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Limbus   Listen
noun
Limbus, Limbo  n.  
1.
(Scholastic Theol.) An spiritual region where certain classes of souls were supposed to await the last judgment. "As far from help as Limbo is from bliss." "A Limbo large and broad, since called The Paradise of fools." Note: The limbus patrum was considered as a place for the souls of good men who lived before the coming of our Savior. The limbus infantium was said to be a similar place for the souls of unbaptized infants. To these was added, in the popular belief, the limbus fatuorum, or fool's paradise, regarded as a receptacle of all vanity and nonsense.
2.
Hence: Any real or imaginary place of restraint or confinement; a prison; as, to put a man in limbo.
3.
Hence: A state of waiting, or uncertainty, in which final judgment concerning the outcome of a decision is postponed, perhaps indefinitely; neglect for an indefinite time; as, the proposal was left in limbo while opponents and proponents refused to compromise.
4.
(Anat.) A border or margin; as, the limbus of the cornea.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Limbus" Quotes from Famous Books



... electric genius inspired the frail and delicate organization of Chopin with an intensity of admiration which consumed him, as a wine too spirituous shatters the fragile vase; we cannot now call up other names from the dim limbus of the past, in which so many indistinct images, such doubtful sympathies, such indefinite projects and uncertain beliefs, are forever surging and hurtling. Perhaps there is no one among us, who, in looking through the long vista, would not meet the ghost of some feeling whose shadowy form ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt

... in rapid motion, and the squire curses his miserly purse that would not hire a guard, and his dame says, I told you so!—Foolhardy man, to suppose, because we have constables in the streets of big cities, we have dismissed the highwayman to limbo. And here he is, and he will cost you fifty times the sum you would have laid out to keep him at a mile's respectful distance! But see, the wretch is bowing: he smiles at our carriage, and tells the coachman that he remembers he has been our guest, and really thinks ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... little unwilling, though very unwilling to be the life of it, as editor. And now that you are safely through your book, and before the greater Sequel rushes to its conclusion, send me, I pray you, that short chapter which hovers yet in the limbo of contingency, in solid letters and points. Let it be, if that is readiest, a criticism on the Dial, and this too Elysian race, not blood, and yet not ichor.—Let Jane Carlyle be on my part, and, watchful of his hours, urge the poet in the golden ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... them?"—what he can still do for them, or what they could still do for him. Probably he sincerely means both, but the latter much more than the former; he laments the breaking of the tools of Mammon much more than the breaking of the images of God. It would be almost impossible to grope in the limbo of what he does think; but we can assert that there is one thing he doesn't think. He doesn't think, "This man might be as jolly as I am, if he need not come to me for ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton

... perhaps most important, Aubrey Williams claims that "the critical value for the Dunciad of Harte's poem has not been fully appreciated."[3] Its value can best be substantiated, or disputed, if it is rescued from its typographical limbo in the collections and reprinted from ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte

... accountability. Further-more; as your doctrine is exceedingly evil, by Yamjamma's theory it follows, that you must be proportionably bedeviled; and since it harms others, your devil is of the number of those whom it is best to limbo; and since he is one of those that can be limboed, limboed he shall be ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville

... pray him to say masses for their souls as far as the value of these links will carry him, and to do on trust what else may be necessary to free them from Purgatory. And hark ye, as they were just living people, and free from all heresy, it may be that they are well nigh out of limbo already, so that a little matter may have them free of the fetlocks; and in that case, look ye, ye will say I desire to take out the balance of the gold in curses upon a generation called the Ogilvies of Angus Shire, in what way soever ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott

... left to lean on; there is the large wooden reel which the blear-eyed old deacon sent the minister's lady, who thanked him graciously, and twirled it smilingly, and in fitting season bowed it out decently to the limbo of troublesome conveniences. And there are old leather portmanteaus, like stranded porpoises, their mouths gaping in gaunt hunger for the food with which they used to be gorged to bulging repletion; and old brass andirons, waiting until time shall revenge them on their paltry substitutes, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... of the Avenue Marceau and of the Rue Galilee, she divined rather than recognized a shadow that had passed by her, a forgotten form. She thought, she wished to think, she was mistaken. The one whom she thought she had seen existed no longer, never had existed. It was a spectre seen in the limbo of another world, in the darkness of a half light. And she continued to walk, retaining of this ill-defined meeting an impression of coldness, of vague embarrassment, and of pain ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... among a mass of "strange people" who couldn't possibly know unless he himself made the sign, suddenly filled me with a sense of the absurdity of the entire feeling. It may not even then have seemed as absurd as it really was, but at least it seemed enough so to collapse or to pass into the limbo of ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... as I know, the story of their first—and last—meeting has never yet been told to the world at large. It is a harrowing tale, and it found no place in official communiques. Just one of those regrettable incidents that fade into the limbo of forgotten things, it served as a topic of conversation to certain ribald subalterns, and then it gradually disappeared into obscurity along with Percy FitzPercy. Only it took several months for the topic to fade; Percy beat it in about ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile

... whether you like it or not, play you must in your appointed order. We are all unwilling competitors. Nobody asks our naked little souls beforehand whether they would prefer to be born into the game or to remain, unfleshed, in the limbo of non-existence. Willy nilly, every one of us is thrust into the world by an irresponsible act of two previous players; and once there, we must play out the set as best we may to the bitter end, however little we like it or ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen

... on guard. Two hours you watch, four for sleep, and then two hours you watch again. All quiet, save that two or three prisoners are brought in from the front to be deposited in limbo, and gazed at in the morning by recruits who have never ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... watching about the wharves, and again in low grog-shops—then pimping about the "Dutch beer-shops and corner-shops"—picking up, here and there, a hopeful-looking nigger, whom they drag off to limbo, or extort a bribe to let him go. Again, they act as monitors over the Dutch corner-shops, the keepers of which pay them large sums to save themselves the heavy license fine and the information docket. When they are no longer able to pay over hush-money, they find ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams

... that of the Pterodactyl, the antique aragon, a winged fish. The task of sustaining these existences was too great for old Ocean, and the monsters dropped from the upper end of the chain into the encrusting mud, the petrified symbols of failure. So one day man may drop into the limbo of vanities, among the abandoned tools ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various

... of landing at the head of each rapid, and walking down the shore to pick his channel, and to make sure that there was smooth water below. They had been told that there was no rapid immediately above the falls, that the water slipped over without giving warning, but Stonor dismissed this into the limbo of red-skin romancing. He did not believe it possible for a river to go over a fall ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner

... depart, for he felt oppressed by anguish. "Now," said the lady, "I will take you to the church of the Holy Fathers. Do you see it, my son? This is the church of the Holy Fathers, which first was full and now is empty. Come; now I will take you to limbo. Do you see these little ones? These are those who died unbaptized." The lady wished to show him paradise; but he was too confused, so the lady made him look through a window. "Do you see this great palace? There are three seats there; one for you, one for your ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane

... with music. One of these, striking by chance on the roof of the limbo with his flute, brought out a hollow sound, upon which the elders of the tribe determined to bore in the direction whence the sound came. The flute was then set up against the roof, and the Raccoon sent up the tube to dig a way out, but he could not. Then the Moth-worm mounted into the breach, ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly

... ground. Him they release from durance base, 995 Restor'd t' his fiddle and his case, And liberty, his thirsty rage With luscious vengeance to asswage: For he no sooner was at large, But TRULLA straight brought on the charge, 1000 And in the self-same limbo put The Knight and Squire where he was shut; Where leaving them in Hockley i' th' Hole, Their bangs and durance to condole, Confin'd and conjur'd into narrow 1005 Enchanted mansion to know sorrow, In the same order and ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler

... chambermaid or a farmer's daughter. It must take months at least to conciliate the friends of so rich an heiress, and months at the end of them to prepare the wedding gala. But Charley could not wait for months; before one month was over he would probably be laid up in some vile limbo, an unfortunate poor prisoner at the suit ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope

... a week, and before being banished to the limbo of forgotten and unconsidered trifles, the business was a subject for intermittent conversation and a certain amount of conjecture. Then it was forgotten, and it is doubtful if it will ever be resurrected in any ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling

... more to that of boys. If that means that girls are merely to learn more lessons, and to study what their brothers are taught, in addition to what their mothers were taught; then it is to be hoped, at least by physiologists and patriots, that the scheme will sink into that limbo whither, in a free and tolerably rational country, all imperfect and ill- considered schemes are sure to gravitate. But if the proposal be a bona fide one: then it must be borne in mind that in the public schools of England, and in all private ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley

... your foot from land, we should have been with you in a trice, and laid you fast by the heels. I would advise you, for the future, to keep at a proper distance from the sea, for fear of the worst. You see I tell you all this for your good. For my part, I should be better satisfied if you were in limbo, with a rope about your neck, and a comfortable bird's eye prospect to the gallows: but I do as I am directed; and so ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin

... feel, on first returning to it in the autumn, and which the representative of the family we are imagining finds rather an impassioned pleasure in. He came on to New York, while the others lingered in a dim Bostonian limbo, and he amused himself very well, in a shadowy sort, looking at those other shades who had arrived in like sort, or different, and were there together with him in those fine days just preceding the election; after which the season broke ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells

... show it?" Quoth he: "The Baker hath his art No less, Sir, than the Poet; I tell ye, I'm so blithe to-night I'd paint the old Moon's orb red! Oh, think ye that I took delight For years in baking war-bread? One shape, one colour and one size, By Government controlled? But now all this to limbo flies; What wonder that to-night I cries ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 23, 1919 • Various

... pitiful wind in the fir-plantations. Poor little soul! He cannot come. Perchance on a night when trees were tost, The Changeling rode with his cavalcade Among the clouds, that were tossing too, And made the little soul afraid. They hunted him madly, the howling crew, Into the Limbo of the lost, Into the Limbo of the others Who wander crying ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various

... have risen only to endure through a few years of sickly existence, and then to pass away. The Federalists, the National Republicans, the Antimasons, the Whigs, and the Know-Nothings have each appeared, flourished for a short time, and then passed to the limbo of factions lost to earth. This discipline of the Democracy has not been without its uses, and the country occasionally has profited from it; but now it is to be abused, through application to the service of the Great Anarch at Richmond. The Rebel power, which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various

... the dreadfull passion 280 Was overpast, and manhood well awake, Yet musing at the straunge occasion, And doubting much his sence, he thus bespake; What voyce of damned Ghost from Limbo lake,[*] Or guilefull spright wandring in empty aire, 285 Both which fraile men do oftentimes mistake, Sends to my doubtfull eares these speaches rare, And ruefull plaints, me bidding ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser

... stand with arms a-kimbo, A blue and blonde sub aureo nimbo; She scans her literary limbo, The ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)

... satanic repulsions afterward. They used their eyes and critical faculties after marriage instead of before. The romance exhaled like a morning mist; and the facts came out distinctly. They learned what kind of man and woman they actually were, and two idealized creatures were sent to limbo. Because I don't blunder upon the woman I wish to marry, but pick her out, that's no reason I can't and won't love her. Your analysis and judgment were correct only up to date. You have now to meet a suit honestly, openly announced. This may be ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe

... evacuation of the forts early in April. Even after these staggering blows at the Confederacy, Carleton expatiated on the mighty work that yet remained to be done before Secessia should become one of the curiosities of history in the limbo of ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis

... out that I was the man who used to carry their booty away, sometimes to quiet places on the coast, and sometimes across to Holland, and the first time I dropped anchor in the Pool I should find myself seized and thrown into limbo. No, lad; I must carry out my agreement—which is that I am not to land you in England, but that I am to take you across to Holland or elsewhere—the elsewhere meaning that if you fall overboard by the way there will be no complaints as to ...
— When London Burned • G. A. Henty

... the Clothes-Volume itself was too like a Chaos, we have now instead of the solar Luminary that should still it, the airy Limbo which by intermixture will farther volatilise and discompose it! As we shall perhaps see it our duty ultimately to deposit these Six Paper-Bags in the British Museum, farther description, and all vituperation of them, may be spared. Biography or Autobiography of Teufelsdroeckh there is, clearly ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... meant to us, Man of Earth?" Zezdon Afthen raised his dark eyes to the terrestrian with a look in their depths that made Wade involuntarily resolve that Thet and all Thessians should be promptly consigned to that limbo of forgotten things ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell

... writer was not called a historian unless he had considerable pretensions to style. Thus, men who could write, and had written, in an informal way, excellent historical accounts, were not studied by their countrymen as historians. Their writings were relegated to the limbo of antiquarian remains. The habit of writing notes of their campaigns, memoranda of their public conduct, copies of their speeches, &c. had for some time been usual among the abler or more ambitious nobles. ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell

... tail were long ago gone to that undiscovered limbo where all things lost, broken, vanished, and destroyed; things that lose themselves—for servants are too honest to steal; things that break themselves—for servants are too careful to break; find an everlasting ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... with us yet in spite of some very serious lessons which have been taught them. We may pass by the objectors of the class who believe that vaccinated persons cough like cows and bellow like bulls; these objections go into the limbo of old wives' fables or into the category of wilful misrepresentation. Unfortunately there is a large class of persons who can believe the absurdest nonsense about any subject which is particularly distasteful to them.[6] Another class of objection is the ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

... sound of something falling, and that again by the report of a musket from the Castle battlements. It was strange to hear the alarm spread through the city. In the fortress drums were beat and a bell rung backward. On all hands the watchmen sprang their rattles. Even in that limbo or no-man's-land where I was wandering, lights were made in the houses; sashes were flung up; I could hear neighbouring families converse from window to window, and at length ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... seaman. There was nothing of the lubber about poor Ben: always the first man at his duty, and ready to share his last copper with a fellow-mortal in distress, whether seaman or landsman. Well, Ben once got into a great frolic ashore, and kicked up such a bobbery that the watchman clapped him in limbo for the night; and the justice next morning gave him such a clapper-clawing with his tongue, and bore down upon him so hard with his reprimands, as I think the lawyers call it, and raked him so severely fore and aft with his good advice, to wind up with, that Ben ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society

... would be a victory! And until that final act was accomplished, how could she be certain that all the rest of her achievements might not, by some capricious turn of Fortune's wheel—a change of Ministry, perhaps, replacing Sidney Herbert by some puppet of the permanent official gang— be swept to limbo ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey

... different roads. We cannot understand a passage in the twenty-sixth Paradiso, where Dante inquires of Adam concerning the names of God, except as a hint that the Chosen People had done in this thing even as the Gentiles did.[242] It is true that he puts all Pagans in Limbo, "where without hope they live in longing," and that he makes baptism essential to salvation.[243] But it is noticeable that his Limbo is the Elysium of Virgil, and that he particularizes Adam, Noah, Moses, Abraham, David, and ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell

... the deep perplexity of his mind, moved hope and a shadowed joy. Within him arose again the vision of happiness once pictured and prayed for, once revived, never quite banished to the grey limbo of ambitions beyond fulfilment. Now realities saddened the thought of it and brought ambition within a new environment less splendid than the old. But, despite clouds, hope shone fairly forth at last. So a planet, that the eye has followed at twilight and then lost a while, beams anew at dawn ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts

... done?" asked Grey, when we had got all who remained on deck in limbo. "If those gentlemen down there find it's hot, which I suspect they will very soon, they will begin to grow obstreperous, and try to force their way out. When men get desperate, they are somewhat ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston

... fields of La Crau, near Mariannes, there rained stones (they are there to this day) to help Hercules, who otherwise wanted wherewithal to fight Neptune's two bastards. But whither are we bound? Are we a-going to the little children's limbo? By Pluto, they'll bepaw and conskite us all. Or are we going to hell for orders? By cob's body, I'll hamper, bethwack, and belabour all the devils, now I have some vine-leaves in my shoes. Thou shalt ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... politic might in time share on equal terms the chance of the poor boy to become a man of genuine influence and importance on his own account, just as now by the neglect, or worse, of his parents the very rich boy is apt to be relegated to the limbo of curiosities, ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen

... minit, sorr," ejaculated Mr McCarthy, who, as soon as he had satisfied himself that his limbs were pretty sound, had devoted his energies to opening the hatchway—"that is as soon as I've unkivered this limbo and let the other hands come up. Faix, an' if them divils had not battened it down and Boltrope and the Norwegee could a got at thim, it's too many for tbim we'd ha' been, ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson

... Navarre, more priest-ridden than Rome herself, with every man a Carlist and every woman that which her confessor told her to be. In the south, Andalusia only asked to be left alone to go her own sunny, indifferent way to the limbo of the great nations. Which way should Aragon turn? In truth, the men ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman

... wildly, and dropped the whole box of peas on the head of the unfortunate clerk. The result was such a strenuous chorus of "Amens," that the laughter of the congregation could not be restrained, and the peas were abolished and consigned to the limbo of impractical inventions. Possibly the story may ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield

... part in Adam's heritage, these can no more be damned than they can be saved. I can never believe that the Centaur Cheiron, who was wiser than men are, is suffering eternal torments in the belly of Leviathan. A traveller who penetrated once into Limbo, relates how he saw him seated in a grassy spot and conversing with Rhipheus, the most righteous man of all the Trojans. Others indeed affirm that Holy Paradise itself has been opened to admit Rhipheus of Troy. Any way the case Is one where ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France

... lived, in his best hours, in a world of subjects and situations; he wrote another play and made it as different from its predecessor as such a very good thing could be. It might be a very good thing, but when he had committed it to the theatrical limbo indiscriminating fate took no account of the difference. He was at last able to leave England for three or four months; he went to Germany to pay a visit long deferred to his mother ...
— Nona Vincent • Henry James

... sorrowful expression—which Dante ascribes to fear—is caused by pity, Virgil conducts his disciple into the first circle of hell. Instead of lamentations, only sighs are heard, while Virgil explains that this semi-dark limbo is reserved for unbaptized children, and for those who, having lived before Christ, must "live desiring without hope." Full of compassion for these sufferers, Dante inquires whether no one from above ever visited them, and is told ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber

... convictdom poured out his regrets in words straight from the soul, and produced a song worthy to rank as a classic: but all the songs of that day have been mercifully allowed to drift into oblivion; and their singers, with their grey clothes and their fetters, have gone clanking down to the limbo of forgotten things. ...
— The Old Bush Songs • A. B. Paterson

... quarries, the discovery of metallic alloys, the necessity of roofing larger spaces, the demand for a sedentary amusement, for music to dance to in new social gatherings—any such humble reason, besides many others, can cause one art to issue more particularly out of the limbo of the undeveloped, or out of ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... swear its clamor tore the stuttering leaves from shrub and shrunken tree; Swear no limbo e'er heard muttering Like that spawn of echoes sputtering Midnight with their drunken glee— Yet, ere half were done, I ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice

... screech of rubber on concrete knifed through two seconds of time before snapping, like a celery stalk of sound, into aching silence. The silence of limbo, called into being for the space of a slow heartbeat. Then the thud of running feet, the rising hubbub of ...
— The Cuckoo Clock • Wesley Barefoot

... running at games. Fat mothers and babies along the curb, bargaining with pushcart men. A wheezing hurdy-gurdy, with every other note gone to the limbo of lost chords, rasped and leaked jerky tunes. All the shops had foreign names on the windows—not even an "English spoken here" sign. The fresh wind blew down the dirty street, and peppered everything with dust. Newspapers increased their circulation in a most irritating manner under foot. ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke

... passion hitherto unknown. He sees the picture vividly—a majestic, gallant ship done to destruction; a rich, ruined seaman wandering on earth a broken heart in a dishonoured bosom. Not only a gallant ship, but a lifelong pride and the fulness of a heart's desire swept recklessly into limbo. Here, at last, had ...
— Stories by English Authors: The Sea • Various

... relationships are liable at every moment to be corrupted and undermined at their source. We cannot yet precisely measure the interval which must elapse before, so far as Europe at least is concerned, syphilis and gonorrhoea are sent to that limbo of monstrous old dead diseases to which plague and leprosy have gone and smallpox is already drawing near. But society is beginning to realize that into this field also must be brought the weapons of ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... is what is called being happy," he used to say to himself. And being happy gave him the impression of a limbo; he felt as though his old personality was dying within him. He could no longer recover his former way of life; all his disquietudes had vanished. He felt that he was balanced, lacking those alternations of courage and cowardice which had previously formed the characteristic thing ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja

... and now he knew, and was quite satisfied with the knowledge) and the ever-present cigarette between thin, sensitive fingers. Dan clapped him on the shoulder, and shot a black look at his daughter, relegating her to an indescribable Fowler limbo, which was where she belonged, and would reside until Dan got excited and forgot how she'd betrayed him to Dr. Moss, which would take about ten or fifteen minutes all told. Jean Fowler knew her father far too well to worry about ...
— Martyr • Alan Edward Nourse

... eye, called inarticulately for the tools of his trade, his undulating monologue welled forth until Coleridge might have envied him. Helwyse heard the sound, but let the words go by to that unknown limbo whither all sounds, good or bad, have been flying ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne

... Lambourne, "thou art thinking of Black Joan Jugges of Slingdon, and hast sympathy with human frailty. But, corragio, most noble Duke of the Dungeon and Lord of Limbo, for thou art as dark in this matter as thine own dominions of Little-ease. My most reverend Signior of the Low Countries of Kenilworth, know that our most notable master, Richard Varney, would give as much to have a hole in this same Tressilian's coat, as would make us some fifty ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott

... pieces, wetting the mass, and binding it with a pannikin of flour, putting it into the coals in the frying-pan, and covering the whole with hot ashes. But the flour would not last, and those delicious horse-dampers, though now but things of the past, were by no means relegated to the limbo of forgotten things. The boiled-up bones, hoofs, shanks, skull, etc., of each horse, though they failed to produce a sufficient quantity of oil to please us, yet in the cool of the night resolved themselves ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles

... Elephant Island to the rescue of the men waiting there under the watch and ward of Wild. It was a moment hard to describe. Pain and ache, boat journeys, marches, hunger and fatigue seemed to belong to the limbo of forgotten things, and there remained only the perfect contentment ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton

... little capable of being individually cared for, that they are left to the action of mere general laws as sufficient for what for the time can be done for them. Such may well to themselves seem to be blown about by all the winds of chaos and the limbo—which winds they call chance? Even then and there it is God who has ordered all the generals of their condition, and when they are sick of it, will help them out of it. One thing is sure—that God is doing his ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald

... list of personages was no longer a miracle of foresight; it was a mere coincidence. He doubted if Mr. Marrier was worth even his three pounds a week. Edward Henry began to feel ruthless, Napoleonic. He was capable of brushing away the whole Azure Society and New Thought movement into limbo. ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett

... "put it so, if you like; that is enough to relegate the notion to the limbo of centaurs and chimaeras. What we have no reason to suppose to be true, we have no reason ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson

... found in the garden, and the consequent sterility of the milk, the evil eye and the cattle dying, etc., etc.,—it will take more than altar denunciations, believe me,—it will take years of vigorous education to relegate these ideas into the limbo of exploded fantasies. And the people won't be comfortable without them. You take away the poetry, which is an essential element in the Gaelic character, and you make the people prosaic and critical, which is the worst thing possible ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan

... my youth. Old fights and wrestlings have injured them irreparably. That punch on the head of a man whose very name is forgotten settled this thumb finally and for ever. A slip-grip at catch-as-catch-can did for the other. My lean runner's stomach has passed into the limbo of memory. The joints of the legs that bear me up are not so adequate as they once were, when, in wild nights and days of toil and frolic, I strained and snapped and ruptured them. Never again can I swing dizzily aloft and trust all the proud quick that is I to a single rope-clutch in the driving ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London

... eyes looking up to my window from the lane below, which on the night of my arrival I had relegated to the limbo of dreamland, had been verity and not phantasm. If that were so, then the uncanny visitant to my cottage had pursued me ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer

... it will, but there's no help for it. Old novels go to the trunkmakers; second-hand uniforms make the splendour of dignity-balls in the colonies: who is to say that there may not be a limbo for us also? At all events, I have a scheme for our transition state—a plan I have long revolved in my mind—and ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever

... Council of State prove that the reform proposals of the High Commission are not to be consigned to the limbo of abortions. Tuan Fang, one of the leaders, has just been appointed to the viceroyalty of Nanking, with carte blanche to carry out his progressive ideas; and the metropolitan viceroy, Yuan, on taking ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin

... who paid him sportive homage, and pretty women, as he illustrated, by means of a wineglass, two knives, and a saltspoon, his new invention for having one's boots fastened by electricity, which was to do for Marconigrams, expose radium as a foolish fraud, and consign clock-work to limbo. "You don't touch the buttons and the invention does the rest," ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson

... even less difficulty with his legal arrangements than he had anticipated. He had, hitherto, relegated the subject of divorce to the limbo of things as little thought and spoken of as possible by well-bred people. He knew nothing of the modus operandi, and was surprised at the ease and celerity with ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland

... When you fellers get into a snarl running off a white 'un, or a free nigger, I has to bring out the big talk to make it seem how you didn't understand the thing. 'Tain't the putting the big on, but it's the keepin' on it on. You'd laugh to see how I does it; it's the way I keeps you out of limbo, though." ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams

... from having its effect on the spectator. The monks and priesthood of France amounted to little less than a hundred and fifty thousand. All were now thrown up from the darkness of centuries before a wondering world. I had Milton's vision of Limbo ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various

... square accounts with Willett, who was ass enough to strike him. This from Case, mind you, who, I believe, hates Willett himself. I've just got him stowed away for the night. Had to take him out of earshot of the store and put him in limbo at Craney's shack, where he can't hear what's going on. I gave him a dose that would flatten out St. Vitus himself. There'll be no budging Case this night unless—but that ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King

... thought there would be no great harm if I was to help him to get free, and save his neck; so I agreed to take a message to the rest of the brig's people, to tell them to keep up their spirits, and to try and get their arms and legs out of limbo. He then told me to hunt in the carpenter's chest for a file, and a cold-chisel and hammer. While I was looking one night for the tools, the thought struck me, all of a heap like—if this chap was to get free, what would he do with Mr Vernon ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston

... had heard, as children do, but she had never seen any member of the family from the Far Hill Place, and mentally relegated them to the limbo of the damned under the classification of "them, from the States." Their name, even, was rarely mentioned, and, while curiosity often swayed her, temptation had ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock

... issue could not be evaded; like Banquo's ghost, it would not down. There were not wanting men, even when the war had ended and the question of chattel slavery had been forever relegated to the limbo of "things that were," who were willing still to toy with half-way measures, to cater to the caprices of that treacherous yet brave power—the South. They had not yet learned that Southern sentiment was fundamentally revolutionary, dynamic in the extreme, and could not be ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune

... on the lake shore, the people were very bitter against us, and we had some difficulty. The word went among us they were Scotch, from the Canadas, but of this I know nothing. We heard in the morning, however, that most of our officers were in limbo, and we crossed and marched up a hill, intending to burn, sink, and destroy, if they were not liberated. Mischief was prevented by the appearance of Mr. Mix, with the other gentlemen, and we pushed off without ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper

... drew a long breath. He remembered in a vague sort of way the stories which used to be told of the terrible Apulian spider, but he had consigned them to the limbo of medical fable where so many fictions have clothed themselves with a local habitation and a name. He looked into the round eyes and wide pupils a little anxiously, as if he feared that she was in a state of undue excitement, but, true to his professional training, he waited for another ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... simple piety; the repose of the soul was its object: its motive, reverent affection. The present king disowns indeed all knowledge of a dangerous aitu; he declares the souls of the unburied were only wanderers in limbo, lacking an entrance to the proper country of the dead, unhappy, nowise hurtful. And this severely classic opinion doubtless represents the views of the enlightened. But the flight of my Lafaele marks the grosser terrors ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson

... his self-imposed task of counting the rifle balls, and now and then a sharp click told that another was consigned to that limbo guarded by Towse. Mrs. Dicey stood in silence for a time, gazing upon the unutterably gloomy forest, the distant, throbbing stars, and the broad, wan flashes at long intervals gleaming through ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)

... here," answers Borlasse, in a subdued tone. "Desarted as this bar-room appear to be, it's got ears for all that. I see that curse, Johnny, sneakin' about, pretendin' to be lookin' after his supper. If he knew as much about you as I do, you'd be in limbo afore you ked get into your bed. I needn't tell you thar's a reward offered; for you seed that yourself in the newspaper. Two thousand dollars for you, an' five hundred dollars for the fellow as I've seed about along wi' you, and ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid

... occasion he took the liberty, while preaching, to denounce a rich man in the community, recently deceased. The result was an arrest, a trial for slander, and an imprisonment in the county jail. After Lorenzo got out of "limbo," he announced that, in spite of his (in his opinion) unjust punishment, he should preach, at a given time, a sermon about "another rich man." The populace was greatly excited, and a crowded house greeted his appearance. With great solemnity ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various

... prologue briefly explaining its purpose, the mystery begins, like the old liturgical plays, with the witness of the prophets; then follows a scene in Limbo where Adam is shown lamenting his fate, and another in Heaven where the Redemption of mankind is discussed and the Incarnation decided upon. With the Annunciation and the Visitation of the Virgin the first day closed. ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles

... look for them, in out-of-the-way corners of our book museums, the shriveled cheap publications—the publications of the Rationalist Press Association, for example—on which my arguments were based. Lying in that curious limbo with them, mixed up with them and indistinguishable, are the endless "Replies" of orthodoxy, like the mixed dead in some hard-fought trench. All those disputes of our fathers, and they were sometimes furious disputes, ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells

... devoted himself to the subject for many years, he failed in securing the adoption of his sailing carriage. It is indeed quite clear that a power so uncertain as wind could never be relied on for ordinary traffic, and Mr. Edgworth's project was consequently left to repose in the limbo of the Patent Office, with thousands of other ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles

... see at once that this is the maddest of the uneconomic: partridges killed by our land magnates at, shall we say, a guinea a head, to be retailed in Leadenhall at one shilling and ninepence, with one poacher in limbo for every fifty birds! our poet, maker, creator, gauging ale, and that badly, with no leisure for making or creating, only a little leisure for drinking, and such like beer-barrel avocations! Truly, a cutting of blocks with fine razors ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope

... laughing, as did all round him, "Thou art a cunning rogue enough, whoever thou art. Go into limbo, and behave thyself ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley

... those rascals coming up astern and making for us. The cowards! They didn't dare attack the old barquey when she was all ataunto in the open sea; and only now rely on their numbers and the fact of our being in limbo here. However, if they do attack us, we shall ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson

... Protestantism. This ceremony had only survived in Catholic countries; in Jingalo the Reformation had killed it, and it had gone with graven images, the invocation of saints, and the worship of relics to the limbo of forgotten foolishnesses. ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman

... particular to write about, but your letter has been lying for some days in the limbo of unanswered letters, to wit my pocket, and ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler

... Mary's character, while we cannot say that they are concealed with partisan intent, are so wrought into the picture that they do not impress the imagination as ugly at all. They are consigned to the dim limbo of the past and have the effect of winning for her that sympathy which human nature is always ready to bestow, in art if not in life, upon the Magdalen type. On the other hand, the ignoble traits of Queen Elizabeth ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... adventurous by the success of the "Vagrancies," he next tried his hand at editorials on light or picturesque topics, and with satisfying though not equal results, for here he occasionally stumbled upon the hard-rooted prejudices of the Inside Office, and beheld his efforts vanish into the irreclaimable limbo of the scrap-basket. Nevertheless, at ten dollars per column for this kind of writing, he continued to make a decent space bill, and clear himself of the doldrums where the waning of the city desk's favor had left him. All that he could now make he needed, for his change of domicile ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... think so?" Webb stared seriously. "That would be bad, wouldn't it—that is, if the officers ketched 'im an' had enough proof agin 'im to put 'im in limbo." ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben

... Fifteenth Amendment is utterly impracticable and should be relegated to the limbo of forgotten issues. It is very certain that any party founded on the proposition would utterly fail in a national canvass. What we are considering is something practical, something that means attainable progress. It seems to me to follow, ...
— The South and the National Government • William Howard Taft

... and intends him to fork out," said Mahony carelessly; and, with this, dismissed the subject. Now that his own days in the colony were numbered, he no longer felt constrained to pump up a spurious interest in local affairs. He consigned them wholesale to that limbo in which, for him, they had ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson

... hand the purpose of the House of Austria was to do away with the elective principle and the prescriptive rights of the Estates in Bohemia first, and afterwards perhaps to send the Golden Bull itself to the limbo of wornout constitutional devices. At present however their object was to secure their hereditary sovereignty in Prague first, and then to make sure of the next Imperial election at Frankfurt. Time afterwards might fight still more in their favour, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... whom you stole me from," replied the boy. "Also, to have the satisfaction of puttin' you in limbo; although I did not expect ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne

... morning, betwixt the moss And gum that locked our friend in limbo, A spider had spun his web across, And sat in the midst with arms akimbo: So, I took pity, for learning's sake, And, de profundis, accentibus laetis, Cantate! quoth I, as I got a rake; And up I fished his ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps

... of those theories made stone, those gods with three heads and seven hands, who sit on lotus leaves and flourish lingams and what not, in the temples of India. Let us leave, therefore, these morbid elaborations of the human intelligence to drift to limbo, and come rather to the natural heresies that spring from fundamental weaknesses of the human character, and which are common to all religions. Against these it is necessary to keep constant watch. ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells

... esteemed characters,—though Willelmus Sacrista, of the red nose, too is one. These shall proceed straightway to Waltham; and there elect the Abbot as they may and can. Monks are sworn to obedience; must not speak too loud, under penalty of foot-gyves, limbo, and bread-and-water: yet monks too would know what it is they are obeying. The St. Edmundsbury Community has no hustings, ballot-box, indeed no open voting: yet by various vague manipulations, pulse-feelings, we struggle ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle

... followed St. Augustine in opposition to the accepted opinion of the Schools of his time, and for that reason he was called the torturer of children, tortor infantum. The Schoolmen, instead of sending them into the flames of hell, have assigned to them a special Limbo, where they do not suffer, and are only punished by privation of the beatific vision. The Revelations of St. Birgitta (as they are called), much esteemed in Rome, also uphold this dogma. Salmeron and Molina, and before ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz

... Divine right, monarchy, aristocracy, oppression, despotism, tyranny—these and all other devils of the old world order were bound for the limbo which awaits outworn, discredited social institutions. The Declaration of Independence officially proclaimed the new order,—challenging "divine right" and maintaining that "all men are created equal; that they ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing

... roof of the cottage was gone; there were no fragments, for the wind was a clean sweeper; it had bodily vanished. The walls stood. He dragged himself unsteadily to his feet, and looked about for his spade. It was nowhere to be seen; the besom of the gale had whirled it to some unknown limbo. ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall

... preface, lest we might seem cold to the very remarkable merits of "Sir Rohan's Ghost," if we treated it as a book worth finding fault with, instead of condemning it to the indifferent limbo of general eulogy. It is our deliberate judgment that no first volume by any author has ever been published in America showing more undoubtful symptoms of genuine poetic power than this. There are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various

... may develop in the arts of life, or the knowledge of nature, must remain in that limbo of vanity, to which Ariosto consigned embryo politicians, and Milton consigned departed friars—the world of the moon. But it will scarcely supply instances of more memorable individual faculties, or of more powerful effects produced by those faculties. The efforts of Conspiracy and Conquest ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various

... opening a law-suit against the captain of the Termagant for the unlawful appropriation of the whale harpooned by Glynn. The men highly approved of what they called a "shore-going scrimmage," and advised the captain to go and have the captain and crew of the Termagant "put in limbo right off." ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne

... St. Jean; and the name of Waterloo appears in the tepid records of 1794 at the head of a plan for arranging the stages of the retreat (5th July) which the nervousness of Coburg soon condemned to the limbo of unfulfilled promises.[353] Is it surprising that, two days later, the Duke of York declared to him that the British were "betrayed and sold to the enemy"? Worse still, the garrisons of Valenciennes, Conde, Quesnoy, and Landrecies, amounting ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... ghosts from Limbo take Return, or listen from the bowed skie To heare how well their learned lines do take? Or if they could; is Heavens felicitie So small as by mans praise to be encreas'd, Hells pain no greater then hence ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More

... evening passed very slowly. If I could have gone to O'Halloran's, I might have forgotten my anxiety; but, as I couldn't go to O'Halloran's, I could not get rid of my anxiety. What had become of him? Was he in limbo? Had he taken Louie's advice and flitted? Was he now gnashing his splendid set of teeth in drear confinement; or was he making a fool of himself, and an ass, by persisting in indulging in ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille

... ignore, the euphuism. But should the quality of substance fail, then we repudiate it and despise it. Therefore Marino, who is certainly not more euphuistic than Shakespeare, but who has immeasurably less of potent stuff in him, wears the motley of his barocco style in limbo bordering upon oblivion, while the Swan of Avon parades the same literary livery upon both summits of Parnassus. So true it is that poetry cannot be estimated apart from intellectual and moral contents. Had ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... deafening. It deprived her of the power to think. But she no longer felt afraid. She found this limbo of howling desolation infinitely preferable to the awful loneliness of her cabin. Slowly and with difficulty she ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell

... line-of-battle-ship Ohio at Saucelito, and obtained the privilege of leaving his crew on board as "prisoners" until he was ready to return to sea. Then, discharging his passengers and getting coal out of some of the ships which had arrived, he retook his crew out of limbo and carried the first regular mail back to Panama early in April. In regular order arrived the third steamer, the Panama; and, as the vessels were arriving with coal, The California was enabled to hire a crew and get off. ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... things you may have said or done, you must put all evil behind you and live—simply, bravely, well." The greater the evil, the greater the need of forgetting. Not flippantly, but reverently, leave your misdeeds in a limbo where they may not rise to haunt you. This great thing you may do, not with the idea of evading or escaping consequences, but so that past evil may be turned into present and future good. The criminal himself is coming to be treated ...
— The Untroubled Mind • Herbert J. Hall

... many-handed, sinister and splendid, seemed moving through the gloom on a throne of gold, uplifted by a phalanx of elephants. Fudo I saw, shrouded and shrined in fire, and Maya-Fujin, riding her celestial peacock; and strangely mingling with these Buddhist visions, as in the anachronism of a Limbo, armored effigies of Daimyo and images of the Chinese sages. There were huge forms of wrath, grasping thunderbolts, and rising to the roof: the Deva-kings, like impersonations of hurricane power; the Ni-O, guardians of long-vanished temple gates. Also there ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn

... that which made the bush alive in the desert of Horeb—the presence of the living God; now, the vision was over, the desert was dull and dry, the bush burned no more, the glowing lava had cooled to unsightly stone! There was no God, nor any man more! Time had closed and swept the world into the limbo of vanity! For a time she sat without thought, as it were in a mental sleep. She opened her eyes, and the blank of creation stared into the very heart of her. The emptiness and loneliness overpowered her. Hardly aware of what she was doing, she ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald

... looking into the wood fire. He was watching the Cherwell swirl through a narrow archway. He was conscious of heavenly blue in the white limbo ceiling above him, and the cushions of his chair had ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps

... village. There is the glass coupe in front, the drawing-room of the house. There is the interieur, which you may compare, if you please, to the dining-room, only there you do not dine; and there is the rotundo, a sort of cabin attached, the limbo of the establishment, in which you may find half-a-dozen unhappy wights for days and nights doing penance. Then, in the very fore-front of this moving castle—hung in mid air, as it were—there is the banquette. It is the roomiest of all, and has, moreover, spacious untenanted ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie

... them, and lips to answer with honied greetings of gratitude and love: these cannot remove the old heart, and put a new one into the bosom of the spectators. The whole is a pageant seen for a day among men in its passage to that 'Limbo large and broad' whither, as ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... pass, and vagrant through the land; Nor sail with Ward[276] to ape-and-monkey climes, Where vile Mundungus trucks for viler rhymes: Not sulphur-tipp'd, emblaze an ale-house fire; Not wrap up oranges, to pelt your sire! Oh, pass more innocent, in infant state, To the mild limbo of our father Tate:[277] Or peaceably forgot, at once be blest In Shadwell's bosom with eternal rest! 240 Soon to that mass of nonsense to return, Where things destroyed are swept to ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope

... warn him against fishing and will say:—In these waters abideth an Ifrit who giveth as a last favour a choice of deaths and fashion of slaughter to the man who saveth him!" Now when the Ifrit heard this from the Fisherman and saw him self in limbo, he was minded to escape, but this was prevented by Solomon's seal; so he knew that the Fisherman had cozened and outwitted him, and he waxed lowly and submissive and began humbly to say, "I did but jest with thee." But the other an swered, "Thou liest, O vilest of the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... limbo more than three weeks, and we knew nothing of it. He was brought up for examination three several days, and still we heard nothing. They put him to the rack to make him tell where the captain was to be found—but the brave fellow would not slip. Yesterday he got his ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... shingle, to—there on the edge of the great wan water,—that July in 330 when mean Satrap Bessus killed his king, Codomannus, last of the Achaemenidae, then in flight from Alexander;—and the House of Cyrus and Darius came to an end. What a time it was that drifted into Limbo then! One unit of history; one phase of the world's life-story! It had seen all those world-shaking Tiglath-pilesers eastward; all those proud Osirified kings by the Nile;—and now it was over; had died in its last stronghold, Persia, and there ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... raises the axe to chop the offender's head off, thinks better of it, twirls Picard swiftly around, and using the flat of the chopper spanks the rear of the Picard anatomy, sending him sprawling into the limbo. ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon

... problem solvers the maxim of the golden quality of silence, particularly while the attacks of the Northern abolitionists upon the general Southern regime were so active. On the other hand the new severities of the law were promptly relegated, as the old ones had been, to the limbo of things laid away, like pistols, for emergency use, out of sight and out of mind in the daily routine ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

... bonds quickly or the stockholders did not "come through," as he phrased it. He knew fairly well the financial resources of those whom he had favored with his liberal patronage and realized that they were doomed to go down with him to that limbo provided for the over-sanguine and ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart

... touch it. I acquit myself of the charge, but, my dear fellow, with an uneasy sense of the responsibility I incur in thus possibly suggesting to you a retrospect of events which you had much best consign to the limbo of the—not unexplainable, but not worth trying to explain. It was patent from what I have gathered that you were in an overstrung and excitable condition at that time, and that your temporary collapse was purely nervous in its character. It seems there was some nonsense ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes

... sometimes does by movements and quiverings of the flesh within its coat, corresponding with its good-will,[47] told him, that his fall was not owing to the fruit which he tasted, but to the violation of the injunction not to taste it; that he remained in the Limbo on hell-borders upwards of five thousand years; and that the language he spoke had become obsolete before ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt

... party of fugitives of mixed nationalities and professions—consuls, charges, attaches, and innocent, agitated citizens—was summarily grabbed and ordered into indefinite limbo. ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers

... awaits all who would violate our shores, or light up the flame of sedition in the land. If, as some philosophers aver, the pigeon does not all die, but in some tranquil limbo flutters on in an eternity of innocent cooing, it must console the poor bird to reflect that, however cheap he may be held, he has not perished altogether in vain. To serve a useful purpose is the great economy of things, to point a warning, at the cost ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous

... imagination to embrace the ordinary facts of life and human nature. But even the most sensible will understand that it was annoying for Milly regularly to find her own and the family purse reduced to a state that demanded rigid economy. The Invader, stirring in that limbo where she lay, might have answered that rigid economy was Milly's forte and real delight, and that it was well she should have nothing to spend in ridiculously disguising the fair body they were condemned to share. Mildred certainly left behind her social advantages which ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods

... "and I dare say there are plenty of other men, even in this Dutch limbo, who have an eye for beauty; let them break their hearts, if they have any, but keep your ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson

... the Genesis creation myths, and the Adam, Noah, Lot, and Jonah legends, and the divine origin of the Hebrew punctuation, and the prophecies regarding Antichrist, and the early date of the book of Daniel have now been relegated to the limbo of ontworn beliefs, Christianity has ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... given him, he had hoped one day to electrify the town. But that hope was now buried very deep down in his heart, and if ever brought out, like an "old property," to be looked at and turned about, its only greeting was a quiet sneer, after which it was relegated to the limbo whence it had been disinterred. James Madgin had given up the expectation of ever shining in the theatrical system as a "great star;" he was trying to content himself with the thought of living and dying a respectable mediocrity—useful, ornamental ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various

... to us one November day—we knew he had been out to vote—with the news that General Winfield Scott, his and the then "Whig" candidate, had been defeated for the Presidency; just as I rescue from the same limbo my afterwards proud little impression of having "met" that high-piled hero of the Mexican War, whom the Civil War was so soon and with so little ceremony to extinguish, literally met him, at my father's side, in Fifth Avenue, where he had just emerged from a cross-street. I remain vague as to ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James

... they loved and frisked and laughed and courted to that sad accompaniment. There is scarce one of the airs that has not an amari aliquid, a tang of sadness. Perhaps it is because they are old and defunct, and their plaintive echoes call out to us from the limbo of the past, whither they have been consigned for this century. Perhaps they were gay when they were alive; and our descendants when they hear—well, never mind names—when they hear the works of certain maestri now popular, will say: Bon Dieu, is this ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... "you would know that thought is dynamic, and that it may call into existence forms and pictures that may well exist for hundreds of years. For, not far removed from the region of our human life is another region where float the waste and drift of all the centuries, the limbo of the shells of the dead; a densely populated region crammed with horror and abomination of all descriptions, and sometimes galvanised into active life again by the will of a trained manipulator, a mind ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood

... distinguished old man of soldier-like aspect would pass them on horseback, and gaze at their two tall British figures with a look of curious and benign interest, as if he mentally wished them well, and well away from this drear limbo of penitence ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier

... peculiar. The holy flame is elicited from certain flints which are said to have been brought by a member of the Pazzi family from the Holy Land. They are kept in the church of the Holy Apostles on the Piazza del Limbo, and on the morning of Easter Saturday the prior strikes fire from them and lights a candle from the new flame. The burning candle is then carried in solemn procession by the clergy and members of the municipality to the high altar in the cathedral. A vast crowd has meanwhile assembled in the cathedral ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer

... but yesterday that the old Fifth Avenue Hotel passed to the limbo of bygone things. When "Victoria's Royal Son" came to visit us it was new and stately, and held by loyal patriots to be something for strangers from beyond the seas to behold and wonder at. But before the ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice

... been generous in the endowment of our councilors. They agreed, unconsciously, in a mute love for the muddy field through which they tramped, with eyes narrowed close by the concentration of their minds. At length they drew breath, let the argument fly away into the limbo of other good arguments, and, leaning over a gate, opened their eyes for the first time and looked about them. Their feet tingled with warm blood and their breath rose in steam around them. The bodily exercise made ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf

... effect which attract the poet: a deeper symbolism and an effect both aesthetic and moral recommend the element to him. With Milton, however, there follows a curious result. He produces his manufactured myth of Sin and Death and his ludicrous Limbo of Vanity with a gravity and earnestness as convincing as those which urge home any part of his theme; yet we are aware that he is only making poetic pretence of belief; so that a certain distrust of his sincerity throughout creeps ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop

... the Ranger. "You seem to be in limbo. I reckon you bit off more'n you could chew, for once in your life. Thought you were shooting up Rangers, did you? Instead you barked up against some tenderfeet who were too much for you. I guess you ain't quite so smart as ...
— The Pony Rider Boys with the Texas Rangers • Frank Gee Patchin

... devoted his vivacious intellect chiefly to Looney, in whose progress he expressed an almost grandmotherly interest. Looney sputtered and made sport as usual, till one night an unbaptized idea was somehow wafted into the limbo of his brain. He was counting over the faggots in the great store-room under his dormitory when the thought came. Soon afterwards he went upstairs, and quietly got into bed. It was a model dormitory. So many cubic feet of air were allowed for each child. The temperature was regulated according ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson

... not!" West blazed into sudden ferocity. He had the look of a wild animal at bay. "You are to prosecute!" he exclaimed violently. "Do you hear? I won't have any more of your damned charity! I'll go down into my own limbo and stay there, without let or hindrance from you or any other man. If you are fool enough to offer me another chance, as you call it, I am not fool enough to take it. The only thing I'll take from you ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell

... one point they were all very emphatic. That ill-fated library window should pass into the limbo of things that have been. Already builders were converting the library into an entrance hall, and the main door would occupy its natural place in the front ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy

... any rate, there could be no longer any doubt but that the artist's power really lay in the creation of ideal forms; whether presented in monomime or combined in poetic and decorative groups, called up from the wonderful limbo of ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys

... quote the Commissioners had an idea which might have animated all their labors. But they left it in limbo, they reverenced it, and they passed by. Perhaps we can raise it again and ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann

... consign the boatswain to the limbo of memory. He was inside the street-car, so he did not see the automobile, driven by a figure in a gray overcoat and cap, that drew up at the curb beside the boatswain. Nor did he observe that automobile's consequent strange behavior in persistently keeping half a block behind ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer

... another; both contain such obsolescences as a presto, fugue, scherzino, and the like. But for all the classic garb, the hands are the hands of Esau. In one of the pieces there is even a motto tucked, "All hope leave ye behind who enter here!" Can he have referred to the limbo of classicism? ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes

... but Montucla and others misunderstood him, and, still worse, misunderstood their own misunderstanding, and made him say the circle was exactly double of the equilateral triangle. He was let out of limbo by Lacroix, in a note to his edition of Montucla's History ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan

... new-born's flat nose. There may also be abnormal sleepiness, greater even than that of the normal baby in the first month or two in that there is no spontaneous awakening from the coma for food. But in most cases this is put down to normal variability, or maybe to that limbo of all a baby's troubles: weakness. After some months, it is noticed that the infant is failing to grow at the normal rate, either physically or mentally. Examination at this time reveals a curious thickening of the ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.

... pop-limbo has been talked about the Princes denial of the marriage! I grant that it was highly improper to marry Mrs. Fitzherbert at all. But George was always weak and wayward, and he did, in his great passion, marry her. That he should afterwards deny it officially seems ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm

... The battle eke to Sionward grew hot, The soldiers slain, the hardy knights were killed, Legions of sprites from Limbo's prisons got, The empty air, the hills and valleys filled, Hearting the Pagans that they shrinked not, Till where they stood their dearest blood they spilled; And with new rage Argantes they inspire, Whose heat no flames, whose burning ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso

... Present, the Immediate, the Actual, has proved too potent for me. It takes away not only my scanty faculty, but even my desire for imaginative composition, and leaves me sadly content to scatter a thousand peaceful fantasies upon the hurricane that is sweeping us all along with it, possibly, into a Limbo where our nation and its polity may be as literally the fragments of a shattered dream as my unwritten Romance. But I have far better hopes for our dear country; and for my individual share of the catastrophe, I afflict myself little, or not at all, and shall ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... unreal, nor yet quite real; something much better than a stage property and not wholly a living woman; more of a Beaumont and Fletcher personage of the boards—and as such effective—than a Shakespearian piece of nature. The theatrical limbo to which such almost but not quite embodied shadows ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden

... mass-populations. Russia has been lately moving in the same direction; her commercial interests are rapidly progressing, but her peasantry is at a standstill, France and Italy have already grown a fat bourgeoisie, but their workers remain in a limbo of poverty and strikes. And in all these countries, including Germany, Socialism has arisen as a protest against the commercial order—which fact certainly does not look as if commercialism ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter

... Halpin suggested in 1856 that the "H.S." attacked by Florio in his Worlde of Wordes in 1590 may have been directed at Shakespeare, but advanced no evidence to support his theory, which has since been relegated by the critics to the limbo of fanciful conjecture. I was not aware of Mr. Halpin's suggestion when I reached ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson

... was a sincere Liberal in the non-party sense of that very elastic word. So was I. That is to say, there was a time when we both thought ourselves good mid-Victorian Liberals—a school of politicians whose ideas have now been swept into the limbo of forgotten things, the only surviving principles of that age being apparently those associated with a faint and somewhat fantastic cult of the primrose. In 1866 he wrote to his sister—and I cannot but smile on reading the letter—"I am more and more Radical ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring

... Carpathians at this point were few and well known. By process of elimination, Renwick had at last assured himself that his first theory was tenable, for Selim had confirmed it. A hundred conjectures flashed into the Englishman's mind as he trudged onward, to be one by one dismissed and relegated to the limbo of uncertainty. But assuming that Selim had told the truth, Renwick had found the trail, and would follow wherever it might lead him, ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs



Words linked to "Limbus" :   complex body part, anatomical structure, body structure, bodily structure, structure



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