"Dumbness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... back to Miss Jencks and Caliban. It was Harriet Buxton who had suggested that the boy was not so deaf as we had thought, only stupid, and that his dumbness might yield to the methods then being so successfully used with that afflicted child who has since triumphed so brilliantly over more than human obstacles. Although, as Harriet pointed out, I have always ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... within forty years they would be watchful of their publications, lest, by inadvertence, anything disrespectful might be spoken of the African Slave-trade,—that they would consider it an ample equivalent for compulsory dumbness on the vices of Slavery, that their colporteurs could awaken the minds of Southern brethren to the horrors of St. Bartholomew,—that they would hold their peace about the body of Cuffee dancing to the music of the cart-whip, provided only ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... at the dumbness, the paralysis that had fallen upon her. Grace, confidence, the power of movement even, seemed gone from her. A fever of shame ran through her being. Horrible doubts assailed her. She sat down awkwardly and helplessly on one of the little stools by her ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... again at last—"You may want to know what I get by it. But that's my own affair." He really didn't want to know even this—or continued, for the safest plan, quite to behave as if he didn't; which prolonged the mere dumbness of diversion in which he had taken refuge. He was glad when, finally—the point she had wished to make seeming established to her satisfaction—they brought to what might pass for a close the moment of his life at which he had had least to say. Movement and progress, after this, with more ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... again, the incredulous terror with which she had taken the measure of her dwelling. Between those four walls she had lived ever since; they were to surround her for the rest of her life. It was the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation. Osmond's beautiful mind gave it neither light nor air; Osmond's beautiful mind indeed seemed to peep down from a small high window and mock at her. Of course it had not been physical ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... room stricken into dumbness by the shock of this sudden calamity. Time passed. The awful news flashed through the house. The servants heard it, and came silent and awe-struck to the room; but when they saw the white face, and the mourner by the bedside, they stood still, nor did they dare to cross ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... There was a tremendous oppression upon her, such as one feels sometimes in a nightmare dream. She longed to speak out, to clear herself in Maurice's eyes, and yet she could not frame a single intelligible sentence. It was as though she were afflicted with dumbness. ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... his tongue of the break with God has been radical and strange. Dumbness, and slowness or thickness of speech alternate with an unnatural sharpness. Sometimes the spittle has a peculiar oiliness that results in a certain slipperiness of statement. Sometimes it has a bitter, poisonous, ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... that they forgive me? thinkest thou that, were only the plebeians my safeguard and my favourers, they would not seize me by open force,—that I had not long ere this found a gag in their dungeons, or been swallowed up in the eternal dumbness of the grave? Observe," continued he, as, reading the Vicar's countenance, he perceived the impression he had made—"observe, that, throughout the whole world, a great revolution has begun. The barbaric darkness of centuries has been broken; the ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... on, ye feathered songsters, Lift your praises loud and high, Merry lark, and thrush, and blackbird, In the grove and in the sky Make your music, shame our dumbness, Till ...
— A Christmas Faggot • Alfred Gurney
... Omar in a weak voice, his eyes starting from his head. "Life cannot be unchequered by the frowns of fate, but death must bring dumbness to my lips. Caution, when besmeared in blood, is no longer virtue, or wisdom, but wretched and degenerate cowardice; no, never let him that was born to execute judgment secure his honours by cruelty and oppression. Hath not thy Koran told thee that fear and submission is a subject's tribute, ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... understood, did his utmost to put softness and tenderness into his voice so that the sincerity of his tone might prevail if his words did not. As a rule, however fine and deep a phrase may be, it only affects the indifferent, and cannot fully satisfy those who are happy or unhappy; that is why dumbness is most often the highest expression of happiness or unhappiness; lovers understand each other better when they are silent, and a fervent, passionate speech delivered by the grave only touches outsiders, while to the widow and ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... when they tumbled in and saw her was marked. But the utter dumbness that followed this question was so impressive that Ruth could almost hear her own ...
— Ruth Fielding at the War Front - or, The Hunt for the Lost Soldier • Alice B. Emerson
... you, to awake your dormouse valour, to put fire in your heart, and brimstone in your liver. You should then have accosted her; and with some excellent jests, fire-new from the mint, you should have bang'd the youth into dumbness. This was look'd for at your hand, and this was balk'd: the double gilt of this opportunity you let time wash off, and you are now sail'd into the north of my lady's opinion; where you will hang like an icicle on Dutchman's beard, unless you do redeem ...
— Twelfth Night; or, What You Will • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... lips, so much as to say, That is well, or, I like this. We have often asked, Madam, do you want anything? Is there anything you wish for? Do but ask and command us: but we have never been able to draw a word from her. We cannot tell whether her silence proceeds from pride, sorrow, stupidity, or dumbness; and this is all ...
— Fairy Tales From The Arabian Nights • E. Dixon
... phlegmatic society, that lady being stout and lazy, fond of her meals, and given to afternoon slumbers. Lesbia and Mary were not by any means sympathetic; yet, after all, blood is thicker than water; and Lesbia was intelligent, and could talk of the things Mary loved, which was better than total dumbness, even if she generally took an ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... He hires a couple of rooms in a hotel. His wife puts some flowers on the mantel piece in the sitting-room and wears her best dress all the time while she is waiting for the president's consort and the cabinet ladies to call. They do not call. The Hon. Slote is shocked almost to dumbness to discover that the Capital does not know that he is on earth. Beyond a two-line "personal" in the morning paper, jammed among the "hotel arrivals," no mention is made of his coming. He has bills in his trunk providing for a public ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... impressive, like some wax mask of an avenging Fate. With a sensation of relief, Patty's eyes wandered from the haggard face to a calla lily in a pot on the window-sill, and she noticed that it bore a single perfect blossom. While she waited, overcome by a dumbness which seemed to invade her from head to foot, her eyes clung to that calla lily as if it were her one connection with reality. All the rest, the close, dingy room, with the ailantus tree and the high wall beyond, the sickening sweetish odour with which she was unfamiliar, the ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... may the wild beast of the forest tear me to pieces, may my own weapon turn against me in the evil hour, may I be terrified by midnight spectres and hag-ridden, may my body be smitten with leprosy, my eyes with blindness, my tongue with dumbness, my bones by rottenness, if ever I speak one syllable to anybody, be it priest, or child, or father, or condemning judge, or threatening headsman, of anything I have seen, heard or learnt in this place, or write it down with my hand or put anybody on the track of it! May every ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... heroic temper, without sadness or bitterness; the thing was to tear away the veil and look fate in the face. The great thing, perhaps, was to speak of it while still they could give themselves leave; a day would arrive, they acknowledged with averted eyes, when dumbness would be more becoming. Meanwhile, Mrs Murchison would have found it hard to sustain her charge against them that they talked of nothing but books and authors; the philosophy of life, as they were intensely creating it, was more entrancing than any book or any author. Simply and definitely, and ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... ran each to the other, and did be silent, because that there was no speech of words by which we could say aught of all that did be in our hearts. And truly you to be with me in understanding; for you too, mayhap, to have suffered thiswise of dumbness; even if that it hath not been so great. But yet to ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... Mrs Todgers, 'how he used to watch your sister; and that a kind of stony dumbness came over him whenever she was ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... absorbing enthusiasm was the instruction of a class of deaf-mutes, who could be trained to talk, he believed, by means of the "Visible Speech" alphabet. He was so deeply impressed by the progress made by these pupils, and by the pathos of their dumbness, that when he arrived in Canada he was in doubt as to which of these two tasks was the more important—the teaching of deaf-mutes or the ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... talk he is obliged by the necessities of life, or at least he thinks so; though my own private belief is, that the wisest rule upon which a man could act in this world (alas! I did not myself act upon it) would be to seal up his mouth from earliest youth, to simulate the infirmity of dumbness, and to answer only by signs. This would soon put an end to the impertinence of questions, to the intolerable labour of framing and uttering replies through a whole life, and, above all (oh, foretaste of Paradise!), to the hideous ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... how much he loved her, surely it was a hopeless task to attempt an explanation through mere words. If, after all, she was capable of misconceiving the entire set of his motives during the past two years, expostulation would be futile. In his thoughts of her he fell into a great spiritual dumbness. Never, even in his moments of most theoretical imaginings, did he see himself setting before her fully and calmly the hopes and ambitions of which she had been the mainspring. And before a reconciliation, many such rehearsals must take place in the secret ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... to a comrade, but it was nice to have to look after the little ones too. They were grateful for it, and he discovered that it gave him much pleasure. Boy Comfort he was very fond of now, his only sorrow being that the boy could not talk yet. His dumbness ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... fancy and a grief proportioned to his own power of suffering. How we long to pierce the thoughts and feel the heart-beats and watch the trickling tears behind that machine-like exterior, that impassible mask! Our imagination is powerfully excited by the dumbness of that fate borne by one whose words never reached the outward air, whose thoughts could never be read on the hidden features; by the isolation of forty years secured by two-fold barriers of stone and iron, and she clothes the object of her contemplation in majestic splendour, connects the ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... as choking rage enabled him to speak. "Silence, I say! ere I strike thee into eternal dumbness. What I have said, I've said. Dost hear me? To-morrow, at the Circus, I will name thy husband, and then and there thou shalt accept him, whoever he may be. I have a reason for wishing this—a reason of State far beyond the comprehension of a ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... together, and his eyes grew hot, bursting. His lips moved as in speaking, though with never a sound. It was the dumbness—the choking dumbness of that emotion which made it so terrible. Such silence could not last—he seemed to feel it could not—and so moved backward out of hearing. There he stood for a little while, leaning ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... dismissal. Disconcerted, wholly ill at ease, the four went obediently to the library, deserted now that the cotillion was beginning. The two men struggled valiantly with the conversation, but the twins sat stricken to shamed dumbness: no topic could thrive in the face of their mute rigidity. Silences stalked the failing efforts. Mr. White's eyes clung to the clock while his throat dilated with secret yawns; Mr. Morton twisted restlessly and finally let a nervous sigh ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... doctor, then, since I can cure dumbness," cried the outlaw. "Now let me see whether I can mend your broken leg, gossip," and he cut the first cripple so suddenly across the shins that he dropped his staff and commenced to dance with pain. ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... you have been readers of Tolstoi, you will see that I passed into a vein of feeling similar to his, with its abhorrence of all that conventionally passes for distinguished, and its exclusive deification of the bravery, patience, kindliness, and dumbness of ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... Elysees, recovering from his transient delirium, the Schoolmaster had awoke in a cell of the Conciergerie, where the insane are temporarily confined. Hearing every one say around him, "He is a furious madman," he resolved to continue to play his part, and pretended dumbness in order not to compromise himself by his answers, in case they should suspect his feigned insanity. This stratagem succeeded. Conducted to Bicetre, he pretended to have other attacks of madness, always taking care to choose ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... party took advantage of his dumbness—which, as she had not unnaturally mistaken him for the butler, she took for a silent and respectful query as to her business and ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... remember kisses, Remember the dear heart-leap when they came: Not always, but sometimes we remember The kindness, the dumbness, the good flame Of ...
— The Congo and Other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... instincts, would be capable of few higher intellectual manifestations than an Orang or a Chimpanzee, if he were confined to the society of dumb associates. And yet there might not be the slightest discernible difference between his brain and that of a highly intelligent and cultivated person. The dumbness might be the result of a defective structure of the mouth, or of the tongue, or a mere defective innervation of these parts; or it might result from congenital deafness, caused by some minute defect of the internal ear, which only a ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... taciturn almost to dumbness. She is a thick-set, black-haired woman, and looks at me disapprovingly out of the corner of her eye as if I were a blackbeetle which she would like to squash under foot. She tolerates me, however, on ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... O sweet! when I do look on thee, In whom all joys so well agree, Sweet, think not I am at ease, For because my chief part singeth; This song from death's sorrow springeth: As to swan in last disease: For no dumbness, nor death, bringeth Stay to true love's melody: Heart and soul do ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... true God, the Creator, many a time to you, as well as the creation of the world and the fate that's to come and the transformation of every sort of creature and every sort of beast out of the Apocalypse, but you've persisted like a senseless idol in your deafness and your dumbness and have brought Ensign Erkel to the same, like the veriest evil seducer ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... was but little wind. There was an inexplicable dumbness in the cold. There was no hail. The thickness of the falling ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... have accosted her; and with some excellent jests, fire-new from the mint, you should have banged the youth into dumbness." ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... not have been a person that our great Master [20] cast out of another person; therefore the devil herein referred to was an impersonal evil, or whatever worketh ill. In this case it was the evil of dumbness, an error of material sense, cast out by the spiritual truth of being; namely, that speech belongs to Mind instead of matter, [25] and the wrong power, or the lost sense, must yield to the right sense, and exist ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... Italian tones; "and thou would'st not create a pang in my heart? Then never seek to learn wherefore, when at the still tender age of fifteen, I resolved upon consummating so dreadful a sacrifice as to affect dumbness. The circumstances were, indeed, solemnly grave and strangely important, which demanded so awful a martyrdom. But well did I weigh all the misery and all the peril that such a self-devotion was sure to entail upon me. I knew that I must exercise the most stern—the ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... they got out, and left me pondering on deafness and dumbness. To be dumb, of course, is, comparatively speaking, nothing; for most of the perplexities of life come from talk. But to be deaf—to live ever in silence, to see laughing lips moving, to see hands ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... Tessie pretending fear just for the joy of having Chuck reassure her. Then back again in the dusk, Chuck bending to the task now against the current. And so up the hill, homeward bound. They walked very slowly, Chuck's hand on her arm. They were dumb with the tragic, eloquent dumbness of their kind. If she could have spoken the words that were churning in her mind, they would have ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... actors of the scene at Chaillot. I will, moreover, grant that we may draw the following inference,—that even men of genius are liable to cross humours; but I must at the same time add that the example is not dangerous, dumbness not being an efficacious method of making one's self valued, or ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... vehemence into a constructive vindictiveness, an imaginary annihilation of the deserted object, something like the hidden rites of vengeance with which the persecuted have made a dark vent for their rage, and soothed their suffering into dumbness. Such hidden rites went on in the secrecy of Gwendolen's mind, but not with soothing effect—rather with the effect of a struggling terror. Side by side with the dread of her husband had grown the self-dread which ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... threw himself, and on the ground he remained, his eyes fixed on heaven, his lips closed in dumbness; and thus he continued for the space of three days and three nights, till his frenzy had mounted to such a pitch that it turned against himself. He then arose in fury, and tore off mail and breastplate, and every particle of clothing ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... account as much as possible, all things were concluded to their mutual satisfaction, and in about a fortnight's time they set forward for Wales, where Dickory, notwithstanding his dumbness, behaved himself with so much diligence and affability, that he not only gained the love of the family where he lived, ...
— Dickory Cronke - The Dumb Philosopher, or, Great Britain's Wonder • Daniel Defoe
... says, "I saw a smith stand with open mouth swallowing a tailor's news." ('King John,' act iv. scene ii.) And again, "They seemed almost, with staring on one another, to tear the cases of their eyes; there was speech in the dumbness, language in their very gesture; they looked as they had heard of a world destroyed." ('Winter's Tale,' ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... other accomplishments, had a faculty for dumbness and said nothing; but a smile which approached a grin formed on his face as he stood eyeing quizzically first one and then the other. Finally, picking up the empty glasses, he left ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... who is born of a boundless birth, who takes for his fireside the immeasurable—express or expect to be expressed? What we would like to be—even what we are—who can say? Our music is an apostrophe to dumbness. The Pantomime above us rolls softly, resistlessly on, over the pantomime within us. We and our machines, both, hewing away on the infinite, beckon and ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... down slowly, reluctantly, the melancholy charm of the place catching at my dress as I walked, like the supplicating fingers of a ghost condemned to dumbness. There was one rock-hewn house I had wanted to see, coming up, which Lady Turnour had scorned, saying "when you've been in one, you've been in all." And she had not understood the guide's story of a legend that was attached to this particular house. ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... homelessness. Set forth for me the wine, the honeycomb Whereto desire saith 'Yes!' O Senses, weave me from all lovely dust Some home-array, some fair familiar garb For me, exiled. Charm me some rare anointment I may trust Against her query, searching like a barb The dumbness of a heart unreconciled. Clothe me with silver; fold me from dismay; Save me from pity. For I hear her say, ...
— The Singing Man • Josephine Preston Peabody
... as well, but 'tisn't a many. There's hen bane which do kill the fowls and fishes if they eat the seed of it. And there's water hemlock which lays dumbness upon man. ...
— Six Plays • Florence Henrietta Darwin
... speak, being stricken with fear and the dumbness of bewilderment. He stood quite silent, and as he lifted his eyes and let them rest on the stranger's own, they became large with ...
— The Little Hunchback Zia • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... led to different wishes as to burial. Perhaps Joseph felt that his position in Egypt required that his embalmed body should for a while remain there. Perhaps he wished to leave with his people a silent witness of his own hope, and a preacher, eloquent in its dumbness, of the duty of their keeping alive that hope, whatever ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... being made ridiculous, her sense of outrage that a perfectionist like herself should suffer punishment, added to her knowledge of the flight of time on school mornings, strangled her into dumbness. But she clasped the paper in her breast as a drowning man might a spar from the wreck. At least Number 4 was intact. She had been mercifully spared the fracture of this one ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... the reigning conventionalities. The rigidity of behavior which at this time characterized the Bostonians seemed sometimes ludicrous and sometimes disagreeable to the foreign visitor. There was great gravity, together with a certain pomp and dumbness, and these things were supposed to be natural to the inhabitants and to give them joy. People are apt to forget that such masks are never worn with ease. They result from the application of an inflexible will, and always inflict discomfort. The Transcendentalists ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... his wife, who was childless, should have a son in her old age who should be a great prophet and preacher, proclaiming the Messiah. Since that time, the aged couple, who live south of Jerusalem, have indeed been blessed with a child, the father's dumbness disappearing with its birth and the priest again praising the Lord of his people. To this child has been given the name ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... too much for John. 'Upon my heart and life, my dea—' he began. Here Bob's letter crackled warningly in his waistcoat pocket as he laid his hand asseveratingly upon his breast, and he became suddenly scaled up to dumbness ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... care he cut slice after slice, each one so thin that the light shone through it. Every head was turned toward him and each burning pair of eyes was fixed upon the precious bread with an expression of animal dumbness, which reminded one of the intent eyes of a hungry dog as it watches a hoped-for morsel. As he advanced step by step, the wounded stretched up shriveled hands, or propped themselves on one elbow to make ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... knowledge of nature brings him nearer to the unchanging and consoling element in the world. All the quite happy entertainment which he gets out of life comes to him from his contemplation of the peasant, as himself a rooted part of the earth, translating the dumbness of the fields into humour. His peasants have been compared with Shakespeare's; that is, because he has the Shakespearean sense of their placid vegetation by the side of hurrying animal life, to which they act the ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... teeth. This, I tell you, was for him the first axiom of wisdom, 'Meditation is learning, speech is unlearning.' His disciples, however, did not refrain from speech all their lives, nor did their master impose dumbness on all for a like space of time. For those of more solid character a brief term of silence was considered sufficient discipline; the more talkative were punished by exile from speech for as much as five years. I may add that my master Plato deviates little or not at all from the principles ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... Juliet found herself compelled. But with what heart-tearing groans and sobs, with what intervals of dumbness, in which the truth seemed unutterable for despair and shame, followed by what hurrying of wild confession, as if she would cast it from her, the sad tale found its way into Dorothy's aching heart, I will not attempt to describe. It is enough that at last ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... severely by their self-imposed dumbness, but they suffered like Stoics. Maggie also suffered, and Maggie would not stand it. Maggie it was who had invented the slate. Indeed, they had heard some plain truths from that stout, bustling woman. They had not yielded, but they had accepted the slate in order to minimize the inconvenience ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... anger within her was turned into the rage of dumbness. What reasons for her belief could she give? All the reasons that seemed so strong and living within her—she saw them suffocated and shrivelled up under her husband's breath. There was no proof to give, but her own impression, which would seem to him her own folly. She turned her head ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... Amour," autobiographical novel by Albert Savarus; a sort of "ferocious" Sormano. Represented as a young Sicilian girl, fourteen years old, in the services of the Gandolphinis, political refugees at Gersau, Switzerland, in 1823. So devoted as to pretend dumbness on occasion, and to wound more or less seriously the hero of the romance, Rodolphe, who had secretly entered ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... have been in poor Tom at once; of lust, as Obidicut; Hobbididance, prince of dumbness; Mahu, of stealing; Modo, of murder; and Flibbertigibbet, of mopping and mowing; who since possesses chamber-maids and waiting-women. So bless thee, master!]] The passage in crotchets is omitted in the folio, because I suppose ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... fellow, speak to him! I'll have none of this coacted, unnatural dumbness in my house, in a family where ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... beast called Winter, untamed, has returned, and taken possession of New England. Nature, giving up her melting mood, has retired into dumbness and white stagnation. But we are wise. We say it is better to have it now than later. We have a ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... me scenes miscalled of the bygone, Over the leaze, Past the clump, and down to where lay the beheld ones; —Yea, as the rhyme Sung by the sea-swell, so in their pleading dumbness Captured me these. ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... I make a broken delivery of the business; but the changes I perceived in the king and Camillo were very notes of admiration. They seem'd almost, with staring on one another, to tear the cases of their eyes; there was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture; they looked as they had heard of a world ransomed, or one destroyed: a notable passion of wonder appeared in them; but the wisest beholder, that knew no more but seeing could not say if the importance were joy or sorrow;—but ...
— The Winter's Tale - [Collins Edition] • William Shakespeare
... he will deny being a doctor, but they must beat him well. So they find the faggot-maker, whom they beat soundly, till he consents to follow them. He is introduced to Lucinde, who pretends to be dumb, but, being a shrewd man, he soon finds out that the dumbness is only a pretence, and takes with him L['e]andre as an apothecary. The two lovers understand each other, and Lucinde is rapidly cured with "pills matrimoniac."—Moli['e]re, Le M['e]decin Malgr['e] ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... dreaded, the world from which they had fled. But all this extraordinary drama, this intensity of feeling, remained inarticulate. They could only say, "Thank you, Miss Innes; it was very good of you to come to sing for us." It was their very dumbness that made them seem so wonderful. It was the dumbness of these women—they could only speak in prayer—it was that that overcame her. But the Reverend Mother was different. Evelyn listened to her, thinking of nothing but her, and when the Reverend Mother left her, Evelyn moved away, still ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... 10. Alice and I went to Mr. Durant to-day about the tree planting; but Alice was stricken with temporary dumbness and never opened her lips, though she had solemnly promised to do at least half the talking; so I had to wade right into the subject alone. I began in medias res, for I couldn't think of a really graceful and diplomatic introduction on the spur of the moment. Mr. Durant ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... to suspend their opinions," &c. On the words: "the tongue of the dumb shall shout," compare Matt. xii. 22: [Greek: tote prosenechthe auto daimonzomenos, tuphlos kai kophos. kai etherapeusen auton, hoste ton tuphlon kai kophon kai lalein kai blepein.] Spiritual dumbness is the incapacity for the praise of God which, in the time when salvation is withheld, so easily creeps in, and which is removed by the bestowal of salvation. The words: "For in the wilderness," &c., state the ground of the leaping and shouting, point to the bestowal ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... guessed the nature of my errand at Cocheforet, and that they were not minded to be bound by Mademoiselle's orders. In particular, I augured the worst from Clon's appearance. His lean malevolent face and sunken eyes, his very dumbness chilled me. ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... was seized with overpowering dumbness and chill. What was really in his mind was the Terrace—was Wharton's advancing figure. But her state—the ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sort. The man with the palsy could not come himself, however much he wanted to do so, and four men were required to bring him; the child was dead and so beyond all human help; the two blind men were undoubtedly beggars and outcasts; the dumb man was possessed of a devil in addition to his dumbness; the group of people who were subjects of his healing power had every manner of disease, but while the people were different and the cases were desperate, ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... with thy dumbness me deceive, I know before the fitting man all Nature yields, Though answering not in words, the skies, trees, hear his voice—and thou O sun, As for thy throes, thy perturbations, sudden breaks and shafts of flame gigantic, I understand ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... 21st.—To-day not for the first time felt a great want of courage to express feelings strongly awakened on hearing a speech of O'Connell. To have so strong an impulse and not obey it seems unnatural; it seems like an inflicted dumbness. 28th.—Spoke 30 to 35 minutes on University bill, with more ease than I had hoped, having been more mindful or less unmindful of Divine aid. Divided in 75 v. 164. [To his father next day.] You will see by your Post that I held forth last night on the Universities bill. The House ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... unbroken silence was another element of horror. The doomed spectatress of this solemn, maddening whirl would fain have shrieked, or even whispered, to break the silence, but she could not. Either her powers of articulation had disappeared in that region of universal dumbness, or the dead atmosphere was waveless, and could vibrate to no sound. She knew, by harrowing experience, the scene that was to come, and she prayed inwardly to God to ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... that it seemed as if every string must be broken. This mania spread until even the outlying bassoons, triangles, and celestas were infected. A piercing note of command, however, from a clarinet caused a devastating dumbness to fall suddenly on every instrument except the piano, which continued self-consciously alone. The pianist looked at the ceiling mostly, but one note seemed to be an especial favourite with him, and whenever he played it he looked closely and paternally at it, almost indeed applying his ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... and the malcontents of the stricter persuasion were convinced, that no one but a Papist and a malignant would have kept near her person a creature of such doubtful origin. They conceived that Fenella's deafness and dumbness were only towards those of this world, and that she had been heard talking, and singing, and laughing most elvishly, with the invisibles of her own race. They alleged, also, that she had a Double, a sort of apparition resembling her, which slept in the Countess's ante-room, ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... the sad event. But there was no whispering in the house; only the funereal rustling of dresses as the women gathered to their seats disturbed the silence there. None could remember when the little church had been so full before. There was finally a waiting pause, an expectant dumbness, and then Aunt Polly entered, followed by Sid and Mary, and they by the Harper family, all in deep black, and the whole congregation, the old minister as well, rose reverently and stood until the mourners were seated in the front pew. There was another communing silence, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... all,— Hath stood with me upon a silent hill, When the last flush of the dissolving day Fainted before the moonlight, and, as 'twere Unconscious of my listening, uttered there The comprehensions of a soul true poised With elemental beauty, giving tongue Unto the dumbness of the blissful air. So have I seen him, too, within his home, When, newspaper on knee, his earnest gaze Seemed scanning issues from the money list; But comments came not, till my curious eye Led out his meditation ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... with the boy who didn't count. But, as luck would have it, to take the empty places, from the head table, vanquished, came Cousin Jim and his partner. Jim now played opposite her, and laughed over his "dumbness" at the game. ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... see? could he feel through the faintness, the numbness, While linger'd the spirit half-loosed from the clay, Dumb eyes seeking his in their piteous dumbness, Dumb quivering ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... conjure. His daughter has gone across the field; she has learned to read, but not to write, at the village school. The two old people, husband and wife, are fools. The whole family share a sort of animal dumbness; if I ask them a question, I may or may not get half a reply: "Mm-no, mm-yes." I am not a Lapp, ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... dumbness and blindness thus open the way for, vanity instantly reinforces. That is to say, once a normal man has succumbed to the meretricious charms of a definite fair one (or, more accurately, once a definite fair one has marked him out and grabbed him by the nose), he defends his ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... logic, literature, or political economy, no man can speak with more positive and perfect assurance. But on all topics where the conscience—the inner most moral nature—must be the umpire, "the English Opium Eater" is silent. His "silence" indeed, "answers very loud," his dumbness has a tongue, but it requires a "fine ear" to hear its accents; and to interpret them what but his own exquisitely subtle and musical style, like ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... nature yours than of a child Whose dumbness finds a voice mighty to call, In wordless pity, to the souls of all, Whose lives I turn to profit, and whose mute And constant friendship links the man ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... of the child's betwitching smiles, she stood for a moment regarding him, not in mere silence, but with a look of dumbness. She was a mother. One who is mother only to her own children is not a mother; she is only a woman who has borne children. But here ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... the boys. They were as silent as before. It seemed as though they had been smitten with sudden dumbness. ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... those eyes upon her. All his strength and bigness, all his manhood, huge and unaware, seemed to lie deep in them like a monster coiled up under the sea. When he looked at her he seemed to lose that heavy dumbness, that inarticulate stupidity which occasionally stirred and vexed even her good disposition; his mouth might still be shut, but his eyes were fluent—they told her not only of his manhood but ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... was visible; the midnight sun, by this time muffled in a transparent mist, shed an awful, mysterious lustre on glacier and mountain; no atom of vegetation gave token of the earth's vitality: an universal numbness and dumbness seemed to pervade the solitude. I suppose in scarcely any other part of the world is this appearance of deadness so strikingly exhibited. On the stillest summer day in England, there is always perceptible an under-tone of life ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... course Ithuel understood all that was said in English, while the very idea of being catechized in French threw him into a cold sweat. In this strait the idea suddenly crossed his mind that his greatest security would be in feigning dumbness. ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... him that the trampling roar grew louder every second, drowning into dumbness the crashing and grinding of the ice; and the volleying mist-clouds seemed to race up-stream to meet him. Then, with a sickening jump and turn of his heart, a hope came and shook him out of his stoicism. He saw that his ice-cake was sailing ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... is because of you that I am compelled to trail in the dust and have lost my beauty." And they cried out for fear. But God sent an angel who caught hold of the serpent and loosed them, and smote the serpent with dumbness, so that thereafter it could only hiss. And a great wind came and took it up, and cast it away upon the ...
— Old Testament Legends - being stories out of some of the less-known apochryphal - books of the old testament • M. R. James
... a dwarf, but a gallant knight. At that moment his memory came back to him, and he knew he was Conal, one of the Knights of the Red Branch, and he remembered now that the spell of dumbness and deformity had been cast upon him by the Witch of the Palace of ...
— The Golden Spears - And Other Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... side. I shall never forget their faces; one moment, and then they turned and fled. It was base, but I could not blame them; the sight was not one to induce composure, as the Professor himself would say. So I thanked him as well as I could for the dumbness and heat that were on me; and he took off his hat and made a grand bow, and then he shook hands—oh, so cordially! and begged to present me with the freedom of the wheelbarrow; and then he went away. There, ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards
... forced to dwell on the point, because I am sure to slur it over is to be false to Shakespeare) this dumbness of love was not the sole source of misunderstanding. If this had been all, even Lear could have seen the love in Cordelia's eyes when, to his question 'What can you say to draw a third more opulent than your sisters?' ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... taciturn storekeeper, who regards his customers with a stare of solemn amusement as Critturs born by some extraordinary vicissitude of nature to the use of a language that practically amounts to deafness and dumbness, never suffers his philosophical interest in them to affect his commercial efficiency; he drops them now and then a curt English phrase, or expressive Yankee idiom; he knows very well when they mean to buy and when they do not; and they equally wary and equally silent, unswayed by the glib ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... uttered prior to the infliction of dumbness were words of doubt and unbelief, words in which he had called for a sign as proof of authority of one who came from the presence of the Almighty; the words with which he broke his long silence were words of praise unto God ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... torch, O Day! Steal out, appear, Dim, ghostly Night, with dumbness us entrancing! Spread thy rose-purple veil about us here; Weave round us twigs, the mystery enhancing: Love's rapture flees the lurking listening ear— Flies from the Day, so indiscreetly glancing; Hesper alone—no tattling ...
— Rampolli • George MacDonald
... Abigail Williams and Ann Putnam were spoke to by the Court; but neither of them could make any answer, by reason of dumbness or other fits.) ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... 10th April we passed the 89th parallel of latitude, and though sick to death, both in spirit and body, pressed still on. Like the lower animals, we were stricken now with dumbness, and hardly once in a week spoke a word one to the other, but in selfish brutishness on through a real hell of cold we moved. It is a cursed region—beyond doubt cursed—not meant to be penetrated by man: and ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... fair, O sweet, &c. Sweet, think not I am at ease, For because my chief part singeth; This song from death's sorrow springeth, As to Swan in last disease; For no dumbness nor death bringeth Stay to true love's melody: Heart and soul do ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald |
