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More "Feebleness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... missionaries, and in the resolute boycotting of foreign merchants. And behind all this race-movement there is more than race-feeling: there is also the definite conviction that foreign help is proof of national feebleness, and that the Empire remains disgraced before the eyes of the commercial world, so long as its import and export trade are managed by aliens. Several large Japanese firms have quite emancipated themselves from the domination of foreign middlemen; large trade ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... to nibble at an unlawful spot. Is this due to feebleness of the teeth? By no means: the Cetonia's skin is no tougher on the back than on the belly; moreover, the grub is capable of perforating the skin when it leaves the egg; a fortiori, it must be more capable of doing so now that it has attained a sturdy ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... are trembling, and I am quite in a fever.... My face burns. It is time to stop.... I'll send off this letter quickly, before I'm ashamed of its feebleness. But for God's sake, in your answer not a word—do you hear?—not a word of sympathy, or I'll never write to you again. Understand me: I should not like you to take this letter as the outpouring of a misunderstood soul, ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... resources in the management of her domestic affairs; her ever ready access and willing audience to all who need her; her freedom of thought and action in the midst of the most agonizing sufferings and accumulated embarrassments; her elasticity,—may I say her perseverance,—in spite of feebleness; her tact to practise it, were it not instinctive; her extreme perfection in little things; ... her incomparable skill in re-awakening a sleeping conscience, in re-opening a heart that has long been closed; in fine, innumerable are the things which she accomplishes, and which ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... he has in truth no pretension. He is endowed, however, with a kind of reflective talent, which is often mistaken by fools for creative power. The morbid fancies and melancholy scorn of a Byron, for instance, such gentry reflect back from their foggy imaginations in exaggerated and distorted feebleness of whining versicles, and so on with other lights celestial or infernal. This, however, by the way. The only rational pursuit he ever followed, and that only by fits and starts, and to gratify his faculty of "wonder," ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... of the Empress's admiration of her organ-playing, had a brief but kindly commendation for Manlia and Gargilia; praised Numisia highly for her efficient discharge of the duties devolving on her, and condoled with Causidiena on her blindness and feebleness, wording what he said so dexterously that she could not but feel ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... held in due form, the lads of the new regiment mounted guard, and their officers made a tour of inspection afterwards with their new friends, who pointed out the strength and feebleness of the old fort. ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... describe is very different in appearance. He is of blonde complexion, rather pale, with fair silken hair that waves gently down his cheeks, and falls upon his shoulders. He is far from robust. On the contrary, his form is thin and delicate. It is not the delicacy of feebleness or ill-health, but only a body of slighter build. The manner in which he handles his oar shows that he possesses both health and strength, though neither in such a high degree as the dark youth. His face expresses, perhaps, a larger amount of intellect, and it is a countenance that would strike ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... The development of the reason undisturbed by the emotions seems to be the ideal at which Plato aims in his later dialogues. There is no mystic enthusiasm or rapturous contemplation of ideas. Whether we attribute this change to the greater feebleness of age, or to the development of the quarrel between philosophy and poetry in Plato's own mind, or perhaps, in some degree, to a carelessness about artistic effect, when he was absorbed in abstract ideas, we can hardly be wrong in assuming, amid such ...
— Philebus • Plato
... knew myself infinitely superior to them; I knew the long creature's novel was worthless; I knew that I had fifty books in me immeasurably better than it, and savagely and sullenly I desired to trample upon them, to rub their noses in their feebleness; but oh, it was I who was feeble! and full of visions of a wider world I raged up and down the cold walls of impassable mental limitations. Above me there was a barred window, and, but for my manacles, I would have sprung at it and torn it with my teeth. Then passion was ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... poem, although poor as a whole, is not altogether bad, but contains many lines that glow with beautiful poetic feeling, and many descriptive passages which are admirable. Furthermore, I will venture to say that despite the feebleness of a large part of the work (as poetry) it is yet worth preserving in its entirety on account of its unique character. It may be that I am the only person in England able to appreciate it so fully owing to the way in which it ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... recollect that we left Mrs Forster in the lunatic asylum, slowly recovering from an attack of the brain-fever, which had been attended with a relapse. For many weeks she continued in a state of great feebleness, and during that time, when, in the garden, in company with other denizens of this melancholy abode (wishing to be usefully employed), she greatly assisted the keepers in restraining them, and, in a short time, established that superiority over them, which is invariably the result ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... of feebleness and incapacity, which the sacred penman so beautifully describes, man becomes an object of compassion; and it is affecting to see him struggling amidst the ruins of his former self. The sight becomes increasingly painful from the consideration that this is one day to be our own condition; that ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... regret, should never breed resentment; an affection which can be in creased only by the decay of those to whom we owe it, and which is then most fervent, when the tremulous voice of age, resistless in its feebleness, inquires for the natural protector of its cold decline. If these are the general sentiments of man, what must be their depravity—what must be their degeneracy—who can blot out and erase from the bosom the virtue that is most ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... and the speech in his hand, and the Duke of Wellington on his left. All three looked so miserable, so ashy-grey and worn out, that never did human greatness appear to me so little worth.... In spite of his feebleness, George IV. read his banale speech with great dignity and a fine voice, but with that royal nonchalance which does not concern itself with what his Majesty promises, or whether he is sometimes unable to decipher a word. It ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... In sheer feebleness the stunned party sank down upon the prostrate log. They now observed the charred remains of a camp fire, and shreds of grey blanket adhering ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... salvation; for, as is said Qq. Vet. et Nov. Test., qu. 83, "it is in the power of the Giver to have pity when, or as much as, He wills. Hence He came when He knew it was fitting to succor, and when His boons would be welcome. For when by the feebleness of the human race men's knowledge of God began to grow dim and their morals lax, He was pleased to choose Abraham as a standard of the restored knowledge of God and of holy living; and later on when reverence grew weaker, He ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... III.] as German king, and was soon crowned emperor as Frederick III., acted as guardian for Sigismund of Tirol, who was a minor, and also became regent of Austria in consequence of the infancy of Ladislaus. His rule was a period of struggle and disorder, owing partly to the feebleness of his own character, partly to the wish of his brother, Albert, to share his dignities. The Tirolese soon grew weary of his government, and, in 1446, Sigismund was declared of age. [Sidenote: Popular revolt under Ulrich Eiczing and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... his tasks one morning before breakfast, Moonshee entered the room with one of his profoundest salaams, and an expression at once so earnest and so comical that I anxiously asked him what was the matter. Panting alike with the eagerness of childhood and the feebleness of age, he stammered, "I have something of the greatest importance to confide to you, Mem Sahib! Now is the time! Now you shall prove the devotion of your faithful Moonshee, who swears by Allah not to touch a grain of ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... the moral and mental strength necessary for the discharge of its obligations. Strength of all kinds seemed to fail him. His physical vitality was low; the health he had gained in Madeira had been too severely taxed since his return. He had fought bravely against the mental feebleness that was creeping gradually over him with a paralyzing languor; but he knew he could not bear the conflict much longer. Everything was telling against him. He would fain have proved to his people ...
— Brought Home • Hesba Stretton
... seen the vases which they make, the palaces which they build? From that clay out there and from stone something comes that delights my old age and forbids me to think of my feebleness. ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... dreaming of vanished youth, abandoned hopes, and lost opportunities. Nowadays Mavis could meet the unduly interested regard of male investigators with a candid unvacillating outlook; there came no hint of feebleness in resistance, too ready submission, or temperamental proneness to surrender; but her eyes, whether she wished it or not, still served as messengers between all that was feminine in her and all that was masculine outside ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... ideas? What about the way in which, during the last thirty years, these Theosophical ideas have spread through this Fifth Race civilisation, have permeated its literature, are beginning to guide its science, are beginning to inspire its art? That is the proof of the strength of the force, despite the feebleness of the vehicles in which that force is playing. Very clearly not to you nor to me is the spread of these ideas due, but to the Mighty Ones behind the Society, who give the forces in which we are lacking. For the whole Movement is Theirs; They are working outside as well as within. ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... as I walked from Siboney to the front, than the feebleness of the resistance offered by the Spaniards to our advance. The road, after it enters the hills, abounds in strong defensive positions, and if General Chaffee or General Wood, with five thousand American regulars, had held it, as General Linares attempted to hold it ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... armed policemen conducted me to their chief. He was similarly armed with sword and pistol, and he was engaged in taking some measures with regard to a tattered, trembling old man, who was standing before him, and who could not answer the questions put to him, on account of his feebleness. Having finished his business with the old man, he turned to me. I inquired about the girl of the night before. At first he listened to me attentively, but afterwards he began to smile, at my ignorance of the regulations, in consequence of which she had been taken to the station- house; and ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... traditional jealousy of any invasion of the civil power by the military has no doubt played some part in this; but a healthy vigilance is one thing, and morbid distrust another. Morbid distrust and unreasoned prepossession were responsible for the feebleness of the navy in 1812, and these feelings long survived. An adverse atmosphere was created, with results unfortunate to the nation, so far as the navy was important to ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... speech in imitation of Lysias, occurring in the Dialogue called the Phaedrus. This is still more marked in the speech of Pausanias which follows; and which is at once hyperlogical in form and also extremely confused and pedantic. Plato is attacking the logical feebleness of the sophists and rhetoricians, through their pupils, not forgetting by the way to satirize the monotonous and unmeaning rhythms which Prodicus and others were introducing into Attic prose (compare ...
— Symposium • Plato
... you may not be at the mercy of a troublesome impression, certain precautions must be taken. In the state of weakness and feebleness in which you are, a disagreeable face, an unlucky word, antipathetic surroundings, a mere nothing would be enough to ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... soul,/But I do love thee!] The meaning of the word wretch, is not generally understood. It is now, in some parts of England, a term of the softest and fondest tenderness. It expresses the utmost degree of amiableness, joined with an idea, which perhaps all tenderness includes, of feebleness, softness, and want of protection. Othello, considering Desdemona as excelling in beauty and virtue, soft and timorous by her sex, and by her situation absolutely in his power, calls her Excellent ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... Julie turned to the boy. For some moments she regarded him shrewdly. She saw he was no longer the wild young savage she had brought up; there was a certain nervous, blase feebleness about his movements as he sat uneasily in his chair, his hands thrust in the pockets of his hunting coat, his chin sunk on his chest. She noticed too, the unnatural redness of his lips and the haggard pallor ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... Supreme Court on one of the most momentous questions ever submitted to a judicial tribunal, has not startled the country more by its far-reaching and calamitous results, than it has amazed jurists and statesmen by the poverty of its learning and the feebleness of its logic. It has surprised all, too, by its total want of sympathy with the spirit in which the war for the Union was prosecuted, and, necessarily, with those great issues growing out of it, which concern not only the life of the Republic, but the very ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... in its effects; a principle, which, by whatever name you may please to call it, acts by motives and considerations suited to our condition; and which, putting it at the very lowest, must be confessed, in our present infirm state, to be an habitual aid and an ever present support to the feebleness of virtue! In a selfish world it produces the effects of disinterestedness, and when public spirit is extinct, it supplies the want of patriotism. Let us therefore with gratitude avail ourselves of its help, and not relinquish the good which ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... men whose feebleness of sight, or bitterness of soul, or the offence given by the conduct of those who claim higher hope, may have rendered this painful creed the only possible one, there is an appeal to be made, more secure ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... morsels of the good things set before him he evidently felt refreshed. His eyes lost somewhat of their lack-lustre air of confirmed invalidism, and his voice regained a measure of its natural tone. When he attempted to rise and dress himself, however, he betrayed such a degree of bodily feebleness that his wife forbade him to make further exertions. He yielded to her importunities, and remained in bed, which was manifestly the best place for him. He was pestered by no unnecessary questions to account for his presence, Mrs. Savareen rightly ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... seem that bombast is one of the hardest things to avoid in writing. For all those writers who are ambitious of a lofty style, through dread of being convicted of feebleness and poverty of language, slide by a natural gradation into the opposite extreme. "Who fails in great endeavour, nobly ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... their weak leaky speech all made them to be easily recognised wherever they went. It was Feeble-mind's salvation that Death had knocked at his door every day from his youth up. He was feeble in body as well as in mind; only the feebleness of his body had put a certain strength into his mind; the only strength he ever showed, indeed, was the strength that had its roots in a weak constitution at which sickness and death struck their dissolving blows every day. To escape death, both the ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... the extreme. His dissatisfaction is proved by the eagerness with which he threw himself into the cause of reform; and what would have discouraged another braced Yoshida for his task. As he professed the theory of arms, it was firstly the defences of Japan that occupied his mind. The external feebleness of that country was then illustrated by the manners of overriding barbarians, and the visit of big barbarian war ships: she was a country beleaguered. Thus the patriotism of Yoshida took a form which may be said to have defeated itself: he had it upon him ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Council, which the Chancellor had summoned without letting its object be known, and reduced his enemies to humiliated silence. The only observation which even the usually ready Bishop found to offer was that the answer had been prepared for Las Casas by the Court preachers. The feebleness of this must have struck all present, and the Chancellor with fine irony asked: "You now hold that Micer Bartholomew is so lacking in argument and discretion that he has to find somebody else to answer for ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... right when she told Malcolm that he was much aged and broken. "I have lost my Benjamin, the son of my right hand," he had said to her—"God's hand is heavy upon me;" and though he strove to bear his sorrow with resignation, his feebleness alarmed them all. Theo, as usual, was undisciplined in her grief. "He will die too," she lamented. "Elizabeth, David has gone, and now poor father will follow him. I have never seen him look so ill. David and he were everything to ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... may be presumed that men have referred to reason in what they do, and have not suffered its orders to be disobeyed through mere impulse and desire, (though those orders may be full of error owing to the reason's own feebleness,) so long men are not held intemperate. But when it is palpably evident that the reason cannot have erred but that its voice has been deadened or disobeyed, and that the reasonable creature has been dragged dead round the walls of his own citadel by mere passion and impulse,—then, and ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... is an inferior person. For, look you, there are at least nine chances in ten that he writes POOR verses. Now the habit of chewing on rhymes without sense and soul to match them is, like that of using any other narcotic, at once a proof of feebleness and a debilitating agent. A young man can get rid of the presumption against him afforded by his writing verses only by convincing us that they are verses ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... illustration of the folly of those colonizationists, who are endeavoring to suppress the rising tide of our colored population by extracting a few drops annually with their 'mop and pattens.' Dame Partington is clearly outdone by them, in regard to pertinacity of purpose and feebleness of execution. Rev. Sidney Smith, in his speech at the Taunton ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... about thirty-five years of age, notwithstanding the length of time during which—to use a funny phrase which somebody got up for him—he has been "afflicted with a loose tail-board to his mortal sand-cart." Some benevolent friend was so much distressed about the feebleness of "Old Sands of Life" as to send him one day a large parcel by express, marked "C. O. D.," and costing quite a figure. "Old Sands" paid, and opening the parcel, found half ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... support, hung for a moment, with apathetic lifelessness, upon his bosom; while her head, with an impulse not difficult to define, drooped like a bending and dewy lily upon his arm. But the passive emotion, if we may so style it, was soon over; and, with an effort, in which firmness and feebleness strongly encountered, she freed herself from his hold with an erect pride of manner, which gave a sweet finish to the momentary display which she had made of womanly weakness. Her voice, as she called upon him to follow her into the passage, was again firm in a moment, and pervaded ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... made for the family; she has to scrape it and prepare it while other cares are pressing upon her. When her child is born, she has no opportunities for rest or quiet. She must paddle the canoe for her husband—pain and feebleness must be forgotten. She is always hospitable. Visit her in her teepee, and she willingly gives you what you need, if in her power; and with alacrity does what she can to promote your comfort. In her looks there is little that is attractive. Time has not caused the wrinkles in her forehead, ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... a tradition which is perhaps the best known of all, and universally accepted. In Ephesus, in extreme old age, too infirm to walk, St. John was carried as a little child to the church where he had so long preached. In feebleness his ministry had ended. The last sermon as such had been preached. He could no longer repeat the words of Christ he had heard on the mountain, and the sea-shore, and in the Temple. He could no longer tell of the wonders of which he was the only surviving witness. In ...
— A Life of St. John for the Young • George Ludington Weed
... newspaper after newspaper to "make home happy by cheerful looks and words." They wish to do so. With a laudable desire to save money, they spend themselves, and "get along" without help. It is truly a getting-along, not a living. Sometimes, however, they are obliged to mention their feebleness, or their ailments, as reasons for neglect of duty. It is astonishing how little importance, in many cases, the husband attaches to the facts thus stated. Apparently he considers ailments either as being natural to woman, ...
— A Domestic Problem • Abby Morton Diaz
... the incident that had given rise to the coalition of female energy and masculine feebleness—a contrast in union said not to be uncommon ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... an infant, if thou thinkest Thou canst stand, Childlike, proudly pushing back The offered hand, Courage soon is changed to fear, Strength doth feebleness appear; In his love if ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... appointed quaestor of Cisalpine Gaul, at a very seasonable moment for his country, the Marsian war being on the point of breaking out. Sertorius was ordered to raise soldiers and provide arms, which he performed with a diligence and alacrity, so contrasting with the feebleness and slothfulness of other officers of his age, that he got the repute of a man whose life would be one of action. Nor did he relinquish the part of a soldier, now that he had arrived at the dignity of a commander, but performed wonders with ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... not leap after it but faced the skilled fencer, blazing defiance though fully expectant of the unsheathed dirk. But no dirk was unsheathed. Lucian, forgetting his feebleness, sprang for the cane and had dropped to one knee to snatch it up when Hugh set ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... hills in the world, and so extremely beautiful in their own peculiar way, that to describe them would be an idle and a useless task, which could only serve to exhibit the vanity of the writer and the feebleness of his pen. ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... beautiful to be told in words; her wifehood was lovely, was intense; but her motherhood was greater. Day and night her love for her boy protected and guided him, like pillar of cloud, like pillar of fire. She knew no weariness, no feebleness; she grew constantly stronger and more beautiful, and the child grew stronger and more beautiful, with a likeness to her and a oneness with her which were marvelous. He was a loving and affectionate boy to all; his father, his grandparents, old ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... unhappy race had now turned. That the remnant would be preserved, and among them the dear objects of her tender affection; and that in some selected spot we should wear out our lives together in pleasant society. "Do not let my state of feebleness deceive you," she said; "I feel that I am better; there is a quick life within me, and a spirit of anticipation that assures me, that I shall continue long to make a part of this world. I shall throw off this degrading weakness ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... simplicity was with power, as of a nature which had cared only for the greater things. He felt himself meeting one who had more than he of human quality, richer in suffering, richer in all emotion, and (what was vastly surprising) under her dullness, her feebleness, of ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... of soaring upwards. Mighty deeds raised Germany from political disruption and feebleness to the forefront of European nations. But we do not seem willing to take up this inheritance, and to advance along the path of development in politics and culture. We tremble at our own greatness, and shirk the sacrifices it demands from ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... forgiven his grandparent, he had been growing to feel for the desolate old man a sort of filial tenderness, and strong in his fresh young manhood, it seemed terrible to him to see John Trevlyn lying there in his helplessness and feebleness, waiting for death. ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... with its own strength; the nation, disgusted with the nature of the American war, refused its sympathy; without that sympathy ministers could do nothing effectual, and never can do any thing effectual. The character of the cabinet was feebleness, the spirit of the metropolis was faction; the king, though one of the best of men, was singularly unpopular; and the war became a system of feeble defence against arrogant and increasing hostilities. France, powerful as she was, became ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... insisted on again and again, as the true method to please him, and to obtain his protection against all dangers. There are few moods of the religious life that are not represented in the Psalms: penitence, intellectual perplexity, domestic sorrow, feebleness, loneliness, the approach of death, the excitement of great events, the agony of persecution, quiet contemplation of nature, each has its word. The imprecations of some of the Psalms show a trait of the national character without which the picture would be incomplete. ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... dispose of wealth. If Ireland were an independent state, or even a self-governed British colony, things would right themselves. But the politicians who are to rule in Dublin will not depend upon their own resources or be checked by a sense of their own feebleness. They will be constitutionally and legally entitled to the support of the British army; they will constitute the worst form of government of which the world has had experience, a government which relying for its existence on the aid of an external power finds in ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... of the color you see in nature at that point. Until you are enough of a master of your brush to get an effect in this way, do not meddle with the more complex methods of after-painting. You will never do good work by subsequent manipulation, if you have a groundwork of feebleness and indecision. Direct painting is the fundamental process ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... is deficient in strength. Debilitated is used of physical weakness, in most instances brought on by excesses and abuses. Feeble denotes decided or extreme weakness, which may excite pity or contempt. Infirm is applied to a person whose weakness or feebleness is due to age. Decrepit is used in reference to a person broken down or worn out by infirmities, age, or sickness. Impotent implies such loss or lack of strength or vitality as to render ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... the wound. She drew away from the thrust of his face with its great moustache, averting her own face as much as possible. As he looked at her, who was cold and impassive as stone, with mouth shut tight, he sickened with feebleness and hopelessness of spirit. He was turning drearily away, when he saw a drop of blood fall from the averted wound into the baby's fragile, glistening hair. Fascinated, he watched the heavy dark drop hang in the glistening cloud, and ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... petitions are unjust in principle, and on that ground ought not to be granted? Who has said that slavery is not an evil? Who has said it does not tarnish the fair fame of our country? Who has said it does not bring dissipation and feebleness to one race, and poverty and wretchedness to another, in its train? Who has said, it is not unjust to the slave, and injurious to the happiness and best interest of the master? Who has said it does not ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... unknown in sacred mystery, it proclaims man one in nature with the Highest, by birthright a son of the gods, of an intelligence akin to theirs, and less than they only in degree. Through thus presenting at once his strength and his feebleness, his grandeur and his degradation, religion goes beyond philosophy or utility in suggesting motives for exertion, stimuli to labor. This phase of it will ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... dramatist; he acted his prophecies and his preachings on a stage. The warnings were in this form clearly articulated, and forcefully driven home; if they failed to produce the ultimate result of repentance, the obstacle lay not in the feebleness of the instrument, but in the wilful hardness of the subject whereon the instrument was plied. Dramatic representation in the simplicity of its infancy was a golden vessel of the sanctuary, employed in the service of ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... see the light of sympathy in this speaker's eyes. He saw two owls' faces attempting eagle but not reaching up to sparrow-hawk, and he was silent. He had no hope of being believed; moreover, the grim eye of Hawes rested on him, and no feebleness in it. ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... our friends waked up to the conviction that something must be done at once The first step was to forbid any Winnebago coming within the garrison, lest they should find out what they had known as well as ourselves for three months past—namely, the feebleness of the means of resistance. The next was to send fatigue-parties into the woods, under the protection of a guard, to cut ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... bruising himself severely, as he stumbled about to find the ladder, made an effort to obey the command. But he staggered from feebleness when he reached the deck, and had to grasp for some fresh support at ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... published, says, "About thirty thousand persons were killed on that night in Paris and in the country; few of the citizens but were either assassins or assassinated. Ambition, the hatred of the great, of a woman, the feebleness and cruelty of a king, the spirit of party, the fanaticism of the people, animated those scenes of horror, which do not depose so much against the French nation, at that time governed by strangers, as against the passions of the great, ...
— A Trip to Paris in July and August 1792 • Richard Twiss
... colonial rule, no sooner does private enterprise raise its head, and throw out the first feelers on the way to wealth, than a watchful government steps forward, and careful only to secure gain to itself, crushes out (in the first feebleness of existence,) ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... are exposed are more subtle in form and more complex in action. They are less within than without the average home. They are those that give the high death-rate of infants, the crippled limbs of children, the weakness of body and defectiveness of mind and feebleness or perversion of moral nature that make so many human beings unequal to life's demands. They are the dangers, personal and social, summed up in the antitheses of "health" and "disease," of "normal" and "abnormal." Not that the dangers so indicated are new but ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... that other, Mrs. Dering sat alone in her room, only now she sat by the window, instead of the dying fire. Now, as then, Jean slept soundly, only now her childish face wore the rosy flush of health instead of feebleness and pallor, and the little form was straight and perfect, instead ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... Mrs. Dering sat at the bedside holding Ernestine's hand, and over them all the autumn sunshine fell, warm and sweet, as with a touch of loving benediction; and the trill of Jeanie's canary down stairs, was the only sound, save Ernestine's low voice, sad and sweet, in its feebleness. ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... by a tone and a tear; won, as, ever since the days of Goliath, so many battles have been won by the feebleness of weapons, and ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... eye each frost was freshly piercing her boy's breast, each warm damp day he faded into greater feebleness, yet the hope was far clearer. He was happy and content. He had laid hold of the blessed hope of Everlasting Life, and was learning to believe that the Cross laid on him here was in mercy to make him fit for Heaven, first making him afraid and sorry for his sins, and ready to turn to Him Who could ...
— Friarswood Post-Office • Charlotte M. Yonge
... reserved to our own time to demonstrate that corsets and tight lacing do not necessarily go hand in hand. Distortion and feebleness are not beauty. A proper proportion should exist between the size of the waist and the breadth of the shoulders and hips, and if the waist is diminished below this proportion, it suggests disproportion and invalidism rather than ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... god who is worse than the worst of men." In the actual worship of images none of them believe. One conspicuous writer of the time says: "To look for a form and shape to a god, I consider to be a mark of human feebleness of mind." Concerning the schools of thought and in particular the tenets of those Stoics and Epicureans whom St. Paul met at Athens, and whom he could meet in educated circles all over the Roman Empire, we shall have to speak in a following chapter, when ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... to his creditor when present before him signalized Algernon. He detested the man, but his feebleness was seized by the latter question, and he fancied he might, on the road to London, convey to Sedgett's mind that it would be well to split that thousand, as he had ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of very varied accomplishments. His friends have lost much more. Since his last attack of influenza, those who knew him and loved him had been much concerned about him. The pallor of his complexion had greatly increased; so had his feebleness. As long ago as May last, when I called upon him at the Athenæum Club in order to join him at a luncheon he was giving at the Café Royal, I found that he had engaged a four-wheeled cab to take us over ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... were such as pronounced by an ordinary speaker, would not have preserved the audience from that listnessness, which is instantly seen and felt by the speaker, and soon adds embarrassment and confusion to feebleness. In private society, to the last months of his existence, it gave him rather the air of a youth inexperienced in the realities of life, and entering it under the ardour of hope, than of a man who had almost reached the limits of human existence, in the exercise of a profession, which ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... beggar was sober, gloomy, and silent; he scarcely touched the furniture, walked with hanging head behind the furniture vans, and did not even try to appear busy; he merely shivered with the cold, and was overcome with confusion when the men with the vans laughed at his idleness, feebleness, and ragged coat that had once been a gentleman's. After the ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Bolshevism—and your address in Guildhall—urging the British to govern or go—contributed directly to the success of those two governments in this war. If Great Britain had allowed Egypt to get out of hand instead of, as an actual result of your Guildhall speech, sending Kitchener to strengthen the feebleness of Sir Eldon Gorst, the Turks and Germans might have succeeded in their invasion and have cut off the Suez Canal. So you laid the ground for preparedness not only in this country but in France ...
— How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) - A Complete Guide to Correct Business and Personal Correspondence • Mary Owens Crowther
... of a soldier may be both in theory and practice, a difficult one. He may, as it has been well said, be liable to be shot by a court-martial if he disobeys an order, and to be hanged by a judge and jury if he obeys it.' The remembrance of these cases was perhaps the cause of the feebleness shewn in the Gordon Riots in June 1780. Dr. Franklin wrote from London on May 14, 1768 (Memoirs, iii. 315):—'Even this capital is now a daily scene of lawless riot. Mobs patrolling the streets at ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... argues, denies, rebels,—with the result that he scatters his force and fails in his highest effort. It is in his own power to renew his own youth—his own vitality,—yet we see him sink of his own accord into feebleness and decrepitude, giving himself up, as it were, to be devoured by the disintegrating influences which he could easily repel. For, as the directing Spirit of God governs the infinitude of atoms and star-dust which go to make up universes, ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... yesterday, 'The follies of youth are excusable; nothing is admirable in the aged except wisdom, and when that goes from them, they should die.' A cruel speech, fit for a Roman. I applied it to myself, knowing a feebleness like her father's will come to me also—nay, it is not far off. But you, Esther, will never say of me—no, never—'It were better he were dead.' No, your mother was a daughter ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... Rupert shared in the general indignation felt by the British officers and men at seeing the splendid opportunities of crushing the enemy—opportunities gained by the skill and science of their general, and by their own rapid and fatiguing marches—thrown away by the feebleness and timidity of the Dutch deputies. When the siege of Venloo began the main body of the army was again condemned to inactivity, and the cavalry had of course nothing ...
— The Cornet of Horse - A Tale of Marlborough's Wars • G. A. Henty
... touched their interests. Whilst spreading, as a letter written to America by M. de La Fayette put it, "the salutary habit of thinking about public affairs," it had at the same time betrayed the impotence of the government, and the feebleness of its means of action. It was a stride, and an immense ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... welcome. Elinor, was it Elinor? He had never seen her in any way like an invalid before—never knew her to be ill, or weak, or unable to walk out to the door and meet him or anyone she cared for. The sight of her ailing, weak, with those large glistening eyes, enlarged by feebleness, went to his very heart. Fortunately he did not in any way connect this enfeebled state with the phenomenon up-stairs, which was best for all parties. He hurried up to her, taking her ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... weakness taken thee? Whence springs The inglorious trouble, shameful to the brave, Barring the path of virtue? Nay, Arjun! Forbid thyself to feebleness! it mars Thy warrior-name! cast off the coward-fit! Wake! Be thyself! Arise, ...
— The Bhagavad-Gita • Sir Edwin Arnold
... that, as Zeus means the sky, therefore he is no more than the deep concave of heaven personified and deified, and that consequently Zeus is not the true, the only God. This argument is only equalled in feebleness by that of the materialist, who argues that "spiritus" means simply breath, therefore the breath is the soul. Even if the Greeks remembered that, originally, Zeus meant the sky, that would have no more perplexed their minds ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... time her life was overshadowed by the sadness of her father's death, her own isolation, and her increasing feebleness of health. She seems to have been a singularly winning and intelligent girl, and she hence found or inspired affection in several of the guardians successively appointed to take charge of her. But if she had not been thus ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... force of habit, combined with the feebleness of his moral resistance and the nature of his environment, that instead of being an athlete, armed for a glorious strife, he had learned to drift where he should have steered, to float with the current ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... ill, and, with every womanly, tender feeling aroused, she bent over him and pressed upon his lips a kiss which burned him like a coal of fire. She must not kiss him now, and, putting up his hands with the feebleness of a ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... tell 'ee,' she said, striving against her feebleness, 'I thought it would be no harm to see you, though 'tis rather soon—to tell 'ee how very much I thank you for getting me settled again with Ike. He is very glad to come home again, too, he says. Yes, you've done a good many kind ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... follower of Perugino and Raphael, doing finished and delicate work; an 'Assumption' in a church at Trevi is a fine example of his qualities. His best picture was painted in 1516, and is at Assisi. It represents the Madonna enthroned with three saints on each side. In his later works he betrayed feebleness. Pictures by Lo Spagna are often attributed ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... extremely auspicious for breaking down this degrading system. The best citizens of our country acknowledge the feebleness of our administration. They acknowledge that offices are bestowed merely to preserve power, and without the smallest regard to fitness. If, then, there be a man in the United States of firmness and decision, and ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... his followers was not extinguished, but the wisdom was extinguished which had directed it; and perhaps the being treated as the enemies of order had itself a tendency to make them what they were believed to be. They were left unmolested for the next twenty years, the feebleness of the government, the angry complexion which had been assumed by the dispute with Rome, and the political anarchy in the closing decade of the century, combining to give them temporary shelter; but they availed themselves of their ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... to be quite out of patience with Scipio's caution and delay. The soldiers, he said, were full of strength and courage, all eager for the combat, and it was absurd to hold them back on account of the feebleness of one sick man. "Besides," said he, "of what use can it be to delay any longer? We are as ready to meet the Carthaginians now as we shall ever be. There is no third consul to come and help us; and what a disgrace it ...
— Hannibal - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... a plain boy, and shorter by the head than his two sons in the scene, etc. In conclusion, Starkey appears to have been one of those mild spirits, which, not originally deficient in understanding, are crushed by penury into dejection and feebleness. He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to society, if Fortune had taken him into a very little fostering; but wanting that, he became a Captain,—a by-word,—and lived and died ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... long silence between them. During it he remained motionless. With his hanging hands and his drooping head he looked, she thought, almost as much like a puppet as like a man. His whole body had a strange aspect of listlessness, almost of feebleness. Yet she knew how muscular and powerful he still was, although he had long ago ceased from taking care of his body. The silence lasted so long, and he stood so absolutely still, that she began to feel uneasy, ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... next degree most impressive when it is withdrawn altogether: and forms and scenes become sublime in the neutral twilight, which were indifferent in the colors of noon. Much more is this the case in the feebleness of imitation; all color is bad which is less than beautiful; all is gross and intrusive which is not attractive; it repels where it cannot inthrall, and destroys what it cannot assist. It is besides the painter's peculiar craft; he who cannot color is no painter. It is not painting to ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... ladies do? Could they go over the one hundred and twenty miles which lay between them and Twofold Bay? John Mangles and Lord Glenarvan examined the surviving horses with great uneasiness, but there was not the slightest symptom of illness or feebleness in them. The animals were in perfect health, and bravely bearing the fatigues of the voyage. This somewhat reassured Glenarvan, and made him hope the malady would strike no more victims. Ayrton agreed with him, ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... protestations of endless esteem and gratitude. They speak with great affection too of their mother, and never make any allusion intimating acquaintance with her errors. We take special care that Branwell does not know of their writing to Anne. My health is better: I lay the blame of its feebleness on the cold weather more than on an uneasy mind, for, after all, I have many things to be thankful for. Write ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... growth of love; but I now felt the fallacy of that doctrine, and was at first humiliated by the discovery. It struck me like a great heresy against truth and purity; it seemed to lay bare before me the corruptibility and feebleness of poor human nature. To strive against it, however, was idle. The second growth was in full flower, yet with a difference from the first, which I could detect even against the grain of the passion that ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... the surrounding land, while the mud-built hut quickly disappears under the summer rains and the scarcely less destructive efforts of the white ants. Here in South Africa the native races seem to have made no progress for centuries, if, indeed, they have not actually gone backward; and the feebleness of savage man intensifies one's sense of the overmastering strength of nature. The elephant and the buffalo are as much the masters of the soil as is the Kafir, and man has no more right to claim that the land was made for him than have the ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... my eyes, I could have no other belief than that Lilian, too, was being led to a like sacrifice. And how was this sacrifice to be stayed? How was the sad catastrophe to be averted? It was in the endeavour to answer these interrogatories that I felt my feebleness—the utter absence of strength. Had it been a mere question of overtaking the caravan, there would have been no need for the slightest uneasiness. It would still be many days—weeks, indeed—before the north-going train could, arrive at its destination; and if ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... great design of settling the Colony of Georgia, watched over its nascent feebleness, cherished its growth, defended it from invasion, vindicated its rights, and advanced its interests and welfare, Oglethorpe resigned the superintendence and government into other hands, and retired to his country seat ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris
... of a magnificent Indian hookah lay on his knee; the enameled coils lay like a serpent in the room, but he had forgotten to draw out its fresh perfume. And yet there was a complete contradiction between the general feebleness of his young frame and the blue eyes, where all his vitality seemed to dwell; an extraordinary intelligence seemed to look out from them and to grasp ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... a foundation of rock. If they ever seem to fail us, to be shaken and overthrown, it is an evil delusion, and the cause lies not in them but in ourselves. It is we who fail, who are shaken and overthrown through palsied will and feebleness of ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... delineated these inner agitations, if he had chosen; but that he has abstained from doing so out of mercy to the feelings of his readers. We must, therefore, content ourselves with the following feebleness, with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... well and accurately (I need not add so entertainingly) described it, in many of its aspects, as you have done; and this renders your praise the more valuable to me. I do not recollect ever to have heard or seen the charge of exaggeration made against a feeble performance, though, in its feebleness, it may have been most untrue. It seems to me essentially natural, and quite inevitable, that common observers should accuse an uncommon one of this fault, and I have no doubt that you were long ago of this opinion; very much to your ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... tempests I ever remember. The crashing of thunder was followed by the roar of cannon, which was now distinctly heard from the ramparts, and it is not possible to describe the fearful effect of this apparent mockery of heaven. I never before felt so forcibly the feebleness of man. The rain was tremendous—the sky looked like that in Poussin's picture of the Deluge, and a heavy black cloud spread, like the wings of a monstrous vulture, over Brussels. The wounded continued ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 351 - Volume 13, Saturday, January 10, 1829 • Various
... away after long suffering. The blow to Lamb was stunning in its severity; and the loss of this earliest and best-loved friend possibly accelerated his own decease. Towards the close of the year a fall while walking caused a trifling wound. No harm was expected to result; but the general feebleness of his health brought on erysipelas, and upon Saturday, January 3, 1835, he was borne to his rest in a quiet corner of Edmonton Church-yard, there to await the coming, twelve years later, of the ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... gymnasiums, wires and pulleys, and placed them around the odd, lifeless looking mass on the chair. Then a solemn looking individual came forth and announced to the audience that the soloist, owing to his extreme feebleness, had been hypnotized previous to the concert, as it was the only manner in which to get him to play, and that he would be restored to consciousness at once and ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... constant scrambling, among those of equal claims, and brute force must be the final resort; in which case the strongest would have the best of every thing. The democratic rule, then, is, that superiors, in age, station, or office, have precedence of subordinates; age and feebleness, of youth and strength; and the feebler ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... affected by great changes in the temperature, than those which grow in land that affords but little nutriment.* (* The mulberries, cultivated in the thin and sandy soils of countries bordering on the Baltic Sea, are examples of this feebleness of organization. The late frosts do more injury to them, than to the mulberries of Piedmont. In Italy a cold of 5 degrees below freezing point does not destroy robust orange trees. According to M. Galesio, these trees, less tender than the lemon and bergamot orange ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... much desire to return into Spain. He replied in a manner evidencing his willingness to serve, marking no eagerness. He did not notice that there might be a secret meaning, hidden under this question. When he related to me what had passed between him and the King, I blamed the feebleness of his reply, and represented to him the ill effect it would create if at such a time he evinced any desire to keep out of the campaign. He appeared convinced by my arguments, and to wish with more eagerness than before to return ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the upper floor commanded the bottoms of the links; and at night, when I could venture farther, the lower windows were barricaded as if to stand a siege. Sometimes I thought the tall man must be confined to bed, for I remembered the feebleness of his gait; and sometimes I thought he must have gone clear away, and that Northmour and the young lady remained alone together in the pavilion. The idea, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... To compensate for the feebleness of the police, and the popular sympathy with crime, the crown paid L40 for each capital conviction. In 1796, a conspiracy was developed, which led to the legal slaughter of seventy persons, at a profit to the conspirators of L2,800. In 1818, the legislature reluctantly terminated ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... upon such a man if one was not disarmed by his own sufferings. But let us go on. I should have liked to pass over these traits, but I have no right to; I must show you the extraordinary feebleness of the man's character. "Man's character," did I say? No, it was the character of a woman without a will, the victim ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... think me a hard-hearted old fogey—you miss the ring of romance in what I say. That is quite natural. The language of reason always sounds flat to the ear of passion—and not to passion only, but to sentimentality and feebleness. Let us finish. You know my advice. Give no sign of life, and so give time a chance to do its work. Try to forgot the past, and help the lady to do likewise, and do not remind her of it again by letters, or any other kind of communication. ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... that he has left imperfections, which would have been removed if he had lived a few years longer. The arrangement might have been improved; the connexion of the argument might have been made plainer, and the sentences more accurately framed. Something also may be attributed to the feebleness of old age. Even a rough sketch of the Phaedrus or Symposium would have had a very different look. There is, however, an interest in possessing one writing of Plato which is ...
— Laws • Plato
... very old indeed. It is so silly of people—I don't mean you, for you are such a tiny, and couldn't know better—but it is so silly of people to fancy that old age means crookedness and witheredness and feebleness and sticks and spectacles and rheumatism and forgetfulness! It is so silly! Old age has nothing whatever to do with all that. The right old age means strength and beauty and mirth and courage and clear eyes and strong painless limbs. I am older than ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... the believer is incorporated with that of his adorable Head and Surety. The colossal Heart of redeemed humanity beats upon the throne, sending its mighty pulsations through every member of His body; so that, before the believer's spiritual life can be destroyed, Omnipotence must become feebleness, and Immutability become mutable! ...
— The Words of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... reciting with energy, the border gathering songs and tales of war. His memory was latterly much impaired; yet, the number of verses which he could pour forth, and the animation of his tone and gestures, formed a most extraordinary contrast to his extreme feebleness of person, and dotage ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... seized by a dangerous illness, which sunk him to such weakness, that the congregation thought an assistant necessary, and appointed Mr. Price. His health then returned gradually, and he performed his duty, till (1712) he was seized by a fever of such violence and continuance, that from the feebleness which it brought upon him, he ...
— The Psalms of David - Imitated in the Language of The New Testament - And Applied to The Christian State and Worship • Isaac Watts
... absolute recklessness of colonial rule, no sooner does private enterprise raise its head, and throw out the first feelers on the way to wealth, than a watchful government steps forward, and careful only to secure gain to itself, crushes out (in the first feebleness of existence,) ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... had that been the case, alas, for the simple tale of Natalie! How many would have passed it by with but one thought, and that thought invariably,—Nantucket! pooh! a fish story, strikingly embellished with ignorance. And you may indeed discover in the feebleness of my unpretending pen, much that is food for critics; yet give not a thought of ridicule to Nantucket's favored ones, for it is not for me to enlist under her banner of superiority of intellect. To the many questions which I know you have it in your heart to ask, ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale
... pelting him with stones. At last they left him, and in the shadow of some trees he betook himself to prayer. His words have been preserved, it is believed by the Moslems, and are as follows: "O Lord! I make my complaint unto thee of the feebleness of my strength, and the weakness of my plans. I am insignificant in the sight of men. O thou most merciful! Lord of the weak! Thou art my Lord! Do not abandon me. Leave me not a prey to these strangers, nor to my foes. If ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... rather by an exaggeration of the traditional exclusive policy of the eighteenth century relating to colonies, shipping, and commerce. In America, the unsettled commercial and financial conditions which succeeded the peace, the divergence of interests between the several new states, the feebleness of the confederate government, its incompetency to deal assuredly with external questions, and lack of all power to regulate commerce, inspired a conviction in Great Britain that the continent could ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... and beautiful; he is wretched; he is tormented; he wills; he suffers; for to will is to suffer. Yes, I am jealous. I know what there is in my jealousy. When I examine it, I find in it hereditary prejudices, savage conceit, sickly susceptibility, a mingling of rudest violence and cruel feebleness, imbecile and wicked revolt against the laws of life and of society. But it does not matter that I know it for what it is: it exists and it torments me. I am the chemist who, studying the properties of an acid which ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... His feebleness increased (there was no illness), till at sunset, January 27, 1851, in his seventy-sixth year, the "American Woodsman," as he was wont to call himself, set out on his last long journey to that bourne whence no ...
— John James Audubon • John Burroughs
... industrialize art, rather than develop a spiritual sturdiness—a sturdiness which Mr. Sedgwick says [footnote: H. D. Sedgwick. The New American Type. Riverside Press.] "shows itself in a close union between spiritual life and the ordinary business of life," against spiritual feebleness which "shows itself in the separation of the two." If one's spiritual sturdiness is congenital and somewhat perfect he is not only conscious that this separation has no part in his own soul, but he does not feel its existence in others. He does not believe there is such a thing. But ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... these beauties at a glance, and carved them on his soul. The fair Beatrix and the dark Felicite might have sat for those contrasting portraits in "keepsakes" which English designers and engravers seek so persistently. Here were the force and the feebleness of womanhood in full development, a perfect antithesis. These two women could never be rivals; each had her own empire. Here was the delicate campanula, or the lily, beside the scarlet poppy; a turquoise near a ruby. In a moment, as it were,—at ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... man and wife seldom share the same bed; the reason they give is that the breath of the wife weakens the husband.... The Khyoungthas have a legend of a man who reduced a king and his men to a condition of feebleness by persuading them to dress up as women and perform female duties. When they had thus been rendered effeminate they were attacked and defeated without a blow.... Contempt for female timidity has caused a curious custom amongst the Gallas: ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... Government, at its birth and in its feebleness, invoked the blessings and the protection of a Divine Providence, and the thirteen colonies and three millions of people have expanded into a nation of strength and numbers commanding the position which then was asserted and for which ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... the extremity of his danger never having been hinted to Bell, and travelling some forty miles being a most unusual exertion at that time to persons of her class, the idea of going to see her husband at York had never suggested itself to Bell's mind. Her increasing feebleness made this seem a step only to be taken in case of the fatal extreme necessity; such was the conclusion that both Sylvia and he had come to; and it was the knowledge of this that made Sylvia strangle her own daily longing to see her father. Not but ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. II • Elizabeth Gaskell
... unpoetical one, and two of the finest poetical minds of the nation were so dwarfed and weakened by the ungenial atmosphere as to bequeath to posterity nothing more than a few lyrical fragments. In the age which admired the smooth feebleness of Shenstone's pastorals and elegies, and which closed when the libels of Churchill were held to be good examples of poetical satire, Gray turned aside from the unrequited labors of verse to idle in his study, and Collins lived and died almost unknown. Gray ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... history; viewing them enshrined in their perfections, untainted by the world; hearing their exalted sentiments; knowing them as we know a noble statue or a beautiful picture, without the taint of age or feebleness, or the ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... accepted the invitation of the Lyceum he intended to write an original poem, upon a subject which he said had haunted his imagination for years; but cares, anxieties, and feebleness of will, prevented; and a week before the appointed night he wrote to a friend imploring assistance. "You compose with such astonishing facility," he urged in his letter, "that you can easily furnish me, quite soon enough, a poem that shall be equal to my reputation. ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... occasion, but during the canvass in other parts of the state, was chiefly confined to a defense of the Republican party and its policy while in power, which I contrasted with what I regarded as the feebleness of Mr. Cleveland's administration. I touched upon state matters with brevity, but complimented our brilliant and able governor, Foraker. I referred to the attacks that had been made upon me about my speech in Springfield, Illinois, and said that no one had answered by arraignment, except ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... in order to enjoy the simple fare of life. But my determination was, never to do my duty with frantic impetuosity, helped on by the fiery liquor of excitement. I know Bimala finds it difficult to respect me for this, taking my scruples for feebleness—and she is quite angry with me because I am not running ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... withstood a force three times his own until British bayonets pushed him over the crest of Queenstown Heights. Armstrong, however, had a liking for James Wilkinson. They had been companions in arms with Gates at Saratoga, and, although no one knew better than Armstrong the feebleness of Wilkinson's character, he assigned him to New York after the President had forced his ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... son for the first time since his childhood was in Italy. With Venice he was in his father's phrase "simply infatuated." For his son's sake, but also with the thought of a place of retreat when perhaps years should bring with them feebleness of body, Browning entered into treaty with the owner, an Austrian and an absentee, for the purchase of the Manzoni Palazzo on the Grand Canal. He considered it the most beautiful house in Venice. Ruskin had described it in the "Stones of Venice" as "a perfect and very rich ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... good things set before him he evidently felt refreshed. His eyes lost somewhat of their lack-lustre air of confirmed invalidism, and his voice regained a measure of its natural tone. When he attempted to rise and dress himself, however, he betrayed such a degree of bodily feebleness that his wife forbade him to make further exertions. He yielded to her importunities, and remained in bed, which was manifestly the best place for him. He was pestered by no unnecessary questions to account for his presence, ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... seeing that social life does not rest on the vigor of the persons who compose it, but on the authority of certain rules and manners to which all are required to conform. These appear to grit as external defences, thrown up to protect elegant feebleness against any direct collision with positive character, and to keep men and women at a respectful distance from ladies and gentlemen. Life is carried on there at one or more removes from the realities ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... his taste for a mixed diet it is difficult to estimate. Habit has certainly great influence in attaching us to particular kinds of aliment. One who has long been accustomed to animal food cannot at once abstain from it without experiencing some feebleness for the want of its stimulation, and perhaps even temporary emaciation. And, on the other hand, he who has long been confined to a vegetable diet is apt to lose his relish for flesh, and, on recurring suddenly to its use, to find ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... under which themselves enjoyed the leisure of a thousand years for knitting and expanding into strong nations; on the other hand, what is to be thought of the Saracen revolutionists? Everywhere it has passed for a lawful postulate, that the Saracen conquests prevailed, half by the feebleness of the Roman government at Constantinople, and half by the preternatural energy infused into the Arabs by their false prophet and legislator. In either of its faces, this theory is falsified by a steady review ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... without a good leader, but I am such a leader that I can win even with poor soldiers. I am at that age when persons attain their greatest perfection both of body and intellect and suffer deterioration neither through the rashness of youth nor the feebleness of old age, but are strongest because in a condition half-way between the two. Moreover I possess such a nature and such a training that I can with greatest ease discern what requires to be done and make it known. Experience, which causes ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. III • Cassius Dio
... our own time to demonstrate that corsets and tight lacing do not necessarily go hand in hand. Distortion and feebleness are not beauty. A proper proportion should exist between the size of the waist and the breadth of the shoulders and hips, and if the waist is diminished below this proportion, it suggests disproportion and invalidism rather than grace ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... not let me out of their grasp, or rather, I did not know how to free myself. I had not the strength. Now that I am over eighty and have become feeble, I have given up trying to free myself; and, strange to say, as my feebleness increases I realise more and more strongly the wrongfulness of my position, and it grows more ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... whatever; Millwood put me down in argument, on every occasion; it became sheer monomania in my master's daughter to care a button for me; and all I can say for my gasping and procrastinating conduct on the fatal morning, is, that it was worthy of the general feebleness of my character. Even after I was happily hanged and Wopsle had closed the book, Pumblechook sat staring at me, and shaking his head, and saying, "Take warning, boy, take warning!" as if it were a well-known fact that I contemplated murdering a near relation, ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... hearers engaged, when his periods were such as pronounced by an ordinary speaker, would not have preserved the audience from that listnessness, which is instantly seen and felt by the speaker, and soon adds embarrassment and confusion to feebleness. In private society, to the last months of his existence, it gave him rather the air of a youth inexperienced in the realities of life, and entering it under the ardour of hope, than of a man who had almost reached the limits of human existence, in the exercise ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... been going well for the defenders of the castle. The Baron of Wortham was indeed surprised at the feebleness of the assault. The arrows which had fallen in clouds upon the first day's attack upon the castle among his soldiers were now comparatively few and ineffective. The besiegers scarcely appeared to push forward their bridges ...
— The Boy Knight • G.A. Henty
... the back uppermost pirouetting on the wrist alternately in pronation and supination, thus passing from force to feebleness and from feebleness to force, characterizes irritability. ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... exercised? A constitutional sovereign must in the common course of government be a man of but common ability. I am afraid, looking to the early acquired feebleness of hereditary dynasties, that we must expect him to be a man of inferior ability. Theory and experience both teach that the education of a prince can be but a poor education, and that a royal family will generally have less ability ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... while your betters are kept to hard duty!" The sight and behaviour of this malicious scoundrel enraged me so much that I could scarce refrain from laying my cudgel across his pate; but when I considered my present feebleness, and the enemies I had in the ship, who wanted only a pretence to ruin me, I restrained my passion, and contented myself with telling him, I had not forgot his insolence and malice, and that I hoped ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... due to nonclosure of the foramen ovale, which allows a mixture of the venous with the arterial blood in the left cavities of the heart. It is characterized by a dark purple or bluish color of the visible mucous membranes, shortness of breath, and a general feebleness. Foals thus affected generally live only a ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... have turned a military discipline into a pacific oligarchy, and that into a mere plutocracy at last. And there are similar historic riddles to be unpicked in the similar forms of social address. There is something singularly forlorn about the modern word "Mister." Even in sound it has a simpering feebleness which marks the shrivelling of the strong word from which it came. Nor, indeed, is the symbol of the mere sound inaccurate. I remember seeing a German story of Samson in which he bore the unassuming name of Simson, which surely shows Samson very much shorn. ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... subject, usually the never-ceasing topic at the Manse, Helen was for once profoundly silent. Even when her father had dropped asleep, as in his feebleness of age he frequently did in the very midst of conversation, she sat restlessly fingering her wedding-ring, and another which she wore as a sort of guard to it, the only jewel she possessed. It was ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... that dear unfortunate Jarber came, punctual to the appointed time. He looked so terribly harassed, that he was really quite a spectacle of feebleness and fatigue. I saw, at a glance, that the question of dates had gone against him, that Mr. Magsman had not been the last tenant of the House, and that the reason of its emptiness ...
— A House to Let • Charles Dickens
... was dead and mourned for her. This was three days ago, and I have been mourning ever since." So I left him and went away, having assured myself of the feebleness ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... indignation. Let us add that a child has the faculty of quickly accepting the conclusion of a sensation; the distant fading boundaries which amplify painful subjects escape him. A child is protected by the limit of feebleness against emotions which are too complex. He sees the fact, and little else beside. The difficulty of being satisfied by half-ideas does not exist for him. It is not until later that experience comes, with ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... speedily blockaded by the Austrian general Ott; while the imperial commander-in-chief, Melas, advanced with 30,000 upon Nice—of which place he took possession on the 11th of May. The Austrians, having shut up Massena, and well knowing the feebleness of Suchet's division, were in a delirium of joy. The gates of France appeared, at length, to be open before them; and it was not such an army of reserve as had excited the merriment of their spies at Dijon that could hope to withstand ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... this lady that Mary was not so well as in former years. One day, when conversation turned upon this topic, she felt constrained to express her fears. But Mary was hopeful. A proposition was made, and arrangements were perfected to visit Doctor Cullis, to secure the benefit of his prayers. But her feebleness was so great that the plan was abandoned. 'If,' said Mrs. F., 'faith is to cure you, why go to Doctor Cullis, or to any one? Let us go to God ourselves; and, Mary, if you have faith that God can and will cure you sometime, why not believe that ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... they rov'd, With pillage and conflagration; Nor them old age's feebleness mov'd, ...
— Targum • George Borrow
... least inclination to bottle shoulders, but Charles Pendyce brushed his hair, both before and behind, away from a central parting, and about the back of his still active knees there was a look of feebleness. Seen from the front they could readily be differentiated, for the General's whiskers broadened down his cheeks till they reached his moustaches, and there was in his face and manner a sort of ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... with a simple attempt at confiscation supported by an organised system of crime. The argument is put with his usual downright force, and certainly shows no symptoms of any decline of intellectual vigour. He speaks, he says, impelled by the 'shame and horror' which an Englishman must feel at our feebleness, and asks whether we are cowards to be kicked with impunity? Sometimes he hoped, though his hopes were not sanguine, that a point would yet be reached at which Englishmen would be roused and would show ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... perfectly ready to believe, then the sooner they three were out of it the better. So, disregarding the unfortunate doctor's protestations and entreaties, he raised him in his arms and, notwithstanding the increasing sensation of feebleness and numbness which oppressed him, staggered with his burden into the outer air of the court-yard, closely followed of course by Mrs Henderson. But it was a most trying business altogether, for no sooner did Gaunt lay hands upon the sufferer, though he did it ever ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... presented so incompletely, with such fearful hiatuses, and in my own feebleness and waning life) one might well memorize this life of Elias Hicks. Though not eminent in literature or politics or inventions or business, it is a token of not a few, and is significant. Such men do not cope with statesmen or soldiers—but I have ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... illustrated by the ruin of His creation. One cannot help deploring that the great mass of religious books were not consigned to the flames before they were permitted to reach the eyes of the public. Books which exhibit Christianity and its claims with insipid feebleness, or which cramp its majesty into an artificial form at once distorted and mean, must grievously injure its influence. An intelligent Christian cannot look into such works without feeling thankful that they were ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... its severity; and the loss of this earliest and best-loved friend possibly accelerated his own decease. Towards the close of the year a fall while walking caused a trifling wound. No harm was expected to result; but the general feebleness of his health brought on erysipelas, and upon Saturday, January 3, 1835, he was borne to his rest in a quiet corner of Edmonton Church-yard, there to await the coming, twelve years later, of the sister who had been throughout his life ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... urged that, as Zeus means the sky, therefore he is no more than the deep concave of heaven personified and deified, and that consequently Zeus is not the true, the only God. This argument is only equalled in feebleness by that of the materialist, who argues that "spiritus" means simply breath, therefore the breath is the soul. Even if the Greeks remembered that, originally, Zeus meant the sky, that would have no more perplexed their minds than the remembrance that "thymos"—mind—meant originally ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... poorest beings perhaps that exist upon the face of the earth. I have met with brothers who loved each other with that tenderness which is the most pressing want of isolated men. I have seen among them women whose affection had a somewhat in it of that submission and devotion which are inspired by feebleness and misfortune. And never, in this half-annihilation of those beings of my species, could I recognize without shuddering the extent of the power which we may exercise over the existence of our fellow,—the ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... at the funeral of Lord Shaftesbury, in England. It is well to remember such noblemen as he was. The chair at Exeter Hall, where he so often presided, should be always associated with him. His last public act, at 84 years of age, was to go forth in great feebleness and make an earnest protest against the infamies exposed by Mr. Stead in London. In that dying speech he called upon Parliament to defend the purity of the city. As far back as 1840, his voice in Parliament ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... sat at the bedside holding Ernestine's hand, and over them all the autumn sunshine fell, warm and sweet, as with a touch of loving benediction; and the trill of Jeanie's canary down stairs, was the only sound, save Ernestine's low voice, sad and sweet, in its feebleness. ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... fate of Home Rule, and with it the fate of the Liberal party, are sealed. "Obstruction" (says the Parnellite paper) cannot be permitted!" It is the revelation of the impotency of Parliament, and Parliamentary procedure must be replaced by some quicker means of effecting reform. Mr. Gladstone's feebleness is an incitement to revolution. The Dublin press would manage these things better. An autumn session must not be adventured. If the House should rise before the bill has passed the Commons such a confession of weakness ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... of the Fathers as with the Talmud and Zend-avesta, and with the ideas and dogmas of those whom he calls heretics, as with the religious opinions of the Mongols and the followers of the Lama of the Himalayan hills. The miserable attack which, in his rancorous feebleness, he has just committed on the Bible Society will redound merely to his own shame and ridicule, and the disgrace of the sect to which he belongs. What could persuade him to speak of the Vulgate? What could induce him to grasp that two-edged sword? ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... daily bread. So you, my children—those whom I behooved To bear the burden, stay at home like girls, While in their stead my daughters moil and drudge, Lightening their father's misery. The one Since first she grew from girlish feebleness To womanhood has been the old man's guide And shared my weary wandering, roaming oft Hungry and footsore through wild forest ways, In drenching rains and under scorching suns, Careless herself of home and ease, if so Her sire might have her tender ministry. And thou, my child, whilom ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... health, served to show to the full advantage the outline of features which, noble and regular, though stern and masculine, the artist might have borrowed for his ideal of a young Spartan arming for his first battle. Arthur, slight to feebleness, and with the paleness, partly of constitution, partly of gay excess, on his fair and clear complexion, had features far less symmetrical and impressive than his cousin: but what then? All that are bestowed by elegance of dress, the refinements of luxurious habit, the nameless ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... bank notes of 100 livres, and of 10 livres to be given to those who should need them for the journey, but not as gifts. The Chief-President was more brazen and more fortunate; he made so many promises, showed so much meanness, employed so much roguery, that abusing by these means the feebleness and easiness of the Regent, whom he laughed at, he obtained more than 100,000 ecus for his expenses. The poor prince gave him the money, under the rose, in two or three different payments, and permitted the Duc de Bouillon to lend him his house at Pontoise, completely furnished, and the garden ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... their inclination to crouch before the enemy, I permitted my heart after some struggles to subside and repose in the cool of this reflection—Let them escape. It is only the French nation that ever dragged such feebleness to the scaffold,' Again, page 35—'Honest men, I confess, have generally in the present times an aversion to the Whig faction, not because it is suitable either to honesty or understanding to prefer the narrow principles of the opposite party, but because in every country lax morals ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... strengthen; a gratitude in which injury from the object, though it may blend regret, should never breed resentment; an affection which can be in creased only by the decay of those to whom we owe it, and which is then most fervent, when the tremulous voice of age, resistless in its feebleness, inquires for the natural protector of its cold decline. If these are the general sentiments of man, what must be their depravity—what must be their degeneracy—who can blot out and erase from the bosom the virtue that is most deeply rooted in the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... as it needeth in kind, that one vein bring and give blood to another vein. Also a vein is messager of health and of sickness. For by the pulse of the arteries and disposition of the veins, physicians deem of the feebleness and strength of the heart. Also if a vein be corrupt, and containeth corrupt blood, it corrupteth and infecteth all the body, as it fareth in lepers, whose blood is most corrupt in the veins, of the which the members are fed by sucking of blood, and seeketh thereby corruption ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... those who beheld him now, that never, since Mr. Dimmesdale first set his foot on the New England shore, had he exhibited such energy as was seen in the gait and air with which he kept his pace in the procession. There was no feebleness of step as at other times; his frame was not bent, nor did his hand rest ominously upon his heart. Yet, if the clergyman were rightly viewed, his strength seemed not of the body. It might be spiritual and imparted to him ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... employment. Less exacting rules of evidence and a summary mode of trial are needed to make the law effective. 4. That Congress provide means for distributing arriving aliens who now congregate in the large cities. 5. That as a means of those incapable of self-support through age or feebleness; those who have not brought sufficient money to maintain them for a reasonable time in event of sickness or lack of employment. 6. That adequate means be adopted, enforced by sufficient penalties, to compel steamship companies to observe in good faith the law which forbids them to ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... when able to talk or be talked to, or read to, Edmund was the companion he preferred. His aunt worried him by her cares, and Sir Thomas knew not how to bring down his conversation or his voice to the level of irritation and feebleness. Edmund was all in all. Fanny would certainly believe him so at least, and must find that her estimation of him was higher than ever when he appeared as the attendant, supporter, cheerer of a suffering brother. ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... the resistance offered by Japanese congregations to the authority of foreign missionaries, and in the resolute boycotting of foreign merchants. And behind all this race-movement there is more than race-feeling: there is also the definite conviction that foreign help is proof of national feebleness, and that the Empire remains disgraced before the eyes of the commercial world, so long as its import and export trade are managed by aliens. Several large Japanese firms have quite emancipated themselves from the domination of foreign ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... my feet, for my feebleness was gone, and hasted to the closet. A lancet and other small instruments were preserved in a case which I had deposited here. Inattentive as I was to foreign considerations, my ears were still open to any sound of mysterious import that ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... ordinary atmosphere; languid more for the want of a spur, than from lack of nerve and ability; and unambitious for want of an object, rather than from want of power to climb, was really smothered by the softness and luxury of his surroundings, rather than reduced by the poverty and feebleness of his nature; had really the elements of manly strength and elevation, and had misfortune or poverty fallen upon him, early, he would undoubtedly have developed into a man of the higher type, like the first generations of ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... resolute touch and powerful presentation. It is probable that the great inequalities in many of his paintings, especially at this later time, are due to his leaving much of the execution to assistants. Whatever faults are in the work of the master himself, he is never, up to the last, guilty of any feebleness or insipidity, such, for instance, as in the painting ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... lost no time in seeking their native benefactors. Yet, on account of their weakness, they travelled very slowly, and when they reached the encampment it was deserted. They had no idea whither the natives had gone. They struggled a short distance farther; their feebleness overcame them, and they were forced to sink down in despair. All day they toiled hard to prepare nardoo seed; but their small strength could not provide enough to support them. Once or twice they shot ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland
... our prose writers, the undersigned finds it difficult to render a true judgment, owing to the adverse conditions mentioned earlier in this report. Many fluent pens are doubtless cramped into feebleness through want of space. ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... suppress the rising tide of our colored population by extracting a few drops annually with their 'mop and pattens.' Dame Partington is clearly outdone by them, in regard to pertinacity of purpose and feebleness of execution. Rev. Sidney Smith, in his speech at the Taunton meeting, ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... might be pleased to pass on it. But her kinsman, Lord Meadshire, Lord-Lieutenant of the county, a great magnate in the eyes of the world, was to her just a very kind and playful old man, whose jokes only, because of their inherent feebleness, caused her any discomfort. Cousin Humphrey would preserve her from the results of her fault ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... feebleness &c. adj. Adj. feeble, bald, tame, meager, jejune, vapid, bland, trashy, lukewarm, cold, frigid, poor, dull, dry, languid; colorless, enervated; proposing, prosy, prosaic; unvaried, monotonous, weak, washy, wishy-washy; sketchy, slight. careless, slovenly, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... eagerness with which he threw himself into the cause of reform; and what would have discouraged another braced Yoshida for his task. As he professed the theory of arms, it was firstly the defences of Japan that occupied his mind. The external feebleness of that country was then illustrated by the manners of overriding barbarians, and the visit of big barbarian war ships: she was a country beleaguered. Thus the patriotism of Yoshida took a form which may be said to have defeated itself: he had it upon him to keep out these all- powerful ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Dauphin by a similar display of supernormal knowledge. She satisfied, at Poictiers, the divines of the national party after a prolonged examination, of which the record, 'The Book of Poictiers,' has disappeared. In these ways she inspired the confidence which, in the real feebleness of the invading army, was all that was needed to ensure the relief of Orleans, while, as Dunois attested, she shook the confidence which was the strength of England. About these facts the historical evidence is as good as for any other events ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... or the first half of this century. Great Britain, if left to herself, could act with all the force, consistency, and energy given by unity of sentiment and community of interests. The distraction and the uncertainty of our political aims, the feebleness and inconsistency with which they are pursued, arise, in part at least, from the connection with Ireland. Neither Englishmen nor Irishmen are to blame for the fact that it is difficult for communities differing in historical associations and in political conceptions ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... shrinking overspread Sandy's face. He had suffered so much through religion during the last few months, that in this final moment of humanity the soul had taken refuge in numbness—apathy. Let God decide. He could think it out no more; and in this utter feebleness his terror of hell—the ineradicable deposit of childhood and inheritance—had passed away. He gathered his forces for the few human and practical things which ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... accentuate And, as the dusk unveils the heaven's deep cave, This small world's feebleness fills me with awe again, And all ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 • Various
... should have arisen describing the adventures of the Spirit of Vegetation.[1488] The descent of a hero or a god into Hades may be explained as the passage of the sun from its summer warmth to its winter feebleness, or as the annual death and revival of vegetation. Which of these views shall be adopted will depend in any case on the particular coloring of the story, on the signification of the names involved, or on the ceremonies accompanying the worship. It is not now possible to frame a theory ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... those who may be called philosophical, were vehemently opposed to Christianity, as were most of the eminent actors in the Revolution. Several of them were downright Atheists, who would have regarded the "liberal theology" of Mr. Brooke as a sign of mental feebleness. ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... he grows old. But no feebleness of body or mind can induce him to enter the workhouse; he cannot quit his old haunts. Let it rain or sleet, or let the furious gale drive broken boughs across the road, he still sleeps in some shed or under a straw-rick. In sheer pity he is committed every now ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... any abomination of the Americains, nor sworn deceitfully to any species of compromise; their beloved city was presently to pass into the throes of an election, and this band, heroically unconscious of their feebleness, putting their trust in "re-actions" and like delusions, resolved to make one more stand for the traditions of their fathers. It was concerning this that Madame Delicieuse was incidentally about to speak when interrupted ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... the little fat that there may be is friable, and shrunk within its integuments. The flesh of animals slaughtered whilst under considerable depression of vital energy (as from previous bleeding) has a diminished tendency to stiffen after death, the feebleness of this tendency being in proportion to the degree of depression. It presents, also, an unnatural blue or pallid appearance, has a faint and slightly sour smell, and soon becomes putrid. When an animal has died otherwise than by slaughtering, its flesh ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... of the Republic be cajoled into a friendly attitude towards this blood-thirsty dastard, because that, in the feebleness and fear that have now overtaken her, she essays to gloze over the infamous acts of which she stands convicted before the nations, and assumes an air of friendship towards them. Had the Union fallen, through her infernal ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... each frost was freshly piercing her boy's breast, each warm damp day he faded into greater feebleness, yet the hope was far clearer. He was happy and content. He had laid hold of the blessed hope of Everlasting Life, and was learning to believe that the Cross laid on him here was in mercy to make him fit for Heaven, first making him afraid and sorry for his sins, and ...
— Friarswood Post-Office • Charlotte M. Yonge
... this sublime self-sacrifice both Mr. Sagittarius and the Prophet were as men dumb. They said not a word. They only gazed—with a sort of strange idiotcy—at Madame as she rose, with an elaborate and studied feebleness, from the maroon couch and prepared to go upstairs to assume the appropriate neglige. Only when she was at her full height did the Prophet, rendered desperate by the terrible results of his own ingenuity, nerve himself to utter one ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... marvelled at the feebleness of human reason. A proposition is true or false, but no art can prove it to be one or the other, in the midst of the uncertainties of science and the conflicting lessons of experience, until a new incident disperses the clouds of doubt; I was poor, I become rich, ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... Madam; or perhaps it may be Miss? Will you take a seat, and excuse the feebleness that forces me to receive visits in ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... and distasteful. I do not like to have my manners praised, my honesty, or my diligence. But there are other tracts where I know I am still in the stage of conscious effort. In this extensive region, aware of my feebleness and hearing an inward call to greater heights, it will always be cheering to hear those about me say, "Well done!" Of course in saying this they will inevitably hint that I have not yet reached an end, and their praises ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... regards himself as being mulcted. He may be thick-headed, but he can see that in such a see-saw of profits versus wages the superior power of capital has the odds all in its favor. He learns to regard the whole state of the industrial world as one in which might makes right, and feebleness ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... metaphysical speculation produced in England has been of little more, practical value to the world than a drove of bogs. In precisely the same way the celibacy of Schopenhauer, Kant and Nietzsche has reduced German philosophy to feebleness. ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... due to connective tissue infiltration (scurvy sclerosis). There may be pains in the joints and often watery swelling (oedema) of the ankles. Bleeding from internal mucous membranes is less common than from the skin. The appetite is poor, palpitation of the heart and feebleness and irregularity of the pulse are prominent symptoms. Owing to the sore gums the patient is unable to chew the food. The urine often contains albumin and is scanty and concentrated. There are weariness, depression, headache and finally ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... showing that he expected to be compelled to strengthen his voice. His weight at that time was but ninety pounds, and those ninety pounds must have been composed of brain and voice and sinew, for, notwithstanding his evident feebleness, he spoke calmly and earnestly for three hours. As for the speech, those who came expecting to witness a renewal of the outburst of passion and invective which characterized his first appearance in the Senate, when he made his impromptu, eloquent reply to the savage assaults of Senator ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... Jew is everywhere numerically feeble. That is nothing to the point—with the Irishman's history for an object-lesson. But I am coming to your numerical feebleness presently. In all parliamentary countries you could no doubt elect Jews to the legislatures—and even one member in such a body is sometimes a force which counts. How deeply have you concerned yourselves about this in Austria, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... nothing to be feared, because there was no organisation; but nevertheless, especially in the manufacturing towns, the suffering was fearful and the hatred of the Government most bitter. What is so lamentable in the history of those times is the undisciplined wildness and feebleness of the attempts made by the people to better themselves. Nothing is more saddening than the spectacle of a huge mass of humanity goaded, writhing, starving, and yet so ignorant that it cannot choose capable leaders, cannot ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... it indicates feebleness or dyspepsia when an educated man is heard whining, about election time, with his fears of ignorant voting. It is his business to enlighten and control that ignorance. With a voice and a pen at his command, with a town hall in every town for the ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... striving to set before thee, kind reader, those glories with which Anselmus is encompassed, or even in the faintest degree to shadow them forth to thee in words. Reluctantly I could not but acknowledge the feebleness of my every expression. I felt myself enthralled amid the paltriness of every-day life; I sickened in tormenting dissatisfaction; I glided about like a dreamer; in brief, I fell into that condition of the student Anselmus, which, in the Fourth Vigil, I have endeavored to ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... he asked, and was startled by the feebleness of the voice which seemed in no way related ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... fact a smart brisk fellow of about thirty-five years of age, notwithstanding the length of time during which—to use a funny phrase which somebody got up for him—he has been "afflicted with a loose tail-board to his mortal sand-cart." Some benevolent friend was so much distressed about the feebleness of "Old Sands of Life" as to send him one day a large parcel by express, marked "C. O. D.," and costing quite a figure. "Old Sands" paid, and opening the parcel, found half a ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... little thought he was escorting a Press-lady)—to pay a visit to the New Wimbledon—and being nothing if not loyal, I chose the day when the shooting for the "Queen's" commenced. My escort informed me with an inane smile, that the Camp had experienced "Bisley weather;" the feebleness of which joke so annoyed me, that I am half inclined to put his name in the pillory of public print—(what a glorious expression for our own Midlothian Mouther)—but I refrain, for ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 30, 1892 • Various
... advancing nearly all which the imagination or the reason can produce, while yet in that social youth which promised a long and a yet more glorious existence—while even their great parent herself had scarcely emerged from the long pupilage of nations, they fell into the feebleness of age! Amid the vital struggles, followed by the palsied and prostrate exhaustion of her Ionian children, the majestic Athens suddenly arose from the obscurity of the past to an empire that can never perish, until heroism shall cease to warm, poetry to delight, and wisdom ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... looked at the portrait of his beloved bishop, the only personal possession which the prelate had been able to bequeath him (admirable type of the men whose genius will preserve the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church, compromised for the moment by the feebleness of its recruits and the decrepit age of its pontiffs; but ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... married Isabella of Castile, and had thus united those two populous and wealthy kingdoms; and now, in the arrogance of power, seized with the pride of annexation, he began to look with a wistful eye upon the picturesque kingdom of Navarre. Its comparative feebleness, under the reign of a bereaved woman weary of the world, invited to the enterprise. Should he grasp at the whole territory of the little realm, France might interpose her powerful remonstrance. Should he take but the half which was ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... cruel more merciless, the untruthful more false, the carnal more degraded. 'In vino veritas' expresses, even, indeed, to physiological accuracy, the true condition. The reason, the emotions, the instincts, are all in a state of carnival, and in chaotic feebleness. ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... harshly. "What is this make-believe feebleness? That you are pale, poltroon, I do not wonder! But why these tottering limbs? Why this assumption of weakness? Do you look to trick me ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... parade was held in due form, the lads of the new regiment mounted guard, and their officers made a tour of inspection afterwards with their new friends, who pointed out the strength and feebleness of the ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... years of our composer's life were passed amid great distress from poverty and feebleness. He could compose but little; and, though his friends solaced his latter days with attention and kindness, his sturdy independence would not accept more. It is a touching fact that Beethoven voluntarily suffered want and privation in his last years, ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... soaring upwards. Mighty deeds raised Germany from political disruption and feebleness to the forefront of European nations. But we do not seem willing to take up this inheritance, and to advance along the path of development in politics and culture. We tremble at our own greatness, and shirk ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... for federal courts to carry out the law was hardly open to debate. The feebleness of the Articles of Confederation was, in a large measure, attributed to the want of a judiciary to hold states and individuals in obedience to the laws and treaties of the union. Nevertheless on this point the advocates of states' rights ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... I restored him to the bosom of the club, and compassionating the feebleness of his health and extreme lowness of his spirits, I recommended him to "take a little wine for his stomach's sake," and, when he was sufficiently re-established, to embrace the media-via, ni-jamais-ni-toujours plan—not ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... to secure the friendship of the young prince by ministering, in every possible way, to his pleasures. They led him to the chase, encouraged whatever disposition he chanced to manifest, and endeavored to train him in a state of feebleness and ignorance which might promote their ambitious plans. The Kremlin became the scene of constant intrigues. Cabal succeeded cabal. The position of the triumvirate became, month after month, more perilous. The young prince gave decisive indications ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... her neck sobbing, and the old woman in her pitiful fright was brought back partly to reason in the great love of her life for the little child. Even in her feebleness she was ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... was the child of poor parents, natives of Oederan in the Erzgebirge in Saxony. Her father was no ordinary man; he possessed enormous vitality, but in his old age showed traces of some feebleness of mind. In his young days he had been a trumpeter in Saxony, and in this capacity had taken part in a campaign against the French, and had also been present at the battle of Wagram. He afterwards became ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... you ask yourself the question why it is there. These facades, of which there are so many, vary in detail; in effect they are all the same, an utter weariness to the eye. Every fresh day's research into the city brings increasing disappointment, a sense of the childish, of feebleness, and weakness exhibited in public, as if they had built in sugar for the top of a cake. The level ground will not permit of any advantage of view; there are none of those sudden views so common and so striking in English towns. Everything is planed, smoothed, and ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... man well known throughout the army for his courage and ability, but notwithstanding this Sam took a strong prejudice against him, for he seemed to be half-hearted in his work and to disapprove of the prevailing policy of pacification by fire and sword. Sam ascribed this feebleness to the fact that he had been originally appointed to the army from civil life, and that he had not enjoyed the benefits of an ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... something about it. But she has a way of deprecating with her long, knobby, mittened hand over her mouth, and of looking at the same time, in a mysterious manner, down into one of the angles of the room—it reduces her protest to a feebleness: she's incapable of seeing in it herself more than a fraction of what it has for her, and really thinks it would be wicked and abandoned, would savor of Criticism, which is the cardinal sin with her, to see all, or to follow any premise to it in the ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... and went about preparing the meal. When it was ready the old man suffered himself to be persuaded and ate a little. He was in reality stronger than he looked, and an extraordinary nervous energy still lurked beneath the appearance of a feebleness almost amounting to decrepitude. The little nourishment he took sufficed to restore the balance, and when he rose from the table, he was outwardly almost himself again. When a man has suffered great moral pain for years, he bears a new shock, even the worst, better than ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... I was aroused by hearing a joyous shout in the tones of Bob's well-remembered voice; and, raising myself with difficulty, only to sink back in utter feebleness, I caught a momentary glimpse of the boat in the act ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... Cato, by John Hunter, a masterly declaimer, but a plain boy, and shorter by the head than his two sons in the scene, etc. In conclusion, Starkey appears to have been one of those mild spirits, which, not originally deficient in understanding, are crushed by penury into dejection and feebleness. He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to society, if Fortune had taken him into a very little fostering; but wanting that, he became a Captain,—a by-word,—and lived and died a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... first colonists to that of the children of Israel when they fled from the house of bondage. He painted the Pilgrim fathers landing on Plymouth Rock, snow, and ice, and desolation around, but the fire of faith in their hearts. He contrasted the feebleness of the beginning with the grandeur of the result, whence he deduced the inference that the Lord had led his people with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; he alluded to the changed appearance of the country, converted from a heathen wilderness into a Christian ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... relate this miracle.[5] The Christians obeyed the order, and with great solemnity carried back in procession the sacred relics to Antioch, singing on this occasion the psalms which ridicule the vanity and feebleness of idols, repeating after every verse: "May they who adore idols and glory in false gods, blush with shame and be covered with confusion." The following evening, lightning fell on the temple of Apollo, and reduced to ashes all the ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... thus given in England to the discussion of the Problem of Society. The declared object of the work—which is of the class of philosophical novels—is to exhibit the miseries of the poor; the conventionalisms, hypocrisies, and feebleness of the rich; the religious doubts of the strong, and the miserable delusions and superstitions of the weak; the mammon-worship of the middling and upper classes, and the angry humility of the masses. The story is very slight, but sufficient for ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... advanced in middle life, tall and of a stately presence, with a voice more musical even than the tones which had recently enchanted every one. His countenance was impressive, a truly Olympian brow, but the lower part of the face indicated not feebleness, but flexibility, and his mouth was somewhat sensuous. His manner was at once winning; natural, and singularly unaffected, and seemed to sympathise entirely with those whom ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
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