plumb-line above the clay-daubed chimney. No sound or movement disturbed the serenity ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... there as the diminutiveness of the cultivated ground surrounding each Indian hut.(222) But in these earthly paradises, where, as Byron said, even bread is gathered like fruit, the powers of man slumber as certainly as they grow torpid in polar deserts.(223) The sentence: "In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread," has been a blessing to mankind. Athens was not only the literary and political, but also the economic capital of Greece; and yet Attica ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... was need once more of a Divine Revelation to the torpid frivolous children of men, if they were not to sink altogether into the ape condition. And in that whirlwind of the Universe,—lights obliterated, and the torn wrecks of Earth and Hell hurled aloft into the Empyrean; black whirlwind, which made even apes serious, and drove ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... afterwards, when it now stopped their breath, nor suffered them to respire, they sat down for a little, with their backs to the wind. Then indeed the sky resounded with loud thunder, and the lightnings flashed between its terrific peals; all, bereft of sight and hearing, stood torpid with fear. At length, when the rain had spent itself, and the fury of the wind was on that account the more increased, it seemed necessary to pitch the camp in that very place where they had been overtaken by the storm. But ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... inscrutable, marking the even beat of light and darkness, and the beat of the life of the torpid creature dreaming in the depths of his cradle—his imperious needs, sorrowful or glad—so regular that the night and the day which bring them seem by them to ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... credible that she was kept in ignorance by the traitors and murderers who had enrolled themselves in her service—that one who pensioned the actual murderer of Murray and a would-be murderer of Elizabeth was incapable of approving what her keen and practised intelligence was too blunt and torpid to anticipate as inevitable and inseparable from the general design. In August the conspirators were netted, and Mary was arrested at the gate of Tixall Park, whither Paulet had taken her under pretence of a hunting-party. At Tixall she was ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... explained the captain. "She's only a little slow. Constitutionally torpid—if I may use the expression. I am merely loud with her (and I beg you will honor me by being loud, too) as a necessary stimulant to her ideas. Shout at her—and her mind comes up to time. Speak to her—and she drifts miles away from you ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... To leaven the virtue of these honest men! But the Devil remained till the Break of Day Blushed upon Sleep and Lord Castlereagh:[45] 170 Then up half the house got, and Satan got up With the drowsy to snore—or the hungry to sup:— But so torpid the power of some speakers, 't is said, That they sent even ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... not in more moral earnestness only, but in a more open intelligence; not merely in a more dogged resolution to work and be silent, but in a ready willingness to use the understanding. The poison of our sins, says Mr. Carlyle in his latest utterance, 'is not intellectual dimness chiefly, but torpid unveracity of heart.' Yes, but all unveracity, torpid or fervid, breeds intellectual dimness, and it is this last which prevents us from seeing a way out of the present ignoble situation. We need light more than ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... your varied powers Made only for life's gala bow'rs, To smooth Reflection's mentor-frown, Or Pillow joy on softer down.— Fools!—yon blest orb not only glows To chase the cloud, or paint the rose; These are the pastimes of his might, Earth's torpid bosom drinks his light; Find there his wondrous pow'r's true measure, Death turn'd to life, and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... her aspect, and the mere slave of discipline (he had pulled in the St. Catherine's second torpid), obeyed her command, and presently we ...
— HE • Andrew Lang
... seaward. They were not alone in this, for a little further up the beach the two Fiji Islanders sat huddled on their haunches, gazing stupidly first at the horizon and then at their white captors. It was the sight of these two worthies that spurred Mr. Gibney's torpid ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... efficiency of his troops either by haranguing or by drilling them. He did not keep himself in the public eye, but retired into the pleasant shade of his gardens, regarding past, present, and future with equal indifference, like one of those listless animals which lie sluggish, and torpid so long as you supply them with food. While he thus loitered languid and indolent in the woods of Aricia,[95] he received the startling news of Lucilius Bassus' treachery and the disaffection of the fleet ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... for freighting up the Yukon, are the only towns apparently assured of a prosperous future. Wrangell (formerly Fort St Dionysius, Fort Stikine and Fort Wrangell), founded in 1833, is a dilapidated and torpid little village, of some interest in Alaskan history, and of temporary importance from 1874 to 1877 as the gateway to the Cassiar mines in British Columbia. Its inhabitants are chiefly ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... under the snowy winding-sheet, the Spider goes up to her bound prisoner. She has a better weapon than the bestiarius' trident: she has her poison-fangs. She gnaws at the Locust, without undue persistence, and then withdraws, leaving the torpid ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... his poor Queen to her reflections, and taken into that sad line, in which by degrees he carried it so far. There are three of them, it seems;—the first female souls that could ever manage to kindle, into flame or into smoke: in this or any other kind, that poor torpid male soul: those Mailly Sisters, three in number (I am shocked to hear), successive, nay in part simultaneous! They are proud women, especially the two younger; with ambition in them, with a bravura magnanimity, of the theatrical or operatic kind; ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... whether the donation to the Curates' Aid Society did have much effect. It may perhaps have induced a resolution in some few to go to the poll whose minds were active in regard to religion and torpid as to politics. But the donation to St Fabricius certainly had results. It was taken up and made much of by the Roman Catholic party generally, till a report got itself spread abroad and almost believed that Mr Melmotte was going to join the Church ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... their fashion, and made some rude attempts at performing a sort of pantomime. I may now close this detail with observing that the natives of this mountainous region have stronger animal spirits than those of the plains, and pass their lives with more variety than the torpid inhabitants of the coast; that they breathe a spirit of independence, and being frequently engaged in warfare, village against village, they would be better prepared to resist any ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... Should no false kindness lure to loose delight, Nor praise relax, nor difficulty fright; Should tempting Novelty thy cell refrain, And Sloth effuse her opiate fumes in vain; Should beauty blunt on fops her fatal dart, Nor claim the triumph of a letter'd heart; Should no disease thy torpid veins invade, Nor Melancholy's phantoms haunt thy shade; Yet hope not life from grief or danger free, Nor think the doom of man revers'd for thee: Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes, And pause awhile from Letters, to be wise; There mark what ills the scholar's life assail, Toil, envy, ...
— English Satires • Various
... which he lifted only to drop it with a yell, for underneath it lay a torpid snake, doubtless one of those that had been used in ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... this ancient and embowered mansion! I had strongly felt the silence and vacancy of the depriving day on which you vanished. How prone are our hearts perversely to quarrel with the friendly coercion of employment at the very instant in which it is clearing the torpid and injurious mists of unavailing melancholy!' Then follows a sprightly attack before which Johnson may have quailed indeed. 'Is the Fe-fa-fum of literature that snuffs afar the fame of his brother authors, and thirsts ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... observe, that "winter lingering chills the lap of May." Sudden changes of temperature are experienced, which are governed very much by the course and changes of the wind. Nature appears suddenly to have been awakened from her torpid state. ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... become, save perhaps for my music, an automaton. But, although I did not improve in appearance, my health was completely restored, and when the war came I was in perfect condition for the arduous task I immediately undertook. Moreover, my mind, torpid for a year, was free and refreshed for those practical details it must grapple with at once. I turned the Zattiany palace in Buda Pesth into a hospital. And then for four years I was again an automaton, but ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... keeping company with your superiors. Madame Lambert tells her son, Let your connections be with people above you; by that means you will acquire a habit of respect and politeness. With one's equals, one is apt to become negligent, and the mind grows torpid. She advises him, too, to frequent those people, and to see their inside; In order to judge of men, one must be intimately connected; thus you see them without, a veil, and with their mere every-day merit. A happy ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... were inundating his white apron, the whole of his massive, torpid form quivered with grief. He seemed to be sinking, melting away. When he was at last able to speak, he stammered: "Oh, you don't know how good he was to me when we lived together in the Rue Royer-Collard! He did everything. He ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... Italian lake, and the waving pines, and our solitary home, and my babe's distant grave. Tell me," she cried, again starting up, "has he not spoken of me lately—has he not seen me in his dreams? have I not been present to his soul when the frame, torpid and locked, severed us no more, and, in the still hours, I charmed myself to his gaze? Tell me, has he not owned that Lucilla haunted his pillow? Tell me; and if I err, my spells are nothing, my power is vanity, and I am the helpless ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... keel and bring down its speed. Professional ecclesiastics in all ages have succumbed to the temptation of thinking that 'church property' was first of all to be used for their advantage, and, secondarily, for behoof of God's house. Eager zeal has in all ages to be yoked to torpid indifference, and to drag its unwilling companion along, like two dogs in a leash. Direct opposition is easier to bear than apparent assistance which tries to slow down to ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... was so feeble as to be quite unable to catch hold of my extemporised tinder. After prolonged and fruitless efforts the intense cold began to chill me, and being well aware of the great danger of getting benumbed, or of falling into that torpid state of indifference to life, coupled with intense desire for rest which precedes death from cold, I made up my mind at once, tired and hungry though I was, to turn round and walk ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... paradise of the man of law, and nine-tenths of the profession are bound sooner or later to regard themselves as shelved for good in the provinces. Wherefore, every Tribunal of First Instance and every Court-Royal is sharply divided in two. The first section has given up hope, and is either torpid or content; content with the excessive respect paid to office in a country town, or torpid with tranquillity. The second section is made up of the younger sort, in whom the desire of success is untempered as yet by disappointment, and of the really clever men urged on continually by ambition ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... rooms and gray corridors, with carpets that muffled the feet which at intervals passed along them. It was a house of silence, brooding within the high fence that shut it and the grounds from a landscape torpid under the hot sun of summer, and across which occasionally drifted the lonely, mournful whistle of a train on a nearby railroad. Inside the house there was always a hush, a heavy quiet—restful to ...
— Under Arctic Ice • H.G. Winter
... the door reply, The hall wake, yawn, and smile; the torpid stair Will grumble at our feet, the table cry: 'Fetch my belongings for me; I am bare.' A clatter! Something in the attic falls. A ghost has lifted up his robes and fled. The loitering shadows move along the walls; Then silence very slowly lifts his ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 • Various
... lasting as long as a week are by no means unknown. Within a short time of the onset the urine may be found to contain acetone bodies, the breath may smell distinctly of acetone, and the child may become torpid and drowsy or agitated and restless. At times there may be exaggerated and deepened respiratory movements—the so-called air hunger. In many cases, however, otherwise characteristic, these more severe manifestations are absent or but little ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... shaken" (Conimb. prob. 6. sec. 3. de som.) why they stutter or falter in their speech, Mercurialis and Montaltus, cap. 17. give like reasons out of Hippocrates, [2676]"dryness, which makes the nerves of the tongue torpid." Fast speaking (which is a symptom of some few) Aetius will have caused [2677] "from abundance of wind, and swiftness of imagination:" [2678]"baldness comes from excess of dryness," hirsuteness from a dry temperature. The cause of much waking in a dry brain, continual meditation, discontent, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... state of affairs at the Foss River Ranch when Lablache put into execution his threats against the Hon. Bunning-Ford. The settlement had returned to its customary torpid serenity. The round-up was over, and all the "hands" had returned to the various ranches to which they belonged. The little place had entered upon its period of placid sleep, which would last until the advent of the farmers to spend the proceeds of their garnered harvest. ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... wiry—have their histories also. But how rarely we see squirrels in winter! The naturalists say they are mostly torpid; yet evidently that little pocket-faced depredator, the chipmunk, was not carrying buckwheat for so many days to his hole for nothing: was he anticipating a state of torpidity, or providing against the demands of a very active appetite? Red and gray squirrels are more or less active ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... according to the primitive notions of the Shokas, that inside the earth lives in a torpid condition an evil spirit in the shape of a gigantic reptile. The rumbling preceding an earthquake is, to the Shoka mind, nothing else than the heavy breathing of the monster previous to waking, whereas the actual shock is caused by the brute stretching its limbs. When ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... him here torpid lies, That drew the essential forms of grace; Here closed in death the attentive eyes That saw ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... nothing Christian about it. It is merely sentimental slush, sloppy shirking of anything that compels national alertness, or effort, or self-discipline, or self-denial; a moral cowardice that pushes away any fact which disturbs a shallow, torpid, irresponsible, self-indulgent optimism. ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... into a beast of burden. I trudge on with my mind torpid—I take whatever comes to me, and go on mechanically. Oh it cows me, it wears me down! I have learned to bear anything—anything! A man might kick me ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... hastily to the chamber in which he left him, believing he had withdrawn too soon, and that the king, as he knew no other was present, was speaking to him: he soon drew near enough to hear what was said; and while he was standing torpid in suspense, dreading to be discovered, and not knowing how to retire, ALMORAN ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... intended and apparently capricious mingling of satirical and pathetic sentiment, but valuable for its vivid expression of Italian feeling toward the Austrians. These the Italians hated as part of a stupid and brutal oppression; they despised them somewhat as a torpid-witted folk, but individually liked them for their amiability and good nature, and in their better moments they pitied them as the victims of a common tyranny. I will not be so adventurous as to say how far the beautiful military ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... cradled rest, Was I not softly hush'd?—here fondly rear'd? Ah! is not this my country?—so endear'd By every filial tie! In whose lap shrouded both my parents lie! Oh! by this tender thought, Your torpid bosoms to compassion wrought, Look on the people's grief! Who, after God, of you expect relief; And if ye but relent, Virtue shall rouse her in embattled might, Against blind fury bent, Nor long shall doubtful hang the unequal fight; For no,—the ancient flame Is not ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... handclasp! Had that trembling been a weakness or a strength? For all time since—and increasingly during the later years—secret memories of it had wonderfully quickened a life that would otherwise have tended to fall dull, torpid, stubborn. It was not that their hands had met, but that they had trembled—those two strange hands that had both repelled and coerced each other—faltering at last into that long moment of ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... brink, sometimes sheltering himself behind a tuft of bushes, and trailing his line along the water, in hopes to catch a pickerel. But, taking the river for all in all, I can find nothing more fit to compare it with, than one of the half-torpid earth-worms which I dig up for bait. The worm is sluggish, and so is the river,—the river is muddy, and so is the worm. You hardly know whether either of them be alive or dead; but still, in the course of time, they both manage to creep away. The best aspect of the Concord is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various |
