"Torpid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sweet-breathed morning, with its birds and flowers, is enough to brighten the most torpid thing into animation!" exclaimed Louise, grasping her friend's hand warmly. "You don't know how I love everything and everybody to-day, Mrs. Stanhope," she continued, in a tone of earnest enthusiasm, as she entered the little parlor, still holding the good woman by one hand, while she ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... but is likely to be weakened by adopting it: and if the inducements to an act are not such as are consentaneous to his own feelings and character (where affection or the rights of others are not concerned), it is so much done toward rendering his feelings and character inert and torpid, instead of active ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... suppose all of us have known instances of that sort. Men in my position, with a long life of ministry behind them, can naturally remember many such instances. And this is the outline history of the suicide of a Christian. First secret sin, unsuspected, because the conscience is torpid; then open sin, known to be such, but done nevertheless; then dominant sin, with an enfeebled will and power of resistance; then the abandonment of all pretence or profession of religion. The ladder goes down into the pit, but not to the bottom of the pit. And the man that ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... gives me any joy. I have learned what the bitterness of exile is, in these days; and I never should have known it but for the absence of "Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow,"—I can perfectly appreciate that line of Goldsmith; for it well expresses my own torpid, unenterprising, joyless state of mind and heart. I am like an uprooted plant, wilted and drooping. Life seems so purposeless as not to be worth the trouble of carrying it on ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... permeations of the stomach and duodenum will have to seek other outlets, which is indicated by the putrid smell of the body and a foul breath with finally dyspepsia, and what is usually termed biliousness, torpid liver, etc. ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... been materially worse. My feelings at intervals are of a deadly and torpid kind, or awakened to such a state of unnatural and keen excitement that, only to instance the organ of sight, I find the very blades of grass and the boughs of distant trees present themselves to me with microscopic distinctness. Towards evening I sink into a state of ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... appeared cleanly circular, flattened, biconcave, and without notches, indentations or spheroidal swellings. The white globules changed their shape, taking at intervals the spherical form, and varying their shapes again by delicate expansions. I was not deceived then, it was a torpid man that I had under my eyes, ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... dumb; her torpid conscience suddenly awoke and condemned her; Mrs. Milward, who was immediately leaving Rangoon and had no fear of retaliation, ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... For, by trade, he is a writer of articles, and he earnestly believes that the mental exercise of attempting to produce fiction acts as a healthy influence upon a non-fictionist's style. It stimulates the torpid imagination. It quickens the eye for the vivid touches, the picturesque and the dramatic. It is a groping ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... tracks—sharp, nervous, and wiry—have their histories also. But how rarely we see squirrels in winter! The naturalists say they are mostly torpid; yet evidently that little pocket-faced depredator, the chipmunk, was not carrying buckwheat for so many days to his hole for nothing: was he anticipating a state of torpidity, or providing against the demands of a very active appetite? Red and ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... But this was not to be. Some hidden agency had forced the two ever farther asunder. Moreover, Gnulemah developed rapidly, while Nurse underwent a process of gradual congealment,—her wits and emotions became torpid. Besides this, she was the victim of disfigurement, physical as well as spiritual; while Gnulemah, both naturally and by training, was sensitive to beauty and ugliness. Other surface causes no doubt there were, in addition to the hidden one, which was ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... question of questions to every student of speculative politics at the present hour is—Whither will this portent direct its energies? Will it press onward towards some yet mightier endeavour, or, mastered by some hereditary taint, sink torpid and neglectful, leaving its vast, its practically inexhaustible ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... the first to arrive, and seated torpid in a red satin chair with a gilt back, he gave every appearance of lasting the others out. And symbolizing Bosinney's name 'the big one,' with his great stature and bulk, his thick white hair, his puffy immovable shaven ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... trusty conspirators in all France; at least, as long as our armies are victorious, and organized in their present formidable manner. Should anything happen to our present chief, an impulse may be given to the minds now sunk down, and raise our characters from their present torpid state. But until such an event, we shall remain as we are, indolent but submissive, sacrificing our children and treasures for a cause we detest, and for a man we abhor. I am sorry to say it, but it certainly ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... moral earnestness only, but in a more open intelligence; not merely in a more dogged resolution to work and be silent, but in a ready willingness to use the understanding. The poison of our sins, says Mr. Carlyle in his latest utterance, 'is not intellectual dimness chiefly, but torpid unveracity of heart.' Yes, but all unveracity, torpid or fervid, breeds intellectual dimness, and it is this last which prevents us from seeing a way out of the present ignoble situation. We need light more than heat; ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... Josepha, starting up in her enthusiasm. "It is a general flare-up! It is Sardanapalus! Splendid, thoroughly complete! I may be a hussy, but I have a soul! I tell you, I like a spendthrift, like you, crazy over a woman, a thousand times better than those torpid, heartless bankers, who are supposed to be so good, and who ruin no end of families with their rails—gold for them, and iron for their gulls! You have only ruined those who belong to you, you have sold no one but yourself; and then you have ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... her at the slightest ascent, and the incessant vibrating sound that came from the arteries of her throat was painful to those near her. With heavy feet and enfeebled body, she dragged herself along, as if life were too heavy a burden for her. Her faculties and her senses were so torpid that she swooned for no cause at all, for so small a matter as the fatigue of combing her ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... call this little animal "the Sleeper," because he lies in a torpid state through the long winter and spring, until the weather becomes quite warm. He builds his nest in an old hollow tree, or beneath the bushes, and during the summer lays up a great quantity of nuts or acorns for his winter provender. Dormice ...
— Tame Animals • Anonymous
... striking clocks summoned him remorselessly to rise and work he often reeled with dizziness. It seemed to him that the greatest happiness attainable would be to creep into some dark, warm corner, out of the sight and memory of men, and lie there torpid, with a blessed half-consciousness that death was slowly overcoming him. Of all the sufferings collected into each four-and-twenty hours this of rising to a new ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... the ditch, led each by a grenadier. In the centre of it they turned and kneeled, neither of their eyes being bound. A priest advanced, and seemed to pray with the brown man fervently; another offered spiritual consolation to the Englishman, who seemed now to have rallied his torpid faculties, but he waved him away impatiently, and taking a book from his bosom, seemed to repeat a prayer from it with great fervour. At this very instant of time, Mr Bang caught his eye. He dropped the book on the ground, placed one hand on his heart, while he pointed upwards towards ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... the hours in which he is not writing. He has got to take it easy somehow, and the question is what is he to do. He can't, as a rule, do much in the way of hard exercise. Violent exercise in the open air is pleasant enough, but it leaves the brain torpid and stagnant. A man who really makes a business of writing has got to live through ten or twelve hours of a day when he isn't writing. He can't afford to read very much—at least he can't afford to read authors whom he admires, because they affect his style. There is something ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... bed for Lovedy in a little room within her own, and the undressing and bathing of the poor child had revealed injuries even in a more painful state than those which had been shown to Mr. Grey, shocking emaciation, and most scanty garments. The child was almost torpid, and spoke very little. She was most unwilling to attempt to swallow; however, Rachel thought that some of her globules had gone down, and put much faith in them, and in warmth and sleep; but incessantly occupied, and absolutely sickened ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and character require it should long remain so. Those who strive to introduce many of the European habits and fashions, by displacing our own, do a serious injury to the republic, and deserve censure. An idle person, with good powers of mind, becomes torpid and inactive after a few years of indulgence, and is incapable of making any high effort. Highly important it is, then, to avoid this enemy of mental and moral improvement. I have no wish that you pursue trade; I would rather see you on a ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... death is not unlike that of its companion already described, though the declivity of its channel, and its uniform exposure to sun-heat prevented any considerable portion of its current from becoming torpid, lingering only well up on the Mountain slopes to finish their sculpture and encircle them with a zone of moraine soil for forests and gardens. Nowhere in all this wonderful region will you find more ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... praise relax, nor difficulty fright; Should tempting novelty thy cell refrain, [p]And sloth effuse her opiate fumes in vain; Should beauty blunt on fops her fatal dart, Nor claim the triumph of a letter'd heart; Should no disease thy torpid veins invade, Nor melancholy's phantoms haunt thy shade; Yet hope not life, from grief or danger free, Nor think the doom of man revers'd for thee: Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes, And pause ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... of our sight henceforth. The old Ordnance-Master, as an Imperial General of rank, is needed now for War-Service, if he has any skill that way. In those late months, he was duly in attendance at Philipsburg and the Rhine-Campaign, in a subaltern torpid capacity, like Brunswick-Bevern and the others; ready for work, had there been any: but next season, he expects to have a Division of his own, and to do something considerable.—In regard to Berlin and the Diplomacies, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Time folded his wings and paced wearily along his drowsy path. They who had most cheered the torpid hours were gone. Clancy had sailed on a Spanish barque for Colon, contemplating a cut across the isthmus and then a further voyage to end at Calao, where the fighting was said to be on. Geddie, whose quiet and ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... stammer, and the door reply, The hall wake, yawn, and smile; the torpid stair Will grumble at our feet, the table cry: 'Fetch my belongings for me; I am bare.' A clatter! Something in the attic falls. A ghost has lifted up his robes and fled. The loitering shadows move along the walls; Then silence very slowly lifts his head. ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 • Various
... the woods. I watched them passing from one tree to the other, as the branches met, stirred by the breeze; and having hitherto seen them hanging lazily by their claws to boughs, I was surprised at the rapidity of their movements. I have often heard people assert that the sloth spends his torpid existence in a perpetual state of pain, from the peculiar sighing noise he makes, and the slowness of his movements when placed on the ground. In the first place, I cannot believe that God has created ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... religion, a civilization that is about to die. He is the personification, in fact, of ancient Islam. [Footnote: Islam: the religion of the Mohammedans.] What result can we expect to obtain from an embassy to such a man, who, together with his people, spends his life torpid and motionless among ancient dreams of humanity that have almost disappeared from the surface of the earth? There is not a single point on which we can understand each other; the distance between us is nearly that which ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... weak, and his courage die out, and his zeal become torpid apathy and cowardly wish to shuffle off responsibility and shirk work, who shall stand? The lessons of self-distrust, of the nearness to one another of the most opposite emotions in our weak natures, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... riverside walk at Nevers presents nothing but cheerful bustle and an aspect of prosperity, here you approach the Allier through scenes of squalor and torpid neglect. The poorer inhabitants, too, are very un-French in appearance, wanting that personal tidiness characteristic of their country people in general. An aristocratic place, means an Ultramontane place, and every third man you meet in Moulins wears a soutane. What so ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... occasionally so intense that the human frame can scarcely endure exposure to it for any length of time. When winter has set in nearly every bird disappears, and few wild animals are any longer to be seen; some, like the bear, remain torpid, others change their color to a snowy white, and are rarely observed. Rocks of the softer kinds are often rent asunder, as if with the explosion of gunpowder, by the irresistible expansive power of the frost.[159] Dogs ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... listen. Torpid with comfort and impressed by the sight of the ocean covered with vessels rushing to and fro like wild beasts about their den, they sat speechless, somewhat awed by the soothing and gorgeous sunset. Roland alone talked on without end; he was one of those whom nothing can ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... brightly, and poured in a stream of light through the iron grating of the cell where Peters and his wife lay clasped in each other's arms, not asleep, but torpid, and worn out with extreme suffering. Peters was the first to break the silence, and gently moved Ellen, as he called her by her name. She had not for some time lifted up her head, which was buried in his ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... through the quiet night. The bridge resounds in one continued peal as the coach rolls on without a pause, merely affording the toll-gatherer a glimpse at the sleepy passengers, who now bestir their torpid limbs and snuff a cordial in the briny air. The morn breathes upon them and blushes, and they forget how wearily the darkness toiled away. And behold now the fervid day in his bright chariot, glittering aslant over the waves, nor scorning ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Difficulty fright; Should tempting Novelty thy Cell refrain, And Sloth's bland Opiates shed their Fumes in vain; Should Beauty blunt on Fops her fatal Dart, Nor claim the Triumph of a letter'd Heart; Should no Disease thy torpid Veins invade, Nor Melancholy's Phantoms haunt thy Shade; Yet hope not Life from Grief or Danger free, Nor think the Doom of Man revers'd for thee: Deign on the passing World to turn thine Eyes, And pause awhile from Learning to be ...
— The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and Two Rambler papers (1750) • Samuel Johnson
... rogue! how could Westminster chuse him again To leaven the virtue of these honest men! But the Devil remained till the Break of Day Blushed upon Sleep and Lord Castlereagh:[45] 170 Then up half the house got, and Satan got up With the drowsy to snore—or the hungry to sup:— But so torpid the power of some speakers, 't is said, That they sent even him to ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... country (see these titles), and St Michael, the ocean port for freighting up the Yukon, are the only towns apparently assured of a prosperous future. Wrangell (formerly Fort St Dionysius, Fort Stikine and Fort Wrangell), founded in 1833, is a dilapidated and torpid little village, of some interest in Alaskan history, and of temporary importance from 1874 to 1877 as the gateway to the Cassiar mines in British Columbia. Its inhabitants are chiefly Thlinkit ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... assured them never went far from land. Notwithstanding, they became uneasy at the calmness of the weather, declaring that as the prevailing winds were from the east, and had not power to disturb the torpid stillness of the ocean, there was the risk of perishing amidst stagnant and shoreless waters, and being prevented by contrary winds ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... wiry—have their histories also. But who ever saw squirrels in winter? The naturalist says they are mostly torpid; yet evidently that little pocket-faced depredator, the chipmunk, was not carrying buckwheat for so many days to his hole for nothing;—was he anticipating a state of torpidity, or the demands of a very active appetite? Red and gray squirrels are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... thousands that perished in our late contests with France and Spain, a very small part ever felt the stroke of an enemy; the rest languished in tents and ships, amidst damps and putrefaction; pale, torpid, spiritless, and helpless; gasping and groaning, unpitied among men made obdurate by long continuance of hopeless misery; and were at last whelmed in pits, or heaved into the ocean, without notice and without remembrance. By incommodious encampments ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... food seem held in light esteem by lizards. Their blood need not be highly oxygenated; it nourishes just as well when impure. In temperate climes lizards lie torpid and buried all winter; some species of the tropic deserts sleep peacefully all summer. Their anatomy includes no means for the continuous introduction and expulsion of air; reptilian lungs are little more than closed sacs, without ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... leaders of the Party. Can't remember one of them except BLISSOP, the Secretary of the Association, a chap about my own age, who told me his brother remembered me at Oxford. There was a fellow of that name, I think, who came up in my year, a scrubby-faced reading man. We made hay in his room after a Torpid "rag," which he didn't like. Hope it isn't the same. I said I remembered him well. Dined with TOLLAND; nobody but leaders of the Party present, all as serious as judges, and full of importance. CHORKLE, who drops his "h's" frightfully, asked me "'ow long ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 11, 1891 • Various
... freedom and natural movement of the thoughts. My reason, however, for noticing this peculiarity in Isocrates, is by way of fixing the attention upon the superiority, even artificial ornaments, of downright practical business and the realities of political strife, over the torpid atmosphere of a study or a school. Cicero, long after, had the same passion for numerositas, and the full, pompous rotundity of cadence. But in Cicero, all habits and all faculties were nursed by the daily practice of life and its ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... have been rid of Gregorio, she would have felt almost sure of victory; but as it was, she believed the man absolutely meant to baffle her, partly out of a spiteful rivalry, partly because his master's torpid indolence could be used to his own advantage. She was absolutely certain that his sneering tone of remark made her husband doubly disinclined to let any religious book be near, or to permit her to draw him to ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... think any thing is better than to be torpid. I'd rather know I could never hope for happiness hereafter, than not have blood enough really to hope ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... tops of the trees. A pudgy muskrat, swimming with head up, was moved to sidle off briskly as he met a cotton-mouth moccasin snake, so fat and swollen with summer poison that it looked almost like a legless lizard as it moved along the surface of the water in a series of slow torpid s's. Directly above the head of either of the waiting assassins a compact little swarm of midges hung, holding to a ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... is our taste, that if the most torpid dunce this fruitful age can boast of, could by some artful imposture prepossess the public, that the most insipid of all his own bread-sauce compositions, to be published next winter, was a piece MILTON's, or any other celebrated ...
— Essays on Taste • John Gilbert Cooper, John Armstrong, Ralph Cohen
... (hirundines rusticae) being found in a torpid state during the winter in the Isle of Wight or any part of this country, I never heard any such account worth attending to. But a clergyman, of an inquisitive turn, assures me, that when he was a great boy, some workmen, ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... forage upon the country. The farmers waited until winter before they made an attack upon this stronghold; and then they came and dug up the ground, knowing that these reptiles always pass the cold season in a torpid ...
— Stories of New Jersey • Frank Richard Stockton
... to the pavement, where something lay huddled against the wall of the house, and the coachman, torpid on his box behind the fidgety horses, started at ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... strength of which she had lately been conscious forsook her; all her body was oppressed with languor, her mind miserably void. No book made appeal to her, and the sight of those which she had bought from home was intolerable. She lay upon a couch, her limbs torpid, burdensome. Eleanor's company ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... month undoubtedly presents fewer floral attractions than any other in the whole year. Everything is in a torpid state of existence, and the combined forces of frost, snow, wind, and rain render December unpleasant both indoors and out. The only kinds of vegetation which seem to flourish just now are the insignificant, but wonderfully ...
— Little Folks (December 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... the winged insects, and they are not so originally. They acquire that form and that inimitable brilliancy by progressive changes. The slow and creeping caterpillar worm of to day, passes in a few days to a torpid figure, and a state resembling death; and in the next change comes forth in all the miniature magnificence of life, a splendid butterfly. No resemblance of the former creature remains; every thing is changed; all his powers are new, and life ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... pages drove together in an open carriage, and received quite an ovation from the crowd, but no one had thought of providing them with overcoats. Silk stockings, satin knee-breeches and lace ruffles are very inadequate protection against an Arctic blast, and we arrived at the Cathedral stiff and torpid with cold. From the colour of our faces, we might have been five little "Blue Noses" from Nova Scotia. The ceremony was very gorgeous and imposing, and I trust that the pages were not unduly clumsy. Every one ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... settling of the slime of those turbid rivers into the polluted sea, and the gaining upon its deep and fresh waters of the lifeless, impassable, unvoyageable plain, how little could we have understood the purpose with which those islands were shaped out of the void, and the torpid waters enclosed with their desolate walls of sand! How little could we have known, any more than of what now seems to us most distressful, dark, and objectless, the glorious aim which was then in the mind of Him in whose hand are all the corners of the earth! How little imagined ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... plantation, I ride every day, and play on the piano just enough not to forget my notes, et voila! Once a week I go to town, to execute commissions, or return visits, and on Sundays I go to church; and so my life slides away from me. My head and heart, however, are neither as torpid nor as empty as my hours; and I often find, as others have done, that external stagnation does not necessarily produce internal repose. Occasionally, but seldom, people come from town to see us; and sometimes, but not often, small offices ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... so great be borne away uncontested? Where now prithee is divine Eryx, thy master of fruitless fame? where thy renown over all Sicily, and those spoils hanging in thine house?' Thereat he: 'Desire of glory is not gone, nor ambition checked by fear; but torpid age dulls my chilly blood, and my strength of limb is numb and outworn. If I had what once was mine, if I had now that prime of years, yonder braggart's boast and confidence, it had taken no prize of goodly bullock to allure me; nor heed I these gifts.' So he spoke, and on that ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... Importance does not depend on rarity so much as on authenticity. The massacre of a distant tribe, which is heard through the report of others, falls far below the heart-shaking effect of a murder committed in our presence. Our sympathy with the unknown victim may originally have been as torpid as that with the unknown tribe; but it has been kindled by the swift and vivid suggestions of details visible to us as spectators; whereas a severe and continuous effort of imagination is needed to call up the kindling suggestions of the ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... he had reached the right and rear of the Union line; while Hooker complacently viewed the situation from his comfortable headquarters at the Chancellor house, apparently in a semi-torpid state, retaining just enough activity to initiate manoeuvres, which, under the circumstances, were the most ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... me of all my faculties: Lesbia, when once in thy presence, I have not left the power to tell my distracting passion: my tongue becomes torpid; a subtle flame creeps through my veins; my ears tingle in deafness; my eyes are veiled with darkness." Catullus, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... The acceleration of my torpid pulse in the keen fight with the wind, whose violence was almost equal to that of a tornado, and the familiar faces of the bright stars above me, I felt as a blessed relief. I ran not knowing whither, and ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... things just served to stir the torpid sense, Nor pain nor pity in my bosom raised. Memory, though slow, returned with strength: and thence Dismissed, again on open day I gazed, At houses, men, and common light, amazed. The lanes I sought, and as the sun retired, Came, where beneath ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth
... of pain or pleasure.—I know: only the outline of a dull life, that long since, with thousands of dull lives like its own, was vainly lived and lost: thousands of them, massed, vile, slimy lives, like those of the torpid lizards in yonder stagnant water-butt.—Lost? There is a curious point for you to settle, my friend, who study psychology in a lazy, dilettante way. Stop a moment. I am going to be honest. This is what I want you to do. I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed to your clean ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... in the best mood for sight-seeing, and Paris was not sitting up for company; in fact, she was "not at home." Remembering all this, I must say that the whole appearance of the city was dull and dreary. London out of season seemed still full of life; Paris out of season looked vacuous and torpid. The recollection of the sorrow, the humiliation, the shame, and the agony she had passed through since I left her picking her way on the arm of the Citizen King, with his old riflard over her, rose before me sadly, ominously, as I looked upon the high board fence which surrounded the ruins ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... large enough to admit his hand, and took out the nest with the animals rolled up in it, put the whole into a bag made of bark, and brought it down. They actually reached the bottom sometimes without being disturbed. It was very wet, cold weather, and they may have been somewhat torpid; but I started a large brown rat at the foot of one of these trees, which ran up the stem into a hole, and four dormice were out in a minute from it, apparently in terror of their large friend. There were no traces of ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... son of the Fiend, as was reported, and one who had cheated his father at dice when gambling with him for his own soul; Giambattista Cibo, who in mockery took the name of Innocent, and into whose torpid veins the blood of three lads was infused by a Jewish doctor; Sigismondo Malatesta, the lover of Isotta, and the lord of Rimini, whose effigy was burned at Rome as the enemy of God and man, who strangled Polyssena ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... the great Atlantic, see God take The mist from woe's white mountain, spring and stream, The breath of man in frost, the spiral lean From roof-cracked caves where, though the heart may break, The soul will not lie torpid, like the snake,— And battle smoke. On them He breathes with dream And, Lo! an Angel with a sword agleam 'Twix the Old World and New for ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... combed, had carefully removed his gray hairs, but he could not rid himself of his wizened air. The puny little man of law, tightly buttoned into his clothes, reminded you of a torpid viper; for if hope had brought a spark of life into his magpie eyes, his face was icily rigid, and so well did he assume an air of gravity, that an ambitious public prosecutor could not have ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... not so entirely torpid as it appeared, nor was she so absolutely self-absorbed. One idea was rising day by day out of the dark confusion of her thoughts, and that was the goodness and generosity of her lover. In this appreciation there ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... theory. We are commonly told that the conscientious man is always contented and happy,—satisfied with himself, and at peace with God. But facts contradict this theory. The conscientious man is apt to be very much dissatisfied with himself,—much, more so than the man whose conscience is torpid and indifferent. There is comfort in faithful work; no doubt there is great content in the steady performance of regular duties; but here conscience is subordinate to work. It is work which gives contentment; but CONSCIENCE, when thoroughly ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... strongest and most durable necessities. Alfieri, on the other hand, sick of his past life, mortally afraid of falling once more under the tyranny of his baser nature, seeking on all sides assistance in that terrible struggle of the winged intellect out of the caterpillar cocoon in which it had lain torpid so long, was wrought up, if ever a man was, to the pitch of enjoying, of desiring a mere intellectual passion just in proportion as it was absolutely ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... same uncouth-looking effort of humanity that he had been at Yale. No wonder the Northern boys jeered him, with his sloth-ways, his mouthed English, torpid eyes, and brain shut up in that worst of mud-moulds,—belief in caste. Even now, going up and down the tan-bark, his step was dead, sodden, like that of a man in whose life God had not yet wakened the full live soul. It was wakening, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... Religion is but a vain display of ceremonies, to which they are attached by habit, which entertains their eyes, and produces a transient emotion in their torpid understandings, without influencing their conduct or reforming their morals. Even by the confession of the ministers of the altars, nothing is more rare than that internal and spiritual Religion, which alone is capable of regulating the life of man and ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... Swift, all manner of writers, who were themselves ministering in the Church of England, unite in bearing testimony to the torpid condition into which the Church had fallen. Decorum seemed to be the highest reach of the spiritual lives of most of the clergy. One finds curious confirmation of the statements {130} made publicly ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... prodigious and unheard-of strides, while the world is ringing with the noise of intellectual achievements, Spain sleeps on untroubled, unheeding, impassive, receiving no impression upon it. There she lies at the farther extremity of the continent, a huge and torpid mass, the sole representative now remaining of the feelings and knowledge of the middle ages. And, what is the worst symptom of all, she is satisfied with her own condition. Though she is the most backward country in Europe ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... of a subtle casuistry to the unclean side: but his discursive reason would not let him trammel himself into a poet-laureate or stamp-distributor, and he stopped, ere he had quite passed that well-known "bourne from whence no traveller returns"—and so has sunk into torpid, uneasy repose, tantalized by useless resources, haunted by vain imaginings, his lips idly moving, but his heart for ever still, or, as the shattered chords vibrate of themselves, making melancholy music to the ear of memory! Such is the fate of genius ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... stretched him flat on his belly, with his beak placed on the line. The fowl shut his eyes, and soon presented the appearance of being dead. The same process was gone through with the others. Bouvard passed them quickly across to Pecuchet, who ranged them on the side on which they had become torpid. ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... mountains which surround Cashmere. It is a gregarious herb, about six or seven feet high, with a perennial thick branched root, with an annual round smooth stem, large leaves and dark purple flowers. The roots are dug up in the months of September and October, when the plant begins to be torpid; they are chopped up into pieces, from two to six inches long, and are exported without further preparation. The quantity collected, according to Dr. Falconer, is very large, amounting to about two million pounds per annum. The cost of its collection and transport to a mercantile ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... they succeeded so far as to obtain all the information he could give concerning his fall; but he remembered nothing further than that Edith had been the means of bringing him to the snow-hut, where he lay in a deep, torpid slumber, until the voice and hand of Maximus awakened him. When Frank was told that Edith was lost, he sprang from his bed as if he had received an electric shock. The confusion of his faculties seemed swept away, and he began to put on his garments ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... strange it was, to find, in every stagnant town, this same Heart beating with the same monotonous pulsation, the centre of the same torpid, listless system, I came out by another door, and was suddenly scared to death by a blast from the shrillest trumpet that ever was blown. Immediately, came tearing round the corner, an equestrian company from Paris: marshalling themselves under the walls of the church, ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... jeered he who had put the question. "That's a good one. The idea of coupling 'Torpid' Walling's name with anything that savors of work. You'll have a good time fast enough. But I'll wager anything you like, that in his company you will circumnavigate the globe without having done any work harder than spending ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe
... those kings whom God seems to send for the express purpose of hastening revolutions. Of all the enemies of liberty whom Britain has produced, he was at once the most harmless and the most provoking. His office resembled that of the man who, in a Spanish bull-fight, goads the torpid savage to fury, by shaking a red rag in the air, and by now and then throwing a dart, sharp enough to sting, but too small to injure. The policy of wise tyrants has always been to cover their violent acts with popular forms. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... always pull up and plan the wheel-marks; I carry a tape for the purpose, and it saves a lot of hard swearing in court afterwards." Brodie spoke seriously, and Devar vowed that he would interrupt no more, since he merely succeeded in stimulating the man's torpid wits. ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... on, as if Alicia had not spoken. "As to the rest of the people—bah! you can't rouse Calcutta. It is sunk in its torpid liver, and imagines itself superior. It's really funny, you know, the way hepatic influences can be idealised—made to serve ennobling ends. But ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... for Mrs. Hilmer to see that her lord and master was fed properly, but why did she waste hours over a custard when she had money enough to hire it done? That course didn't get either of them anywhere—Hilmer remained at a level of torpid content, and naturally he looked down on his wife as a sort of sublimated servant girl who wasn't always preparing to leave and demanding higher wages... No, most men fell too easily in the trap of their personal comforts. Even Fred had become self-satisfied. Beyond his dinner and paper ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... outward stimulus, or else by an inpouring of the Spirit. What we want is life, "more life, and fuller." To escape from monotony, to get away from the life of mere routine and habits, to feel that we are alive—with more of surprise and wakefulness in our existence. To have less of the gelid, torpid, tortoise-like existence. "To feel the years before us." To ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... stubborn, obstinate; cutting. Dow, dowe, am (is or are) able, can. Dow, a dove. Dowf, dowff, dull. Dowie, drooping, mournful. Dowilie, drooping. Downa, can not. Downa-do (can not do), lack of power. Doylt, stupid, stupefied. Doytin, doddering., Dozen'd, torpid. Dozin, torpid. Draigl't, draggled. Drant, prosing. Drap, drop. Draunting, tedious. Dree, endure, suffer. Dreigh, v. dreight. Dribble, drizzle. Driddle, to toddle. Dreigh, tedious, dull. Droddum, the breech. Drone, part of the bagpipe. Droop-rumpl't, short-rumped. ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... the move to Udalkhand arrived at length, and Stella's heart rejoiced. The place was situated on the edge of a river, a brown and turgid torrent in the rainy weather, but no more than a torpid, muddy stream before the monsoon. A native town and temple stood upon its banks, but a sandy road wound up to higher ground on which a few bungalows stood, overlooking the grim, parched ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... anything like enterprise. Those nations that are partly civilized exhibit more or less industry, and are acquainted with some of the arts; but barbarous nations are acquainted with none of the improvements that elevate society, and exhibit a state of lounging indolence and torpid inactivity. If there be noise, it is not the rattle and whirl of business, or the hum of industry; but the noise of giddy mirth, boisterous and unmeaning laughter, or fierce and angry contention. If there be stillness, it is not the peace and quiet of well-ordered society, ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble
... think, this is true: It is a woman, or the woman in man that recognizes a Messiah.... Look at those males of singing flesh—the ultra-masculine Romans—how blind and how torpid they were to Him; and the materialistic Jews, ponderously confronting each other with stupid forms and lifeless rituals, while their Marys and Magdalens and Miriams followed the Master and waited upon Him!... I always found a kind of soulful ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... topazo. Topic subjekto. Topmost plejsupra. Topography topografio. Topple fali. Topsy-turvy, to turn renversi. Topsy-turvy renversita—ite. Toque cxapo. Torch torcxo. Toreador toreadoro. Torment turmenti. Torment turmento—ado. Torpedo torpedo. Torpedo boat torpedboato. Torpid sensenta. Torpidity sensenteco. Torpor sensento. Torrent torento. Torrid varmega. Torsion tordo. Torso torso. Tortoise testudo. Tortuous torda. Torture turmentego. Torture turmentegi. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... Robertson? So adieu to my vision. I awake, like John Bunyan, 'and behold it is a dream.' Well enough that I awake without a sciatica, which would have probably rewarded my slumbers had I profaned Queen Mary's bed by using it as a mechanical resource to awaken a torpid imagination." ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... first signs of the city's awakening from its lethargic industrial sleep. The beast was beginning to move along its score of miles of length. But out here in the vacancies of the lake it seemed still torpid. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... by its beams, Inhabiting his own eternity, Beyond time's limit or what bound soe'er To circumscribe his being, as he will'd, Into new natures, like unto himself, Eternal Love unfolded. Nor before, As if in dull inaction torpid lay. For not in process of before or aft Upon these waters mov'd the Spirit of God. Simple and mix'd, both form and substance, forth To perfect being started, like three darts Shot from a bow three-corded. And as ray In crystal, ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... him here torpid lies, That drew the essential forms of grace; Here closed in death the attentive eyes That saw the manners ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... left her. It was getting to be more than a passing whim with Arobin to see her and be with her. He had detected the latent sensuality, which unfolded under his delicate sense of her nature's requirements like a torpid, ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... realize that this silent plain had once resounded with martial music and trembled to the tramp of armed men. It was hard to people this solitude with rushing columns of cavalry, and stir its torpid pulses with the shouts of victors, the shrieks of the wounded, and the flash of banner and steel above the surging billows of war. A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... before by the genius of Christianity. It was monstrous that an emperor calling himself a Christian should preside at such a spectacle. But the martyrdom of Telemachus at last touched the callous and torpid consciences of nominal Christians. Thenceforth the games of the amphitheatre were abolished. But it was too late for repentance. Alike "the incomparable wickedness and the incomparable splendor" of the Imperial City were doomed to destruction. Even the blood of a Christian ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... a certain fitness for their special purpose. These graceful creatures (is it possible that a fine yacht can be counted as an inanimate thing?) reclined on the muddy bosom of the basin, but I would not put the Rob Roy there, it seemed so pent up and torpid a life, and with the curious always gazing down from the lofty quay right into your cabin, especially as next day I wished ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... volume, or indeed any volume of the Review, at random, we are almost certain to meet with some electric shock of paradox designed to arouse the attention of the torpid. In one number we find the writer, ever daring and alert, setting out with an eulogium on "the wonderful benefit of arbitrary power" in France. He runs on in this vein for some time, accumulating examples of the wonderful benefit, ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... the wood, seized the sacrificial knife, was just on the point of dealing the stroke. In what manner to express myself properly, I know not; he only would know, who did these things. For no language can describe how it happened that his hand did not become torpid, that the strength of his nerves did not relax, that the affecting sight of his son did not ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume I - Basil to Calvin • Various
... years later the statesman who emancipated the peasants of Prussia observed that Hungary was the only part of the Austrian dominions in which the peasant was not in a better condition than his fellows in North Germany; [9] and so torpid was the humanity of the Diet that until the year 1835 the prison and the flogging-board continued to form a ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... sets in, the fibres and vessels contract, the leaves wither, and are no longer able to perform their office of transpiration; and, as this secretion stops, the roots cease to absorb sap from the soil. If the plant be an annual, its life then terminates; if not, it remains in a state of torpid inaction during the winter; or the only internal motion that takes place is that of a small quantity of resinous juice, which slowly rises from the stem into the branches, and enlarges their ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... respire, they sat down for a little, with their backs to the wind. Then indeed the sky resounded with loud thunder, and the lightnings flashed between its terrific peals; all, bereft of sight and hearing, stood torpid with fear. At length, when the rain had spent itself, and the fury of the wind was on that account the more increased, it seemed necessary to pitch the camp in that very place where they had been overtaken ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... could all have come from, or how they could have been stowed away. On looking into the places where they had been crammed, there were found some children next the sides of the ship, in the places most remote from light and air; they were lying nearly in a torpid state, after the rest had turned out. The little creatures seemed indifferent as to life or death; and when they were carried on deck, many of them could not stand. After enjoying for a short time the unusual luxury of air, some water was brought; it was then that the extent of their ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... pain of hunger has continued for some time, it is succeeded by languor and debility, when a draught of water, by keeping the stomach distended, will remove for a short time every sort of uneasiness. The two attendants, Johnson and Demba, lay stretched upon the sand in torpid slumber, and when the kouskous arrived, were with difficulty awakened. Mr. Park felt no inclination to sleep, but was affected with a deep convulsive respiration, like constant sighing, a dimness of sight, and a tendency to faint, when he attempted to ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... light began, Spring, like our Youth, with joy, and beauty fair; Noon picturing Summer;—Summer's ardent sphere Manhood's gay portrait.—Eve, like Autumn, wan, Autumn resembling faded age in Man; Night, with its silence, and its darkness drear, Emblem of Winter's frore and gloomy reign, When torpid lie the vegetative Powers; Winter, so shrunk, so cold, reminds us plain Of the mute Grave, that o'er the dim Corse lours; There shall the Weary rest, nor ought remain To the pale ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... shrinking, Drive what may through darksome smother; Saturate, but never sinking, Fatal only to the other! Deadlier than the sunken reef Since still the snare it shifteth, Torpid in dumb ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... frost. The old knight gazed at it for a long while amid complete silence. Others looked at him, for it was known that he was like a father to Rotgier, and that he loved him. But he did not shed even a single tear, only his face looked more severe than usual, but there was depicted in it a kind of torpid calm. ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... poor and blinded ones In trustful patience wait to feel O'er torpid pulse and failing ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... which he lifted only to drop it with a yell, for underneath it lay a torpid snake, doubtless one of those that had been ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... was almost torpid. The want of exhilarating exercise, the long dearth of companionship, the terrible monotony of her life, the restless nights, the dank gloomy atmosphere in which she had her perpetual being, were, she told herself dully, doing their work. And she did not ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... drawing. But tardily. Old men work slowly. Brain and hand alike Are dull and torpid. To die young is best, And not to be remembered as old men Tottering ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... weakness moved a circle of his friends to tears, and he sat amongst us insensible to all we could say to him, cowering down, or rather I might say collapsing into a shapeless heap upon his chair, deaf, blind, torpid, motionless,—even then I whispered to the others that I would engage that Kant should take his part in conversation with propriety and animation. This they found it difficult to believe. Upon which I drew close to his ear, and put a question to him about the Moors of Barbary. To the surprise ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... register. Cash would sit and watch him furtively; but Bud was too engrossed with his own misery to notice it. Then, quite unexpectedly, reaction would come and leave Bud in a peace that was more than half a torpid refusal of his mind to worry much ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... fain to fancy the foundations of quite a lesson learn'd. After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on—have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear—what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons—the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night. We will begin from these convictions. Literature flies so high and is so hotly spiced, that our notes ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... his hand, lying flat and inert upon the brown leather arm of his chair. His eyes rested on it, and for the moment he forgot everything else in a sort of torpid study of it. How white it was, how thin, how withered; the nails were parched into minute corrugations; the veins stood out like dark wires; the skin hung loosely on it, and had a dry lustre: an old man's hand. He gazed at it fixedly, till his eyes closed and his head fell forward. But he ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... auspicious occasion for your journey; you will travel in the company of the new Junior Dean, whose society, I am sure, you will find delightful. His predecessor, a personal friend of my own, succumbed, I grieve to say, a few months ago—owing to the alleged inadequate supply of beef-steaks at a 'Torpid' breakfast. . . . Painful, but apparently inevitable. I need hardly say, the perpetrators of this insult have been rusticated for a ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... hastened to remove the refulgent edifice, steering it prudently to its station in the stable yard. Then he went to find the defeated Starling Tucker. That stricken veteran sat alone amid the ruins of his toppled empire in the little office, slumped and torpid before the cold, rusty stove. He refused to be comforted by his devotee. He said he would never touch one of them things again, not for no man's money. The Darwinian hypothesis allows for no petty tact in the process of evolution. Starling Tucker was ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... his bewildered state, seeing a squirrel cracking a nut on the branch of a hollow tree near him, he made a half-frenzied dart at the frightened animal, which ran away. But the same association of ideas in his torpid and confused brain impelled him to search for the squirrel's hoard in the hollow of the tree. He ate the few hazel-nuts he found there, ravenously. The purely animal instinct satisfied, he seemed to have borrowed from it a certain strength ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... sleep, and augment until they awaken the patient, and frequently with much agitation and alarm. The power of conveying the food to the mouth is at length so much impeded that he is obliged to consent to be fed by others. The bowels, which had been all along torpid, now, in most cases, demand stimulating medicines of very considerable power: the expulsion of the faeces from the rectum sometimes requiring mechanical aid. As the disease proceeds towards its last stage, the trunk is almost permanently ...
— An Essay on the Shaking Palsy • James Parkinson
... of half-dead humanity became so dense, so deaf, so torpid,—or perhaps it should be said so happy—that Marshal Victor, their heroic defender against twenty thousand Russians under Wittgenstein, was actually compelled to cut his way by force through this forest of men, so as to cross the Beresina with the five thousand heroes ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... which betrayed a perfect insensibility, convinced me that intelligence resulting from methodical and practical study is preferable to the torpid insanity incident ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... are packed with the greatest care. The casks, or cases, are made as tight as possible and covered with pitched canvas. Such was the cask in question. Yet, when the head was taken off, and a few of the packages removed, an enormous large scorpion was found in the midst of the cask, nearly in a torpid state, but it quickly recovered on exposure ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... fear and trembling, till at last, encouraged by his stillness, one more daring than the rest jumped upon the shoulder of the monarch. Soon, many others followed his example, and made merry on the back of their unresisting King. Speedily tiring of such a torpid ruler, they again petitioned Jupiter, and asked him to send them something more ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... being dull. In every direction there is abundant opportunity for brave and thoughtful men to find the fullest occupation for whatever energy they may possess. There is work to be found everywhere in this sense, and none but the most torpid can find an excuse for joining the spiritually unemployed. The fields, surely, are white for the harvest, though there are weeds enough to be extirpated, and hard enough furrows to be ploughed. We know what has been done in the field of physical science. It has made the world infinite. The days ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... acquaintance with the mild Zibethicus and the gentle Lemmings. As for the German Hamster, he became so drowsy as the weather grew colder, that it became evident that he could sleep day and night upon boards, though he never fell into the perfectly torpid, almost dead state that he would have done, could he have been humoured by ...
— The Rambles of a Rat • A. L. O. E.
... Emma of the Sandwich Isles, literally the Queen of the South, come to hear the wisdom of the Saint; and last of all, the friend and partner of his earlier work, the sharer in the revival of the Church from her torpid repose, John Henry Newman, who met Dr. Pusey there for one last day, fulfilling the words written ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... endless file, one sees such faces as used to be exhibited in ball-rooms during the performance of quadrilles, before round dances came in,—faces marked by the renunciation of all human joy. Sometimes a faint suspicion suggests itself on the Avenue, that these torpid countenances might be roused to life, in case some horse should run away. But that one chance never occurs; the riders may not yet be toned down into perfect breeding, but the horses are. I do not know what could ever break the gloom of this joyless ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... vomiting,—symptoms to which modern physicians attach much importance. The stupor and profound lethargy show that there was an injury to the brain, to which, in all probability, was added a stagnation of black blood in the torpid veins. Probably decomposing blood gave rise to the offensive odor of the person. The function of the lungs was considerably impaired. The petechial fever in Italy in 1505 was a form of the sweating sickness. There were visitations in 1506 and in 1515 in England. ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... could effect we had yet to learn, but we owned that they were as powerful in the water as the fiercer kind of ants on land, where they were virulent enough in places to master even the larger kinds of snakes if they could find them in a semi-torpid state after a meal—biting with such virulence and in such myriads that the most powerful ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... has got quickly into his smoking-coat: at least he is here: he has heard all. Barbara and I crawl away with no more spring or backbone in us than a couple of torpid, ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... of Arc, a mere child in years, ignorant, unlettered, a poor village girl unknown and without influence, found a great nation lying in chains, helpless and hopeless under an alien domination, its treasury bankrupt, its soldiers disheartened and dispersed, all spirit torpid, all courage dead in the hearts of the people through long years of foreign and domestic outrage and oppression, their King cowed, resigned to its fate, and preparing to fly the country; and she laid her hand upon this nation, this corpse, and it rose and followed her. She led it ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... fair and rounded arm, No crimson stream gush'd o'er its spotless snow; Vainly they sought the frozen heart to warm, And bid its chill'd and torpid currents flow; Vainly they practised every learned charm To call into the veins life's ruddy glow; Stirless, they laid her on that bridal bed, Stirless, she lay, all life ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... The camp was sleeping. The forces of destruction lay torpid in the starry shadow of the night. There was no moon, but the stars gave a light that relieved the gloom. They were so near to the eye that it might seem a lancer could pick them from their nests of blue. The Southern Cross hung like ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... morning and, stupid and indifferent, began work at six o'clock. We made bread out of the dough which our comrades had prepared while we slept. The whole day, from dawn till ten at night, some of us sat at the table rolling out the dough, and, to avoid becoming torpid, we would constantly rock ourselves to and fro while the others kneaded in the flour. The enormous oven, which resembled a fantastic beast, opened its large jaws, full of dazzling flames, and breathed forth upon us its hot ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... Franceschetto was planning how to carry off his ducats. While the Holy Father still hovered between life and death, a Jewish doctor proposed to reinvigorate him by the transfusion of young blood into his torpid veins. Three boys throbbing with the elixir of early youth were sacrificed in vain. Each boy, says Infessura, received one ducat. He adds, not without grim humor: 'Et paulo post mortui sunt; Judaeus quidem aufugit, et Papa non sanatus est.' The epitaph of this poor old Pope reads like a ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... peccatoribus," with a faint trembling voice, as if even to the dulled faculties, through the deepening shadow of death, some faint distorted gleam of the truth had pierced, and the soul was, in truth, less torpid than ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 2 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... brightest apparel, the greenest of cloaks thrown over them, lifting up their heads and sharing in the general rejoicing, in the glory of their annual resurrection. Is it in summer, with its myriads of blooms, and its thousand thousand happy voices, the silent torpid river, basking in the light of the sun, and responding only to the fishes as they frisk near the surface? Or is it in the autumn, with its many shades, with its long avenues on which nature has lavished whole tubes of burnt sienna and vermilion; when you tread on gorgeous paths heavy with golden ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren
... the training they proposed would not be enough, and that he himself should take all who chose to go down, to Abingdon twice a week. From that time there were many defaulters; and the spirit of Diogenes groaned within him, as day after day the crew had to be filled up from the torpid or by watermen. Drysdale would ride down to Sandford, meeting the boat on its way up, and then take his place for the pull up to Oxford, while his groom rode his horse up to Folly bridge to meet him. There he would mount again and ride off to Bullingdon, or to the Isis, or Quentin, or ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... Frost Spirit comes!—and the quiet lake shall feel The torpid touch of his glazing breath, and ring to the skater's heel; And the streams which danced on the broken rocks, or sang to the leaning grass, Shall bow again to their winter chain, ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... but not immense, Born destitute of feeling and of sense. No power he but o'er his brain desired— How not to suffer it to be inspired. Ideas unto him were all unknown, Proud of the words which, only, were his own. So unreflecting, so confused his mind, Torpid in error, indolently blind, A fever Heaven, to quicken him, applied, But, rather ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... its mouthful, the andaconda begins at the tail and gradually engulfs its victim, while its elastic jaws, and throat, and stomach are distended sufficiently to let it in; after which it lies in a torpid state for many weeks, till the morsel is digested, when it is ready for another meal. A horse goes down entire, but a cow sticks at the horns, which the anaconda cannot swallow. They are allowed to protrude from its mouth until they decay ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... minister, still seated upon the gun-carriage, his arms resting upon the touch-hole, and his chin upon his arms, in the attitude of one who adjusts and points a cannon, continued in silence to watch the battle, like an old wolf, which, sated with victims and torpid with age, contemplates in the plain the ravages of a lion among a herd of cattle, which he himself dares not attack. From time to time his eye brightens; the smell of blood rejoices him, and he laps his burning tongue over ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet |
