"Enervating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Segrave. The elemental instinct of self-defense, of avenging a terrible insult by physical violence, rose within him, whispering of strength and power, of the freedom, muscle-giving life of the country as against the enervating, weakening influence of ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... people. The humanitarians in the United States who tried to introduce labor legislation in their own country accepted this naive philosophy of the German people, which had been so skilfully developed by Prussian statesmen, without appreciating that its result was enervating. Our prevailing political philosophy, however, that workers and capitalists understand their own interests and are more capable than the state of looking after them, stood in the way of adopting on grounds of statesmanship the ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... these men would have done what our soldiers are now doing, that they would have endured what is being endured all around us. Are we not entitled to conclude from this that civilization, contrary to what was feared, so far from enervating, depraving, weakening, lowering and dwarfing man, elevates him, purifies him, strengthens him, ennobles him, makes him capable of acts of sacrifice, generosity and courage which he did not know before? The fact is that civilization, even when it seems to entail corruption, brings intelligence ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... her son those advantages which he never could have in a heathen land. To adopt either the first or the last of these courses, she was urged by her natural disposition, which was singularly modest and retiring, her feeble health, the enervating influence of the climate, and above all by the strong tendency to self-indulgence which always accompanies a heart-rending sorrow. "But oh," she says in a letter to a friend, "these poor, inquiring and Christian Karens, and the ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... duties, occupations, pleasures—all tedious alike—to which the artificial state of society limits a peaceful generation. The atmosphere of the camp and the smoke of the battle-field are morally invigorating; the hardy virtues flourish in them, the nonsense dies like a wilted weed. The enervating effects of centuries of civilization vanish at once, and leave these young men to enjoy a life of hardship, and the exhilarating sense of danger,—to kill men blamelessly, or to be killed gloriously,—and to be happy in following out their native instincts ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of "Arching the Gulf;" and Trampy came down with it. For a few days, he led a terrible life, a desperate struggle, made efforts in every direction; but, at last, worried, hustled, driven to bay, Trampy disappeared into the darkness, while Jimmy, freed from this enervating opposition and feeling sure of himself henceforward, gained fresh courage, added another arch to "Bridging ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... odor arose, of violets fermented in the sun, a hot boudoir perfume, enervating, weakening, which called up before de Gery's eyes feminine visions, Aline, Felicia, gliding across the enchanted landscape, in that blue-tinted atmosphere, that elysian light which seemed to be the ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... a certain law of decadence seems to have prevailed, because of which every nation, after acquiring great power, has in turn succumbed to the enervating effects which seem inseparable from it, and become the victim of some newer nation that has made strenuous preparations for long years, in secret, and finally pounced upon her as a lion on ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... the city in his flag-ship, and the two admirals had an interview on the scene of their former exploits. The same afternoon Farragut sailed in the Hartford for the North, to enjoy a brief respite from his labors during the enervating autumn months of the Gulf climate. Though now sixty-two years old, he retained an extraordinary amount of vitality, and of energy both physical and moral; but nevertheless at his age the anxieties and exposure he had to undergo tell, and had drawn from him, soon after his return from ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... surprised by gentlemen in interesting positions. Another lady, lying in a large bed, was teasing with her foot a little dog, lost in the sheets. One drawing showed four feet, bodies concealed behind a curtain. The large room, surrounded by soft couches, was entirely impregnated with that enervating and insipid odor which I had already noticed. There seemed to be something suspicious about the walls, the ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... this place is enervating,' replied Michael, jumping up from the parapet. 'I know people do not generally consider moorland air enervating; but mine is a peculiar constitution, and needs more bracing than other men's. Shall we ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... all-seeing, severely just national deity, regarded by them much as the Jehovah of the Hebrews was by that nation. When in later times the conquest of Eastern countries and of Macedon and Greece brought in luxury, works of art, foreign literature, and all the delightful but enervating influences of aestheticism, the Romans became corrupted, and gradually began to identify their own more noble deities with the beautiful but unprincipled, self-indulgent, and tricky set of gods and goddesses of the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... easier after that, although the room was oppressively hot and enervating. I had no doubt the search for me would now come in the right direction, and after a little, I dropped into a doze. How long I slept I do ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Armenia. The military preparations were, however, continued. Vigorous measures were taken to restore the discipline of the Syrian legions, which had suffered through the long tranquillity of the East and the enervating influence of the climate. With the spring Trajan commenced his march. Ascending the Euphrates, to Samosata, and receiving as he advanced the submission of various semi-independent dynasts and princes, he ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... the most active mind; the deep-drawn sighs it will elicit; and if there be one melancholy feeling which presses on the heart more heavily than another, it is the ample developement which it enjoys during the prevalence of this enervating breeze. It seldom, however, blows with force; it is rather an exhalation than a wind. It scarcely moves the leaves around the traveller, but it sinks heavily and damply in his heart. A stranger is at first unaware of the cause of the mental misery he endures; his temper sours as his spirits ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction - Vol. X, No. 289., Saturday, December 22, 1827 • Various
... frequently the huge squares of many acres, heavy with the luxuriant wealth of the cane, and thronged by dusky laborers. The heat, which in the uplands is pleasant, though rather too steady in the plains, becomes oppressive and enervating. The distinction between the wet and dry seasons, also, is much more distinctly marked, and, in short, everything corresponds more fully with the usual ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... territorial sea: 200 nm International disputes: long section with Zaire along the Congo River is indefinite (no division of the river or its islands has been made) Climate: tropical; rainy season (March to June); dry season (June to October); constantly high temperatures and humidity; particularly enervating climate astride the Equator Terrain: coastal plain, southern basin, central plateau, northern basin Natural resources: petroleum, timber, potash, lead, zinc, uranium, copper, phosphates, natural gas Land use: arable land: 2% permanent crops: 0% meadows and pastures: 29% forest and woodland: 62% ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the grip of a dull, enervating, overpowering agony that seemed to be weighing my heart down and filling my throat with pent-up sobs. I was writhing inwardly, praying for Matilda's mercy. It was the most excruciating pain I had ever experienced. I remember it distinctly in ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... the simple stress of a letter from a French commandant, has made himself our servant and teased his brain for devices to amuse us. His chief cook precedes us to his birthplace at Chellata, to arrange a sumptuous Arab supper. After a ride made enervating by the simoom, we descend at the arcaded and galleried Moorish house where Ben-Ali-Cherif was born, and are visited by the sheikh of the college which the agha maintains. It is a strange, peaceful, cloistered scene, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... and Faith, catching her excitement, pressed closer, wide-eyed and shivering. Lady Moreham saw that, though they had been brave as mature women, so far, they were breaking down under the strain, unsupported by any older and stronger relative. The atmosphere was enervating here, and emotion is contagious. Glancing quickly around, she formed her resolution, and throwing an arm ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... read the works of French authors, and particularly those of Voltaire, who was his favorite among writers. This predilection was not likely to overcome the fierce temper of the king, who discovered his pursuits and flogged him unmercifully, thinking to cane all love for such enervating literature, as he deemed it, out of the boy's mind. In this he failed. Germany in that day had little that deserved the name of literature, and the expanding intellect of the active-minded youth turned irresistibly towards the ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... now the middle of June, and the weather, even at Skelwick, was hot and enervating. There was thunder about, and frequent rain. It was trying for everybody. The constant heavy showers necessitated carrying mackintoshes to school, as if it were winter; the lawn was too wet and sopping for tennis, ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... he sat Courtlandt could see down the main thoroughfare of the pretty village. There were other streets, to be sure, but courtesy and good nature alone permitted this misapplication of title: they were merely a series of torturous enervating stairways of stone, up and down which noisy wooden sandals clattered all the day long. Over the entrances to the shops the proprietors were dropping the white and brown awnings for the day. Very few people shopped ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... future. The love of those we have lost may enable us to love better those who remain, and those who are to come. So used, it is an infinitely precious possession, and to be cherished with all our hearts. As it leads to vain regrets, it is at best an enervating enjoyment, and a needless pain. The figments of theology are a consecration of our delusive dreams; the teaching of the new faith should be the utilization of every emotion to the bettering of the world ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... led the enervating life of a fashionable swell—that was the word of the time—and had knocked about race-course stables from the age of nineteen to twenty-five. In circumstances like these, he could not forget that Enguerrand de Hardimont ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... currents, would tremble upon their stalks; till again all would return to the former motionless silence. The weight of the burning atmosphere, saturated with sharp perfumes, became almost intolerable. Large drops of sweat stood in pearls on the forehead of Djalma, still plunged in enervating sleep—for it no longer resembled rest, but a ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... of the Crusade. In the result he was wofully disappointed, as every man deserves to be who commits positive evil that doubtful good may ensue. But this line of policy accorded well enough with the narrowmindedness of the emperor, who, in the enervating atmosphere of his highly civilised and luxurious court, dreaded the influx of the hardy and ambitious warriors of the West, and strove to nibble away by unworthy means the power which he had not energy enough to confront. If danger to himself had existed from the residence of the chiefs ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... the promise illusive. When the terrace was reached it appeared not only to have caught and gathered all the heat of the valley below, but to have evolved a fire of its own from some hidden crater-like source unknown. Nevertheless, instead of prostrating and enervating man and beast, it was said to have induced the wildest exaltation. The heated air was filled and stifling with resinous exhalations. The delirious spices of balm, bay, spruce, juniper, yerba buena, wild syringa, and strange ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... whether it be incipient illness, or the enervating effects of this soft climate, but I feel unusually weak, and the least exertion or excitement is not only disagreeable but painful. While the rest were at Capo di Monte, I stood upon my balcony looking out upon the lovely scene before me, ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... to weaknesses and deficiencies which, if Tennyson did not care to acknowledge to others, he must certainly have acknowledged to himself. It roused him and put him on his mettle. It was a wholesome antidote to the enervating flattery of coteries and "apostles" who were certainly talking a great deal of nonsense about him, as Arthur Hallam's essay in the 'Englishman' shows. During the next nine years he published nothing, with the exception of two unimportant contributions to certain minor periodicals.[1] ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... again to Margaret. "We will find a taxi at the corner. These first spring days are so enervating." ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... divided by pauses, like the intermittent discharges of artillery, was distinct and audible. On the 7th of October, the heat increased to such a degree, and became so very oppressive, that many complained of its enervating effects. About twelve o'clock, a pale, sickly mist, lightly tinged with purple, emerged from the forest ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... who thought he had left England forever, went home in a little while and is living there now in inglorious ease and somewhat enervating luxury, while Mr. Heathcote, who thought that he was coming out for a short visit and couldn't possibly live out of England, is already more than half an American, a successful, practical farmer, and, it may be added, a happy man. "Heart's Content" has been renaissanced, papered, tiled, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... types, and she had found that she could appeal to them all, if she would. Since her return to England, anxieties and influences extremely depressing had accustomed her to a somewhat gloomy atmosphere. To-night the atmosphere was light and soft, brilliant and enervating. ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... the land. He saw the slow but splendid strength of the nation rejoicing in its new possibilities. And beyond that, what? Wealth was the great means towards the great end, but if the great end were once lost sight of, there was no more hideous poison than that stream of enervating prosperity. He remembered his own diatribes concerning the decadence of England; how he had pointed to the gold poison, to the easy living of the poor, the blatant luxury of the rich. He had pointed to the soft limbs, the cities which had become pools of sensuality, ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... go home also, mother," Vane said to Lady Isabel, after their departure, "it will not do for you to remain longer in this enervating climate." ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... a drink," said Hewson. Already he had had many. His face was relaxed, flushed, already showing signs of a flabby degeneration. In this man of iron sudden success was insidiously at work, enervating his powers. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... The place itself had as little of the allurement of elegance and beauty about it as the people. Here was no bright gilding on the ceiling—no charm of ornament, no comfort of construction even, in the furniture. Here were no viciously-attractive pictures on the walls—no enervating sweet odors in the atmosphere—no contrivances of ventilation to cleanse away the stench of bad tobacco-smoke and brandy-flavored human breath with which the room reeked all night long. Here, in short, was vice wholly undisguised; recklessly showing itself ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... good young friends," he chortled, "to think of fighting with your hands, but you were not quite quick enough. Not to-day goes anyone in my cruiser! What do you think of the enervating ray, heh? Ingenious, not? Ludwig Leider discovered it. I am Ludwig Leider. You shall come with me and with your own eyes watch the de-energizing of New York and Paris and Berlin. For I am ready to do away with your ...
— The Winged Men of Orcon - A Complete Novelette • David R. Sparks
... general outlook is different in winter than in summer. In the former season he goes back and forth to work in the dark, or at best, in the cold twilight. He is not only more depressed but he is clumsier in his heavier clothing. If the enervating influence of these factors is combined with a greater clumsiness due to cold and perhaps to colds, it is not difficult to account for this type of seasonal distribution of accidents. A study of the accidents of 1917 indicated that 13 per cent. occurred ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... Society would be slow to give him credit for changed motives and character, and as proof would take only patient continuance in well-doing. The good doctor now more than suspected that in his own home Haldane would find much that was depressing and enervating. Worse than all, he would have to contend with an excitable and ungoverned nature, already sadly warped and biased wrongly. "What will be the final result?" sighed the old gentleman to himself. But he soon fell back hopefully on his belief that ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... bound for Colon. Two days later Blake himself was aboard a British freighter northward bound for Kingston. Once again he beheld a tropical sun shimmer on hot brass-work and pitch boil up between bone-white deck-boards sluiced and resluiced by a half-naked crew. Once again he had to face an enervating equatorial heat that vitiated both mind and body. But he neither fretted nor complained. Some fixed inner purpose seemed to sustain him through every discomfort. Deep in that soul, merely filmed with its fixed equatorial calm, burned some dormant and crusader-like ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... sent for information on this subject, said: "The lives of the British soldiers in India are very tedious and trying, especially during the hot summers, which, in the greater part of the empire, last for several months. The climate is enervating and is apt to reduce moral as well as physical vitality. There are few diversions. The native quarters of the large cities are dreadful places, especially for young foreigners. I cannot conceive of worse, from both a sanitary and a moral point ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... healthy, wholesome, well-developed women, and that counts a good deal in the race for beauty. If the five-mile walk is too exhausting, then take a longer time getting to the point, when it will be exhilarating instead of enervating. ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... the open air, and each day she exulted over an increase of vigor. Almost everything favored her in her new home. When she was well enough to go out much the strangers had gone, and everything in the town was restful, yet not enervating. The Waylands, while on the best terms with other permanent residents, were not society people. Mrs. Wayland had become satisfied with that phase of life in her youth. Her husband was a reader, a student, and something of a naturalist. ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... highlands of Mexico, the plateau-regions of Bolivia and Ecuador, and the highlands of southern Asia are habitable, but they are not densely peopled. Because of their altitude they are relieved of the enervating effects of ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... won her. The dreadful jostle of opportune circumstance; her husband's absence, her brother's;—the chance pause in the empty London house between country visits;—Paul Quentin following, finding her there; the hot, dusty, enervating July day, all seemed to have pushed her to the act of madness and made of it a willess yielding rather than a decision. For she had yielded; she had left her husband's house and ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... him or her as to enable them to live without exertion may absolutely parasitise them; while vast wealth unhealthy as its effects generally tend to be) may, upon certain rare and noble natures, exert hardly any enervating or deleterious influence. An amusing illustration of the different points at which enervation is reached by different females came under our own observation. The wife of an American millionaire was visited by a woman, the daughter and also the widow of small professional men. She stated ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... dusty white highway. From where he stood the road trailed off miles behind and wound up five hundred feet or more above him to the ancient city of Dreiberg. It was not a steep road, but a long and weary one, a steady, enervating, unbroken climb. To the left the mighty cliff reared its granite side to the hanging city, broke in a wide plain, and then went on up several thousand feet to the ledges of dragon-green ice and snow. To the right sparkled and flashed a wild mountain stream ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... where the lava had been washed bare, and at almost every step the water-laden boughs poured down a fresh shower upon them. The labour was terrible, for now it was as if they were forcing their way through a bath of hot vapour which was enervating in the extreme. ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... the result of her geographic isolation, as well as her centrality of location. She was nearest to the new republics and had most to lose. Eliminating Canada as a British possession and Brazil with an enervating climate and Latin leadership, the United States was the only power whose size and resources entitled her to speak with authority on the question of European interference. The Monroe doctrine was primarily intracontinental and for immediate ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... perseverance of Dr Barth, while for five years travelling many thousand miles, amidst hostile and savage tribes, in an enervating climate, frequently with unwholesome or insufficient food, having ever to keep his energies on the stretch to guard himself from the attacks of open foes or the treachery of pretended friends, have gained for him the admiration of all who ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... had his turn. I must have mine now. I haven't had a day off from being a wife for ever so long. And it's a little enervating, you know. It spoils ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... nest of the far more powerful slave ants, poison or assassinate the queen, and establish themselves by sheer usurpation in the queenless nest. 'Gradually,' says Sir John Lubbock, 'even their bodily force dwindled away under the enervating influence to which they had subjected themselves, until they sank to their present degraded condition—weak in body and mind, few in numbers, and apparently nearly extinct, the miserable representatives of far superior ancestors maintaining a precarious existence as contemptible parasites of ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... heroes, are all excellently portrayed, and with an ease and vigor of style that lend a peculiar charm to the book, and rivet the attention of the reader from cover to cover. It is really refreshing to meet with such a work as this in these degenerate days of namby-pamby novels, so enervating to mind and morals. Captain Glazier's work elevates the ideas, and infuses a spirit of commendable patriotism into the young mind, by showing the youth of the country how nobly men could die for the principles they cherished and the ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... literature doubtless fostered his manly ideas, which, however, sprang from his own experience in life. One must, he felt, be hard on oneself, and on one's guard against the vanity of newfangled ideas and against the enervating effect of civilization. It is in the nature of things that with this farmer and father of a family of twelve, assiduity, prudence, and self- discipline should be among the highest virtues. This is notably apparent in The Old Hay (Gamla ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... for its members, he holds that the enervating influences of authority are least powerful in popular governments, and that the tyranny of a public opinion not enforced by law need only be endured by voluntary slaves. Emerson confides in great men, "to educate whom the State exists"; but he ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... For these twin boons we stand, Partaking thrice per diem Of their fulness out of hand; No enervating fashion Shall cheat us of our right To gratify our passion With a mouthful at a bite! We'll cut it square or bias, Or any way we please, And faith shall justify us When we ...
— A Little Book of Western Verse • Eugene Field
... lay on his knee. He sat brooding: his hands upon the packets, his head bowed. One might have thought him a man overcome and dissolved by the enervating memories of passion; but in truth, he was gradually and steadily reacting against them; resuming, and this time finally, as far as Chloe Fairmile was concerned, a man's mastery of himself. He thought of her unkindness ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... food and guarding his more or less helpless family. As the season advances the vegetation increases and the fawn begins to eat grass. When the summer heat commences the little streams begin to dry up, and the animal once more has difficulty in supporting life because of the enervating heat, the effect of drought on the vegetation, and the distance which has to be traveled to get water; therefore, fully ten months in each year the deer has all he can do to live without extra exertion incident to rutting. Soon after the autumn rains commence vegetation becomes ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... town's only business street was about deserted. On its shady side were hitched a few Texas ponies whose drooping heads and wilted ears bespoke the heat—so hot it was that the flies, even, did not molest them. Scattered groups of lounging, idle men indicated the enervating influence of the sizzling 108 ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... enervating branch of science. Galileo frequently came down to breakfast with red, heavy eyes, eyes that were swollen full of unshed tears. Still he persevered. Day after day he worked and toiled. Year after year he went on with his task till he had ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... prosperity of Trinidad is due to the fact that it has a warm, moist, even climate all the year round. That's fine for cocoa and coco-nuts, but it's not good for humans. The warm moist air of Trinidad is deuced enervating. No, let me go back to Barbados. It may not be as beautiful—I'll admit that it isn't—but at least there is a north-east breeze nearly all the year round ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... bicycle has now to be considered in connection with the overpowering heat. Half the distance to Amritza is hardly covered, and the riding time scarcely two hours, yet it finds me reclining beneath the shade of a roadside tree more used up than five times the distance would warrant in a less enervating climate. The greensward around me as I recline in the shade is teeming with busy insects, and the trees are swarming with the beautiful winged life of the tropical air. Flocks of paroquets with most gorgeous plumage—blue, red, green, gold, and every ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... a bright spring day, of enervating softness; a fosie day—a day when the pores of everything seemed opened. People's brains felt pulpy, and they sniffed as with winter's colds. Peter Riney was opening a pit of potatoes in the big garden, shovelling aside the foot-deep mould, and tearing ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... doctrine embodied in it, Ashe sat so completely absorbed in reverie that he gave no heed to what was being said. In his ascetic life at the Clergy House he had been so far removed from the sensuous, save for that to which the services of the church appealed, that this enervating and luxurious atmosphere, this gathering to which its quasi- religious character seemed to lend an excuse, bred in him a species of intoxication. He sat like a lotus-eater, hearing not so much the words ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... school in question were quiet and enervating; active or boisterous sports were prohibited to the end that good manners might be cultivated. In the play-rooms, the girls observed the strictest etiquette, and discipline was maintained independent of oversight by teachers. Mercante could hardly believe, however, that the decorum ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... drew. The quality of the air seemed to change, too, rendering it difficult to breathe, so that we found ourselves gasping for breath at frequent intervals, while perspiration poured from us in streams that we could distinctly feel trickling down our bodies and limbs. So enervating were the conditions that none of us cared to make the slightest unnecessary movement; yet the steady decline of the mercury was a warning that I dared not ignore. Accordingly, at eight bells in the afternoon watch, when Enderby took charge ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... been said in regard to the enervating effects of a southern climate, the inhabitants of the state of Louisiana have shown a pertinacity in maintaining their levee system which is almost unexampled. They have always asserted their rights to the lowlands in which they live, and have under the most trying ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... simplicity which is still more delightfully picturesque in his foreign English. Oh, he speaks English perfectly, only with an obvious accent enough. I am sure we should be cordial friends, if the lines had fallen to us in the same pleasant places; but he is fixed at Rome, and we are half afraid of the enervating effects of the Roman climate on the constitutions of children. Tell me, do you hear often from Mr. Chorley? It quite pains us to observe from his manner of writing the great depression of his spirits. His ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... a fortnight to Christmas; but the weather showed no signs yet of the frost and snow, conventionally associated with the coming season. The atmosphere was unnaturally warm, and the old year was dying feebly in sapping rain and enervating mist. ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... firmly aloof both from nonsense and from enervating praise. Let him dream of great themes, and work for great things! Let him rely on more quiet friends who watch loyally, hope, encourage, inspire. By and by the scales drop from his eyes; he sees himself, ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... date of that expedition the valley had acquired a reputation for beauty and fertility, which was subsequently found to be only comparative in relation to the barrenness of the rest of the Tibetan frontier. The summer months, though not hot, are relaxing and enervating. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... by his poetic and inward temper, he might have fallen a prey to the enervating mysticism, then in wait for ardent souls in many a melodramatic revival of old religion or theosophy. From all this, fascinating as it might actually be to one side of his character, he was kept by a genuine ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... in rash defiance as in loyalty to my friend—that I would ask to be relieved of my position as Ammunition Officer and allowed to return to my battalion. The permission was granted. And oh! I cannot explain it, but it was good to be back with my company after the enervating experience of staff-life. And, better still, now that Doe was no longer a platoon commander but Brigade Bombing Officer, he could live where he liked, and had arranged to share my dug-out—that delectable villa on Fusilier Bluff known as "Seaview." Really, under these conditions, the Peninsula, ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... men. The hard work, the rough life, the exposure and hardship, had braced and invigorated them all, and they were attaining a far more vigorous manhood than they would ever have possessed had they grown up in the somewhat sluggish and enervating ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... the earliest times of the colonization of New Mexico, a period of two centuries, in a state of continual hostility with the numerous savage tribes of Indians who surround their territory, and in constant insecurity of life and property from their attacks, being also far removed from the enervating influences of large cities, and, in their isolated situation, entirely dependent upon their own resources, the inhabitants are totally destitute of those qualities which, for the above reasons, we might naturally have expected to distinguish them, and are as deficient in energy of ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... centre numerous rivers and streams flow down, and thoroughly irrigate the greater part of this lovely island: indeed, it may well be looked on as the Paradise of the East; for though, in the low country, the climate is relaxing and enervating to European constitutions, in the higher regions the air is bracing and exhilarating in ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... born at a reasonably comfortable stage of the world's history. He had a decent prospect as to clothing and shelter, and there was abundance of food for those brave enough or ingenious enough to win it. The climate was not enervating. There were cold times for the people of the epoch and, in their seasons, harsh and chilling winds swept over bare and chilling glaciers, though a semi-tropical landscape was all about. So suddenly ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... soon as a man realises that he is primarily a spirit, having a body as an instrument through which to play, his point of view is entirely altered. The pursuit of mere physical enjoyment and luxury is recognised as having an enervating and blunting effect upon the finer spiritual faculties: it puts the instrument out of tune and spoils its tone. Money is seen as somewhat of a snare and a delusion, when valued for its own sake. The object of life is recognised as spiritual growth, and in that growth ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... from Virginia southward were different. Here was an unlimited supply of fertile lands which lent themselves readily to the unskillful and exhausting methods of slave labor. Here too was a warm climate congenial to the Negro, though enervating and often unhealthful for the white. The staples, such as the sugar cane, rice and later the cotton plant, were such as the unscientific slave labor might easily cultivate. All the conditions of profitable slave labor were present, namely, possibilities for concentration of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... this continued popularity is indeed encouraging. It argues that the taste for the legitimate, the sane in literature, has not yet been drowned in the septic sea of fin de siecle slop—that, despite the enervating influence of an all- pervasive sensationalism, or sybaritism, there be still minds capable of relishing the rugged, strong enough to digest the mental pabulum furnished by a really masculine writer. Carlyle ranges like an archangel through the universe ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... himself. After he had gone to bed he felt that sleep would not come to him, for a fever coursed in his veins, and a desire for reverie fermented in his heart. Dreading a wakeful night, one of those enervating attacks of insomnia brought about by agitation of the spirit, he thought he would try to read. How many times had a short reading served him as a narcotic! So he got up and went into his library to choose a ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... time they noticed the great difference that thirst produces between horses and cow cattle. The latter seemed to think that they could obtain relief by quietly yielding to the enervating effect of thirst, and travelling as slowly as their drivers would permit them. They were urged forward with much difficulty, and the Makololo were constantly wielding their huge jamboks to induce them to go ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... to speak of visiting his cousin's camp, though he bit his lip immediately afterward in a flash of indecision. The turbulent night had seemed of a sort to think things over. Moonlit fields and roads were enervating. Storm whipping a man's blood into fire and energy—biting his brain into relentless activity!—there ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... difficult, and a great silence fell upon the scene, for the insects and birds, warned by instinct of what was impending, sought shelter in the deepest recesses of the forest, while the Indians, unable or unwilling to labour in the enervating heat, and also knowing from past experience what was coming, retired to their huts and resigned themselves to the overpowering languor which oppressed them. Of all the inhabitants of the village, Dick and Phil were the only two who resisted the enervating ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... poisonous fly of parasitism; there are many women in whose hearts all sense of duty to the race has died, and these belong to many classes. A woman may become a parasite on a very limited amount of money, for the corroding and enervating effect of wealth and comfort sets in just as soon as the individuality becomes clogged, and causes one to rest content from further efforts, on the strength of the labor of someone else. Queen Victoria, in her palace of marble ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... which had subdued his native province, he worked for years under the stress of one and the same task, and devoted to its proper accomplishment all of his strongest and best hours. He almost loved the enervating, daily-renewed combat between his tenacious, proud, and often tried willpower, and this ever-growing fatigue, which was his secret and which the product should in no wise betray by ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... was extremely enervating. She had owed her force of character to her incessant intellectual activity, which had also kept her mind pure, and her body in excellent condition. Had she not found an outlet for her superfluous vitality as a girl in the cultivation of her mind, she must ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... cheeks, her adorable little chin; her lips pressed against his fingers. She breathed warmly on his forehead and on his eyelids, while the odor of her hair, a charming feminine perfume, sweet, heavy, enervating, came to his nostrils, so penetrating, so delicious, that his flesh pricked and tingled with it; a veritable sensation of faintness passed over this huge, callous fellow, with his enormous bones and corded muscles. He drew a short breath through his nose; his jaws suddenly ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... to be little in life anywhere without one. Bachelors are quickly restored by their antitoxin cheer, but there is a more dangerous bacillus hidden in this powerful living therapeutic agency which in afteryears works its damaging, enervating effect in the heart of a man. They save but to slay! Can there be no healing balm benign in a woman's tender sympathy? Cannot the microbe of remorse be isolated from this serum beautifully administered by melting eyes and graces so fair that we wonder ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... he judged that longer delay would, probably, be attended with evils greater than those to be encountered on the march; that discontents would inevitably spring up in a life of inaction, and the strength and spirits of the soldier sink under the enervating influence of a tropical climate. Yet the force at his command, amounting to less than two hundred soldiers in all, after reserving fifty for the protection of the new settlement, seemed but a small one for the ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... the exquisite bit of flesh and blood beside her, and thought of her elegant home and her elegant mother, and of all the softening and enervating influences of her city life, and laughed. How little had she in common with such a work as that to which Mrs. Partridge had given ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... Wagner suddenly leaves tragedy and gives us a melodious duet between the brother and sister on the theme: "What can equal a brother's love?" This duet and finale unite to form a masterpiece; a deserved rebuke to any cynic who may consider that Wagner could not adopt the enervating methods of the Italian school if he desired. His cadenzas here are miracles of compressed technique, and, although the melody is conventional, the music itself is never for a moment simple ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... mind has eternally vacillated. The Supernaturalists, contemplating a Being acting through impulse, though with superhuman wisdom, and considering the best courtier to be the most favored subject, combines contradictory expedients, inconsistently mixing the assertion of free action with the enervating service of petition; while he admits, in the words of a learned archbishop, that "if the production of the things we ask for depend on antecedent, natural, and necessary causes, our desires will be answered no less by the omission ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... respect) or of merit (of love). Since no one can obligate me to feel, we are to understand by love not the pathological love of complacency, but only the active love of benevolence or practical sympathy. Since it is just as impossible that the increase of the evils in the world should be a duty, the enervating and useless excitation of pity, which adds to the pain of the sufferer the sympathetic pain of the spectator, is to be struck off the list of virtues, and active readiness to aid put in its place. In friendship love and respect unite in exact equipoise. Veracity is one of the duties toward self; ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... the vulgarities of the world and to plunge, far from the customs and modes held in such reverence, into convulsions and raptures which were holy or infernal and which, in either case, proved too exhausting and enervating. ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... he became a more idle man. The rich enervating climate began to tell upon his mind, as it did upon Lucia's health. He missed that perpetual spur of nervous excitement, change of society, influx of ever-fresh objects, which makes London, after all, the ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... Hittites to establish themselves in Mesopotamia and Syria, and to gain possession of the fords of the Euphrates and the great lines of trade. But the northerner was not suited by nature for the hot and enervating climate of the south. His force diminished, his numbers lessened, and the subjugated Semite increased in strength. Mitanni perished like the Hittite empire, and with the rise of the second Assyrian empire the intruding nations of the north found themselves compelled to struggle ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... encouraged in developing feelings so dangerous to the real culture of man. At the risk of being hard and coarse, it will seem preferable to dispense with this dissolving force of the beautiful rather than see human nature a prey to its enervating influence, notwithstanding all its refining advantages. However, experience is perhaps not the proper tribunal at which to decide such a question; before giving so much weight to its testimony, it would be well to inquire if the beauty we have been discussing is the power that ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... 'That enervating ride through the myrtle climate of South Devon—how I dread it to-morrow!' Mrs. Swancourt was saying. 'I had hoped the weather would have been ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... attains to national consciousness without over-rating itself. The Germans are always in danger of enervating their nationality through possessing too little of this rugged pride.—H. v. TREITSCHKE, P., ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... repentance involved their sojourn in the Ante-purgatory. To a mind preoccupied, like Browning's, with the failures of aspiring souls, this hint naturally appealed. He imagined his Sordello, too, as a moral loiterer, who, with extraordinary gifts, failed by some inner enervating paralysis[11] to make his spiritual quality explicit; and who impressed contemporaries sufficiently to start a brilliant myth of what he did not do, but had to wait for recognition until he met the eye and lips of Dante. It is difficult not to suspect the influence of another great poet. Sordello ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... voyager in the succession of discoverers: he had been brought up in the household of the King of Portugal, but nourished an ardent spirit of enterprise and thirst for glory, despite the enervating influences of a court. He sailed early in the year 1500, and pursued the track of John Cabot as far as the northern point of Newfoundland; to him is due the discovery of the Gulf of St. Lawrence,[56] and he also pushed on northward, by the coast of Labrador,[57] almost to ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... destructive" tendency of Communism, and of proclaiming its supreme and impartial contempt of all class struggles. With very few exceptions, all the so-called Socialist and Communist publications that now (1847) circulate in Germany belong to the domain of this foul and enervating literature. ...
— The Communist Manifesto • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
... Berkshire air rather enervating, Hawthorne moved in November, 1851, to a temporary residence in West Newton, where he wrote "The Blithedale Romance," which was published in 1852. This novel, founded on his Brook Farm experience, is a study of the failure of the typical reformer. In June, 1852, the family ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... enervating atmosphere, King's Cobb has its fine traditions of a sturdy independence, and a slashing history withal; and its aspect is as picturesque as that of an opera bouffe fishing-harbour. Then, too, its High Street, as well as its meandering rivulets of low streets, is rich in buildings, ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... the efforts to this end which were being made by the French forces at Arras and in Champagne, and—perhaps the most weighty consideration of all—the need of fostering the offensive spirit in the troops under my command after the trying and possibly enervating experiences which they had gone through of a severe Winter in ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... dry; and, at a distance, the sound of some rustic pipe (more common at that day than in this), mingled now and then with the bells of the lazy mules, broke the voluptuous silence,—the silence of declining noon on the shores of Naples. Never till you have enjoyed it, never till you have felt its enervating but delicious charm, believe that you can comprehend all the meaning of the dolce far niente; and when that luxury has been known, when you have breathed the atmosphere of fairy land, then you will no longer wonder why ...
— Zicci, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... How dark the moral clouds that have been hanging over the country for a period far beyond the memory of man! how black that dismal canopy which is only lit by fires that carry and shed around them disease, famine, crime, madness, bloodshed, and death. How hot, sultry, and enervating to the whole constitution of man, physically and mentally, is the atmosphere we have been breathing so long! The miasma of the swamp, the simoom of the desert, the merciless sirocco, are healthful when compared to such an atmosphere. And, hark! what formidable being is that who, ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... and stable civilization has rarely arisen in the tropics, because there the overabundance of Nature renders sustained work unnecessary, while the hot, enervating climate tends to destroy initiative and ambition. It is no accident that the greatest nations of modern times are located chiefly within the stimulating temperate zones, where Nature is richly endowed, but where, too, her treasures are rarely ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... castles of the nobles were but the monuments of past taxation and servitude. With yells of hatred the infuriated populace razed them to the ground. The palaces of the kings, where, for uncounted centuries, dissolute monarchs had reveled in enervating and heaven-forbidden pleasures, were but national badges of the bondage of the people. The indignant throng swept through them, like a Mississippi inundation, leaving upon marble floors, and cartooned walls and ceilings, the impress of their rage. At one bound France had passed ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... about and look at. Give me leave to fight ennui, and the despondency it brings with it, by taking the squadron about, showing fresh ground to my young fellows, and taking them into ports where I shall be able to send them ashore to amuse themselves, and thus break the enervating monotony of ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... well knowing that he had no such desirable relative, but drawn to secrecy by the unnatural course of events: "The years pass unperceived and all changes but the heart of man; how appeared my cousin, and has he greatly altered under the enervating sun ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... herself smiling at Brodrick's hat. She felt a sudden melting, enervating tenderness for Brodrick's hat. The passion which, in the circumstances, she could not permit herself to feel for Brodrick, she felt, ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... wine, and a little music. My friend on the mountain yonder is of tougher fibre and sterner outlook, disapproves of the sea's laxity and instability, has no ear for music and no palate for the grape, and regards the sun as a rather enervating institution, like central heating in a house. What he likes is a grey day and the wind in his face; crags at a great altitude; and a flask of whisky. Yet I think that even he, if we were trying to determine from what inner sources mankind ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... take to Britishers," said he, once, "for they are too contracted, and never seem to me to have taken in a full breath of the free air of the universe. They seem usually to have been in the habit of inhaling an enervating moral and intellectual atmosphere. But you suit me, you do. Young ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... found the atmosphere enervating, for with a half smile and shake of the head, he rose up to go. ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... grave, but said nothing. He knew that the enervating climate of the Southern river city would never do for his wife. Change of climate might benefit her greatly; the doctors had all said so of late; but not ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... in you! I have revealed to you weaknesses of which I am ashamed. Ah! why have I ever known any other feeling than that of friendship! Friendship alone returns as much as it receives; it fortifies instead of enervating; it is the only passion worthy of a man. Never forsake me, my friend; you will console me, whatever ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... demonstrated that it was too far to the east than another demonstrated with equal clearness that it was much too far to the west. No sooner had my indignation died down at its angular and aggressive squareness than I was called up again to notice and condemn its enervating and sensual roundness. In case any reader has not come across the thing I mean, I will give such instances as I remember at random of this self-contradiction in the sceptical attack. I give four or five of them; ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... doing, want of continuity and impatience of results. Many organisations, after winning some advantages,—over the railroads for instance,—fell into abeyance or even out of existence; others lapsed under the enervating influence of a little temporary prosperity, such as a few years of better prices. The truth is, American farmers have had the will to organise, but they have missed ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... appetite, the sound sleep, of a little child. Hence, the rude huts and chalets of the peasant Priessnitz were crowded with battered dukes and princesses, and notables of every degree, who came from the hot, enervating luxury which had drained them of existence to find a keener pleasure in peasants' bread under peasants' roofs than in soft raiment and palaces. No arts of French cookery can possibly make anything taste so well to a feeble and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... vow, all in the range of the highest moral feeling. It is possible that there are people who might imbibe this sort of mental liquor and come to no damage by it, but Paul found it remarkably heady. At first he thought the draught stimulative, but in a while he began to know that it was enervating. He ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... directions remind one of the first impromptu (in A flat), but the characters of these pieces are otherwise very unlike. The earlier work is distinguished by a brisk freshness; the later one by a feverish restlessness and faint plaintiveness. After the irresolute flutter of the relaxing and enervating chromatic progressions and successions of thirds and sixths, the greater steadiness of the middle section, more especially the subdued strength and passionate eloquence at the D flat major, has a good effect. But here, too, the languid, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... an extent that I feared to voice my convictions and that fear still clings to me like a nemesis. It seems that every individual personality in a public or private audience rises up to overwhelm me, causing my tongue to grow heavy and my mind to become a blank. This enervating fear blends into every thought I have, whether sleeping or waking. I have fought with all my might to rid myself of it but ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... outbreak of the war, he hastened to offer his voluntary services to the army as surgeon. Owing to temperate habits and a strong physique, he had kept in good health, and no one would have dreamed that this strong, fifty-year-old man had passed so many years in an enervating tropical climate. The only signs it had left on his face were the dark, yellowish color of his skin, and the habit of keeping the eyes half-closed. The long years in India had also made a deep impression on his character, ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... of danger to the state and ought to be prevented." He looked upon music as a tonic which does for the mind what gymnastics do for the body; and taught that only such music ought to be tolerated by the state as had a moral purpose, while enervating forms should be suppressed by ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... gloom is broken by gladdening beams of sunlight. They sketch a mazy fretwork pattern of light and shade on the dank underlay of rotting vegetation which the melting snow has laid bare. The air is weighted down with heavy, resinous odours, and an enervating warmth has descended to the depths of the lower forests. But Winter has not yet spread its wings for its last flight. Spring's approach has been heralded by its feathered trumpeters, garbed in their sober plumage. It is on its way, that is all. The transition of the ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... Enervating and degrading pleasure and ambitious or revengeful wars, engrossed the whole attention of the Russian court during the reign of Elizabeth. The welfare of the people was not even thought of. The following anecdote, illustrative ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... same tender green, the birds sang, the flowers came up and opened, and I felt that a great power of nature for beauty was not affected by the war. It was like a great sanctuary into which we could go and find refuge for a time from even the greatest trouble of the world, finding there not enervating ease, but something which gave optimism, confidence, and security. The progress of the seasons unchecked, the continuance of the beauty of nature, was a manifestation of something great and splendid which ...
— Recreation • Edward Grey
... temperature for the year averaging seventy-seven degrees and varying from sixty-nine to eighty-four degrees. June, July, and August are the coolest and driest months, and December to March the rainiest and hottest. It is often humid, enervating, but the south-east, the trade-wind, which blows regularly on the east side of the islands, where are Papeete and most of the settlements, purifies the atmosphere, and there are no epidemics except when disease is brought directly from the cities of America or Australasia. A delicious ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... devoted to the welfare of city and state after the fashion of the boy to his team. It is because war, with all its horrors, has stimulated and exhibited this virtue that its glory persists far into our industrial age; and the hope of a lofty patriotism, that shall be equal to the enervating influences of peace, lies in an educated and ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... love, the cultivated kind that bores into a woman's heart through silk and laces in a hot-house atmosphere and brings about all kinds of enervating reactions until operated upon by marriage; the other kind a field woman breathes into her lungs and it gets into her circulation and starts up the most awful and productive activity. I've had both kinds. I moped for months over Gale Beacon, and made ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... he had debated with himself there before dinner, and it had all come to nothing—worse than nothing. He walked right on into the Chase, glad to get out of the Grove, which surely was haunted by his evil genius. Those beeches and smooth limes—there was something enervating in the very sight of them; but the strong knotted old oaks had no bending languor in them—the sight of them would give a man some energy. Arthur lost himself among the narrow openings in the fern, winding about without seeking any issue, till the twilight deepened ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... of literary tastes there are few things more depressing than the conversations of 'small-talk' which an exacting society occasionally demands. Who has not suffered from their enervating effects? We are not all possessed of that mental abstraction which La Fontaine succeeded in carrying with him throughout life, forming a buffer from which all idle talk rebounded. He was once asked to dinner by a 'fermier-general' ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... to flinch from whatever befalls thee.' [Footnote: Ibid. ii. 208.] This is, of course, not intended as a complete description, but shows that the spirit of the earlier Ṣufism was profoundly ethical. Count Gobineau, however, assures us that the Ṣufism which he knew was both enervating and immoral. Certainly the later Ṣufi poets were inclined to overpress symbolism, and the luscious sweetness of the poetry may have been unwholesome for some—both for poets and for readers. Still I question whether, for properly trained readers, this ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... kinds of weapons: his gracefulness and skill in the tourney were the theme of praise among the Moorish dames, and his prowess in the field had made him the terror of the enemy. He had long repined at the timid policy of Boabdil, and endeavored to counteract its enervating effects and keep alive the martial spirit of Granada. For this reason he had promoted jousts and tiltings with the reed, and all those other public games which bear the semblance of war. He endeavored also to inculcate into his companions-in-arms those high chivalrous sentiments ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... missionary, most of us dwell upon the heroic self-denial he practices and the bravery with which he faces the gravest dangers. Certainly, the missionary in Brazil is due a good share of such appreciation. He has been called upon to endure shameful indignities, painful personal dangers and the enervating perils of a hostile climate. Our own missionaries have been beaten, stoned, thrown into streams, arrested and haled before courts, shot at and in many instances saved only by the most signal dispensations of Providence. Dr. Bagby, our first missionary, in spite of ...
— Brazilian Sketches • T. B. Ray
... not?" said his friend impatiently; "well, let us follow his example. We will intoxicate this mighty king with enervating pleasures, we will tempt him with wine and women, we ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... reasons for this—first, that being a multi-millionaire is becoming, as it were, a sort of recognized profession, having its own sports, its own methods of business and its own interests; second, that the luxury of to-day is so enervating and insidious that a girl or youth reared in what is called society cannot be comfortable, much less happy, on the income of less than a couple ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... makes him crooked. A horse-hair mattress is the best for a child to lie on. The pillow, too, should be made of horse-hair. A feather pillow often causes the bead to be bathed in perspiration, thus enervating the child, and making him liable to catch cold. If he be at all rickety, if he be weak in the neck, if he be inclined to stoop, or if he be at all crooked, let him, by all ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... surface of the pools for grass. A great stillness reigned everywhere, and he failed to see any of the beasts that only a moment ago were prowling around the castle. As he walked on, the woods grew thicker, and the darkness more impenetrable. Warm winds, filled with enervating perfumes, caressed him; he sank into masses of dead leaves, and after a while he leaned against an oak-tree to rest ...
— Three short works - The Dance of Death, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, A Simple Soul. • Gustave Flaubert
... the seat of local inflammations than any other part of the bowels. Diseases of this part of the bowels are liable to come at any time of the year; but in hot weather the tendency to fermentation is much greater than at other times of the year, and bodily resistance is reduced because of the enervating influence of the heat, of too long working hours, and of too short nights for sleep, and of the ever-present, omnipotent and omnivorous appetite which is taking into the stomach and bowels food beyond the digestive capacity ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.
... Mr. Dod, "they stick up little handbills addressed to their 'chers concitoyens' as if voters were a lot of baa-lambs and willie-boys. It makes enervating reading." ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... these were among the most glorious days for houseboating: tonic days with a hint of winter in the chill, crisp air, and dreamy days with a lingering of summer in the sun's warm glow. The enervating heat was over, and the worrisome insects were gone. In peace we could sail in the marsh stream or climb the banks for ferns and holly. Gadabout moved with masses of pale reeds, spicy boughs of cedar, bay branches, and glowing holly nodding on her bow. The air was no longer filled with the song of ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... sat there doing nothing in the middle of flowers, and sea breezes, and beautiful views. To comprehend all the luxury of the bel far niente one must come to Naples, where idleness loses half its evil by losing all its enervating qualities; there is something in the air so elastic that I have never been at any place where I have felt as if I could make exertions so easily as here, and yet it is a great pleasure to sit and look at the Bay, the ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... better—stronger for endurance, more fitted for the uses of the world, more sensitive to what is noble in nature—by its contemplation. At the best Correggio does but please us in our lighter moments, and we are apt to feel that the pleasure he has given is of an enervating kind. To expect obvious morality of any artist is confessedly absurd. It is not the artist's province to preach, or even to teach, except by remote suggestion. Yet the mind of the artist may be highly moralised, and then he takes rank ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... more able to withstand the enervating effects of isolation than the European, he is no more anxious to work hard for small wages, no more and no less capable of honesty and thrift, no more and no less endowed with human virtue, no more and no less cursed with the vices ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... altogether so; but the reason, if not precisely similar to that which calls forth the article in the London Examiner, springs from the same impulse: I love a good cigar, and have been in my day an inveterate smoker, but hope, and am now endeavoring, to overcome the useless and enervating habit, more especially since I have seen the poverty and desolation occasioned in Virginia from the cultivation of tobacco. Still I must confess, that even now, like an old war horse when he smells powder, am I, when I come in contact with the odoriferous exhalation of a good ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... lots within the wall and the laying out of streets and alleys with regard to climatic conditions. They will be properly laid out if foresight is employed to exclude the winds from the alleys. Cold winds are disagreeable, hot winds enervating, moist winds unhealthy. We must, therefore, avoid mistakes in this matter and beware of the common experience of many communities. For example, Mytilene in the island of Lesbos is a town built with magnificence and ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius |
