"Vitality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Assyrian colonists at various times after successful campaigns. Nearly the whole empire had to be reconquered under much the same conditions as in the first instance. Assyria itself, it is true, had recovered the vitality and elasticity of its earlier days. The people were a robust and energetic race, devoted to their rulers, and ready to follow them blindly and trustingly wherever they might lead. The army, while composed chiefly of the same classes of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... formation and any retarding of growth the previous season means little or no production. Winter injury to wood and bud, diseases or insects attacking the foliage, soil moisture, and summer temperatures will lower tree vitality. There are times when strong vigorous trees fail to fruit which could be due to a high or low carbohydrate-nitrogen balance. Soil type, plant food, age of tree, and location will have some influence on annual or even biennial production ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... knows no actual object. It will manifest itself in suppressed force, seeking for exit in a thousand directions; sometimes grotesque perhaps, but always force. It will give energy to expression, vitality to his admiration of the beautiful, devotion to his worship, enthusiasm to his zeal for freedom. More than this, it will NOT make his private life unbearable by contrast; rather the reverse. The vision of Medora will not intensify the shadow over Rosoman ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... majesty of the sword, until in its very vastness it collapsed. The heart of its people did not beat in unison. Nations may be made by the joining of hands, but the measure of their real strength and vitality, like that of the human body, is in the heart. Show me the country whose people are not at heart in sympathy with its institutions, and the fervor of whose patriotism is not bespoken in its flag, and I will ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... paradise to little Signy, whose imaginative, romantic nature found infinite delight in the beauty of the Isle, in its myriads of sea-fowl, in its grand-encircling ocean, in the freedom and poetry of life with such environs. But to a strong lad like Yaspard, full of vitality, longing for action and the company of his fellows, there was less to content him, and much to stir in him that spirit of mischief which attends on every energetic boy not blessed with wise guardians, and with plenty ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... can be no doubt that early marriages are bad for both parties. For children of such a marriage always lack vitality. The ancient Germans did not marry until the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth year, previous to which they observed the most rigid chastity, and in consequence they acquired a size and strength that excited the astonishment ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... to his soul. The inhabitant of Paris has one great blessing, which he does not take into account until he suffers from its loss—one great half of his existence is filled up without the least trouble to himself. The all-potent vitality which ceaselessly envelops him takes away from him in a vast degree the exertion of amusing himself. The roar of the city, rising like a great bass around him, fills up the gaps in his thoughts, and never leaves ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... periods of his life. Again, the button—that portion of the back against which the heel of the neck rests, which forms a prominent mark in all Violins, and an evidence of style, has a remarkably pronounced development in the Violins of Guarneri, and, in fact, may be said to give a vitality to the whole work. There are many instances where excellent and original specimens of workmanship have been, speaking artistically, ruined for want of skill in handling that ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... of the younger operators knew him only as a symbol, a genius behind a key, or as a hand. Professionally speaking, it was his hand that made his personality unique and enviable. There was a queer vitality in the signals sent into the air from a wireless machine when his strong white fingers played upon the key; his touch was as familiar to them as the voice ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... Monte will be hired to fill the place of Sand Creek Riley, whom we all regrets. It's hardly reequired that I p'int out the benefits of this yere arrangement. As stage driver, old Monte for every other night will get sawed off on Tucson. An' I misjedges the vitality of this camp if, with the pressure on it thus relieved, an' Tucson carryin' half the load, it's onable to live through. In my opinion, Dan, by the light of this explanation, you at least oughter ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... their work when they have reached the surface. The waves have torn off masses and thrown them up so as to form an elevation above the water; then birds have come, dropped seeds, and formed their nests, and dwelt there; and timber and plants floating about have been cast on shore, and their vitality not yet destroyed, have taken root; and more coral and shells have been heaved up and ground fine by the toiling waves to form a beach; and thus a fit dwelling-place for man has been formed. Nearing the sandy beach ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... Lancashire coast. Twenty years ago this was a small bathing resort called into existence chiefly by the enterprise of a local baronet whose name it bears. Its present prosperity and prospective importance are another illustration of the vigour and vitality of the North of Ireland, which is connected through Fleetwood with the great manufacturing regions of middle and northern England, as it is through Larne with the ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... nature has considerably less vitality in it, than we experience in a complete and perfect dream. In dreaming we are often conscious of lively impressions, of a busy scene, and of objects and feelings succeeding each other with rapidity. We sometimes imagine ourselves earnestly ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... vivid face pleaded for her. He could not refuse the outstretched hand of this slender lance-straight girl whose sweet vitality was at once so delicate and so gallant. Reluctantly his palm ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... mind, as well as broad of shoulder he was. Forty years of age now, his hair, by the habit of thought, was tinged with gray at the temples; yet skin and complexion were as those of a boy. Quick in movement, agile, alert, thrilling with vitality and virility, his pleasures were, as they had always been, the pleasures of the great out-of-doors. A yachtsman, his big yawl, the "Manana," was known in every club port from Gravesend to Bar Harbor. He motored. He rode. He played tennis, and golf, and squash, and ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... and personal traits, this much may be granted: if those who knew him were told he was a Jew they would not be much surprised. In his exuberant vitality, in his sensuous love of music and the other arts, in his combined imaginativeness and shrewdness of common sense, in his superficial expansiveness and actual reticence, he would have been typical enough of the potent and artistic race for whom he has so often ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... great body of my fellow-citizens, whether they have been my fellow-citizens a long time or a short time, and drink, as it were, out of the common fountains with them and go back feeling that you have so generously given me the sense of your support and of the living vitality in your hearts, of its great ideals which made America the hope ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... cleanliness, the same care, the inmates of the sunless cells were visited with sickness and death in double measure. Our whole population in New England are groaning and suffering under afflictions, the result of a depressed vitality,—neuralgia, with a new ache for every day of the year, rheumatism, consumption, general debility; for all these a thousand nostrums are daily advertised, and money enough is spent on them to equip an ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... true philosophy upon the antecedents—the remote springs—of that event, every where visible in the history of the world; and by expatiating upon the principles set forth in our manifesto, and their salutary effect upon the well-being of mankind, give practical force to their vitality. Huzzas are not arguments for thinking men; and now, when thought is every where busy in the formation of omnipotent opinion, the American should cast off the garb of national pride, and with the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... sighted, not a sign of smoke appeared on the spotless horizon. At regular intervals the gun on the forward deck boomed thrice in quick succession, startling the lifeless hulk into a sort of spasmodic vitality. Then she would sink back once more into the old, irksome lethargy, incapable of resisting the gentlest wave, submissive to the whim of the slightest breeze. The ship's carpenter and his men were making slow ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... are, and he felt conscious of a claim which the world had not granted. It was almost a shock to him to feel the egoistic desire for personal happiness stirring strongly within him; the desire had been suppressed for so long, that when it once awoke it surprised him by its vitality. ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... age, although it acknowledges their inanity! None lasts—none endures, save the foliage of the hardy oak, which only begins to show itself when that of the rest of the forest has enjoyed half its existence. A pale and decayed hue is all it possesses, but still it retains that symptom of vitality to the last.—So be it with Father Eustace! The fairy hopes of my youth I have trodden under foot like those neglected rustlers—to the prouder dreams of my manhood I look back as to lofty chimeras, of which the pith and essence ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... that strive for life within them? That enormous weight of skirts that you hang over portions of your bodies that should be choicely protected instead of burdened, how they hang down like so many dead weights on your vitality, weakening and diseasing the most delicate economy of your fearfully and wonderfully made systems! and how your whole frames are taxed every day of your lives with this wrongly placed and worse than useless ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... dreadful morning of his arrest; for the vial of wrath had then been broken upon his head, and he had tasted the whole bitterness of an agony which can be endured but a short while, and can never be felt a second time. For, as intense heat quickly destroys the vitality of the nerves on which it acts, and as flesh once deeply cauterized by fire is thenceforth insensible to impressions of pain, so the soul over which one of the fiery agonies of life has passed can never ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... the citizens' wives and the church servants that are poured out there," replied Durtal. "No, its vitality comes from the Sisterhoods, the peasant women, the pious schools, the pupils of the Seminary, and perhaps more especially from the children of the choir, who crowd to kiss the Pillar and kneel before the Black Virgin. As for the devotion ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... learn "that its seed is in itself upon the earth." Does this mean that the seeds of these trees were buried in the earth, and their vitality not destroyed by the great visitation of fire, ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... of this delightful life Natalya's wonderful vitality began slowly to collapse. She earned less and less, and, amid her gratitude to God for having relieved her of the burden of Becky and Joseph, a secret fear entered her heart. Would she be taken away before Daisy became self-supporting? Nay, would she even be able to endure the burden ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... race prejudices between the French and Anglo-Saxon elements of the country seem to be acquiring violent vitality. Such a consummation as a fusion of the two races is out of all calculation. The French Canadians will continue, as they have always been, isolated from their fellow Canadians; nor would this matter very much if good feeling and mutual tolerance ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... 1857 was a most trying time for business men. Mr. Price's labors were arduous in the extreme; his energy was unbounded, and the labors he was compelled to perform doubtless so over-taxed his strength that he had not sufficient vitality to recover. ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... did David's development produce more effect than upon Mr. Ancrum. The lame, solitary minister, who only got through his week's self-appointed tasks at a constant expense of bodily torment, was dazzled and bewildered by the spectacle of so much vitality spent with such ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... he cared, the whole population of the town might lay claim to having been at Weimar—and he could not understand Madeleine finding it important. For he was in one of those moods when the entire consciousness is so intently directed towards some end that, outside this end, nothing has colour or vitality: all that has previously impressed and interested one, has no more solidity than papier mache. Meanwhile she spoke on, and did not appear to notice how time was flying. He was forced at length to take out his watch, and exclaim, in ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... beholds a frightful, living, and bristling thicket which quivers, rustles, wavers, returns to shadow, threatens and glares. One word resembles a claw, another an extinguished and bleeding eye, such and such a phrase seems to move like the claw of a crab. All this is alive with the hideous vitality of things which have been ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... thoughts must be interpenetrated by its brightness and remodelled by its power. This indwelling light of the soul should be recognised in every creation of his pencil, expressive as a spoken word; and in this lies the peculiar vitality of Christian beauty, and the cause of the remarkable difference between Classic and Christian art." "Physical beauty is employed by the Christian painter but as a material veil, from beneath which the hidden divinity ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... docile, pliable, quick of apprehension, ready to acquire: a very bright lovely boy, a youth of even splendid grace, who seemed quite without vices, as if that beautiful form represented a vitality so exquisitely poised and balanced that it could know no uneasy desires, no unrest—a radiant presence for a lonely man to have won for himself. If he were silent when his father expected some response, still he did ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... rainfall made Bengal the predestined breeding-ground of mankind; the seat of an ancient and complex civilisation. But subsistence is too easily secured in those fertile plains. Malaria, due to the absence of subsoil drainage, is ubiquitous, and the standard of vitality extremely low. Bengal has always been at the mercy of invaders. The earliest inroad was prompted by economic necessity. About 2000 B.C. a congeries of races which are now styled "Aryan" were driven ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... me that such visitors dart at me and, with finger and thumb, carry off a portion of my vitality," was his saying. ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... of love and politics and a searching study of their influence on character. The author shows with extraordinary vitality of treatment the tricks, the heat, the passion, the tumult of the political arena, the ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... as if by miracle. Hunger, cold, dirt, abuse, still left him a feeble vitality. At six years old his big dark eyes wore so sad a look that mothers of merry children often stopped to sigh over him, frightening the child, for he did not understand sympathy. So unresponsive and dumb was he that they called him half-witted. Three babies younger than he had died by ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson
... engines," not in the sense in which we now apply the term to machines for the extinguishing of fires, but as indicating the source from which the power was derived, motive power engines deriving their vitality and strength from fire. The modern name—steam engine—to some extent is a misleading one, distracting the mind from the source of power to the medium which conveys the power. Similarly the name "Gas Engine" masks the fact of the motors so called ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 484, April 11, 1885 • Various
... albeit his power fails at others. [Footnote: From this point of the legend onward there is an inextricable confusion as regards the four different versions. While the hero is decidedly a Badger in the Micmac, I regard the great ferocity, craft, and above all the vitality which he displays as far more characteristic of the Lox or Wolverine of the Passamaquoddy. What is almost decisively in favor of the latter theory is that in all the stories, despite his craft and power, ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... Woman Suffrage is the truest of all faiths. The amount of really good ridicule that has been expended upon this thing is appalling, and yet we are compelled to confess that to all appearance "the cause" has been thereby shorn of no material strength, nor bled of its vitality. And shall it be admitted that this potent argument of little minds is as powerless as the dullards of all ages have steadfastly maintained? Forbid it, Heaven! the gimlet is as proper a gimlet as any in all ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... Summer in Arcady a deeper note in the treatment of Nature was struck, and Mr. Allen's style took on, not only greater freedom, but a richer beauty. The story is a kind of incarnation of the tremendous vitality of Nature, the unconscious, unmoral sweep of the force which makes for life. So completely enveloped is the reader in the atmosphere of the opulent world about him, so deeply does he realize the primeval forces rushing tumultuous through that ...
— James Lane Allen: A Sketch of his Life and Work • Macmillan Company
... action. These attributes seemed to cling about him. There was something vital and compelling in his presence. Worn and spent and drawn as he was from the long ride, he thrilled Madeline with his potential youth and unused vitality and promise of things to be, red-blooded deeds, both of flesh and spirit. In him she saw the strength of his forefathers unimpaired. The life in him was marvelously significant. The dust, the dirt, the sweat, ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... by a murmur of sympathetic pity. He is frightfully thin; and his features look as haggard as if he were about to give up the ghost. The whole vitality of his system seems to have centred in his eyes, which shine with ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... present along with the disease, use all means to increase the patient's vitality. Simple diet is best, and abundance of fresh air within and without the house by ...
— Reform Cookery Book (4th edition) - Up-To-Date Health Cookery for the Twentieth Century. • Mrs. Mill
... been good? Nothing but the mistrust which had lately taken body and which married itself now to the fruitful wonder produced by her visitor's challenge on behalf of poor Pansy. There was something in this challenge which had at the very outset excited an answering defiance; a nameless vitality which she could see to have been absent from her friend's professions of delicacy and caution. Madame Merle had been unwilling to interfere, certainly, but only so long as there was nothing to interfere with. It will perhaps seem to the reader that Isabel went fast in casting doubt, on mere ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... a moment. Any anxiety, any trouble, seemed so incongruous with the sweet spring-tide peace in the air, that one did not readily take it home to heart. Hope was in the atmosphere like an essential element; one might call it oxygen or caloric or vitality, according to the tendency of mind and the habit of speech. But the heart knew it, and the pulses beat strongly responsive to it. Faith ruled the world. Some tiny bulbous thing at her feet that had impeded her step caught ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... a morose but attentive and good-hearted native named Allahdad, and thanks in part to Allahdad's good nursing, and in part to the bland and health-giving breezes of the ocean, he gradually regained his former health, strength, and vitality. At the time he regarded these seven years spent in Sind as simply seven years wasted, and certainly his rewards were incommensurate with his exertions. Still, it was in Sind that the future became written on ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... southern end of the Lake. Hence the largest glaciers ran into the Lake at its southwestern end. And, since the mountain slopes here are toward the northeast and therefore the shadiest and coolest, here also the glaciers have had the greatest vitality and lived the longest, and have, therefore, left the plainest records. Doubtless, careful examination would discover the pathways of glaciers running into the Lake from the eastern summit also; but I failed ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... she was not likely to be attractive to men. She was like a fine flower, already past its bloom and without fragrance, though the petals were still unwithered. Moreover, she would have been unattractive to men also from the lack of just what Kitty had too much of—of the suppressed fire of vitality, and the ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... the differences in the hands of people. They show all kinds of vitality, energy, stillness, and cordiality. I never realized how living the hand is until I saw those chill plaster images in Mr. Hutton's collection of casts. The hand I know in life has the fullness of blood in its veins, and is elastic with spirit. How different dear Mr. Hutton's hand was from its dull, ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... failure of that other restless night. A heaviness hung upon her as the day wore on; a kind of thick readiness for sleep. She yawned over her work. The workroom seemed stuffy, the day unusually long. The nervous strain of the past few days was reacting, and even Sally's vitality was shaken by the consequences of her successive excitements. When tea-time came she was relieved. But there had been no news of Gaga, or from him: not even a message through Miss Summers. Miss Summers grew more and more fidgetty and anxious as ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... action have operated upon you, and given to certain of your measures a vitality that authorizes me to hope much for ...
— Speeches of His Majesty Kamehameha IV. To the Hawaiian Legislature • Kamehameha IV
... well as one of the most prominent places in the city of New York is the grave-yard of old Trinity Church. A handsome iron railing separates it from Broadway, and the thick rows of grave-stones, all crumbling and stained with age, present a strange contrast to the bustle, vitality, and splendor with which they are surrounded. They stare solemnly down into Wall Street, and offer a bitter commentary upon the struggles and anxiety of the money kings of the great city. Work, toil, plan, combine as you may, ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... by the awful duty set out for me, I nevertheless performed it with success, and I care to say nothing more about that part of the tragedy. Neranya escaped death very narrowly and was a long time in recovering his wonted vitality. During all these weeks the rajah neither saw him nor made inquiries concerning him, but when, as in duty bound, I made official report that the man had recovered his strength, the rajah's eyes brightened, and he emerged ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... doubt that I had experienced the ebb of some vitality, for it is the saddest thing about us that this bright spirit with which we are lit from within like lanterns, can suffer dimness. Such frailty makes one fear that extinction is our final destiny, and it saps us with numbness, and we are less than ourselves. Seven nights ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... was announced by the herald that my friend would give a Bear Dance, at which he was to be publicly proclaimed a medicine man. It would be the great event of his short existence, for the disease had already exhausted his strength and vitality. Of course, we all understood that there would be an active youth to exhibit the ferocious nature of the beast after which ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... a wider circle of more worldly friends. It is the first great work in any modern speech. It is in very truth the recognition of a new world of men, a new and more practical set of merchant intellects which, with their growing and vigorous vitality, were to supersede ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... with the Talavera; in the first and second generations the produce was intermediate in character, but in the fourth generation "it was found to consist of many varieties; nine-tenths of the florets proved barren, and many of the seeds seemed shrivelled abortions, void of vitality, and the whole race was evidently verging to extinction."[224] Now, considering how little these {105} varieties of wheat differ in any important character, it seems to me very improbable that the sterility resulted, as Mr. Sheriff thought, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... course, men of unusual energy, vitality, and ambition who naturally choose the fastest gait, set up their own standards, and who will work hard, even though it may be against their best interests. But these few uncommon men only serve by affording a contrast to emphasize the ...
— Shop Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor
... Wasr. Look how the shadow of the campanile creeps out beneath us, over church and War-Office-Annexe, over life and over death. Religion is a corpse and the world is its morgue. But out of corruption comes forth sweetness. No creature known to man possesses more intense vitality than the dermestes beetle which propagates in the skull of a mummy. From the ashes of the Cross you arise. Christ is dead; long live Christianity. Behold the world at your feet. Courage, my friend, open the Gates and lead mankind into the ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... I examined the dripping head, and saw plainly that my bullet must have gone right through the monster's brain, probably only stunning it for the time being, and enough to give the boy time to hack off its head. For these creatures have an amount of vitality that is wonderful, and after injuries that are certain in the end to prove fatal, contrive to get back into the ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... departments, the wise advocate of reform must approach his work. His patriotism and thoughtfulness are both necessary. To proceed against the democratic law is not practicable: to establish a new system which is inconsistent with the abundant vitality and conscious strength of that already established ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... of the world shone out of the lodger. He was like a sea breeze in a soap factory. When he awakened in the morning he whistled. When he came down to breakfast he sang. When he came home in the evening he danced. He had an amazing store of vitality: from the highest hair on the top of his head down to his heels he was alive. His average language was packed with jokes and wonderful curses. He was as chatty as a girl, as good-humoured as a dog, as unconscious as a kitten—and she knew nothing at all of men, except, perhaps, that they wore ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... which has been manifested in the writings of M. Bergson is one more indication, added to the many which history provides, of the inextinguishable vitality of Philosophy. When the man with some important thought which bears upon its problems is forthcoming, the world is ready, indeed is anxious, to listen. Perhaps there is no period in recorded time in which the thinker, with something relevant to say ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... fit, made some difference, but the physician decided that his manner was responsible for most of the illusion—his self-confident stride, his masterful quality, the impression he gave of abundant vitality and of strength of character and of body. These were all in strong contrast to Brand's courtly, winning manners, affable tones and leisurely, ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... by an ague, Bull, picking his staggering steps to the fire, and sinking in a heap into a chair, symbolized the uttermost tribute of manhood to the ravages of whiskey. He was not drunk. He had not even been drinking; but his vitality was gone. He tried to speak. It was impossible. His tongue would not frame words, nor his throat utter them. He could only look helplessly at de Spain as de Spain hastily made him stand up on his shaking knees, threw a ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... the worn masonry of the balustrade, slight, lithe and graceful, she was the embodiment of vitality in repose. She stood so still, but there was a light shining in the brown eyes, that were cast down and over the parapet, keeping a careful watch for any indication of Berry's activity, a tell-tale quiver of the sensitive ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... of a dark December, the water was up to their waists, there was no draining the treacherous clay surfaces. The men suffered to the limit of their vitality and sometimes passed it; they needed constant care and watching. It had to be explained to them that they were not required to give up their lives to spirits, in a land that worshiped idols. Behind the strange lights and noises heralding death there were solid ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... that was killing him ceased its ravages, or rather was slain in its turn by the increased vitality against which it had to strive. He left the hospital and took up his quarters at the Palace Hotel, and then, like the General of an army, he began to formulate his ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... true also that the feeble-minded family is more likely to renew its vitality by the mixing in of new, normal blood in the country than in the city. Illegitimacy holds in the problem of rural feeble-mindedness the same position that prostitution occupies in urban amentia. The attractive feeble-minded ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... teaching has led to his expulsion from the Jesuit order, but not, so far, from the priesthood. The present condition of the church of Rome is not unhopeful to those who believe as I do that that venerable church has been used of God to great ends in the past and that her spiritual vitality is by no means exhausted. Father Tyrrell and such as he are nearer in spirit to the New Theology men than are the latter to those Protestants who pin their faith to external standards of belief. It is a curious but indisputable fact that the ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... level turf to hearten her up, satisfy the fulness of sensation which held her, and shake her nerves into place. It was exhilarating. She grew keen and tense, her whole economy becoming reliable and well-knit by the strong exercise and sense of the superbly healthy and unperplexed vitality of the horse under her. Honoria could have fought with dragons just then, had such been there to fight with! But, in point of fact, nothing more agressively dangerous presented itself for encounter than the ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... MacDowell left Columbia, but continued his private piano classes, and sometimes admitted free such students as were unable to pay. After his arduous labors at Columbia, which had been a great drain on his vitality, he should have had a complete rest and change. Had he done so, the collapse which was imminent might have been averted. But he took no rest though in the spring of 1905 he began to show signs of nervous breakdown. ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... then darted out of the room, leaving the two girls face to face. "They don't like me to see 'em cuddling," he said with a grin; and, urged by the enormous amount of vitality that was in him, Bob bounded to the kitchen stairs to slide down, and, directly after, a gritty rubbing noise, made metrical to accompany the shrill whistling of a tune, arose, the result of the fact that Bob Hartnup, the doctor's boy, who clung to the ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... holiday which, whether of days or of weeks, had looked short to the labor weary when first they came, and was growing shorter and shorter, while the days that composed it grew longer and longer by the frightful vitality of dreariness. Especially to those of them who hated work, a day like this, wrapping them in a blanket of fog, whence the water was every now and then squeezed down upon them in the wettest of all rains, seemed a huge bite snatched by that vague enemy against whom the grumbling of the ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... incorporations as having an independent being. Thus, by degrees, it became at last passive to its own creations. You may see imaginative children every day anthropomorphizing in this way, and the dupes of that super-abundant vitality in themselves, which bestows qualities proper to itself on everything about them. There is a period of development in which grown men are childlike. In such a period the fables which endow beasts with human attributes first grew up; and we luckily read them ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... eye seems rather an external, optical instrument than a bodily member through which emotion and virtue of soul may be expressed, (as pre-eminently in the chameleon,) because the seeming want of sensibility and vitality in a living creature is the most painful of all wants. And next to these in ugliness come the eyes that gain vitality indeed, but only by means of the expression of intense malignity, as in the serpent and ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... sum of the impression which he produces that he ultimately resolves these conflicting emotions into a harmonious tone of feeling. As he stands in such close proximity to real life, and endeavours to endue his own imaginary creations with vitality, the equanimity of the epic poet would in him be indifference; he must decidedly take part with one or other of the leading views of human life, and constrain his audience also to participate ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... of the Land Bill in the Commons, after long and wearisome debate. The Lords amended it to death, and sent it back to the Commons—the poor and pithless shadow of its former self. Restored to life in the Lower House, it was again presented for the acceptance of the peers. Again they struck at its vitality, but the Commons said, Nulla vestigia retrorsum. A thousand popular platforms and almost the whole provincial press called upon the government to be firm; mass meetings in London and other large cities and towns clamored for the abolition ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... up and floated quietly, but courage was ingrained in him; deep down beneath his consciousness was a vitality, an inherited stubborn resistance to death, of which he knew nothing. It was that unidentified quality of mind which supports one man through a great sickness or a long period of privation, while another of more robust ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... we examined the lioness. She was old, if one might judge from her worn teeth, and not very large, but thickly made, and must have possessed extraordinary vitality to have lived so long, shot as she was; for, in addition to her broken shoulder, my express bullet had blown a great hole in her middle that one might have ...
— A Tale of Three Lions • H. Rider Haggard
... a law of guarantees, similar to those which have played so conspicuous a part in the theory, but sometimes also in the practice, of the Dual Monarchy. So many severe amputations might, however, prove too much for the vitality of the patient; and in any case we may assume that either Austria-Hungary will be able to prevent the operation, or that the Allies, if they can once bring matters thus far, will insist upon completing the process by a drastic post-mortem inquiry. Any ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... maybe so involved that paralytic conditions will surely result; and if these nerve centers escape special involvement, other organs may be affected, such as the stomach, bowels, and liver; if these escape, the bones may be so deficient in vitality as to be incapable of sustaining the frame as development proceeds; the skin only may be involved, or the mucous membranes so affected as to make of the child a perpetual snuffler and inefficient breather. In most cases of lesser as well as greater mental ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... concealment which astonished his confederates, but which, perhaps, contributed in no slight degree to the success with which he eluded the efforts directed towards his capture. At length the Fenian organization in Ireland began to pass through the same changes that had given it new leaders and fresh vitality in America. The members of the organization at home began to long for union with the Irish Nationalists who formed the branch of the confederacy regenerated under Colonel Roberts; and Kelly, who, for various reasons, was unwilling to accept the new regime, saw ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... at the cold collation of which Jeeves had spoken. I felt in urgent need of sustenance, for the recent interview had pulled me down a bit. There is no gainsaying the fact that this naked-emotion stuff reduces a chap's vitality and puts him in the vein for a good whack at ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... tubercular animal. It belongs to that small group known as acid-fast bacteria. The tubercle bacillus is not really destroyed by external influences, and it may retain its virulence for several months in dried sputum if protected from the light. Its vitality enables it to resist high temperatures, changes in temperature, drying and putrefaction to a, greater degree than most non-spore-producing germs. Direct sunlight destroys the germ within a few hours, but it may live in poorly lighted, filthy ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... a little picture which seems to have stepped straight out of a Velasquez canvas, the bell-shaped skirt, the stiff corslet, the straight, tight hair and round eyes full of vitality. ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... spoke of; that is to say, the reduction, by competition, of the wages of the worker to the least sum that will maintain life and muscular strength enough to do the work required, with such little surplus of vitality as might be necessary to perpetuate the wretched race; so that the world's work should not end with the death of one starved generation. I do not know if there is a hell in the spiritual universe, but if ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... of energy, evoked under the spell of Io's enchantment, he had filled his spare hours with work, happy, exuberant, overflowing with a quaint vitality. A description of the desert in spate, thumb-nail sketches from a station-agent's window, queer little flavorous stories of crime and adventure and petty intrigue in the town; all done with a deftness and brevity that was saved from being too abrupt only by broad ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... from one of the phenomena of animated Nature,—the nutrition and production of a seed. He regarded the entire world in the light of a living being gradually maturing and forming itself from an imperfect seed-state, which was of a moist nature. This moisture endues the universe with vitality. The world, he thought, was full of gods, but they had their origin in water. He had no conception of God as intelligence, or as a creative power. He had a great and inquiring mind, but it gave him no knowledge of a spiritual, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... demonstrated extraordinary vitality and appetite for punishment. He had no more gone down than the adventurer, peering into the gloom, saw him struggle up on his knees. Instantly Lanyard made toward him, intent on finishing this work so well begun, but in his second stride ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... of a strange, irregular thrill of enthusiasm which ran through him from time to time and startled his imagination into life. It was only the instinct of a strong vitality unconsciously longing to be the central point of the vitalities around it. But he could not understand that. It seemed to him like a great opportunity brought "within reach but slipping by untaken, not to return again. He felt a strange, almost uncontrollable longing ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... hospital, unless you are prepared to have a nurse here for some time, or to assume the burden of a long and tedious illness." He looked at her thoughtfully. "The journey to Shoshone would be a considerable strain on the patient in his present condition. He has a splendid amount of constitutional vitality, or he would scarcely have survived his injuries so long without medical attendance. Can you tell me ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... fifty years old, three dicotyledonous plants germinated: I am certain of the accuracy of this observation. Again, I can show that the carcasses of birds, when floating on the sea, sometimes escape being immediately devoured; and many kinds of seeds in the crops of floating birds long retain their vitality: peas and vetches, for instance, are killed by even a few days' immersion in sea-water; but some taken out of the crop of a pigeon, which had floated on artificial sea-water for thirty days, to my ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... in extent to the half of Europe, are only the purgatory, not yet the real Siberian hell. You still find woods there, poor, thin, dwarfed woods, it is true, but where there is wood there is fire and vitality. The true hell of human torture begins beyond the line of the woods; then there is nothing but ice and snow; ice that does not even melt in the plains in summer—and in the midst of that icy desert, miserable human beings thrown upon this ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... these?" Mr. Coleridge's reply was strong, but expressive. "Why, Davy could eat them all! There is an energy, an elasticity in his mind, which enables him to seize on, and analyze, all questions, pushing them to their legitimate consequences. Every subject in Davy's mind has the principle of vitality. Living thoughts spring up like the turf under his feet." With equal justice, Mr. Davy entertained the same exalted ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... retirement in which Milly lived was easily explained by her delicate health. It seemed as though in her sojourns—which more and more encroached upon those of the original personality—the strong, intrusive ego consumed in an unfair degree the vitality of their common body, leaving Milly with a certain nervous exhaustion, a languor against which she struggled with a pathetic courage. She learned also to cover with a seldom broken silence the deep wound which was ever draining her young heart of its happiness; ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... she answered in a voice that, low and soft, was still richly colored by the wealth of vitality that found expression in her splendid body. "I am not at all indifferent to your condition—quite the contrary. I am intensely interested. As for the amusement you afford me—please consider—for three years I have amused you. Can ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... winding drive at which the gardeners were at work on borders and shrubberies, and on to the road. The air was like champagne. The slight breeze just ruffled the lake on which the sun was glittering; Stafford was conscious of a strange feeling of eagerness, of quickly thrilling vitality which was new to him. He put it down to the glorious morning, to the discovery of the affection of his father, to the good horse that stepped as lightly as an Arab, and carried him as if he were ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... Italian sunlight was pouring into the room and gilding the dingy interior with brilliant reflections. In spite of this cheering glow of sunshine, the rooms still had the same dead and uninhabited appearance, and the presence of my friend, a vigorous and practical man, seemed to bring no recognizable vitality or human element to counteract the oppressiveness of the place. Every detail of my waking dream or hallucination of the night before was perfectly fresh in my mind, and the sense of apprehension was still ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... clergy had ever seen it done before—with his genius too, now so rare, and yet so needed, for governing his fellow-men—That he, in the fulness of his power, his health, his practical example, his practical success, should vanish in a moment: and that immense natural vitality, that organism of forces so various and so delicate, just as it was developing to perfection under long and careful self-education, should be lost for ever to this earth: leaving England, and her colonies, and indeed all Christendom, so much the poorer, ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... forces which we might have named, and which would have manifested the same incontestable supremacy: there is the energy of meekness, that spirit of docility which communes with the Almighty in hallowed and receptive awe: there is the boundless vitality of love which lives on through midnight after midnight, unfainting and unspent: there is the inexhaustible energy of faith which hold on and out amid the massed hostilities of all its foes. You cannot defeat spirits like these, you cannot crush and destroy them. You cannot hold them ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... person of his own age to talk with. In fact, he had never before seen a lad whose friendship he desired. Most boys were so well and strong that they had no conception of what it meant not to be so, and their very robustness and vitality overwhelmed a personality as sensitively attuned as was that of Laurie Fernald. He shrank from their pity, their ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... carry the sad analogy still farther in his increasing pallor, and the slow and not strong pulse which always characterized him. This would perhaps be a mistake. It is difficult to reconcile any idea of bloodlessness with the bounding vitality of his younger body and mind. Any symptom of organic disease could scarcely, in his case, have been overlooked. But so much is certain: he was conscious of what he called a nervousness of nature which neither father ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... We can ruin it by stupid blundering at the very birth, and we can kill it by neglect. It is not every flower that has vitality enough to grow in stony ground. Lack of reticence, which is only the outward sign of lack of reverence, is responsible for the death of many a fair friendship. Worse still, it is often blighted at the very beginning by the insatiable desire for ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... onslaught. He always remained a chief. He was always the head of the restless element, always the fearless and undaunted leader. He was the Marshal Ney of the Indian nations, until sickness and old age sapped his vitality and ambition. ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... individuals belonging to the same species are not all equal in intelligence, any more than in size or strength or vitality. Some dogs are more intelligent than others, and the same is notably true of men. Now, are these differences between members of the same species due to heredity or environment? This question we can better approach after considering ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... belonging to "the family." To my own observation of the ancient seat of the Hays I owe one of the most delightful recollections of my life, that of a Christian home. Not only the outward observances, but the inner spiritual vitality of religion, were there, while unselfish devotion to all within the range of her influence or authority marked the character of her who was at the head of this little family kingdom. The present head of the house, a Hay to the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... Maitres Sonneurs," and "Cosina." From 1850 to 1864 she gave a great deal of attention to the theatre, and of her numerous pieces several enjoyed a wide and considerable success, although it cannot be said that any of her plays have possessed the vitality of her best novels. The most solid of the former was her dramatization of her story, "Le Marquis de Villemer" (1864), which was one of the latest, and next to it "Le Mariage de Victorine" (1851), which was one of the earliest. Her successes ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... Bunsen was brought into contact with the Vatican movement for the establishment of the papal church in the Prussian dominions, to provide for the largely increased Catholic population. He was among the first to realize the importance of this new vitality on the part of the Vatican, and he made it his duty to provide against its possible dangers by urging upon the Prussian court the wisdom of fair and impartial treatment of its Catholic subjects. In this object he was at first ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... and now had her two children with her in Paris. That she could do her literary work and still attend to her manifold social duties must ever mark her as a phenomenon. She was no mere adventuress. That she was systematic, orderly and abstemious in her habits must go without saying, otherwise her vitality would not have held out and allowed her to attend the funerals ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... were the four horses at the Moonbeam;—and he could ride them to hounds as well as any man. So much he could do, and would seem in doing it to be full of life. But as for selling the four horses, and changing altogether the mode of his life,—that was more than he had vitality left to perform. Such was the measure which he took of himself, and in taking it he despised himself thoroughly,—knowing well how poor a ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... that Roger Williams is remembered. His opponents had mightier intellects than his, but the world has long since decided against them. Colonial sermon literature is read today chiefly by antiquarians who have no sympathy for the creed which once gave it vitality. Its theology, like the theology of "Paradise Lost or the Divine Comedy," has sunk to the bottom of the black brook. But we cannot judge fairly the contemporary effect of this pulpit literature without remembering the passionate ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... themselves to the novel of life and manners have all sought to be realistic, and the value of their work largely depends on the success which has attended their efforts in this direction. The enduring vitality of "Tom Jones" is due to Fielding's fidelity to nature, and it is safe to predict that no novel which fails in this respect can have more than an ephemeral reputation. Nothing could be more false than the views of contemporary life contained in ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... nearly insensible. At length I began to move, health returned, the sea-breeze gave me new sensations of life; and, but for one circumstance, I should have felt all the enjoyment of that most delightful of all contrasts—between the languor of a sick bed, and the renewed pouring of vitality ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... accommodate a denser population than could be accommodated on the same surfaces otherwise arranged. Nor is it any argument against bulk being an object with God that space itself is infinite; for there may be an infinity of matter to fill it; and since we see clearly that the endowment of matter with vitality is a principle—indeed, as far as our judgments extend, the leading principle in the operations of Deity, it is scarcely logical to imagine it confined to the regions of the minute, where we daily trace it, and not extending to those of the august. As we find cycle within cycle without end, yet ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... which now exist in Ceylon may, to a considerable extent, be traced back to these two countries. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Tamil conquerors of Ceylon are reported to have burnt every Buddhist book they could discover, in the hope of thus destroying the vitality of that detested religion. Buddhism, however, though persecuted—or, more probably, because persecuted—remained the national religion of the island, and in the eighteenth century it had recovered its ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... to see the spirit of co-operation active in many ways. Churches were quietly doing their work with as little wrangling over small doctrinal differences as could be expected from an age in which wrangling was the chief symptom of vitality. Education had settled upon a basis it has always retained, that of "universal knowledge at the public cost"; the College was doing its work so effectually that students came from England itself to share in her privileges, and justice gave as impartial and even- handed results as conscientious ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... noise the beast was still assaulting the tree, and Vye marveled at its vitality, for the belly wound would long ago have killed any creature he knew. Whether it could trace his flight aloft, or whether its howls would bring more of its kind, he could not guess, but every second he could gain was ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... muscularity of his whole person—indicated correctly the possession of prodigious strength. His face was finely southern. His features were frank and fearless—moderately intelligent, and well marked—the tout ensemble showing an active vitality, strong, and usually just feelings, and a good-natured freedom of character, which enlisted confidence, and seemed likely to acknowledge few restraints of a merely conventional kind. Nor, in any of ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... he had seen the animal not only move its fins, but actually swim off some distance from the ship! He knew, moreover, that a shark may be cut in twain,—have the head separated from the body,—and still exhibit signs of vitality in both parts for many hours after the dismemberment! Talk of the killing of a cat or an eel!—a shark will stand as much killing as twenty cats or a bushel of eels, and still ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... make such a statement to-day seems not unlike the sober announcement that the earth is round or that the sun does not revolve about it. Before Harvey's time, however, it was considered as an organ that was "in some mysterious way the source of vitality and warmth, as an animated crucible for the concoction of blood and the generation ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... attentions were tempting him to dietetic destruction. A few months after he wrote the words, "The children are well" and "At any rate, I want to go first," he was returning to America with the body of his eldest son, who died suddenly in Holland, and facing bravely the fact that his own vitality had been fatally impaired. "What exceeding folly," he wrote to a friend, "was it that tempted me to cross the sea in search of what I do not seem able to find here—a righteous stomach? I have been wallowing in the slough ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... in the nest, though!" he exclaimed; and putting in his hand he drew out an extraordinary little lump of vitality, which, however, was evidently a young bird. "I will bring it down to its mother," he said; "for if I threw it, the poor ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... did not fulfil their obligations to the State. These obligations had been long since abolished, and the feudal tenure transformed into an unconditional right of property, but the peasants clung to the old ideas in a way that strikingly illustrates the vitality of deep-rooted popular conceptions. In their minds the proprietors were merely temporary occupants, who were allowed by the Tsar to exact labour and dues from the serfs. What, then, was Emancipation? Certainly the abolition of all obligatory labour and money dues, and perhaps ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... exhausting; it ate away the life of the nation, because it drew wholly upon itself and not upon the outside world, with which it could have been kept in contact by the sea. In the war that next followed, the same energy is seen, but not the same vitality; and France was everywhere beaten back and brought to the verge of ruin. The lesson of both is the same; nations, like men, however strong, decay when cut off from the external activities and resources which at once draw ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... the artist's father, and is represented with such truth of nature and so much vitality of expression and character as at once to give rise to the remark, 'I must have known that man, he seems so living ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... Goddard Tuckerman, lacking narrative interest, palatable platitudes, lyric lilt, but being, rather, contemplative, aloof, delicately minor and in many ways curiously modern, must have fallen on ears not attuned to it. He had none of the Bolshevik revolutionary vitality of Whitman, to thrive and grow by the opposition he created. He could have aroused no opposition. It would have been his happy fate to find men and women who could appreciate his delicate observation of nature, his golden bursts of imaginative vigor, his wistful, contemplative ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... mischievous, evil and cunning in Saxo's eyes. Oldest of beings, with chaotic force and exuberance, monstrous in extravagant vitality. ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... difference in the temperature of the climate between summer and winter. Frosts are unknown. It is no disparagement to San Francisco to say that Oakland for delicate persons is more desirable. The trade winds as they blow from the Pacific ocean, and make one robust and hardy in San Francisco, when there is vitality to resist them, are tempered as they blow across the Bay some fourteen miles or more, while the fogs, so noted, as they rush in through the Golden Gate and speed onward, are greatly modified as they reach the further shore. As it has such a splendid climate ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... Thus it happens that on seeking a definition of life there is great difficulty in finding one that is neither more nor less than sufficient. As the best mode of determining the general characteristics of vitality, let us compare its two most unlike kinds and ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... bald. He reminded you of Mr Pickwick. He was grotesque, a figure of fun, and yet, strangely enough, not without dignity. His blue eyes, behind large gold-rimmed spectacles, were shrewd and vivacious, and there was a great deal of determination in his face. He was sixty, but his native vitality triumphed over advancing years. Notwithstanding his corpulence his movements were quick, and he walked with a heavy, resolute tread as though he sought to impress his weight upon the earth. He spoke in ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... languages which have outlived their current use and have been preserved for religious purposes alone, Hebrew is, so far as I am aware, the only one which has ever showed signs of renewing its old vitality—like the roses of Jericho which appear to be dead and shrivelled but which, when placed in water, recover their vitality and their bloom. We may join in hoping that again in Palestine Hebrew may recover ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... The conversation showed no vitality, and down it dropped dead as before, the man who was standing up continuing to gaze into the moisture. What had at first appeared as an epicene shape the decreasing space resolved into a cloaked female under an umbrella: she now relaxed her ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... with the blood in that important organ. The effect of the air upon the blood is this: by thrusting out as it were, all the noxious properties which it has collected in its passage through the body, it endues it with the peculiar property of vitality, that is, it enables it to build up, repair, and excite the different functions and organs of the body. If therefore this air, which we inhale every instant, be not pure, the whole mass of blood is very soon contaminated, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 392, Saturday, October 3, 1829. • Various
... place where the marble boat was kept, and I was about finished. I never saw such vitality in an old woman in my life as Her Majesty had, and it was no wonder that she had ruled this vast Empire of China so successfully ...
— Two Years in the Forbidden City • The Princess Der Ling
... voting down the "Middle-of-the-Road" group that adhered to independence. Bryan was nominated, although Sewall was rejected for Thomas E. Watson, of Georgia. The organization of the People's Party continued after 1896, but its vitality was gone forever. ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... Eitel, "signifies the highest pitch of abstract, ecstatic meditation; a state of absolute indifference to all influences from within or without; a state of torpor of both the material and spiritual forces of vitality; a sort of terrestrial Nirvana, consistently culminating ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... soaring rapture, and profundity of sigh, suspense (more agonizing than suspension), despair, prostration, grinding of the teeth, the hollow and spectral laugh of a heart forever broken, and all the other symptoms of an annual bill of vitality; and every new pledge of his affections sped him toward the pledge-shop. But never had he crossed that fatal threshold; the thought of his uniform and dignity prevailed; and he was not so mean as to send a child to do what ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... noticed that the largest fish despise flies, much as a person of a full roast-beef habit may be supposed to turn up his nose at a small mutton-chop. In other rivers they take the fly quite freely, but in the Potomac they have had that branch of their education greatly neglected. In the matter of vitality they are simply extraordinary: they cling to life with a tenacity that very few fish exhibit. In the spring or fall, when the water and the air are at a comparatively low temperature, a bass will live for eight or ten hours without water. The ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... rose, its force lessened, my vitality grew, and the terrible desire to yield and be swept away waned. Now we had reached the foot of the cyclopean stairs, now we were half up them—and now as we struggled out upon the ledge on which the watching fortress stood, the clutching stream shoaled swiftly, the shoal ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... have been some years older than her husband,—how many we need not inquire too curiously,—but in vitality she had long passed the prime in which he was still flourishing. She had borne him five children, and cried her eyes hollow over the graves of three of them. Household cares had dragged upon her; the routine of village life wearied her; ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... that the little good-for-nothings that come of utterly used-up and worn-out stock, and ought to die, can't die, to save their lives. So they grow up to dilute the vigor of the race with skim-milk vitality. They would have died, like good children, in most average country places; but eight months of shelter in a regulated temperature, in a well-sunned house, in a duly moistened air, with good sidewalks to go about on in all weather, and four months of the cream of summer ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... appearance would have placed her in the profession of a trained nurse, or perhaps in the remotest analysis, a sewing woman of superior tastes. She was small, wiry, her head too large for her body; but the abounding nervous vitality, the harsh fire that burned in her large brown eyes, and the firm mouth would have attracted the attention of the most careless. Her mask, with its high Slavic cheek-bones and sharp Jewish nose, proclaimed her a magnetic woman. In her quarter on the far East Side the children called her "Aunt Yetta." ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... and early in April was in a condition to inspire the highest expectations." And Swinton well sums up: "Under Hooker's influence the tone of the army underwent a change which would appear astonishing had not its elastic vitality been ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge |
