"Feeble" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... put my ear to the wall and told the poor boy to speak in accents loud; he confessed that seeing a spring in the wall he touched it—it opened, he entered where he was mantled in Egyptian darkness, and could not make his exit. I was his deliverer. When he emerged, he looked like a ghost, and in feeble accents told me of why he had gone into solitude, which, as I see my partner seated like patience on a monument waiting for me, I shall leave him to be the hero of his own tale; and as I hear, fair Mlle., that you are going to desert Paris and turn your ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... of diffuse cellulitis is severe, and is usually ushered in by a distinct chill or even a rigor, while the temperature rises to 103, 104, or 105 F. The pulse is proportionately increased in frequency, and is small, feeble, and often irregular. The face is flushed, the tongue dry and brown, and the patient may become delirious, especially during the night. Leucocytosis is present in cases of moderate severity; but in severe cases the virulence ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... English church was the natural fruit of long memories and traditions of outrages inflicted by both these; its influence was now about to be powerfully manifested in the overthrow of the English power and its feeble church establishments in the colonies. At the opening of the War of Independence the Presbyterian Church, reunited since the schism of 1741, numbered one hundred and seventy ministers in seventeen presbyteries; but its weight of influence was out of all ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... having, as he himself declares, to walk seldom less than ten miles a day, and frequently more; and this exercise was continued during the whole period of the experiment. His health for two years previously had been very feeble, arising, as he supposed, from a diseased spleen; which organ is at this time enlarged, and somewhat indurated. His digestive powers have always been good, and he had been in the habit of making his meals at times entirely of ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... is uncommonly glad to see you," John answered, with that feeble jocosity in which we are all apt to indulge when at length a great weight is lifted ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... or the threat of endless and unmeaning travel through waste and perilous places. But in such visions the wise man will put but little confidence, content, in a sober and cautious spirit, with a full consciousness of his feeble powers of foresight and the narrow limits of his activity, to deal as they arise with the problems ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... sheds—houses they were not—which were on either side of our path; only here and there, a single lamp shed a sickly light upon the dismal and intersecting lanes (though lane is too lofty a word), through which our footsteps woke a solitary sound. Sometimes this feeble light was altogether withheld, and I could scarcely catch even the outline of my companion's muscular frame. However, he strode on through the darkness, with the mechanical rapidity of one to whom every stone is familiar. I listened eagerly for the sound of the watchman's voice, in vain—that ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... seed of Assaracus, and brave Asilas, and Messapus, tamer of horses, brood of Neptune: then each on signal given retired to his own ground; they plant their spears in the earth and lean their shields against them. Mothers in eager abandonment, and the unarmed crowd and feeble elders beset towers and house-roofs, or stand at the ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... be done at once. I turned to Mrs. Brown. I had great reliance in her maternal instincts: I had that still greater reliance common to our sex in the general tender-heartedness of pretty women. But I confess I was alarmed. Yet, with a feeble smile, I tried to introduce the subject with classical ease and lightness. I even said, "If Shakspeare's Athenian clown, Mrs. Brown, believed that a lion among ladies was a dreadful thing, what must"—But here I broke down; for Mrs. Brown, with the awful intuition of her sex, I saw at ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... electric lamps, but after a time she found the passage of it not particularly easy. Some repairs to the tramway lines were going on higher up, and she narrowly escaped various pitfalls in the shape of trenches and holes in the roadway, very insufficiently marked by feeble lamps. But the stir in her blood drove her on; so did the strangeness of this white darkness, suffused with moonlight, yet in this immediate neighbourhood of the Falls, impenetrable. She was impatient to get through it; to breathe ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... atom scarcely perceptible in the hand, and lost to view when it falls into the earth. Yet there lay the seed of eternal life—thence sprang the stem on which all the saved of mankind shall grow as branches. Israel was feeble among the nations—a little child writhing in the grasp of imperial Rome; Judea and Galilee, with the heathenish Samaria between, constituted his beat throughout the brief period of his public ministry. The range ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... exhibit shows the same wonderful energy and advancement. There is a compulsory educational law and twenty-two per cent. of the children attend school. There are schools for the blind, deaf and feeble-minded, and a display of all their excellent methods of education, from kindergarten ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... things, was happy enough. Her education had not taught her to expect great things. She went forth to her work in the morning with a light heart. Merry as a cricket, she forgot in the sunshine all the ominous forebodings of her feeble old mother. It so chanced, however, that Absalom's master could not find her employment at that season, and she therefore worked on a farm at a little distance. Madge saw little of Absalom, except at night, and then he was tired and went early to bed. Her restless spirit could ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... another illustration of how all science ultimately finds practical application. You probably have forgotten that when two half-rings of dissimilar metals are joined together and one is suddenly heated or chilled, there is produced at the opposite connecting point a feeble current which will flow until the junctures are both at the same temperature. You might call this a thermo-electric thermometer, or a telethermometer, or a microthermometer, or any of a ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... time indeed I came upon a small but growing sect who believed, after a fashion, in the immortality of the soul and the resurrection from the dead; they taught that those who had been born with feeble and diseased bodies and had passed their lives in ailing, would be tortured eternally hereafter; but that those who had been born strong and healthy and handsome would be rewarded for ever and ever. Of moral qualities or conduct ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... from what they read, they take more delight in the actual stories, and in the strange and unlooked-for issues of events than in the doctrines implied; therefore, besides reading these narratives, they are always in need of pastors or church ministers to explain them to their feeble intelligence. ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... simple and shrinking thing; but he—why does he wait and hold back who was so bold for her just now, but now in her presence is cowardly? God! whence comes this fear, that he should shrink from a lonely girl, feeble and timid, simple and mild? It is as if I should see the dog flee before the hare, and the fish chase the beaver, the lamb the wolf, and the dove the eagle. In the same fashion the labourer would forsake his pick with which he strives to earn ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... took possession of her where she sat in the drawing-room, as it were amid the scattered fragments of the ex-member (he still, among the ladies, emitted a feeble radiance). Miss Proctor had always approved of Anne. If Anne had no metropolitan distinction to speak of, she was not in the least provincial. She was something by herself, superior and rare. A little inclined to take herself too seriously, perhaps; but her husband's ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... that he was the more feeble, avoided the second; but he avoided him in a manner which was deeply furious; any one who could have observed him would have discerned in his eyes the sombre hostility of flight, and all the menace ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... laughed would be to give a feeble idea of the peals of laughter that succeeded each other as she stood and looked at me. She would try to control her merriment for a moment, only to break forth afresh, until she was obliged to sit down from sheer ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, July 1878, No. 9 • Various
... Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom. A feeble senate and enervated people cheerfully acquiesced in the pleasing illusion, as long as it was supported by the virtue, or even by the prudence, of the successors of Augustus. It was a motive of self-preservation, not a principle of liberty, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... sat taking her turn, suddenly he asked had he been sick long, and looked at her with a quieted eye. The wandering seemed to drop from him at a stroke, leaving him altogether himself. He lay very feeble, and inquired once or twice of his state and how he came here; nor was anything left in his memory of even coming to the spring where he had ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... step; a man must see the shame and guilt of his having lived such a life. Some people admit there is a spiritual life to live, and that they have not lived it, and they are sorry for themselves, and pity themselves, and think, "How sad that I am too feeble for it! How sad that God gives it to others, but has not given it to me!" They have great compassion upon themselves, instead of saying, "Alas! it has been our unfaithfulness, our unbelief, our disobedience, ...
— The Master's Indwelling • Andrew Murray
... them, together with the surrounding colonies, and leaves them part of an English confederacy; or, if they are able, by effecting a separation singly, and so either merging in the American Union, or keeping up for a few years a wretched semblance of feeble independence, which would expose them more than ever to the intrusion of the surrounding population. I am far from wishing to encourage, indiscriminately, these pretensions to superiority on the part of any particular race; but while ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... with feeble steps, and leaning on two men, to the infirmary; and General Rolleston ordered a cup of coffee, lighted a cigar and sat cogitating over this strange business and asking himself how he could get rid of this young madman and yet befriend ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... fourth day was cooler; the kitten hoisted its tail for the first time in their acquaintance, and betrayed a feeble interest in the flight of a white dusk-moth that came hovering around ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... his chair, with partially opened eyes, the white-washed and dingy Mr. BUMSTEAD managed to get off his hat, covering himself with a bandanna handkerchief and innumerable old pieces of paper and cloth, as he did so, from head to foot; made a feeble effort to throw it at the aged lawyer; and then, chair and all, tumbled forward with a crash to the rug, where he lay in ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 22, August 27, 1870 • Various
... too feeble," said he, placing his right hand on his heart, and rolling his eyes in a way which almost always makes a woman laugh when she, in cold blood, sees such a look. "A lover! A lover? Say a ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... Mongolian, with his high cheek bones set on a broad face, and his compressed, unintellectual, pig-like eyes; or encounter, in the Indian Archipelago or the Australian interior, the pitiably low Alforian races, with their narrow, retreating foreheads, slim, feeble limbs, and baboon-like faces. Or, finally, passing westward, we find the large-jawed, copper-colored Indians of the New World, vigorous in some of the northern tribes as animals, though feeble as men, but gradually sinking in southern ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... mankind in right and wrong, and for the customs and habits which the republic of humanity has established for better assistance in the paths of virtue—as if, forsooth, such were vulgar because common, and to be despised by the mighty because useful to the feeble. This is not the proper spirit for the satirist. If he wields his pen in support of such a theory he will do more harm than good. A conventionality is not necessarily bad or contemptible merely as such. Not a promiscuous and indiscriminate slashing, but a careful pruning is the proper ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... walked along the weed-framed flags to the arched front door, by the side of which hung the rusty and broken fragments of a bell, at which he pulled for some moments in vain. To all appearances the place was entirely deserted. No one answered his shout, or the wheezy summons of the cracked and feeble bell. He passed along the front, barely out of reach of the spray which a strong west wind was bringing from seaward, looked in through deserted windows till he came at last to a great crack in the walls, through which he stepped into a ruined apartment. It was thus ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... seemed like a sanctuary in which some mysterious rite was being performed. But suddenly the silence was broken by shrieks so passionate and acute that all the earlier ones were only remembered as feeble lamentations. ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... and entered the Spanish capital a thoughtless, reckless woman, fully determined to follow her own inclinations, without regard to the consequences. Her beauty made an immediate impression upon the feeble mind of her consort; but she spurned his advances, made a jest of his pathetic passion for her, and was soon deep in a life of dissipation. Mariana, as the older woman, might have checked this impulsive nature; ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... John Humpleby's daughter, of Liphook, who expected, at least, to have stood up next after my Lady Maria. Then, after the minuets, came country dances, the music being performed by a harp, fiddle, and flageolet, perched in a little balcony, and thrumming through the evening rather feeble and melancholy tunes. Take up an old book of music, and play a few of those tunes now, and one wonders how people at any time could have found the airs otherwise than melancholy. And yet they loved and frisked and laughed and courted to that sad accompaniment. ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... growing very feeble, was garrulously comfortable before the fire in Nancy McVeigh's kitchen. She was in a happy frame of mind, as her worldly anxieties were now very much a dream of the past. Nancy herself, with her strong, resolute face, her kindly eyes and tall gaunt frame, enrobed ...
— Nancy McVeigh of the Monk Road • R. Henry Mainer
... so long when I was in a passion and tried to hit you, and the more I raged the more you held me out, and laughed, till I came round and thought how stupid I was to attack such a giant as you, when I was only a poor feeble boy?" ...
— Marcus: the Young Centurion • George Manville Fenn
... held the lamp down, its feeble rays showing that he was upon a broad stone laid across one of the old mine-shafts, one of those close by the ancient furnace we had discovered on our first visit. On this he now halted for a moment, partly from curiosity, partly to draw ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... to open wide the doors which had been locked and barred by the glorious revolution; and that Great Britain, the bulwark of the World, the Rock which alone had withstood the sweeping flood, the ebbs and flows of Democracy and Tyranny, was herself feeble, disjointed, and almost on the eve of ruin. So, at least, it was represented by her antagonist in argument, Childe Harold, whose sentiments, partly perhaps for the sake of argument, grew deeper and darker in proportion to ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... operation. The greater part of this correspondence is in cipher. But portions of it that are not thus written are highly interesting, and give evidence that Mrs. Prevost possessed a cultivated mind. Her health was very feeble, and continued so, after she became the wife of Colonel Burr, until her decease. Some extracts from her letters ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... his authority increased, but he has his crime doubled. Therefore can it be imagined, if this be true, that He will suffer this great gift of government, the greatest, the best, that was ever given by God to mankind, to be the plaything and the sport of the feeble will of a man, who, by a blasphemous, absurd, and petulant usurpation, would place his own feeble, contemptible, ridiculous will in the place of the Divine ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... realize I hadn't ever really lived. Just been a tail-ender who had 'gone the pace'. Hadn't even had a beginning. Was it too late to start over again? Probably." His voice came in crisp accents. "But it was a last chance—a feeble one—a straw to the drowning," he laughed. "That sounds absurd to you but I don't know how to explain ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... in the villages I passed through? Indeed the children appear to be nipt in the bud, having neither the graces nor charms of their age. And this, I am persuaded, is much more owing to the ignorance of the mothers than to the rudeness of the climate. Rendered feeble by the continual perspiration they are kept in, whilst every pore is absorbing unwholesome moisture, they give them, even at the breast, brandy, salt fish, and every other crude substance which air and exercise ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... the corpse—but not the tranquil statue I had seen it last. Its knees were both raised, and one of its little hands drawn up and clenched near its throat, as if in a feeble but agonised struggle to force up the superincumbent mass. The eyes, that I had last seen closed, were now open, and the face no longer serenely pale, but ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... had descended on the forest many hours before, so many in fact that the camp fire had sunk to a feeble red glow, and the dying embers were already circled by a ring of dead white ash. The breeze was crooning softly through the branches of the trees, singing weird chanties to itself. In between the murmurs of the wind there came ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... fearful her words might reach ears for which they were not designed, she spoke them in a voice so feeble, that her cousin, for whom they were intended, lost the consolation they ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... the corner of his empty third-class carriage, peering out of the window, in which he could see only the reflection of the feeble gas-lamp. There was no doubt about it, however—they were moving. The first stage of his journey had commenced. The blessed sense of motion, after so long waiting, at first soothed and then exhilarated him. In a few moments he became ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... my conviction, after I had shouted myself hoarse and feeble. The sea-sickness had yielded for a time to the more powerful throes of despair; but the physical malady returned again, and, acting in conjunction with my mental misery, produced such agony as I never before endured. I yielded to it; my energies ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... photographer in Paris, at the time of his first visit there, thinking it might be a help in the prosecution of his scheme, and now he was always trying to get some photographs of the scenes among which he camped. They were generally very poor and feeble, the weather being so often unpropitious, and the process (paper process) so imperfect and tedious. Still, it was the means of giving pleasure to our relations and friends by acquainting them with ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... How feeble, indeed, is our faith, how wavering our hope, how insufficient our love of God and our neighbor. They need ...
— The Excellence of the Rosary - Conferences for Devotions in Honor of the Blessed Virgin • M. J. Frings
... of Christians. Against the purple background of the hangings of the baldacchino, between the wing-like drapery on either side, enclosing, as it were, a brasier of glory, he assumed real majesty of aspect. He was no longer the feeble old man with the slow, jerky walk and the slender, scraggy neck of a poor ailing bird. The simious ugliness of his face, the largeness of his nose, the long slit of his mouth, the hugeness of his ears, the conflicting jumble of his withered features disappeared. In that waxen countenance ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... have made up your mind," cried the lady hysterically, who knew from a twelve years' experience that John Temple's made-up mind was like an adamantine wall to all her feeble missiles. ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... the cold has gone again, I continue to keep well in body, and already I begin to walk a little more. My head is still a very feeble implement, and easily set a-spinning; and I can do nothing in the way of work beyond reading books that may, I hope, be of some use ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... used by Mr. De Dosme on his yacht comes from Comaille, near Antun. The price of it is quite low, and, seeing the feeble consumption (from 33 to 45 lb. for the yacht's boiler), it competes advantageously with the coal that Mr. De Dosme was ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 623, December 10, 1887 • Various
... up that concealing cloud were growing more feeble. Then Shann heard the triumphant squall from Togi, saw her brown body still on the torn tail just above the forking. The wolverine used her claws to hitch her way up the spine of the sea monster, heading for the mountain of blood spouting from behind the head. Fork-tail ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... the door. In her hand, she has a bouquet of violets, freshly gathered. A subdued smile lights up her face. As soon as she looks in, her features become distorted with horror. She takes half a step backwards, holding her hand before her eyes, as if to ward off a blow. A feeble cry, filled with pain, as if torn by force from the throat is expressed ...
— Hadda Padda • Godmunder Kamban
... Day-kau-ray. No one could tell her age, but all agreed that she must have seen upwards of a hundred winters. Her eyes dimmed, and almost white with age—her face dark and withered, like a baked apple—her voice tremulous and feeble, except when raised in fury to reprove her graceless grandsons, who were fond of playing her all sorts of mischievous tricks, indicated the very great age she must ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... though regarded with reverence, must not be allowed to become old or feeble, lest, with the diminishing vigour of the ruler, the cattle should sicken, and fail to bear increase, the crops should rot in the field and men die in ever growing numbers. One of the signs of failing energy is the King's inability to ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... she is in the Southern States. Allowing herself to believe that the condition of the negroes was not so deplorable as she had supposed, she even began to extenuate the institution of slavery by arguments too transparently feeble to call for detailed confutation. It is true, she says, that slavery is an evil to-day, but to-morrow it will be a boon to humanity, and a boon to the negro world. Why? Because the American negro, enlightened by the teachings of Christianity through ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... the understanding of the later more refined spiritual life, as in turn this latter throws light on its crude predecessors. It is no disparagement to the higher forms of thought that they have grown from feeble beginnings, and it does not detract from the historical value of primitive life that we must decline to credit it with depth and refinement. Every phase and every stadium of human experience has its value, and the higher stages must ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... before died only of old age, now poisoned by the breath of the monsters, fell sick in the morning of life, with the brightness of youthful hope in their eye, and the down of unripe years on their cheek. The hair now often grew grey ere the knee became feeble; the teeth rotted out while there was enough to put between them; the eye often failed to see the beautiful objects, and the ear to drink in the soft sounds, which the Great Master of all created for the food of each. The heart now grew sometimes to be trembling and irresolute, ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... into the gravel with vexation, and Mrs. Rolleston attempted a feeble remonstrance. "The children will be disappointed if Cecil goes away,"—which sentiment ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... consequence of the exhaustion which naturally ensued from it; at all events, in the course of ten or eleven months the St. John's dancers were no longer to be found in any of the cities of Belgium. The evil, however, was too deeply rooted to give way altogether to such feeble attacks. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... intended as a mirror for the rulers of the time. "Nothing," says he, "gains estimation for a prince like great enterprises. Our own age has furnished a splendid example of this in Ferdinand of Aragon. We may call him a new king, since from a feeble one he has made himself the most renowned and glorious monarch of Christendom; and, if we ponder well his manifold achievements, we must acknowledge all of them very great, and ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... group of thatched cottages—scarcely more than huts—whose inhabitants were all afield at their work, excepting a poor blind man, attended by a little ragged boy, who sat on a stone by the wayside, apparently to solicit alms from those who passed by. Although he seemed to be extremely aged and feeble, he was chanting a sort of lament over his misfortunes, and an appeal to the charity of travellers, in a loud, whining, yet vigorous voice; promising his prayers to those who gave him of their substance, and assuring them that they should surely ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... he in a feeble tone, falling back in his chair. And then again, in a louder tone of dismay—"A girl!" He pauses again, and now again gives way to the fear that is destroying ...
— A Little Rebel - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... with those kindly eyes! After a while she said: "Now I shall put on my coat and hat, and we shall walk over to Emerson's house. I am almost afraid to promise that you will see him. He sees scarcely any one now. He is feeble, and—" She did not finish the sentence. "But we'll walk ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... his patron's walk, that he saw and heard the men who had governed the great world—measured himself with them, looking up from his silent corner, gauged their brains, weighed their wits, turned them, and tried them, and marked them. Ah, what platitudes he must have heard! what feeble jokes! what pompous commonplaces! what small men they must have seemed under those enormous periwigs, to the swarthy, uncouth, silent Irish secretary. I wonder whether it ever struck Temple that that Irishman was his master? ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... have been an anomalous circumstance if no such cases had occurred, for different individuals of the same species, namely, of Solanum dulcamara (Dutrochet, tom. xix. p. 299), revolve and twine in two directions: this plant, however; is a most feeble twiner. Loasa aurantiaca (Leon, p. 351) offers a much more curious case: I raised seventeen plants: of these eight revolved in opposition to the sun and ascended from left to right; five followed the ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... tell you the truth, I am a little on the shady side of extreme youth—old enough to be through with my juvenile indiscretions—ha! ha!" (The laugh decidedly forced and feeble). "I am a little over ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... as that. Always it led on. They could see it; they could see its direction; that was all. Tireless it ran on and on and on. For all they knew the Indian, hearty and confident in his wilderness strength, might be watching them at every moment, laughing at the feeble thirty feet their pain bought them, gliding on swiftly in an hour farther than they could travel in a day. This possibility persisted until, in their minds, it became the fact. They endowed their enemy with all they themselves lacked; with strength, with swiftness, with the sustenance of ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... his hand to the pulse, and still there seemed to be no sign, till he lifted the fingers up a little and drew a catching breath, for there was certainly a feeble throbbing sensible. ...
— Syd Belton - The Boy who would not go to Sea • George Manville Fenn
... afforded no prospect of a clue. It was traced on ruled lines, in the cramped, conventional, copy-book character technically termed "small hand." It was feeble and faint, and defaced by blots, but had ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... wail of a lost soul—all this, and more—and thinking your soul, too, is about to shake off its mortal coil and take its flight with the thousands that have just gone, are going, and the many more to follow before the rising of the next sun—all this is too much for a feeble pen like ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... into a feeble vein of humor] I greatly doubt whether she has as much money as y o u ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... she cried; "you may do what you please with our belongings and with Captain Marchand's ship, but my husband is too sick a man to walk a plank. You have not noticed, perchance, that his legs are so feeble that he could scarce mount from the cabin to the deck. It would be impossible for him to walk a plank; and as for my daughter and myself, we know nothing about such a thing, and could ...
— Kate Bonnet - The Romance of a Pirate's Daughter • Frank R. Stockton
... discrepancy between what he wanted and what the world would give him, between the inner man so full of desires and plans, and that outward nature which denied him his desires and thwarted his plans, and before which he felt so feeble and insecure. He also could not but be driven, if his life was to go on at all on any tolerable basis, to believe in something that had to do both with the world outside him and with the world of his heart, in a being ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... chamber which recalled to him so many royal souvenirs, whither had come so many courtiers, the scene of so much flattering homage, alone with a despairing servant, whose feeble soul could afford no support to his own, the king at last yielded to sorrow, and his courage sank to a level with that feebleness, those shadows, and that wintry cold. That king, who was so grand, so sublime in the hour of death, meeting ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Charleston, and Florence, from Salisbury, and Wilmington, from Belle Isle, and Libby Prison, came also, in these later months of the war, thousands of our bravest and noblest heroes, captured by the rebels, the feeble remnant of the tens of thousands imprisoned there, a majority of whom had perished of cold, nakedness, starvation, and disease, in those charnel houses, victims of the fiendish malignity of the ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... debt was appalling and money poured into the national treasury in but feeble currents, the tariffs that replenished it again were borne like a young Hercules by the farming class, though they received but a minimum of its protection. Every influence, therefore, that tends to exalt agriculture as a profession, and farming as a desirable ...
— The Stewardship of the Soil - Baccalaureate Address • John Henry Worst
... flowers that beam in summer air, and of all strong and goodly trees, pleasant to the eyes and good for food,—stately palm and pine, strong ash and oak, scented citron, burdened vine,—there be any so deeply loved, by God so highly graced, as that narrow point of feeble green." ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... existed in each succeeding period, a faint memorial of their former grandeur and luxuriance. Thus every case of apparent retrogression may be in reality a progress, though an interrupted one: when some monarch of the forest loses a limb, it may be replaced by a feeble and sickly substitute. The foregoing remarks appear to apply to the case of the Mollusca, which, at a very early period, had reached a high organization and a great development of forms and species ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... work, tentative, talkative, no clear expression of the whole; and as he tries to expand it further in lines we may study with interest, for the very failures of genius are interesting, he becomes even more feeble. Yet the feebleness is traversed by verses of power, like lightning flashing through a mist upon the sea. The chief thing to say about this direct, detailed work is that he got out of its manner as fast ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... military despot, and, despising the feeble Senate, assumed both the legislative and the executive power. The jurisconsults, in fact, from this reign, begin to treat the emperor as the source of all law, the Senate and the people being no longer considered in the state. But this arbitrary rule, introduced by Severus, is thought ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... great collapse in American business—"the panic of fifty-seven"—led the commercial world to turn to the party in power for some scheme of redress. But their very principles, among which was non-intervention in business, made the Democrats feeble doctors for such a need, and they evaded the situation. The Republicans, with their insistence on positivism in government, had therefore an opportunity to make a new application of the doctrine of governmental ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... behold thy husband!" with a bound My heart went forth to meet thee. He deceived, He lied to me—ah! that's the aptest word— And I believed. Shall I not turn again, And meet him, craft with craft? Paolo, love, Thou'rt dull—thou'rt dying like a feeble fire Before the sunshine. Was it but a blaze, A flash of glory, and a long, ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... Waterloos in my term of generalship and many a time was I a feeble enough officer of "The Kid's Guards" as the kindergarten was translated in Tar Flat by those unfamiliar with the ...
— The Girl and the Kingdom - Learning to Teach • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... The feeble smile that had hitherto kindled the features of Mr. Sapling into a ray of chastened imbecility, was distorted in an ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... without cavil at the arrogance that would exalt the work of men's hands above the work of God. Shall we strive with our pigments to outshine the sun, or teach the secrets of form to the cunning Artificer by whom the world was made? What room for Art, except as the feeble reflex of the splendors ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... soon able to read those works for themselves. All the Deists were rendered into their language, and some were honored with many translators. True, there were replies from the theologians of England immediately upon the appearance of the works of the leading Deists; but many of them were very feeble, the puny blows doing more harm than good. When these rejoinders came to be translated they had almost as deleterious an influence as if they had been panegyrics instead of well-meant thrusts. John Pye Smith says, "Translations ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... degrees of meaning to twenty successive persons, varying in age, character, and culture. Yet the very youngest and feeblest shall understand something of its meaning, while the wisest and oldest shall not have exhausted it. The young and feeble intellect, receiving a formula of truth with suitable explanations of its terms, takes in at once a portion of its meaning and gradually grows into a fuller comprehension of what it has received. A statement ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... of Christ, without exactly knowing why. The philosophers did not teach it him, for they adapted Christianity to their philosophy. Celsus' feeble attack on Christianity had not misled Julian's ripe and cultured intelligence. Eusebius explained his pupil's hatred of Christ in the following way: "He has heathen blood in him, for he comes of Illyrian stock; he does not belong to this sheepfold. Or is his pride so boundless, his envy so ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... the fancy. Dark is less fertile of images than the feeble lustre of the moon. I was alone, and the walls were chequered by shadowy forms. As the moon passed behind a cloud and emerged, these shadows seemed to be endowed with life, and to move. The apartment was open to ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... which he held to his breast as tenderly, I was sure, as young Mrs. Buford was holding the blue bundle in the parlor, and two long plaits hung down over his arm. From between him and the bundle there came a feeble squawking and fluttering of wings. From them all poured rivulets of water, and mingled with the squawks were weak gurgles. As I looked, Matthew stopped and lifted the bundle closer on his breast, disclosing its identity as that of Polly, and buried his face in the soaked hair while they all stood ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... step through all the intricacies of the world feminine, might not serve him perfectly with the ladies of the island. His fever had, it seemed, struck a little blow on his self-confidence, and rendered him so feeble as ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... localau, 5. The Carajas counted by a scale equally rude, and their conception of number seemed equally vague, until contact with the neighbouring tribes furnished them with the means of going beyond their original limit. Their scale shows clearly the uncertain, feeble number sense which is so marked in the interior of South America. It contains wadewo, 1, wadebothoa, 2, wadeboaheodo, 3, wadebojeodo, 4, wadewajouclay, 5, wadewasori, ...
— The Number Concept - Its Origin and Development • Levi Leonard Conant
... had a great effect in breaking the strength of the enemy, and they were much more feeble on the renewal of the war in the spring. The good conduct of the praying Indians had overcome the popular prejudice so much that it was decided to employ them to assist the scanty forces of the English in hunting down the hostile tribes, and Gookin boasts of their having taken and slain more than ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... which he should be compelled to stow himself and his numerous curiosities, he was unequal to the sacrifice. On the other hand, he knew an entire state-room would now fall to his share, and this self-indulged and feeble-minded young man preferred his immediate comfort, and the gratification of his besetting ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... this fleet. 'Tis an inferior against a superior fleet. Therefore the greatest skill and address is requisite to counteract the designs of the enemy, to watch and seize the favourable opportunity for action, and to catch the advantage of making the effort at some or other feeble part of the enemy's line; or if such opportunities don't offer, to hover near the enemy, keep him at bay, and prevent his attempting anything but at risk and hazard; to command their attention, and oblige them to think of nothing but being ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... of scientific knowledge, the man who has both a considerable brain of his own to call on and the mightiest brains in existence, all coordinated for perfect, instant effectiveness. Why, with these brains working for him, he can become omnipotent; there can be but feeble resistance to his steps toward universal power! Only chance, unpredictable chance, always at work, always powerful, can defeat him—and my audacity allows me to disregard ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... that marriage, which gave me the opportunity of making your acquaintance—the marriage of your daughter with M. Davarande. You and I, madame, you, with the devotion of a mother, and I—well, with just the feeble insight of a humble priest—brought about a truly Christian marriage, a marriage which has satisfied the needs of the dear child as regards her religion and her affection and which was also in accordance with her social position. ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... night to the man and walked forward to Alderman Crood's door. It was like the house to which it gave entrance—very high and broad, a massive affair, topped by a glass transom, behind which a light, very dim and feeble, was burning. Brent felt for and rang a bell, and heard it ring somewhere far off in the house. Then he waited; waited so long that he was about to ring again, when he heard a bolt being withdrawn inside the big door; then another. Each creaked in a fashion that suggested small ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... assistance in the grand work I have in contemplation. The time is at hand, the cause of equality will soon triumph; the abject slaves now hold up their heads; I have electrified them with my speeches, but I am getting old and feeble; I require my son to leave my mantle to, as one prophet did to another, and then I will, like him, ascend in ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... of Decheance became louder. But as yet there were only few cries of Vive la Republique!—such a cry was not on the orders issued by Lebeau. At midnight the crowd round the hall of the Corps Legislatif is large: cries of La Dechaeance loud—a few cries, very feeble, of ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... my heroic fathers, if this feeble arm cannot redeem your heritage; if the foul boar must still wallow in thy sweet vineyard, Israel, at least I will not disgrace you. No! let me perish. The house of David is no more; no more our sacred seed ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... the night; and ably did the tempter perform his task. An increase of devotion and respect was skilfully blended with an apparent anxiety and alarm, which flattered the self-esteem and vanity of Louis, at the same time that they renewed all the terrors of the previous evening. His feeble remonstrances were overruled; his filial misgivings were stifled; and the favourite at length quitted his presence satisfied that he would not seek to ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... forgotten all he has said to me," she thought. In a feeble, expressionless voice ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... and the eyes opened with a piteous, appealing expression in their depths. It was apparent that there was something he wanted to say, something he had to say before he died. He gasped a dozen words or more in a tongue utterly unknown to Barnes, who bent closer to catch the feeble effort. It was he who now shook his head; with a groan the sufferer closed his eyes in despair. He choked and coughed violently ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... was a woman of feeble intelligence and violent temper; prompt to take offense, and not, for the most part, easy to appease. But Mrs. Karnegie being—as we all are in our various degrees—a compound of many opposite qualities, possessed ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... was on his side using all his diplomatic ability to gain help for the oppressed Netherlanders from France and England. But Charles IX had his own difficulties and was in too feeble health (he died May, 1574) to take any decided step, and Queen Elizabeth, though she connived at assistance being given to the rebel cause on strictly commercial terms, was not willing either to show open hostility to Philip or ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... really good aurist. I am always nervous about ear-troubles. Fancy your having to shout your love to him! In a letter written about two weeks ago, Miss Lyman says, "How am I? Longing for a corner in which to stop trying to live, and lie down and die," and adds that she is now too feeble to travel. I suppose she is liable to break down at any moment, but I do hope she won't be left to go abroad. I judge from what you say of Mr. H. that he is slipping off. I always look at people who are going to heaven ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... mutiny and assassination there were also some feeble attempts at negotiation to characterize the Ernestian epoch at Brussels. The subject hardly needs more than ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... brother,' said the monk, in his feeble voice, as he drew a lantern from beneath his cloak. You may not accompany us; but have no fear. The ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... before—such a town as one sees in a foreign land, built with quaint roofs and gables and curiously coloured. As he crossed the bridge he met a woman who stared at him in amazement. He raised his head to speak, but he had lost the power of utterance. The woman waited; and at last with a feeble stammering speech he asked her the name of the place. She shook her head and said she did not understand his words, and with a look of pity she went on ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... there were only a few worshippers—some old men mumbling their rosaries, and some women crouched on their heels before the shrine. A solitary lamp hung from a silver chain in the sanctuary, casting a feeble ray amid the premature gloom. An awful silence reigned throughout the aisles. Opposite the place where Zulma was stationed stood a square box through the bars of which faintly gleamed the white surplice of the ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... into custody and led her away, she smiled and gave me her delicious hand. That I caught a view of myself in a mirror, looking perfectly imbecile and idiotic. That I retired to bed in a most maudlin state of mind, and got up in a crisis of feeble infatuation. ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... our return to Coolgardie. We had four routes open to us—either the road to Derby and thence by steamer: the road to Derby and thence along the coastal telegraph line: the way we had come: and an entirely new route, taking our chances of the desert. The first was dismissed as feeble, the second as useless, and the third as idiotic. Therefore the fourth remained, and though it was natural enough for me to wish to win distinction in the world of travel (and I daresay this was the motive that inspired me), surely it speaks well for them indeed, that ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... were fairly on their way and had shaken down into something like composure, that the history of the kitten could be told. It then appeared that David and Ambrose had heard feeble cries proceeding from a retired corner behind a caravan. They had at once left Jane, and gone to ...
— Penelope and the Others - Story of Five Country Children • Amy Walton
... Weak and feeble states like those of Central America may not feel themselves able to assert and vindicate their rights. The case would be far different if expeditions were set on foot within our own territories to make ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Buchanan • James Buchanan
... am going to be as serious as ever I was in my life, when I warn you how you breathe such a suspicion as that the Hopes are not happy. Remember you have no evidence whatever about the matter. When you offered Mr Hope your congratulations, he was feeble from illness, and probably too much exhausted at the moment to show any feeling, one way or another. And as for this crying fit of Mrs Hope's, no one is better able than you, my dear, to tell how many causes there may be for ladies' tears besides being ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... heard a feeble rap on her door. At the threshold stood the wheelchair to which her father was confined like a slave chained to his seat in the galley. She caught a brief impression of a pair of eyes beyond him: the eyes of Eleanor Kent, full of the message of strength; eyes ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... Arthur's feeble, fretful voice, and in a minute the poetry had all gone out of her head, and she was by her boy's side, feeding him, jesting with him, and planning how the first day of his convalescence should be celebrated by a grand festival, inviting the two ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... quite so bad as that, you know," said Freeman, with a feeble laugh; and, to prove it, he blundered off the saddle, and came down on the ground with a thwack. He picked himself up, however, and recollecting that he had a flask with brandy in it, he felt for it, found it intact, and, with an inarticulate ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... late years—how often he never let his mistress know. In early days he had been welcomed by the servants and treated with the respect due Miss Ann Peyton's coachman, but the older generation of colored people had died off or had become too aged and feeble to "make the young folks stand around." As for the white people, Uncle Billy couldn't make up his mind what was the matter with them. Wasn't Miss Ann the same Miss Ann who had been visiting ever since her own beautiful home, Peyton, had been burned ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... a trembling voice, at the same time hitting the building a very feeble blow with his fence picket. "Come out, and be quick about it. There are a dozen of us ...
— The Boy Trapper • Harry Castlemon
... to me?" she asked, and the bare utterance of the words kindled a feeble spark of hope within her, ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... his back and after giving a few feeble twitches of his great legs, remained without life, his legs pointing stiffly ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... than correctness of statement. In a late magazine article it is stated that the organization known as the Patrons of Husbandry "was originally borrowed from an association which for many years had maintained a feeble existence in a community of Scotch farmers in North Carolina." This statement has no foundation in fact. The order is not the out-growth directly, or even indirectly, of any pre-existing organization. It is the result, so far as it is possible to trace impulses to their source, of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... Mavis, too, would stay there with Jason's mother, and with deep relief the boy saw that the two women seemed drawn to each other closer than ever now. In the early afternoon old Jason limped ahead of him to the barn to show his stock, and for the first time Jason noticed how feeble his grandfather was and how he had aged during his last sick spell. His magnificent old shoulders had drooped, his walk was shuffling, and even the leonine spirit of his bushy brows and deep-set eyes seemed to have lost something of ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... and feet extending, until with a jerk he was at the end of the rope. Then he ought to have died and swung edifyingly, but instead a more terrible thing happened; his head came right off, and down the body went spinning to the sea, feeble, grotesque, fantastic, with the head racing it in ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... abode A fair Phoenician, tall, full-sized, and skill'd In works of elegance, whom they beguiled. While she wash'd linen on the beach, beside 510 The ship, a certain mariner of those Seduced her; for all women, ev'n the wise And sober, feeble prove by love assail'd. Who was she, he enquired, and whence? nor she Scrupled to tell at once her father's home. I am of Sidon,[70] famous for her works In brass and steel; daughter of Arybas, Who rolls in affluence; Taphian pirates thence Stole me returning ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... forth, they asked him if he was coming, and he replied, "Yes, I am coming soon." Those were his parting words to his friends, and his greeting to the Angel of Death.[8] He never left that fireside, and his companions were too feeble to return for him when they found he ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton |
