"Torpid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in the Bois, seated beside the favourite maid in the huge and sumptuous open carriage, also at the back of the theatre boxes taken by the Levantine, for she began to go out, since she had grown less torpid under the treatment of her masseur and was determined to amuse herself. The theatre pleased her, especially farces or melodramas. The apathy of her large body found a stimulus in the false glare of the ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... evening, I sat upon our front step, in a kind of torpid state of mind through my refusal to contemplate the dismal future. My eye turned listlessly down the street. The only moving figure in it was that of a slender man approaching on the further side of the way. He carried two valises, one with each hand, and leaned ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... otherwise be consigned by the partial hand of nature, and, indeed; of transferring them from a state of almost mental blindness to that of intellectual and accountable beings." The New York Statesman[217] speaks of the effects in "improving the moral principle, which is torpid and almost obliterated, and opening the way to moral and religious instruction and knowledge of the Deity which is almost void." An early report of the American School[218] tells of the transition of their "imprisoned minds ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... again fallen back into a torpid slumber. Ben Zoof continued, "His sleep is getting more composed. Let him alone; he will come round yet. Haven't I heard of men more dried up than he is, being brought all the way from Egypt in cases ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... choked and impeded with its own foliage, and pungent and stifling with its own rank maturity; when the long hillside ranks of wild oats, thickset and impassable, filled the air with the heated dust of germination. In this quickening irritation of life it would be strange if the unfortunate man's torpid intellect was not helped in its awakening, and he was allowed to ramble at will over the ranch; but with the instinct of a domestic animal he always returned to the house, and sat in the porch, where Josephine usually found him awaiting her when she herself returned from a visit to the mill. Coming ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... reason, however, for noticing this peculiarity in Isocrates, is by way of fixing the attention upon the superiority, even artificial ornaments, of downright practical business and the realities of political strife, over the torpid atmosphere of a study or a school. Cicero, long after, had the same passion for numerositas, and the full, pompous rotundity of cadence. But in Cicero, all habits and all faculties were nursed by the daily practice of life and its impassioned realities, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... themselves in the centre of their delicate nets, and they are hurried off in a panic to be converted into preserved provisions. Each cell being closed, the whole nest is cemented over with a thick covering of clay. In due time the young family hatch, eat their allowance of spiders, undergo their torpid change, and emerge from their clay mansion ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... the dog-owner was not over-enthusiastic in the matter; he pleaded a 'business engagement,' but as he was the most notorious and torpid of the town loafers, and wouldn't have recognized a 'business engagement' had he met it face to face, his excuse was treated with contempt. Therefore he had ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... later, Terry stood at the window looking down over the blistering plaza. Davao was torpid under the noonday heat. Three carabaos grazed undisturbed on the forbidden square: another of the awkward powerful brutes dawdled up the dusty road, hauling a decrepit two-wheeled cart on which a naked-backed, red-pantalooned native dozed: Padre Velasco, the ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... bound by formalism and incredibly blind to the immense and vivid interest of the news whereby it was surrounded, as if a man, set down in a meadow full of deep and clear springs, should elect to drink from a shallow, torpid, and muddy trickle. Legislation, taxes, transportation problems, the Greatness of Our City, our National Duty (whatever it might be at the time—and according to opinion), the drink question, the race problem, labor and capital; these were the reiterated topics, ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... and blinded ones In trustful patience wait to feel O'er torpid pulse and failing limb ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... of the house, coming up the kitchen stairs, confirmed the statement. In pity for his torpid incredulity she begged him to examine her house from top to bottom, and herself conducted ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... but no one had thought of providing them with overcoats. Silk stockings, satin knee-breeches and lace ruffles are very inadequate protection against an Arctic blast, and we arrived at the Cathedral stiff and torpid with cold. From the colour of our faces, we might have been five little "Blue Noses" from Nova Scotia. The ceremony was very gorgeous and imposing, and I trust that the pages were not unduly clumsy. Every one was amazed at ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... room from which the ill-omening woman had issued, they found another, even her of whom they were in search, sitting by the fire, torpid and corpulent, to a degree which indicated that as it had been her trade to nurse others, she had not forgotten herself ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... his writing, but the subject was distasteful to him, and he turned the talk to a new book in which he had been interested. She knew enough of it to slip in the right word here and there; and thence they wandered on to kindred topics. Under the warmth of her attention his torpid ideas awoke again, and his eyes took their fill of pleasure as she leaned forward, her thin brown hands clasped on her knees and her eager face ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... a ruined paradise. The ruined paradise is the mind, now torpid in death, of Adonais. The 'Dream' which has been speaking is a lost angel of this paradise, in the sense of being a messenger or denizen of the mind of Adonais, incapacitated for exercising any further action: indeed, the Dream forthwith fades, ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... with the idea that they were destitute of flesh, blood, and animal life, mere umbroe. These ghosts are described as being nearly as destitute of sensation as they are of strength. They are called "the inhabitants of the land of stillness." They exist in an inactive, partially torpid state, with a dreamy consciousness of past and present, neither suffering nor enjoying, and seldom moving. Herder says of the Hebrews, "The sad and mournful images of their ghostly realm disturbed them, and were too much for their self possession." Respecting ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... I have. Sorry for it, but there is no other handy. From this day your Churches also are closed, your Public Worship ceases, and furthermore your Revenues cease; and all makes dead halt, and falls torpid in respect of you. From this day; and so continues, till the day (may it be soon!) when the Heidelberg Church of the Holy Ghost is opened again, and right done in that question. Be it yours to speed such day: it is you that can and will, you who know those high Catholic ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... looking at Athelstane with compassion, "that so dull a spirit should be lodged in so goodly a form! Alas! that such an enterprise as the regeneration of England should turn on a hinge so imperfect! Wedded to Rowena, indeed, her nobler and more generous soul may yet awake the better nature which is torpid within him. Yet how should this be, while Rowena, Athelstane, and I myself, remain the prisoners of this brutal marauder and have been made so perhaps from a sense of the dangers which our liberty might bring to the usurped power ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... sharp tones made all these torpid men start like a sudden flick of a whip. Then again, motionless where they lay, the force of habit made some of them repeat the order in hardly audible murmurs. Captain Allistoun glanced down at his crew, and several, with fumbling fingers and hopeless movements, tried ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... Vehicles—probably tradesmen's carts—drew up in front, their stopping being followed by more or less assiduous assaults upon the knocker and the bell. But in every case their appeals remained unheeded. Whatever it was they wanted, they had to go unsatisfied away. Lying there, torpid, with nothing to do but listen, I was, possibly, struck by very little, but it did occur to me that one among the callers was more ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... spoke. It was getting on towards evening; and both of them had to go to work when it grew dark. Summer was almost over, so the wood-mouse had begun to collect her winter-stores. She did not lie torpid like the hedgehog or the bat and she could not fly to Africa like the stork and the swallow, so she had to have her store-room filled, if she did not wish to suffer want. She had already collected a good deal of beech-mast. But the nuts were not ripe yet and, if she ...
— The Old Willow Tree and Other Stories • Carl Ewald
... picture winter like old age, torpid, tedious, and uncheerful? Winter has its own delights: this is the time to instruct and mend the mind by reading and reflection. At this season, too, I often take my harp, and amuse myself by playing or singing the little favourite ...
— The Stranger - A Drama, in Five Acts • August von Kotzebue
... interest of this paper lies in the beautiful passage which ends it. "The world must go on its own way, for all that we can say against it. Beauty, though it beams over the organization of a doll, will have its hour of empire; the most torpid heiress will easily get herself married; but the wife whose sweet nature can kindle worthy delights is she that brings to her hearth a joyous, hopeful, ardent spirit, and that subtle power whose sources we can hardly trace, but which yet so ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... OF HEAT, COLD AND DAMPNESS. Many colonies destroyed by extremes of weather. Evils of thin hives. Bees not torpid in Winter. When frozen are killed, 114. Take exercise to keep warm. Perish if unable to preserve suitable degree of warmth. Are often starved in the midst of plenty. Eat an extra quantity of food in thin, cold hives, 115. Muscular exertion occasions waste of muscular fiber. ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... part of South America. When we first arrived at Bahia Blanca, September 7th, 1832, we thought nature had granted scarcely a living creature to this sandy and dry country. By digging, however, in the ground, several insects, large spiders, and lizards were found in a half-torpid state. On the 15th, a few animals began to appear, and by the 18th (three days from the equinox), everything announced the commencement of spring. The plains were ornamented by the flowers of a pink wood-sorrel, wild peas, oenotherae, and geraniums; and the birds began to lay ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... kind, where the auditory nerve has been in some degree torpid, or rather perhaps where there has been a kind of paralysis, or want of action, in the muscles which brace the membrane of the tympanum, and keep the chain of bones in their proper state; a person has not been able to hear, except during a considerable ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... several leagues out at sea. At sea, the food of this animal is fish, seals, and the carcases of whales; on land, it preys upon deer and other animals, and will, like the Black Bear, eat many kinds of berries. In winter, it beds itself deeply under the snow or eminences of ice, and awaits, in a torpid state, the return ...
— Book about Animals • Rufus Merrill
... the girl at once. She didn't know that life is anything but selective, or that all the arts round out one's appreciation of the beautiful, or that anything was "by way of being" something. But all the food she took didn't make her torpid; she giggled easily and had eyes like hothouse grapes, and in spite of her fat there was something about her, like Cousin Egbert said of Vernabelle. Anyway, she prevailed. Oswald Cummings, the pagan, for one, quickly side-stepped ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... cold-blooded experiment in subjecting a vast region to the most rigorous and least generous conditions possible, leaving it unshielded alike from Polar winds in winter or scorching heat in summer, divesting it of beauty and of charm, and then casting this arid, frigid, torpid land to a branch of the human family as unique as its own habitation; separating it by natural and almost impassable barriers from civilizing influences, and in strange isolation leaving it to work out ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... females. With moths of the family of the Bombycidae, the sexes pair immediately after assuming the imago state; for they cannot feed, owing to the rudimentary condition of their mouths. The females, as several entomologists have remarked to me, lie in an almost torpid state, and appear not to evince the least choice in regard to their partners. This is the case with the common silk-moth (B. mori), as I have been told by some continental and English breeders. Dr. Wallace, who has had great experience in breeding Bombyx cynthia, is convinced ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... culminating strength in the people; while fine sculpture, requiring always submission to severe law, is an unfailing proof of their being in early and active progress. There is no instance of fine sculpture being produced by a nation either torpid, weak, or in decadence. Their drama may gain in grace and wit; but their sculpture, in days ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... The woman was a saint—the kindliest, gentlest creature I have ever met. I told her that I was ill and in trouble, and wanted to rest, and she put me to bed and nursed me like a child. I was a long time in getting well. The very strings of my being seemed to have snapped. I lay torpid week after week, and the good soul took care of me and asked no questions. She was one of those rare spirits who pray to God to guide them day by day, and mean literally what they ask. God had sent me to ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... auspicious occasion for your journey; you will travel in the company of the new Junior Dean, whose society, I am sure, you will find delightful. His predecessor, a personal friend of my own, succumbed, I grieve to say, a few months ago—owing to the alleged inadequate supply of beef-steaks at a 'Torpid' breakfast. . . . Painful, but apparently inevitable. I need hardly say, the perpetrators of this insult have been rusticated ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... blankets. No more was said, for Bill knew why the smoke was there. All three covered up their heads and were soon asleep. It got real cold in the middle of the night and the gnats became too torpid to move. The boys slept like logs for they were tired. It could not have been more than four o'clock when the cheery voice of Mr. Waterman was heard ...
— Bob Hunt in Canada • George W. Orton
... moved to sidle off briskly as he met a cotton-mouth moccasin snake, so fat and swollen with summer poison that it looked almost like a legless lizard as it moved along the surface of the water in a series of slow torpid s's. Directly above the head of either of the waiting assassins a compact little swarm of midges hung, holding to a sort ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... universal passion. Some have attempted to deny its universality; they have imagined that it is chiefly prevalent in cold climates, where such a passion becomes most capable of agitating and gratifying the torpid minds ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... incurred the displeasure of the master, who, enraged at his want of comprehension and attention, struck him over the head with a knotted cane. This appeal, although made to the least sensitive part of his frame, roused the indolent Asiatic from his usual torpid state. The weapon, in the twinkling of an eye, was snatched out of the hand, and suspended over the head of the astonished pedagogue, who, seeing the tables so suddenly turned against him, made the signal for assistance. ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Hungarian was about to prevail in ridicule of the spurious lutes of the romantic painters when Segouin shepherded his party into politics. Here was congenial ground for all. Jimmy, under generous influences, felt the buried zeal of his father wake to life within him: he aroused the torpid Routh at last. The room grew doubly hot and Segouin's task grew harder each moment: there was even danger of personal spite. The alert host at an opportunity lifted his glass to Humanity and, when the toast had been drunk, he threw open a ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... call this little animal "the Sleeper," because he lies in a torpid state through the long winter and spring, until the weather becomes quite warm. He builds his nest in an old hollow tree, or beneath the bushes, and during the summer lays up a great quantity of nuts or acorns for his winter provender. ...
— Tame Animals • Anonymous
... he would sit all the evening and smoke and stare at some object which his mind failed to register. Cash would sit and watch him furtively; but Bud was too engrossed with his own misery to notice it. Then, quite unexpectedly, reaction would come and leave Bud in a peace that was more than half a torpid refusal of his mind to worry much ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... of plants and are very fond of lettuces and cabbages. Through the day they lie half asleep, and towards evening move about, especially if warm and moist, and are evidently fond of moisture. In winter they lie torpid, and in spring deposit their eggs about two inches ...
— Charley's Museum - A Story for Young People • Unknown
... character. She seemed less demented than walking in a dream, her faculties asleep. It was somnambulism rather than madness. She had not the expression of insane people, the shifty eyes, the cunning and perverseness, the animal and torpid presence. ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... earth tell us that one of those movements has begun to be felt in the Northern mind, which perplex tyrannies everywhere with the fear of change. The insults and wrongs so long heaped upon the North by the South begin to be felt. The torpid giant moves uneasily beneath his mountain-load of indignities. The people of the North begin to feel that they support a government for the benefit of their natural enemies; for, of all antipathies, that of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... this evening?—and got no answer. Her ladyship was listening to something at a distance; or, rather, having heard something at a distance, was listening for a repetition of it. "I wonder what that can have been?" said she. For fire-arms in July are torpid mostly, and ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... great bell Silence clangs His solemn call, and thou, O soul! Dost stir in sense's torpid fangs, Like the blind magnet, ...
— Thoughts, Moods and Ideals: Crimes of Leisure • W.D. Lighthall
... survival was the usual price. He was in danger of becoming no better than an animal, of sinking to the level of the negroes who sometimes toiled beside him. The man, however, was still there, not yet dormant, but merely torpid from a surfeit of despair; and the man in him promptly shook off that torpidity and awoke at the first words Blood spoke to him ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... bright evening, but my depression has been growing so long and steadily that I can't seem to control it any more. There, Millie, the lady superintendent is looking for you. Don't worry. You medical and scientific people know that it is nothing but a torpid liver. Perhaps I may be ill enough to have a trained nurse. You see I am playing a deep game," and with an attempt at a hearty laugh he said good-night, and she was compelled to hasten away, but it was ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... might say, I was struck all of a heap. Then the delicious thought that I—by nature a vagabond, though by decree of the High Gods the father of a family and a Justice of the Peace—had to face the charge of being a German spy shook my soul with ribald laughter. I had been dull and torpid before the arrival of Dawson; he had awakened me into joyous life. I arose, filled and lighted a large calabash pipe, and passed a box of cigars to the detective. "Throw that stump away and take another," said I. "I owe you more than a cigar or ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... this occasional apparition that in a less enlightened age seemed to warrant the extraordinary belief, which still ekes out a precarious existence in misinformed circles, that these birds, instead of wintering abroad, retire in a torpid condition to the bottom of lakes and ponds. It cannot be denied that these waters have occasionally, when dredged or drained, yielded a stray skeleton of a swallow, but it should be evident to the most homely intelligence that such debris merely indicates ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... of an accident, sir, I always pull up and plan the wheel-marks; I carry a tape for the purpose, and it saves a lot of hard swearing in court afterwards." Brodie spoke seriously, and Devar vowed that he would interrupt no more, since he merely succeeded in stimulating the man's torpid wits. ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... and freedom for the present; superadd a due pressure of bodily suffering, and personal degradation; and you have a slave, who, (of whatever zone, nation or complexion,) will be what the poor African is, torpid, debased, and lowered beneath ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... I don't! Please make out a wholesome bill of fare, and I'll stick to it, if I can. I am getting stout, and I don't like it; and my liver's torpid, and I have palpitations and headache. Overwork, mother says; but it may be overeating.' And Stuffy gave a sigh of mingled regret for the good things he renounced, and relief as he finished loosening his belt as soon as ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... reflection upon the Swedish race. They are industrious and energetic when occasion requires, but, like all people who live at the extreme North, acquire tropical habits of indolence from the climate. During the tedious winters, when the days are but six hours long, all who can afford it become torpid, like frogs, and lie up in their houses till the summer sun thaws them out. Balls, parties, and sleigh-riding occasionally rouse them up, but lethargy is the general rule. The warm weather comes very suddenly, and then the days are eighteen hours long. This being the season ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... their breath, nor suffered them to respire, they sat down for a little, with their backs to the wind. Then indeed the sky resounded with loud thunder, and the lightnings flashed between its terrific peals; all, bereft of sight and hearing, stood torpid with fear. At length, when the rain had spent itself, and the fury of the wind was on that account the more increased, it seemed necessary to pitch the camp in that very place where they had been overtaken by the storm. But this was ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... think of sending me The Jar of Honey. When I receive the book I will write to him. I cannot thank you sufficiently for your letters, and I can give you but a faint idea of the pleasure they afford me; they seem to introduce such light and life to the torpid retirement where we live like dormice. But, understand this distinctly, you must never write to me except when you have both leisure and inclination. I know your time is too fully occupied and too valuable to be often at the service ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... "if he ever molest you hereafter; if again I find that bright cheek blanched, and those dear eyes dimmed with tears; and I know that, in my own house, some one has dared thus to insult its queen,—am I to be still torpid and inactive, lest a dastard and craven hand should avenge my assertion ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... all appear in any one period of the disease, or in one case, but at one time or other all of them, as well as those which follow: the flesh becomes cold to the touch, though the patient does not himself perceive it; the limbs grow numbed and torpid, the breathing dull and slow, and the voice hollow; and usually the appetite in this period declines, and comes almost to nothing: night sweats come on, black swellings appear on the veins, the flesh wastes and the breast becomes flat and hollow: the mouth is full of a thin spittle, ...
— Hypochondriasis - A Practical Treatise (1766) • John Hill
... of old age. Johnson (now in his seventieth year,) said, 'It is a man's own fault, it is from want of use, if his mind grows torpid in old age.' The Bishop asked, if an old man does not lose faster than he gets. JOHNSON. 'I think not, my Lord, if he exerts himself.' One of the company rashly observed, that he thought it was happy ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... he did know, could he control them. Then, for the first time, did the cold Triones grow warm with sunbeams, and attempt, in vain, to be dipped in the sea that was forbidden {to them}. And the Serpent which is situate next to the icy pole, being before torpid with cold, and formidable to no one, grew warm, and regained new rage from the heat. They say, too,[9] that thou, Booetes, being disturbed, took to flight; although thou wast {but} slow, and thy wain impeded thee. But when, from the height of the skies, the unhappy Phaeton looked down upon ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... comes,—the Frost Spirit comes! and the quiet lake shall feel The torpid touch of his glazing breath, and ring to the skater's heel; And the streams which danced on the broken rocks, or sang to the leaning grass, Shall bow again to their winter chain, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... collect fifty trusty conspirators in all France; at least, as long as our armies are victorious, and organized in their present formidable manner. Should anything happen to our present chief, an impulse may be given to the minds now sunk down, and raise our characters from their present torpid state. But until such an event, we shall remain as we are, indolent but submissive, sacrificing our children and treasures for a cause we detest, and for a man we abhor. I am sorry to say it, but it certainly does, no honour ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... aspect, and the mere slave of discipline (he had pulled in the St. Catherine's second torpid), obeyed her command, and presently we were ...
— HE • Andrew Lang
... heavy-laden, hearts care full, Unwelcome nights follow unwelcome days, And dreams divine end in awakenings dull. Still it is life, anil life is cause for praise. This ache, this restlessness, this quickening sting, Prove me no torpid and inanimate thing, Prove me of Him who is of life the Spring. I am alive!—and ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge
... but a vain display of ceremonies, to which they are attached by habit, which entertains their eyes, and produces a transient emotion in their torpid understandings, without influencing their conduct or reforming their morals. Even by the confession of the ministers of the altars, nothing is more rare than that internal and spiritual Religion, which alone is capable of regulating the life of man and ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... the warm down beneath which dream, in other lands, the luxurious rich, little knowing of the dangers through which their luxury has come to them. Like the Bedouin of the desert who darts alone across the sands of Africa, the bird is neither seen nor heard; the torpid atmosphere, deprived of its electrical conditions, echoes neither the whirr of its wings nor its joyous notes. Besides, what human eye was strong enough to bear the glitter of those pinnacles adorned with sparkling crystals, or the sharp reflections of the snow, iridescent on the summits ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... the other, 'and in that he is a beastly glutton. He gorges himself with it till all his faculties are overpowered and his mind becomes torpid. It's twice worse than drinking. I wonder whether he'll do a bit of speculation before he goes back ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... noble Porthos! careful heaper-up of treasure, was it worth while to labor to sweeten and gild life, to come upon a desert shore, surrounded by the cries of seagulls, and lay thyself, with broken bones, beneath a torpid stone? Was it worth while, in short, noble Porthos, to heap so much gold, and not have even the distich of a poor poet engraven upon thy monument? Valiant Porthos! he still, without doubt, sleeps, lost, forgotten, ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... spoken, to awaken the drowsy and to excite the torpid. The instant he found each man on the alert, he resumed his orders with a calmness that gave a direction to the powers of all, and yet with an energy that he well knew was called for by the occasion. The enormous sheets ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... pre-existent to myself,—one Windsor Castle; and I was so delightful and so juvenile, that, without attending to any thing but my eyes, I stood full two hours and a half, and found that half my lameness consists in my indolence. Two Berrys, a Gothic chapel, and an historic castle, are anodynes to a torpid mind. I now fancy that old age was invented by the lazy. St. George's Chapel, that I always worshipped, though so dark and black that I could see nothing distinctly, is now being cleaned and decorated, a scene of' lightness and graces. Mr. Conway ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... bordered on distraction, seemed to have suspended her faculties, till, waking by degrees to a keen sense of anguish, a whirlwind of rage and indignation roused her torpid pulse. One recollection with frightful velocity following another, threatened to fire her brain, and make her a fit companion for the terrific inhabitants, whose groans and shrieks were no unsubstantial sounds of whistling winds, or startled birds, modulated by a romantic fancy, ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... Francis. That rogue! how could Westminster chuse him again To leaven the virtue of these honest men! But the Devil remained till the Break of Day Blushed upon Sleep and Lord Castlereagh:[45] 170 Then up half the house got, and Satan got up With the drowsy to snore—or the hungry to sup:— But so torpid the power of some speakers, 't is said, That they sent even ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... infants out of the baskets, and cared not how the enraged mothers lacerated their faces in return. The scenes of horror changed so quickly, that you could not dwell more than half a minute upon any of them. The tenderest heart became torpid and insensible. One tale of woe followed on the heels of another,—"Such a person too has been plundered!—Such an one's house has been set on fire!—This man is cut in pieces; that has been transfixed with the bayonet!—Those poor creatures are seeking ...
— Frederic Shoberl Narrative of the Most Remarkable Events Which Occurred In and Near Leipzig • Frederic Shoberl (1775-1853)
... their torpid rocks array, But winter, lingering, chills the lap of May; No zephyr fondly sues the mountain's breast, But meteors glare, ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... return, Andrea began to attack Meyerbeer's work, in order to wake up Gambara, who sat sunk in the half-torpid state common in drunkards. ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... spread a pestilential stench around. Here and there they would divide and range themselves in ranks that took the form of human beings with faces all convulsed. Upon a rotting tree-trunk in the midst of all these horrors sat an enormous owl, torpid in its daytime roost; behind it a frowning cavern, guarded by two monsters direly blent of snake and toad and lizard. These, with all the other seeming life the chasm harbored, lay in deathlike slumber, and any movement visible was that of one plunged in deep dreams; so that the forester ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... wind up watches in these regions, and as time is arbitrarily marked off by the cries of the gastric juices, I cannot tell you how the hours were reckoned up that evening. I think we two humans verged into a semi-torpid condition after that barbaric meal. Repletion, heat, and fatigue were too strong a combination for complete wakefulness; and though perhaps not exactly asleep, we were, like hibernating animals, very ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... His torpid eyes, sunk in fat, were fixed upon the ikon stand. He saw the long familiar figures of the saints, the verger Matvey puffing out his cheeks and blowing out the candles, the darkened candle stands, the ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... no disease thy torpid veins invade, Nor Melancholy's phantoms haunt thy shade; Yet hope not life from grief or danger free, Nor think the doom of man reversed for thee— Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes, And pause awhile from Letters to be wise; There mark what ills the ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... do "lie up" in England every winter, but probably very few survive to the following spring. We should have said that it was impossible that any should survive but for one authentic instance in recent years, in which a barn-swallow lived through the winter in a semi-torpid state in an outhouse at a country vicarage. What came of the Newbury birds I do not know, as I left on the 2nd of November—tore myself away, I may say, for, besides meeting with people I didn't know who ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... all the big names of the British aristocracy can be traced back to strong ales or weak (Lucy) Waters. Even those who desire the abolition of the House of Peers, or look on it, with Bagehot, as "a vapid accumulation of torpid comfort," cannot deny that it is an institution that has grown up naturally with the country, and that it is only now (if even now) that it is felt with anything like universality to be an anomaly. The American society which is typified by the four hundred of New York, the society ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... with very little wine in it; only one full bin could I discover. The bins themselves lined but two of the walls, and most of them were covered in with cobwebs, close-drawn like mosquito-curtains. The ceiling was all too low: torpid spiders hung in disreputable parlors, dead to the eye, but loathsomely alive at an involuntary touch. Rats scuttled when we entered, and I had not been long alone when they returned to bear me company. I am not a natural historian, and had rather face a lion with ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... and pleasant Arguments increase. General gaiety ensues, the places about resound with joyous applause. But never does the liquid imbibed overpower weary minds, but Rather, if ever slumber presses their heavy eyes and dulls The brain; and their strength, blunted, grows torpid in the Body, coffee puts sleep to flight from the eyes, and slothful inactivity from the whole frame. Therefore to absorb the sweet draught would be an advantage For those whom a great deal ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... arteries carry the vital blood into the different parts, abundantly charged with vital spirits, which cherish the heat of these parts, sustain them when asleep, and recruit them when exhausted? How should it happen that, if you tie the arteries, immediately the parts not only become torpid, and frigid, and look pale, but at length cease even to be nourished? This, according to Galen, is because they are deprived of the heat which flowed through all parts from the heart, as its source; whence it would appear that the arteries rather ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... Her brain was almost torpid. The want of exhilarating exercise, the long dearth of companionship, the terrible monotony of her life, the restless nights, the dank gloomy atmosphere in which she had her perpetual being, were, she told herself dully, doing their work. And she did not care. But if her brain ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... lie,' cried Mrs. Darrell. 'Such things never die. They sleep, perhaps—like the creatures that hide themselves in the ground and lie torpid all the winter—but with one breath of the past they ...
— Milly Darrell and Other Tales • M. E. Braddon
... unexpected comfort, made that mass of men inaccessible to every thought but that of rest. Though the artillery of the left wing of the Russians kept up a steady fire on this mass,—visible like a stain now black, now flaming, in the midst of the trackless snow,—this shot and shell seemed to the torpid creatures only one inconvenience the more. It was like a thunderstorm, despised by all because the lightning strikes so few; the balls struck only here and there, the dying, the sick, the dead sometimes! Stragglers arrived in groups continually; but once here ...
— Adieu • Honore de Balzac
... casks, or cases, are made as tight as possible and covered with pitched canvas. Such was the cask in question. Yet, when the head was taken off, and a few of the packages removed, an enormous large scorpion was found in the midst of the cask, nearly in a torpid state, but it quickly recovered on exposure to the ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... at the virtue of his mate who, timid and torpid, used to pass over a great part of the planet without permitting himself any distraction whatever, but would awake with an overpowering tension whenever the chances of their voyage brought him the opportunity of a few days' stay in his home ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... shiny, so that the Kid noticed it and made blunt comments upon the subject. His rheumatism was not his worst foe, now. He had to pet his digestive apparatus and cut out strong coffee with three heaping teaspoons of sugar in each cup, because the Little Doctor told him his liver was torpid. He had to stop giving the Kid jolty rides on his knees,—but that was because the Kid was getting too big for baby play, the Old Man declared. The Kid was big enough to ride real horses, now, and he ought to be ashamed to ride ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... call her companion. She knew how hard he had worked during the day, and she resolved not to call him as long as she could keep awake herself. Her position was by the tree; but in order to rouse her torpid faculties, she took a walk around the island. When she reached the side of their narrow domain where they had landed in the morning, she was startled by what she thought was a slight splashing in the water, at a considerable distance from her. After the manner of the Indians, she lay ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic
... but brightly, and poured in a stream of light through the iron grating of the cell where Peters and his wife lay clasped in each other's arms, not asleep, but torpid, and worn out with extreme suffering. Peters was the first to break the silence, and gently moved Ellen, as he called her by her name. She had not for some time lifted up her head, which was buried in his bosom; and she was not aware ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... time, barking frantically in a most excited state. He knew perfectly well what snakes were, having frequently been bitten. I owe my life on this occasion solely to the fact that the snakes were in a torpid state, and came at me one at a time instead of altogether. It was the cold season, about the month of June or July. It is impossible at such moments to take any account of time, so I cannot say how long the battle lasted. At length, however, ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... tiresome story enough, as foggy as the day, sharpened by no sudden flashes of pain or pleasure.—I know: only the outline of a dull life, that long since, with thousands of dull lives like its own, was vainly lived and lost: thousands of them,—massed, vile, slimy lives, like those of the torpid lizards in yonder stagnant water-butt.—Lost? There is a curious point for you to settle, my friend, who study psychology in a lazy, dilettante way. Stop a moment. I am going to be honest. This is what I want you to do. I want you to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... as if Alicia had not spoken. "As to the rest of the people—bah! you can't rouse Calcutta. It is sunk in its torpid liver, and imagines itself superior. It's really funny, you know, the way hepatic influences can be idealised—made to serve ennobling ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... is held a power of money-making, which no hereditary pride, or gentlemanly love of doing nothing, prevents him from using. This ill-will, to be sure, is mostly of a negative kind; its most common form of manifestation is in absence of speech or action, a sort of torpid and genteel ignoring all unpleasant neighbours; but really the whale-fisheries of Monkshaven had become so impertinently and obtrusively prosperous of late years at the time of which I write, the Monkshaven ship-owners were ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the great Atlantic, see God take The mist from woe's white mountain, spring and stream, The breath of man in frost, the spiral lean From roof-cracked caves where, though the heart may break, The soul will not lie torpid, like the snake,— And battle smoke. On them He breathes with dream And, Lo! an Angel with a sword agleam 'Twix the Old World ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... unclean side: but his discursive reason would not let him trammel himself into a poet-laureate or stamp-distributor, and he stopped, ere he had quite passed that well-known "bourne from whence no traveller returns"—and so has sunk into torpid, uneasy repose, tantalized by useless resources, haunted by vain imaginings, his lips idly moving, but his heart for ever still, or, as the shattered chords vibrate of themselves, making melancholy music to the ear of memory! Such is the fate of genius in an age, when in the unequal ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... for sight-seeing, and Paris was not sitting up for company; in fact, she was "not at home." Remembering all this, I must say that the whole appearance of the city was dull and dreary. London out of season seemed still full of life; Paris out of season looked vacuous and torpid. The recollection of the sorrow, the humiliation, the shame, and the agony she had passed through since I left her picking her way on the arm of the Citizen King, with his old riflard over her, rose before me sadly, ominously, as I looked upon the high board fence which surrounded the ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... quails and herons. Sparrows and cuckoos have been found during the winter in hollow trees, torpid and without the least appearance of life, which being warmed recovered themselves and took flight. We know that hedgehogs, marmots, sloths, and serpents, live underground without breathing, and the circulation of the blood is very feeble in them during all the ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... supplying our ideas from foreign sources 'enfeebles all internal strength of thought,' as a course of dram-drinking destroys the tone of the stomach. The faculties of the mind, when not exerted, or when cramped by custom and authority, become listless, torpid, and unfit for the purposes of thought or action. Can we wonder at the languor and lassitude which is thus produced by a life of learned sloth and ignorance; by poring over lines and syllables that excite little more idea or interest than if they were the characters of ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... summer days, the sun blazed down on the blue ice; skua gulls nestled in groups on the snow; sly penguins waddled along to inspect the building operations; seals basked in torpid slumber on the shore; out on the sapphire bay the milk-white bergs floated in the swell. We can all paint our own picture of the good times round the Benzine Hut. We worked hard, ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... depend on rarity so much as on authenticity. The massacre of a distant tribe, which is heard through the report of others, falls far below the heart-shaking effect of a murder committed in our presence. Our sympathy with the unknown victim may originally have been as torpid as that with the unknown tribe; but it has been kindled by the swift and vivid suggestions of details visible to us as spectators; whereas a severe and continuous effort of imagination is needed to call up the kindling suggestions of ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... seemed to smile. Then Smith silently pointed to the hand which held a little pipe. A sickly perfume assailed my nostrils, and the explanation of the hushed silence, and the ease with which we had thus far executed our plan, came to me. The cunning mind was torpid—lost in a ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... which half hid their great horned heads, Ootah could see the eyes of the musk-oxen—they were greenish and phosphorescent. Occasionally the creatures roared sullenly, but the fight was less exciting than it would have been had they been less torpid from ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... not appear to the Quakers to be the foundation of any solid comfort in life. It may give spirits for the moment as strong liquor does, but when the effect of the liquor is over, the spirits flag, and the mind is again torpid. It can give no solid encouragement nor hope, nor prospects. It can afford no anchorage ground, which shall hold the mind in a storm. The early christians, imprisoned, beaten and persecuted even to death, would have had but poor consolation, ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... appearance of a man is usually a pretty clear index to his type of mind. The stolid, easy-going man, who usually advocates the baseline game, does so because he hates to stir up his torpid mind to think out a safe method of reaching the net. There is the other type of baseline player, who prefers to remain on the back of the court while directing an attack intended to break up your game. He is a very dangerous player, and a deep, ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... the unfeeling man who reported the Torpid races for "Bell's Life" had the unkindness to state in cold print; "Worcester succeeded in making the bump at the Cherwell, in consequence of No. 3 of the Brazenface boat suffering from fatigue." And on the copy of the journal sent to Mrs. Green of Manor Green, her son sadly drew a pencil ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... torpid brooklet, That to the night-gleaming moon Flashed in turn the frozen glances, Melts upon ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... gain of one class in the community is loss to another. Probably the law has always existed, and only the very rapid and sudden changes bring it into prominence, because of the swift readjustment needed, an operation which torpid human nature ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... Noon picturing Summer;—Summer's ardent sphere Manhood's gay portrait.—Eve, like Autumn, wan, Autumn resembling faded age in Man; Night, with its silence, and its darkness drear, Emblem of Winter's frore and gloomy reign, When torpid lie the vegetative Powers; Winter, so shrunk, so cold, reminds us plain Of the mute Grave, that o'er the dim Corse lours; There shall the Weary rest, nor ought remain To the pale ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... and thrives remarkably well. In one of his last letters he writes to me as follows on the subject: "The Abrolhos lizard is very docile, and knows Mrs. Emery quite well, and will eat and drink out of her hand; but is timid with strangers. Its habits are rather torpid, but it becomes active when in the sun or before the fire. It eats so very little that a piece of sponge cake about the size of a small bean will satisfy it for three or four weeks. It changes its skin ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... are we not to expect, if Protogenes is going to be hostile to love? he whose whole life, whether in work or at play, has been devoted to love, in forgetfulness of letters, in forgetfulness of his country, not like Laius, away from his country only five days, his was only a torpid and land love: whereas your love 'unfolding its swift wings,' flew over the sea from Cilicia to Athens, merely to gaze at and saunter about with handsome boys. For that was the original reason, doubtless, ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... cold prevails toward the end of January, for a few days occasionally so intense that the human frame can scarcely endure exposure to it for any length of time. When winter has set in nearly every bird disappears, and few wild animals are any longer to be seen; some, like the bear, remain torpid, others change their color to a snowy white, and are rarely observed. Rocks of the softer kinds are often rent asunder, as if with the explosion of gunpowder, by the irresistible expansive power of the frost.[159] Dogs become mad from ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... Born destitute of feeling and of sense. No power he but o'er his brain desired— How not to suffer it to be inspired. Ideas unto him were all unknown, Proud of the words which, only, were his own. So unreflecting, so confused his mind, Torpid in error, indolently blind, A fever Heaven, to quicken him, applied, But, rather than ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... anxiety, with nausea and vomiting,—symptoms to which modern physicians attach much importance. The stupor and profound lethargy show that there was an injury to the brain, to which, in all probability, was added a stagnation of black blood in the torpid veins. Probably decomposing blood gave rise to the offensive odor of the person. The function of the lungs was considerably impaired. The petechial fever in Italy in 1505 was a form of the sweating sickness. There were visitations in 1506 and in 1515 in England. In 1517 the disease lasted full ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... The bottom was not far. I descended in a flowing, undulating fashion and settled softly on the water-bed, beside a large, up-jutting fang of rock. It was black in the depths. The cold penetrated all. Torpid and prone, I lay there numbed into absolute quiescence. It seemed that a torpid inertia, doomed to be everlasting, had settled upon me. I knew no want, no desire, had not the slightest will to move, to rest, to sleep, to eat, ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... on with motionless hands and silent lips! Ah! this humiliation would have killed me in Italy, because I love my people, and they understand and appreciate all that is rare and beautiful. My heart burns with scorn and contempt for these torpid Berliners." ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... breathe very little are stifled in fixed air, but are not soon quite killed in it. Butterflies and flies of other kinds will generally become torpid, and seemingly dead, after being held a few minutes over the fermenting liquor; but they revive again after being brought into the fresh air. But there are very great varieties with respect to the time in which different kinds of flies will either become torpid in the fixed air, ...
— Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air • Joseph Priestley
... most worthy and estimable person, was of a phlegmatic temperament; her sympathies were not easily aroused, her mind was lazy and torpid, in conversation she was unutterably dull. There were times when she was painfully conscious of this, and would have given much for the ceaseless flow of words which fell from the lips of her friend Mrs. Milton-Cleave. And that evening after ...
— The Autobiography of a Slander • Edna Lyall
... of subtle pressure got him to compromise on a pair of white rats at half-a-crown. Never shall I forget the look of majestic contempt with which the Personage withered me as he extracted two torpid rodents from a congeries of their kith and, holding them by their pink tails, dropped them into a paper bag with the air of a Marchese depositing alms in the palm of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 4, 1920 • Various
... stammer, and the door reply, The hall wake, yawn, and smile; the torpid stair Will grumble at our feet, the table cry: 'Fetch my belongings for me; I am bare.' A clatter! Something in the attic falls. A ghost has lifted up his robes and fled. The loitering shadows move along the walls; Then silence ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 • Various
... blest each wayward breeze; For still the graceful knight was near, Prompt to discourse, relate, and hear: The spirit had that exercise, The fine perceptions' play, That perish with the worldly wise, The torpid, and the gay. ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... you. You take no pains to make yourself agreeable. Considering that your father was an artist, you seem to me rather a dull and uninspired young man. But who can tell? There may be things stirring beneath that torpid brain of yours of which no other person knows ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... strong one," repeated the prince. "When they took me away from Russia, I remember I passed through many German towns and looked out of the windows, but did not trouble so much as to ask questions about them. This was after a long series of fits. I always used to fall into a sort of torpid condition after such a series, and lost my memory almost entirely; and though I was not altogether without reason at such times, yet I had no logical power of thought. This would continue for three or four days, and then ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... affairs at the Foss River Ranch when Lablache put into execution his threats against the Hon. Bunning-Ford. The settlement had returned to its customary torpid serenity. The round-up was over, and all the "hands" had returned to the various ranches to which they belonged. The little place had entered upon its period of placid sleep, which would last until the advent of the farmers to spend the ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... claim them. In the East Indies the soldiers and Civil Servants of "John Company," and the merchant community, "shook the pagoda tree" until they had accumulated sufficient fortunes on which to retire, when they returned to England with yellow faces and torpid livers, grumbling like Jos Sedley to the ends of their lives about the cold, and the carelessness of English cooks in preparing curries, and harbouring unending regrets for the flesh-pots and comforts of life in Boggley ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... the chamber in which he left him, believing he had withdrawn too soon, and that the king, as he knew no other was present, was speaking to him: he soon drew near enough to hear what was said; and while he was standing torpid in suspense, dreading to be discovered, and not knowing how to ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... so argued; and my sad heart heard, But made no comment. Then the Baron spoke, And waited for my answer. All in vain I strove for strength to utter that one word My mind dictated. Moments rolled away— Until at last my torpid heart awoke, And forced my trembling lips to say him nay. And then my eyes with sudden tears o'erran, In pity for myself and for this man Who stood before me, lost in pained surprise. "Dear friend," I cried, "Dear generous friend forgive A troubled ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... of my curiosity concerning my fellow- lodgers at Les Trois Pigeons; however, it had been comparatively a torpid growth; my meeting with them served to enlarge it so suddenly and to such proportions that I wonder it did not strangle me. In fine, I sat there brush-paddling my failure like an automaton, and saying over and over aloud, ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... by which the faction worked. They drew that power from Scotland rekindled into a temper of religious anxiety, which they never could have drawn from Scotland lying torpid, as she had lain through the 18th century. The new machinery, (created by Parliament in order to meet the wishes of the Scottish nation,) the money of that nation, the awakened zeal of that nation; all these were employed, honourably in one sense, that is, not turned aside into private ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... and intemperance pervaded the land, from the highest to the lowest classes of society. The Established Church was torpid, as far as it was not a scandal; but those who dissented from it came within the meshes of the Act of Uniformity, the Test Act, and the Corporation Act. By law, such a man as Priestley, being a Unitarian, could neither teach nor preach, and was liable to ruinous fines and ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... stronger life, but that individual geniuses should seem so exceptionally abundant. This mystery is just about as deep as the time-honored conundrum as to why great rivers flow by great towns. It is true that great public fermentations awaken and adopt many geniuses, who in more torpid times would have had no chance to work. But over and above this there must be an exceptional concourse of genius about a time, to make the fermentation begin at all. The unlikeliness of the concourse is far greater than ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... the Church of Scotland no doubt called forth an attention to the subject which stirred up the public, and made religion at any rate a topic of deep interest for discussion and partizanship. Men's minds were not allowed to remain in the torpid condition of a past generation. 2d. The aesthetic movement in religion, which some years since was made in England, has, of course, had its influence in Scotland; and many who showed little concern about religion, whilst it was ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... the rich table-d'hote wine; he is hail-fellow with the conductor, and alive to all the incidents of the road. A man can be alive in 1860 and 1830 at the same time, don't you see? Bodily, I may be in 1860, inert, silent, torpid; but in the spirit I am walking about in 1828, let us say;—-in a blue dress-coat and brass buttons, a sweet figured silk waistcoat (which I button round a slim waist with perfect ease), looking at beautiful beings with gigot sleeves and tea-tray hats under ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... week?" It was the first week in March. Wilfrid could not keep from sobbing aloud. In the early period of such a captivity, imagination, deprived of all other food, conjures phantasms for the employment of the brain; but there is still some consciousness within the torpid intellect wakeful to laugh at them as they fly, though they have held us at their mercy. The face of time had been imaged like the withering mask of a corpse to him. He had felt, nevertheless, that things had gone on as we trust them to do at the closing of our eyelids: he had preserved ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Before we can safely reorganize we must not only examine the hearts but the stock-list. No matter how many brilliant alliances have been arranged, no matter how many husbands and wives have drifted apart in the local whirlpools of the summer's current, the season will be dull if Wall Street is torpid and discouraged. We cannot any of us, you see, live to ourselves alone. Does not the preacher say that? And do we not all look about us in the pews, when he thus moralizes, to see who has prospered? The B's have taken a back seat, the C's have moved up nearer ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... employers remonstrated; and the same arguments they had used upon their former clerks were urged upon his consideration. Fearing the loss of situation, he repented, but it was only to fall again before the power of that appetite with which he had tampered as with a torpid viper, which now felt the warmth of his embrace, and became a living, craving creature within ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... of animals constantly around our country habitations, of underground and nocturnal habits, some of which become torpid in winter. All are timid and unobtrusive, and yet have great influence upon our welfare; for they check the rapid increase of those worms and insects which live and breed beneath the soil, and would destroy the crops which are ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... the same way as Caesar effected the Italian— by analogous extension of the institution of the urban censorship with its set terms and other essential rules to all the subject communities of Italy and Sicily.(102) This had been one of the first institutions which the torpid aristocracy allowed to drop, and in this way deprived the supreme administrative authority of any view of the resources in men and taxation at its disposal and consequently of all possibility of an effective ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... sleep seem not to remember that though it must be granted them that they are crawling about before the break of day, it can seldom be said that they are perfectly awake; they exhaust no spirits, and require no repairs; but lie torpid as a toad in marble, or at least are known to live only by an inert and sluggish locomotive faculty, and may be said, like a wounded snake, to "drag ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... there the heap grew, hidden in the darkness; I slept beneath a dome of history. All day the heap lay quiet, but at night, When I was sleeping, it began to stir, And from the pages clamorous with battles. The battles issued, stretching torpid wings; And laurels showered upon my slumbering eyes. Austerlitz gleamed among my curtains, Jena Glowed in the gilded tassels holding them And on a sudden lapsed into my dream. Till once, when Metternich was gravely telling His version of my father's history, Down ...
— L'Aiglon • Edmond Rostand
... other. The large room was emptying; the stove-pipe, in the shape of a palm-tree, spread its gilt leaves over the white ceiling, and near them, outside the window, in the bright sunshine, a little fountain gurgled in a white basin, where; in the midst of watercress and asparagus, three torpid lobsters stretched across to some quails that lay heaped up in ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... To try the failing powers of age. Vex'd by the constant call of these, Virtue a while for conquest tries: But weary grown and fond of ease, She makes with them a compromise: Av'rice himself she gives to rest, But rules him with her strict commands; Bids Pity touch his torpid breast, And ...
— Miscellaneous Poems • George Crabbe
... in another moment, that he would plunge his weapon into the shark's body; but instead of that, what was his surprise to see him suddenly leap on its back and dig the fingers of one hand into its left eye. If the hammer-head had been torpid before, it now made ample amends by its sudden activity; off it darted along the surface, Nub holding up its head to prevent it from diving, while with his right hand he struck his knife with all his might sometimes before him and sometimes behind ...
— The South Sea Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... a great circuit rather than see the hateful place. He would set his heart on touching every post in the streets through which he walked. If by any chance he missed a post, he would go back a hundred yards and repair the omission. Under the influence of his disease, his senses became morbidly torpid, and his imagination morbidly active. At one time he would stand poring on the town clock without being able to tell the hour. At another, he would distinctly hear his mother, who was many miles off, calling him by his name. But this was not the worst. A deep melancholy took ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... women nurse dirty infants and sit in groups upon the stone steps, rendering them almost impassable. But to-night a thing had happened in Wyatt's Buildings which had awakened in the inhabitants, hardened to sordid crime, a sort of torpid interest. ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... striking clocks summoned him remorselessly to rise and work he often reeled with dizziness. It seemed to him that the greatest happiness attainable would be to creep into some dark, warm corner, out of the sight and memory of men, and lie there torpid, with a blessed half-consciousness that death was slowly overcoming him. Of all the sufferings collected into each four-and-twenty hours this of rising to a new ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... thrown over them, lifting up their heads and sharing in the general rejoicing, in the glory of their annual resurrection. Is it in summer, with its myriads of blooms, and its thousand thousand happy voices, the silent torpid river, basking in the light of the sun, and responding only to the fishes as they frisk near the surface? Or is it in the autumn, with its many shades, with its long avenues on which nature has lavished whole ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren
... be a snake," said Leander, reassuringly; "in such cold weather as this the snakes are all torpid and lying in their holes underground, stiffer ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... the day after it was written, and found him in a state of such torpid despondency that any summons to action, even the most painful, was a blessing. He had felt that the only chance of combating his sorrow, and preventing its obtaining full mastery over all his faculties, was to work off the sense of depression by hard study,—to battle against it with the ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... roused and keen. There it was—a slight noise in the room!—slight, but clear, and with an unknown significance about it! It was awful to think it would come again. I do believe it was only one of those creaks in the timbers which announce the torpid, age-long, sinking flow of every house back to the dust—a motion to which the flow of the glacier is as a torrent, but which is no less inevitable and sure. Day and night it ceases not; but only in the night, when house and heart ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... for.—1. "Dry and powder the mandrake root (often called may-apple) and take about one teaspoonful." This dose may be repeated two or three times a day, according to the requirements of the case. This is a stimulant, a tonic and a laxative, and is especially good when the liver is in a torpid and inactive condition. ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... came. It had been very cold and gray for a day or two, and I felt dull and torpid. And then, one morning towards mid-day, the white flakes began to fall. There had been a few little flurries of snow before, lasting only for a minute or two; but this was different. The great flakes fell slowly and softly, and soon the whole landscape began ...
— Bear Brownie - The Life of a Bear • H. P. Robinson
... which now I drain, By this spirit, which shall cheer you, As its fumes mount to my brain, From thy torpid ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... his audience had arrived, and then he went on the platform and played. It was a lazy, hand-to-mouth existence, and Thomas said he must have got to like that easy way of living and the relaxing Southern atmosphere. At any rate, when he got back to New York in the fall, he was rather torpid; perhaps he had been growing too fast. From this adolescent drowsiness the lad was awakened by two voices, by two women who sang in New York in 1851,—Jenny Lind and Henrietta Sontag. They were the first great artists he had ever heard, and he never ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... instance, by turning one of the cranks by which it is worked, PUNCHINELLO will be able to project a shower of such mortiferous missiles against all abettors of crime and vice, all quacks, political and social, all corrupt officials, all Congress, (except the Right Party,) all torpid fogies and peddlers of red tape, all humbugs of every size and shape, in fact, as will speedily reduce them to ashes. Then, by skilfully manipulating the other crank, he can produce from it strains of such mellifluous harmony that the very ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 27, October 1, 1870 • Various
... a drunkard— Only a year has flown, But into that loathsome creature The fair young boy has grown. The work was sure and rapid. I will paint him as he lies In a torpid, drunken slumber, Under the ...
— The Kingdom of Love - and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... is harmless, and in the absence of the mosquito the yellow fever patient is harmless—as the experimental evidence now stands. Yellow fever epidemics are terminated by cold weather because the mosquitoes die or become torpid. The sanitary condition of our southern seaport cities is no better in winter than in summer, and if the infection attached to clothing and bedding it is difficult to understand why the first frosts of autumn should arrest the progress of an epidemic. But all this is explained now that the mode ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... birthright of charm and seduction for his sake sat down to eat her mess of pottage. Not that she thought even as far as that. Thought appeared to be suspended. As a typhoon has its calm center, so the mad tumult of her spirit held a false peace. She rested there in it, torpid as to ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... was stilled the mighty hum. No lights, save here and there from before the columns of a temple, or in the porticoes of the voiceless forum, broke the wan and fluctuating light of the struggling morn. From the heart of the torpid city, so soon to vibrate with a thousand passions, there came no sound: the streams of life circulated not; they lay locked under the ice of sleep. From the huge space of the amphitheatre, with its stony seats rising one above ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... things just served to stir the torpid sense, Nor pain nor pity in my bosom raised. Memory, though slow, returned with strength; and thence Dismissed, again on open day I gazed, At houses, men, and common light, amazed. The lanes I sought, and as the sun retired, Came, where beneath ...
— Lyrical Ballads 1798 • Wordsworth and Coleridge
... eaten both by Indians and white hunters. Sometimes they are captured by pouring water into their burrows; but this method only succeeds in early spring, when the animals awake out of their torpid state, and the ground is still frozen hard enough to prevent the water from filtering away. They are sometimes shot with guns; but, unless killed upon the spot, they will escape to their burrows, and tumble in before the hunter can lay ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... reason shows that heretics should be put to death: the first is, Lest the wicked should injure the righteous; second, That by the punishment of a few many may be reformed. For many who were made torpid by impunity, are roused by the fear of punishment; AND THIS WE DAILY SEE IS THE RESULT ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... his family. Hence, nothing so much excites the wonder of the traveler there as the diminutiveness of the cultivated ground surrounding each Indian hut.(222) But in these earthly paradises, where, as Byron said, even bread is gathered like fruit, the powers of man slumber as certainly as they grow torpid in polar deserts.(223) The sentence: "In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread," has been a blessing to mankind. Athens was not only the literary and political, but also the economic capital of Greece; and yet Attica was one ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... Perfecto. His smooth brown head rested in what seemed an accustomed hollow of the chair back. His wide, thin lips were pursed in sybaritic enjoyment of his cigar. He stretched himself in the warmth of the fire, sleek, torpid, and loathsome. ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... Should tempting novelty thy cell refrain, [p]And sloth effuse her opiate fumes in vain; Should beauty blunt on fops her fatal dart, Nor claim the triumph of a letter'd heart; Should no disease thy torpid veins invade, Nor melancholy's phantoms haunt thy shade; Yet hope not life, from grief or danger free, Nor think the doom of man revers'd for thee: Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes, And pause awhile from letters, to be wise; There mark ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson |
