"Deadness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that he had grown accustomed to the deadness of it, liked this change from Indian Tom's cabin. He liked his wallow of soft sand during the day, and he liked still more the aloneness and the aloofness of their ramparted stronghold when the cool of evening came. ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... every syllable of this letter, it dropped from her hands; but she uttered not a word. There was, however, a paleness in her face, a deadness in her eye, and a kind of palsy over her frame, which Miss Woodley, who had seen her in every stage of her uneasiness, never had ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... doubt concerning the marriage laws of the State. He said that, having searched the Scriptures, and learned what he could from other books, he was fully convinced that it was the modern so-called "orthodox" Christian Church (in which little else but signs of deadness and lack of faith appeared) that alone condemned the ancient usage of the patriarchs, which in the Bible was nowhere condemned. He had read in a book that many of the Jews and most of the Asiatics had more than one wife at the time of the ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... did I come to little fire-hills that burnt redly, and sent out fire and noise, so that I heard their trouble each time through the forest, before that I was come to them. And about each was there a deadness and desolation, where the fire had killed the big trees; yet, as I did observe, the quick life of little plants did grow more nigh, as that they were born and lived between the times of the fire-bursts. And this I do take it that ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... us, in short, to be sanctified wholly. Oh, beloved, what a blessed reckoning is the reckoning of faith! How vastly does it transcend all the reckonings of logic or mathematics. For, by it, we experience a continual deadness to sin, and a continual ...
— The Theology of Holiness • Dougan Clark
... Cecchi's eyes were dark stilettos; the gaze of the Englishman was like a narrow flash of blue steel. He was going to say something. I waited apathetically. Then the words came, falling like icicles in the deadness of ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... we speak of being risen with Christ, seeing that our faith, in the measure of its genuineness, its depth and its operative power upon our characters, will be the gate through which there shall pass into our deadness the life that truly is, the life that has nought to do with death or sin. And this unity with Jesus, brought about by faith, brings about that the depths of the Christian life are hid with Christ in God, and that we, risen with Him, do even now sit 'at the right hand ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Wordsworth,—A letter from you is very grateful; I have not seen a Kendal postmark so long. We are pretty well, save colds and rheumatics, and a certain deadness to everything, which I think I may date from poor John's loss, and another accident or two at the same time, that has made me almost bury myself at Dalston, where yet I see more faces than I could wish. Deaths overset one and put one out long after the recent grief. Two or three have died, ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... ill report of him from Chester, and on the 21st he wrote from Blackpool to his sister-in-law. "I have come to this Sea-Beach Hotel (charming) for a day's rest. I am much better than I was on Sunday; but shall want careful looking to, to get through the readings. My weakness and deadness are all on the left side; and if I don't look at anything I try to touch with my left hand, I don't know where it is. I am in (secret) consultation with Frank Beard, who says that I have given him indisputable ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... income paid by incumbents on their appointment) did not amount to more than L500 a year in all. It may be that the standard of religious life was not lower in Ireland than it was in England when the spiritually-minded non-Jurors had been driven out and Hanoverian deadness was supreme; but in England there was no other Church to form a contrast. In Ireland the apathy and worldliness of the Protestant clergy stood out in bold relief against the heroic devotion of the priests and friars; and at the time when the unhappy peasants, forced to pay tithes to a ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... of the electric light were rendered visible, and all the colours of the solar spectrum were extracted from utter darkness. The extreme richness of the electric light in invisible rays of low refrangibility was demonstrated, one-eighth only of its radiation consisting of luminous rays. The deadness of the optic nerve to those invisible rays was proved, and experiments were then added to show that the bright and the dark rays of a solid body, raised gradually to incandescence, are strengthened together; intense dark heat being an invariable accompaniment of intense white heat. ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... of the central purpose of the poem, Browning said: "Yes, just about that." With constancy to an ideal as the central purpose, the details of this poem, without being minutely interpreted, may yet serve as a representation of the depression, the hopelessness, the dullness and deadness of soul, the doubt and terror even of the man who travels the last stages of a difficult journey to a long-sought but unknown goal. His victory consists in the unfaltering persistence of his search. The "squat tower," when he reaches it, is prosaic and ugly, but finding it is ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... Asia be absorbed into Europe. Thoughts of this kind, fermenting among the subject populations, would produce a general debility, a want both of power and of inclination to make any combined effort, a desire to wait until an opportunity of acting with effect should offer. Hence probably the deadness and apathy which characterize this period, and which seem at first sight so astonishing. Distrust of their actual leader paralyzed the nations of Western Asia, and they did not as yet see their way clearly towards placing themselves under any ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... coldness of desire and deadness of feeling; want of curiosity and slowness of intellect, make the Amazonian Indians very uninteresting companions anywhere. Their imagination is of a dull-gloomy quality, and they seemed never to be stirred by the emotions—love, pity, admiration, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... recent times we have taken perhaps exaggerated notice, partly to the blindness of the polite world to the true difficulty and true value of work of this kind; and the importance which Roman education under the Empire gave to rhetoric was the mark not of deadness, but of the survival of a manly public spirit. Lincoln's wisdom had to utter itself in a voice which would reach the outskirts of a large and sometimes excited crowd in the open air. It was uttered in strenuous conflict with a man whose reputation quite overshadowed ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... were had for a deep wish In the deadness of the night, There'd be a truce to longing Between the dusk and the light: But love is had for sighing, For living and for dying, And there's no one now to ask me ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott
... dust, and at its far edge flowed the river,—deep here, tinted with green, writhing and gurgling and curdling on the banks over shelving ledges of lichen and mud-covered rock. Beyond it yawned the opening to the great West,—the Prairies. Not the dreary deadness here, as farther west. A plain, dark russet in hue,—for the grass was sun-scorched,—stretching away into the vague distance, intolerable, silent, broken by hillocks and puny streams that only made the vastness and silence more wide and heavy. Its limitless ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... hasty line to let you know that I have come to this sea-beach hotel (charming) for a day's rest. I am much better than I was on Sunday, but shall want careful looking to, to get through the readings. My weakness and deadness are all on the left side, and if I don't look at anything I try to touch with my left hand, I don't know where it is. I am in (secret) consultation with Frank Beard; he recognises, in the exact description I have given ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... hasty appeals to the great source of benevolence, for support, if not for a change of spirit. Still she never beheld Hetty on her knees, that a feeling of tender recollection, as well as of profound regret at the deadness of her own heart, did not come over her. Thus had she herself done in childhood, and even down to the hour of her ill fated visits to the garrisons, and she would willingly have given worlds, at such moments, to be able to exchange her present sensations for the confiding faith, those pure ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... colonies was preceded by an interval of stupor. The violent ferment which had been stirred in the nation by the affairs of Wilkes and the Middlesex election, was followed, as Burke said, by as remarkable a deadness and vapidity. In 1770 the distracted ministry of the Duke of Grafton came to an end, and was succeeded by that of Lord North. The king had at last triumphed. He had secured an administration of which the fundamental principle was that the sovereign was to be the virtual head of ...
— Burke • John Morley
... himself appears in public sight Conscious of fate, desponding of the fight. Slowly he moves, and at his altar stands With eyes dejected, and with trembling hands; And, while he mutters undistinguish'd pray'rs, A livid deadness ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... at nothing, and is as insensible to the duty of a mother as to that of a wife. If we put together these features in her character, her hot animal passions, her cool inflexible revenge, her cynical disregard of all decency, her deadness to natural affection for her child, her ferocity and her cunning, we have a hideous picture of corrupted womanhood. We cannot but wonder whether, in after days, remorse ever did its merciful work upon Herodias. She urged Herod to his ruin at last by her ambition, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... done. She did indeed behave at this time with more than ordinary gaiety; and good humour gave a glow to her countenance that set off her features, which were very pretty, to the best advantage, and lessened the deadness that had ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... to imagine it AS IT EXISTS, purely by itself, without your favorable or unfavorable, hopeful or apprehensive comment. It will be almost impossible for you to realize such a condition of negativity and deadness. No one portion of the universe would then have importance beyond another; and the whole collection of its things and series of its events would be without significance, character, expression, or perspective. Whatever of value, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... aged, but with an expression of countenance intelligent and pleasant. His hair and eyes are black; he is habited as a priest; his hands are joined in prayer; before him is a crucifix, at his feet a skull, and behind him are a globe and a pair of compasses. His devotion, his deadness to the world, and his love of science are ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... always see me in church," she returned, with a stiff bow, and an expansion of deadness on her face, which I interpreted into an assertion of dignity, resulting from the implied possibility that I might have passed her over in my congregation, or might have forgotten her after ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... extent than we are probably yet aware of. Whereas formerly, before the advent of machinery, the commonest article you could pick up had a life and warmth which gave it individual interest, now everything is turned out to such a perfection of deadness that one is driven to pick up and collect, in sheer desperation, the commonest rubbish still surviving ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... no recurring time when one is certain to be free from those harsh words, and unjust censures, which are almost more than blows, aye even to those natures we are apt to fancy so hardened to rebuke. Imagine the deadness of heart that must prevail in that poor wretch who never hears the sweet words of praise or of encouragement. Many masters of families, men living in the rapid current of the world, who are subject to a variety of ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... sooner began to recall to mind my former experience of the goodness of God to my soul, but there came flocking into my mind an innumerable company of my sins and transgressions; amongst which these were at this time most to my affliction; namely, my deadness, dulness, and coldness in holy duties; my wanderings of heart, of my wearisomeness in all good things, my want of love to God, His ways and people, with this at the end of all, Are these the fruits of Christianity? Are these tokens of ...
— Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners • John Bunyan
... transgression, but an era, incident, and step in human existence, an established part of the visible order of things from the beginning. When the New Testament speaks of death as a punishment, it always uses the word in a symbolic sense, meaning spiritual deadness and misery, which is a perfect retribution, because it discriminates with unerring exactness. This has been conclusively proved by Klaiber,1 who shows that the peculiar language of Paul in regard to the trichotomist division of man into spirit, soul, and body necessarily ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... bear the Christian name? What justice is there, or what reasonableness, in demanding as a test of genuineness the same degree of attainment on the part of Christian people, many of them uneducated, who are only just emerging from the deadness and ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... friend, meikle as I love you. We speak owre, owre often o' the lost; for our foolish hearts find mair pleasure in that than in anything else; but ill does it fit us for being alone. Weel do I ken your feeling—a stone deadness o' the heart, a feeling there are no words to express, but that seems as it were insensibility itself turning into pain; an' I ken, too, my lassie, that it is nursed by the very means ye take to flee from it. Ye maun learn to think mair o' the living and ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... water color to have the "force of oil." He would like it to have the peculiar delicacy, paleness, and transparency belonging specially to its own material. On the other hand, I think he would not like an oil painting to have the deadness or paleness of a water color. He would like it to have the deep shadows, and the rich glow, and crumbling and bossy touches which are alone attainable in oil color. And if he painted in fresco, he would neither aim at the transparency of water color, nor the ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... He offers to us the glory of sympathy with his mind. By love of nature, by joy in the communion with its beauty, by growing insight into the wonders of color, form, and purpose, we enter into fellowship with the Creative art. We go into harmony with God. By dullness of eye and deadness of heart to natural beauty, we keep away from sympathy with God, who is the fountain of loveliness as well as the fountain of love. But the inmost harmony with the Infinite we find only through love, and the reception of his love. Then we are prepared to see the world aright, to ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... seemed as she had been entombed for years, And came again to living with a start. There was an awful echoing in her ears And a great deadness pressing at her heart. She shuddered and with terror seemed to freeze, Lip-shrunken and wide-eyed a moment's space, And then she touched the little lifeless face, And kissed it, and rose up ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... is very tall, rigid, long-necked, and extremely thin, with fine dark hair and a lean grey clean-shaven face, the heavy-lidded eyes of an almost Asian deadness, the upper lip projecting beyond the lower, a drift of careless hair sticking boyishly forward from the forehead, the nose thin, the mouth mobile but decisive, the whole set and colour of the face stonelike ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... froid [Fr.]; stoicism, imperturbation &c (inexcitability) 826 [Obs.]; nonchalance, unconcern, dry eyes; insouciance &c (indifference) 866; recklessness &c 863; callousness; heart of stone, stock and stone, marble, deadness. torpor, torpidity; obstupefaction^, lethargy, coma, trance, vegetative state; sleep &c 683; suspended animation; stupor, stupefaction; paralysis, palsy; numbness &c (physical insensibility) 376. neutrality; quietism, vegetation. V. be insensible &c adj.; have a rhinoceros hide; show insensibility ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... king, as best informed, they give him a most discouraging portrait of the spirit of this nation. "So far as relates to England," say these ministers, "it would be want of duty not to give your Majesty this clear account: that there is a deadness and want of spirit in the nation universally, so as not at all to be disposed to the thought of entering into a new war; and that they seem to be tired out with taxes to a degree beyond what was ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... be not in the same manner enlightned or agitated. And therefore (in the fourth Figure of the sixth Iconism) the Ray AAAHB will have its side HH more deadned by the resistance of the dark or quiet medium PPP, Whence there will be a kind of deadness superinduc'd on the side HHH, which will continually increase from B, and strike deeper and deeper into the Ray by the line BR; Whence all the parts of the triangle, RBHO will be of a dead Blue colour, and so much the deeper, by how much the nearer they lie to the ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... that conveyed the illusion of superior moral force. But that there was any strength in her husband that could be described as moral Anne would not have admitted for a moment. She believed herself to be crushed, grossly, by the superior weight of moral deadness that ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... Near at hand there was nothing but sage-brush. He dared not risk crossing the open patches to reach the rocks. Again he peeped over the sage. The rustlers—four—five—seven—eight in all, were approaching, but not directly in line with him. That was relief for a cold deadness which seemed to be creeping inward along his veins. He crouched down with bated breath ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... lifelessness is the result of forcing your mind to one set of thoughts and feelings. You become worn out—your feelings exhausted—deadness and depression ensues. Now, turn your mind off from these subjects—divert it by a cheerful and animated conversation, and you will find, after a while, that it will return to them with ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... emptiness of his own righteousness brings also with it a further discovery of the naughtiness of his heart, in its hypocrisies, pride, unbelief, hardness of heart, deadness, and backwardness to all gospel obedience; which sight of himself lies like millstones upon his shoulders, and sinks him yet further into doubts and fears of damnation. For bid him now receive Christ; he answers, he cannot, ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... suffer in silence. They try to conceal it all from us. Their feverish attempts to find some sunshine in life every evening, the desperate and futile migrations they make each few months, and the pathetic mental deadness of their gatherings, they try to keep private. We might never know to what straits many rich folk have come, were it not for the newspapers and their kindly society columns. Bless their noble insistence on showing us the lives of the rich, their ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... offers work worthy of the highest artist. The would-be actor takes from it vitality and motion, endowing it instead with the rigidity of death, as if the soul had resumed its cast-off garment, the stiffened and mouldy corpse—whose frozen deadness it could ill model to the utterance of its ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... our own unsupported opinion, or the self-sufficient exercise of our own supposed discernment;—what with our insolent mistrust; or our shortsighted folly and presumption; or, lastly, our coldness and deadness of heart,—our slender appetite for Divine things, which makes us yearn back after Earth, at the very open gate of Heaven;—in one way or other, I repeat, we contrive to evacuate our own admission that the Bible is an inspired Book: we fasten discredit on ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... Some sailorly instinct, of which I have no recollection whatever, had taken a turn of the rope under my arms and round the yard, and so kept me from slipping away. But I woke up to agonies of cold—a sodden deadness of the limbs which set me wondering numbly if I had any legs left—and a gnawing hunger and emptiness. I felt no thirst; perhaps because my body was so soaked with water. In the same dull way the horrors of the previous day came back on me, and I wondered heavily if my dead comrades ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... and cold, in the face of all that nature or experience testifies, still each moment to believe in Jesus as our all-sufficient sanctification, in whom we are perfected before God. Complaints as to want of feeling, as to weakness or deadness, seldom profit: it is the soul that refuses to occupy itself with itself, either with its own weakness or the strength of the enemy, but only looks to what Jesus is, and has promised to do, to whom progress in ...
— Holy in Christ - Thoughts on the Calling of God's Children to be Holy as He is Holy • Andrew Murray
... save herself from falling, since she saw there precisely that which the shape of the room and the disarray of it, along with vacant space and the low camp-bed in the centre of that space, had foretold—for all her dumbness of feeling, deadness of sympathy—she must assuredly see.—All these last four-and-twenty hours she had solaced herself with the phantom society of Dickie the baby-child, of Dickie the eager boy, curious of many things. But here was one different from both these. Different, too, from the young ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... by the unrest which follows any illuminating vision of ideal beauty, he asked himself almost angrily, in an effort to divert his thoughts, if it were possible that he was weakening in his purpose, since he no longer found the old zest in his hatred of Fletcher. The deadness of his emotions had then affected this one also—the single feeling which he had told himself would be eternal; and the old nervous thrill, so like the thrill of violent love, no longer troubled him when ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... stupidity, when hope itself sees nothing to hope for. Let us not trouble ourselves about the cause of our earthliness, except we know it to be some unrighteousness in us, but go at once to the Life. Never, never let us accept as consolation the poor suggestion, that the cause of our deadness is physical. Can it be comfort to know that this body of ours, because of the death in it, is too much for the spirit—which ought not merely to triumph over it, but to inspire it with subjection and obedience? Let us comfort ourselves in the ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... she began to hear voices, and it seemed to her that they were German voices, arguing about something. The voices seemed angry and excited. At first she did not bother about them. She was wondering how badly she was hurt. Her arms and limbs had a curious sort of deadness about them, a detached sensation, as if they belonged to some one else. She wondered if she was paralyzed and dared not try to move them, fearful lest she might find that it ...
— The Apartment Next Door • William Andrew Johnston
... ghastly thing to the boy as he came to realize it—this utter deadness and coldness of "the world". Thyrsis himself was all afire with love—with love, not only for his vision and his art, but for all humanity, and for humanity's noblest dreams. His friends were poets and sages of past time, men ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... had lost, nor of anything she wished to gain; she had nothing left but the sense that she was empty, that she needed some goal, and had none. She sat down upon a stone between the wide street and the wide pavement, and saw the moon shining gray upon the stone houses. It was all deadness. ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... life. Then it was that Savonarola, a friar in one of the convents of Florence, all on fire with enthusiasm for purity and goodness, began to awaken the hearts of the people with his burning eloquence, and his denunciations of their worldliness and the deadness of the Church. He prophesied a great outpouring of the wrath of God, and in particular that the Church would be purified and renewed after a quick and terrible punishment. The passion, the conviction, the eloquence ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... the lady who has just sat down (Mrs. Foster), although I am not so much worn by my labors as she seems to have been. For thirty-five years I have observed in society its impetus checked, and a kind of lethargy and deadness in practical ethics, arising from fear of this prejudicial effect upon public economy. I have noticed that in the last five years there has been a revolution as perfect as if it had been God's resurrection ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... work now. I bury myself in it up to the ears. Long hours—8 and 9 on a stretch, sometimes. And all the days, Sundays included. It isn't all for print, by any means, for much of it fails to suit me; 50,000 words of it in the past year. It was because of the deadness which invaded me when Susy died. But I have made a change lately—into dramatic work—and I find it absorbingly entertaining. I don't know that I can write a play that will play: but no matter, I'll write half a dozen that won't, anyway. Dear me, I didn't know there was such fun in it. I'll ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... is the same deadness, stiffness, and restraint that marked the first course; hardly has a tinge of colour touched the ladies' cheeks or noses. It is a dinner of wax dolls, official,-magnificent, with the magnificence which comes chiefly of ample room, lofty ceilings, and seats placed so ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... nothing at all. Cornish people at that time—and they may still be the same—lived in a spiritual atmosphere, at least in their own county; so much so, that I have often heard them complain, when they returned from the "shires," of the dryness and deadness they felt there. I can certainly set my seal to this testimony, and declare that those of us who had visions in Cornwall have not had them in the same way out ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... There was a deadness of atmosphere between those rocky walls that struck chill even to Adela's inconsequent soul. "What a ghastly place!" she commented. "I should think Ezekiel's valley of dry bones must have ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... pattern that has been given. Mr. Masters was at the whole expense of the entertainment, mentally; and he talked with the ease and pleasantness that seemed natural to him, of things that could not help interesting the others; even Diana in her deadness of heart, even Mrs. Starling in her perversity, pricked up their ears and listened. I don't believe, either, he even found it a difficult effort; nothing ever seemed difficult to Mr. Masters that he had to do; it was ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... will, by degrees lose their life, so that at length they become altogether dead, which is very painful to the soul, especially as regards the will, which had been tasting I know not what of sweetness and tranquillity, which comforted the other powers in their deadness and powerlessness. ...
— Spiritual Torrents • Jeanne Marie Bouvires de la Mot Guyon
... pitchy deadness of night, when there was no wind and the cold on the peaks had frozen the waterfall, then the silence seemed insupportable. Many hours that should have been given to slumber were paced out under the cold, white, pitiless stars, ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... he is a dark and dread divinity. The precise significance of his title Plouton[1348] is uncertain; but under this name he is connected in the myths with processes of vegetation—it is Plouton who carries off Persephone, leaving the world in the deadness of winter. The figure of the underground deity appears to have taken shape from the combination of two mythological conceptions—the underground fructifying forces of nature, and the assemblage of the dead in a nether world or kingdom.[1349] His only moral significance ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... time just then. The excitement of the Jacobi episode had roused him for a while, but now natural reaction had set in, and the deadness and dulness of his daily routine oppressed him intolerably. Nothing interested him—nothing gave him pleasure. His literary work, the society of his friends, even his nightly "smokes" with the faithful Goliath, were like the dust and bitterness of the apples of Sodom. The present was like the ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... the late nights, must be counted along with the occasional thrills of delirious excitement. But as far as regards our great legislative bodies, it will be easy to show that there would still exist, in other forms, an ample scope for living oratory to make up for the deadness that would fall ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... with his abortive and atrophied complex vision, all he sees is the eternal soullessness and deadness of matter; dead moonlight, dead water, dead mud and slime and refuse, dead mist and vapour, dead earth-mould and dead leaves. And while the desolate chemistry of nothingness grips him with its dead fingers and he turns hopelessly to the silent tree-trunk at his side, that also repels him with ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... adds the charm of peace and purity to the countryside. There's never, I should think, enough of it to give the sense of utter desolation and deadness that it gives ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... lean face grew hazy. Then Jean bowed his head in his hands, and sat there, while a slight tremor shook all his muscles at once. He grew deathly cold and deathly sick. This paroxysm slowly wore away, and Jean grew conscious of a dull amaze at the apparent deadness of his spirit. Blaisdell placed a huge, ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... to learn that "things are not what they seem" in this strange world, and that mostly we may expect to find the hidden matter below the surface directly opposite to that which appears above. She therefore simply concluded that this deep insensibility resulted from coldness of heart and deadness of feeling, and gradually the conviction deepened in her mind, that Aletheia Randolph was the name which had trembled on the lips of her unknown friend, when he warned her to beware of some one of her ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... rationality enough, and persuasions sufficient, so there is also argument most prevalent to persuade to continue therein, and that to heartily, cheerfully, and unfeignedly, unto the end: did not, as I have said, blindness, madness, deadness, and willful rebellion, carry them away in the vanity of their minds, and ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... with the deepest alarm those few patriotic statesmen who were not blinded by national vanity or by slavery to routine. The foreign policy of Prussia in 1805, miserable as it was, had been but a single manifestation of the helplessness, the moral deadness that ran through every part of its official and public life. Early in the year 1806 a paper was drawn up by Stein, [129] exposing, in language seldom used by a statesman, the character of the men by whom Frederick William was surrounded, and declaring that nothing but a ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... more ready to complain than such as have least cause? Or supposing ourselves in a good condition; lively, active, diligent, watchful, &c, when it is just otherwise with us: Or, on the contrary, complaining of deadness, formality, upsitting, fainting, heartlessness in the ways of God, when it is not so. Or, in questioned matters, taking truth to be error, and ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... he could remember how "she related with great dearness of affection, how she never heard any harsh or unkind word to be darted out of my mouth against her." And to this consolation was added who knows what of confidence and tenderness of certain hope, or a kind of deadness, perhaps, that may lighten the pain of a heart very often tried and inured to every pain. For it is certain that "this green wound" was green and grievous for a briefer time than the agony of his earlier sorrows. He himself, ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... is another offence, that of quenching the Spirit, which accounts for the comparative darkness and deadness of many of ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... him to-night, Kittie, he's killin' me with his deadness. I ran out of the house from it. It's ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... would prejudice her yet more in the eyes of the jury. It troubled him a little to find with what complete calmness he could await the result; often he said to himself that he must be sadly lacking in human sympathy. Julian Casti, on the other hand, had passed into a state of miserable deadness; Waymark in vain tried to excite hope in him. He came to his friend's every evening, and sat there for ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... upwards of seventy. But, for myself, I count not amongst the number of my days the years that I wasted in the vanity of the world. When I lived to the flesh in the bondage of sin, I was dead in the inner man; and those years of deadness I can never call years of life. But now the world hath been crucified to me, and I to the world, and I have put off the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and live no longer to the flesh, but Christ ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... combined this deadness to the spirit and the interests of Christianity with zeal for dogma. He never flinched in formal orthodoxy, and the measures which he took for riveting the chains of superstition on the people were calculated with the military firmness ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... the reserve of convalescence, he kept his exploit secret, his spirits visibly rose; and whenever he was left alone, or only with his little boy, he repeated his experiments, launching himself from one piece of furniture to another; and in spite of the continued deadness of the left side, feeling life, vigour, ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... key and hammered doggedly. Only soggy deadness answered. He tested his plugs and tried again. In vain. An hour later, he still was there, fighting for the impossible, striving to gain an answer from vacancy, struggling to instil life into a thing deadened by ice, and drifts, and wind, ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... Old Testament to memory, &c.; and this I did with prayer, often falling on my knees, leaving my books for a little, that I might seek the Lord's blessing, and also, that I might be kept from that spiritual deadness, which is so frequently the result of much study. I looked up to the Lord even whilst turning over the leaves of my Hebrew dictionary, asking His help, that I might quickly find the words. I made comparatively little progress in English; for living with some of my countrymen, ...
— A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself, First Part • George Mueller
... The farmer called one of his men to hold the mare, and ushered the young man in. Once there, Richard's conjurations ceased. There was a deadness about the rooms and passages that told of her absence. The walls he touched—these were the vacant shells of her. He had never been in the house since he knew her, and now what ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... my deadness give; Shine, that my soul may live; Joy to my sorrow bring; Light on Thy ...
— Hymns from the East - Being Centos and Suggestions from the Office Books of the - Holy Eastern Church • John Brownlie
... favor of the House of Hanover, and the Tories were secretly intriguing with the exiled Stuarts. Many of the leaders, such as the great Whig champion, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, were without political principle or even personal honesty. The Church, too, was in a condition of spiritual deadness. Bishoprics and livings were sold and given to political favorites. Clergymen, like Swift and Lawrence Sterne, were worldly in their lives and immoral in their writings, and were practically unbelievers. The growing religious skepticism ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... flower have been studied, for example, apart from the flower as an organ; the flower apart from the plant; the plant apart from the soil, air, and light in which and through which it lives. The result is an inevitable deadness of topics to which attention is invited, but which are so isolated that they do not feed imagination. The lack of interest is so great that it was seriously proposed to revive animism, to clothe natural facts and events with myths ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... with a ring in his voice. Never before had she put wonder in a word. He had struck the right chord at last. Now it seemed that he held a live creature under his hands, as if the deadness and the dread apathy had gone away forever with the utterance of that one syllable. This was a big moment. If only he could make up to her for what she had lost! He felt his throat swell, ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... matter of fact, China is dead, and there is no better proof of her complete deadness than the fact that among all her millions of coolies there is not enough spirit for the ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... will hear," said David hastily, and over and anon renewed his grateful acknowledgments to Heaven for sending Jeanie safe down from the land of prelatic deadness and schismatic heresy; and had delivered her from the dangers of the way, and the lions ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... consolations were solutions, and she was stirred by an imitative passion. How stupid had she not been to let life and Sir Isaac overcome her! She felt that she must make herself like Elizabeth, exactly like Elizabeth; she tried forthwith, and a certain difficulty she found, a certain deadness, she ascribed to the square modernity of her house and something in the Putney air. The house was too large, it dominated the garden and controlled her. She felt she must get away to some place that was chiefly exterior, in the sunshine, far from towns and struggling, straining, angry and despairing ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... brought Gilbert Fenton no reply to his advertisement. He called at the post-office morning and evening, only to find the same result; and a dull blank feeling, a kind of deadness of heart and mind, began to steal over him with the progress of the days. He went through the routine of his business-life steadily enough, working as hard as he had ever worked; but it was only by a supreme effort that he could bring his mind to bear upon the details of business—all ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... month, while devout persons upbraid themselves, and are ready to tear their hair, because they always feel stupid and sleepy in church. The proper ventilation of their churches and vestries would remove that spiritual deadness of which their prayers and hymns complain. A man hoeing his corn out on a breezy hillside is bright and alert, his mind works clearly, and he feels interested in religion, and thinks of many a thing that might be said at the prayer-meeting at night. But at night, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... ragged wall of rock shut out the forward view. Dismounting on some cinders, we stepped into a gap, and from thence looked down into the most gigantic crater on the earth. I confess that with the living fires of Kilauea in my memory, I was at first disappointed with the deadness of a volcano of whose activity there are no traditions extant. Though during the hours which followed, its majesty and wonderment grew upon me, yet a careful study of the admirable map of the crater, a comparison of the heights of the very considerable cones which are buried ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... essential and valuable; but unless they are permeated by a spirit of devotion they will fail at the crucial point. Pectus facit theologum—it is the heart that makes the theologian; and a theology which does not spring from spiritual experience is doomed to decay, to deadness, and therefore to disaster. ...
— The Prayers of St. Paul • W. H. Griffith Thomas
... that our camera is capable of distinguishing centres of industrial activity, then our picture will give us 'vital' patches, which stand out against a background of deadness. This deadness ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... have not a shadow of doubt; but at the same time they are cold and dead as to any attempt whatsoever to give them effect." The heat of the Irish royalist failed to kindle a spark of feeling in the two cousins. He found that their "deadness" proceeded from a rooted distrust of the Emperor Leopold, and from a conviction that Britain had nothing to fear from Jacobinical propaganda. Above all they believed that the present was not the time for action, especially as the imminence of bankruptcy in France ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... sure, as I then was, with a perception of the more subtle evils of their calling. I had never heard the nature of it discussed, and was absolutely without experience of it, but the vapid vacuity of the last years of my aunt Siddons's life had made a profound impression upon me,—her apparent deadness and indifference to everything, which I attributed (unjustly, perhaps) less to her advanced age and impaired powers than to what I supposed the withering and drying influence of the overstimulating atmosphere of emotion, excitement, and admiration in which she ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... facts the skull of Papeete showed to the searcher, as a lamp shows up other things than the things searched for. The deadness of the English Church to the spiritual, and the corruption of ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... to the eye. It consisted of a rank coarse kind of grass, and arrowweed, mesquite, and tamarack. The last named bore a pink fuzzy blossom, not unlike pussy-willow, which was quite fragrant. Here the deadness of the region seemed further enlivened by several small birds, speckled and gray, two ravens, and a hawk. They all appeared to be hunting food. On a ridge above Furnace Creek we came upon a spring of poison water. It was clear, sparkling, with ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... atmosphere than the stuffy gloom of churches and seminaries and colleges. What do I care for that miserable little college on the hill, full of your good little boys with their churchly conceits and bowings and deadness? I want life, and I mean to have it. I will spend my money as I see fit—for travel—for clothes—for luxury—for anything that strikes my ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... out in fact was often less trouble than the lesson. Latin and Greek had nothing in them which commended them to his instinct as likely to bring him peace even at the last; still less did they hold out any hope of doing so within some more reasonable time. The deadness inherent in these defunct languages themselves had never been artificially counteracted by a system of bona fide rewards for application. There had been any amount of punishments for want of application, but ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... "And David went up by the ascent of Mount Olivet, weeping, and his head covered, and so also all the people with him." The explanation is given in ver. 8, where the [Hebrew: ble] is intentionally resumed. We cannot, therefore, agree with Drechsler who explains the being "covered," by "dullness and deadness in reference to spiritual things."—The first part of ver. 8 is again resumed in Rev. vii. 17, xxi. 4. As death entered into the world by sin (Gen. ii. 17; Rom. v. 12), [Pg 153] so it ceases when sin is completely overcome; compare 1 Cor. xv. 54, where our passage is expressly ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... more than half a year together. Whichever way the eye is turned, it meets a picture calculated to impress upon the mind an idea of inanimate stillness, of that motionless torpor with which our feelings have nothing congenial; of anything, in short, but life. In the very silence there is a deadness with which a human spectator appears out of keeping. The presence of man seems an intrusion on the dreary solitude of this wintry desert, which even its native animals ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... the Moosehide; then followed days full to overflowing, breathless, fevered, yet without result beyond a general stringing up of nerves. The special spell of Dawson was upon them all—the surface aliveness, the inner deadness, the sense of being cut off from all the rest of the world, as isolated as a man is in a dream, with no past, no future, only a fantastic, intensely vivid Now. This was the summer climate of the Klondyke. The Colonel, ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... well-known states is called living. If where motion is there is life, then there is no dead matter; for all matter, or at least all matter of which we have experience, moves. To charge upon Materialists the dogma of matter's deadness is a paltry trick which a writer like Mr. Smith should disdain to practice. Nor does it become him to lecture Atheists about their dogmatism, while from his own published writings can be adduced such ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... the contrary hypothesis, namely, that the bits of matter following their laws could make that world and do no less, should we not be just as thankful to them? Wherein should we suffer loss, then, if we dropped God as an hypothesis and made the matter alone responsible? Where would any special deadness, or crassness, come in? And how, experience being what is once for all, would God's presence in it make it any ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... you, because, in spite of everything, you are still so much further along than they, because you are capable of seeing where their eyes are shut, because you and your kind can help them, and put the germ of life into the deadness of their days, because of all that makes you what you are, and gives you the chance to become infinitely more—you, in the face of all that, can sit down in the fragrance of a garden-scented breeze and write as you have done about God and the things ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray |
