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Limbo   Listen
noun
Limbo  n.  A West Indian dance contest, in which participants must dance under a pole which is lowered successively until only one participant can successfully pass under, without falling. It is often performed at celebrations, such as weddings.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Limbo" Quotes from Famous Books



... things. He was a sincere Liberal in the non-party sense of that very elastic word. So was I. That is to say, there was a time when we both thought ourselves good mid-Victorian Liberals—a school of politicians whose ideas have now been swept into the limbo of forgotten things, the only surviving principles of that age being apparently those associated with a faint and somewhat fantastic cult of the primrose. In 1866 he wrote to his sister—and I cannot but smile on reading the letter—"I am more ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring

... on guard. Two hours you watch, four for sleep, and then two hours you watch again. All quiet, save that two or three prisoners are brought in from the front to be deposited in limbo, and gazed at in the morning by recruits who have never seen ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... Dusenberry and Dunn may be seen at times watching about the wharves, and again in low grog-shops—then pimping about the "Dutch beer-shops and corner-shops"—picking up, here and there, a hopeful-looking nigger, whom they drag off to limbo, or extort a bribe to let him go. Again, they act as monitors over the Dutch corner-shops, the keepers of which pay them large sums to save themselves the heavy license fine and the information docket. When they are no longer able to pay over hush-money, they find themselves walked up to the ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams

... make sure that there was smooth water below. They had been told that there was no rapid immediately above the falls, that the water slipped over without giving warning, but Stonor dismissed this into the limbo of red-skin romancing. He did not believe it possible for a river to go over a fall ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner

... facial angle of a negro; bodies which resemble the bodies of their parents are connected with souls between which a similar resemblance can be traced. If the souls existed before birth, we must suppose those souls to be kept waiting in a limbo of some kind till a body is prepared suitable for their reception. We must suppose that among the waiting souls, one is from time to time selected to be the offspring of such and such a matrimonial union, so as to present (as it were) a colourable appearance of being ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall

... homesteaders in the wheat belt, he came of age in the year of the Civil War draft, and was unpatriotic enough, some said, to dodge conscription, or the chance of it, by throwing up his hostler's job in a Wahaska livery stable and vanishing into the dim limbo of the Farther West. Also, tradition added that he was well-spared by most; that he was ill-spared, indeed, by only one, and that one ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde

... pop-limbo has been talked about the Princes denial of the marriage! I grant that it was highly improper to marry Mrs. Fitzherbert at all. But George was always weak and wayward, and he did, in his great passion, ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm

... attempted anything else! The nude without material or spiritual significance, with no beauty of design or colour, the nude simply because it was the nude, was Bronzino's ideal in composition, and the result is his "Christ in Limbo." But as a portrait-painter, he took up the note struck by his master and continued it, leaving behind him a series of portraits which not only had their effect in determining the character of Court painting all over Europe, but, what is more to the point, a series of portraits ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson

... enough to keep an apprentice busy, but where would he find a lad sufficiently behind the times to learn a humble trade now banished to the limbo ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

... straightened, how his broad shoulders squared. There was something eloquent in the gesture; Mark King, with no toleration of a clutter of side issues, came straight to the main barrier, which must be swept aside for good and all, or which must be skirted and so passed and relegated to the limbo ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory

... old man of soldier-like aspect would pass them on horseback, and gaze at their two tall British figures with a look of curious and benign interest, as if he mentally wished them well, and well away from this drear limbo of penitence and exile ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier

... of the English people has already made its choice; and that when that beautiful "Hero and Leander," in which Hood has outrivalled the conceit-mongers at their own weapons, by virtue of the very terseness, clearness, and manliness which they neglect, has been gathered to the limbo of the Crashawes and Marinos, his "Song of the Shirt" and his "Bridge of Sighs" will be esteemed by great new English nations far beyond the seas, for what they are—two of the most noble lyric poems ever written by an English pen. If our poetasters talk with Wordsworth of ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... subject for many years, he failed in securing the adoption of his sailing carriage. It is indeed quite clear that a power so uncertain as wind could never be relied on for ordinary traffic, and Mr. Edgworth's project was consequently left to repose in the limbo of the Patent Office, with thousands of other equally useless though ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles

... wall. These things constitute the general identity of old castles; and when one has wandered through a good many, with due discretion of step and protrusion of head, one ceases very much to distinguish and remember, and contents one's self with consigning them to the honourable limbo of the romantic. I must add that this reflection did not in the least deter me from crossing the bridge which ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James

... time—both here and in the world to come.' Some such sentence, at least, was in his sermon that day, and the preacher no doubt supposed St. Matthew, not St. Matthew Henry, accountable for its origination. In the Limbo into which Robert's then spirit flew, it had been sorely exercised about the substitution of the sufferings of Christ for those which humanity must else have endured while ages rolled on—mere ripples on ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald

... no other twentieth-century reprinting; and, perhaps most important, Aubrey Williams claims that "the critical value for the Dunciad of Harte's poem has not been fully appreciated."[3] Its value can best be substantiated, or disputed, if it is rescued from its typographical limbo in the collections and reprinted from ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte

... and ephemeral, never heard from that central again. Later she took up the receiver and got another central, who had never heard her tale of woe and had to have it all over again. This central also asked her name and number and promised to report, then vanished into the interstellar limbo where busy ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes

... heart is sad! What woes can fate still hold in store! The friend I cherished a thousand days Is smashed to pieces on the floor! Is shattered and to Limbo gone, I'll see my Mug ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various

... now assailed with violent storms, and at last took refuge for two days on some uninhabited islands, which by reason of the ill weather and the hurly-burly of thunder, lightning, wind, and rain, they called "Limbo." Repairing their torn sails with their shirts, they sailed for the mainland on the east, and ran into a river called Cuskarawook (perhaps the present Annomessie), where the inhabitants received them with showers of arrows, ascending the trees and shooting ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... task of counting the rifle balls, and now and then a sharp click told that another was consigned to that limbo guarded by Towse. Mrs. Dicey stood in silence for a time, gazing upon the unutterably gloomy forest, the distant, throbbing stars, and the broad, wan flashes at long intervals ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)

... that Great Britain has done very much to make up for her natural defects of position. The Panjdeh affair having relegated the policy of "masterly inactivity" to the limbo of benevolent futilities, the materials for the Quetta railway, which had been in large part sent back to Bombay in the year 1881, were now brought back again; and an alternative route was made to Quetta. The urgent need of checkmating French intrigues in Burmah led ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose

... mark of their beauty upon him, so unconsciously impressed, for the health of their power and sweetness still living in his blood—for these does that chase seem alone of worth, when the dusty entomological relic thereof is in limbo. And so that long and costly shelf, groaning beneath the weight of Grose and Dugdale, and many a mighty slab of topographical prose; those pilgrimages to remote parish churches, with all their attendant ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard

... him in France. We have had Mrs. Lirriper in France and we can imagine her in Mesopotamia or in heaven. The subtle character in the modern novels we cannot really imagine anywhere except in the suburbs or in Limbo. ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton

... was the man who used to carry their booty away, sometimes to quiet places on the coast, and sometimes across to Holland, and the first time I dropped anchor in the Pool I should find myself seized and thrown into limbo. No, lad; I must carry out my agreement—which is that I am not to land you in England, but that I am to take you across to Holland or elsewhere—the elsewhere meaning that if you fall overboard by the way there will be no complaints as to the breach of the agreement. That is, in fact, what they ...
— When London Burned • G. A. Henty

... for the Church than any living man. He was the author of that sublime utterance of uncalculating bigotry, "Better not reign than reign over heretics." He had pursued error with fire and sword. He had peopled limbo with myriads of rash thinkers. He had impoverished his kingdom in Catholic wars. Yet all this had not sufficed. He lay there like a leper smitten by the hand of the God he had so zealously served. ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay

... is precisely the same, on grounds of either logic or Scripture, as advocating the right of adultery toward a bad husband. This is not even good fooling; and, its local use past and no longer buoyed by personal liking for the author, the book sinks back into the limbo of partisan polemics with many worse ones and perhaps some better ones, dragging its ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... beyond doubt in simple piety; the repose of the soul was its object: its motive, reverent affection. The present king disowns indeed all knowledge of a dangerous aitu; he declares the souls of the unburied were only wanderers in limbo, lacking an entrance to the proper country of the dead, unhappy, nowise hurtful. And this severely classic opinion doubtless represents the views of the enlightened. But the flight of my Lafaele marks the grosser terrors of ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson

... how darkly do his own petty interests overshadow the giant things of life. Thrones may totter and fall, monarchs pass to the limbo of memories, whilst we wrestle with an intractable collar-stud. Had another than Inspector Sheffield been driving to Buckingham Palace that day, he might have found his soul attuned to the martial tone about him; for "War! ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer

... next eternity of an hour to strike and pass into limbo.... At last dawn began to break: the window curtains became transparent, a cock crowed in the yard below, the voice of a stable-boy sounded loud in the stillness of ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre

... There is the glass coupe in front, the drawing-room of the house. There is the interieur, which you may compare, if you please, to the dining-room, only there you do not dine; and there is the rotundo, a sort of cabin attached, the limbo of the establishment, in which you may find half-a-dozen unhappy wights for days and nights doing penance. Then, in the very fore-front of this moving castle—hung in mid air, as it were—there is the banquette. It is the roomiest ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie

... he would make the blind see, the deaf hear, and the lame walk; and by way of preparation or beginning to this intended cure, he had them all apprehended and confined in a dark hole, which greatly terrified them with the apprehension of severe punishment. After one night's repose in limbo, he sent a physician or surgeon of most profound skill and judgment to them, who brought the keys of their melancholy apartments, and pretending greatly to befriend them, advised them, if there were any of ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown

... its tail were long ago gone to that undiscovered limbo where all things lost, broken, vanished, and destroyed; things that lose themselves—for servants are too honest to steal; things that break themselves—for servants are too careful to break; find an everlasting ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... more than approximation; but Montucla and others misunderstood him, and, still worse, misunderstood their own misunderstanding, and made him say the circle was exactly double of the equilateral triangle. He was let out of limbo by Lacroix, in a note to his edition ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan

... time I make no doubt. I have known too many of them. No ship is wholly bad; and now that their bodies that had braved so many tempests have been blown off the face of the sea by a puff of steam, the evil and the good together into the limbo of things that have served their time, there can be no harm in affirming that in these vanished generations of willing servants there never has been ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad

... Mount St. Jean; and the name of Waterloo appears in the tepid records of 1794 at the head of a plan for arranging the stages of the retreat (5th July) which the nervousness of Coburg soon condemned to the limbo of unfulfilled promises.[353] Is it surprising that, two days later, the Duke of York declared to him that the British were "betrayed and sold to the enemy"? Worse still, the garrisons of Valenciennes, Conde, Quesnoy, and Landrecies, amounting to nearly 11,000 men, ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... necessary to search the foliations of the coal-seams and the successive layers of the rocks, those archives of the prehistoric world; the present day affords to contemplation an inexhaustible treasury realizing perhaps everything that can emerge from the limbo of possibility. In what will soon be half a century of study, I have caught but a tiny glimpse of a very tiny corner of the realm of instinct; and the harvest gathered overwhelms me with its variety: ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre

... unbaptized.[1967] Having entered into the mother at the time of her conception, the devil held the soul of this child, who, for lack of water, had died the enemy of its Creator. The greatest anxiety was felt concerning the fate of this soul. Some thought it was in limbo, banished forever from God's sight, but the more general and better founded opinion was that it was seething in hell; for has not Saint Augustine demonstrated that souls, little as well as great, ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France

... return to masculine costume—looking the most exquisite piece of Dresden china as she says it. I have seen that masculine tyrant of hers smiling knowingly to himself on such occasions, and it has not been difficult to guess why and when those historic bloomers disappeared into the limbo of lost causes. There is little doubt that when Love came in by the door, the bloomers went out, so ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne

... the theists to the contrary, are also agreed. It matters not what a man calls his mental process; be he infidel, sceptic, rationalist, agnostic, or atheist; he is firm in the conviction that religions of all varieties are rapidly sinking into the limbo of all other ancient superstitions. To him it is but a matter of time for the inevitable crumbling and disappearance of these superstitions, and the time involved is directly proportional to the ease and rapidity ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks

... answering the question of human destiny is by the conception of a general resurrection. Souls, as fast as they leave the body, are gathered in some intermediate state, a starless grave world, a ghostly limbo. When the present cycle of things is completed, when the clock of time runs down and its lifeless weight falls in the socket, and "Death's empty helmet yawns grimly over the funeral hatchment of the world," the gates of this long barred receptacle of the deceased ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... suffering from the heat, but much more from mental perturbation. Though not a stingy or penurious man, it was still true that of all earthly things he suffered most from a financial loss. How often had he seen chance or miscalculation sweep apparently strong and valiant men into the limbo of the useless and forgotten! Since the alienation of his wife's affections by Cowperwood, he had scarcely any interest in the world outside his large financial holdings, which included profitable investments in a half-hundred companies. But they must pay, pay, pay ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser

... that Dr. Jennings and Mrs. Boyer, having shaken off the dust of a pension that had once harbored three malefactors, and having retired Peter and Anna and Harmony into the limbo of things best forgotten or ignored, found themselves, at the corner, confronted by a slovenly girl in heelless slippers and wearing a knitted shawl over her head. "The Frau Schwarz is wrong," cried Olga passionately in Vienna dialect. "They were ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... that evening passed very slowly. If I could have gone to O'Halloran's, I might have forgotten my anxiety; but, as I couldn't go to O'Halloran's, I could not get rid of my anxiety. What had become of him? Was he in limbo? Had he taken Louie's advice and flitted? Was he now gnashing his splendid set of teeth in drear confinement; or was he making a fool of himself, and an ass, by persisting in indulging in ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille

... self-respecting member of the body politic might in time share on equal terms the chance of the poor boy to become a man of genuine influence and importance on his own account, just as now by the neglect, or worse, of his parents the very rich boy is apt to be relegated to the limbo of curiosities, ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen

... to get rid of Leocadia, and made up his mind to lay her in the street, insensible as she was. He had set to work with that intention, when she came to herself, saying, "Where am I? Woe is me! What darkness is this? Am I in the limbo of my innocence, or the hell of my sins? Who touches me? Am I in bed? Mother! dear father! do you hear me? Alas, too well I perceive that you cannot hear me, and that I am in the hands of enemies. ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... between stump and graving-tool—the one showing the effort, the other noting the result of the act; the one making you feel all that is merely dreamed or vague, formless or vacant, the other determining, fixing, giving shape even to the indefinite; the one representing the cause, the force, the limbo whence things issue, the other the things themselves. German has the obscure depth of the infinite, French the clear ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... Alexander, Imperial General against the Turks, and Heir-Apparent of Wurtemberg withal, can speak of many things,—hardly much of his serene Cousin the reigning Duke; whose health is in a too interesting state, the good though unlucky man. Of the Gravenitz sitting now in limbo, or travelling about disowned, TOUJOURS UN LAVEMENT SES TROUSSES, let there be deep silence. But the Prince Alexander can answer abundantly on other heads. He comes to his inheritance a few months hence; actual reigning Duke, the poor serene ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... and make a rush through the Lusatian defiles on Prague.[350] But a despatch from St. Cyr, which reached him at Goerlitz late at night on the 23rd, showed that Dresden was in serious danger from the gathering masses of the allies. This news consigned his second plan to the limbo of vain hopes. Yet, as will appear a little later, his determination to defend by taking the offensive soon took form in yet a third design for the destruction ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose

... of poverty was early relegated to the limbo of neglect. Only a few years after the founding of Manila royal decrees began to issue on the subject of complaints received by the King over the usurpation of lands on the part of the priests. Using the same methods ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... said old Bob, "and, provided we keep their arms lashed behind their backs, and their legs in limbo, they'll not escape from ...
— Adventures in Australia • W.H.G. Kingston

... chiefly bearded men, who paid him sportive homage, and pretty women, as he illustrated, by means of a wineglass, two knives, and a saltspoon, his new invention for having one's boots fastened by electricity, which was to do for Marconigrams, expose radium as a foolish fraud, and consign clock-work to limbo. "You don't touch the buttons and the invention does ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson

... Martignat, "that a devotion to the death of St. Joseph obtains many graces for those who are agonizing, and that, as St. Joseph did not at once pass into heaven—because Jesus Christ had not opened its gates—but descended into Limbo, it is a most useful devotion for the agonizing, and for the souls in Purgatory, to offer to God the resignation of St. Joseph when he was dying and about to leave Jesus and Mary in this world, ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier

... although we know that Dante had made a special study of Bo[:e]thius, yet we cannot well identify the dottore with this philosopher: for how can we be expected to assume that Francesca was acquainted with these two facts? The reference is probably to Virgil, and to his position in Limbo. ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan

... upon the status of the former slave could not be avoided. The issue could not be evaded; like Banquo's ghost, it would not down. There were not wanting men, even when the war had ended and the question of chattel slavery had been forever relegated to the limbo of "things that were," who were willing still to toy with half-way measures, to cater to the caprices of that treacherous yet brave power—the South. They had not yet learned that Southern sentiment was fundamentally revolutionary, dynamic in the extreme, and could not be toyed with as with ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune

... in common with others of his time, in regard to changes of level of the land and the origin of the crystalline rocks, that it did contain the principles upon which modern palaeontology is founded, while those of Cuvier are now in the limbo—so densely populated—of ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard

... the self-consciousness of his immense vitality, sweeps into the limbo of oblivion these dusty debris of the past, with no nearer approach to the romantic regret of a Malory for the glories of old time or to Villon's awestruck contemplation of the mysterious evanishment of storied ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford

... against the Greek Church is that of being non-missionary; and the charge which is so utterly untrue, is deemed sufficient to relegate her to the limbo of the effete and worthless. The truth is, that the missionary zeal, and activity of that Church, are among the most outstanding features of her history; and when we consider the terrible odds against which she has had to contend, both in Europe and Asia, we wonder at the success that ...
— Hymns from the Morningland - Being Translations, Centos and Suggestions from the Service - Books of the Holy Eastern Church • Various

... preliminary declaration that, if he was ever to have another crow, it should be now, on seeing the Devil's unaccountable and first cousin, to say the least, in relationship, so handsomely cornered, and, at last so securely put in limbo,—these, all these combined to form a scene as stirring to the view, as it was replete with moral picturesque to the mind. But we must content ourself with this meagre outline; another and a different, quickly succeeding scene in the shifting ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson

... punctum (n.s.) Oe. flavo-nitida antennis obscuris, fronte puncto atro-nitido impresso, thorace lunula utrinque atro-nitida impresso, scutello flavo, elytris nigro-fuscis limbo et sutura ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King

... would be condemned To Tantal's hunger or Ixion's wheel, Or to the vulture of Prometheus, Rather than that this murther were undone. When as I die I'll drag thy cursed ghost Through all the rivers of foul Erebus, Through burning sulphur of the Limbo-lake, To allay the burning fury of that heat That rageth ...
— 2. Mucedorus • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]

... has adopted as things of use and wont, shall be certified by our scrutiny. So in youth we say, and what results? What do the best become? Incapables, detached from the sap of life, forced to escape to the intellectual limbo of a suspension of judgment, extending till it fills heaven and earth. We no longer discuss opinions even; the most we can attain to is an attitude of mind. In view of the vast variety of phases in which even man's great ideas have been held, a sense of indifference among them, ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry

... personages was no longer a miracle of foresight; it was a mere coincidence. He doubted if Mr. Marrier was worth even his three pounds a week. Edward Henry began to feel ruthless, Napoleonic. He was capable of brushing away the whole Azure Society and New Thought movement into limbo. ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett

... faculty, but even my desire for imaginative composition, and leaves me sadly content to scatter a thousand peaceful fantasies upon the hurricane that is sweeping us all along with it, possibly, into a Limbo where our nation and its polity may be as literally the fragments of a shattered dream as my unwritten Romance. But I have far better hopes for our dear country; and for my individual share of the catastrophe, I afflict ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... to the forthcoming felo-de-se—goes off with his companion to leave the water clear for Barbara Allen, who enters, takes an affecting leave of her laird lover, and straightway drowns herself. Jack Ketch is now, by a rapid change of scene, discovered in limbo, and condemned to death; why, we were too stupid to make out. The fatal cart—very likely modelled after "the best authorities"—next occupies the stage, drawn by a real horse, and filled with Sir Gregory Gash (who it seems is going to be hanged) and Jack Ketch not as a prisoner, but as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 25, 1841 • Various

... which, so they said, had been well known in Paris, in the days when she was still some one—had dismissed her from her position in his household. That was natural enough, and there was no further reason for remembering her. Having disappeared into the limbo of the unfortunate, she was as far beyond the mental range of those who retained their blessings as souls that have passed are out of sight of men and women who still walk the earth. For this very reason she called out in Mrs. Wappinger that motherly good-nature which was only ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King

... the appetites of the common clay. Far from descending to the assistance of a fiend, theirs was but the august ambition to approach nearer to the Fount of Good; the more they emancipated themselves from this limbo of the planets, the more they were penetrated by the splendour and beneficence of God. And if they sought, and at last discovered, how to the eye of the Spirit all the subtler modifications of being and of matter might be made apparent; if they discovered how, for the wings of the ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... shaken with sobbing that I could tell him no more than that you had gone to the Coffee House, where they meant to draw you into a duel. He took me up to my own room, and I heard him going out to wake Limbo to harness, and at last heard him driving away in our coach. I hope I may never in my life spend such another hour as I ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... green eyes looking up to my window from the lane below, which on the night of my arrival I had relegated to the limbo of dreamland, had been verity and not phantasm. If that were so, then the uncanny visitant to my cottage had pursued ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer

... thought, which consisted in his silently raising his hat as for a sign of dignified dismissal. He had cultivated of old, for the occasions of life, the right, the discriminated bow, and now, out of the grey limbo of the time when he could care for such things, this flicker of propriety leaped and worked She might, for that matter, herself have liked it; since, receding further, only with her white face toward him, she paid it the homage of submission. ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James

... incline to the belief that it is absolutely extinct. The death-knell rang for all time when the sewing-machine was invented. The machine has been a very doubtful blessing, as it has allowed even the art of stitchery in ordinary work to slide into the limbo of forgotten things. What woman now knows what it is to "back-stitch" a shirt cuff, for instance, drawing a thread for guidance, and carefully going back two or three threads in order to make a neat, firm line of stitching? The sewing-machine does all this, and ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes

... of Limbo, the Willoughby name for the middle school, because the boys there are supposed to be too old to have to fag, and too young to be ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed

... separately, had never failed to be genially appreciative. The flavor of war, which filled the air as a restless spirit since diplomatic relations with Germany had come to an end—the numb fear with which he had been obsessed but a moment ago—were completely relegated to the limbo of forgetfulness as he now issued forth in search of praise ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris

... her interest; had understood, or seemed to understand, what he said to her, and forgotten it the next moment—had no pocket to put it in, did not know what to do with it, and let it drop into the Limbo of Vanity. They had not been married many days before the scouts of advancing disappointment were upon them. Augustus resisted manfully for a time. But the truth was each of the two had to become a great deal more ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald

... well to remember and act upon his own dictum when, in the preface to The Satire, he observed, and with truth, that had he originally "written with the grave decorum of a secluded moralist, he would" by this time "have gone down into the limbo ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 24, 1891. • Various

... act most cautiously on all things. I shall know how to get a word, any word you wish, to the new President, I think, and my services as you know are at your order at any time. But if you are sent into the Limbo of private life you will be welcomed by a host who have preceded you ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane

... to impress the biologists of his day, even those on whom, like Romanes, he might have reasonably counted for understanding and for support. But he kept alive Hering's work when it bade fair to sink into the limbo of obsolete hypotheses. To use Oliver Wendell Holmes's phrase, he "depolarised" evolutionary thought. We quote the words of a young biologist, who, when an ardent and dogmatic Weismannist of the most pronounced type, was induced ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler

... theories; and Napoleon III. and Mr. Cobden laid their wise heads together to form plans for the completion of the 'cordial understanding,' on the basis of free trade. Less than forty years had sufficed to effect a gradual change of human opinion, and protection seemed about to be sent to that limbo in which witchcraft, alchemy, and judicial astrology have been so ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... very articles of the Christian Creed militated against the ultimate scorn of the human body: the doctrine of the Resurrection alone was enough to give it more sanctity than could be derived from all the polytheism of antiquity. The Baptism of Christ, the descent into Limbo, and the Crucifixion itself, were scenes from which the use of drapery had to be less or more discarded. The porches and frontals of Gothic churches abounded in nude statuary, from scenes in the Garden of Eden down to the Last Judgment. Abuses crept in, of course, and the ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford

... national vigour, in the number of its soldiers, in the military renown of its chiefs, in the proud prosperity of its people, or in the majesty of its gods; the present fabric is as spacious and magnificent, it would seem, as that which has but just vanished into the limbo of the past. No kingdom ever shone with brighter splendour, or gave a greater impression of prosperity, than the kingdom of Assyria in the days succeeding its triumphs over Blam and Arabia: precisely at this ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... inadequately treated, which will here be found. Some of them may seem of small importance in the eyes of many—“caviare to the general”—but I have thought it better that even these minor details should not be consigned to the limbo of ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter

... foolish fancy, and who might perhaps renew the odious subject. Walking with Modeste, on the contrary, seemed like going back to the days of her childhood, the remembrance of which soothed her like a recollection of happiness and peace, now very far away; it was a reminiscence of the far-off limbo in which her young soul, pure and white, had floated, without rapture, but without any great grief ...
— Jacqueline, v1 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)

... uncertainty, athwart the deep perplexity of his mind, moved hope and a shadowed joy. Within him arose again the vision of happiness once pictured and prayed for, once revived, never quite banished to the grey limbo of ambitions beyond fulfilment. Now realities saddened the thought of it and brought ambition within a new environment less splendid than the old. But, despite clouds, hope shone fairly forth at last. So a planet, that the eye has followed ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts

... extreme to pause for explanation with Janet. On I pushed through the groups of children, of whose sports I had been so often a lazy, lounging spectator. I sprung over the gutter as if it had been the fatal Styx, and I a ghost, which, eluding Pluto's authority, was making its escape from Limbo lake. My friend had difficulty to restrain me from running like a madman up the street; and in spite of his kindness and hospitality, which soothed me for a day or two, I was not quite happy until I found myself aboard of a Leith smack, and, standing down the Firth ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott

... a downcast look on most of these men's faces, and a general shabbiness of appearance that was not attractive. And no wonder: for they had come from the battlefield, and crossed the sea in crowded ships, not too comfortable; and were drawing near, as prisoners of war, to the dreary limbo which, unless they chanced to die, was to be their abode for they knew not how long. To be prisoners of war is an honourable estate, almost the only captivity to which no shame attaches: yet this is but cold comfort to compensate for ...
— The French Prisoners of Norman Cross - A Tale • Arthur Brown

... twenty-two years he was convicted on a charge of horse-stealing and sent to the Frankfort, Ky., penitentiary for six years. After serving four years he was pardoned by the Legislature. He remained out of prison for the two following years. We next find him in "limbo" in Indiana. He was arrested, and twenty different charges were preferred against him. By pleading guilty to the count of stealing a wagon, the court dismissed the other cases and gave him a sentence of three years at hard labor. He was taken to the ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds

... nothing earthly left to lean on; there is the large wooden reel which the blear-eyed old deacon sent the minister's lady, who thanked him graciously, and twirled it smilingly, and in fitting season bowed it out decently to the limbo of troublesome conveniences. And there are old leather portmanteaus, like stranded porpoises, their mouths gaping in gaunt hunger for the food with which they used to be gorged to bulging repletion; and old brass andirons, waiting until time shall revenge ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... some want of sleep—for what could he do with it? It was impossible to make merchandise of it, for he was every inch a gentleman. He could not burn it, for under an acrid exterior he had a kindly nature. It was believed, indeed, that he had established some limbo of his own, in which such unwelcome commodities were subject to a kind of burial or entombment, where they remained in existence, yet were decidedly outside the ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton

... independent; on the other, Navarre, more priest-ridden than Rome herself, with every man a Carlist and every woman that which her confessor told her to be. In the south, Andalusia only asked to be left alone to go her own sunny, indifferent way to the limbo of the great nations. Which way should Aragon turn? In truth, the men of Aragon ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman

... were all very emphatic. That ill-fated library window should pass into the limbo of things that have been. Already builders were converting the library into an entrance hall, and the main door would occupy its natural place in the front of ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy

... peas on the head of the unfortunate clerk. The result was such a strenuous chorus of "Amens," that the laughter of the congregation could not be restrained, and the peas were abolished and consigned to the limbo of impractical inventions. Possibly the story may ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield

... into limbo; he was like a fresh northwest wind—he revived everyone. He made Doris think of David Martin as she first knew him—and naturally Doris adored Cameron. She came near praying that Nancy might, after a fashion, pay her debts for her. But no! she would not influence ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock

... guessed; But know, 'tis from no nightly sexton's hand. There's not a damned ghost, nor hell-born fiend, That can from limbo 'scape, but hither flies; With leathern wings they beat the dusky skies, To sacred churches all in swarms repair; Some crowd the spires, but most the hallowed bells, } And softly toll for souls departing knells: } Each chime, ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden

... she returns his little greasy photograph, accompanied by a little perfumed note, expressing the hope that he will think of her only as a sister, his paradise is wrecked, and his puppy love is swept into the limbo of things that were, the school boy's tale, the wonder of ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor

... I acquit myself of the charge, but, my dear fellow, with an uneasy sense of the responsibility I incur in thus possibly suggesting to you a retrospect of events which you had much best consign to the limbo of the—not unexplainable, but not worth trying to explain. It was patent from what I have gathered that you were in an overstrung and excitable condition at that time, and that your temporary collapse was purely nervous in its character. It seems there was some ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes

... nothing was done. This is the pleasant way of the West. All take an interest in any possible or impossible enterprise; but when it comes to finding some money and doing something, the scheme is relegated to the limbo of things undone. ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker

... of Horeb—the presence of the living God; now, the vision was over, the desert was dull and dry, the bush burned no more, the glowing lava had cooled to unsightly stone! There was no God, nor any man more! Time had closed and swept the world into the limbo of vanity! For a time she sat without thought, as it were in a mental sleep. She opened her eyes, and the blank of creation stared into the very heart of her. The emptiness and loneliness overpowered her. Hardly aware of what she was doing, she slid to her ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald

... contrary, Man is punished for original sin in the children's limbo, where there is no pain of sense as we shall state further on (II-II, Q. 69, A. 6): whereas men are punished in hell for no other than mortal sin. Therefore there will be no place where a man can be punished for venial sin with ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas

... some daughter of Eve. Would any Circe or Calypso—and if so, what one?—ever check this pale-haired scientist's nocturnal sailings into the interminable spaces overhead, and hurl all his mighty calculations on cosmic force and stellar fire into Limbo? Oh, the pity of it, if such should ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy

... to suffer. He lived, in his best hours, in a world of subjects and situations; he wrote another play and made it as different from its predecessor as such a very good thing could be. It might be a very good thing, but when he had committed it to the theatrical limbo indiscriminating fate took no account of the difference. He was at last able to leave England for three or four months; he went to Germany to pay a visit long deferred ...
— Nona Vincent • Henry James

... lay very still in his arms, and the man laughed quietly to himself, sure that he had subdued her and driven her crazy scheme into limbo. The wild creature had one dread and by reason of it one master. Never had she been so amenable to discipline as under Dillon's remote and affable authority. Curran had no fear of consequences in studying the secret years of Arthur Dillon's existence. The study ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith

... pistols, I will send a bullet through the body of the first petticoated gentleman who heaves in sight, whether he is a ghost or not. If so be I starts off, just be good enough to follow me when I make chase, and we will have him in limbo before ...
— The Young Rajah • W.H.G. Kingston

... at editorials on light or picturesque topics, and with satisfying though not equal results, for here he occasionally stumbled upon the hard-rooted prejudices of the Inside Office, and beheld his efforts vanish into the irreclaimable limbo of the scrap-basket. Nevertheless, at ten dollars per column for this kind of writing, he continued to make a decent space bill, and clear himself of the doldrums where the waning of the city desk's favor had left him. All that he could now make ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... Provence, in the fields of La Crau, near Mariannes, there rained stones (they are there to this day) to help Hercules, who otherwise wanted wherewithal to fight Neptune's two bastards. But whither are we bound? Are we a-going to the little children's limbo? By Pluto, they'll bepaw and conskite us all. Or are we going to hell for orders? By cob's body, I'll hamper, bethwack, and belabour all the devils, now I have some vine-leaves in my shoes. Thou shalt see me lay about me like mad, old boy. ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... dynamic, and that it may call into existence forms and pictures that may well exist for hundreds of years. For, not far removed from the region of our human life is another region where float the waste and drift of all the centuries, the limbo of the shells of the dead; a densely populated region crammed with horror and abomination of all descriptions, and sometimes galvanised into active life again by the will of a trained manipulator, a mind versed in the practices of lower magic. That this woman understood ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood

... would sink into the limbo to which you consigned Moliere. If we may judge a theory by its results, when compared with the deliberate verdict of the world, your aesthetic does not seem to hold water. The "Odyssey" is not really inferior ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang

... will I have the thumbs of my youth. Old fights and wrestlings have injured them irreparably. That punch on the head of a man whose very name is forgotten settled this thumb finally and for ever. A slip-grip at catch-as-catch-can did for the other. My lean runner's stomach has passed into the limbo of memory. The joints of the legs that bear me up are not so adequate as they once were, when, in wild nights and days of toil and frolic, I strained and snapped and ruptured them. Never again can I swing dizzily aloft and trust all the proud quick that is I to ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London

... animals. There is nothing impossible in the idea that Romulus and Remus may have imbibed wolfish traits of character from the wet nurse the legend assigned them, but the legend is not sound history, and the supposition is nothing more than a speculative fancy. Still, there is a limbo of curious evidence bearing on the subject of pre-natal influences sufficient to form the starting-point ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... closet, colored with palette scrapings. It is always a great stunt with students to make something like this. Mr. Bent has long ago outgrown it as a studio furnishing and will have nothing short of mahogany around him, but it is too roomy and useful for me to give up, so it is banished to the limbo of the kitchen. I have known students to clean their palettes many times a day just to get a little more ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed

... one-and-sixpence for a new piece of flint for his starboard eye. Now you know that old Wilkins never axed no more than threepence. Now, how we're to pay at that rate, comes to more than my knowledge. Jim hadn't the dirt, although he had brought his threepence; so his blinkers are left there in limbo." ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat

... health and beauty of the race; to improve the quality of children born, and the general vigor and purity of social life, than any one measure which could be proposed. It rests upon a recognition of motherhood as the real base and cause of the family; and dismisses to the limbo of all outworn superstition that false Hebraic and grossly androcentric doctrine that the woman is to be subject to the man, and that he shall rule over her. He has tried this arrangement long enough—to ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... the world over; all the ancient controversies as to their merits or demerits have died down. The Bayreuth theatre, the outward and visible sign of his inner greatness, has risen to the point of its most splendid glory and lapsed into the limbo of tenth-rate things. Every one who really cares for the art of music, and especially the art of opera (of which art music is by far the most important factor), has had ample time and opportunity for ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman

... With opportunity given him, he had hoped one day to electrify the town. But that hope was now buried very deep down in his heart, and if ever brought out, like an "old property," to be looked at and turned about, its only greeting was a quiet sneer, after which it was relegated to the limbo whence it had been disinterred. James Madgin had given up the expectation of ever shining in the theatrical system as a "great star;" he was trying to content himself with the thought of living and dying a respectable mediocrity—useful, ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various

... Ernest,—I've nothing particular to write about, but your letter has been lying for some days in the limbo of unanswered letters, to wit my pocket, and it's time ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler

... I am not the same person. I will esteem it a great favor if you will leave the man you saw at that time in the limbo of the past—the farther off ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe

... edition, was the work of a very young man who dealt in a romantic spirit with the gloomier facts of life. Its title, The Unclassed,[3] excited a little curiosity, but the author was careful to explain that he had not in view the declasses but rather those persons who live in a limbo external to society, and refuse the statistic badge. The central figure Osmond Waymark is of course Gissing himself. Like his creator, raving at intervals under the vile restraints of Philistine surroundings and with no ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing

... put in quad, broke out, overpowered and nearly killed two guards. Took to various means of livelihood, until they got him again. Trouble in prison; transferred to the solitary with a little punishment thrown in for a reminder. When he got out of limbo again, he lived in bad company, in one of the tunnels near the Adelphi; hard place for the police to rout a cove from. Then followed a series of rough bungling jobs he was supposed to have been mixed up in. At any rate, he got the credit. More hazards than loot! He had ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham

... Melancholy, monotony, austerity; a sense as of perennial frost, spite of the light and heat; a lost region peopled with visionary forms; a purgatory of souls doing penance till the hour of deliverance shall strike; a limbo, lovely but phantasmal, unearthly, over-earthly—that is the kind of impression India left on my mind. I reach China, awake, and rub my eyes. This, of course, is the real world. This is every-day. Good temper, industry, intelligence. Nothing abnormal or overstrained. The natural man, working, ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... laws, in a cause so inferior in turpitude to others that every hour pass into oblivion, with more of a mark of natural, and less or none of supernatural chastisement. I thought I might be contented with such a view of these prodigies as might quickly consign them to the limbo of men's machinations; yet somehow or other—perhaps the Burgundy bottle, if it could have spoken, like that of Asmodeus, might have helped the solution—I got dreamy, and of course foolish, raising objections against my own conclusions, and instituting an alter ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various

... musket from the Castle battlements. It was strange to hear the alarm spread through the city. In the fortress drums were beat and a bell rung backward. On all hands the watchmen sprang their rattles. Even in that limbo or no-man's-land where I was wandering, lights were made in the houses; sashes were flung up; I could hear neighbouring families converse from window to window, and at length I ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... rover, with a calmness which at the moment made his young companion upbraid him as the most merciless of human kind; "ha! I wonder how he got there? I heard that some how or other he was in limbo at Cecil Place; he wanted to make an escape, I suppose, and so took to the old earth. Ay, ay! look your last on the bright sun, that's laughing at man and man's doings—you'll never mount to ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall

... to an early wedding, She'd dress her head o'ernight, sponge up herself, And give her neck three lathers. Gaar. Ne'er a halter.") Laugh and lye downe Launcepresado Law, the spider's cobweb Legerity Letters of mart Leveret Limbo Line of life Linstock Long haire, treatise against (An allusion to William Prynne's tract The Unlovelinesse of Love-Lockes.) Loves Changelings Changed, MS. play founded on Sidney's ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen

... generally characteristic of first ventures,—not more than enough to augur richer maturity hereafter. Dead-ripeness in a first book is a fatal symptom, sure sign that the writer is doomed forever to that pale limbo of faultlessness from which there is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various

... until the sight of Keela in the satin gown had sent him back with a shock to that finer, cleaner, quieter call that had come in the Sherrill garden. Then the disordered interval between had fled to the limbo ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple

... were captured by the Philistines, and Chloris and Jurgen and all the People of the Field were judged summarily. They were declared to be obsolete illusions, whose merited doom was to be relegated to limbo. To Jurgen ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell

... with a few others followed St. Augustine in opposition to the accepted opinion of the Schools of his time, and for that reason he was called the torturer of children, tortor infantum. The Schoolmen, instead of sending them into the flames of hell, have assigned to them a special Limbo, where they do not suffer, and are only punished by privation of the beatific vision. The Revelations of St. Birgitta (as they are called), much esteemed in Rome, also uphold this dogma. Salmeron and Molina, and before them Ambrose Catharin and [174] others, ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz

... him, no suggestions of the transcendental, no hints as to the ultimate nature of reality and the constitution of the world; and so away with him, a creature of mere rhetoric and ingenuities, to the outer limbo! But if, instead of asking what a writer is without, we try to discover simply what he is, will not our results be more worthy of our trouble? And in fact, if we once put out of our heads our longings for the mystery of metaphysical suggestion, the more we examine ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey

... was not called a historian unless he had considerable pretensions to style. Thus, men who could write, and had written, in an informal way, excellent historical accounts, were not studied by their countrymen as historians. Their writings were relegated to the limbo of antiquarian remains. The habit of writing notes of their campaigns, memoranda of their public conduct, copies of their speeches, &c. had for some time been usual among the abler or more ambitious nobles. Often these were kept by them, laid by for future elaboration: ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell

... should pass his inner life there would be no occupant but himself. From the world where men and women had ties of love and pity and mutual regard they had cast him out, forcing him into a spiritual limbo where none of these things obtained. It was only lawful that he should make use of such advantages as his lot ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King

... blazed into sudden ferocity. He had the look of a wild animal at bay. "You are to prosecute!" he exclaimed violently. "Do you hear? I won't have any more of your damned charity! I'll go down into my own limbo and stay there, without let or hindrance from you or any other man. If you are fool enough to offer me another chance, as you call it, I am not fool enough to take it. The only thing I'll take from you is ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell

... on the lake shore, the people were very bitter against us, and we had some difficulty. The word went among us they were Scotch, from the Canadas, but of this I know nothing. We heard in the morning, however, that most of our officers were in limbo, and we crossed and marched up a hill, intending to burn, sink, and destroy, if they were not liberated. Mischief was prevented by the appearance of Mr. Mix, with the other gentlemen, and we pushed off ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper

... the pigeons awaits all who would violate our shores, or light up the flame of sedition in the land. If, as some philosophers aver, the pigeon does not all die, but in some tranquil limbo flutters on in an eternity of innocent cooing, it must console the poor bird to reflect that, however cheap he may be held, he has not perished altogether in vain. To serve a useful purpose is the great economy of things, ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous

... crucifix and tapestry over the altar are covered with a white and not a purple veil; the throne also is white, and the Pope is vested in a white cope. On the rich facing of the altar is represented Christ dead, His descent into limbo, and His resurrection. The cardinal dean generally celebrates the high mass, after the Gloria in excelsis of which no bells are allowed to be tolled in Rome (except at the papal benediction) but in their stead are used troccole or boards struck with iron: this practice ...
— The Ceremonies of the Holy-Week at Rome • Charles Michael Baggs

... composers except Lortzing, who took advantage of the romantic episode of Peter's service as ship carpenter in Holland to make him the hero of one of the most sparkling of German comic operas. Lortzing had a successor in the Irishman T. S. Cooke, but his opera found its way into the limbo of forgotten things more than a generation ago, while Lortzing's still lives on the stage of Germany. Peter deserved to be celebrated in music, for it was in his reign that polyphonic music, albeit of the Italian order, ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... one, seeing that it is supported by the English navy; the French government interest, which is likewise backed up by a fleet of warships, and the French factory interest, represented by our friend in limbo, who, though he isn't saying much just now, seems to have a pretty strong political pull. So, on the whole, the ownership appears to be muddled, and the pack itself subject to a good many conflicting claims. I expect also that ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe

... of heroes, individuals, comes to us in its noble array with its solo arts, its striding heroes everywhere in front of all, and with nothing nearer to the people in it than the Greek Chorus, which, out of limbo, pale and featureless across all ages, sounds to us as the first far faint coming of the crowd to the arts of this groping world. Modern art, inheriting each of these and each of all things, is revealed to ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee

... manly stature; and into so questionable an aspect, that we ask with new eagerness, How he specially came by it, and regret anew that there is no more explicit answer. Certain of the intelligible and partially significant fragments, which are few in number, shall be extracted from that Limbo of a Paper-bag, and presented with the ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... there's no help for it. Old novels go to the trunkmakers; second-hand uniforms make the splendour of dignity-balls in the colonies: who is to say that there may not be a limbo for us also? At all events, I have a scheme for our transition state—a plan I have long revolved in my mind—and there's ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever

... hostile even to any inquiry upon the matter. Every leading physiologist and psychologist down to the present time has relegated what, for want of a better term, has been called "Thought-Reading" to the limbo of explored fallacies."[64] A second Report by the same writers was read at a meeting of the Society in the same year. In this Report the first series of "Thought-Transference ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett

... develop in the arts of life, or the knowledge of nature, must remain in that limbo of vanity, to which Ariosto consigned embryo politicians, and Milton consigned departed friars—the world of the moon. But it will scarcely supply instances of more memorable individual faculties, or of more powerful effects produced by those faculties. The efforts ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various

... this. And see what you do!—What a vast domain of art you set a Solomon's seal upon! how numberless are the poems, pictures, and statues—the most beautiful productions of their authors—you put in limbo! To me, I confess, it appears the very top of prudery to condemn these lovely creations, merely because they quicken ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various

... a sort of limbo, without the pale of civilized society, we have no church service to-day. We have done the best we could, however, in sending one of the outside dragomen to purchase a Bible, in which we succeeded. He brought us a very handsome ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor

... black curls, his southern complexion and his foreign birth. Delorme thought Gerald an idler of no account, and perceived in him the sure signs of a decadence which was rapidly drawing the English aristocratic class into the limbo of things that were. But Gerald was an insatiable hawker of gossip; and a fashionable painter, with an empire among young and pretty women, must keep himself ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... bill was introduced in the Senate and referred to the Committee on Special Legislation, that limbo of lost causes. The suffragists rallied for a hearing and succeeded in getting it reported without recommendation. When taken from the calendar the Senators seemed to realize for the first time that they were dealing with a live issue. One of them demanded to know why that bill ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various

... merely that he has been walking in a vain show, but that he has been himself but the phantom of a dream. But for the life of the living God, making him be, and keeping him being, he must fade even out of the limbo of vanities! ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald

... Bunk beckoned him in. His life, which had once been as other people's lives, had been touched by the hand of fate; and gayeties and good cheer, along with friendship and love, had been banished to the limbo of lost dreams. So he turned across the creek and led the way to the cave that was destined ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge



Words linked to "Limbo" :   oblivion, mythical place, theology, divinity, gumbo-limbo



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