"Excitability" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... appetite of man, increased by the accumulation of semen, is absent in woman. She does not have nocturnal emissions accompanied by voluptuous sensations which spontaneously awaken sexual desire. For this reason a pathological sexual excitability is necessary to spontaneously provoke in woman voluptuous dreams or masturbation. For the same reason we cannot speak of compensatory masturbation in woman. Onanism, however, is not uncommon among women, although less frequent than in men. It results either from artificial and local excitations, ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... this incident had made on Frederick wore off only too soon. Who doubts that Simon did everything to lead his adopted son down the same paths that he was following? And Frederick possessed qualities which made this only too easy: carelessness, excitability, and, above all, boundless pride, which did not always scorn pretense and ended by doing its utmost to escape possible disgrace, by trying to realize what it first had pretended to possess. He was not naturally ignoble, but he fell into the habit of preferring inward ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... of Christian Schwartz was one to influence all around him. He seems to have had all the quiet German patience and endurance of hardship, without much excitability, and with a steadiness of judgment and intense honesty and integrity, that disposed every one to lean on him and rely on him for their temporal as well as their spiritual matters—great charity and warmth of heart, and a shrewdness of perception that made him ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... sufferings other than his own, projected and sheltered by what only aggravated his; but my visit gave me proof that he had really very little overstated the effect upon himself. Making allowance, which sometimes he failed to do, for special peculiarities, and for the excitability never absent when he had in hand an undertaking such as Copperfield, I observed a nervous tendency to misgivings and apprehensions to the last degree unusual with him, which seemed to make the commonest ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... society. But unless there is, on the part of the members of the group, a deep-seated emotional attachment to the group itself, solidarity will be very precarious. The intensity and solidarity, of feeling exhibited so markedly during war-time is made possible by the intense excitability of this instinct when the group is under conditions of stress or danger. Any scheme for enlisting a great number of individuals in modern society in a scheme of social reform or improvement, must and does, when ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... a fact which Brown-Sequard discovered, quite by accident, in the course of his researches. He found that certain artificially-produced lesions of the nervous system, so small even as a section of the sciatic nerve, left, after healing, an increasing excitability which ended in liability to epilepsy; and there afterwards came out the unlooked-for result that the offspring of guinea-pigs which had thus acquired an epileptic habit such that a pinch on the neck would produce a fit, inherited an epileptic habit of like kind. It has, ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... sorrow, great joy, a sudden severe jolt to the nervous equilibrium, sexual excitement, an overwhelming anger or grief may leave in their wake a permanent hyperthyroidism. The symptoms are the reverse of cretinism and myxedema. There is an over-excitability of the nerves in place of sluggishness, and an over-reactivity of the whole organism to its environment. The heart's action is too fast, and under the slightest stimulus gets faster to the point of obtruding ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... that the boy had burst among us with eyes for his father only, and thoughts of nothing but the report about his health; as for Miss Belsize, she looked as though she liked him the better for it, or it may have been for an excitability rare in him and rarely becoming. His pink face burnt like a flame. His eyes were brilliant; they met mine at last, and I was warmly greeted; but their friendly light burst into a blaze of wrath as almost simultaneously they fell upon ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... strange it all is!" she resumed, with a manner that betokened a strong nervous excitability. "Can this be the same world— these the same scenes that were so full of peace and beauty an hour ago? How tremendous is the contrast between the serene, lovely June day and evening just passed and this coming tempest, whose ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... the common narcotics, nicotine, morphine, opium, alcohol, etc., and are frequently used as antidotes for these poisons. Binz found that dogs that have been stupified with alcohol could be awakened with coffee. It may thus be prescribed for hard drinkers to counteract the baleful excitability produced by alcohol; in fact, many topers taper off after a long debauch with coffee containing small amounts of alcoholic beverages. Considering its ability to counteract the slow intoxication of tobacco, it may be inferred that coffee is indispensable ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... combination of qualities which rumor had led me to expect in him, and with which I had become familiar in my acquaintance with men of wide authority and outstanding ability. What disturbed me was that his blindness, his ill health, and his suffering had united to these traits an intense excitability and a morbid nervousness. ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... student, possessing his share of the vivacity and excitability of the south, would stamp, spring from his seat, shout and applaud, calling out in Greek "splendid!" "inimitable!" "capital!" "prettily said!" and so forth. Plutarch writes a little essay on the proper manner of behaving in the lecture-rooms, and he tells us: "You should sit in a proper manner ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... function of the accumulated semen in the reservoirs for the sexual products. Experiences with the exhaustibility of the sexual mechanism speak for the same thing. Where there is no stock of semen it is not only impossible to accomplish the sexual act, but there is also a lack of excitability in the erogenous zones, the suitable excitation of which can evoke no pleasure. We thus discover incidentally that a certain amount of sexual tension is itself necessary for the excitability ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... of her excited passion, flung back upon the sensitive brain, turned it from its balance. It had been a brilliant brain, and that very excitability that had lent its brilliance ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... observed to load and fire with as steady a hand and as serene a countenance as if he had been practising at a target. Others were equally calm and determined. There were some, however, even of the brave, who, from constitutional excitability, and not from any cowardice of spirit, exhibited symptoms of nervousness. Their cheeks paled and their hands shook. But, the momentary tremor past, these men become perhaps the most resolute ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge
... repellent of aspect. On a black dress she wore the smallest white muslin apron that either Audrey or Miss Ingate had ever seen. She kept pins in her mouth, but in other respects showed few eccentricities beyond an extreme excitability. When at eight o'clock Mademoiselle's new gown, promised for seven, had not arrived, Elise begged permission to use Madame's salts. When the bell rang at eight-thirty, and a lackey brought in an oval-shaped box with a long loop to it of leathern strap, ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... the central structures to an abnormal kind of activity, and the same effect may be brought about by emotional agitation and by the action of poisons. The fourth case mentioned here, absence of external stimulation, would naturally raise the nervous structures to an exceptional pitch of excitability. Such a condition would, moreover, prove favourable to hallucination by blurring the distinction between ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... His excitability saved him. In his magnificent solicitude for the mission that is at once the token and the curse of those who are really called, he shut himself off from a world from which the one thing he wanted was bread; ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... believe, its debility, its childishness. If the professions of so-called mediums were true, why cannot they exhibit their powers in some open and incontestable way, not surrounding themselves with all the conditions of darkness and excitability, in which the human power of self-delusion finds ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... before you can think," he said. "Many beings live in a condition of Willing without ever attaining to the condition of Thinking. In the North, life is long; in the South, it is shorter; but in the North we see torpor, in the South a constant excitability of the Will, up to the point where from an excess of cold or of heat the ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... System. But from this specialisation we are not justified in ascribing to the nervous system any monopoly of the function, even when it is as highly developed as in Man. . . . Just as the direct excitability of the nervous system has progressed in the history of the race, so has its capacity for receiving imprints; but neither susceptibility nor retentiveness is its monopoly; and, indeed, retentiveness seems inseparable ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... extravagant excitability of his southern blood, beat his forehead and his breast, bemoaned himself as a betrayed and ruined man, and bewailed his wife and children. Rufinus, however, put an end to his ravings. He had consulted with the abbess, and he put it strongly to the unhappy man that he could, in any case, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... or to any one unacquainted with the position of the family, this fainting would have been unaccountable. To those who understood the mission of the man with the bag, and were moreover acquainted with the excitability of the nerves of Mr. Simon Tuggs, it was quite comprehensible. A long-pending lawsuit respecting the validity of a will, had been unexpectedly decided; and Mr. Joseph Tuggs was the possessor of ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... succumbs under the morbid impression produced so repeatedly. These are the ordinary antecedent symptoms characteristic of the incubation of insanity; to which are frequently added somatic exaltation, or, in popular language, physical excitability—a disposition to knit the brows—great activity of the mental faculties—or else a well-marked decline of the powers of the understanding—an exaggeration of the normal conditions of thought—or a reversal of the mental habits and sentiments, such as a sudden aversion ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... doctor. "Look out for his knife. Bah! how absurd!" he added the next moment, calming down from the excitability ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... mean while, they were becoming every day more perfect in the performance of their parts; and their imaginative powers, nervous excitability, and flexibility and rapidity of muscular action, were kept under constant stimulus, and attaining a higher development. The effect of these things, so long continued in connection with the perpetual pretence, becoming more ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... afflicted with a species of religious mania. Mr. Justice Charles gave great weight to his testimony. He invited the jury to say that "although there was, in his correspondence which had been read, evidence of excitability, to talk of him as a young man who did not know what he was saying was to exaggerate the effect of his letters." He went on to ask with much solemnity: "Why should this young man have invented a tale, which must ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... these men setting forth or assembling to defend their king or church, and we see it without surprise; a rich daring loves danger, a deep excitability likes excitement. If we look around us, we may see what is analogous: some say that the battle of the Alma was won by the "uneducated gentry"; the "uneducated gentry" would be Cavaliers now. The political sentiment is part of the character; the essence of Toryism is enjoyment. Talk of the ways ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... excitability. Health. Comparison with a furnace. Oxidation. Electricity. Hydrogen. Theory ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... and usually appears when the horse has traveled a short distance after having been stabled for a few days. The characteristic symptoms of this disease in an animal are: Excitability without apparent cause; actions seem to indicate injury of the hind quarters or loins. Animal has a peculiar goose-rumped look, owing to the muscles over the quarters being violently contracted, ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek
... judgment was good, and, though apt to be hasty and headlong, was always likely to come right in the end; but internally, we may perceive, his modesty, self-distrust, anxiety and other unexpected qualities, must have been great. And then his explosiveness, impatience, excitability; his conscious dumb ignorance of all things beyond his own small horizon of personal survey! An Orson capable enough of being coaxed and tickled, by some first-rate conjurer;—first-rate; a second-rate might have failed, and got torn to pieces for his pains. ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... moment and shouting with good humour the next, open-handed with sovereigns after months and years of lonely toiling or sharing his last plug of tobacco with a stranger met on the road. His faults she knew as well: his drunkenness often, his looseness of living, his excitability, all born of unnatural surroundings; but his virtues she knew as well, none better, and all her craving for the scent of the gums and to feel again the swaying saddle and to hear again the fathomless noon-day silence and to see again the stock rushing in jumbling ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... same admiration view, observes that "women laugh more than men, and the haughty Turk not at all." But are not these facts referable to comparative excitability and apathy, and also to the multiplicity and variety of female ideas compared with the dulness of the Moslem's apprehension. Jean Paul proceeds to say that the more people laugh at our joke, the better we are pleased, and that this does not seem as though the ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... because they exist only in your somewhat—shall we say, lyrical imagination? I laid the circumstances before the woman and she acted as she saw fit to act. Hugh, my dear boy, I wish that you would try to restrain your—your growing tendency to excitability. I know that this is a trying day ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... and dies from a drunkard's disease, but her end is shown as the ineluctable consequence of her life, its early greyness and monotony, the sudden shock of a new and strange environment and the resultant weakness of will which a morbid excitability inevitably brought about. The novel, that is to say, deals with a "rhythmical series of events and follows them to their conclusion"; it gets at the roots of things; it tells us of something which we know to be true in life ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... midshipmen one from the West, tall, angular, swarthy, with a coal-black eye which had a trick of cocking up and out, giving a queer, perplexed, yet defiant cast to his countenance; moreover, he stuttered a little, not from imperfection of organs, but from nervous excitability. We had also a lieutenant from far down East, red-haired, sanguine of complexion, bony of structure, who had a gesture of tossing his hair and head back, and looking tremendously leonine and master of the situation—monarch of all he surveyed. The two ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... by a dance or other social event. It may well be, then, that it is not the hereditary temperament of the Negro, so much as the habit, which he shares with other peoples at the same level of culture, of living and acting in a crowd, that accounts for his apparent excitability. But after all, "mafficking" is not unknown in civilized countries. Thus the quest for a race-mark of a mental ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... these two men of genius, and its constancy elevates both in my estimation. They are not more unlike than are their respective works, both of which, though so dissimilar, are admirable in their way. The mobility and extreme excitability of the French, render such men as Monsieur Thiers extremely dangerous to monarchical power. His genius, his eloquence, and his boldness, furnish him with the means of exciting the enthusiasm of his countrymen as surely as a torch applied to gunpowder produces an explosion. In England ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... want of strength.' In begging one of his friends at a distance to visit him once more, he reminds him that, in his present state of health, he must not forget that it might be for the last time. No wonder then if his natural excitability was often morbidly increased. He always looked forward with joy to his leaving this 'wicked world,' but as long as he had to work in it, he exerted all his powers no less for his own immediate task than for the general affairs of the Church, which ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... the mania for flagellation was subsiding. The function of dancing in primitive religious ceremonial has been pointed out in a previous chapter. It is there a common and obvious method of both creating and expressing a high state of nervous excitability. In later times religious dancing becomes more purely hypnotic in character, and suggestion plays a powerful part. During the medieval period the conditions were peculiarly favourable to the prevalence of psychological ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... and seems to suffer none from either its isolation or antiquity. He thrives very well, like the generality of parsons, and will be a long liver if careful. He has what a phrenological physiologist would call a vitally sanguine constitution—has a good deal of temper, excitability, and determination in his character. You may persuade him, but he will be awkward to drive. He has a somewhat tall, gentlemanly, elastic figure; looks as if he had worn stays at some time; is polished, ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... attack was a strong nervous excitability, which was induced by very slight causes, and Hazlet had not long returned to Saint Werner's when the dissipation of his life began once more to tell perniciously upon his state of health. It must not be imagined that because he was the easiest possible victim of ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... observers: of these, the most just at once, and eloquent, that we remember to have read, is that contained in an ever-memorable letter from a Mr Tomkins to a Mrs Jenkins, attributed (with what justice, deponent knoweth not) to a noble and learned lord, supreme in natural theology and excitability, remarkable for versatile nose and talents, and distinguished for chequered fortunes, and "inexpressibles" to match. This learned lord, or Tomkins aforesaid, or whoever may have been the inditer of the epistle ad Jenkins, is eloquent exceedingly upon the narcotine ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... life through an exceptional sensibility. Strindberg laid hold on life through an exceptional excitability—even an exceptional irritability. In his plays, novels, and essays alike, he is a specialist in the jars of existence. He magnified even the smallest worries until they assumed mountainous proportions. He was the kind ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... virtues of his countrymen, and revealing with a kindly smile their weaknesses. In this truest, perhaps, of all the portraits that have ever been drawn of the Poles, we see the gallantry and devotion, the generosity and hospitality, the grace and liveliness in social intercourse, but also the excitability and changefulness, the quickly inflamed enthusiasm and sudden depression, the restlessness and turbulence, the love of outward show and of the pleasures of society, the pompous pride, boastfulness, and other little vanities, in ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... that potassium bromide diminishes the sensibility of the cortical substance of the cerebrum to electric excitement, while, the excitability of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... the languor and indolence of the voice indicated that the tropical indifference was far from conquered, and it was an anxious question whether the life destined for him might not be exceptionally perilous to his peculiar temperament of nonchalance and excitability. ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to make your last move, should you catch me in such a mood, but you will not; all your pains will be in vain! But why should he speak in such covert terms? I presume he must be speculating on the excitability of my nervous system. But, dear friend, that won't go down, in spite of your machinations. We will try and find out what you ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... honour. She was better able to understand him now than in her more childish days last summer; and she did not merely see, as before, that she was looking at the upper surface of a mystery. He had, at the same time, grown in character, his excitability and over-sensitiveness seemed to have been smoothed away, and to have given place to a calmness of tone, that was by ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... present. The gradually freshening breeze had now dispersed the mist, and the two vessels were clearly in view from the shore and to each other. The remarkable interest of the scene increased with each moment. Don Herero, with all the excitability of his nationality, could hardly contain himself as he walked rapidly back and forth, always keeping his eyes ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... of no great consequence what it was in the composition which set her off into this nervous paroxysm. She was in such a state that almost any slight agitation would have brought on the attack, and it was the accident of her transient excitability, very probably, which made a trifling cause the seeming occasion of so much disturbance. The theme was signed, in the same peculiar, sharp, slender hand, E. Venner, and was, of course, written by that wild-looking girl who had excited the master's curiosity and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... again dropped the raisins.... I don't know how Musa was behaving all this time, I tried not to look at her. I don't imagine Punin's agitation proceeded from any extreme attachment to my person; it was simply that his nature could not stand the slightest unexpected shock. The nervous excitability of these poor devils! ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... for instance, the degree of attention with its resistance against distracting stimuli, the power of memory under various conditions and on various material, the mental excitability and power of discrimination, the quickness and correctness of perception, the chains of associations, the rapidity of the associative process for various groups, the types of reaction, the forming of habits and their persistence, the conditions of fatigue and of exhaustion, ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... decomposed animal and vegetable matter, with many other invisible agents, are exerting their deadly influence; and were it not that every part of his system is endowed with a self-preserving power, a principle of excitability, or, in other words, a vital principle, the operations of the economy would cease, and a dissolution of his organic structure take place. But this principle being implanted in the system, reaction takes place, and thereby a vigorous ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... imagined that this new method of aerial navigation had thoroughly aroused the excitability of the French nation, so that thousands of people were met together just outside Paris on the 17th December to see Professor Charles and his mechanic, Robelt, ascend in their new craft. The ascent was successful in every way; the ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... of their acknowledged nervous energy and excitability, Americans often show a good deal of a quality that rivals the phlegm of the Dutch. Their above-mentioned patience during railway or other delays is an instance of this. So, in the incident related ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... in the second intercostal space at the right of the sternum. This may not be due to narrowing of the aortic orifice; it may be due to a sclerosis of the aorta. On the other hand, it may be due entirely to the hastened blood stream from the nervous excitability. This is probably the case if this sound disappears when the patient reclines. If it increases when the heart becomes slower and the patient is lying down, the cause is ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... and decompositions, were it only that as stimulants they suppose a stimulability sui generis, which is but another paraphrase for life. Or if they are themselves at once both the excitant and the excitability, I miss the connecting link between this imaginary ether and the visible body, which then becomes no otherwise distinguished from inanimate matter, than by its juxtaposition in mere space, with an heterogeneous inmate, the cycle of whose actions ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... well and strong again. I begged hard of Mr. Gregory and the Advocate, and at last they came to agree with me, and to this day Arthur does not know of my suspicions of him. He regards my reception by the populace as a curious illustration of the excitability of an Italian ...
— The Romance Of Giovanni Calvotti - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... doctor appeared at my bedside. Meantime a change had come over me. I seemed to have lost the nervous excitability of a girl and to have become a woman, full of courage and hope. Dr. —— regarded me steadily for a moment; then,—"Ah! better this morning? That's my brave girl." Meeting his gaze fully, I replied, "I shall try henceforth ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... substituted for soul, but soul has commonly a fuller and more determinate meaning; we can conceive of spirits as having no moral nature; the fairies, elves, and brownies of mythology might be termed spirits, but not souls. In the figurative sense, spirit denotes animation, excitability, perhaps impatience; as, a lad of spirit; he sang with spirit; he replied with spirit. Soul denotes energy and depth of feeling, as when we speak of soulful eyes; or it may denote the very life of anything; as, "the hidden soul of harmony," MILTON L'Allegro ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... indifferent, and excitable. Their disposition is irritable; they frequently exhibit fits of great excitability of temper and passion. They cry or weep without cause. They often have hallucinations and while asleep have attacks resembling night terrors. They complain of pains in the joints, and are frequently treated for disease that does not exist. Such condition as hysterical cough, ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... extraordinary readiness, under the strain of battle, together with the drunkenness of troops traversing a rich wine-growing country, have often accounted for an honest, but quite mistaken belief in the minds of German soldiers, without excusing at all the deeds to which it led. Of this abnormal excitability, the old Cure of Senlis gave one or ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a particular consideration, however, based upon deep conviction, which constrains me to forbid the introduction here as far as possible of such music as can powerfully affect any person's mind, and to this I of course am no exception. Know that my wife suffers from a morbid excitability, which will finally destroy all the happiness of her life. Within these strange walls she is never quit of that strained over-excited condition, which at other times occurs but temporarily, and then generally as the forerunner of a serious illness. ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... Xenocles eXhibited eXtraordinary and eXcessive eXcitability Whenever he was not calmed down by books from Cole's ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... the one man in all the world who can hear and understand, and sympathise," exclaimed Mr. Mudge, grasping his hand and holding it tightly while he spoke. The nailed chair prevented further excitability. ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... while the nerves of motion are unemployed. If this is continued for a long time, the nerves of sensation lose their strength from over-action, and the nerves of motion lose their power from inactivity. In consequence, there is a morbid excitability of the nervous, and a debility of the muscular system, which make all exertion ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... tone of levity and solemnity with which he rapidly descanted upon matters of little importance, a certain air of trepidation—a degree of nervous unction in action and in speech—an unquiet excitability of manner which appeared to me at all times unaccountable, and upon some occasions even filled me with alarm. Frequently, too, pausing in the middle of a sentence whose commencement he had apparently forgotten, he seemed to be listening in the deepest attention, as if either in momentary ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... good stories that illustrate the political excitability of the inns in past times, and the energy with which ministers were wont to repress the first manifestations of insubordination. Rushworth records the adventure of four young men of Lincoln's Inn who throw aside prudence and sobriety in a tavern hard by ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... reported progress to her, that there was a certain sort of repressed excitability about him, a wistful nervousness very foreign to his assured independence and self-confidence, and he several times seemed as if he were going to make some disclosure to her; all of which made his young mistress think that he had something on his mind ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... breathes its clear and life-giving air, and looks out across its gardens and glittering gables and spires, and again meets her French acquaintances, and throws herself into their arms and into their interests with all her old warmth and excitability. The little grey bonnet only gives certain incongruous piquancy to her pleasant, kind-hearted exuberance. She returns to England, but far-away echoes reach her soon of changes and revolutions concerning all the people for whom her regard is so warm. ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... The repressed excitability she had detected made her vaguely nervous (not that she would have so called herself), and as the next day was the blank Sunday, she appeased and worked off her restlessness by walking with the children to Sedhurst church. It was the sixteenth Sunday after Trinity, and the ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... did not think her worth one moment's excitability, so he calmly told her she could find another occupant for his room if she was dissatisfied with his conduct, and he ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... fervour of this determination from brooding over mysteries and jealousies, Alma lay down with a contented sigh, and was soon asleep, thanks to the health she still enjoyed. Her excitability was of the imagination rather than of the blood, and the cool, lymphatic flow, characteristically feminine, which mingled with the sanguine humour, traceable perhaps to a paternal source, spared her many an hour of wakefulness, as it guarded ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... free, lively, uniform, the blood will flow unchecked, gently or with fiery speed, according as the affection is of a gentle or violent description; digestion, secretion, and excretion will follow their natural course; the excitable membranes will pliantly play in a gentle vapor-bath, and excitability as well as sensitiveness will increase. Therefore the condition of the greatest momentary mental pleasure is at the same time the condition of the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... have feeble intellects, and superior intellects more commonly have normal nervous systems. But the psychopathic temperament, whatever be the intellect with which it finds itself paired, often brings with it ardor and excitability of character. The cranky person has extraordinary emotional susceptibility. He is liable to fixed ideas and obsessions. His conceptions tend to pass immediately into belief and action; and when he gets a new idea, he has no rest ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... certainly not. Don't say a word of this to him. I shall find Harry, and ask about these disturbed nights, and then watch him, trusting it may not have gone too far; but there must be dreadful excitability ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... over him, and, "though regulated, none the less powerful." He says that he is not so restless nor his mind so chaotic, but that he still has a pain at heart which he declares to be almost unbearable, joined to some nervous excitability. ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... reassembled in December, 1861, expenditures were racing ahead of receipts, and there was a deficit of $143,000,000. It must not be forgotten that this month was a time of intense excitability and of nervous reaction. Fremont had lately been removed, and the attack on Cameron had begun. At this crucial moment the situation was made still more alarming by the action of the New York banks, followed by all other banks, ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... graces of politics! (Renewed laughter). I will admit that woman is an excitable creature, and I will admit that politics needs no more excitement; but sometimes, you know, things are homoeopathic. A woman's excitement is apt to put out a man's; and if she should bring her excitability into politics, it is likely that it would neutralize the excitement that is already there, and that there would be a grand peace! (Laughter). But, not to trifle with it, woman is excitable. Woman is yet to be educated. Woman is yet to experience ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... the first place to remember, in imagining the opening scenes, that she is deliberately bent on counteracting the 'human kindness' of her husband, and also that she is evidently not merely inflexibly determined but in a condition of abnormal excitability. That exaltation in the project which is so entirely lacking in Macbeth is strongly marked in her. When she tries to help him by representing their enterprise as heroic, she is deceiving herself as much as him. Their attainment of the crown presents ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... possession of his wonderful flowers was exhausted. Their textures and nuances palled on him. Besides, despite the care he lavished on them, most of his plants drooped. He had them removed from his rooms, but in his state of extreme excitability, their very absence exasperated him, for his eyes were ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... contagious influence of illusion, scattered broadcast, unbalanced weaker minds; the people were tempted to acts of generous folly by the tension to which they were subjected. Already there was a taint of morbid, nervous excitability in the air, a feverish condition in which men's hopes and fears alike became distorted and exaggerated, arousing the worst passions of humanity at the slightest breath of suspicion. And Maurice ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... nearer to windward. At length Greenly, himself, reported that the Plantagenet had "turned the hands-to," again. At this intelligence, Sir Gervaise started, as from a reverie, smiled, and spoke. We will here remark, that now, as on the previous day, all the natural excitability of manner had disappeared from the commander-in-chief, and he was quiet, and exceedingly gentle in his deportment. This, all who knew him, understood to denote a serious determination ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... cottonseed meal, rape cake) and constant, well-regulated work. Saccharine, starchy, and fatty food (potatoes, wheat, corn, etc.) are to be specially avoided. In the mare one diseased and irritable ovary should be removed, to do away with the resulting excitability of the remainder of the generative organs. An irritable womb, with frequent straining and the ejection of a profuse secretion, may sometimes be corrected by a restricted diet and full but well-regulated work. Even fatigue will act beneficially in some such cases, hence the practice ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... extreme. The paroxysms of agitation and terror which they sometimes excite, and which are often spontaneously renewed by darkness and solitude, and by other exciting causes, are of the nature of temporary insanity. Indeed, the extreme nervous excitability which they produce sometimes becomes a real insanity, which, though it may, in many cases, be finally outgrown, may probably in many others lead to ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... body, and those persons capable of fully expressing the highest emotions are especially susceptible to bodily sensations. Tears are physical emblems of grief, and fellow-feeling calls forth sympathetic tears. Excessive anxiety of mind produces general excitability of body, which soon results in chronic disease. Pleasurable emotions stimulate the processes of nutrition, and are restorative. This concomitance of mental and bodily states is very remarkable. Joy and Love, as well as jealousy and anger, flash in the eye and mould the features ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... was a sober light in the dark, steady eyes. In the St. James Club, which he had just left, perhaps the most sedate, certainly the most exclusive club in New York, it had been the one topic of conversation. Elderly gentlemen, not usually given to excitability, had joined with the younger members in a hectic denunciation of the police as criminally inefficient, and had made dire and absurdly vain threats as to what they, electing themselves for the moment a supreme ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... impression of the man. He was one of those strange, unbalanced creatures that never reach maturity; he was a child all his short life; he had the generosity, the affection, the impulsiveness of a child, and he had, too, the timidity, the waywardness, the excitability of a child. If a project came into his mind, he flung himself into it with the whole force of his nature; it was imperatively necessary that he should at once execute his design. No considerations of prudence or common-sense availed to check him; life became intolerable to him if he could ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... step. It came prompt, as usual, but with a promptitude, we felt disposed to flatter ourselves, inspired by other feelings than mere excitability of nerve and vehemence of intent. We thought our Professor's "foot-fall" (to speak romantically) had in it a friendly promise this ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... in springtime exhibit restlessness, excitability, perversity, and indisposition to exertion that are not displayed at other times. This condition, sometimes known as "spring fever," has been studied in over a hundred cases, both children and adults, by Kline. The majority of these report a feeling ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... all agree in wishing for the same thing at the same time, while if they, or any considerable number of groups, want different things at the same time, the result in so far is anarchy. Government is paralysed, and with the well-known excitability of humanity in groups men begin to confound the importance of the thing wanted with the importance of getting what they want. The clash of contending factions is apt to suggest the clash of arms. The first necessity, therefore, is the formation of large and coherent parties, not merely for the ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... the rush, pandemonium itself seemed to break loose. Yells, shots, screams, and oaths filled the air. The crowd surged this way and that. Tables were overturned and sent crashing to the floor. And then came sudden darkness, as some one of the attendants in misguided excitability switched off the lights. ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... quickened into eagerness, an eagerness deepened by the tender interest that always hangs round the names of those whom we have known in happier and younger days. The happy memories recalled by hearing of his old tutor seemed to blot out his present misfortunes. With French excitability, he laughed and ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... women, it was a mortal malady and incompatible with any common show of health under any circumstances. And then came the damnatory clause in his experience ... that he had never known 'a system' approaching mine in 'excitability' ... except Miss Garrow's ... a young lady who wrote verses for Lady Blessington's annuals ... and who was the only other female rhymer he had had the misfortune of attending. And she was to die in two years, though she was dancing quadrilles then (and has lived to do the same by the ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... as concerns its early discipline and training. This chapter will, therefore, be devoted to special suggestions with regard to the management and training of those children who are by heredity predisposed to nervousness, over-excitability, and who possess but a minimum ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... of behaviour. He was kind-hearted and had the gift of pleasing. On public occasions his demeanour and words were dignified. In private he talked in a homely way, his words following one another too quickly and sometimes showing a confusion of thought and excitability of brain. To the poor he would speak with familiar kindness, chatting with them like a good-natured squire. Yet simple as he was in his habits and private talk, he always spoke and acted as a gentleman; the coarseness of the old court was a thing of the past. ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... cause of an omission which certainly is not fortuitous. The reason lies in the situation and in the feeling of the moment; where confusion, and anxiety, and earnest self-defence predominate, the excitability and play of the imagination would be checked and subdued ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... courteous youth—to whom, of course, I was quite unknown and deaf and dumb—who graciously shifted goods and chattels from the inn's best room to hand it over to me for my occupation. With due tact and some excitability, I protested vigorously against his coming out. He insisted. Smiling upon him with grave benignity, I said that I would take a smaller room, and gave orders to that effect to my man, adding that my whole sense of right and justice towards fellow-travelers revolted against such ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... be sure how far Godfrey was serious when he talked like this; the humorous impulse so blended with the excitability of his imagination, that people who knew him little and heard him talking at large thought him something of a crack-brain. The odd thing was that, with all his peculiarities, he had many of the characteristics of a sound man of business; indeed, had it been otherwise, the ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... but whether the wit be great or little, the "thin partition" separating madness from sanity is equally mysterious. It is true that the excitability attendant upon genius approximates so closely to madness, that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between them; but, without the attendant "genius" to hold up the train of madness, and call for our special permission and respect in any of its fantastic excursions, the most ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... theoretical conceptions of disease, and Cullen's theory of spasm and atony exercised a profound influence on practice, particularly in this country, where it had the warm advocacy of Benjamin Rush. Even more widespread became the theories of a pupil of Cullen's, John Brown, who regarded excitability as the fundamental property of all living creatures: too much of this excitability produced what were known as sthenic maladies, too little, asthenic; on which principles practice was plain enough. Few systems of medicine have ever stirred such ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... still the march continued. Late in the evening we came upon a group of tents by the roadside—Rosecrans's head-quarters, with Rosecrans himself, and not in the best of humors, as some of us discovered on riding up to see friends on his staff. In his petulance and excitability the commanding general forgot to be gentlemanly, some of them said; and they left him not at all relieved of any doubts they had concerning our sudden and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... devoted nurse, Alison Cunningham; to whom his lifelong gratitude will be found touchingly expressed in the course of the following letters. In 1858 he was near dying of a gastric fever, and was at all times subject to acute catarrhal and bronchial affections and extreme nervous excitability. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... through the medium of a variety of scenes. His mind is awakened, now; his heart, though full of pain, is no longer benumbed. They should have food and solace. If he linger here much longer, I fear that he may sink back into a lethargy. The extreme excitability, which circumstances have imparted to his moral system, has its dangers and its advantages; it being one of the dangers, that an obdurate scar may supervene upon its very tenderness. Solitude has done what it could for him; ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... weakness and the grave. So with a pale face, anxious eye, and hollow cheek, I had to quit the desk again and ride mournfully home, the remainder of the day being consumed in a rest, which only increased my melancholy feelings, because it made me more than ever conscious of my feebleness and excitability. ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... the most vigorous. Mere sexual excitement, a wild, fierce, furious rush of passion, is not only not sexual vigor, but in its inverse ratio; and a genuine insane fervor caused by weakness; just as a like nervous excitability indicates weak nerves instead of strong. Sexual power is deliberate, not wild; cool, not impetuous; while all false ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... my outward circumstances has its counterweight m the excitability of my nature. I think upon the whole, the task and load of life is very equal, its labors and its burdens very equal: they only have real sorrow who make it for themselves, in their own hearts, by their own faults; and they only have real joy who make and ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... whispered in one another's ears, imparting excessively mysterious information of the utmost importance, putting a finger to their lips, screwing up their eyes to enjoin secrecy. A provincial flavor distinguished them all, with differences of inflection, Southern excitability, the drawling accent of the Centre, Breton sing-song, all blended in the same idiotic, strutting self-sufficiency; frock-coats after the style of Landerneau, mountain shoes, and home-spun linen; the monumental assurance of ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... animals become feeble and diseased after a time, though nourished with the same food which increased their growth from infancy, and afterwards supported them for many years in unimpaired health and strength, must be sought for from the laws of animal excitability, which, though at first increased, is afterwards diminished by frequent repetitions of its adapted stimulus, and at length ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... winds, a mistaken course, or a serious mishap. Kate was so little in the mood for talking that Barracombe in responsive silence could toss the various probabilities about in his mind until he felt a nervous excitability that annoyed him. ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... influence of bells so many services to the establishment which monopolizes them, I must, however, not forget that the power they possess over the nerves, however agreeable or interesting in health, is pernicious, and often fatal, when the excitability is increased by disease? What medicine can allay the fever which is often exasperated by their clangor? What consoling hope can he feel who, while gasping for breath, or fainting from debility, hears a knell, in which he cannot but anticipate his own?—Hundreds ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... light reading of tired readers. To do the work in their way, they required to be brooded over, or had at least the aid of tune and of impassioned recitation. Stories which are to be told to children in the age of eagerness and excitability, or sung in banquet halls to assembled warriors, whose daily ideas and feelings supply a flood of comment ready to gush forth on the slightest hint of the poet, cannot fly too swift and straight to the mark. But Mr. Macaulay wrote to be only ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... other channels, such as branches from the superior intercostal arteries which enter the anterior spinal artery. While total anaemia of the brain instantaneously abolishes consciousness, partial anaemia is found to raise the excitability of the cortex cerebri. By estimation of the exchange of gases in the blood which enters and leaves the brain, it has been shown that the consumption of oxygen and the production of carbonic acid in that organ is not large. Further, it may be noted that the condition ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... pride, eminently truthful, a stern holder of his plighted word and a respecter of women—a respect shown by the general practice of monogamy.[860] Even when stirred to war he is said not to lend himself to unnecessary cruelty.[861] The activity, liveliness and excitability of this people may be traced in the accounts of antiquity; but Roman records would add the impression of duplicity, treachery and cruelty as characteristics of the race. Yet as these characteristics are exhibited in the record of a great national war against a hated invader, ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... the cough depends mainly whether the larger bronchial tubes and the trachea are affected; the more this is the case, the more violent the inclination to cough. Further the strength of the cough depends on the excitability of the patient; the greater this is, the more as a rule will he cough. Sometimes the position of the patient is of influence; if he lies mostly on the diseased side the expectoration becomes more difficult ...
— Prof. Koch's Method to Cure Tuberculosis Popularly Treated • Max Birnbaum
... tobacco, should be very moderately used. For my own part, I have never smoked or snuffed, and my daily allowance of alcoholic drinks is a so-called pint bottle of beer or two glasses of wine. I have more frequently suffered from nervous excitability due to tea or coffee, than from any other kind of stimulant. I can compose best when my brain is coolest and my digestion easiest. I do not believe in artificial ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... induce an overwhelming lassitude, and are, in my opinion, most unfavourable elements in a climate so generally recommended for pulmonary consumption. Whatever effect the humid mildness of the air may have in diminishing excitability, and in allaying pulmonary irritation in patients of a nervous temperament, it is decidedly injurious in those of a feeble and lymphatic habit.... The delusion of an Italian climate, as regards the cure or prophylaxis ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... bodies in certain situations to approach each other, gravitation, without in the least hinting at its nature; yet, though he knew not what gravitation was, he investigated the laws by which bodies were acted on by it, in the same manner, though we are ignorant of excitability, or the nature of that property which distinguishes living from dead matter, we can investigate the laws by which dead matter acts on living bodies through this medium. We know not what magnetic attraction is, and yet we can investigate its laws; the same holds ...
— A Lecture on the Preservation of Health • Thomas Garnett, M.D.
... when Ramon Hamilton presented himself at Henry Blaine's office in answer to the latter's summons, he found the great detective in a mood more nearly bordering upon excitability than he could remember having witnessed before. Instead of being seated calmly at his desk, his thoughts masked with his usual inscrutable imperturbability, Blaine was pacing restlessly back and forth with the disquietude, ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... to get sleep is to many persons a matter of high importance. Nervous persons who are troubled with wakefulness and excitability, usually have a strong tendency of blood on the brain, with cold extremities. The pressure of the blood on the brain keeps it in a stimulated or wakeful state, and the pulsations in the head are often painful. Let such rise ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... self-torment commonly attributed to the Puritan. His friend Maxime Du Camp, who tried to bring him out and teach him the arts of popularity, he rebuffed with deliberate insult. He developed an aversion to any interruption of his work, and such tension and excitability of nerves that he shunned a day's outing or a chat with an old companion, lest it distract him for a month afterward. His mistress he seems to have estranged by an ill- concealed preference to her of his exacting Muse. ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... store-room or treasury on the ground floor, the ladder or steps would have been useless. The life is divided between the rewards and punishments on the one hand, and the hope and fear on the other: namely, the active life or excitancy belongs to the former, the passive life or excitability to the latter. Call the former the afficients, the latter the affections, the deeds being merely the signs or impresses of the former, as the seal, on the latter as the wax. Equally evident is it, that the affections ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Boston, for example, to a lecture, if the speaker concludes a sentence with some allusion to "freedom," and the people clap and stamp. That the blood should tingle in our veins at so slight a cause, makes him think that we are certainly in need of something worthy of our great excitability, and that we are thankful for small favors in that way. He does not think less than we of liberty where an occasion makes that name and idea appropriate; but that the condition of his slaves should reconsecrate for ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... excitability, irresponsibility and supersensitiveness, are the weakest points of ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... bad!' This is a bit of Faraday's innermost nature; and as I read these words I am almost constrained to retract what I have said regarding the fire and excitability of his character. But is he not all the more admirable, through his ability to tone down and subdue that fire and that excitability, so as to render himself able to write thus as a little child? I once took the liberty of censuring ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall
... had been before worked upon, even from my earliest childhood, and the great nervous excitability of my temperament, it is a wonder that my mind did not reel, if not succumb— but I now began to combat the approaches of one sort of insanity with the actual presence of another—I wrote verses. That was "tempering ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... happiest terms, made her own laws and duties, and was treated like a sister by Caroline, while the children were heartily fond of her, all except Elvira, who made a fierce struggle against her authority, and then, finding that it was all in vain, conformed as far as her innate idleness and excitability permitted. ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of pleasure, quick excitability, and consequent irritability, are the marked ingredients in every strong character; its strength must be employed against itself to produce ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... disease resulting from infection of a wound by a specific micro-organism, the bacillus tetani, and characterised by increased reflex excitability, hypertonus, and spasm of one or more ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... strength beyond its power, making himself seriously ill in his endeavours to save his beloved mother some small trouble. They seemed to be very tenderly attached one to the other, and to supply to each all that was wanting in each: the mother's gentleness soothing down her boy's excitability, and the boy's nervousness rousing the mother to exertion. They were interesting people—so lonely, apparently so unfit to 'rough it' in the world; the mother so gentle in temper, and the son so frail in constitution—two ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various
... who know Tarasconese excitability, it is easy to imagine the frantic condition of the little town after Tartarin's abrupt disappearance. Et autrement, pas moins, differemment, they lost their heads, all the more because it was the middle of August and their brains boiled in the sun till their skulls were fit to crack. From morning ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... effect of really interesting the doctor in my present condition, which was indeed one of chronic irritation and extreme excitability, alternating with fits of the very blackest despair. Instead of offending my gentleman I had put him on his mettle, and for half an hour he honored me with the most exhaustive inquisition ever elicited from a medical man. His panacea was somewhat ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung |
