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More "Torpor" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a long journey before me, and I looked forward to it with dread. It is my habit when forced to travel in France, the part of France chiefly affected by the war, to resign myself to a period of misery. I relapse into a condition of sulky torpor. Railway Transport Offices may amuse themselves by putting me into wrong trains. Officers in command of trains may detach the carriage in which I am and leave it for hours in a siding. My luggage ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... waive formalities. We really haven't time. This is to-day, but it will soon be to-morrow, and then we may be very different people, and in some other country." He had a way of floating people out of dull or awkward situations, out of their own torpor or constraint or discouragement. It was a marked personal talent, of almost incalculable value in the representative of a great business founded on social amenities. Thea had liked him yesterday for the way in which he ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... unprecedented brilliancy and activity. It was a period very fruitful in great men and great events, and, though stormy and turbulent, was favorable to experiments and reforms. The nations of Europe seem to have been suddenly aroused from a state of torpor and rest, and to have put forth new energies in every department of life. The material and the political, the moral and the social condition of society was subject to powerful agitations, ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... had been found, since he himself was not aware that he was in the corral. But at any rate he would be in a position to give an account of what had taken place before this terrible execution. The next day Ayrton awoke from his torpor, and his companions cordially manifested all the joy they felt, on seeing him again, almost safe and sound, after a hundred and ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... passed her on the deck she looked at Romayne with compassionate interest so vividly expressed in her beautiful face that I imagined they might be acquainted. With some difficulty, I prevailed sufficiently over the torpor that possessed him to induce him to look at our ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... comfort or elegances of life. But it is otherwise with genius. It sinks in the progress of society, as much as science and the arts rise. The country of Homer and AEschylus sank for a thousand years into the torpor of the Byzantine empire. Originality perishes amidst acquisition. Freshness of conception is its life: like the flame, it burns fierce and clear in the first gales of a pure atmosphere; but languishes and dies in that polluted by ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... be called, a lethargy of conscience. In vain Remorse rears her horrent crest, and rouses all her snakes; beneath the deadly fixed eye and leaden hand of Indolence, their wildest ire is charmed into the torpor of the bat, slumbering out the rigours of winter, in the chink of a ruined wall. Nothing less, Madam, could have made me so long neglect your obliging commands. Indeed I had one apology—the bagatelle was not worth presenting. Besides, so strongly am I ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... on its flight, or balancing on its wings as it pierces the deep with its searching eye, ready to dart upon its prey. All is silence, solitude, and desolation, save that occasionally may be seen the fin of some huge shark, either sluggishly moving through the heated element, or stationary in the torpor of the mid-day heat. A sight so sterile, so stagnant, so little adapted to human life, cannot well be conceived, unless, by flying to extremes, we were to portray the chilling blast, the transfixing cold, and 'close-ribbed ice' at the ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... vivid morning sun occasionally lighting up the wall whenever the closely drawn curtains were lightly blown aside by the freshening breeze. The whole events of the night might have been a dream but for the insupportable languor which numbed his senses, and the torpor of his arm, that, swollen and discolored, lay outside the coverlet on a pillow before him. Cloths that had been wrung out in iced water were replaced upon it from time to time by Sophy, Miss Dows' housekeeper, who, seated ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... the child himself was becoming an object of terror. He no longer moved. Torpor was coming over him. He did not perceive that he was losing consciousness—he was becoming benumbed and lifeless. Winter was silently delivering him over to night. There is something of the traitor in ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... kind of peaceful monotony, broken by the frequent visits of Nurse Brown and the house surgeon, with his grave face and preoccupied air; and for some time Ida lay in a kind of semi-torpor, feeling that everything that was going on around her were the unreal actions in a dream; but as she grew stronger she began to take an interest in the life of the great ward and her fellow-patients; and on the second day after her return ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... set. In senseless hush the world was chained While Rama's hand the bow retained, And Jamadagni's son amazed And powerless on the hero gazed. Then when his swelling heart had shrunk, And his proud strength in torpor sunk, Scarce his voice ventured, low and weak, To Rama lotus-eyed, to speak: "When long ago I gave away The whole broad land to Kasyap's sway He charged me never to remain Within the limits of his reign. Obedient to my guide's behest On earth by night I never ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... spread out under that, by way of diffusing his weight over as much surface as possible, was the work of only a few minutes. But by that time the perishing man was almost incapable of helping himself. The great difficulty that the rescuer experienced was to rouse Lumley once more to action, for the torpor that precedes death had already set in, and to get on his knees on the edge of the ice, so as to have power to raise his friend, would only have resulted in the loss of his own life as well. To make sure that he should not let ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... hoarded gold came knowledge and culture, which he had obtained from the Saracen. Now, these germs had been revived by direct contact with the sources of ancient knowledge in the East during the Crusades; and while the long mental torpor of Europe was rolling away like mist before the rising sun, England felt the warmth of the same quickening rays, and Oxford ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... everything he saw, and so was Agatha Terry, until they got under way, when she discovered that a mail- steamer was a joke compared with the yacht in the matter of motion. In short, the unfortunate Agatha was soon reduced to her normal condition of torpor. Mildred always declared that she hibernated on board ship like a dormouse or a bear. She was not very sea-sick, she simply lay and slept, eating very little and thinking not ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... torpor to a certain extent, Steve found himself engaged in some practical thoughts. He had lately been balancing his books, and the result was not encouraging. He was now reviewing this with a certain grim despondency and ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... poured more chloroform upon the cotton, eager now for that physical and mental sensation, that dreamy torpor, which bewildered ...
— Yvette • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant
... with the baleful crust of egotism gone, with every nerve of life exposed, with conscience struggling to its feet from the torpor of thirty-odd vacant years, he was as two men in one, with different lives and different souls, yet as inseparable in their misery as those poor victims of Gallic tyranny, chained back to back and thrown ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... took the form of a state of torpor that kept him asleep until the next morning. He awoke, however, in excellent condition, but with an immense longing for solitude. In reality, he shrank from finding himself in the presence of his ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... Intoxications are the mental intoxication arising respectively from (1) Bodily passions, (2) Becoming, (3) Delusion, (4) Ignorance. The Five Hindrances are (1) Hankering after worldly advantages, (2) The corruption arising out of the wish to injure, (3) Torpor of mind, (4) Fretfulness and worry, (5) Wavering of mind.[17] "When these five hindrances have been cut away from within him, he looks upon himself as freed from debt, rid of disease, out of jail, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... decrees as faith in the soundness of his judgment, the infallibility of his decisions. No woman of sense and spirit ever becomes an exemplar in unquestioning obedience to a mortal man, unless through apathy—fatal torpor of mind or heart. Of this fact in moral history our respactable barrister was happily ignorant. He was no better versed in the lore of the heart feminine than when he accepted Mabel Aylett's esteem and friendly regard in lieu of the shy, but ardent attachment ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... the attempt to attract the unconverted by worldly inducements or amusements, have themselves forfeited the blessing of GOD; and have so lost spiritual power, that those whom they have thus attracted have been nothing benefited! Instead of seeing the dead quickened, a state of torpor and death ...
— A Ribband of Blue - And Other Bible Studies • J. Hudson Taylor
... and ungenial for some days after Mr. Hunt's return to Nodowa; yet spring was rapidly advancing and vegetation was putting forth with all its early freshness and beauty. The snakes began to recover from their torpor and crawl forth into day; and the neighborhood of the wintering house seems to have been much infested with them. Mr. Bradbury, in the course of his botanical researches, found a surprising number in a half torpid state, under flat stones upon the banks which overhung the cantonment, ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... whispered name, and thrusting out her hands, as if to tear away a physical bond, broke through the torpor that possessed her, and stood upon her feet. She staggered, white and trembling, to Jim's bedside, and there, in the faint light, she saw that ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... creaking ladder into the wireless-room. Harrison was in a torpor, muttering inanely and pleadingly as his long, white fingers opened and ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... of absence, in November, whence, early in December, the General set out on his return to the army, which was to winter at Morristown. Soon after leaving Brooklyn, and while on the road to Hartford, he "felt an unusual torpor slowly pervading his right hand and foot. This heaviness crept gradually on until it had deprived him of the use of his limbs on that side, in a considerable degree, before he reached the house of his friend Colonel Wadsworth"—the gentleman to whom he had written the letter ...
— "Old Put" The Patriot • Frederick A. Ober
... as for its child. The England that is about us dates from the American War. It was then that the moral, the philanthropic, the religious ideas which have moulded English society into its present shape first broke the spiritual torpor of the eighteenth century. It was then that with the wider diffusion of intelligence our literature woke to a nobler and larger life which fitted it to become the mouthpiece of every national emotion. It was then ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... my 'calm grit'!" laughed Jack, grimly—almost hysterically. "Doesn't the scoundrel know that I'm all but frozen into the torpor of dread?" ...
— The Submarine Boys for the Flag - Deeding Their Lives to Uncle Sam • Victor G. Durham
... of many other diseases is announced by a languid indifference to surroundings, and a slow response to the customary stimuli. The child's brain seems clouded, and a light form of torpor invades the whole body. The child, who is usually active and interested in things about him, but who loses his activity and becomes dull and irresponsive, should be carefully watched. It may be that he is merely changing his form of growth—i.e., is beginning to grow tall after completion of his ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... as noisy as the days: for a few hours, they made up energetically for long months of torpor and monotonous existence. The god having re-entered the temple and the pilgrims taken their departure, the regular routine was resumed and dragged on its tedious course, interrupted only by the weekly market. At an early hour on that day, the peasant folk came in from ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... our position with respect to the Scriptures is not in all points the same as our fathers'. For sixteen hundred years nearly, while physical science, and history, and chronology, and criticism, were all in a state of torpor, the questions which now present themselves to our minds could not from the nature of the case arise. When they did arise, they came forward into notice gradually: first the discoveries in astronomy excited uneasiness: then as men began to read more critically, ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... I was sunk in this torpor I cannot estimate; but when I awoke, it seemed as if the sun were settling toward the horizon. Captain Nemo was already up, and I had started to stretch my limbs, when an unexpected apparition brought me ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... somnolence, fruitful in heavy heads and heavy eyes at morning. You cannot sleep; well, I can best explain my state thus: I cannot wake. Sleep, like the lees of a posset, lingers all day, lead-heavy, in my knees and ankles. Weight on the shoulders, torpor on the brain. And there is more than too much of that from an ungrateful hound who is now enjoying his first decently competent and peaceful weeks for close upon two years; happy in a big brown moor behind him, and an incomparable burn ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thoughts and energies, his spirits flagged. The vivacity, the wit for which he had been noted deserted him and he sank gradually into a mental lethargy which, as his malady increased, at times almost amounted to torpor, but alternated with a restlessness and irritation of the nerves very distressing to witness. In order to divert his attention from the life with which he could no longer mingle, it was decided that ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... little one!' he said to his mother; and she went to the kitchen, where, frozen with grief, she remained all morning in a kind of torpor. Martha was afraid she would have a stroke. But she dared not speak to Edward, for, hovering in the passage, she had seen his face as he ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... notice very briefly a second and a third, which are, that the elevation of spirits produced by opium is necessarily followed by a proportionate depression, and that the natural and even immediate consequence of opium is torpor and stagnation, animal and mental. The first of these errors I shall content myself with simply denying; assuring my reader that for ten years, during which I took opium at intervals, the day succeeding to that on which I allowed myself this luxury was ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... occupied the time and thought of two Committees of the House of Commons, was, for the time, thrown away, and the misery of the inmates of asylums allowed to go unrelieved. The facts, however, had been made widely known. The inertia, torpor, and indifference to human suffering—in short, the crime which characterized the majorities who threw out the Bills calculated to remove the abuses in asylums, had at last to give way to the popular demand. What was gained by prolonging the dismal condition of these abodes of woe for some years ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... her, the one clear thought in her mind was that she must obey Diana's last behest and keep silence. It was not hard to do that, for she had no words. Throughout the day, in a kind of mental torpor, she helped the stewardess sort and pack all the costly clothes and possessions which were really Diana's, putting them into the trunks already labelled for a hotel in Cape Town; her own things were locked and sealed up in the abandoned ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... at the buccaneer and the widow by turn, with a stupefied air, almost terrified. Finally, being ashamed to show his credulity, he rose abruptly and paced up and down a few minutes in the hope that movement would dispel the torpor which ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... less worthy the sacrifice grand, The heritage noble we took at their hand, The peace and the comfort, the fruits of the land; And, sunk in a torpor as hopeless as base, Recoil from the shock of the Sodomite band, That would ruin the ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... overcame him. Fatigued and appeased, he sank into a sort of gentle and uncertain torpor. As he fell asleep, he decided he would await a favourable opportunity, and his thoughts, fleeting further and further away, lulled him to ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... answered nor moved. Nothing stirred the horrible torpor of her resignation to her fate. She knew that the ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... more completely than any other property is quality. The sky over us, and the waters of the earth, are subject to infinite variations. Yet, whether in the tiny drop that trembles at the point of a leaf or in the vast ocean-globe of our planet, in the torpor of forest-ponds or in the wrath of cataracts, water never loses its quality of wetness,—the open sky never that of dryness. These two characteristics are of course entirely the reverse of each other,—as unlike as are the properties of transparency ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... that was waiting for him to fall insensible, as had ever been the custom of the living victims on whom it fixed its baneful glare, heard his cry and awoke from its seeming torpor. It lifted its head, fire seemed to flash from its dull eyes, its vast length began to stir. Higher and higher it reared its head, then of a sudden it leaped from the slope of rock, as alligators when disturbed ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... should imagine him in the last years of his life? Half enchanted by visions of beauty and loveliness, and half bored to death; on the one side inspired by a soaring fancy to the singing of ethereal songs, and on the other urged by a general disgust to burst occasionally through his torpor into bitter and violent speech? If we are to learn anything of his mind from his last works, ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... feel that what before was to rest is now to rot; that your years are gliding from you unenjoyed and wasted; that the contrast between the animal life of passionate civilisation and the vegetable torpor of motionless seclusion is one that, if you are still young, it tasks your philosophy to bear,—feeling all the while that the torpor may be yours to your grave? And when your guest has left you, when you are again alone, is the ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... he was breathing, the shadow of night that enwrapped him, the imposing tranquillity that reigned around, all conspired to beget the desire for repose. He felt his eyelids gradually grow heavier and heavier; and after a while an invincible torpor seized ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... weight oppressed me. Towards three o'clock in the evening this feeling rose to a violent degree. Yawns dislocated my jaws. My lungs panted as they inhaled this burning fluid, which became rarefied more and more. A moral torpor took hold of me. I was powerless, almost unconscious. My brave Conseil, though exhibiting the same symptoms and suffering in the same manner, never left me. He took my hand and encouraged me, and I heard him murmur, "Oh! if I could only not ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... although we do not suspect that the same perverted taste which meets its reproof in these lectures is common amongst us. Were we called upon to describe the malady under which our countrymen labour in respect to literary taste, we should describe it as a state of torpor and lethargy, rather than of virulent disease. It is indifference, more than any morbid taste, which an imaginative work would have to struggle against in this country. There is little necessity here to guard ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... a torpor, which lasted he did not know how long, and which wrapped in a thick fog all the succeeding events. For some time he can hardly be said to have had any conscious history. He awoke to life and torture when half-way across the sea towards ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... going and give little pleasure, for they are almost all bounded on either side by high stone walls that jealously exclude the view. So much for Sorrento in its winter dress. But when the spring comes, here truly is a transformation from cold and torpor! The soft warm air is redolent of the penetrating fragrance of orange blossom, of stocks, of jessamine, of wallflower, and of a hundred odorous plants and shrubs from each garden and grove behind ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... her stupor. Her eyes widened in troubled questioning. She heard the angry voices rise, and she saw the Etheling leap to his feet and shake his clenched hand above his head. Then she lost sight of everything, for the fang had pierced her torpor and touched her. ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... had carried him to the room in the hotel where his mother and Marie-Anne were waiting in agonized surprise, that irresistible torpor which follows suffering too intense for human endurance, crept ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... maintain a steady fixed stare, there comes on in a few seconds a very singular condition, characterized by muscular rigidity and inability to move, with a strange exaltation of most of the senses, and generally a closure of the eyelids,—this condition being followed by torpor. ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... now succeeded Madame d'Argeles's torpor; there was an expression of scorn and anger on her rigid features, and her eyes, usually so dull and lifeless, fairly blazed. "It is not folly," she exclaimed, "but vengeance!" And as the astonished baron opened his lips to question ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... this quadruped is an improvement upon another, and so on. We must descend, in an inevitable logical series, to the most elementary manifestations of life, and thence, finally, to matter. If it is not admitted that pure matter is a man in a state of torpor, it must be admitted that man is a melange of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, azote, phosphorus—a melange which has been brought little by little to perfection. Such is the final inference from the doctrine which we are ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... old order had passed away, and no new order had, as yet, effectively disclosed itself. He had not formulated all this, or even consciously recognised the modification of his own attitude. Nevertheless he felt the gnawing ache of inward emptiness. It effectually broke up the torpor which had held him. It made him very restless. It reawoke in him an inclination to ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... door opposite the bench creaked slightly, and a gentleman entered. The woman's wondering eyes passed over him. In an instant her torpor was shaken off. She riveted her gaze on the new-comer. Her features contracted with lines of pain. She drew the child aside, as if to hide it from sight. Then her face twitched, and she staggered back into the arms ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... from her cousin, trusting that the visit might remain a secret, too mortifying to both parties to be divulged, but she found Horatia in a state of eager anticipation, awakened from the torpor to watch for tidings of a happy conclusion to their difficulties, and preparing jests on the pettish ingratitude with which she expected Lucilla to requite the services that ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... noticed how when night comes on a tired languor seizes the body, and inactive torpor overpowers the soul, and reason shrinks within itself like a fire going out, and feeling quite worn out is gently agitated by disordered fancies, only just indicating that the man is alive? But when the sun rises and scares away deceitful dreams, and brings on ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... unable to communicate with people, she lived in a sort of somnambulistic torpor. The processions of Corpus-Christi Day seemed to wake her up. She visited the neighbours to beg for candlesticks and mats so as to adorn the ...
— Three short works - The Dance of Death, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, A Simple Soul. • Gustave Flaubert
... part of the grateful work it has to do is to deliver us from the curse of perpetual concession for the sake of a peace that never comes, and which, if it came, would not be peace, but submission,—from that torpor and imbecility of faith in God and man which have stolen the respectable name of Conservatism. A question which cuts so deep as that which now divides the country cannot be debated, much less settled, without excitement. Such excitement is healthy, ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... and his bloodshot eye has not closed, no, not for a moment, from its horrible task of gazing on the dead face of the father that cursed him. He sleeps now, if sleep it can be called, that is rather the torpor of exhaustion; but his rest is taken on that father's death-bed. Oh! young man, feel for me! Do your task in such a manner, that my wretched boy may not awake till it is over, and the blessing of the widow be on you ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 540, Saturday, March 31, 1832 • Various
... was centered in the question of how to rouse his friend from the torpor in which he lay, and get him out of this voluptuous garden of delights, before any lurking danger could overtake him. Full of this intention, he presently ventured to draw aside the curtain that concealed Lysia's pavilion, . . and looking in, he saw to his great relief, that she was no longer there. ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... the origin of it, which the curious in Physiology may consult; they are not fit for reporting here. [Ib. iv. 476.] It seems to have consisted in an overclouding, rather than a total ruin of the mind. Incurable depression there was; gloomy torpor alternating with fits of vehement activity or suffering; great discontinuity at all times:—evident unfitness for business. It was long hoped he might recover. And Doctors in Divinity and in Medicine undertook him: Theologians, Exorcists, Physicians, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... he said to himself, "very much a virgin," and he found himself giggling softly, notwithstanding the twinges of pain from his legs. He felt suddenly as if his spirit had awakened from a long torpor. The spell of dejection that had deadened him for months had slipped off. He was free. The thought came to him gleefully, that as long as he stayed in that cot in the hospital no one would shout orders at him. No one would tell him to clean his rifle. There would be no one to salute. ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... their potatoes well! Faces flushed, eyes brightened, and teeth shone. It was the best, the most stimulating, dinner ever swallowed in that room. Nor was it until each male guest had eaten, drunk, and talked himself into torpor suitable to the company of his wife, that the three brothers could sit in ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects, and, lying sunk in the tasselled meadow-grasses, one looks up through a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... after moan of pain, and as the pitiful sounds reached the praefect's ears, a smothered oath escaped his tightly clenched teeth. Like some gigantic beast roused from noonday sleep, he straightened his massive frame and seemed suddenly to shake himself free from that state of torpor into which Dea Flavia's unexpected appearance had at first thrown him. He too, advanced to the foot of the catasta and there faced the imperious beauty, whom the whole city had, for the past two years, tacitly agreed to ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... and the principles of its administration at variance with Scripture and reason. This takes away all motives to industry and thrift. Then again, the people are ignorant; have no mental discipline, no store of useful knowledge, but their minds are marked with torpor, imbecility, and poverty of thought: while at the same time they are full of grovelling ideas, false opinions, and superstitious notions, imbibed in childhood and confirmed by age. The children, too, are growing up in ignorance of all that is ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble
... pressure of a hostile environment. Cold, storms, rivers that block journeys, forests that must be felled, treacherous seas that lure with promise and exact toll for carelessness, arouse men out of their torpor and aid the development of the virtues we have been considering. The necessity of rearing some sort of shelter makes against laziness for industry and perseverance. The dangers of wind or flood check heedlessness in the choice of location for the home and foster prudence and foresight. In ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... yesterday, and his heavy munching was the only vital sound. I got up and walked about to assure myself that I was awake, saddled and bridled the horse, and mounted the great southward pali, thankful to reach the breeze and the upper air in full possession of my faculties, after the torpor and ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... became moody and distrustful. Next he began to neglect his health. with the result that, catching a chill, he died, after a short illness, so suddenly and unexpectedly that for a few days we were almost beside ourselves with the shock — my mother, in particular, lying for a while in such a state of torpor that I had fears for her reason. The instant my father was dead creditors seemed to spring up out of the ground, and to assail us en masse. Everything that we possessed had to be surrendered to them, including ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... from that torpor which, to such a people, is shame; and when France does awaken, when she does open her eyes, when she does distinguish, when she does see that which is before her and beside her, she will recoil with a terrible shudder from the monstrous crime which dared to espouse her ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... the goal and aspiration of the used-up roues of the aristocracy. Under Louis XIV., such popularity was an impossibility to a woman of that sort, but society under the Regency seemed to have awakened from the torpor and gloom of the later years of the monarchy to a reign ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... of bitter disgust. We may observe casually that he was not destitute of personal attractions; he was above middle height, with a slender and well-proportioned figure, and he had dark auburn hair and fine dark eyes. In a little while he sank into a deep reverie, or rather into a sort of mental torpor. He walked on without noticing, or trying to notice, his surroundings. Occasionally he muttered a few words to himself; as if, as he himself had just perceived, this had become his habit. At this moment it dawned upon him that his ideas were becoming ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... and fetterless, and strong, Rejoicing that their icy bonds are broke, The breeze is burthen'd with the grateful song Of birds innumerous: who from torpor woke, Cleave the fine air with renovated stroke. The teeming earth flings up its budding store Of herbs, and flow'rs, escaping from the yoke. That Winter's spell had cast around; and o'er The clear and sun-lit sky, dark ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... remembrances of old hopes too, which proved still-born, and of old distresses, which often enough proved still-born likewise,—the whole of these simplified now, sanctified, the tumult of them stilled, along with the hot, young blood which went to make them, by the kindly torpor of increasing age and the approaching footsteps ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... was already covered with a layer of snow, and I suppose it was the frigid pressure on my forehead that caused the dream. It is, however, probable that, had it not been for the hideous vision that shook my nerves free of paralysing torpor, I should never have awakened from ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... plain history of strange occurrences happening to one's self, the actual existence of the Supernatural around us; and the absolute certainty of a future state of being, after the passage through that brief soul-torpor in which the body perishes, known ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... young about the beginning of the new year. At birth the cubs are very small, weighing but little more than a pound and a half, and there are from one to four in a litter. Two, however, is the usual number. The mother, although in a state of semi-torpor, suckles these cubs in the den, and they remain with her all that year, hole up with her the following winter, and continue to follow her until the second fall, when they leave her and ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... noisy, which crushed forward under the sudden pushes of the last comers. And now they touched the corpse. Some of them even bent down to feel it with their fingers. The doctor kept them back. But the mayor, waking abruptly out of his torpor, broke into a rage, and, seizing Dr. Labarbe's stick, flung ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... zealous and laborious service, cannot alone save from the lowered tone and dulness of spirit which are our insensible but universal and inveterate enemies in all the business of real life. And that torpor and insensibility and deadness to what is high and great is, more than any other evil, the natural foe of all that is characteristic and essential in the Christian ministry; for that ministry is one of life and reality, or it ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... general had intended. Nevertheless his troops profited by it. They had not realized until they stopped how near they too had come to utter exhaustion, and for several days they were in a kind of physical torpor while their strength ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... if unpalatable, was more tonic than he knew; because Roy's love for India went deeper than he knew. The justice of Jiwan Singh's reproach; the hint at tragic severance of the two countries mingled within him, waked him effectually from semi-torpor; and the process was as painful as the tingling renewal of life in a frozen limb. By timely courage, on the spot, the threat to India had been staved off: but it was there still—sinister, ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... away. She felt the novelty of her position, indeed, but no longer with disturbance or affright. Now and then, there came a thrill of almost youthful enjoyment. It was the invigorating breath of a fresh outward atmosphere, after the long torpor and monotonous seclusion of her life. So wholesome is effort! So miraculous the strength that we do not know of! The healthiest glow that Hepzibah had known for years had come now in the dreaded crisis, when, for ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... had never seen his wife so completely overwhelmed with grief; and that she who has always shown herself full of strong and manly courage in adversity, is now utterly broken down. On hearing this, Lodovico roused himself from the torpor of his grief to try and comfort his sister-in-law, and sent her an affectionate letter by one of his secretaries, begging her to seek the consolation which he himself could not find, and telling her how much he thought of her, even though his own grief and bitterness of soul made it impossible for ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... protracted and halting dubiousness. It was the quality of the repose appertaining to the scene. This was not the repose of actual stagnation, but the apparent repose of incredible slowness. A condition of healthy life so nearly resembling the torpor of death is a noticeable thing of its sort; to exhibit the inertness of the desert, and at the same time to be exercising powers akin to those of the meadow, and even of the forest, awakened in those who thought of it the attentiveness usually engendered by understatement ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... revolution in taste, and given victory to the "Romantic School." He has had not only readers, but imitators. Among Frenchmen, the author of "Cinq Mars" may be cited as a tolerably successful one. Italy, in which what we call "Novels" were previously unknown, has been roused from its torpor, and has found a worthy imitator of British talent in the author of the "Promessi Sposi." Of the Waverley Novels, six editions have been published in Paris. Many of them have been translated into French, German, Italian, and other languages. To be read both on the banks of the Ganges and the Ohio; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 545, May 5, 1832 • Various
... a Bacchante,[A] prompt for wild excitement, and fearless to tread by night the mountain forest, with song and dance of delirious mirth; yet constantly she wore the laurel in token of purification, and, with water from fresh fountains, cleansed the statue of Minerva. Stagnancy and torpor were intolerable to her free and elastic impulses; a brilliant fancy threw over each place and incident Arcadian splendor; and eager desire, with energetic purposes, filled her with the consciousness of large latent life: and yet the lower instincts ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... ill-feeling, not calculated to develop the higher attributes of our nature. But whatever may have been the injurious effects of extreme partisanship, the people as a rule have found in the discussion of public matters an excitement which has prevented them from falling into that mental torpor so likely to arise amid the isolation and rude conditions of early times. If the New England States have always been foremost in intellectual movement, it may be attributed in a great measure to the fact that from the first days of their settlement ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... affection, her rejected counsels, her ruined property; and she would rise and curse the sons who had deceived and plundered her, till a single glance from her elder daughter-in-law drove her back to the chimney corner, where she used to sit and pass her time in silent torpor, while this mood was upon her. Then she would sally out, and if she met her grandsons, in whom she sorrowfully noticed the same keen glance under the low brows, which she had first loved and afterwards learned to fear in her own sons, she would draw them to ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... were conveyed in various broken hints and modest interrogatories. While they mortified, they charmed me; they enlightened me while they perplexed. I came away with my soul roused by a new impulse. I have emerged from a dreary torpor, not indeed to tranquillity or happiness, but to ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... when once the earth is covered, all is dreary, monotonous whiteness—not merely for days or weeks, but for more than half a year together. Whichever way the eye is turned, it meets a picture calculated to impress upon the mind an idea of inanimate stillness, of that motionless torpor with which our feelings have nothing congenial; of anything, in short, but life. In the very silence there is a deadness with which a human spectator appears out of keeping. The presence of man seems an intrusion on the dreary solitude of this wintry desert, which even ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... encouragements, when He said, 'In My Father's house are many mansions.' Yonder they dwell for ever with God; here God in Christ for ever dwells with the loving heart. It is a permanent abode so long as the conditions are fulfilled, but only so long. If self-will, rising in the Christian heart from its torpor and apparent death, reasserts itself and shakes off Christ's yoke, Christ's presence vanishes. In the last hours of the Holy City there was heard by the trembling priests amidst the midnight darkness the motion of departing Deity, and a great voice said: 'Let us depart hence'; and to-morrow ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... carried Thy words as it were fixed in our entrails: and the examples of Thy servants, whom for black Thou hadst made bright, and for dead, alive, being piled together in the receptacle of our thoughts, kindled and burned up that our heavy torpor, that we should not sink down to the abyss; and they fired us so vehemently, that all the blasts of subtle tongues from gainsayers might only inflame us the more fiercely, not extinguish us. Nevertheless, because for Thy Name's sake which Thou hast hallowed throughout the earth, this our ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... at the clear pool, he saw in the water the shadow of the triumphant warrior holding the tomahawk above him. One after another the most critical periods of his life were lived over again, and then he sank into a deep torpor, from which he did not rouse himself until far ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... towards the old man, pressing him and encouraging him. He, in a state of torpor, with his immovable mask of tanned skin, looked at them without appearing to understand. They asked him if he knew the "Five Vowels." He held down his head; he could not recollect it; all the songs of the good old days were mixed up in his head. ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... this service, excellent at all times, is especially so at the present day. For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... description of the man to be had, no emphasis would have been laid upon this story had it not transpired that the moment a report of it had come to Mrs. Hammond's ears (why is there always some one to carry these reports?) she roused from the torpor into which she had fallen, and in ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... oratory with Anjou, her habitual torpor was sloughed away. For once she quivered and crimsoned and raised her voice, whilst for once her sleepy eyes kindled and flashed as she inveighed ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... volcanoes. Even as he looked, the vapors arose from the solfataras of the "smoking mountain" and a vast shower of cinders and stones was thrown into the air. Unnoticed passed the eruption before the gaze of Saint-Prosper, whose mind in a torpor swept dully back to youth's roseate season, recalling the homage of the younger for the elder brother, a worship as natural as pagan adoration of the sun. From the sanguine fore-time to the dead present lay a bridge of darkness. With honor within grasp, deliberately ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... showed signs of relief and improved rapidly. Perceptible but feeble movements were made by all the limbs except the right arm. The patient remained in a comatose condition for eight or nine days, during which he had enuresis and intestinal torpor. He suffered from severe concussion of the brain, which accounted for his prolonged coma. Delirium was present, but he was carefully watched and not allowed to injure himself. His recovery was tedious and was delayed by several relapses. His first complaint after consciousness returned ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... thirst. By the time the guard had gone down the main hatch to intercept him, Stephanow and a band of Russian mutineers had trundled the brandy casks to the deck and were in a wild debauch. The main hatch was clapped down, leaving the mutineers in possession of the deck, till all fell in drunken torpor, when Benyowsky rushed his soldiers up the fore scuttle, snapped handcuffs on {126} the rebels, and tied them to the masts. In the midst of this disorder, such a hurricane broke over the ocean that the tossing yard-arms alternately ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... again that voice breaks in upon the slumbrous torpor of Israel and smites the dead souls of priests and people alike. Now it is a Balaam, now it is an Elijah, a David, an Isaiah, a John the Baptist, a Paul the Apostle, a Peter the Hermit, a Savonarola, a Huss, a Whitefield, ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... dreamy sense stole over him of remoteness or detachment from all visible things, as though he were suddenly and mysteriously separated from the rest of humankind by an invisible force which he was powerless to resist. He was still lost in this vague half-torpor or semi- conscious reverie, when a light tap startled him back to the realization of earth and his earthly surroundings. In response to his "Entrez!" the tall Nubian, whom he had seen in Cairo as the guardian of the ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... crouched before the motionless body, he does not know; only that he tried many times to shake the dying youth from the terrible torpor in vain. Senior breathed heavily, and ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... In a state of semi-torpor, M. Max sprawled upon the bed for ten minutes or more, during which time, as he noted, the door remained ajar. Then there entered a figure which seemed wildly out of place in the establishment of Ho-Pin. It was that of a butler, ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... days after I was unable to shake off the feeling of mental torpor and a vague regret for what had been and what had gone for ever. My leave seemed like a thing I had dreamt of long ago. Sometimes I asked myself in a puzzled manner: "Have I really been ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... Torpor, ebes sensus, scola parua labor minimusque Causant quo minimus ipse minora canam: Qua tamen Engisti lingua canit Insula Bruti Anglica Carmente metra iuuante loquar. Ossibus ergo carens que conterit ossa loquelis Absit, et interpres ...
— Confessio Amantis - Tales of the Seven Deadly Sins, 1330-1408 A.D. • John Gower
... need not be detailed here. It was indeed pathetic to see his strenuous and repeated efforts to assure me that he remembered all the parts of the telegraphic apparatus, and his smile of saddened self-depreciation when he hesitated over some detail. At last he sank into a torpor with the usual stertorous breathing, flushed face and gradually chilled extremities. His last words were scrawled almost illegibly by his failing hand—"Remember, watch, wait, I will send ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... swept over whistling and pattering. Men disturbed in their peaceful torpor by the pain of quarrelsome shouts, moaned, muttering curses. Mr. Baker crawled off a little way to leeward where a water-cask loomed up big, with something white against it. "Is it you, Podmore?" asked Mr. Baker, He had to repeat the question ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... The pleasant torpor didn't last long, because presently, the rhythmic thud of the wheels began singing to him the same damned tune that had dogged his footsteps earlier that morning: "I'm all alone, you're all alone; come on, let's be ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... on the box he put his hand into an inner pocket to find his note-book, then incontinently fainted. I struggled to my feet and sprinkled water over his face till he revived and rolled on to the floor, where presently he sank into sleep or torpor. As he did so the ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... grief brings its own peculiar antidote along with it. The buoyancy of youth soon repels its deadening weight, the firmness of manhood resists its weakening influence, the torpor of old age is insensible to its most ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... not so. The wild goats that leap along those rocks have as much passion of joy in all that fair work of God as the men that toil among them. Perhaps more. Enter the street of one of those villages, and you will find it foul with that gloomy foulness that is suffered only by torpor, or by anguish of soul. Here, it is torpor—not absolute suffering,—not starvation or disease, but darkness of calm enduring; the spring known only as the time of the scythe, and the autumn as the time of the ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... indicated by his companion, and at once perceived the nature of the escape he had made; for there had lain a large brown snake, on which he would have inevitably trodden, the consequences of which made him shudder to contemplate. Being aroused from its torpor by the approach and close proximity of those, whom its instinct told it were enemies, the reptile raised its head and about two feet of its body in a perpendicular attitude, with the head slightly extended and swaying from side to side; while ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... the donkey, which had begun to think that this time it had really been pensioned off, was put into the shafts, and the caravan gradually disappeared upon the white road. Then the village became quite dull again; but it was roused from its torpor by the annual fte. This was the chief event of the year. The peasants came in from the scattered villages and from the isolated farms lying in the midst of the chestnut woods. All the women coifed themselves with their best kerchiefs, the heads of most of the young ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... proposed that we should row towards the school of fish in sight, and try to take some of them, the strongest disinclination to make any such attempt was evinced, and it was only after much argument and persuasion, and by direct personal appeals to us individually, that he overcame this strange torpor, and induced us to take ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... am I?" cried Amine, after remaining in a state of torpor for some hours. The sun glared fiercely upon her, and dazzled her eyes as she opened them—she cast them on the blue wave close by her, and beheld a large shark motionless by the side of the raft, waiting for his prey. Recoiling from the edge, she started up. She ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... to the glory of earth and of skies? Is it fate, or ill fortune, hath woven about you Strong meshes which ye are too helpless to break? Shall we scornfully wonder, or angrily flout you, Or strive from their torpor ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... Others, huddled together, sleep off the fumes of their wine, removed on one side. The exhalation from the carnage is so strong that the president of the civil committee faints in his chair,[31115] the fumes of the tavern blending with those from the charnel-house. A heavy, dull state of torpor gradually overcomes their clouded brains, the last glimmerings of reason dying out one by one, like the smoky lights on the already cold breasts of the corpses lying around them. Through the stupor spreading over the faces of butchers and cannibals, we see appearing that of the idiot. It is the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Henry III., too, he was betrayed by his most intimate councillors and domestics. This treachery pleased him (as it had pleased that King) because it induced him to keep idle, now from fear, now from interest, now from disdain, and now from policy. This torpor was agreeable to him because it was in conformity with his humour and his tastes, and because he regarded those who counselled it as good, wise, and enlightened people, not blinded by their private interests, but seeing clearly things as they were; while he was ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... renewed vigor through the evenings that followed; then French Janin sank back into a torpor, varied ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... cold and darkness of their sleeping places, for we cannot call them homes, and long for the morning to come. The cold weather is very hard upon them, they love the warm sunshine, and during the season of ice and snow are in a constant state of semi-torpor. You see them on the street, in their thin, ragged garments, so much overpowered by the cold that they can scarcely strike or utter a note. Sometimes a kind-hearted saloon-keeper will permit them to warm themselves at his stove for a moment or two. These are the bright periods in their dark lives, ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... mostly secrete it. They reserve it for persons whom they can trust, and whom they know to be capable of appreciating its nuances. But a good Government is well worth a great deal of social dulness. The dignified torpor of English society is inevitable if we give precedence, not to the cleverest classes, but to the oldest classes, and we have seen how useful ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... man lays out his life as a gardener does a garden, on the principle of selection, of order, and with a view to the succession of the seasons. You all bemoan the dulness of life; you, in Paris, the torpor of ennui stifles you, you cry. On the contrary, I would wish the days were weeks, and the weeks months. And why? Simply because I have discovered the philosopher's stone. I have grasped the secret of my era. ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... was a general expectation at that time that a great poet was to come, and although Bjoernson had as yet published nothing to justify the expectation, he found the public of Copenhagen ready to recognize in him the man who was to rouse the North from its long intellectual torpor, and usher in a new era in its literature. It is needless to say that he did not discourage this belief, for he himself fervently believed that he would before long justify it. The first proof of his strength he gave in the tale "Synnoeve Solbakken" ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... sorrowful father. "He had treated many worse cases even when things were worse, and brought them round. But Dan was worn out with all he had been doing for the past months. He fell an easy prey; and he did not suffer much, thank God. He lay mostly in a torpor, much as Reuben did, as I hear, but slowly sank away. His poor mother! She had begun to think that she was to have all her children about her yet. But in truth we must not repine, having so many left to us, when they say there is scarce ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... cloud of pecuniary embarrassments, such as suggested prudentially an absence from Ireland. Meantime, what was it that made him an object of peculiar interest to Lady Carbery? It was the singular revolution which, in one whom all his friends looked upon as sold to constitutional torpor, suddenly, and beyond all hope, had kindled a new and nobler life. Occupied originally by no shadow of any earthly interest, killed by ennui, all at once Lord Massey had fallen passionately in love with ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... be brought off, it was decided that working parties at her house led to too much giddiness from suppressed giggles or torpor from too much food. So she relapsed once more into loneliness. Unfortunately air-raids were now becoming events of occasional fright and anxiety in London, and this deterred Cousin Sophie from Darlington, Cousin Matty from Leeds, Joseph's wife from Northallerton or old, married schoolfellows ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... of puzzling occurrences, how many enigmas his presence stirred in our minds! The magic circle of my revolving thought grew too much for me. "What does all this mean!" I exclaimed to myself, trying to shake off my torpor, and struggling to find words for my meditation. "Who is this being whom I saw so many years ago, jubilant with manhood and life, and now see again, as young and as full of life, only still more austere, still more incomprehensible. After all, maybe it is his brother, or even his son?" ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... opposition came to nothing. The battle of Culloden annihilated the Jacobite party. The death of Prince Frederic dissolved the faction which, under his guidance, had feebly striven to annoy his father's government. His chief followers hastened to make their peace with the ministry; and the political torpor became complete. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and has everywhere been in inverse proportion to her power. The loveliest and most fertile provinces of Europe have, under her rule, been sunk into poverty, in political servitude, and in intellectual torpor, while Protestant countries, once proverbial for sterility and barbarism, have been turned, by skill and industry, into gardens, and can boast of a long list of heroes and statesmen, philosophers and poets. Whoever, knowing what Italy and ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... the Maestro was ready to go to bed, and long in the torpor of the tropic night there came to him, above the hum of the mosquitoes fighting at the net, the soft, wailing croon of Isidro, back at his ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... best of her faculties, Mrs. Ray did not succumb to the paralytic seizure occasioned by the twofold shock which she had experienced. On the morning after Ralph's departure from Wythburn she seemed to awake from the torpor in which she had lain throughout the two preceding days. She opened her eyes and looked up into the faces that were bent ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... and being permitted to carry my own chair into the room, I put it by the western window, which looked across two miles of meadows waving in buckwheat, in clover and grass, and sat there in a curious torpor of spirit. I was glad to be alone, for I had discovered a new idea—the idea of sin. I wished to be left to myself till I could think out what it meant. I believed I could do that by night, and, after I had got to the root of the matter, I could cast the whole ...
— Painted Windows • Elia W. Peattie
... for the king to entreat, and as useless for him to try to overcome her depression: the poor girl was completely overwhelmed,—the appearance of an angel would hardly have awakened her from her torpor. ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... whispers me of times to come? What if it be the mission of that age My death will usher into life, to shake This torpor of assurance from our creed?" (vol. ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... and there were many eager faces crowding around the doors, many longing to enter the fair Paradise and explore the far-extending vistas which met their gaze. It was an age of anxious and eager inquiry; the torpor of the last centuries had passed away; and a new world of discovery, with spring-like freshness, dawned upon the sight. Jordano Bruno was one of these zealous students of the sixteenth century. We see him first in a Dominican ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... courage the struggle continued, until my supporters fell, and I myself was nailed to the mast. The mutineers, however, also sank under their wounds, and soon my ship was but one vast grave. My eyes also closed, my breath stopped—I thought I was dying. But it was only a torpor which held me chained: the following night, at the same hour in which we had cast the Dervise into the sea, I awoke, together with all my comrades; life returned, but we could do and say nothing but what had been done and said on that fatal night. Thus we sailed for fifty years, ...
— The Oriental Story Book - A Collection of Tales • Wilhelm Hauff
... there he proposed to lie the night. They had supped—the Duke, de' Alvari, Gismondo Santi, Messer Valdicampo, his wife and two daughters, and a couple of friends, potential citizens of Cagli, whom he had invited, that they might witness the honour that was being done his house. It waxed late, and the torpor that ensues upon the generous gratification of appetite was settling upon the company when Armstadt—Gian Maria's Swiss captain—entered and approached his master with the air of a man who is the bearer of news. He halted a pace or two from the Duke's high-backed ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... other people's housemaids, that her mistress will spy a spot on the dresser straight through the pewter platter, put up on purpose to hide it. Her faculties are alert as her limbs and her senses. No danger of my spouse dying of torpor. The longest night in the year I've known her lie awake, planning her campaign for the morrow. She is a natural projector. The maxim, "Whatever is, is right," is not hers. Her maxim is, Whatever is, is wrong; and what ...
— I and My Chimney • Herman Melville
... men carried the dying general to the rear, and by his own request, being in great pain, laid him upon the ground. He refused to see a surgeon, declared it was all over with him, and sank into a state of torpor. "They run; see how they run!" cried out one of the officers. "Who run?" asked Wolfe, suddenly rousing himself. "The enemy, sir; egad, they give way everywhere." "Go, one of you, my lads," said the dying general, "with all speed to Colonel Burton, and tell him to march ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... exercised an influence over them, and hours passed in silence, during which, allowing themselves to yield to the lulling effects of springs, they remained as it were sunk in the torpor of a calm intoxication. With his arm around her waist, he listened to her talking while the birds were warbling, noticed with the same glance the black grapes on her bonnet and the juniper-berries, the draperies of her veil, and the spiral forms assumed by the clouds, and when he bent towards her ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... full speed. With a few rapid passes he roused the mate from his torpor and fixed him ...
— Light Freights • W. W. Jacobs
... period was, to what a blank of imbecility the human mind had fallen, can only be known to those who have waded in the chronicles. Excepting Comines and La Salle and Villon, I have read no author who did not appal me by his torpor; and even the trial of Joan of Arc, conducted as it was by chosen clerks, bears witness to a dreary sterile folly,—a twilight of the mind peopled with childish phantoms. In relation to his contemporaries, Charles ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... week in August; summer was dying, as a London summer dies, in days of feverish sunlight and breathless languor. Everywhere there was the same torpor, the same wornout, desiccated life in death. It was in the streets with their sultry pallor, in the parks and squares where the dust lay like a grey blight on every green thing. Everywhere the glare ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... recovered, and the whole party having reassembled, they set out to recross the swamp, intending, when they should get into the woods, to build a hut of leaves and branches, kindle a fire, and pass the night there as well as they could. But an overpowering torpor had now begun to seize hold upon some of the party, and it was with the greatest difficulty the others could prevent the drowsy ones from lying down to sleep in the snow. This almost irresistible tendency to sleep is common in cold countries. It is one of the effects of extreme cold upon ...
— The Cannibal Islands - Captain Cook's Adventure in the South Seas • R.M. Ballantyne
... attacks were so fitful; now she appeared brilliant and vivacious, with gleams of her former great beauty, the gracious and agreeable hostess; again, her condition was that of sheer indifference and semi-torpor. And who was the officious and familiar ayah, her attendant and shadow, an obtrusive creature with bold black eyes and a resolute mouth? Why did she speak so authoritatively to her mistress? Why did she wear such handsome jewellery and expensive silk saris, heavily fringed with gold, and strut ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... he swallowed it mechanically without any sign of conscious appreciation. White as white marble, and aged by many years, he remained stretched in his rigid corpse-like attitude, his eyes always fixedly upturned, till one day he was roused from his deepening torpor by the sound of sobbing. With a violent effort he brought his gaze down from the ceiling, and saw a figure kneeling by his bed, and a mass of bronze brown hair falling over a face concealed by two shapely white hands through which the tears were falling. Feebly ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... scared at nothing out in No Man's Land. The laborers of the camp were more or less incurious. They did their allotted hours of labor each day, passed at night to the bunk house, and fell into a snake-like torpor. Life seemed quiet and innocuous. Liquor was prohibited. The regime was military. Soon after the bugle had sounded Retreat each evening the raw little settlement became silent, save for the unending requiem to hope which the great waters chafing through the ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... you have. You've been in a torpor, haven't you? Well, to be in a torpor, is to torp. Now I'm going to do it all over again, and if you interrupt this time, ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... had now succeeded Madame d'Argeles's torpor; there was an expression of scorn and anger on her rigid features, and her eyes, usually so dull and lifeless, fairly blazed. "It is not folly," she exclaimed, "but vengeance!" And as the astonished baron opened his lips to question her: "Let me finish," she said imperiously, "and then ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... leave of absence, in November, whence, early in December, the General set out on his return to the army, which was to winter at Morristown. Soon after leaving Brooklyn, and while on the road to Hartford, he "felt an unusual torpor slowly pervading his right hand and foot. This heaviness crept gradually on until it had deprived him of the use of his limbs on that side, in a considerable degree, before he reached the house of his friend Colonel Wadsworth"—the gentleman to ...
— "Old Put" The Patriot • Frederick A. Ober
... little pleasure, for they are almost all bounded on either side by high stone walls that jealously exclude the view. So much for Sorrento in its winter dress. But when the spring comes, here truly is a transformation from cold and torpor! The soft warm air is redolent of the penetrating fragrance of orange blossom, of stocks, of jessamine, of wallflower, and of a hundred odorous plants and shrubs from each garden and grove behind the many obstructing walls. The balconies and gate-pillars are draped in scented ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... dispassionate, neither sentimental nor unintelligent, neither nervous nor senseless. It is well known as a cure to all sorts of mental disease, occasioned by nervous disturbance, as a nourishment to the fatigued brain, and also as a stimulus to torpor and sloth. It is self-control, as it is the subduing of such pernicious passions as anger, jealousy, hatred, and the like, and the awakening of noble emotions such as sympathy, mercy, generosity, and what not. It is a mode of Enlightenment, as it is the dispelling of ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... hideously frightful than the face of Ferrand, who was then plunged into that torpor which ordinarily succeeds violent attacks. Of a mortal pallor, strongly relieved by the shadows of the alcove, his face, streaming with a cold sweat, announced the last stage of consumption; his closed ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... night, through uneasiness about Laura. Towards the morning I came to a resolution to try what change of scene would do to rouse her. She cannot surely remain in her present torpor of insensibility, if I take her away from Limmeridge and surround her with the pleasant faces of old friends? After some consideration I decided on writing to the Arnolds, in Yorkshire. They are simple, kind-hearted, ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... and life have in a sense become commonplace to our experience, it is but in an external torpor; the true sentiment slumbers within us; and we have but to reflect on ourselves or our surroundings to rekindle our astonishment. No length of habit can blunt our first surprise. Of the world I have but little to say in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... when the smoke of passion blinds the intelligence and suffocates the senses; it is then that the will, fashioned in the school of pliant energy, seizing the reins with a firm and vigorous grasp, snatches the imagination from its torpor by bringing it to bear on objects capable of arousing it; it is then that the will animates the heart with generous and noble sentiments, and applies the mind to the consideration of truths which enlighten ...
— Serious Hours of a Young Lady • Charles Sainte-Foi
... Mahrattas, under a chief named Morari Row, had been hired to assist Mohammed Ali; but as the French power seemed irresistible, this force bad hitherto remained inactive on the frontiers of the Carnatic. The fame of the defense of Arcot roused them from their torpor. Rajah Sahib learned that the Mahrattas were in motion. It was necessary for him to be expeditious. He first offered large bribes to Clive, and vowed that if his proposals were not accepted he would instantly storm ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... agitation passes over the queen's features, her lips tremble, and her eyes are obscured with a tear! This first, this single token of human sympathy has revived the heart of the queen and awakened her from her torpor. ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... have been about eleven o'clock. Dick Sand then felt that a kind of torpor, if not a true sleep, was going to overcome him. It would, however, be rest. But, just as he was yielding to it, the thought came to him that, by the settling of the clay, washed in, the lower orifice was likely to be obstructed. All passage for the outer air would be closed. ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... acquired several languages in less than two years. Gifford was distraught for lack of reading, went to sea at thirteen, became a shoemaker, studying algebra late at night, was savagely unsociable, sunk into torpor from which he was roused to do splenetic and vexatious tricks, which alienated his friends. Rittenhouse at fourteen was a plowboy, covering the fences with figures, musing on infinite time and space. Benjamin Thompson was roused to a frenzy ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... eloquent—was but a persistent sound in that ear, though, now and then, Penrod's attention would be caught by some detached portion of a sentence, when his mind would dwell dully upon the phrases for a little while and lapse into a torpor. At intervals his mother, without turning her head, would whisper, "Sit up, Penrod," causing him to sigh profoundly and move his shoulders about an inch, this mere gesture of compliance exhausting all the energy that remained ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... flashing in their eyes, the barbarians pursued our men, who were in a state of torpor, the warmth of their veins having deserted them. Many were slain without knowing who smote them; some were overwhelmed by the mere weight of the crowd which pressed upon them; and some were slain by wounds inflicted by their own comrades. The barbarians spared ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... his apparent torpor, was the first to hear the faint thud of hoofs in the loose sand of the roadway. He grew instantly alert, raising himself on his elbow and gazing with fear-wide ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... fetch my future wife in a style befitting her new position, you may be sure of that," he said, and brought his clenched fist down upon the table with a crash, so that pots and pans rattled upon the hearth and started the paralytic from his torpor. ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... far as it can now be determined, we propose here to sketch the rise and progress of Christologic doctrine, in its most striking features, during the first three centuries. Beginning with the apostolic view of the human Messiah sent to deliver Judaism from its spiritual torpor, and prepare it for the millennial kingdom, we shall briefly trace the progressive metamorphosis of this conception until it completely loses its identity in the Athanasian theory, according to which Jesus was ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... calmness and the delightful tranquillity that reigned here, so little resembling what I had found below. Instead of swearing and cursing, buffoonery, debauchery, and drunkenness; instead of pride and vanity, torpor in the one corner, and riot in the other; instead of all the loud broiling, and the boasting and bustling, and chattering, which were incessantly stupifying a man yonder; and instead of the numberless constant evils to be found below, you here saw ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... and Mrs. Lawson assumed their green legs and strode over Wimbledon with pompous, majestic tread. The Woman's Rights Reform shook off its sluggish torpor, and rose a mighty shape of masculine vigor, strength and power. As in atonement for past sloth and inertness, the reformists became more active in their several departments than ever before. Lectures were delivered, clubs formed, and committees appointed ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... And this day would make it worse. An intolerable weight oppressed me. Towards three o'clock in the evening this feeling rose to a violent degree. Yawns dislocated my jaws. My lungs panted as they inhaled this burning fluid, which became rarefied more and more. A moral torpor took hold of me. I was powerless, almost unconscious. My brave Conseil, though exhibiting the same symptoms and suffering in the same manner, never left me. He took my hand and encouraged me, and I heard him murmur, "Oh! if I could only ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... of the country. All effort was concentrated on those of its nomes which lay on the Eastern frontier, or which were crossed by the Pharaohs in their journeys into Asia, such as the Bubastite and Athribite nomes; the rest remained sunk in their ancient torpor.* ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... and aspiration of the used-up roues of the aristocracy. Under Louis XIV., such popularity was an impossibility to a woman of that sort, but society under the Regency seemed to have awakened from the torpor and gloom of the later years of the monarchy to a reign ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... winter, and now she had more rest; her brain was dulled with the foul black atmosphere; she slept more, though a sleep which seemed to weigh her down, an unhealthful torpor. The passion of her misery ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... nor moved. Nothing stirred the horrible torpor of her resignation to her fate. She knew ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... us to say good night to Mr. Farrell, whose car was just then announced. I went across, too, to shake hands and wish him good luck on polling-day. As our eyes met he started, came out of the torpor in which he had been gazing about him, and bowed to ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the horses redoubled their speed, wild with new liberty. They left the old tracks. Before he knew where he was, they had startled the constellations and well-nigh grazed the Serpent, so that it woke from its torpor and hissed. ...
— Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew • Josephine Preston Peabody
... delay was longer than the general had intended. Nevertheless his troops profited by it. They had not realized until they stopped how near they too had come to utter exhaustion, and for several days they were in a kind of physical torpor while ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... morning sun occasionally lighting up the wall whenever the closely drawn curtains were lightly blown aside by the freshening breeze. The whole events of the night might have been a dream but for the insupportable languor which numbed his senses, and the torpor of his arm, that, swollen and discolored, lay outside the coverlet on a pillow before him. Cloths that had been wrung out in iced water were replaced upon it from time to time by Sophy, Miss Dows' housekeeper, who, seated near his bedhead, ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... through the province of Meath, arrived at the borders of Cualnge. Fortunately for the invaders, the expedition took place while the Ulstermen lay prostrate in their cess, or "Pains," a mysterious state of debility or torpor which was inflicted on them periodically in consequence of an ancient curse laid upon Conchobar and the warriors of Ulster as a punishment for a wrong done to the goddess Macha. This strange malady, resembling the couvade among certain savage nations, ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... from an upright and downright declaration of its faith. One part of the grateful work it has to do is to deliver us from the curse of perpetual concession for the sake of a peace that never comes, and which, if it came, would not be peace, but submission,—from that torpor and imbecility of faith in God and man which have stolen the respectable name of Conservatism. A question which cuts so deep as the one which now divides the country cannot be debated, much less settled, without excitement. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... said Coningsby. 'It has passed through the heaven of philosophy like a hailstorm, cold, noisy, sharp, and peppering, and it has melted away. And yet can we wonder that it found some success, when we consider the political ignorance and social torpor which it assailed? Anointed kings turned into chief magistrates, and therefore much overpaid; estates of the realm changed into parliaments of virtual representation, and therefore requiring real ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... Sueviae finis. Peucinorum Vene dorumque et Fennorum nationes Germanis an Sarmatis ascribam, dubito: quanquam Peucini, quos quidam Bastarnas vocant, sermone, cultu, sede ac domiciliis, ut Germani, agunt. Sordes omnium ac torpor procerum: connubiis mixtis, nonnihil in Sarmatarum habitum foedantur. Venedi multum ex moribus traxerunt. Nam quidquid inter Peucinos Fennosque silvarum ac montium erigitur, latrociniis pererrant. Hi tamen inter Germanos potius referuntur, quia et domos ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... idleness, remissness &c. adj.; sloth, indolence, indiligence[obs3]; dawdling &c. v. ergophobia[obs3], otiosity[obs3]. dullness &c. adj.; languor; segnity|, segnitude|; lentor[obs3]; sluggishness &c. (slowness) 275; procrastination &c. (delay) 133; torpor, torpidity, torpescence[obs3]; stupor &c. (insensibility) 823; somnolence; drowsiness &c. adj.; nodding &c. v.; oscitation[obs3], oscitancy[obs3]; pandiculation[obs3], hypnotism, lethargy; statuvolence heaviness[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... of the third day, there was some unusual activity on board the ship, which roused our hero from his torpor. The bell in the bows rang out... the heavy boots of the sailors could be heard running on the deck... "Engine ahead!... engine astern!." Shouted the hoarse voice of Captain ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... no emotion affects the sharpness of the outline or the precision of the technique. We discern here manifold touches, lively, vibrant, crude, well fitted to reproduce the shocks and starts of the poor human machines as they pass from a weary torpor to the hyperaesthesia of hallucination—but these juxtaposed touches are placed and combined by an intelligence that is ever master of itself. The style is impressionist. The author is prone, unduly prone in my opinion, to make use of visual ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... moment I speak of, I saw one hand slowly drawn from his pocket, and in effort to relieve it from its torpor, he twisted and turned it until it seemed to have life again. Next came forth the other hand, and it underwent the same operation, until both appeared to possess some power. Then he shrugged up one shoulder ...
— Facts for the Kind-Hearted of England! - As to the Wretchedness of the Irish Peasantry, and the Means for their Regeneration • Jasper W. Rogers
... "the developer of the skies in their embodied movements;" and Mrs. Thrale, when a party of clever people sat silent, is said to have been "provoked by the dullness of a Witurnity that, in the midst of such renowned interlocutors, produced as narcotic a torpor as could have been caused by a dearth the most barren of all ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... no one could feel without being stirred the illumination of Montesquieu; and Rousseau's questions, even if they proved unanswerable, were stuff for thought. The work of the forty years before the French Revolution is nothing so much as a preparation for Bentham. The torpor slowly passes. The theorists build an edifice each part of which a man whose passion is attuned to the English nature can show to be obsolete and ugly. If the French thinkers had conferred no other benefit, that, at least, would have been a ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... spiritual side of his mind there was no torpor. He loved to explain the sense of the prayers to his willing pupil, and to tell him the Gospel story, dwelling on whatever could waken or carry on the Christian life; and between the tiltyard and the oratory Hal spent ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that good servant for going lame. He walked round and round like a wild beast, chafing and fuming awhile; then sank into a torpor of dejection, and sat with his head bowed on ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... annihilated the Jacobite party. The death of Prince Frederic dissolved the faction which, under his guidance, had feebly striven to annoy his father's government. His chief followers hastened to make their peace with the ministry; and the political torpor became complete. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... state of semi-torpor, M. Max sprawled upon the bed for ten minutes or more, during which time, as he noted, the door remained ajar. Then there entered a figure which seemed wildly out of place in the establishment of Ho-Pin. It was that of a butler, most accurately dressed and most deferential ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... factory because of a complete breakdown from long hours of overwork. In one winter she had been at the machine seventy-one hours a week for ten weeks. After this severe experience, she had a long prostration and was depleted, exhausted, in a sort of physical torpor in which she was unable to ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt
... end he lay flat on his back, staring at the dim illuminations of the windows and listening to the faint out-of-door noises or the sharper borings of insects in the logs of the structure. His mind was not active. He lay in a semi-torpor, whose most vivid consciousness was that of mental discomfort and the ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... the knowledge that an enemy was in Russia, aroused the Russians from a torpor. Pamphlets and other publications denouncing the government in withering terms, seemed to spring up from the pavement. "Arise, Oh Russia!" says one unknown writer, "Devoured (p. 216) by enemies, ruined by slavery, shamefully oppressed by the stupidity of tchinovnik and spies, ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... was excellent, that the cutlets were very nice, that the birds were splendid; the jam pudding was voted delicious. And they leaned back in their chairs, their eyes filled with the torpor of digestion. Frank brought out a bottle of old port, the last of a large supply which he had had from Mount Rorke's wine merchant. The pleasure of the wine was in their stomachs, and under its influence ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... and days and weeks, even months have to elapse before he can make up his mind what to do. Our haste, and what we consider smartness in business, are looked upon by the Persian as quite an acute form of lunacy,—and really, when one is thrown much in contact with such delightful placidity, almost torpor, and looks back upon one's hard race for a living and one's struggle and competition in every department, one almost begins to fancy that we are lunatics ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... known under the title of Letters to Eugenia. The secretive character of those, however, into whose hands the manuscript at first fell; the singular and yet actual pleasure that is caused generally enough in the minds of all men by the exclusive possession of any object whatever; that kind of torpor, servitude, and terror in which the tyrannical power of the priests then held all minds—even those who by the superiority of their talents ought naturally to be the least disposed to bend under the odious yoke of the clergy,—all these circumstances united contributed so much to stifle ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... by a sentiment of the same kind, though in a lesser degree. The masculine desire to obtain, and the delightful consciousness that he possessed, at least, the tremendous advantage of asking for the love he craved, roused him from the sweet torpor to which delicious, ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... and still not a sound to break the torpor of the Algerian night, save the hum of conversation around the table of Fanfar, the colonist. Monte-Cristo's sombre air had not passed away. He was a prey to a species of uneasiness he had never experienced ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... knot seemed fierce for action, fiery and panting with that wolfish thirst, to quench which blood must flow. But all the rest seemed dumb, and tongue-tied, and crest-fallen. The sullenness of fear brooded on every other face. The torpor of despairing crime, already in its own fancy baffled and detected, had fallen on every other heart. For, at the farther end of the room, whispering to his trembling hearers dubious and dark suspicions, with terror on his tongue, stood ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... a dead language, even in the birth-place of the prophet. Not a printing-press at this day is to be found throughout the whole Arabian Peninsula. Even in Spain, in Christian Spain, alas! the contrast is scarcely less degrading. A death-like torpor has succeeded to her former intellectual activity. Her cities are emptied of the population with which they teemed in the days of the Saracens. Her climate is as fair, but her fields no longer bloom with ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... his life in bitter misery, that the result of the toil of the worker was filched by some inexplicable process, he was immediately voted "balmy." They were not ripe for fighting. There was as yet no clearly seen Cause that would rouse them from their torpor. But one day the flood would burst the dam of besotted ignorance, and the human cataract would descend ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... awakened from that absorbing torpor by my poor horse, who was busy licking my ears. The faithful animal suspected something was wrong, for usually at such a time I would sing Spanish ditties or some Indian war-songs. Sunset was also the time when I ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... little slumber overcame him. Fatigued and appeased, he sank into a sort of gentle and uncertain torpor. As he fell asleep, he decided he would await a favourable opportunity, and his thoughts, fleeting further and further away, lulled him to rest ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... sinking his rays in the clear blue waters where Posilippo's head is reflected with its green and flowery crown. A warm, balmy breeze that had passed over the orange trees of Sorrento and Amalfi felt deliciously refreshing to the inhabitants of the capital, who had succumbed to torpor in the enervating softness of the day. The whole town was waking from a long siesta, breathing freely after a sleepy interval; the Molo was covered with a crowd of eager people dressed out in the brightest colours; the many cries of a festival, joyous songs, love ditties sounded from all quarters ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - JOAN OF NAPLES—1343-1382 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... head, as there were neither fractures nor external wounds. All that night and next day the tenderest, the most unwearied care was exerted to call back the flickering gleam of life. The shock had been too great; his deadly torpor deepened into death. ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... volunteer, an officer of artillery, and a private soldier, raised him together in their arms, and bearing him to the rear laid him softly on the grass. They asked if he would have a surgeon, but he shook his head and answered that all was over with him. His eyes closed with the torpor of approaching death, and those around sustained his fainting form. Yet they could not withhold their gaze from the wild turmoil before them, and the charging ranks of their companions rushing through fire and smoke. "See how they run," one of the officers exclaimed, as the French ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... over the wet country; the faint dripping resumed, and suddenly a great shower of drops tumbled upon Gloria stirring her out of the trance-like torpor which the passage of the train had wrought. She ran swiftly down a descending level to the bank and began climbing the iron stairway to the bridge, remembering that it was something she had always wanted to do, and that she would have the added excitement of traversing the yard-wide ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... of the village, and a chronicle of the old times "before the war." It was some time before he could get into the regular track of gossip, or could be made to comprehend the strange events that had taken place during his torpor. How that there had been a revolutionary war—that the country had thrown off the yoke of old England—and that, instead of being a subject of his Majesty George the Third, he was now a free citizen of the United States. Rip, in ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... her lips blue, her flesh gray. It was plain to him that she had reached the limit of endurance, that she was ready to sink into the last torpor. He ripped open his overcoat and shook the snow from it, then gathered her close so that she might get the warmth of his body. The rugs from the automobile he ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... asked Sophie, with a look of pain in her grave little face. "Do you fear any such torpor in your own life? My love, this ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... exposed to such fierce heat, that I used to wonder how he was able to bear it. Sometimes I have interposed some shelter, but rarely with any permanent effect, for the sleeper usually contrived to turn himself, and to roll again into the spot where the fire glowed the brightest. His torpor was generally profound, but he would sometimes discourse incoherently for a long while in his sleep. At six he would suddenly compose himself, even in the midst of an animated narrative or of earnest discussion, ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... crust of egotism gone, with every nerve of life exposed, with conscience struggling to its feet from the torpor of thirty-odd vacant years, he was as two men in one, with different lives and different souls, yet as inseparable in their misery as those poor victims of Gallic tyranny, chained back to back and thrown into ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... lengthening of time is fortunately not true of all the melancholy scenes of life, nor is it peculiar to things that are painful. An invalid life with its almost unbroken monotony, and with the large measure of torpor that often accompanies it, usually flies very quickly, and most persons must have observed how the first week of travel, or of some other great change of habits and pursuits, though often attended with keen enjoyment, appears disproportionately long. Routine ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... bee shook off its torpor, And it spread each gauzy wing, As it flew to tell the flowers Of ...
— The Child's World - Third Reader • Hetty Browne, Sarah Withers, W.K. Tate
... occur to me. A swarm of loose thoughts flutter about in my head. The feeling of declining day makes me downcast, sentimental; autumn is here, and has already begun to hush everything into sleep and torpor. The flies and insects have received their first warning. Up in the trees and down in the fields the sounds of struggling life can be heard rustling, murmuring, restless; labouring not to perish. The down-trodden existence of the whole insect world is astir for yet a little while. They poke ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... come to Beryl activity of those artistic instincts, which for a time, had slumbered in the torpor of despair; and when her daily task of work had been accomplished, the prisoner leaned with folded arms on the stone ledge of the window, and studied every changing aspect of earth and atmosphere. By ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... still-born, and of old distresses, which often enough proved still-born likewise,—the whole of these simplified now, sanctified, the tumult of them stilled, along with the hot, young blood which went to make them, by the kindly torpor of increasing age and the approaching footsteps of greatly ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... circumstances under which the bodies had been found, since he himself was not aware that he was in the corral. But at any rate he would be in a position to give an account of what had taken place before this terrible execution. The next day Ayrton awoke from his torpor, and his companions cordially manifested all the joy they felt, on seeing him again, almost safe and sound, after a hundred ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... have regarded the Roman Catholics as in almost as much need of reconversion as the Hindoos and Mahometans; and as in those days their Church shared in that universal religious torpor that had crept over the world, it is most likely that he found them in ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... a kind of torpor; the expression of his face painful to witness; his wan hands lying outside the counterpane, and now and then slightly moving, which showed me he still lived. Towards daybreak I was so worn out that I dropped asleep as I sat beside him with my face on the edge of his pillow—such ...
— Jacques Bonneval • Anne Manning
... their sensations on seeing me I know not, all I know is that my own were such that a cloud came over my sight, and I was like a statue without power of speech or motion. But this torpor soon gave way to choler, which roused my heart's blood, and unlocked my hands and my tongue. My hands indeed were for a while restrained by respect for that divine face before me; but my ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... trials; but they will not be comforted. A day elapses, followed by a second. Not one of them touches the leaf of salad; their appetite has disappeared. Their movements become more uncertain, as though hampered by irresistible torpor. On the second day, they are dead, every ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... came to the door of his cabin. I went into the quiet smoky place with its earthen floor and sat in a dull torpor by the hearth, under the sooty "laff" and rafters. The old man did not say a word to me. He put some turf on the fire and then sat on a three-legged stool at the ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... nonsensical themes, so that in any well-directed school we should have been a wretched fourth class. I was never at the bottom; emulation spurred me on until I surpassed or equalled the head boy; but as soon as I reached the top, I fell back into a state of torpor. I was perhaps to be excused, as nothing could equal the dryness and insipidity of our studies. It is true that we translated Cornelius Nepos; but none of us, probably not even the master himself, knew who ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... rather the great danger of being made to appear ridiculous—which he had just passed through, contributed to rouse him from his torpor. He exerted himself to turn the conversation, and was quite lively ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... things, it is plain that there can be no moral change produced in him, unless he is first wakened from this drowze. He cannot become the subject of that new birth without which he cannot see the kingdom of God, unless his torpor respecting the Unseen is removed. Entirely satisfied as he now is with this mode of existence, and thinking little or nothing about another, the first necessity in his case is a startle, and an alarm. Difficult as he now finds it to be, to bring the invisible ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... veil that has obscured them is once drawn aside, can British benevolence withhold its exertions, to elevate the moral tone of this degraded eastern race, and to call forth the dignity of the human character, in exchange for the strange torpor and vileness in which this people are involved. Here an occasion presents for the display of a temper truly Christian, and for the erection of a standard to surrounding kingdoms, in which also these outcasts of society are dispersed, of that philanthropy and sound policy ...
— A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies • John Hoyland
... himself. A very notable oculist, Himly, was the first to have made the observation that in the diseased excitability of the retina every color is a tone higher. Luminous black looks blue, blue looks violet, violet looks red, red looks yellow. Torpor of the retina inverts ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... habit of speech. But the heart knew it, and the pulses beat strongly responsive to it. Faith ruled the world. Some tiny bulbous thing at her feet that had impeded her step caught her attention. It was coming up from the black earth, and the buried darkness, and the chill winter's torpor, with all the impulses of confidence in the light without, and the warmth of the sun, and the fresh showers that were aggregating in the clouds somewhere for its nurture—a blind inanimate thing ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... colonies were given also the privilege of exchanging their products among themselves, the volume of exports and imports increased and gave an impetus to activity which brought a notable release from the torpor and vegetation characterizing earlier days. Yet, even so, communication was difficult and irregular. By sea the distances were great and the vessels slow. Overland the natural obstacles to transportation were so numerous and the methods of conveyance so cumbersome ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... grenadier-guard uniform at their head: horse, foot and artillery; northward to Stralsund on the Baltic shore, where a terrible human Lion has taken up his lair lately. Charles XII. of Sweden, namely; he has broken out of Turkish Bender or Demotica, and ended his obstinate torpor, at last; has ridden fourteen or sixteen days, he and a groom or two, through desolate steppes and mountain wildernesses, through crowded dangerous cities;—"came by Vienna and by Cassel, then through Pommern;" leaving his "royal train of two thousand persons" to follow at its leisure. He, for his ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... unsuspected by himself suddenly came to him, and how life, instead of being a trivial succession of nothings, all at once became significant and solemn—any man who can remember that, will feel that if there were nothing else that his troubles did for him than to shake him out of torpor and rouse him to a tension of wholesome activity, so ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... The pain and torpor of her last short illness were already overmastering her. Maggie was alarmed at the burning touch of her hand, but she had no experience to guide her and her own great joy to ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... unconverted by worldly inducements or amusements, have themselves forfeited the blessing of GOD; and have so lost spiritual power, that those whom they have thus attracted have been nothing benefited! Instead of seeing the dead quickened, a state of torpor and death has ...
— A Ribband of Blue - And Other Bible Studies • J. Hudson Taylor
... at all. The collapse had come. The bad air, the nervous strain, the lack of sleep, had worn down his slender store of strength, and when the great victory came he fell like a tree whose trunk has been slowly gnawed across by teeth of silent saw. His drowse deepened into torpor. ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... the processes of digestion had released my escort from its torpor. Some had eaten until their abdomens were so distended that I thought they must burst, for beside the thag there had been fully a hundred antelopes of various sizes and varied degrees of decomposition, which they had unearthed from burial beneath the floors of their ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... passion of joy in all that fair work of God as the men that toil among them,—perhaps more. Enter the street of one of those villages, and you will find it foul with that gloomy foulness that is suffered only by torpor, or by anguish of soul. Here, it is torpor—not absolute suffering—not starvation or disease; but darkness of calm enduring: the spring, known only as the time of the scythe, and the autumn as the time of the sickle, and the sun only as a warmth, the wind as a chill, and the ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... that they had to cross the little river; and now, for the first time, he became conscious of a low, soft murmur, as of insects swarming, but this, though continuous, did not take his attention much, for he set it down to a cloud of insects, roused from their torpor by the sun, and now busily feeding, perhaps, close at hand, though invisible as he rode gently along, breathing in with delight ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... seeing that she lay in the same unaltered state I went to the door of the hut to breathe one gasp of the fresh morning air. I was watching the first red streak that heralded the rising sun, when I was startled by the words, "Thank God," faintly uttered behind me. Suddenly she had awoke from her torpor, and with a heart overflowing I went to her bedside. Her eyes were full of madness! She spoke, but ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... cometh! the Messiah comes! The King! the Comforter! the Christ!—He comes To burst the bonds of Death, and overturn The power of Time.—Hark! the trumpet's blast Rings o'er the heavens! They rise, the myriads rise— Even from their graves they spring, and burst the chains Of torpor,—He has ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... passed in a kind of peaceful monotony, broken by the frequent visits of Nurse Brown and the house surgeon, with his grave face and preoccupied air; and for some time Ida lay in a kind of semi-torpor, feeling that everything that was going on around her were the unreal actions in a dream; but as she grew stronger she began to take an interest in the life of the great ward and her fellow-patients; ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... around me, and to which my ear is not accustomed, make upon me for the most part only an impression like the rattling of carriages or any other indifferent noise. Only your voice or that of Titus could to-day wake me out of my torpor. Life and death are perfectly alike to me. Tell, however, my parents that I am very happy, that I am in want of nothing, that I amuse myself famously, and never ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... despair, that in that hell in which she rolled on from sin to sin, desperate and unsatisfied, she had taken to drinking to escape herself, to save herself from the present, to drown herself and founder for a few moments in the heavy slumber, the lethargic torpor in which she would lie wallowing across her bed for a whole day, just as she fell when she tried to make it. The miserable creature! how great an incentive, how many motives and reasons she found for devouring her suffering, and bleeding internally: in the first place ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... sank fast into famine and anarchy. The madness of the monks and the folly of the king expelled the Moors in 1609, and the loss of a million of the best mechanics and farmers of Spain struck the nation with a torpor like that of death. In 1650 Sir Edward Hyde wrote that "affairs were in huge disorder." People murdered each other for a loaf of bread. The marine perished for want of sailors. In the stricken land nothing flourished but the rabble of monks ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... sufficiently remembered. What that period was, to what a blank of imbecility the human mind had fallen, can only be known to those who have waded in the chronicles. Excepting Comines and La Salle and Villon, I have read no author who did not appal me by his torpor; and even the trial of Joan of Arc, conducted as it was by chosen clerks, bears witness to a dreary, sterile folly, - a twilight of the mind peopled with childish phantoms. In relation to his contemporaries, Charles seems quite a ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dish-water of a greenish-yellow color. But its effects are particularly pleasant. An irresistible sleep seizes you, and lasts twelve, twenty-four hours, or even more, according to the dose, and the temperament of the individual. Delicious dreams charm this long torpor. ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... consequences, and I had quite a level view of those. What I had done was barely even manslaughter at the worst. But at the best the man was not dead. Raffles was bringing him to life again. Alive or dead, I could trust him to Raffles, and go about my own part of the business, as indeed I did in a kind of torpor of the ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... the night. They had supped—the Duke, de' Alvari, Gismondo Santi, Messer Valdicampo, his wife and two daughters, and a couple of friends, potential citizens of Cagli, whom he had invited, that they might witness the honour that was being done his house. It waxed late, and the torpor that ensues upon the generous gratification of appetite was settling upon the company when Armstadt—Gian Maria's Swiss captain—entered and approached his master with the air of a man who is the bearer of news. He halted ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... the old man, pressing him and encouraging him. He, in a state of torpor, with his immovable mask of tanned skin, looked at them without appearing to understand. They asked him if he knew the "Five Vowels." He held down his head; he could not recollect it; all the songs of the good old days were mixed up in his ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... There a man could store his mind better than anywhere else: there he could not only live but grow: there more than anywhere else he might escape the self-complacency which leads to intellectual and moral torpor, because there he would be certain to meet not only with his equals but with his superiors. These were grave grounds which he could use in an argument: but a man needs no arguments in justification of the things he likes, and Johnson liked London because it was the home of the intellectual ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... shore of yellow sands. Here came the nymph; Th' opposing dreams push'd sideways with her hands, And through the sacred mansion from her robe Scatter'd refulgent light. With pain the god, His eyelids weigh'd with slothful torpor, rais'd; But at each effort down they sunk again: And on his breast his nodding chin still smote. At length he rous'd him from his drowsy state; And, on his elbow resting, ask'd the nymph, For well he knew her, why she thither came. Then ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... her innocent had meant nothing to her more than that he would inform and rally all of her friends. That he could know anything that would throw light on the evil mystery did not seem possible. She was then too miserable and depressed to do much more than wait, in a sort of stunned torpor, for what might next occur. Mechanically she answered such questions as were put to her in order that a record of the case might be made, and then was led to the cells below. She shuddered as she saw the dimly lighted stairway, and it seemed to her morbid fancy that she was to be thrust into ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... would have to grope if they arose, and so with folded hands they sit like the Buddha, which one great section of heathenism has taken as being the true emblem and ideal of the noblest life. Absolute passivity lays hold upon them all—torpor, stagnation, no dream of advance or progress. The sheep are dejected, despairing, anarchic, disintegrated, lacerated, guideless, and shepherdless—away from Christ. So He thought them. God give you and me grace, dear brethren, to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... "the hours were dreary; Dull did life in torpor fade; Time is lame, and we grew weary In the slumbrous cedarn shade. Round our hearts with long caresses, With low sighings, Silence stole, And her load of steaming tresses Fell, like Ossa, on the ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... to endure all inflictions, and a recklessness that can seize with avidity whatever coarse fragments of pleasure the day or the hour may afford. But this poverty applies itself to nerves strung for the subtlest happiness. No torpor here; no moments of rash and unscrupulous gratification—unreflected on, unrepented of—which being often repeated make, in the end, a large sum of human life; but the heart incessantly demands ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... rapidly. They turned; all around them was turning—the lamps, the furniture, the wainscoting, the floor, like a disc on a pivot. On passing near the doors the bottom of Emma's dress caught against his trousers. Their legs commingled; he looked down at her; she raised her eyes to his. A torpor seized her; she stopped. They started again, and with a more rapid movement; the Viscount, dragging her along, disappeared with her to the end of the gallery, where, panting, she almost fell, and for a moment rested her head upon his breast. And ...
— The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert • Various
... and her thoughts were not engrossed by anything in particular. She was not at all lost in thought, but thoughts were not lost to her. They are never lost to us; they lie only in a state of torpor, as it were, both the lately active thoughts that have lulled themselves to rest, and those which have not yet awoke. But thoughts come often undesired; they can touch the heart, they can distract the head, they can at times ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... Death we have both learned the propensity of man to define the indefinable. I will not say, then, commence with the moment of life's cessation—but commence with that sad, sad instant when, the fever having abandoned you, you sank into a breathless and motionless torpor, and I pressed down your pallid eyelids with the ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... had sneered, seized a power which the Whig houses had ever since the Revolution kept in their grasp. The real significance of his entry into the ministry was that the national opinion entered with him. He had no strength save from his "popularity," but this popularity showed that the political torpor of the nation was passing away, and that a new interest in public affairs and a resolve to have weight in them was becoming felt in the nation at large. It was by the sure instinct of a great people that this ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... one unfailing resource. If he were robbed of this, what stay had life for him henceforth? He could not try to persuade himself that his suffering would pass, sooner or later, and time grant him convalescence; the blackness ahead was too profound. He fell again into torpor, and let the days go as they would; ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... kneeling to drink at the clear pool, he saw in the water the shadow of the triumphant warrior holding the tomahawk above him. One after another the most critical periods of his life were lived over again, and then he sank into a deep torpor, from which he did not rouse himself until far ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... glasses from his nose and wipe them; and he told himself that he would do better to rest for a little, that there would be time enough later on, and settled back into his corner with as little curiosity, with as much torpor as the drowsy traveller who pulls his cap down over his eyes so as to get some sleep in the railway-carriage that is drawing him, he feels, faster and faster, out of the country in which he has lived for so ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... of this torpor in Miss Fenton's nature, from which he formed the purpose of breaking with her; for Lord Elmwood still retained enough of the sanctity of his former state to have yielded up his own happiness, and ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... nobility of Socrates' life, thus devoted to awakening them that sleep out of their moral torpor; the enmities that his keen and trenchant questionings of quacks and pretenders of every kind induced; the devotion of some of his friends, the unhappy falling away of others; the calumnies of interested enemies, the satires of poets; and ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... the lakes, the forests, and the streams, Ocean, and all the living things that dwell 85 Within the daedal earth; lightning, and rain, Earthquake, and fiery flood, and hurricane, The torpor of the year when feeble dreams Visit the hidden buds, or dreamless sleep Holds every future leaf and flower;—the bound 90 With which from that detested trance they leap; The works and ways of man, their death and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... though she did not sob, roll down over her cheeks upon the pillow, that sudden strength came with sudden revolt. A revulsion against her suffering and the cause of it went through her, and she seemed to shake off a torpor, an obsession, and to re-enter some moral heritage from which, for months, her helpless love had ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... the work were without exception their own peasants, who were unemployed during the winter time, and who, but for the timely occupation provided for them, would have spent the cold months in that state of half-starved torpor peculiar to the indigent agricultural labourer when he has nothing to do—at that bitter season when father and mother and shivering little ones watch wistfully the ever-dwindling sack of maize, as day by day two ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... his life? Half enchanted by visions of beauty and loveliness, and half bored to death; on the one side inspired by a soaring fancy to the singing of ethereal songs, and on the other urged by a general disgust to burst occasionally through his torpor into bitter and violent speech? If we are to learn anything of his mind from his last works, it is ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... shadow from the hall, my heart pounding, but my purpose very steady, and passed silently through passages and corridors where here and there lay one in besotted sleep, until at last I came out in a little court by the postern. The warders were long since guzzled to a torpor in their quarters, so there was neither let nor hindrance when I slid the bolt and welcomed in Avenging Justice in the shape of him who stood without, my old lord of Aragon, uncle and protector to my lady. We met with silent greeting as his picked men of arms filed in after him till the little court ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... limbs trembling with the cold, she would have perished. But the warmth from this little animal's body kept the vitality in her poor heart, and instead of death, a drowsiness fell upon her, which would perhaps have ended in a wakeless sleep. But just as she was sinking away into that deathly torpor from which few are aroused, a female figure came, floating like a dark bird of prey, through the storm, now obscured by the thick interlacing of naked branches, and again dimmed in her approach by the veil of virgin ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... at her long absence, thought for the first time of looking for her in all the down-stairs rooms. Rosamond said that she had felt suddenly sick and faint, and wanted to be helped up-stairs. When there she threw herself on the bed with her clothes on, and lay in apparent torpor, as she had done once before on ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... wretches must have been awful in the extreme, for their agonies of mind appear to have surpassed those of the body, and to have prolonged their lives by preventing them falling into the torpor which precedes death from cold. So severe was the frost, that the wreck had the appearance of huge masses of ice; and on shore nothing but the very large fires that were kept burning could have preserved the existence of ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... penitence, but despair. To have erred in one branch of our duties does not unfit us for the performance of all the rest, unless we suffer the dark spot to spread over our whole nature, which may happen almost unobserved in the torpor of despair. This kind of despair is chiefly grounded on a foolish belief that individual words or actions constitute the whole life of man: whereas they are often not fair representatives of portions even of that life. The fragments of rock in a mountain stream may tell much of ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... nothing to do on the face of it with the strength of affections; nevertheless, she felt a sudden concern for this power running to waste on her account, which, combined with a desire to keep possession of that strangely attractive masculine power, made her rouse herself from her torpor. ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... poor beloved Tried-one, that unless the torpor and the veils of sleep had wrapped thee, such sights would rend and bear away thy mind as the whirlwinds rend and carry into space the feeble sails, depriving thee forever of thy reason? Dost thou understand that the Soul itself, raised to its utmost ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... was the cause of her husband's utter ruin; and she strung herself to bear the consequences. The reproaches which agony extorted; or worse, cureless, uncomplaining depression, when his mind was sunk in a torpor, not the less painful because it was silent and moveless. She reproached herself with the crime of his death; guilt and its punishments appeared to surround her; in vain she endeavoured to allay remorse by the memory of her real integrity; the rest of the world, and she among ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... It would seem that Damascene's (De Fide Orth. ii, 14) division of sorrow into four species is incorrect; viz. into "torpor, distress," which Gregory of Nyssa [*Nemesius, De Nat. Hom. xix.] calls "anxiety,"—"pity," and "envy." For sorrow is contrary to pleasure. But there are not several species of pleasure. Therefore it is incorrect to assign ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... solstice, on the 22nd of December, on which day the thermometer fell to thirty-five degrees below zero. The men experienced pain in their ears, noses, and the extremities of their bodies. They were seized with a mortal torpor combined with headache, and their breathing became more ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... Jagienka, either in the forest or at home, he said involuntarily to himself: "Hej! what a girl!" When, helping her to mount her horse, he felt her elastic flesh under his hands, disquietude filled him and he shivered, and a torpor began ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... not an uncommon case in instances of mania—and it is generally the worst symptom. In earlier youth, Cesarini had been delicate even to effeminacy; but now his proportions were enlarged, his form, though still lean and spare, muscular and vigorous,—as if in the torpor which usually succeeded to his bursts of frenzy, the animal portion gained by the repose or disorganization of the intellectual. When in his better and calmer mood—in which indeed none but the experienced could ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... bitter disgust. We may observe casually that he was not destitute of personal attractions; he was above middle height, with a slender and well-proportioned figure, and he had dark auburn hair and fine dark eyes. In a little while he sank into a deep reverie, or rather into a sort of mental torpor. He walked on without noticing, or trying to notice, his surroundings. Occasionally he muttered a few words to himself; as if, as he himself had just perceived, this had become his habit. At this moment it dawned upon him that his ideas were becoming ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... insignificant urchin in a high frill and blue jacket, she gazed intently during the whole repast; Cousin Amelia looking at herself in the silver dish-covers, and when those were removed relapsing into a state of irritable torpor; and as for poor me, all I could do was to think over the pleasures of the past season, and dwell rather more than I should otherwise have done on the image of Frank Lovell, and the very agreeable acquisition he would have been to such a party. ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... canal: round about it were monotonous fields, plowed fields, meadows, little rivers, woods, and again monotonous fields.... No scenery, no monuments, no memories. Nothing attractive. It is all dull and oppressive. In its drowsy torpor is a hidden force. The soul tasting it for the first time suffers and revolts against it. But those who have lived with it for generations cannot break free: it eats into their very bones: and the stillness of it, the harmonious dullness, ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... with cold; not a star appeared in the sky. Of the uneasiness produced by the euphorbia plants, nothing now remained but a sense of weight in the head and a slight inflammation in the throat. I tried to go to sleep again, and fell at length into a kind of painful torpor. I fancied I heard birds of prey crying, and a roaring noise in the recesses of the forest. I got up with a view of driving away this nightmare; but it was not a dream; the day was just breaking, and the birds were welcoming its advent with many a clamorous note. A dull roar, ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... can grow cotton if she will. England and Germany manufacture nearly all the few fabrics of cotton or wool worn here, because those who should lead, instruct, and employ this people, are blind to their duty or recreant to its obligations. Italy, once the light of the world, is dying of aristocratic torpor and popular ignorance, whence come indolence, superstition, ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... Kenneth, who, listening with indifference and apathy to the preceding part of El Hakim's speech, was touched by this last communication, as the thrill of a nerve, unexpectedly jarred, will awaken the sensation of agony, even in the torpor of palsy. Then, moderating his tone, by dint of much effort he restrained his indignation, and, veiling it under the appearance of contemptuous doubt, he prosecuted the conversation, in order to get as much knowledge ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... injured by the Glow-worm's treachery, is restored to his normal state. He revives, in a manner; he recovers movement and sensibility. He is affected by the stimulus of a needle; he shifts his place, crawls, puts out his tentacles, as though nothing unusual had occurred. The general torpor, a sort of deep drunkenness, has vanished outright. The dead returns to life. What name shall we give to that form of existence which, for a time, abolishes the power of movement and the sense of pain? I can see ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... for ever with God; here God in Christ for ever dwells with the loving heart. It is a permanent abode so long as the conditions are fulfilled, but only so long. If self-will, rising in the Christian heart from its torpor and apparent death, reasserts itself and shakes off Christ's yoke, Christ's presence vanishes. In the last hours of the Holy City there was heard by the trembling priests amidst the midnight darkness the motion of departing Deity, and a great voice said: 'Let us depart hence'; ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... twin gifts of sight and memory had unconsciously absorbed and held the whole, and a skill that was never outdone in its time had made memory itself visible on the canvas. Something that was neither a 'harmless illness' nor a 'miracle' had waked Angela from her torpor. ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... Smith—a dirty gin-sodden bundle of rags on the floor in the corner with its head on a candle box, and covered by a horse rug—old Boozer Smith is supposed to have been dead to the universe for hours past, but the chorus must have disturbed his torpor; for, with a suddenness and unexpectedness that makes the next man jump, there comes a bellow from ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson
... place in my meditations. My mind was not occupied with him at all. When, therefore, the door, which had been ajar, began to open slowly, I did not become instantly on the alert. Perhaps it was some sound, barely audible, that aroused me from my torpor and set my blood tingling with anticipation. Perhaps it was the way the door was opening. An honest draught does not move a door furtively, ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... ended; and yonder she sees The spot where he lies, looming white through the trees: Her torpor dissolves with a shuddering start, And a terrible ...
— Beechenbrook - A Rhyme of the War • Margaret J. Preston
... proceed in the historian's words—'contributed largely to raise Louvain to the high position as a place of learning and education which it retained before the Universities were roused from their 15th century torpor by the revival of Learning.' Pope Adrian VI was one of its famous Primuses, and Jansen another. The College which produced a Primus enjoyed three days' holiday, during which its bell was ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... The torpor and composure of a somnambulist had come upon Frederick, who with his shirt sleeves rolled up was ceaselessly washing his arms and hands and brushing his finger nails, all at the bidding of a will not his own. He was acting in a state of will-lessness, of auto-suggestion. Yet it was ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
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