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More "Torpid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... been materially worse. My feelings at intervals are of a deadly and torpid kind, or awakened to such a state of unnatural and keen excitement that, only to instance the organ of sight, I find the very blades of grass and the boughs of distant trees present themselves to me with microscopic distinctness. Towards evening I sink into a state of ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... appeared cleanly circular, flattened, biconcave, and without notches, indentations or spheroidal swellings. The white globules changed their shape, taking at intervals the spherical form, and varying their shapes again by delicate expansions. I was not deceived then, it was a torpid man that I had under my eyes, ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... dumb; her torpid conscience suddenly awoke and condemned her; Mrs. Milward, who was immediately leaving Rangoon and had no fear of retaliation, ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... For, by trade, he is a writer of articles, and he earnestly believes that the mental exercise of attempting to produce fiction acts as a healthy influence upon a non-fictionist's style. It stimulates the torpid imagination. It quickens the eye for the vivid touches, the picturesque and the dramatic. It is a groping ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... tracks—sharp, nervous, and wiry—have their histories also. But how rarely we see squirrels in winter! The naturalists say they are mostly torpid; yet evidently that little pocket-faced depredator, the chipmunk, was not carrying buckwheat for so many days to his hole for nothing: was he anticipating a state of torpidity, or providing against the demands of a very active appetite? Red and ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... But this was not to be. Some hidden agency had forced the two ever farther asunder. Moreover, Gnulemah developed rapidly, while Nurse underwent a process of gradual congealment,—her wits and emotions became torpid. Besides this, she was the victim of disfigurement, physical as well as spiritual; while Gnulemah, both naturally and by training, was sensitive to beauty and ugliness. Other surface causes no doubt there were, in addition to the hidden one, which was ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... question of questions to every student of speculative politics at the present hour is—Whither will this portent direct its energies? Will it press onward towards some yet mightier endeavour, or, mastered by some hereditary taint, sink torpid and neglectful, leaving its vast, its practically inexhaustible ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... the first to arrive, and seated torpid in a red satin chair with a gilt back, he gave every appearance of lasting the others out. And symbolizing Bosinney's name 'the big one,' with his great stature and bulk, his thick white hair, his puffy immovable shaven ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... trusty conspirators in all France; at least, as long as our armies are victorious, and organized in their present formidable manner. Should anything happen to our present chief, an impulse may be given to the minds now sunk down, and raise our characters from their present torpid state. But until such an event, we shall remain as we are, indolent but submissive, sacrificing our children and treasures for a cause we detest, and for a man we abhor. I am sorry to say it, but it certainly ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... moral earnestness only, but in a more open intelligence; not merely in a more dogged resolution to work and be silent, but in a ready willingness to use the understanding. The poison of our sins, says Mr. Carlyle in his latest utterance, 'is not intellectual dimness chiefly, but torpid unveracity of heart.' Yes, but all unveracity, torpid or fervid, breeds intellectual dimness, and it is this last which prevents us from seeing a way out of the present ignoble situation. We need light more than heat; ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... Josepha, starting up in her enthusiasm. "It is a general flare-up! It is Sardanapalus! Splendid, thoroughly complete! I may be a hussy, but I have a soul! I tell you, I like a spendthrift, like you, crazy over a woman, a thousand times better than those torpid, heartless bankers, who are supposed to be so good, and who ruin no end of families with their rails—gold for them, and iron for their gulls! You have only ruined those who belong to you, you have sold no one but yourself; and then you have ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... her at the slightest ascent, and the incessant vibrating sound that came from the arteries of her throat was painful to those near her. With heavy feet and enfeebled body, she dragged herself along, as if life were too heavy a burden for her. Her faculties and her senses were so torpid that she swooned for no cause at all, for so small a matter as the fatigue of combing her ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... call this little animal "the Sleeper," because he lies in a torpid state through the long winter and spring, until the weather becomes quite warm. He builds his nest in an old hollow tree, or beneath the bushes, and during the summer lays up a great quantity of nuts or acorns for his winter provender. Dormice ...
— Tame Animals • Anonymous
... striking clocks summoned him remorselessly to rise and work he often reeled with dizziness. It seemed to him that the greatest happiness attainable would be to creep into some dark, warm corner, out of the sight and memory of men, and lie there torpid, with a blessed half-consciousness that death was slowly overcoming him. Of all the sufferings collected into each four-and-twenty hours this of rising to a new ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... the ditch, led each by a grenadier. In the centre of it they turned and kneeled, neither of their eyes being bound. A priest advanced, and seemed to pray with the brown man fervently; another offered spiritual consolation to the Englishman, who seemed now to have rallied his torpid faculties, but he waved him away impatiently, and taking a book from his bosom, seemed to repeat a prayer from it with great fervour. At this very instant of time, Mr Bang caught his eye. He dropped the book on the ground, placed one hand on his heart, while he pointed upwards towards ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... the hours in which he is not writing. He has got to take it easy somehow, and the question is what is he to do. He can't, as a rule, do much in the way of hard exercise. Violent exercise in the open air is pleasant enough, but it leaves the brain torpid and stagnant. A man who really makes a business of writing has got to live through ten or twelve hours of a day when he isn't writing. He can't afford to read very much—at least he can't afford to read authors whom he admires, because they affect his style. There is something ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... bed for Lovedy in a little room within her own, and the undressing and bathing of the poor child had revealed injuries even in a more painful state than those which had been shown to Mr. Grey, shocking emaciation, and most scanty garments. The child was almost torpid, and spoke very little. She was most unwilling to attempt to swallow; however, Rachel thought that some of her globules had gone down, and put much faith in them, and in warmth and sleep; but incessantly occupied, and absolutely sickened ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and character require it should long remain so. Those who strive to introduce many of the European habits and fashions, by displacing our own, do a serious injury to the republic, and deserve censure. An idle person, with good powers of mind, becomes torpid and inactive after a few years of indulgence, and is incapable of making any high effort. Highly important it is, then, to avoid this enemy of mental and moral improvement. I have no wish that you pursue trade; I would rather see you on a ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... death is not unlike that of its companion already described, though the declivity of its channel, and its uniform exposure to sun-heat prevented any considerable portion of its current from becoming torpid, lingering only well up on the Mountain slopes to finish their sculpture and encircle them with a zone of moraine soil for forests and gardens. Nowhere in all this wonderful region will you find more ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... praise relax, nor difficulty fright; Should tempting novelty thy cell refrain, [p]And sloth effuse her opiate fumes in vain; Should beauty blunt on fops her fatal dart, Nor claim the triumph of a letter'd heart; Should no disease thy torpid veins invade, Nor melancholy's phantoms haunt thy shade; Yet hope not life, from grief or danger free, Nor think the doom of man revers'd for thee: Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes, And pause ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... of our sight henceforth. The old Ordnance-Master, as an Imperial General of rank, is needed now for War-Service, if he has any skill that way. In those late months, he was duly in attendance at Philipsburg and the Rhine-Campaign, in a subaltern torpid capacity, like Brunswick-Bevern and the others; ready for work, had there been any: but next season, he expects to have a Division of his own, and to do something considerable.—In regard to Berlin and the Diplomacies, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Time folded his wings and paced wearily along his drowsy path. They who had most cheered the torpid hours were gone. Clancy had sailed on a Spanish barque for Colon, contemplating a cut across the isthmus and then a further voyage to end at Calao, where the fighting was said to be on. Geddie, whose quiet and ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... stammer, and the door reply, The hall wake, yawn, and smile; the torpid stair Will grumble at our feet, the table cry: 'Fetch my belongings for me; I am bare.' A clatter! Something in the attic falls. A ghost has lifted up his robes and fled. The loitering shadows move along the walls; Then silence very slowly lifts his head. ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 • Various
... the woods. I watched them passing from one tree to the other, as the branches met, stirred by the breeze; and having hitherto seen them hanging lazily by their claws to boughs, I was surprised at the rapidity of their movements. I have often heard people assert that the sloth spends his torpid existence in a perpetual state of pain, from the peculiar sighing noise he makes, and the slowness of his movements when placed on the ground. In the first place, I cannot believe that God has created ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... religion, a civilization that is about to die. He is the personification, in fact, of ancient Islam. [Footnote: Islam: the religion of the Mohammedans.] What result can we expect to obtain from an embassy to such a man, who, together with his people, spends his life torpid and motionless among ancient dreams of humanity that have almost disappeared from the surface of the earth? There is not a single point on which we can understand each other; the distance between us is nearly that which ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... weak, and his courage die out, and his zeal become torpid apathy and cowardly wish to shuffle off responsibility and shirk work, who shall stand? The lessons of self-distrust, of the nearness to one another of the most opposite emotions in our weak natures, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... riverside walk at Nevers presents nothing but cheerful bustle and an aspect of prosperity, here you approach the Allier through scenes of squalor and torpid neglect. The poorer inhabitants, too, are very un-French in appearance, wanting that personal tidiness characteristic of their country people in general. An aristocratic place, means an Ultramontane place, and every third man you meet in Moulins wears a soutane. What so ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... occasionally so intense that the human frame can scarcely endure exposure to it for any length of time. When winter has set in nearly every bird disappears, and few wild animals are any longer to be seen; some, like the bear, remain torpid, others change their color to a snowy white, and are rarely observed. Rocks of the softer kinds are often rent asunder, as if with the explosion of gunpowder, by the irresistible expansive power of the frost.[159] Dogs ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... listen. Torpid with comfort and impressed by the sight of the ocean covered with vessels rushing to and fro like wild beasts about their den, they sat speechless, somewhat awed by the soothing and gorgeous sunset. Roland alone talked on without end; he was one of those whom nothing can ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... brightly, and poured in a stream of light through the iron grating of the cell where Peters and his wife lay clasped in each other's arms, not asleep, but torpid, and worn out with extreme suffering. Peters was the first to break the silence, and gently moved Ellen, as he called her by her name. She had not for some time lifted up her head, which was buried in his ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... through the quiet night. The bridge resounds in one continued peal as the coach rolls on without a pause, merely affording the toll-gatherer a glimpse at the sleepy passengers, who now bestir their torpid limbs and snuff a cordial in the briny air. The morn breathes upon them and blushes, and they forget how wearily the darkness toiled away. And behold now the fervid day in his bright chariot, glittering aslant over the waves, nor scorning ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Difficulty fright; Should tempting Novelty thy Cell refrain, And Sloth's bland Opiates shed their Fumes in vain; Should Beauty blunt on Fops her fatal Dart, Nor claim the Triumph of a letter'd Heart; Should no Disease thy torpid Veins invade, Nor Melancholy's Phantoms haunt thy Shade; Yet hope not Life from Grief or Danger free, Nor think the Doom of Man revers'd for thee: Deign on the passing World to turn thine Eyes, And pause awhile from Learning to be ...
— The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and Two Rambler papers (1750) • Samuel Johnson
... rogue! how could Westminster chuse him again To leaven the virtue of these honest men! But the Devil remained till the Break of Day Blushed upon Sleep and Lord Castlereagh:[45] 170 Then up half the house got, and Satan got up With the drowsy to snore—or the hungry to sup:— But so torpid the power of some speakers, 't is said, That they sent even him to ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... country (see these titles), and St Michael, the ocean port for freighting up the Yukon, are the only towns apparently assured of a prosperous future. Wrangell (formerly Fort St Dionysius, Fort Stikine and Fort Wrangell), founded in 1833, is a dilapidated and torpid little village, of some interest in Alaskan history, and of temporary importance from 1874 to 1877 as the gateway to the Cassiar mines in British Columbia. Its inhabitants are chiefly Thlinkit ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... assured them never went far from land. Notwithstanding, they became uneasy at the calmness of the weather, declaring that as the prevailing winds were from the east, and had not power to disturb the torpid stillness of the ocean, there was the risk of perishing amidst stagnant and shoreless waters, and being prevented by contrary winds ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... wiry—have their histories also. But who ever saw squirrels in winter? The naturalist says they are mostly torpid; yet evidently that little pocket-faced depredator, the chipmunk, was not carrying buckwheat for so many days to his hole for nothing;—was he anticipating a state of torpidity, or the demands of a very active appetite? Red and gray squirrels are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... thousands that perished in our late contests with France and Spain, a very small part ever felt the stroke of an enemy; the rest languished in tents and ships, amidst damps and putrefaction; pale, torpid, spiritless, and helpless; gasping and groaning, unpitied among men made obdurate by long continuance of hopeless misery; and were at last whelmed in pits, or heaved into the ocean, without notice and without remembrance. By incommodious encampments ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... food seem held in light esteem by lizards. Their blood need not be highly oxygenated; it nourishes just as well when impure. In temperate climes lizards lie torpid and buried all winter; some species of the tropic deserts sleep peacefully all summer. Their anatomy includes no means for the continuous introduction and expulsion of air; reptilian lungs are little more than closed sacs, without ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... leaders of the Party. Can't remember one of them except BLISSOP, the Secretary of the Association, a chap about my own age, who told me his brother remembered me at Oxford. There was a fellow of that name, I think, who came up in my year, a scrubby-faced reading man. We made hay in his room after a Torpid "rag," which he didn't like. Hope it isn't the same. I said I remembered him well. Dined with TOLLAND; nobody but leaders of the Party present, all as serious as judges, and full of importance. CHORKLE, who drops his "h's" frightfully, asked me "'ow long ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 11, 1891 • Various
... freedom and natural movement of the thoughts. My reason, however, for noticing this peculiarity in Isocrates, is by way of fixing the attention upon the superiority, even artificial ornaments, of downright practical business and the realities of political strife, over the torpid atmosphere of a study or a school. Cicero, long after, had the same passion for numerositas, and the full, pompous rotundity of cadence. But in Cicero, all habits and all faculties were nursed by the daily practice of life and its ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... have been rid of Gregorio, she would have felt almost sure of victory; but as it was, she believed the man absolutely meant to baffle her, partly out of a spiteful rivalry, partly because his master's torpid indolence could be used to his own advantage. She was absolutely certain that his sneering tone of remark made her husband doubly disinclined to let any religious book be near, or to permit her to draw him to ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... think any thing is better than to be torpid. I'd rather know I could never hope for happiness hereafter, than not have blood enough really to hope ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... tops of the trees. A pudgy muskrat, swimming with head up, was moved to sidle off briskly as he met a cotton-mouth moccasin snake, so fat and swollen with summer poison that it looked almost like a legless lizard as it moved along the surface of the water in a series of slow torpid s's. Directly above the head of either of the waiting assassins a compact little swarm of midges hung, holding to a ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... is our taste, that if the most torpid dunce this fruitful age can boast of, could by some artful imposture prepossess the public, that the most insipid of all his own bread-sauce compositions, to be published next winter, was a piece MILTON's, or any other celebrated ...
— Essays on Taste • John Gilbert Cooper, John Armstrong, Ralph Cohen
... (hirundines rusticae) being found in a torpid state during the winter in the Isle of Wight or any part of this country, I never heard any such account worth attending to. But a clergyman, of an inquisitive turn, assures me, that when he was a great boy, some workmen, ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... forage upon the country. The farmers waited until winter before they made an attack upon this stronghold; and then they came and dug up the ground, knowing that these reptiles always pass the cold season in a torpid ...
— Stories of New Jersey • Frank Richard Stockton
... to the pavement, where something lay huddled against the wall of the house, and the coachman, torpid on his box behind the fidgety horses, started at ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... strength of which she had lately been conscious forsook her; all her body was oppressed with languor, her mind miserably void. No book made appeal to her, and the sight of those which she had bought from home was intolerable. She lay upon a couch, her limbs torpid, burdensome. Eleanor's company ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... month undoubtedly presents fewer floral attractions than any other in the whole year. Everything is in a torpid state of existence, and the combined forces of frost, snow, wind, and rain render December unpleasant both indoors and out. The only kinds of vegetation which seem to flourish just now are the insignificant, but wonderfully ...
— Little Folks (December 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... the winged insects, and they are not so originally. They acquire that form and that inimitable brilliancy by progressive changes. The slow and creeping caterpillar worm of to day, passes in a few days to a torpid figure, and a state resembling death; and in the next change comes forth in all the miniature magnificence of life, a splendid butterfly. No resemblance of the former creature remains; every thing is changed; all his powers are new, and life ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... pages drove together in an open carriage, and received quite an ovation from the crowd, but no one had thought of providing them with overcoats. Silk stockings, satin knee-breeches and lace ruffles are very inadequate protection against an Arctic blast, and we arrived at the Cathedral stiff and torpid with cold. From the colour of our faces, we might have been five little "Blue Noses" from Nova Scotia. The ceremony was very gorgeous and imposing, and I trust that the pages were not unduly clumsy. Every one ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... settling of the slime of those turbid rivers into the polluted sea, and the gaining upon its deep and fresh waters of the lifeless, impassable, unvoyageable plain, how little could we have understood the purpose with which those islands were shaped out of the void, and the torpid waters enclosed with their desolate walls of sand! How little could we have known, any more than of what now seems to us most distressful, dark, and objectless, the glorious aim which was then in the mind of Him in whose hand are all the corners of the earth! How little imagined ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... plantation, I ride every day, and play on the piano just enough not to forget my notes, et voila! Once a week I go to town, to execute commissions, or return visits, and on Sundays I go to church; and so my life slides away from me. My head and heart, however, are neither as torpid nor as empty as my hours; and I often find, as others have done, that external stagnation does not necessarily produce internal repose. Occasionally, but seldom, people come from town to see us; and sometimes, but not often, small offices ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... so great be borne away uncontested? Where now prithee is divine Eryx, thy master of fruitless fame? where thy renown over all Sicily, and those spoils hanging in thine house?' Thereat he: 'Desire of glory is not gone, nor ambition checked by fear; but torpid age dulls my chilly blood, and my strength of limb is numb and outworn. If I had what once was mine, if I had now that prime of years, yonder braggart's boast and confidence, it had taken no prize of goodly bullock to allure me; nor heed I these gifts.' So he spoke, and on that ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... Importance does not depend on rarity so much as on authenticity. The massacre of a distant tribe, which is heard through the report of others, falls far below the heart-shaking effect of a murder committed in our presence. Our sympathy with the unknown victim may originally have been as torpid as that with the unknown tribe; but it has been kindled by the swift and vivid suggestions of details visible to us as spectators; whereas a severe and continuous effort of imagination is needed to call up the kindling suggestions of the ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... he had reached the right and rear of the Union line; while Hooker complacently viewed the situation from his comfortable headquarters at the Chancellor house, apparently in a semi-torpid state, retaining just enough activity to initiate manoeuvres, which, under the circumstances, were the most ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... me of all my faculties: Lesbia, when once in thy presence, I have not left the power to tell my distracting passion: my tongue becomes torpid; a subtle flame creeps through my veins; my ears tingle in deafness; my eyes are veiled with darkness." Catullus, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... The acceleration of my torpid pulse in the keen fight with the wind, whose violence was almost equal to that of a tornado, and the familiar faces of the bright stars above me, I felt as a blessed relief. I ran not knowing whither, and ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... things just served to stir the torpid sense, Nor pain nor pity in my bosom raised. Memory, though slow, returned with strength: and thence Dismissed, again on open day I gazed, At houses, men, and common light, amazed. The lanes I sought, and as the sun retired, Came, where beneath ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth
... of pain or pleasure.—I know: only the outline of a dull life, that long since, with thousands of dull lives like its own, was vainly lived and lost: thousands of them, massed, vile, slimy lives, like those of the torpid lizards in yonder stagnant water-butt.—Lost? There is a curious point for you to settle, my friend, who study psychology in a lazy, dilettante way. Stop a moment. I am going to be honest. This is what I want you to do. I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed to your clean ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... in the best mood for sight-seeing, and Paris was not sitting up for company; in fact, she was "not at home." Remembering all this, I must say that the whole appearance of the city was dull and dreary. London out of season seemed still full of life; Paris out of season looked vacuous and torpid. The recollection of the sorrow, the humiliation, the shame, and the agony she had passed through since I left her picking her way on the arm of the Citizen King, with his old riflard over her, rose before me sadly, ominously, as I looked upon the high board fence which surrounded the ruins ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... large enough to admit his hand, and took out the nest with the animals rolled up in it, put the whole into a bag made of bark, and brought it down. They actually reached the bottom sometimes without being disturbed. It was very wet, cold weather, and they may have been somewhat torpid; but I started a large brown rat at the foot of one of these trees, which ran up the stem into a hole, and four dormice were out in a minute from it, apparently in terror of their large friend. There were no traces of ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... son of the Fiend, as was reported, and one who had cheated his father at dice when gambling with him for his own soul; Giambattista Cibo, who in mockery took the name of Innocent, and into whose torpid veins the blood of three lads was infused by a Jewish doctor; Sigismondo Malatesta, the lover of Isotta, and the lord of Rimini, whose effigy was burned at Rome as the enemy of God and man, who strangled Polyssena ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... the great Atlantic, see God take The mist from woe's white mountain, spring and stream, The breath of man in frost, the spiral lean From roof-cracked caves where, though the heart may break, The soul will not lie torpid, like the snake,— And battle smoke. On them He breathes with dream And, Lo! an Angel with a sword agleam 'Twix the Old World and New for ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... combed, had carefully removed his gray hairs, but he could not rid himself of his wizened air. The puny little man of law, tightly buttoned into his clothes, reminded you of a torpid viper; for if hope had brought a spark of life into his magpie eyes, his face was icily rigid, and so well did he assume an air of gravity, that an ambitious public prosecutor could not have ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... not so entirely torpid as it appeared, nor was she so absolutely self-absorbed. One idea was rising day by day out of the dark confusion of her thoughts, and that was the goodness and generosity of her lover. In this appreciation there ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... theory. We are commonly told that the conscientious man is always contented and happy,—satisfied with himself, and at peace with God. But facts contradict this theory. The conscientious man is apt to be very much dissatisfied with himself,—much, more so than the man whose conscience is torpid and indifferent. There is comfort in faithful work; no doubt there is great content in the steady performance of regular duties; but here conscience is subordinate to work. It is work which gives contentment; but CONSCIENCE, when thoroughly ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... strongest and most durable necessities. Alfieri, on the other hand, sick of his past life, mortally afraid of falling once more under the tyranny of his baser nature, seeking on all sides assistance in that terrible struggle of the winged intellect out of the caterpillar cocoon in which it had lain torpid so long, was wrought up, if ever a man was, to the pitch of enjoying, of desiring a mere intellectual passion just in proportion as it was absolutely ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... same uncouth-looking effort of humanity that he had been at Yale. No wonder the Northern boys jeered him, with his sloth-ways, his mouthed English, torpid eyes, and brain shut up in that worst of mud-moulds,—belief in caste. Even now, going up and down the tan-bark, his step was dead, sodden, like that of a man in whose life God had not yet wakened the full live soul. It was wakening, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... Religion is but a vain display of ceremonies, to which they are attached by habit, which entertains their eyes, and produces a transient emotion in their torpid understandings, without influencing their conduct or reforming their morals. Even by the confession of the ministers of the altars, nothing is more rare than that internal and spiritual Religion, which alone is capable of regulating the life of man and ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... Swift, all manner of writers, who were themselves ministering in the Church of England, unite in bearing testimony to the torpid condition into which the Church had fallen. Decorum seemed to be the highest reach of the spiritual lives of most of the clergy. One finds curious confirmation of the statements {130} made publicly ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... prodigious and unheard-of strides, while the world is ringing with the noise of intellectual achievements, Spain sleeps on untroubled, unheeding, impassive, receiving no impression upon it. There she lies at the farther extremity of the continent, a huge and torpid mass, the sole representative now remaining of the feelings and knowledge of the middle ages. And, what is the worst symptom of all, she is satisfied with her own condition. Though she is the most backward country in Europe ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... of a subtle casuistry to the unclean side: but his discursive reason would not let him trammel himself into a poet-laureate or stamp-distributor, and he stopped, ere he had quite passed that well-known "bourne from whence no traveller returns"—and so has sunk into torpid, uneasy repose, tantalized by useless resources, haunted by vain imaginings, his lips idly moving, but his heart for ever still, or, as the shattered chords vibrate of themselves, making melancholy music to the ear of memory! Such is the fate of genius ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... stretched him flat on his belly, with his beak placed on the line. The fowl shut his eyes, and soon presented the appearance of being dead. The same process was gone through with the others. Bouvard passed them quickly across to Pecuchet, who ranged them on the side on which they had become torpid. ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... mountains which surround Cashmere. It is a gregarious herb, about six or seven feet high, with a perennial thick branched root, with an annual round smooth stem, large leaves and dark purple flowers. The roots are dug up in the months of September and October, when the plant begins to be torpid; they are chopped up into pieces, from two to six inches long, and are exported without further preparation. The quantity collected, according to Dr. Falconer, is very large, amounting to about two million pounds per annum. The cost of its collection and transport to a mercantile ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... they succeeded so far as to obtain all the information he could give concerning his fall; but he remembered nothing further than that Edith had been the means of bringing him to the snow-hut, where he lay in a deep, torpid slumber, until the voice and hand of Maximus awakened him. When Frank was told that Edith was lost, he sprang from his bed as if he had received an electric shock. The confusion of his faculties seemed swept away, and he began to put on his garments ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... strange it was, to find, in every stagnant town, this same Heart beating with the same monotonous pulsation, the centre of the same torpid, listless system, I came out by another door, and was suddenly scared to death by a blast from the shrillest trumpet that ever was blown. Immediately, came tearing round the corner, an equestrian company from Paris: marshalling themselves under the walls of the church, ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... jeered he who had put the question. "That's a good one. The idea of coupling 'Torpid' Walling's name with anything that savors of work. You'll have a good time fast enough. But I'll wager anything you like, that in his company you will circumnavigate the globe without having done any work harder than spending ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe
... those kings whom God seems to send for the express purpose of hastening revolutions. Of all the enemies of liberty whom Britain has produced, he was at once the most harmless and the most provoking. His office resembled that of the man who, in a Spanish bull-fight, goads the torpid savage to fury, by shaking a red rag in the air, and by now and then throwing a dart, sharp enough to sting, but too small to injure. The policy of wise tyrants has always been to cover their violent acts with popular forms. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... always pull up and plan the wheel-marks; I carry a tape for the purpose, and it saves a lot of hard swearing in court afterwards." Brodie spoke seriously, and Devar vowed that he would interrupt no more, since he merely succeeded in stimulating the man's torpid wits. ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... on, as if Alicia had not spoken. "As to the rest of the people—bah! you can't rouse Calcutta. It is sunk in its torpid liver, and imagines itself superior. It's really funny, you know, the way hepatic influences can be idealised—made to serve ennobling ends. But ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... for Mrs. Hilmer to see that her lord and master was fed properly, but why did she waste hours over a custard when she had money enough to hire it done? That course didn't get either of them anywhere—Hilmer remained at a level of torpid content, and naturally he looked down on his wife as a sort of sublimated servant girl who wasn't always preparing to leave and demanding higher wages... No, most men fell too easily in the trap of their personal comforts. Even Fred had become self-satisfied. Beyond his dinner and paper ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... outward stimulus, or else by an inpouring of the Spirit. What we want is life, "more life, and fuller." To escape from monotony, to get away from the life of mere routine and habits, to feel that we are alive—with more of surprise and wakefulness in our existence. To have less of the gelid, torpid, tortoise-like existence. "To feel the years before us." To ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... stubborn, obstinate; cutting. Dow, dowe, am (is or are) able, can. Dow, a dove. Dowf, dowff, dull. Dowie, drooping, mournful. Dowilie, drooping. Downa, can not. Downa-do (can not do), lack of power. Doylt, stupid, stupefied. Doytin, doddering., Dozen'd, torpid. Dozin, torpid. Draigl't, draggled. Drant, prosing. Drap, drop. Draunting, tedious. Dree, endure, suffer. Dreigh, v. dreight. Dribble, drizzle. Driddle, to toddle. Dreigh, tedious, dull. Droddum, the breech. Drone, part of the bagpipe. Droop-rumpl't, short-rumped. ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... the move to Udalkhand arrived at length, and Stella's heart rejoiced. The place was situated on the edge of a river, a brown and turgid torrent in the rainy weather, but no more than a torpid, muddy stream before the monsoon. A native town and temple stood upon its banks, but a sandy road wound up to higher ground on which a few bungalows stood, overlooking the grim, parched ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... anything like enterprise. Those nations that are partly civilized exhibit more or less industry, and are acquainted with some of the arts; but barbarous nations are acquainted with none of the improvements that elevate society, and exhibit a state of lounging indolence and torpid inactivity. If there be noise, it is not the rattle and whirl of business, or the hum of industry; but the noise of giddy mirth, boisterous and unmeaning laughter, or fierce and angry contention. If there be stillness, it is not the peace and quiet of well-ordered society, ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble
... think, this is true: It is a woman, or the woman in man that recognizes a Messiah.... Look at those males of singing flesh—the ultra-masculine Romans—how blind and how torpid they were to Him; and the materialistic Jews, ponderously confronting each other with stupid forms and lifeless rituals, while their Marys and Magdalens and Miriams followed the Master and waited upon Him!... I always found a kind of soulful ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... topazo. Topic subjekto. Topmost plejsupra. Topography topografio. Topple fali. Topsy-turvy, to turn renversi. Topsy-turvy renversita—ite. Toque cxapo. Torch torcxo. Toreador toreadoro. Torment turmenti. Torment turmento—ado. Torpedo torpedo. Torpedo boat torpedboato. Torpid sensenta. Torpidity sensenteco. Torpor sensento. Torrent torento. Torrid varmega. Torsion tordo. Torso torso. Tortoise testudo. Tortuous torda. Torture turmentego. Torture turmentegi. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... Robertson? So adieu to my vision. I awake, like John Bunyan, 'and behold it is a dream.' Well enough that I awake without a sciatica, which would have probably rewarded my slumbers had I profaned Queen Mary's bed by using it as a mechanical resource to awaken a torpid imagination." ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... first signs of the city's awakening from its lethargic industrial sleep. The beast was beginning to move along its score of miles of length. But out here in the vacancies of the lake it seemed still torpid. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... by its beams, Inhabiting his own eternity, Beyond time's limit or what bound soe'er To circumscribe his being, as he will'd, Into new natures, like unto himself, Eternal Love unfolded. Nor before, As if in dull inaction torpid lay. For not in process of before or aft Upon these waters mov'd the Spirit of God. Simple and mix'd, both form and substance, forth To perfect being started, like three darts Shot from a bow three-corded. And as ray In crystal, ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... him here torpid lies, That drew the essential forms of grace; Here closed in death the attentive eyes That saw the manners ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... left her. It was getting to be more than a passing whim with Arobin to see her and be with her. He had detected the latent sensuality, which unfolded under his delicate sense of her nature's requirements like a torpid, ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... realize that this silent plain had once resounded with martial music and trembled to the tramp of armed men. It was hard to people this solitude with rushing columns of cavalry, and stir its torpid pulses with the shouts of victors, the shrieks of the wounded, and the flash of banner and steel above the surging billows of war. A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... before by the genius of Christianity. It was monstrous that an emperor calling himself a Christian should preside at such a spectacle. But the martyrdom of Telemachus at last touched the callous and torpid consciences of nominal Christians. Thenceforth the games of the amphitheatre were abolished. But it was too late for repentance. Alike "the incomparable wickedness and the incomparable splendor" of the Imperial City were doomed to destruction. Even the blood of a Christian ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... a certain fitness for their special purpose. These graceful creatures (is it possible that a fine yacht can be counted as an inanimate thing?) reclined on the muddy bosom of the basin, but I would not put the Rob Roy there, it seemed so pent up and torpid a life, and with the curious always gazing down from the lofty quay right into your cabin, especially as next day I wished ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... volume, or indeed any volume of the Review, at random, we are almost certain to meet with some electric shock of paradox designed to arouse the attention of the torpid. In one number we find the writer, ever daring and alert, setting out with an eulogium on "the wonderful benefit of arbitrary power" in France. He runs on in this vein for some time, accumulating examples of the wonderful benefit, ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... the wood, seized the sacrificial knife, was just on the point of dealing the stroke. In what manner to express myself properly, I know not; he only would know, who did these things. For no language can describe how it happened that his hand did not become torpid, that the strength of his nerves did not relax, that the affecting sight of his son did not ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume I - Basil to Calvin • Various
... years later the statesman who emancipated the peasants of Prussia observed that Hungary was the only part of the Austrian dominions in which the peasant was not in a better condition than his fellows in North Germany; [9] and so torpid was the humanity of the Diet that until the year 1835 the prison and the flogging-board continued to form a ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... sets in, the fibres and vessels contract, the leaves wither, and are no longer able to perform their office of transpiration; and, as this secretion stops, the roots cease to absorb sap from the soil. If the plant be an annual, its life then terminates; if not, it remains in a state of torpid inaction during the winter; or the only internal motion that takes place is that of a small quantity of resinous juice, which slowly rises from the stem into the branches, and enlarges their ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... respire, they sat down for a little, with their backs to the wind. Then indeed the sky resounded with loud thunder, and the lightnings flashed between its terrific peals; all, bereft of sight and hearing, stood torpid with fear. At length, when the rain had spent itself, and the fury of the wind was on that account the more increased, it seemed necessary to pitch the camp in that very place where they had been overtaken ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... could all have come from, or how they could have been stowed away. On looking into the places where they had been crammed, there were found some children next the sides of the ship, in the places most remote from light and air; they were lying nearly in a torpid state, after the rest had turned out. The little creatures seemed indifferent as to life or death; and when they were carried on deck, many of them could not stand. After enjoying for a short time the unusual luxury of air, some water was brought; it was then that the extent of their ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... pain of hunger has continued for some time, it is succeeded by languor and debility, when a draught of water, by keeping the stomach distended, will remove for a short time every sort of uneasiness. The two attendants, Johnson and Demba, lay stretched upon the sand in torpid slumber, and when the kouskous arrived, were with difficulty awakened. Mr. Park felt no inclination to sleep, but was affected with a deep convulsive respiration, like constant sighing, a dimness of sight, and a tendency to faint, when he attempted to ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... light began, Spring, like our Youth, with joy, and beauty fair; Noon picturing Summer;—Summer's ardent sphere Manhood's gay portrait.—Eve, like Autumn, wan, Autumn resembling faded age in Man; Night, with its silence, and its darkness drear, Emblem of Winter's frore and gloomy reign, When torpid lie the vegetative Powers; Winter, so shrunk, so cold, reminds us plain Of the mute Grave, that o'er the dim Corse lours; There shall the Weary rest, nor ought remain To the pale ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... shrinking, Drive what may through darksome smother; Saturate, but never sinking, Fatal only to the other! Deadlier than the sunken reef Since still the snare it shifteth, Torpid in dumb ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... frost. The old knight gazed at it for a long while amid complete silence. Others looked at him, for it was known that he was like a father to Rotgier, and that he loved him. But he did not shed even a single tear, only his face looked more severe than usual, but there was depicted in it a kind of torpid calm. ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... poor and blinded ones In trustful patience wait to feel O'er torpid pulse and failing ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... which he lifted only to drop it with a yell, for underneath it lay a torpid snake, doubtless one of those that had been ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... was almost torpid. The want of exhilarating exercise, the long dearth of companionship, the terrible monotony of her life, the restless nights, the dank gloomy atmosphere in which she had her perpetual being, were, she told herself dully, doing their work. And she did not ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... drawing. But tardily. Old men work slowly. Brain and hand alike Are dull and torpid. To die young is best, And not to be remembered as old men Tottering ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... weakness moved a circle of his friends to tears, and he sat amongst us insensible to all we could say to him, cowering down, or rather I might say collapsing into a shapeless heap upon his chair, deaf, blind, torpid, motionless,—even then I whispered to the others that I would engage that Kant should take his part in conversation with propriety and animation. This they found it difficult to believe. Upon which I drew close to his ear, and put a question to him about the Moors of Barbary. To the surprise ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... register. Cash would sit and watch him furtively; but Bud was too engrossed with his own misery to notice it. Then, quite unexpectedly, reaction would come and leave Bud in a peace that was more than half a torpid refusal of his mind to worry much ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... fain to fancy the foundations of quite a lesson learn'd. After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on—have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear—what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons—the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night. We will begin from these convictions. Literature flies so high and is so hotly spiced, that our notes ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... his hand, lying flat and inert upon the brown leather arm of his chair. His eyes rested on it, and for the moment he forgot everything else in a sort of torpid study of it. How white it was, how thin, how withered; the nails were parched into minute corrugations; the veins stood out like dark wires; the skin hung loosely on it, and had a dry lustre: an old man's hand. He gazed at it fixedly, till his eyes closed and his head fell forward. But he ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... auspicious occasion for your journey; you will travel in the company of the new Junior Dean, whose society, I am sure, you will find delightful. His predecessor, a personal friend of my own, succumbed, I grieve to say, a few months ago—owing to the alleged inadequate supply of beef-steaks at a 'Torpid' breakfast. . . . Painful, but apparently inevitable. I need hardly say, the perpetrators of this insult have been rusticated for a ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... hastened to remove the refulgent edifice, steering it prudently to its station in the stable yard. Then he went to find the defeated Starling Tucker. That stricken veteran sat alone amid the ruins of his toppled empire in the little office, slumped and torpid before the cold, rusty stove. He refused to be comforted by his devotee. He said he would never touch one of them things again, not for no man's money. The Darwinian hypothesis allows for no petty tact in the process of evolution. Starling Tucker was ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... his bewildered state, seeing a squirrel cracking a nut on the branch of a hollow tree near him, he made a half-frenzied dart at the frightened animal, which ran away. But the same association of ideas in his torpid and confused brain impelled him to search for the squirrel's hoard in the hollow of the tree. He ate the few hazel-nuts he found there, ravenously. The purely animal instinct satisfied, he seemed to have borrowed from it a certain strength ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... sleep, and augment until they awaken the patient, and frequently with much agitation and alarm. The power of conveying the food to the mouth is at length so much impeded that he is obliged to consent to be fed by others. The bowels, which had been all along torpid, now, in most cases, demand stimulating medicines of very considerable power: the expulsion of the faeces from the rectum sometimes requiring mechanical aid. As the disease proceeds towards its last stage, the trunk is almost permanently ...
— An Essay on the Shaking Palsy • James Parkinson
... of half-dead humanity became so dense, so deaf, so torpid,—or perhaps it should be said so happy—that Marshal Victor, their heroic defender against twenty thousand Russians under Wittgenstein, was actually compelled to cut his way by force through this forest of men, so as to cross the Beresina with the five thousand heroes ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... which betrayed a perfect insensibility, convinced me that intelligence resulting from methodical and practical study is preferable to the torpid insanity incident ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... are packed with the greatest care. The casks, or cases, are made as tight as possible and covered with pitched canvas. Such was the cask in question. Yet, when the head was taken off, and a few of the packages removed, an enormous large scorpion was found in the midst of the cask, nearly in a torpid state, but it quickly recovered on exposure ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... fear and trembling, till at last, encouraged by his stillness, one more daring than the rest jumped upon the shoulder of the monarch. Soon, many others followed his example, and made merry on the back of their unresisting King. Speedily tiring of such a torpid ruler, they again petitioned Jupiter, and asked him to send them something more ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... being dull. In every direction there is abundant opportunity for brave and thoughtful men to find the fullest occupation for whatever energy they may possess. There is work to be found everywhere in this sense, and none but the most torpid can find an excuse for joining the spiritually unemployed. The fields, surely, are white for the harvest, though there are weeds enough to be extirpated, and hard enough furrows to be ploughed. We know what has been done in the field of physical science. It has made the world infinite. The days ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... acquaintance with the mild Zibethicus and the gentle Lemmings. As for the German Hamster, he became so drowsy as the weather grew colder, that it became evident that he could sleep day and night upon boards, though he never fell into the perfectly torpid, almost dead state that he would have done, could he have been humoured by ...
— The Rambles of a Rat • A. L. O. E.
... Emma of the Sandwich Isles, literally the Queen of the South, come to hear the wisdom of the Saint; and last of all, the friend and partner of his earlier work, the sharer in the revival of the Church from her torpid repose, John Henry Newman, who met Dr. Pusey there for one last day, fulfilling the words written ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... endless file, one sees such faces as used to be exhibited in ball-rooms during the performance of quadrilles, before round dances came in,—faces marked by the renunciation of all human joy. Sometimes a faint suspicion suggests itself on the Avenue, that these torpid countenances might be roused to life, in case some horse should run away. But that one chance never occurs; the riders may not yet be toned down into perfect breeding, but the horses are. I do not know what could ever break the gloom of this joyless ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... vomiting,—symptoms to which modern physicians attach much importance. The stupor and profound lethargy show that there was an injury to the brain, to which, in all probability, was added a stagnation of black blood in the torpid veins. Probably decomposing blood gave rise to the offensive odor of the person. The function of the lungs was considerably impaired. The petechial fever in Italy in 1505 was a form of the sweating sickness. There were visitations in 1506 and in 1515 in England. ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... could effect we had yet to learn, but we owned that they were as powerful in the water as the fiercer kind of ants on land, where they were virulent enough in places to master even the larger kinds of snakes if they could find them in a semi-torpid state after a meal—biting with such virulence and in such myriads that the most powerful ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... has got quickly into his smoking-coat: at least he is here: he has heard all. Barbara and I crawl away with no more spring or backbone in us than a couple of torpid, ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... of Arc, a mere child in years, ignorant, unlettered, a poor village girl unknown and without influence, found a great nation lying in chains, helpless and hopeless under an alien domination, its treasury bankrupt, its soldiers disheartened and dispersed, all spirit torpid, all courage dead in the hearts of the people through long years of foreign and domestic outrage and oppression, their King cowed, resigned to its fate, and preparing to fly the country; and she laid her hand upon this nation, this corpse, and it rose and followed her. She led it ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... fair and rounded arm, No crimson stream gush'd o'er its spotless snow; Vainly they sought the frozen heart to warm, And bid its chill'd and torpid currents flow; Vainly they practised every learned charm To call into the veins life's ruddy glow; Stirless, they laid her on that bridal bed, Stirless, she lay, all life ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... The camp was sleeping. The forces of destruction lay torpid in the starry shadow of the night. There was no moon, but the stars gave a light that relieved the gloom. They were so near to the eye that it might seem a lancer could pick them from their nests of blue. The Southern Cross hung like ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... morning and, stupid and indifferent, began work at six o'clock. We made bread out of the dough which our comrades had prepared while we slept. The whole day, from dawn till ten at night, some of us sat at the table rolling out the dough, and, to avoid becoming torpid, we would constantly rock ourselves to and fro while the others kneaded in the flour. The enormous oven, which resembled a fantastic beast, opened its large jaws, full of dazzling flames, and breathed forth upon us its hot ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... Franceschetto was planning how to carry off his ducats. While the Holy Father still hovered between life and death, a Jewish doctor proposed to reinvigorate him by the transfusion of young blood into his torpid veins. Three boys throbbing with the elixir of early youth were sacrificed in vain. Each boy, says Infessura, received one ducat. He adds, not without grim humor: 'Et paulo post mortui sunt; Judaeus quidem aufugit, et Papa non sanatus est.' The epitaph of this poor old Pope reads like a ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... peccatoribus," with a faint trembling voice, as if even to the dulled faculties, through the deepening shadow of death, some faint distorted gleam of the truth had pierced, and the soul was, in truth, less torpid than ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 2 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... brightest apparel, the greenest of cloaks thrown over them, lifting up their heads and sharing in the general rejoicing, in the glory of their annual resurrection. Is it in summer, with its myriads of blooms, and its thousand thousand happy voices, the silent torpid river, basking in the light of the sun, and responding only to the fishes as they frisk near the surface? Or is it in the autumn, with its many shades, with its long avenues on which nature has lavished whole tubes of burnt sienna and vermilion; when you tread on gorgeous paths heavy with golden ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren
... the training they proposed would not be enough, and that he himself should take all who chose to go down, to Abingdon twice a week. From that time there were many defaulters; and the spirit of Diogenes groaned within him, as day after day the crew had to be filled up from the torpid or by watermen. Drysdale would ride down to Sandford, meeting the boat on its way up, and then take his place for the pull up to Oxford, while his groom rode his horse up to Folly bridge to meet him. There he would mount again and ride off to Bullingdon, or to the Isis, or Quentin, or ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... Frost Spirit comes!—and the quiet lake shall feel The torpid touch of his glazing breath, and ring to the skater's heel; And the streams which danced on the broken rocks, or sang to the leaning grass, Shall bow again to their winter chain, ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... but not immense, Born destitute of feeling and of sense. No power he but o'er his brain desired— How not to suffer it to be inspired. Ideas unto him were all unknown, Proud of the words which, only, were his own. So unreflecting, so confused his mind, Torpid in error, indolently blind, A fever Heaven, to quicken him, applied, But, rather ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... its mouthful, the andaconda begins at the tail and gradually engulfs its victim, while its elastic jaws, and throat, and stomach are distended sufficiently to let it in; after which it lies in a torpid state for many weeks, till the morsel is digested, when it is ready for another meal. A horse goes down entire, but a cow sticks at the horns, which the anaconda cannot swallow. They are allowed to protrude from its mouth until they decay ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... minister, still seated upon the gun-carriage, his arms resting upon the touch-hole, and his chin upon his arms, in the attitude of one who adjusts and points a cannon, continued in silence to watch the battle, like an old wolf, which, sated with victims and torpid with age, contemplates in the plain the ravages of a lion among a herd of cattle, which he himself dares not attack. From time to time his eye brightens; the smell of blood rejoices him, and he laps his burning tongue over ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... vipers, who in a torpid state were harmless, they will when warmed by your benefits turn ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... 265; latency, inaction; passivity. mental inertness; sloth &c. (inactivity) 683; inexcitability &c. 826[obs3]; irresolution &c. 605; obstinacy &c. 606; permanence &c. 141. rare gas, paraffin, noble metal, unreactivity. V. be -inert &c. adj.; hang fire, smolder. Adj. inert, inactive, passive; torpid &c. 683; sluggish, dull, heavy, flat, slack, tame, slow, blunt; unreactive; lifeless, dead, uninfluential[obs3]. latent, dormant, smoldering, unexerted[obs3]. Adv. inactively &c. adj.; in suspense, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... landing-place. The ground was covered with deep bush, and painfully infested with the Nkran, or enkran, [Footnote: Anglice the 'driver,' a small black formica which bites severely, clears out houses, destroys the smaller animals, and has, it is said, overpowered and destroyed hunters when, torpid with fatigue, they have fallen asleep in the bush. The same horrible end, being eaten alive, atom by atom, has befallen white traders whose sickness prevented their escape. 'Accra,' which calls itself Ga, is known to the Oji-speaking peoples as 'Enkran,' ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... indentations or spheroidal swellings. The white globules changed their shape, taking at intervals the spherical form, and varying their shapes again by delicate expansions. I was not deceived then, it was a torpid man that I had under my eyes, and not a ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... listening to something at a distance; or, rather, having heard something at a distance, was listening for a repetition of it. "I wonder what that can have been?" said she. For fire-arms in July are torpid mostly, and this was ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... shape of a palm-tree, spread its gilt leaves over the white ceiling, and near them, outside the window, in the bright sunshine, a little fountain gurgled in a white basin, where; in the midst of watercress and asparagus, three torpid lobsters stretched across to some quails that lay heaped up in ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... I are summoned by Corporal Bertrand from the barn where at full length we have already immobilized ourselves, and are growing torpid: "You must go and look ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... certifies, A charitable man, but not so wise, One day in winter found, Stretch'd on the snowy ground, A chill'd or frozen snake, As torpid as a stake, And, if alive, devoid of sense. He took him up, and bore him home, And, thinking not what recompense For such a charity would come, Before the fire stretch'd him, And back to being fetch'd him. The snake scarce felt the genial heat Before his heart with native ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... power he but o'er his brain desired— How not to suffer it to be inspired. Ideas unto him were all unknown, Proud of the words which, only, were his own. So unreflecting, so confused his mind, Torpid in error, indolently blind, A fever Heaven, to quicken him, applied, But, rather than revive, the ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... and let not such torpid indifference prevail in your councils.—Slavery, the most implacable enemy to your country, is harboured amongst you; it makes a rapid progress, ...
— Anti-Slavery Opinions before the Year 1800 - Read before the Cincinnati Literary Club, November 16, 1872 • William Frederick Poole
... of the way, he began a prelude that flattered me with instant relief, to which I was not, however, so near as I imagined: for as he was unbuttoned to me, and tried to provoke and rouse to action his unactive torpid machine, he blushingly owned that no good was to be expected from it, unless I took it in hand to re-excite its languid loitering powers, by just refreshing the smart of the yet recent blood-raw cuts, seeing it could, no more than a boy's top, keep up without lashing. ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... wings of the Prussian eagle till it shunned a fight with the Gallic cock, a feeling of shame and indignation arose which proved that the limits of endurance had been reached. Observers saw that, after all, the old German feeling was not dead; it was only torpid; and forces were beginning to work which threatened ruin to the Hohenzollerns if they again ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... three hours he began to feel that he could keep awake no longer—for his companion sat silent and stern, his gaze bent upon the dark green shore, searching vainly for the hidden opening—and in a half torpid state the midshipman was about to turn to his silent companion and ask to be relieved of the lines, when he uttered a gasp of thankfulness, and, forgetting discipline, gripped the officer by ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... pleasure.—I know: only the outline of a dull life, that long since, with thousands of dull lives like its own, was vainly lived and lost: thousands of them,—massed, vile, slimy lives, like those of the torpid lizards in yonder stagnant water-butt.—Lost? There is a curious point for you to settle, my friend, who study psychology in a lazy, dilettante way. Stop a moment. I am going to be honest. This is what I want you to do. I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed to your clean clothes, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... to ask how it was. He said he was sometimes afraid to open my letters for fear that he should read that the baby was dead. The child knew Grayson's voice, his step. It would go to him from its own mother. When it was sickest and lying torpid it would move the instant he stepped into the room, and, when he spoke, would hold out its thin arms, without opening its eyes, and for hours Grayson would walk the floor with the troubled little baby over his shoulder. I thought several times it would die when, ...
— 'Hell fer Sartain' and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.
... to be said: she was now disturbed out of her torpid indifference to her environment. As she fidgeted there, pale and frowning, in the noisy basket-chair, beneath George Cannon's eyes, she actually perceived again that romantic quality of existence which had always so powerfully presented itself to her in ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... Dough-Boy made a match, like a black pony and a white one, of equal developments, though of dissimilar colour, driven in one eccentric span. But while hapless Dough-Boy was by nature dull and torpid in his intellects, Pip, though over tender-hearted, was at bottom very bright, with that pleasant, genial, jolly brightness peculiar to his tribe; a tribe, which ever enjoy all holidays and festivities with finer, freer relish than any other race. For blacks, the year's calendar should show ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... attention to Prophet Elias, who had been crawling like a torpid caterpillar. For some moments he had been rigidly motionless in one spot. He was leaning against the front of the vault, his ear closely pressed to the crevice at the base ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... pineries and hothouses, but on schools, and washhouses, and drains, who is less intent on the magnificence of his own grand house, than in providing cottages for his people where decency is possible; then let us not pass him by with a torpid wonder or a vanishing emotion of pleasure—rather let us seize him and raise him up upon a pinnacle, that other landlords may gaze upon him, if, perhaps, their hearts may prick them; and the world shall learn from what one man has done what they have a right to ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... protoplasm, and unless we fight for 'survival' elsewhere, we shall not be numbered among the spirited 'fittest', but degenerate into parasites, dodders, backsliders. So, drawing nutriment from the Doctor's historic brains, and from Leo's, I fall back into worse than a dodder, a torpid violator of the Law of Work, a hopeless Sacculina! Doctor Douglass, it was the bravest hour of your life when you stood up in—church pulpit, and told us the scientists whom we were wont to regard as more dreadful than the cannibals and Calmucks, are only a devoted sect of ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... the Klondike country (see these titles), and St Michael, the ocean port for freighting up the Yukon, are the only towns apparently assured of a prosperous future. Wrangell (formerly Fort St Dionysius, Fort Stikine and Fort Wrangell), founded in 1833, is a dilapidated and torpid little village, of some interest in Alaskan history, and of temporary importance from 1874 to 1877 as the gateway to the Cassiar mines in British Columbia. Its inhabitants are chiefly Thlinkit ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... has been considered by many as a specific capable of neutralizing the scarlatinous poison, whilst others have used it only as a powerful tonic in torpid cases. Experience has shown that it is not a specific, and that its use as a tonic, requiring a great deal of care and discrimination, is a good deal more dangerous than the mode of treatment I am going to recommend in ...
— Hydriatic treatment of Scarlet Fever in its Different Forms • Charles Munde
... any time been more insipid, more muddy, and more standing-water like than I am just now. The country is my aversion. It renders me quite torpid. Were you here just now, you would behold your vivacious friend a most stupid exhibition. It is very surprising that the country should affect me so; whether it be that the scenes to be met with there, ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... its enjoyment and the perception or thought from it its pleasure. Consequently these enjoyments and pleasures make man's life. What is life without joy and pleasure? It is not animated at all, but inanimate. Reduce enjoyment and pleasure and you grow cold and torpid; take them away and you expire and die. Vital heat comes from the enjoyments of the affections and the pleasures ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... said no more, sure that she had roused him from his torpid condition. She wound Joe up to the starting-point, just as she did her kitchen-clock, and he kept upon his course as steadily as that ancient time-piece. She was just the wife for ease-loving Joe, whom her brisk ways never wounded, for ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878 • Various
... reflections, and taken into that sad line, in which by degrees he carried it so far. There are three of them, it seems;—the first female souls that could ever manage to kindle, into flame or into smoke: in this or any other kind, that poor torpid male soul: those Mailly Sisters, three in number (I am shocked to hear), successive, nay in part simultaneous! They are proud women, especially the two younger; with ambition in them, with a bravura magnanimity, of the theatrical or operatic kind; of whom Louis ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... and of internal sensations; for the heart and arteries continue to beat, and we experience variety of passions, and even hunger and thirst in our dreams. Hence I conclude, that our nerves of sense are not torpid or inert during sleep; but that they are only precluded from the perception of external objects, by their external organs being rendered unfit to transmit to them the appulses of external bodies, during the suspension of the power of volition; ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... General gaiety ensues, the places about resound with joyous applause. But never does the liquid imbibed overpower weary minds, but Rather, if ever slumber presses their heavy eyes and dulls The brain; and their strength, blunted, grows torpid in the Body, coffee puts sleep to flight from the eyes, and slothful inactivity from the whole frame. Therefore to absorb the sweet draught would be an advantage For those whom a great deal of long-continued labor awaits And those who need to extend ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... for two civilizations," Grahame continued. "One must consider the source of this abuse however. They are clever men who write against us, but to know them is not to admire them. Bitterkin of the Post has his brain, stomach, and heart stowed away in a single sack under his liver, which is very torpid, and his stomach is always sour. His blood is three parts water from the Boyne, his food is English, his clothes are a very bad fit, and his whiskers are so hard they dull the scissors. He loves America when he can forget that Irish ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... it. A swollen condition of the mucous membrane of that part of the bowel called the duodenum may produce jaundice, as that mechanically closes the orifice of the biliary duct. In constipation there is an inactive or torpid condition of the bowel, and the bile which passes into the intestine may be absorbed and cause the yellow staining of jaundice. Jaundice is one of the symptoms of Texas fever. It may also arise from the presence of ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... Blossoms of Spring," and the last is called "The Joys of Wandering." The latter two movements of Mr. Paine's symphony are "A Promise of Spring" and "The Glory of Nature." The beginning of both symphonies is, of course, a slow introduction representing the torpid gloom of winter, out of which spring ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... by Indians and white hunters. Sometimes they are captured by pouring water into their burrows; but this method only succeeds in early spring, when the animals awake out of their torpid state, and the ground is still frozen hard enough to prevent the water from filtering away. They are sometimes shot with guns; but, unless killed upon the spot, they will escape to their burrows, and tumble in before the hunter can ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... was English Consul at the time, tells us that "In a very short time gaunt figures of men, women, and children might be seen crawling through the streets, with scarcely an evidence of life in their faces, save the expression of a sort of torpid carelessness as to how soon it might be their turn to drop off and die. The Portino, a steamer, carried back fifty of them to Cadiz, who looked when they embarked more like living skeletons of skin and bone than animated human beings." {47} I quote this not to cast reproach ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... transferring them from a state of almost mental blindness to that of intellectual and accountable beings." The New York Statesman[217] speaks of the effects in "improving the moral principle, which is torpid and almost obliterated, and opening the way to moral and religious instruction and knowledge of the Deity which is almost void." An early report of the American School[218] tells of the transition of their "imprisoned minds which have too long been ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... her aspect, and the mere slave of discipline (he had pulled in the St. Catherine's second torpid), obeyed her command, and presently we were abreast ...
— HE • Andrew Lang
... sensitiveness to other noises of the old house. It has been remarked that silence obtains its fullest and most impressive quality when it is broken by some minute sound; and, truth to tell, the place was never still. Perhaps the mildness of the spring air operated on its torpid old timbers; perhaps Oleron's fires caused it to stretch its old anatomy; and certainly a whole world of insect life bored and burrowed in its baulks and joists. At any rate, Oleron had only to sit quiet in his chair and to wait for a minute or two in order ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... growing so long and steadily that I can't seem to control it any more. There, Millie, the lady superintendent is looking for you. Don't worry. You medical and scientific people know that it is nothing but a torpid liver. Perhaps I may be ill enough to have a trained nurse. You see I am playing a deep game," and with an attempt at a hearty laugh he said good-night, and she was compelled to hasten away, but it was with a ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... they were destitute of flesh, blood, and animal life, mere umbroe. These ghosts are described as being nearly as destitute of sensation as they are of strength. They are called "the inhabitants of the land of stillness." They exist in an inactive, partially torpid state, with a dreamy consciousness of past and present, neither suffering nor enjoying, and seldom moving. Herder says of the Hebrews, "The sad and mournful images of their ghostly realm disturbed them, and were too much for their self possession." ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... into a beast of burden. I trudge on with my mind torpid—I take whatever comes to me, and go on mechanically. Oh it cows me, it wears me down! I have learned to bear anything—anything! A man might kick me and I would ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... livers waxed torpid, and our blood boiled in vain. The potato was gone; the benefits conferred on posterity by Sir Walter Raleigh were at length realised in a negative way. Miniature "Murphies" fetched four pence halfpenny each, while an adult member of the genus at ninepence was worth two of the ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... the departure of Ramses XII to his eternal rest, Ramses XIII moved after him to rouse from sorrow by his presence the torpid hearts of his subjects, receive their homage and give ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... he muttered. "If I could but lash that torpid soul of hers to life—teach her what all other women in the world know by nature and instinct! For if she have the beauty of the immortal women, without the warm spirit of sex behind it, it will avail her nothing. Passionless, she can never inspire ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... wondrous time," Hillyard replied fervently. "There was one bad evening, when I realised that I couldn't write poetry. After that I cut my hair and joined the Wine Club. I stroked the Torpid and rowed three in my College Eight. I had friends for the ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... at Nevers presents nothing but cheerful bustle and an aspect of prosperity, here you approach the Allier through scenes of squalor and torpid neglect. The poorer inhabitants, too, are very un-French in appearance, wanting that personal tidiness characteristic of their country people in general. An aristocratic place, means an Ultramontane place, and every third man you meet in Moulins wears a soutane. What so ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... was indifferent to exercise and nourishment. No doubt if I had been turned out into the world to fare for myself I should have gone into a decline. Therefore, it was sheer luck that betrayed me into matrimony, for although my mental energies were torpid for several years my first child seemed to dissipate the shadows that lay in my blood, and at twenty-five I was a normally strong woman. We lived in the country. My husband looked after the servants, and if we were without a cook for several days he filled her place (he ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... own words, "it consists in a diminished quantity or vitiated state of the gastric fluid, in a morbid secretion from the inner coats of the stomach, or from a peculiar acid generated there; whether chronic inflammation of the mucous membrane of that organ, or a torpid state of the liver and a deficient secretion of the bile occasion it: it would appear that such conditions may exist, and then produce their different symptoms, requiring a modified treatment;" ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... my companion went on to say, the bodily constitution of the Saturnians is wholly different from that of air-breathing, that is oxygen-breathing, human beings. They are the dullest, slowest, most torpid ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... destruction of tissue. The normal sensibility of the part is also destroyed. No woman can ever forget the pain she endured when she first applied the corsets; but in time the compressed organs become torpid; the muscles lose their contractile power, and she feels dependent on the mechanical support of the corset. But the mischief is not limited to local weakness and insensibility. The general strength and general sensibility correspond with the breathing capacity. If she has diminished ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... Spirit comes!—and the quiet lake shall feel The torpid touch of his glazing breath, and ring to the skater's heel; And the streams which danced on the broken rocks, or sang to the leaning grass, Shall bow again to their winter chain, and ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... object which his mind failed to register. Cash would sit and watch him furtively; but Bud was too engrossed with his own misery to notice it. Then, quite unexpectedly, reaction would come and leave Bud in a peace that was more than half a torpid refusal of his mind to worry ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... cold-blooded just like dinies. If you let them stay lively, they'll wear themselves out trying to get away. So you put them in a refrigerator. In the vegetable container. They don't freeze there, but they do ... get torpid. They just lay still till you let them warm up again. ...
— Attention Saint Patrick • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... might say, I was struck all of a heap. Then the delicious thought that I—by nature a vagabond, though by decree of the High Gods the father of a family and a Justice of the Peace—had to face the charge of being a German spy shook my soul with ribald laughter. I had been dull and torpid before the arrival of Dawson; he had awakened me into joyous life. I arose, filled and lighted a large calabash pipe, and passed a box of cigars to the detective. "Throw that stump away and take another," said I. "I owe you more than ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... torpid fatuity of Voltaire's Biographers, says he never met with one Frenchman, even of the Literary classes, who could tell him whence this name VOLTAIRE originated. 'A PETITE TERRE, small family estate,' they said; and sent him hunting through Topographies, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... to the influences of nature's beauty and grandeur. Nor had her woman's consciousness to play the chrysalis in any shy recesses of her heart; she was nowhere veiled or torpid; she was illumined, like the Salvatore she saw in the evening beams and mounted in the morning's; and she had not a spot of seeresy; all her nature flew and bloomed; she was bird, flower, flowing ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... soul, a recollection crossing that brain to recall reason. That had been seen, during the storm, on board the "Bonadventure!" The engineer did not neglect either to speak aloud, so as to penetrate at the same time by the organs of hearing and sight the depths of that torpid intelligence. Sometimes one of his companions, sometimes another, sometimes all joined him. They spoke most often of things belonging to the navy, which must ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... began to wake ... Dear, the old instincts, the old desires, the old truths, came back out of chaos; that full feeling here"—she laid her fingers on her throat—"the sense of expectancy, the restless hope growing out of torpid acquiescence—all returned; and, dearest, with them all came memories of him. What am I to do? ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... wanted, but that doubtless was his own fault. He pored over it, studied it, loved it, never doubting that now he had the key to all the wonders and mysteries of Nature. It was five years before he fully found out that the text was the most worthless trash ever foisted on a torpid public. Nevertheless, the book held some useful things; first, a list of the bird names; second, some thirty vile travesties of Audubon ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... distinctly, and without exaggeration. We acquire a lively idea of that wonderful combination, that luxuriant growth—of that insular life which is based in boundless wealth and civil freedom, in universal monotony and manifold diversity; formal and capricious, active and torpid, energetic and dull, comfortable and tedious, the envy and derision of the world. Like other unprejudiced travellers of modern times, our author is not very much enchanted with the English form of existence: his cordial and sincere admiration is often accompanied by unsparing censure. ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... Herr Haase, his lamp alight, his back turned to the Alpine-glow on the mountains, largely at ease in his chair, awaiting the arrival of his Dienstmadchen with the culminating coffee of the day. His yellow cigar was alight; he was fed and torpid; digestion and civilization were doing their best for him. As from an ambush there arrived the ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... peculiar effect on me, not so much a mental effect as what, for want of a better word, I will call a spiritual effect. It sets my soul on flame. I feel as though I had drawn near to a spirit burning like a fiery lamp, and that my own torpid and inert spirit had been kindled at it. That flame will burn out again, as it has burnt out many times before; but while the fire still leaps and glances in my heart I will try to put down exactly what ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... places people call this little animal "the Sleeper," because he lies in a torpid state through the long winter and spring, until the weather becomes quite warm. He builds his nest in an old hollow tree, or beneath the bushes, and during the summer lays up a great quantity of nuts or acorns for his winter provender. Dormice rarely ...
— Tame Animals • Anonymous
... evening, I sat upon our front step, in a kind of torpid state of mind through my refusal to contemplate the dismal future. My eye turned listlessly down the street. The only moving figure in it was that of a slender man approaching on the further side of the way. He carried two valises, one with each hand, and ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... fashion, and made some rude attempts at performing a sort of pantomime. I may now close this detail with observing that the natives of this mountainous region have stronger animal spirits than those of the plains, and pass their lives with more variety than the torpid inhabitants of the coast; that they breathe a spirit of independence, and being frequently engaged in warfare, village against village, they would be better prepared to resist any invasion of ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... creature almost indefinite powers, marvellous energies; in the great majority of men these lie in torpid slumber, but awaking to life in a few, they make of them prophets, men of genius, and saints who ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... of flowers, the leaves of which seemed dark, yet transparent, intermingled with brilliant tubes of bright blue or shining green. On examining this phenomenon more closely, it turned out to be several clusters of dragon-flies, just emerged from their deformed chrysalis state, and still torpid and motionless from the wetness of their filmy wings. Half an hour later we returned to the spot and they were gone. We had seen them at the very moment when beauty was complete and animation dormant. I have since found nearly ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... form'd: Now to her sister and the god unkind; Rich with the gold her avarice had claim'd. To Envy's gloomy cell, where clots of gore The floor defil'd, enrag'd Minerva flew: A darkened vale, deep sunk, the cavern held, where vivid sun ne'er shone, nor freshening breeze Health wafted: torpid melancholy rul'd, And sluggish cold; and cheering light unknown, Damp darkness ever gloom'd. The goddess here In conflict dreaded came, but at the doors Her footsteps staid, for entrance Fate forbade. The gates she strikes—struck by her spear, the gates Wide ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... and sat down. He had had a hard and tiring day. He fell asleep for a little. Then the cool wind that blew inside the cave woke him up. He sat for a few minutes without moving, absent-minded, vague-eyed. He tried to reflect, to recapture his still torpid thoughts. And, as he recovered his consciousness, he was on the point of rising, when he received the impression that his eyes, suddenly fixed, suddenly ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... comparative freedom, religious toleration, etc., was owing mainly to the negroes who had sought the protection of the republic. I found the Spanish Indians treacherous, passionate, and indolent, with no higher aim or object but simply to enjoy the present after their own torpid, useless fashion. Like most fallen nations, they are very conservative in their habits and principles; while the blacks are enterprising, and in their opinions incline not unnaturally to democracy. But for their old antipathy, there is no doubt that the negroes would lean towards America; but they ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... climes a nobler race display, Where the bleak Swiss their stormy mansions tread, And force a churlish soil for scanty bread; No product here the barren hills afford, But man and steel, the soldier and his sword; 170 No vernal blooms their torpid rocks array, But winter ling'ring chills the lap of May; No Zephyr fondly sues the mountain's breast, But meteors glare, and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... the state of affairs at the Foss River Ranch when Lablache put into execution his threats against the Hon. Bunning-Ford. The settlement had returned to its customary torpid serenity. The round-up was over, and all the "hands" had returned to the various ranches to which they belonged. The little place had entered upon its period of placid sleep, which would last until the advent of the farmers to spend ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... are undervalued and unsought? Pray for the outpouring of this blessed Agent for the world's renovation, and thine own. "I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh," is the precursor of millennial bliss. Jesus! draw near, in thy mercy, to this torpid heart, as thou didst of old to thy mourning disciples, and breathe upon it, and say, "Receive ye the Holy Ghost." It is the mightiest of all boons; but, like the sun in the heavens, it is the freest of all: "For if ye, being evil, know how to give good ...
— The Faithful Promiser • John Ross Macduff
... The balcony was undergoing repairs that day, and the travellers could not go out on it; but under the spell of the historic interest of the beautiful old Gothic place, they lingered in the interior till they were half-torpid with the cold. Then she abandoned to him the joint duty of viewing the cathedral, and hurried to their carriage where she basked in the sun till he came to her. He returned shivering, after a half-hour's absence, and pretended ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... been a weakness or a strength? For all time since—and increasingly during the later years—secret memories of it had wonderfully quickened a life that would otherwise have tended to fall dull, torpid, stubborn. It was not that their hands had met, but that they had trembled—those two strange hands that had both repelled and coerced each other—faltering at last into that long ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... OF HEAT, COLD AND DAMPNESS. Many colonies destroyed by extremes of weather. Evils of thin hives. Bees not torpid in Winter. When frozen are killed, 114. Take exercise to keep warm. Perish if unable to preserve suitable degree of warmth. Are often starved in the midst of plenty. Eat an extra quantity of food in thin, cold hives, 115. Muscular exertion ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... rebuffs in this medium calmly and even somewhat humorously. For, by trade, he is a writer of articles, and he earnestly believes that the mental exercise of attempting to produce fiction acts as a healthy influence upon a non-fictionist's style. It stimulates the torpid imagination. It quickens the eye for the vivid touches, the picturesque and the dramatic. It ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... footway, but a mere beaten track in front of the cabins, and this, on wet days, was ankle-deep in mud. The women hung about the doors all day long, knitting the men's blue stockings, and did little else apparently. Both men and women were usually in a torpid state, the result, doubtless, of breathing a poisoned atmosphere, and of insufficient food. It took strong stimulants to rouse them: love, hate, jealousy, whisky, battle, murder, and sudden death. Their ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... quails and herons. Sparrows and cuckoos have been found during the winter in hollow trees, torpid and without the least appearance of life, which being warmed recovered themselves and took flight. We know that hedgehogs, marmots, sloths, and serpents, live underground without breathing, and the circulation of the ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... examined,' let us see how much can really be said for and against our old friend, the toad-in-a-hole; and first let us begin with the antecedent probability, or otherwise, of any animal being able to live in a more or less torpid condition, without air or food, for any considerable period of ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... ships lay becalmed in the Bahama Channel, slumbering on the dead and glassy sea, torpid with the heats of a West-Indian August. Menendez called a council of the commanders. There was doubt and indecision. Perhaps Ribaut had already reached the French fort, and then to attack the united force would be a stroke of desperation. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... shown that it had been most merciful, since there might otherwise have been weeks, if not months, of much severer suffering. He had just looked in at the wife, but she had hardly noticed him, and he saw no dangerous symptoms about her, except an almost torpid calmness. ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... whether those they met were friends or foes. Hjalte, who was foremost in tried bravery among the nobles of the king, chanced to have gone out in the dead of that same night into the country and given himself to the embraces of a harlot. But when his torpid hearing caught from afar the rising din of battle, preferring valour to wantonness, he chose rather to seek the deadly perils of the War-god than to yield to the soft allurements of Love. What a love for his king, must we suppose, ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... was perverse. "I think any thing is better than to be torpid. I'd rather know I could never hope for happiness hereafter, than not have blood enough really to hope or despair ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... Andrea began to attack Meyerbeer's work, in order to wake up Gambara, who sat sunk in the half-torpid state ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... turbid rivers into the polluted sea, and the gaining upon its deep and fresh waters of the lifeless, impassable, unvoyageable plain, how little could we have understood the purpose with which those islands were shaped out of the void, and the torpid waters enclosed with their desolate walls of sand! How little could we have known, any more than of what now seems to us most distressful, dark, and objectless, the glorious aim which was then in the mind of Him in whose hand are all the corners of the earth! how little imagined that in the ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... they pierced the fair and rounded arm, No crimson stream gush'd o'er its spotless snow; Vainly they sought the frozen heart to warm, And bid its chill'd and torpid currents flow; Vainly they practised every learned charm To call into the veins life's ruddy glow; Stirless, they laid her on that bridal bed, Stirless, she lay, all life and ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... manifestly weakened by the Proclamation. Their dream is of wearing out the Unionists by disappointments and delays, restoring a Democratic ascendency in the government, and then buying back the rebels to an outward loyalty by new concessions and guaranties to slavery. Hence torpid campaigns, languid strategy, advances without purpose, and surrenders without necessity. But the policy of emancipation brings the quarrel to a speedy decision. The rebel States must promptly triumph or brave a social dissolution. Every Union advance into ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... and they looked on with motionless hands and silent lips! Ah! this humiliation would have killed me in Italy, because I love my people, and they understand and appreciate all that is rare and beautiful. My heart burns with scorn and contempt for these torpid Berliners." ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... bell Silence clangs His solemn call, and thou, O soul! Dost stir in sense's torpid fangs, Like the blind magnet, toward ...
— Thoughts, Moods and Ideals: Crimes of Leisure • W.D. Lighthall
... virtue of these honest men! But the Devil remained till the Break of Day Blushed upon Sleep and Lord Castlereagh:[45] 170 Then up half the house got, and Satan got up With the drowsy to snore—or the hungry to sup:— But so torpid the power of some speakers, 't is said, That they sent even him to his ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... concerning the methods of the Stock Exchange, and gave her to understand that for an intelligent and enterprising man speculation was the high road to fortune. No doubt for fools and for people of mediocre or torpid abilities it was a dangerous trade; but for keen and bold intellects what pursuit offered such ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... foiled. The enemy will succeed in penetrating the impregnable fortress; each foe has his special tactics, contrived with appalling skill. See, an egg is inserted by means of a probe beside the torpid larva; or else, in the absence of such an implement, an infinitesimal grub, an atom, comes creeping and crawling, slips in and reaches the sleeper, who will never wake again, already a succulent morsel for her ferocious visitor. The interloper makes the victim's cell and cocoon his own cell ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... delight of all kindred Courts. The light dancing march of this new "Epic," and the brisk clash of cymbal music audible in it, had, as we find afterwards, greatly captivated the young man. All is not pipe-clay, then, and torpid formalism; aloft from the murk of commonplace rise glancings of a starry splendor, betokening—oh, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... hour of midnight, and all was still in the solitary cabin of Batoche. Little Blanche was fast asleep in her sofa-crib, and Velours was rolled in a torpid circle on the hearth. The fire burned low, casting a faint and fitful gleam through the room. The hermit occupied his usual seat in the leather chair at one corner of the chimney. Whether he had been ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... number of factors which enter into the raising of the blood-pressure. For instance, at any time during the pregnancy, if the eliminative organs of the mother are doing inefficient work, if she falls a victim to a torpid liver, diseased kidneys, decreased skin elimination, or sluggish bowels, then, with the added and extra excretions from the child, there is superimposed upon the mother far more than the normal amount of eliminative work—and then, because of improper and incomplete elimination, ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... new sods upon the grave of pain. My mind so argued; and my sad heart heard, But made no comment. Then the Baron spoke, And waited for my answer. All in vain I strove for strength to utter that one word My mind dictated. Moments rolled away— Until at last my torpid heart awoke, And forced my trembling lips to say him nay. And then my eyes with sudden tears o'erran, In pity for myself and for this man Who stood before me, lost in pained surprise. "Dear friend," I cried, "Dear generous friend forgive A troubled woman's weakness! As I live, In truth I ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... landed in Wapping, which I should have presupposed to be the most tarry and pitchy spot on earth, swarming with old salts, and full of warm, bustling, coarse, homely, and cheerful life. Nevertheless, it turned out to be a cold and torpid neighborhood, mean, shabby, and unpicturesque, both as to its buildings and inhabitants: the latter comprising (so far as was visible to me) not a single unmistakable sailor, though plenty of land-sharks, who get a half-dishonest livelihood ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... remarkably well. In one of his last letters he writes to me as follows on the subject: "The Abrolhos lizard is very docile, and knows Mrs. Emery quite well, and will eat and drink out of her hand; but is timid with strangers. Its habits are rather torpid, but it becomes active when in the sun or before the fire. It eats so very little that a piece of sponge cake about the size of a small bean will satisfy it for three or four weeks. It changes its skin ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... and agitated—Spain sleeps on, untroubled, unheeding, impassive, receiving no impressions from the rest of the world, and making no impressions upon it. There she lies at the further extremity of the Continent, a huge and torpid mass, the sole representative now remaining of the feelings and the knowledge of the middle ages, and, what is the worst symptom of all, she is satisfied with her own condition. Tho she is the most backward country in Europe, she believes herself to be the foremost. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... street by no means accord with those of people ruled by the fashions of society. There is very little harmony or relation between the exquisite joints of a refined nature, the swift and flexible movements of an elegant organism, and the evolutions clumsily executed by torpid limbs, ankylosed, as it were, by labor ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... all responsibility. Colonel Menard could bring her great-grand-aunt out. The sense of moving in a picture, of not feeling what she handled, and of being cut off from the realities of life followed Angelique into the boat. She was worn to exhaustion. Her torpid pulses owned the ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... snowy-white hair and red face, his countenance indicative of the secretiveness and cunning of his character. He was rather the caucus adviser and manager than one of the orators of his party; seldom speaking, and never except briefly and to the point. Imagination in him has been warped and made torpid by a life of dissipation, as well as by his practical tendencies. He is, like many other Southern statesmen, courteous and pleasing in social conversation; but is heartless, selfish, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... editorial output in general was unflattering. It seemed to him bound by formalism and incredibly blind to the immense and vivid interest of the news whereby it was surrounded, as if a man, set down in a meadow full of deep and clear springs, should elect to drink from a shallow, torpid, and muddy trickle. Legislation, taxes, transportation problems, the Greatness of Our City, our National Duty (whatever it might be at the time—and according to opinion), the drink question, the race problem, labor and capital; these ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... ocean port for freighting up the Yukon, are the only towns apparently assured of a prosperous future. Wrangell (formerly Fort St Dionysius, Fort Stikine and Fort Wrangell), founded in 1833, is a dilapidated and torpid little village, of some interest in Alaskan history, and of temporary importance from 1874 to 1877 as the gateway to the Cassiar mines in British Columbia. Its inhabitants are chiefly ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 826[obs3]; irresolution &c. 605; obstinacy &c. 606; permanence &c. 141. rare gas, paraffin, noble metal, unreactivity. V. be -inert &c. adj.; hang fire, smolder. Adj. inert, inactive, passive; torpid &c. 683; sluggish, dull, heavy, flat, slack, tame, slow, blunt; unreactive; lifeless, dead, uninfluential[obs3]. latent, dormant, smoldering, unexerted[obs3]. Adv. inactively &c. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... stable yields a stercoraceous heap Impregnated with quick fermenting salts, And potent to resist the freezing blast. For ere the beech and elm have cast their leaf Deciduous, and when now November dark Checks vegetation in the torpid plant Exposed to his cold breath, the task begins. Warily therefore, and with prudent heed He seeks a favoured spot, that where he builds The agglomerated pile, his frame may front The sun's meridian disk, and at the back Enjoy close shelter, wall, or reeds, or hedge ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... from the monotony of its daily course. The well-informed walked with a lighter step, and held their heads more jauntily, for life had suddenly acquired a novel interest. With something new to talk about, something fresh to think over, with a legitimate object of sympathy and resentment, the torpid blood raced through their veins as might that of statesmen during some crisis in national affairs. Let us thank God, who has made our neighbours frail, and in His infinite mercy caused husband and wife to quarrel; Tom, Dick, and Harry to fall more or ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... and sit in groups upon the stone steps, rendering them almost impassable. But to-night a thing had happened in Wyatt's Buildings which had awakened in the inhabitants, hardened to sordid crime, a sort of torpid interest. ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... of late years—I am fain to fancy the foundations of quite a lesson learn'd. After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on—have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear—what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons—the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night. We will begin from these convictions. Literature flies ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... subjection are already numbered. Signs in heaven and on earth tell us that one of those movements has begun to be felt in the Northern mind, which perplex tyrannies everywhere with the fear of change. The insults and wrongs so long heaped upon the North by the South begin to be felt. The torpid giant moves uneasily beneath his mountain-load of indignities. The people of the North begin to feel that they support a government for the benefit of their natural enemies; for, of all antipathies, that of slave labor to free is the most deadly and irreconcilable. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... inhabitants.[4224] Whoever has traveled over France, or lived in this country, sees at once what sort of men compose such purely rural groups; he has only to recall physiognomies and attitudes to know to what extent in these rude brains, rendered torpid by the routine of manual labor and oppressed by the cares of daily life, how narrow and obstructed are the inlets to the mind; how limited is their information in the way of facts; how, in the way of ideas, the acquisition of them is slow; ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... above him, the trial of the day, of which we have seen nothing, came back sharper in sleep. While the strong self in the man lay torpid, whatever holier power was in him came out, undaunted by defeat, and unwearied, and took the form of dreams, those slighted messengers of God, to soothe and charm and win him out into fuller, kindlier ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... man, arriving almost penniless on Nepenthe, might have passed a torpid month or two, then drifted into the Club-set and gone to the dogs altogether. Latin saved him. He took to studying those earlier local writers who often composed in that tongue. The Jesuitical smoothness, the saccharine felicity ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... began to read. In a few moments the same numbness stole into his head like a rising fog, a queer, tense feeling, growing at the back of his forehead and at the base of his skull, a dulness, a strange stupefying sensation as of some torpid, murky atmosphere. He looked about him quickly; all the objects in the range of his vision—the corner of the desk, the corduroy couch, the low bookcase with Flossie's yellow slipper and Barye's lioness ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... are eaten both by Indians and white hunters. Sometimes they are captured by pouring water into their burrows; but this method only succeeds in early spring, when the animals awake out of their torpid state, and the ground is still frozen hard enough to prevent the water from filtering away. They are sometimes shot with guns; but, unless killed upon the spot, they will escape to their burrows, and tumble in before the hunter can lay his hands ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... hand, those steadfast natures which can better be depended upon, which in a battle are impregnable to fear and immovable, are equally immovable when there is anything to be learned; they are always in a torpid state, and are apt to yawn and go to sleep over ...
— The Republic • Plato
... no more, sure that she had roused him from his torpid condition. She wound Joe up to the starting-point, just as she did her kitchen-clock, and he kept upon his course as steadily as that ancient time-piece. She was just the wife for ease-loving Joe, whom her brisk ways never ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878 • Various
... no effect. But so it was, and so deep was the apostles' sleep that Christ left them undisturbed the second time. The relapse is worse than the original disease. Sleep broken and resumed is more torpid and fatal than if it had not been interrupted. We do not know how long it lasted, though the whole period in the garden must have been measured by hours; but at last it was broken by the enigmatical last words of our Lord. The explanation of the direct opposition between the consecutive sentences, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... my crime, I tossed it on the tester's canopy, And there the heap grew, hidden in the darkness; I slept beneath a dome of history. All day the heap lay quiet, but at night, When I was sleeping, it began to stir, And from the pages clamorous with battles. The battles issued, stretching torpid wings; And laurels showered upon my slumbering eyes. Austerlitz gleamed among my curtains, Jena Glowed in the gilded tassels holding them And on a sudden lapsed into my dream. Till once, when Metternich was gravely ...
— L'Aiglon • Edmond Rostand
... Man; Far wider tracts within the Torrid Zone Own no such Lord: where Sol's intenser rays Create in bestial hearts more fervid fires, And deadlier poisons arm the Serpent's tooth; In gloomy shades, impassable to Man, Where matted foliage exclude the Sun, The torpid Birds that crawl from bough to bough Utter their notes of terror: while beneath Fury and Venom, couch'd in murky dens, Hissing and yelling, guard the hideous gloom. O'er dreary wastes, untrod by human feet, Without controul the lordly Lion reigns; And every creature trembles at his voice: ...
— An Essay on War, in Blank Verse; Honington Green, a Ballad; The - Culprit, an Elegy; and Other Poems, on Various Subjects • Nathaniel Bloomfield
... lethargy was the result of reaction from excessive and protracted fatigue. He pronounced it needless to send for a doctor: nature, he was sure, would manage best, left to herself. He said every nerve had been overstrained in some way, and the whole system must sleep torpid a while. There was no disease. He imagined my recovery would be rapid enough when once commenced. These opinions he delivered in a few words, in a quiet, low voice; and added, after a pause, in the tone of a man little accustomed to expansive comment, "Rather ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... life. The wrath grows hotter Of my father, and his fury To evade is most important. All the guards that here are with thee Has my liberal hand suborned, So that at the clink of gold Have their ears grown deaf and torpid. Fly! and that thou mayest see How a woman's heart can prompt her, How her honour she can trample, How her self-respect leave prostrate, With thee I will go, since now It is needful that henceforward I in life and death am thine, For without thee ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... is held a power of money-making, which no hereditary pride, or gentlemanly love of doing nothing, prevents him from using. This ill-will, to be sure, is mostly of a negative kind; its most common form of manifestation is in absence of speech or action, a sort of torpid and genteel ignoring all unpleasant neighbours; but really the whale-fisheries of Monkshaven had become so impertinently and obtrusively prosperous of late years at the time of which I write, the Monkshaven ship-owners were ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... the gateway, they came to a bridge, which seemed to be built of iron. Pluto stopped the chariot, and bade Proserpina look at the stream which was gliding so lazily beneath it. Never in her life had she beheld so torpid, so black, so muddy-looking a stream; its waters reflected no images of anything that was on the banks, and it moved as sluggishly as if it had quite forgotten which way it ought to flow, and had rather stagnate than flow either ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to realize that this silent plain had once resounded with martial music and trembled to the tramp of armed men. It was hard to people this solitude with rushing columns of cavalry, and stir its torpid pulses with the shouts of victors, the shrieks of the wounded, and the flash of banner and steel above the surging billows of war. A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... it—a low, monotonous vibration, now almost distinct, now lost, now again discernible, but too vague, too indefinite to be anything but that faint summer harmony which comes from distant breezes, distant movements, mingling with the stir of drowsy field insects, half torpid in the heat ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... Iroquois to leave food at a feast. There were we with food enough to stuff the tribe torpid as winter toads. The padre was sent round to the lodges with a tom-tom to beat every soul to the feast. Chouart and a Dutch prisoner and I cooked like kings' scullions for ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... of our quick and active children—sensitive to the slightest call, ready to run swiftly towards us without relaxing the attention they give to their own movements and to all the external objects they encounter—and compare them with the torpid children in the ordinary schools—clumsy in their movements, indifferent to stimuli, incapable of spontaneous association of ideas—we are led to think of the civilization of our own days as compared with that of olden times. The civil environment ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... of darkness girds him now With a pall of deepest night, Anguish sits throned on his moody brow, And the curse of thy withering blight, Despair, thou dreariest deathliest foe! His senses hath steep'd in a torpid woe. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 529, January 14, 1832 • Various
... was need once more of a Divine Revelation to the torpid frivolous children of men, if they were not to sink altogether into the ape condition. And in that whirlwind of the Universe,—lights obliterated, and the torn wrecks of Earth and Hell hurled aloft into the Empyrean; black whirlwind, which made even apes serious, and drove most of them ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... who had put the question. "That's a good one. The idea of coupling 'Torpid' Walling's name with anything that savors of work. You'll have a good time fast enough. But I'll wager anything you like, that in his company you will circumnavigate the globe without having done any work harder than spending money. No, no, ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe
... conducts to the next one. One truth prepares for a second. If it is a solemn and sad fact that men are sinners, and blind and dead in their trespasses and sin, it is also a cheering fact that the Holy Spirit can enlighten the darkest understanding, and enliven the most torpid and indifferent soul; and it is a still further, and most encouraging truth and fact, that the Holy Spirit is given to those who ask for it, with more readiness than a father gives bread to his hungry child. Here, then, we have the fact of ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... had passed over him like some fattening and solidifying process. He was healthy, he was corpulent, he was prosperous, conventional, and commonplace. If Gabriella had been seeking, with Hogarthian humour, to portray the evils of torpid and self-satisfied respectability, she could scarcely have found a better picture of the condition than Charley presented. And the more Charley expanded, the more bloodless and wan Jane appeared at his side. Her small, flat face with ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... journal I kept on the plantation, I ride every day, and play on the piano just enough not to forget my notes, et voila! Once a week I go to town, to execute commissions, or return visits, and on Sundays I go to church; and so my life slides away from me. My head and heart, however, are neither as torpid nor as empty as my hours; and I often find, as others have done, that external stagnation does not necessarily produce internal repose. Occasionally, but seldom, people come from town to see us; and sometimes, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... He did not keep himself in the public eye, but retired into the pleasant shade of his gardens, regarding past, present, and future with equal indifference, like one of those listless animals which lie sluggish, and torpid so long as you supply them with food. While he thus loitered languid and indolent in the woods of Aricia,[95] he received the startling news of Lucilius Bassus' treachery and the disaffection of the fleet at Ravenna.[96] Soon afterwards he heard with mixed feelings ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... Selim, for that was the sound which always waked the torpid brain of Yusef since Wassef the camel-driver's skull had crackled ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... her swoon, and sat upon a stool by the bookcase, faintly wondering what had happened, but afraid to ask or think. The corner of the bookcase, and the burly form of Stubbard, concealed the window from her, and the torpid oppression which ensues upon a fit lay between her and her agony. Faith, as she passed, darted one glance at her, not of pity, not of love, but of cold contempt and satisfaction at ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... been in the ascendent, he had been true to the cause of hereditary monarchy. Some thought that, if he had been earlier in his place, he might have been able to render important service to the House of Stuart, [300] Even now the stimulants which he applied to his torpid and feeble party produced some faint symptoms of returning animation. Means were found of communicating with Gordon; and he was earnestly solicited to fire on the city. The Jacobites hoped that, as soon as the cannon balls had beaten down a few chimneys, the Estates would adjourn ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... was a liar, and the Pope has excommunicated him from Paradise, 'tis the same still, torpid, dead-like sea we ought to ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... a beast of burden. I trudge on with my mind torpid—I take whatever comes to me, and go on mechanically. Oh it cows me, it wears me down! I have learned to bear anything—anything! A man might kick me and I would ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... had reached the right and rear of the Union line; while Hooker complacently viewed the situation from his comfortable headquarters at the Chancellor house, apparently in a semi-torpid state, retaining just enough activity to initiate manoeuvres, which, under the circumstances, were the most ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... all things of heaven; just as in the world when the sun's heat is joined to light it makes all things of the earth fruitful, which takes place in spring and summer. It is otherwise when the heat is not joined with the light, that is, when the light is cold; then all things become torpid and lie dead. With the angels this Divine good, which is compared to heat, is the good of love; and Divine truth, which is compared to light, is that through which and out of which good of ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... thousands and ten thousands that perished in our late contests with France and Spain, a very small part ever felt the stroke of an enemy; the rest languished in tents and ships, amidst damps and putrefaction; pale, torpid, spiritless, and helpless; gasping and groaning, unpitied among men made obdurate by long continuance of hopeless misery; and were at last whelmed in pits, or heaved into the ocean, without notice and without remembrance. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... Atlantic, see God take The mist from woe's white mountain, spring and stream, The breath of man in frost, the spiral lean From roof-cracked caves where, though the heart may break, The soul will not lie torpid, like the snake,— And battle smoke. On them He breathes with dream And, Lo! an Angel with a sword agleam 'Twix the Old World and ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... was strong for the girl at once. She didn't know that life is anything but selective, or that all the arts round out one's appreciation of the beautiful, or that anything was "by way of being" something. But all the food she took didn't make her torpid; she giggled easily and had eyes like hothouse grapes, and in spite of her fat there was something about her, like Cousin Egbert said of Vernabelle. Anyway, she prevailed. Oswald Cummings, the pagan, for one, quickly side-stepped ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... go outside," proposed Solomon John, "and drive in all that are left. Then to-morrow morning, when they are all torpid, kill them and make collections ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... than forty-eight hours. On the other hand, attacks lasting as long as a week are by no means unknown. Within a short time of the onset the urine may be found to contain acetone bodies, the breath may smell distinctly of acetone, and the child may become torpid and drowsy or agitated and restless. At times there may be exaggerated and deepened respiratory movements—the so-called air hunger. In many cases, however, otherwise characteristic, these more severe manifestations ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... comes,—the Frost Spirit comes! and the quiet lake shall feel The torpid touch of his glazing breath, and ring to the skater's heel; And the streams which danced on the broken rocks, or sang to the leaning grass, Shall bow again to their winter chain, and in mournful ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... with the Gallic cock, a feeling of shame and indignation arose which proved that the limits of endurance had been reached. Observers saw that, after all, the old German feeling was not dead; it was only torpid; and forces were beginning to work which threatened ruin to the Hohenzollerns if they again tarnished the ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... The double-barreled novel lies torpid. I found I could not go on with it. The chapters I had written were still too new and familiar to me. I may take it up next winter, but cannot tell yet; I waited and waited to see if my interest in it would not revive, but gave it up a month ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... usual price. He was in danger of becoming no better than an animal, of sinking to the level of the negroes who sometimes toiled beside him. The man, however, was still there, not yet dormant, but merely torpid from a surfeit of despair; and the man in him promptly shook off that torpidity and awoke at the first words Blood spoke to him ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... They might go to sleep alongside the log, but none of them thinks of doing so, least of all Clancy. There is that in his breast forbidding sleep, and he is but too glad when Woodley's next words arouse him from the torpid repose to which he has been yielding. ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... shaken" (Conimb. prob. 6. sec. 3. de som.) why they stutter or falter in their speech, Mercurialis and Montaltus, cap. 17. give like reasons out of Hippocrates, [2676]"dryness, which makes the nerves of the tongue torpid." Fast speaking (which is a symptom of some few) Aetius will have caused [2677] "from abundance of wind, and swiftness of imagination:" [2678]"baldness comes from excess of dryness," hirsuteness from a dry temperature. The cause ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... yours, to be tumbled about worse than Mother O'Donohue's pig when they took it to Limerick fair in a cart. So just lie easy there among your pillows, my son; and pretend that it's exercise that you are taking for the good of your liver—which is a torpid and a sluggish organ in the best of us, and always the better for such a shaking as the sea is giving us now. And be remembering that the Hurst Castle is a Clyde-built boat, with every plate and rivet in her ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... wisdom and virtue may be said to be inseparable, and criteria of each other. Selfishness is the offspring of ignorance and mistake; it is the portion of unreflecting infancy, and savage solitude, or of those whom toil or evil occupations have blunted or rendered torpid; disinterested benevolence is the product of a cultivated imagination, and has an intimate connexion with all the arts which add ornament, or dignity, or power, or stability to the social state of man. Virtue is thus entirely a refinement of civilized ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... starting up in her enthusiasm. "It is a general flare-up! It is Sardanapalus! Splendid, thoroughly complete! I may be a hussy, but I have a soul! I tell you, I like a spendthrift, like you, crazy over a woman, a thousand times better than those torpid, heartless bankers, who are supposed to be so good, and who ruin no end of families with their rails—gold for them, and iron for their gulls! You have only ruined those who belong to you, you have sold no one but yourself; and then you have ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... the human body, and while comparatively few of them live very long outside the human body, they may, if mixed with food or caught upon clothing, hangings, walls, or floors, remain in a sort of torpid, but still infectious, condition for weeks or even months. Consequently, it has become the custom to take all the bedding, clothing, carpets, curtains, etc., that have touched a patient suffering from ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... unclean side: but his discursive reason would not let him trammel himself into a poet-laureate or stamp-distributor, and he stopped, ere he had quite passed that well-known "bourne from whence no traveller returns"—and so has sunk into torpid, uneasy repose, tantalized by useless resources, haunted by vain imaginings, his lips idly moving, but his heart for ever still, or, as the shattered chords vibrate of themselves, making melancholy music to the ear of memory! ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... to see mankind win its way to a higher level of thought on international affairs. The level of thought in these matters could scarcely be lower than it has been since the Armenian massacres. The collective conscience of Europe is as torpid as it was in the eighteenth century, when weak States were crushed or partitioned, and armed strength came to be the only ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... the evening and smoke and stare at some object which his mind failed to register. Cash would sit and watch him furtively; but Bud was too engrossed with his own misery to notice it. Then, quite unexpectedly, reaction would come and leave Bud in a peace that was more than half a torpid refusal of his mind ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... and met nobody's eye, but kept staring upward into the smoky vacancy towards the ceiling, where, it might be, he beheld a continual portraiture of his victim's horror-stricken agonies. I rather fancy, however, that his moral sense was yet too torpid to trouble him with such remorseful visions, and that, for his own part, he might have had very agreeable reminiscences of the soldier's death, if other eyes had not been bent reproachfully upon him and warned him that something was amiss. It was this reproach in other men's eyes that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... descend, and they saw in glimpses through doorways and windows blue shadows beginning to spread over the brown mountains, they went to pay their visit. It was not much of a place, a small, modernized stucco villa, with a hot pebbly garden, and in it a stone basin with torpid gold fish, and a statue of Diana and her hounds against the wall. But what gave a glory to it was a gigantic rose-tree which clambered over the house, almost smothering the windows, and filling the air with the ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... surround Cashmere. It is a gregarious herb, about six or seven feet high, with a perennial thick branched root, with an annual round smooth stem, large leaves and dark purple flowers. The roots are dug up in the months of September and October, when the plant begins to be torpid; they are chopped up into pieces, from two to six inches long, and are exported without further preparation. The quantity collected, according to Dr. Falconer, is very large, amounting to about two million pounds per annum. The cost of its collection and transport ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... which minor councils form the members of the county council. This general system of municipalities, and a late act of the provincial parliament, enabling the inhabitants to form themselves into road companies, have converted the formerly torpid and inactive townships into busy hives of industry and ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... worse. My feelings at intervals are of a deadly and torpid kind, or awakened to such a state of unnatural and keen excitement that, only to instance the organ of sight, I find the very blades of grass and the boughs of distant trees present themselves to me with microscopic distinctness. ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... I have been careful to report favorably of my health and spirits. But I have not confessed that I still remember the day when I parted with the one hope and renounced the one love which made life precious to me. My torpid condition of mind, at home, has simply given place to a perpetual restlessness, produced by the excitement of my new life. I must now always be doing something—no matter what, so long as it diverts ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... according to any particular style or quality of composition. They may characterized generally, as well suited to affect the public mind—to rouse into healthful activity the conscience of this nation, stupified, torpid, almost dead, in relation to HUMAN RIGHTS, the high ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... old witch clenched her fist, and shook it at the figure. Not that she was positively angry, but merely acting on the principle—perhaps untrue, or not the only truth, though as high a one as Mother Rigby could be expected to attain—that feeble and torpid natures, being incapable of better inspiration, must be stirred up by fear. But here was the crisis. Should she fail in what she now sought to effect, it was her ruthless purpose to scatter the miserable ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... parts. Crowded,—row above row of women, on an amphitheatre of seats, on one side. In an inner pavilion an exhibition of anacondas,—four,—which the showman took, one by one, from a large box, under some blankets, and hung round his shoulders. They seemed almost torpid when first taken out, but gradually began to assume life, to stretch, to contract, twine and writhe about his neck and person, thrusting out their tongues and erecting their heads. Their weight was as much as he could bear, and they hung down almost to the ground when not contorted,—as big ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Fanny had no idea of the time of night, and could not tell whether or not it was time to call her companion. She knew how hard he had worked during the day, and she resolved not to call him as long as she could keep awake herself. Her position was by the tree; but in order to rouse her torpid faculties, she took a walk around the island. When she reached the side of their narrow domain where they had landed in the morning, she was startled by what she thought was a slight splashing in the water, at a considerable distance from her. After the manner of the Indians, she lay down upon ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic
... waves appeared; for Yann had scented from afar the ancient crags of Glorm, and knew that their ravines lay cool before him wherein he should meet the merry wild Irillion rejoicing from fields of snow. So he shook off from him the torpid sleep that had come upon him in the hot and scented jungle, and forgot its orchids and its butterflies, and swept on turbulent, expectant, strong; and soon the snowy peaks of the Hills of Glorm came glittering ...
— Tales of Three Hemispheres • Lord Dunsany
... smoking, his elbows on the table, a petit verre half full beside his plate, half torpid in an atmosphere of tobacco blended with steaming coffee, he seemed to be perfectly at home. He ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... the wide distance between a man whose torpid intelligence condemns him to evident stupidity, and one who, by the exercise of his inner life, has acquired the gift of some power, allows us to suppose that there is as great a difference between men of genius and other beings as there is between the blind and those who see. This hypothesis, since ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... man is usually a pretty clear index to his type of mind. The stolid, easy-going man, who usually advocates the baseline game, does so because he hates to stir up his torpid mind to think out a safe method of reaching the net. There is the other type of baseline player, who prefers to remain on the back of the court while directing an attack intended to break up your game. He is a very dangerous ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... of a former princely station. His reforms gave no quarter to right or left; sleepy monks were dragged out to midnight-prayers, and their devotions enlivened with vivid pictures of hell-fire and ingenuities of eternal torment enough to stir the blood of the most torpid. There was to be no more gormandizing, no more wine-bibbing; the choice old wines were placed under lock and key for the use of the sick and poor in the vicinity; and every fast of the Church, and every obsolete ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... infirmity, they had evidently some talisman or other that kept death at bay. Two or three of their number, as I was assured, being gouty and rheumatic, or perhaps bedridden, never dreamed of making their appearance at the Custom-House, during a large part of the year; but, after a torpid winter, would creep out into the warm sunshine of May or June, go lazily about what they termed duty, and, at their own leisure and convenience, betake themselves to bed again. I must plead guilty to the charge of abbreviating the official breath of more ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... be added quails and herons. Sparrows and cuckoos have been found during the winter in hollow trees, torpid and without the least appearance of life, which being warmed recovered themselves and took flight. We know that hedgehogs, marmots, sloths, and serpents, live underground without breathing, and the circulation of the blood is very feeble in them ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... Doctor Holmes kept a rattlesnake in a cage for a pet, and was accustomed to stir it up with an ox-goad. A New York doctor lost his life by fooling with a poisonous snake, and another in Liverpool frightened a whole congregation of scientists with two torpid rattlesnakes which suddenly came to life on the president's table. Does it arise from their custom of dealing with deadly poisons, or is it because they officiate as the high priests ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... literature beginning with the usual salutation—"Dear Doctor"—setting forth a new and remarkable theory of the cause, and an original motto for the cure, of constipation. Its authors have discovered that the "rectal nerve-tissues" are hungry, torpid, anemic, and to overcome the "atony" they must be "Fed! ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... beside the cold face of her dead darling. How long it rested there she never knew. Earth seemed to pass away; darkness closed over her, and for a time she had no pain, no sorrow; she and Lilly were together. All was black, and she had no feeling. Then she was lifted, and the motion aroused her torpid faculties; she moaned and opened her eyes. Dr. Hartwell was placing her on a sofa, and Mrs. Grayson stood by the table with a handkerchief over her eyes. With returning consciousness came a raving despair; Beulah sprang from the strong arm that strove ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... ascertaining, if possible, the cause or causes which have given rise to it. A swollen condition of the mucous membrane of that part of the bowel called the duodenum may produce jaundice, as that mechanically closes the orifice of the biliary duct. In constipation there is an inactive or torpid condition of the bowel, and the bile which passes into the intestine may be absorbed and cause the yellow staining of jaundice. Jaundice is one of the symptoms of Texas fever. It may also arise from the ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... little, even in the newspapers. I was become, save perhaps for my music, an automaton. But, although I did not improve in appearance, my health was completely restored, and when the war came I was in perfect condition for the arduous task I immediately undertook. Moreover, my mind, torpid for a year, was free and refreshed for those practical details it must grapple with at once. I turned the Zattiany palace in Buda Pesth into a hospital. And then for four years I was again an automaton, but this time a necessary and useful one. When I thought ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... his horse on before. I dare say you have often observed this disposition to temporize, or to procrastinate, in people who are labouring under any very poignant sorrow. Their powers of mind seem to be rendered torpid, so that they have a horror of any thing like action, and like nothing in the world so well as to lie quietly in bed and "nurse their grief," as the old ladies express it—that is to ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... sleep like all the rest; if there were a contending force anywhere; if we would let even that work instead of neglecting it, it would gain strength from hour to hour, and waken up, one at a time, each torpid and dishonoured faculty, till our whole nature became alive with strivings against self, and every avenue was open wide for God. Natural Law, ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... partial hand of nature, and, indeed; of transferring them from a state of almost mental blindness to that of intellectual and accountable beings." The New York Statesman[217] speaks of the effects in "improving the moral principle, which is torpid and almost obliterated, and opening the way to moral and religious instruction and knowledge of the Deity which is almost void." An early report of the American School[218] tells of the transition of their "imprisoned minds which have too long been ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... powdered aloes 1 drachm, gamboge 10 grains, Castile soap and water sufficient to make a pill mass; mix and divide into 34 pills. Dose, one, two, or three, to be given when necessary, for torpid bowels. ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... discussion in Spain,"—exclaims proudly an eminent Spanish writer. Spectacles like that which we have just seen were one of the elements which in a barbarous and unenlightened age contributed strongly to the consolidation of that unthinking and ardent faith which has fused the nation into one torpid and homogeneous mass of superstition. No better means could have been devised for the purpose. Leaving out of view the sublime teachings of the large and tolerant morality of Jesus, the clergy made his personality the sole object of worship ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... Romance, with reading Debauchees, Rouses their torpid powers when Nature fails; And all these Legendary Tales Are, to a ...
— Broad Grins • George Colman, the Younger
... government was favourable, also, for perpetual warfare. Those temporary chief magistrates did not enjoy their dignity long enough to become torpid or careless, but were interested in distinguishing themselves by the activity of their conduct while in office; whereas, in hereditary power, or elective monarchy, the personal feelings of the chief, which must have an influence upon the ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... of twenty feet through the fog the torpid tourists, their noses against the panes, the misses with curious little heads trimmed like those of boys, took this apparition for a cow, and then for ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... calls for Latimer, and he responded briefly. In the excitement Burroughs succeeded in enticing the torpid Bill into the lobby, and so effective were his words, emphasized by his fists, that Moore returned to the hall a chastened man, and demanded that the nomination be set aside. In the uproar Burroughs ventured onto the floor and yelled to the ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... sods upon the grave of pain. My mind so argued; and my sad heart heard, But made no comment. Then the Baron spoke, And waited for my answer. All in vain I strove for strength to utter that one word My mind dictated. Moments rolled away— Until at last my torpid heart awoke, And forced my trembling lips to say him nay. And then my eyes with sudden tears o'erran, In pity for myself and for this man Who stood before me, lost in pained surprise. "Dear friend," I cried, "Dear generous friend forgive A troubled woman's weakness! As I live, In truth I meant ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... know of, has ever found the Golden Gardener and its larva in the silken cocoons of the Bombyx. I do not expect ever to make such a discovery. These cocoons are inhabited only in winter, when the Gardener is indifferent to food, and lies torpid in the earth. In April, however, when the processions of larvae are seeking a suitable site for burial and metamorphosis, the Gardener should profit largely by its good fortune should it ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... between the Holland which Alva had oppressed and plundered, and the Holland from which William had sailed to deliver England! And who, with such an example before him, would venture to foretell what changes might be at hand, if the most languid and torpid of monarchies should be dissolved, and if every one of the members which had composed it should ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... she is the kind of woman I like—brown, pale, dull-complexioned with reflections as of bronze, and strikingly large-eyed like an Indian. I have never been able to contemplate such a countenance without inward emotion. Her physiognomy is rather torpid, but when it becomes animated it assumes a remarkably independent and ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... the hour of midnight, and all was still in the solitary cabin of Batoche. Little Blanche was fast asleep in her sofa-crib, and Velours was rolled in a torpid circle on the hearth. The fire burned low, casting a faint and fitful gleam through the room. The hermit occupied his usual seat in the leather chair at one corner of the chimney. Whether he had been napping or musing it were difficult to say, ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... longer can retain, They sink o'erwhelm'd! and never rise again. Two with Arion yet the mast upbore, That now above the ridges reach'd the shore: Still trembling to descend, they downward gaze With horror pale, and torpid with amaze. The floods recoil! the ground appears below! 750 And life's faint embers now rekindling glow; Awhile they wait the exhausted waves' retreat, Then climb slow up the beach with hands and feet. ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... creatures swallow gravel and earth—to assist the process of digestion. Others have affirmed that it is for the purpose of distending the stomach, so as to enable the reptile to bear his long fast while torpid during the winter. This latter reason I look upon as very absurd, and worthy only of the fabulous Buffon. For my part, I believe that the rubbish usually found in the alligator's stomach is collected there by accident—swallowed, from time to time, by mistake, ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... when he left her. It was getting to be more than a passing whim with Arobin to see her and be with her. He had detected the latent sensuality, which unfolded under his delicate sense of her nature's requirements like a torpid, ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... treating her as a child, playing some imaginary character. She seemed less demented than walking in a dream, her faculties asleep. It was somnambulism rather than madness. She had not the expression of insane people, the shifty eyes, the cunning and perverseness, the animal and torpid presence. ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... onto his knee immediately. He put one hand on the coat of the little dog, and with the other opened a drawer, looked into it, pushed the drawer back, and, resting comfortably against the arms of the chair, gazed into space with a fixed, torpid look. ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... back to her she was still cold and torpid. He could understand that her grief had ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
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