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More "Benumbed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shivering, bowing, thanking the landowner, the coachman, the peasants. He had nothing on but a green jacket with pink ribbons, and it was freezing very hard. The landowner looked at his blue and benumbed shoulders in silence, wrapped the unlucky fellow in his own pelisse, and took him home. The household ran out. They soon thawed the Frenchman, fed him, and clothed him. The landowner ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... all gone, the lights in the streets were winning on the fast-fading twilight, and Mrs. Hilbrough's reception-room was growing dusk when Millard slowly, as one whose purposes are benumbed, rose to leave. Once in the street, he walked first toward one avenue and then toward the other. He thought to go to his apartment, but he shrank from loneliness; he would go to dinner at a neighboring restaurant; then he turned ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... benumbed by these personally conducted biographies, but she was too well-bred not to ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... appearance. On this particular morning, however, he did not feel at all so proud of himself, or especially pleased with any one or anything. He had passed the long night in a wood hard by, and had been benumbed with cold. ...
— What the Blackbird said - A story in four chirps • Mrs. Frederick Locker
... Benumbed with cold, and half dead with terror, Paslew needed all his companion's support, for he could do little to help himself, added to which, they occasionally encountered some large stone, or stepped into a deep hole, so that it required ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... odor came through the loopholes of the windows, and the wind whirled a puff of smoke into the room. The faces of the girls blanched, and they looked at each other fearfully. The entire party seemed benumbed for the moment, then Fairfax sprang to the door ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... knees, her head thrown back and resting against the wall behind. What was the good of getting up or going to bed now? When she was thoroughly exhausted she threw herself, dressed, upon her bed. Otherwise she remained in the same position, chilled and benumbed; in her quiescent state, only her teeth chattered with the cold; she had that continual impression of a band of iron round her brows; her cheeks looked wasted; her mouth was dry, with a feverish taste, and at times a painful hoarse cry rose from her throat and was repeated ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... channel of childhood reminiscences, and she gave them utterance in a kind of monotonous recitative—slightly disconnected, but generally describing the glories of the Sultan of Sulu, his great splendour, his power, his great prowess; the fear which benumbed the hearts of white men at the sight of his swift piratical praus. And these muttered statements of her grandfather's might were mixed up with bits of later recollections, where the great fight with the "White Devil's" brig and ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... the deck of the Lively of Whitby, under circumstances of safety! They received from their townsmen the warmest congratulations; and while each individual was forward in contributing his assistance towards the restoration of their benumbed bodies, each appeared sensible that their narrow escape from death was highly providential. The forbearance of God is wonderful. Perhaps these very men a few hours before, were impiously invoking their own destruction, or venting imprecations upon their fellow beings! True it is that the goodness ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... those tortures said to be In Acheron, the deep, they all are ours Here in this life. No Tantalus, benumbed With baseless terror, as the fables tell, Fears the huge boulder hanging in the air: But, rather, in life an empty dread of Gods Urges mortality, and each one fears Such fall of fortune as may chance to him. Nor eat the vultures into Tityus Prostrate ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... Miriam. She must have had cause to dread some unspeakable evil from this strange persecutor, and to know that this was the very crisis of her calamity; for as he drew near, such a cold, sick despair crept over her that it impeded her breath, and benumbed her natural promptitude of thought. Miriam seemed dreamily to remember falling on her knees; but, in her whole recollection of that wild moment, she beheld herself as in a dim show, and could not well distinguish what was done and suffered; ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... peninsula had for its ruler a prince who sought his glory in smothering free thought among his own people, and in wasting his immense resources in vain efforts to repress it also outside of his own dominions through all Europe. From that hour, Spain became benumbed and estranged from all the advances of science and art, by means of which other nations, and especially England, developed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... silence we had come. I had felt there was much I would like, and ought, to say, but something in Tom's mood or mine, or in the situation, benumbed my thoughts so they would not come forth, or jumbled them so I knew not where to begin. Arrived upon the ground with a palpitating sense of the nearness of the event, we found ourselves still less fit for utterance of the things deepest ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... is before her, and yet she seems hardly conscious of his presence. He gazes on her with surprise, and then gently whispers her dear name. The well known voice recalls her scattered ideas, and its magic sound awakens her benumbed sensations to fresh warmth and life. She raised her head, threw aside the rich clusters of her hair, and a stream of moonlight falling on her countenance revealed to Gomez Arias ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... membranes it is necessary not only to thoroughly remove the tumor but to treat the diseased membrane at the point from which the polypus springs; otherwise another tumor may develop at the same point. The nasal passage having been thoroughly anaesthetized, or benumbed, by the use of cocaine, the nasal speculum is introduced, and by means of reflected light from the head mirror worn by the operator, the interior of the nostril is brought into view. (See ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... yet the best swimmer in the world would have been drowned ere he reached it, as the water was so bitterly cold, that when I was bailing for my life, and, consequently, in pretty violent exercise, my hands became quite benumbed ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... happened, overturning every calculation, every prevision. I am stupefied, benumbed—I was at the Marquise's, where it was darker than usual. One solitary lamp flickered in a corner, dozing under a huge shade. A fat gentleman, buried in an easy-chair, drowsily retailed the news ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... on some grassy eminence. When night fell the waters grew louder, a stinging wind swept the woods, and the carriage, staggering from rut to rut, seemed every moment about to land them in some invisible ravine. Fear and cold at last benumbed the little boy, and when he woke he was being lifted from his seat and torches were flashing on a high escutcheoned doorway set in battlemented walls. He was carried into a hall lit with smoky oil-lamps and hung with armour ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... that strange, benumbed state that had deadened for a while all his sense of suffering—coming back to a consciousness of utter bereavement and insupportable anguish—anguish written in such awful characters upon his pallid and writhen brow that Beatrice and her ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... no pain. Nor would there have been any plaudits for MARCUS CURTIUS when he leapt into the gulf, had he been so drunk as not to know what he was about. The will which depends on unscrupulousness is like the benumbed hand or intoxicated soul. Quench conscience, as a sense of right and obligation, and you can, of course, do a great deal from which another would shrink—and therefore be called "weak-minded" ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... and heaven bear sway. Paul made much of a tender conscience, else he had never done as he did, nor suffered what we read of. 'And herein,' saith he, 'do I exercise myself, to have always a conscience void of offence toward God and toward men' (Acts 24:16). But this could not a stony, benumbed, bribed, deluded, or a muzzled conscience do. Paul was like the nightingale with his breast against the thorn.[15] That his heart might still keep waking, he would accustom himself to the meditation of those things that should beget both love and fear; and would always be very chary, lest he ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... days she floated hither and thither over the sea, soaked to the skin, nigh dead with cold, and so nearly benumbed that but for little Frillikin, who snuggled to her bosom, and kept a little warmth in her, she must have perished a hundred times. She was famished with hunger, but on seeing some oysters in their shells she took and ate as many ...
— Old-Time Stories • Charles Perrault
... the Lady made better time when he was on her back. When the struggle to remount had been repeated until nature could no longer by any staggering effort be made to respond to his will, until his legs were no longer a part of his benumbed being—until below his hips he had no body answerable to his commands, but only two insensible masses of lead that anchored him to the ground—he still forced the frozen feet to carry him, in a feeble, monstrous gait beside the Lady, while he dragged with his hands ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... unusual fixtures about his collar, and learn that the poor animal has a galled shoulder, so raw and inflamed that all his first efforts in the morning are attended by pain, and that he only works well after the flesh has become benumbed by pressure. I ask his driver why he does not turn the creature into the pasture, and let the ulcer heal, and am told that he has been treated thus repeatedly, but that it always returns when labor is resumed. There is a livery stable that I visit frequently; ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... unending laurel-wreaths Beside her Cretan helmsman and her king! Wax-pale, the world stands listening and holds Its breath, benumbed with fright! ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... that we crept sideways even to the windows to look out upon the world. There was everything to repel—the cold, the frost, the hardness, the snow, dark sky and ground, leaflessness; the very furze chilled and all benumbed. Yet the forest was still beautiful. There was no day that we did not, all of us, glance out at it and admire it, and say something about it. Harder and harder grew the frost, yet still the forest-clad hills possessed a something that drew the mind open to their largeness and grandeur. ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... bear such agitation any longer; besides, it is hard even for a strong man to picture in his imagination certain images without risking the loss of his reason. Only in this way can I explain the strange hallucination which appeared before my fatigued eyes in the solitude of my cell. As though benumbed I gazed aimlessly at the tightly closed door, when suddenly it seemed to me that some one was standing behind me. I had felt this deceptive sensation before, so I did not turn around for some time. But when I turned around ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... ability of their country to effect her redemption. Some doubted the capacity, and perhaps the sincerity, of the chiefs. Some were schooled in duplicity, and under the ermine, or under the privy councillor's robe, carried fierce hearts, benumbed by mendicancy and seared by shame. But the first flash of their country's liberty would see them ranged at that country's side, repaying with the fiercest hate the beggar crumbs which England had flung from the fragments of her overloaded ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... the city parks, famished, benumbed and mute, Two hundred thousand refugees, homeless and destitute! Upon the hard, cold ground they crouch—the wrecks of Pomp and Pride; Milady and the city waifs are huddled side by side. And there, 'neath shelter rude and frail, we hear ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... made a collection of all the poisons which she could procure, and administered portions of them all, that she might see which were sudden and which were slow in their effects, and also learn which produced the greatest distress and suffering, and which, on the other hand, only benumbed and stupefied the faculties, and thus extinguished life with the least infliction of pain. These experiments were not confined to such vegetable and mineral poisons as could be mingled with the food or administered in a potion. Cleopatra took an equal ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... the culprits were dragged naked into the midst of the assembly, and at the same time all the apparatus for punishment was brought forth. They were tied to the stake, scourged with rods, and decapitated; while those who were present were so benumbed with fear, that not only no expression of dissatisfaction at the severity of the punishment, but not even a groan was heard. They were then all dragged out, the place was cleared, and the men cited by name ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... stood cold and motionless. He was stunned, benumbed, by what he saw and heard. Laura drew away from Hector, and tried to free her ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... positive discomfort, positive pain, attacked him as he stood ruefully before the porch. His perspiration had dried upon him; and though the wind had now fallen, a binding frost was setting in stronger with every hour, and he felt benumbed and sick at heart. What was to be done? Late as was the hour, improbable as was success, he would try the house of his adopted father, the chaplain ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... one were allowed to pass an opinion on the events of War, except at a moment when he is benumbed by frost, sinking from heat and thirst, or dying with hunger and fatigue, we should certainly have fewer judgments correct *objectively; but they would be so, SUBJECTIVELY, at least; that is, they would contain ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... vessel was wrecked upon the Connecticut shore. She lay some fifty yards from the land; some of the passengers got on shore something as St. Paul did upon the island of Melita. Mr. Van Wart, deeming it safer to hold to the wreck, remained until he was getting benumbed, and feared losing the use of his limbs. Letting himself down into the water, he paddled and swam amongst the broken stuff from the ship until he reached the shore. He was, however, too much exhausted to get upon the land, but some one, who had observed ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... fall from the storm-swept sky. But nothing really interested him now. Since he had heard of Lilla's death, the gloom of his remorse, emphasised by Mimi's upbraiding, had made more hopeless his cruel, selfish, saturnine nature. He heard no sound, for his normal faculties seemed benumbed. ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... have made good against the whole Christian army, over mountains whose peaks were lost in clouds, and valleys whose depths were never warmed by a sun. The winds were exceedingly bleak, and the weather inclement, so that men, as well as horses, exhausted by the fatigues of previous service, were benumbed by the intense cold, and many of them frozen to death. Many more, losing their way in the intricacies of the sierra, would have experienced the same miserable fate, had it not been for the marquis of Cadiz, whose tent was pitched on one of the loftiest hills, and who caused beacon fires to ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... could only by shaking our heads express our inability to profit by their kindness. Understanding what we meant, they immediately cut our thongs, and the youngest of the four perceiving that my arms were benumbed from having been confined so many days, and that I could not use them, showed the most lively commiseration for my sufferings. She gently chafed my wrists with her hands, and showed every sign of pity ...
— The Privateer's-Man - One hundred Years Ago • Frederick Marryat
... The hard, benumbed look in Ralph's face thawed in the warmth of her presence, and her words, though stern, touched a secret spring in his heart. He made two or three vain attempts to speak, then suddenly ...
— A Good-For-Nothing - 1876 • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... wind drove in the rain forcibly, so that the water came over my bed, and ran about the room, that I was fain to skim it up with a platter. And when my clothes were wet, I had no fire to dry them; so that my body was benumbed with cold, and my fingers swelled, that one was grown as big as two. Though I was at some charge in this room also, yet I could not keep out the wind and rain.... Afterwards I hired a soldier to fetch me water and bread, and something to make a fire of, when I was in a room where a fire ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... holding to the slippery rock in the face of the swift current was one that would have taxed the strength of the strongest man, to say nothing of the almost freezing cold water, which chilled the blood and benumbed the senses. ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Montana • Frank Gee Patchin
... She affected a great indignation, pursing her lips and putting her chin in the air as though wounded in some finer sense, changing so rapidly from one mood to another, filling the room with such shrill clamor, that McTeague was dazed and benumbed. ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... felt that he was very very nearly too late; so nearly, that perhaps in a week or two more Eden might have lost hopelessly, and for ever, all trace of self-respect—might have been benumbed into mental imbecility by the torpedo-like influence of helpless grief. Walter felt as if he had been selfishly looking on while a fellow-creature was fast sinking in the water, and as if it were only at the last possible moment that he had held out a saving hand. But, by God's grace, he did ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... found it impossible to extricate himself. To add to his disaster, the force of his fall broke off, from the main body, the section of ice on which he rested. Borne down by the current, in spite of his vain struggles to free himself, he was unable even to call for aid, his fingers moreover being so benumbed with cold that he found it impossible to unbutton the straps which confined his month. In this emergency he could only utter the strange and unintelligible moan which had reached our ears, and which, mingled ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... I felt much at ease—not chill, as I ought to have been after sitting so still for at least two hours; my cheek and arms were not benumbed by pressure against the hard desk. No wonder. Instead of the bare wood on which I had laid them, I found a thick shawl, carefully folded, substituted for support, and another shawl (both taken from the corridor where such things hung) wrapped ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... deaf to the plaintive cries of Thy feeble creature, shouldst Thou still be veiled, then I am content to remain benumbed with cold, my wings bedraggled, and once more I rejoice in ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... deep. On the Monday morning the Bacton boat made another attempt, fell in with them at ten o'clock, and landed them at Palling, more dead than alive, whence, as soon as they could be moved, they were brought to the Yarmouth Sailors' Home, their swollen limbs, benumbed frames, and ghastly countenances testifying to the sufferings they had undergone. At this Home the poor men remained several weeks, receiving every attention from the ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... in the direction of home, but when she reached the road leading to the sea, she went along it to Per Nielsen's farm. There they picked her up, benumbed with misery. "Granny's dead!" she broke out over and over again, looking from one to the other with terror in her eyes. That was all they could get out of her. When they proposed taking her home to the Crow's Nest, she began to scream, so they put ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo
... to touch.] Numbness — N. numbness &c (physical insensibility) 376; anaesthesia; pins and needles. V. benumb &c 376. Adj. numb; benumbed &c v.; deadened; intangible, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... engaged on the pier was perilous and difficult, for the lines had to be fired against a head wind. The piers were covered with ice, and the gale was so strong that the men could hardly stand, while the crews of the wrecks were so benumbed that they could make little effort to ...
— Battles with the Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... necessary, he had put off the evil moment till the postponement had become cruel. But he had lived through it so often in thought, he had so acutely suffered with her in imagination the staggering humiliation of it all, that now, when the time had come, his feelings were benumbed. As he turned into his own grounds that day it seemed to him that his deadness of emotion was such that he could carry the thing through mechanically, as a skilled surgeon uses a knife. If he found her at tea in the drawing-room he might ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... how easily acquaintances, who call themselves friends, can change, when their interest comes, in the slightest degree, in competition with their friendship. Hurried by his impatient rival, and with his hand so much benumbed that he could scarcely feel how to fix the arrow in the string, he drew the bow. The arrow was within a quarter of an inch of Master Sweepstakes' mark, which was the nearest that had yet been hit. Hal seized his second arrow. "If I have any luck," said he but just as he pronounced ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... dependent for all its power on the vigor and freshness of the religion which animated it; and as that vigor and purity departed, losing its own vitality, and sinking into nerveless rest, not deprived of its beauty, but benumbed and incapable ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... was no comprehension in them, and she looked about in wonder. Then, as her benumbed brain again took up its work, ...
— The Golf Course Mystery • Chester K. Steele
... had I possessed my overcoat it would have been bad enough to bear, but with only moderately thick clothing on, I felt the wind pierce to my very bones. I rode on, however, as long as I was able to sit my horse, but at length my limbs became so benumbed by the cold that I could ride no further. The poor beast also was almost exhausted with his exertions in plunging on through ...
— Snow Shoes and Canoes - The Early Days of a Fur-Trader in the Hudson Bay Territory • William H. G. Kingston
... state I lay. How long I know not—it must have been for several hours. I was brought to consciousness by a sense of cold. I was benumbed—a steady rain was falling, and from the condition of my clothes, which were completely saturated, must have been falling for some time previous. I rose with pain and difficulty to my feet. I was still as one stunned and stupified, by one of those extremes of suffering for which the overcharged ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... wand over his head. Instantly the sky became covered with clouds, the fire went down, snow fell in large flakes, an icy wind howled round the mountain. Amid the fury of the storm Helen added curses against her stepsister. The cloak failed to warm her benumbed limbs. The mother kept on waiting for her; she looked from the window, she watched from the doorstep, but her daughter came not. The hours passed slowly, ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... sunken prostration of her intellect, the old woman was insensible even to her consolation. She sipped and drank, it is true; but as if the stream warmed not the benumbed region through which it passed, she continued muttering in ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sleeper. Toward morning he awoke benumbed and cold. As he stirred the dying fire, the wind, which was now blowing strongly, brought to his cheek that which caused the blood ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... in the bitterness of the knowledge that he was sick, Hazel seemed to herself half benumbed; and sat stupidly dwelling on that one fact, feeling it, and yet less with a sense of pain than of an intolerable burden. A weight that made her stir and move sometimes, as if she could get away from it so. It was no use to tell her ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... will be good," and she rubbed her hands at the prospect of not having to crouch under a leaky awning when the rain came pelting down, or over a tiny fire in a brass bowl in the winter, to thaw her frozen and benumbed hands. ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... the next moment he understood. Just within the rays of the electric light, across the street, was Afternoon Tea Willie, waiting faithfully with chattering teeth and benumbed toes. He stood and stared at Roderick as they passed, and then slowly followed at a distance, the picture of abject desolation. Roderick found it almost impossible to keep from laughing, until he began to consider his own ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... for help and mercy; but, though I gave a good account of myself, and he knew my captain, who lodged hard by him, it was to no purpose. They beat and mangled me in a shameful manner, leaving me near dead. I lost so much blood from the wounds I received, that I lay quite motionless, and was so benumbed that I could not feel any thing for many hours. Early in the morning they took me away to the jail. As I did not return to the ship all night, my captain, not knowing where I was, and being uneasy that I did not then make my appearance, ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano
... repeated, and sank back benumbed. It was all theirs to the last farthing: my grandfather had died ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... perhaps because it is automatic, regard for its own comfort and well-being—it cannot be induced to tie itself into a knot. It is in mind that once in the old country a very long and very cold lethargic boa constrictor became benumbed and forgot the primal instinct of the family, and paid for its absent-mindedness with its life. But the ordinary snake under extraordinary conditions, whatsoever its length, is most careful to disentangle ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... Latin Church has its holy Latin, and a trilingual bible of "Hebrew, Latin, Greek," was said by pious fathers of that Church, to represent "Christ crucified between two thieves." The Hindoos have their sacred Sanscrit, and so of the rest. The benumbed and frozen mind of the Esquimaux, amidst the fat seals, blubber, and seas of oil in which it revels and swims, when anticipating the joys of the polar heaven, makes the tongue involuntarily speak in genuine Esquimauxan gibberish. It is, however, not surprising that the language ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... laid to, and the towering mass of the great deep-sea tramp began to be dimly seen through the darkness. There was little confusion in making the transfer of the castaways. Most of them seemed still benumbed with their recent terrible exposure. They docilely allowed themselves to be pushed into the pilot tender and again endured the experience of being lowered to the shifting waves below. Silently, like frightened ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... with a girl who was always called the shot partridge, because her eyes were supposed to be like those of a dying bird. I tried to laugh to myself as I remembered this. But I felt cold, and my senses seemed benumbed as by a great horror. I sat like a stone, with my eyes fixed upon Margot, trying painfully to read into her all that the words of Professor Black had suggested to me—trying, but with the wish not to succeed. I was ...
— The Return Of The Soul - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... upon the old man's shoulders, and he turned and went with them without a word. Through her crack in the wall Bessie watched him go till the dear old head with its fringe of white hairs and the bent frame were no more visible. Then at last, benumbed and exhausted by the horrors she was passing through, her faculties failed her, and she fell forward in a ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... should be inculcated till courage and enterprise are wholly repressed and the mind congested in perpetual inactivity by the fatal influence of frigorifick wisdom.' Is there not some danger, we ask, that the mind will be benumbed into perpetual torpidity by the influence of this soporific sapience? It is still true, however, that this Johnsonese, so often burlesqued and ridiculed, was, as far as we can judge, a genuine product. Macaulay says that it is more offensive than the mannerism of Milton or Burke, because ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... but inwardly something torments me—a gloomy presentiment, unrest, bad dreams, sleeplessness, yearning, indifference to everything, to the desire to live and the desire to die. It seems to me often as if my mind were benumbed, I feel a heavenly repose in my heart, in my thoughts I see images from which I cannot tear myself away, and this tortures me beyond all measure. In short, it is a combination of feelings that are difficult to describe...Pardon me, dear ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... each day, almost froze the noses and ears of the pedestrians, their feet began to pain them so that each step was a penance, and when they reached the open country it looked so mournful and depressing in its limitless mantle of white that they all hastily retraced their steps, with bodies benumbed and hearts heavy. ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... body from which nothing could rouse her. Her mother was in despair. Richard Gardner was too ill to come to see the girl he loved, and he did not write. The blow that had fallen upon his promising and prosperous life seemed to have shattered his nerves and benumbed his initiative. He had no words of hope for Rosalie; so he said nothing. Thus, in silence and apart, the two were suffering their young agony of wrecked hopes and ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... finish his sentence Browne set himself to climb the tree beneath which they had passed the night. His cramped limbs and benumbed fingers made this no easy task and more than once he was near losing his grasp and finishing the story by a headlong fall to the frozen earth, but this danger was passed also, and presently hastening ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... useless. The shattered masts were tied in four-sided racks. To these {187} Iberville had the wounded bound, and the crew plunged for the shore. Eighteen men perished going ashore in the darkness. On land were two feet of snow. No sooner did the French castaways build fires to warm their benumbed limbs than bullets whistled into camp. Governor Bayly of Port Nelson had sent out his sharpshooters. Luckily Iberville's other ships now joined him, and, mustering his forces, the dauntless French leader marched against the fort. Storm ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... On the outside of the wire screen clung a number of house-flies, early-hatched for the season and numb with the night's cold. As Forrest ate he watched the hunting of the meat-eating yellow- jackets. Sturdy, more frost-resistant than bees, they were already on the wing and preying on the benumbed flies. Despite the rowdy noise of their flight, these yellow hunters of the air, with rarely ever a miss, pounced on their helpless victims and sailed away with them. The last fly was gone ere Forrest had sipped his last sip of coffee, marked ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... read a paper indifferently; his even voice filled the hall with weariness, and the people, enfolded by it, sat motionless as if benumbed. Four lawyers softly but animatedly conversed with the prisoners. They all moved powerfully, briskly, and called ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... not in the sea nor in the strife We feel benumbed and wish to be no more, But in the after silence on the shore, When all is lost, except a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... death. I have seen a dog and sheep die hardly. And thus may a wicked man do, because there is an antipathy betwixt nature and death. But even while, even then, when death and nature are struggling for mastery, the soul, the conscience, may be as besotted, as benumbed, as senseless and ignorant of its miserable state, as the block or bed on which the sick lies. And thus they may die like a chrisom-child in show, but indeed like one who by the judgment of God is bound over to eternal damnation; and that also by the same judgment is kept from ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... had long before reading the wonderfully original work of Doctor Holmes reflected deeply on the moral and immoral influences which serpent worship of old, in Syria and other lands, must have had upon its followers. But Elsie Venner sets forth the serpent nature as benumbed or suspended by cold New England winters and New England religions, moral and social influences; the Ophites of old and the Cairene gypsy showed the boy as warmed to life in lands whose winters are as burning summers. Elsie ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... scales were now frozen to ice on his cheeks; his clothes were completely incrusted with the hard snow, which had been beating into them by the strength of the blast, and his joints were getting stiff and benumbed. The tumult of the tempest, the whirling of the snow-clouds, and the thick snow, now falling, and again tossed upwards by sudden gusts to the sky, deprived him of all power of reflection, and rendered him, though not altogether blind or deaf, yet incapable of forming any distinct ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... stung yet calmed with its grateful, stern menace. A thin drizzle of rain was beginning to fall, and the avenues were filled with the furious clamor of belated traffic. The clangor of the overhead trains—almost incessant at this hour—benumbed the ear, and every side-street rang with the hideous clatter of drays and express-carts, each driver, each motor-man, laboring in a kind of sullen frenzy to reach his barn before six o'clock, while truculent pedestrians, tired, eager, and exacting, ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... not afford flame itself, it would enable us to kindle a blaze. Close below it I discovered a quantity of dry leaves, and we now had the means of making what we so much required, a fire to warm our benumbed limbs. No hunter in the prairies is ever without a flint and steel, and we soon had a cheerful fire, burning away between the roots of a thick tree, round which we crouched with our buffalo robes over our shoulders, Boxer joining us to ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... if the very feelings, benumbed and congealed as they may hitherto have been, were suddenly dissolving under some happier influence, and that,—with the external sign—the weakness and pliability of childhood—we were magically regaining its singleness of ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... out the little inventor, his benumbed faculties beginning slowly to assemble themselves. "Why, there ain't a finer, better-spoken young man to ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... dark corner of the room, with his blue, dull eyes, and nervously twitching his lips, pulled toward the letter v. The general frowned at the interruption, and, after a moment's silence, took the card, put on his pince-nez and, groaning from pain in his loins, rose to his full height, rubbing his benumbed fingers. ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... shooting; but the larger animals retire at their approach and seldom are seen. Other gun people, too wise or too lifeless to make much noise, move slowly along the trails and about the open spots of the woods, like benumbed beetles in a snowdrift. Such hunters are themselves hunted by the animals, which in perfect safety follow ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... the direction of the Tuileries, and crossed the gardens with an undecided step. He walked as if he were in some desert, elbowed by men whom he did not see, hearing through all the voices of the crowd one voice alone—the voice of Death. He was lost in the thoughts that benumbed him at last, like the criminals who used to be taken in carts from the Palais de Justice to the Place de Greve, where the scaffold awaited them reddened with all the ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... that it certainly was tough. He was glad they were to land, being very sure that if an Indian did shoot him he would not feel it, so thoroughly benumbed was ...
— Lost In The Air • Roy J. Snell
... the seat of thirst is in the digestive system. When athirst (we have often felt the sensation when hunting) we feel distinctly that all the inhaling portions of the nostrils, mouth and throat are benumbed and hardened, and that if thirst be sometimes appeased by the application of fluids to other parts of the body, as in the bath, the reason is that as soon as they are absorbed they hurry rapidly to the seat of the evil and ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... herself as the outer world wexedly beholds a creature swung along to the doing of things against the better mind. An outer world is thoughtless of situations which prepare us to meet the objectionable with a will benumbed;—if we do not, as does that outer world, belong to the party of the readily heroical. She scourged her weakness: and the intimation of the truth stood over her, more than ever manifest, that the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... community, involved Bird, and he thought his neighbors looked askance at him: as if they believed he could have moved Northwick to action, if he would. Northwick could not have moved himself. He was like one benumbed. He let the days go by, and made no attempt to realize the schemes for the retrieval of his fortunes that had ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... you?" she asked, putting her face down close, while by vigorous patting and rubbing she tried to give life to the benumbed, cowering little figure, which staggered along helplessly, clutching her ...
— The Green Satin Gown • Laura E. Richards
... powerless as if the bones had been removed from his legs and arms, and as if, instead of a tongue in his mouth, there were a moist rag. He wanted to shout at her, and let her know once for all that she had no right to ask anything of him, but his heart was benumbed by craven fear, and to his lips there rose a senseless phrase which he knew to be ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... watch-gun, the camp presented a most distressing spectacle. The Arabs and negroes of the convoy were lying motionless in the open air, rolled in their burnooses. Many of these poor creatures were but lightly clad, and had the lower limbs entirely naked. They were so benumbed and stupified with cold, that they refused to rise and load the camels; they begged to be allowed to lie still and die in peace. The cattle also were in a sad condition, not only from cold, but hunger; for the snow-covered ground afforded them no pasture. As part of the provisions ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 - Volume 18, New Series, August 28, 1852 • Various
... months together in long and dangerous marches; harassed, perhaps, in his rear today; harassing others to-morrow; detached here; countermanded there; resting this night out upon his arms; beat up in his shirt the next; benumbed in his joints; perhaps without straw in his tent to kneel on, [he] must say his prayers how and when he can. I believe, said I—for I was piqued, quoth the Corporal, for the reputation of the army—I believe, an't please your reverence, ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... monkeys twitter plaintively, trembling in the chilly air. The parrots have nothing to say: they look benumbed, and sit on their ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... that had so sharply divided the two armies?" he asked himself and could not answer. "Can something bad have happened to me?" he wondered as he got up: and at that moment he felt that something superfluous was hanging on his benumbed left arm. The wrist felt as if it were not his. He examined his hand carefully, vainly trying to find blood on it. "Ah, here are people coming," he thought joyfully, seeing some men running toward him. "They will help ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... the same affectionate, quiet smile that he had shown when leaving his mother's room in former times. Then she summoned them all. They sat down again round the table while she made the tea and poured it out. But the gathering grew sad, benumbed, as it were, with lassitude. Sandoz vainly tried a diversion by admitting Bertrand, the big dog, who grovelled at sight of the sugar-basin, and ended by going to sleep near the stove, where he snored like a man. Since ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... attended with sundry interruptions and adventures, and night overtook us in the midst of a forest, uncertain where we were, and half dead from exposure to the storm; but after several hours of hard riding, we found ourselves, drenched to the skin and benumbed with the cold, before the door of a one-story log cabin, tenanted ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... failed in his estimate of her. The explanation lies no doubt in the fact that in these man-and-woman affairs instinct is a surer guide than education and intelligence, unless, indeed, the intelligence is preternaturally keen. Lockwood's student life had benumbed the elemental instinct, which in the miners, the "men," yet remained vigorous and unblunted, and by means of which they assessed Felice and her harmless blandishments at their true worth. For all Lockwood's culture, his own chuck-tenders, ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... of his plot depends on the generous confidence of his victim. Polonius is handled in the same way with special reference to Hamlet. His thinking is marked by slowness and insincerity, and when he comes in contact with the rapid current of Hamlet's mind he is benumbed; he can only mutter, "If this is madness, there is method in it." What little portable wisdom was given to him in the first Act is soon withdrawn—he stammers in his deceit, and the old indirectness having no material of thought to work upon becomes a circumlocution ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... the day, one of the older midshipmen being usually with him. "Well I remember," writes one of his officers, "that on being one day relieved to go down to my dinner, I was obliged to have some of the main-top-men to help me down the rigging, I was so benumbed with the intense cold: yet the captain was there six or seven hours at a time, without complaining, ...
— The Life of Admiral Viscount Exmouth • Edward Osler
... like a person stunned with a great blow, and Alice wished grief had had any other effect upon her. It lasted for days. A kind of stupor hung over her; tears did not come; the violent strain of every nerve and feeling seemed to have left her benumbed. She would sleep long, heavy sleeps the greater part of the time, and seemed to have no power to do ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... of sun and fair weather, and then fifty miles of bitter, aching cold, with nights of peril from the increasing chill, so that Jim dared not sleep lest he should never wake again, but die benumbed and exhausted! Yet Arrowhead slept through all. Day after day so, and then ten miles of storm such as come only to the vast barrens of the northlands; and woe to the traveller upon whom the icy wind and the blinding snow descended! Woe ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... partial insensibility sets in—I have known cases where men have slept while being subjected to the most awful tortures—and such was undoubtedly the case with me on that memorable night. My sensibility had become so benumbed that I had partially lost control of my mental processes, and my thoughts broke away at intervals to dwell for a few moments upon some entirely trivial matter which, one would have supposed, could not possibly have had the slightest interest for me, under ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... off-ward, turned the wrong way; it was anciently used of a back-handed or left-handed blow in battle, of squinting eyes, etc. Clumsy, on the other hand (from clumse, also through the Norwegian), signifies benumbed, stiffened with cold; this is the original meaning of clumsy fingers, clumsy limbs. Thus, awkward primarily refers to action, clumsy to condition. A tool, a vehicle, or the human frame may be clumsy in shape or build, awkward in motion. The clumsy man is almost of necessity awkward, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... fight ensued. Many of them lay stretched on the ground, with tomahawks deeply implanted in their skulls: and many others, as the common phrase is, were "dead drunk." This was an exceedingly fortunate circumstance for us. With their senses benumbed, of course they had forgotten their avowal to roast us, or, it may be, the Indian to whom I proposed ransom had conferred with the others, and they, no doubt, agreed to spare our lives until the morning. ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... blissful intervals would not last long. A recollection of something I had heard or read would come back to startle me out of the confident happy mood; reason would revive as from a benumbed or hypnotized condition, and the mocking voice would be heard telling me that I had been under a delusion. Once more I would abhor and shudder at the black phantom, and when the thought of annihilation was most insistent, I would often recall the bitter, ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... the old unquiet breast, Which neither deadens into rest, Nor ever feels the fiery glow That whirls the spirit from itself away, But fluctuates to and fro, Never by passion quite possessed And never quite benumbed by the world's sway?— And I, I know not if to pray Still to be what I am, or yield, and be Like all the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... plaintively, trembling in the chilly air. The parrots have nothing to say: they look benumbed, and sit on their perches ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... one thought of the possible arrival of a stranger at such an hour on such a night, until Serena suggested that it would be a good plan to open the door. Then the unbidden guest was discovered lying benumbed along the threshold. ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... umbrella, which was under water. To the same part O'Brien had a tow-line, which taking in his teeth, he towed me down with the stream to about a hundred yards clear of the fortress, where we landed. O'Brien was so exhausted that for a few minutes he remained quite motionless; I also was benumbed with the cold. "Peter," said he, "thank God we have succeeded so far; now must we push on as far as we can, for we shall have daylight in two hours." O'Brien took out his flask of spirits, and we both drank a half tumbler at least, but ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... had so benumbed him that even after that surrender he stood there, close to her, his countenance blank, his arms dangling at ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... eminence. When night fell the waters grew louder, a stinging wind swept the woods, and the carriage, staggering from rut to rut, seemed every moment about to land them in some invisible ravine. Fear and cold at last benumbed the little boy, and when he woke he was being lifted from his seat and torches were flashing on a high escutcheoned doorway set in battlemented walls. He was carried into a hall lit with smoky oil-lamps and hung with ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... amputated, and is walking about on his insteps. Soon, however, these also fade away, and the unhappy youth rushes frantically home on the stumps of his ankle-bones—at least so it appears to him, and so in reality it would turn out to be if he did not speedily rub the benumbed appendages into ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... the sun set, the tongs fell from the steward's hands. He did not stop to finish his errand, but ran as if the devil or justice were at his heels. He made such leaps, he uttered such groans, he was so blackened, scorched, and benumbed, that every one in the village was afraid of him, thinking that he was mad. The boldest tried to speak to him, but he fled without answering, and hid himself in his house, more ashamed than a wolf that has left his ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... that the fall would kill him, and he groaned in agony. His fingers were benumbed and beginning to slip. Then he fell. The air whizzed in his ears. He tried to keep his feet downward, but it was no use. He was whirled heels over head many times, and his senses were leaving him when he was restored by a plunge ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... Bark comes surgin' in with her Oscar foogitive, his heels tied onder the belly of the lead hoss. Any one can see by his benumbed expression that he's a married man. The two heads straight for the Votes For Women S'loon, an' after boltin' her new he'pmeet into the back room, Miss Bark takes a peek in the glass, pats down her ha'r, an' goes behind the bar ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... extricate him. Excessive cold froze his limbs and deprived him of strength, yet the Indians dared not approach him until he threw away his arms and made signals of submission. Then they drew him out, and, chafing his benumbed body, speedily restored him to activity. His self-possession was never lost for a moment. Discovering that Opecancanough was the chief, he presented to him a small magnetic dial, and made the simple savages wonder at the play of the needle beneath ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... men returned to the river with orders to raise the bullock to the bank, but after they had done so it again lay down, unable to move, the legs having become probably cramped or benumbed from remaining so long fast in the mud. They then descended the river about two miles to where the other bullock lay, which they were equally unable to move. No natives appeared or were even heard; and thus we might be considered to occupy the left bank of the river, all ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... the attack had passed away, still suffered horribly. A sharp pain remained in the hollow of his chest, and his left arm, benumbed, hung from his shoulder like lead. In his long waiting for the help that Martine had gone to bring, he had reflected on the suffering which made the flesh cry out. And he found that he was resigned; he no longer felt the rebelliousness which the mere sight of physical pain had formerly ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... work! work! From weary chime to chime! Work! work! work! As prisoners work for crime! Band, and gusset, and seam, Seam, and gusset, and band, Till the heart is sick, and the brain benumbed, As well ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... times. The common people were badly fed and wretchedly clothed, those in the country for the most part living in huts with their cattle. Lord Kaimes said of the Scotch tenantry of the early part of last century, that they were so benumbed by oppression and poverty that the most able instructors in husbandry could have made nothing of them. A writer in the 'Farmer's Magazine' sums up his account of Scotland at that time in these words:—"Except in a few instances, it was little better ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... appearance of the man. The interest of the tale was so absorbing to me that I took no note of time, nor of the cold night air, and it was only when it was all finished that I felt how deadly chill it had become. "Let us go in, John," I said; "I am cold and feel benumbed." ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... intoxicated that a general fight ensued. Many of them lay stretched on the ground, with tomahawks deeply implanted in their skulls: and many others, as the common phrase is, were "dead drunk." This was an exceedingly fortunate circumstance for us. With their senses benumbed, of course they had forgotten their avowal to roast us, or, it may be, the Indian to whom I proposed ransom had conferred with the others, and they, no doubt, agreed to spare our lives until the morning. It was a night, however, of pain and terror, as well as of the most ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... himself under the lights was to invite the fate he had so narrowly escaped. He knew Mattacheco's skill as a marksman: the Mexican would not be rattled twice in the same half-hour. Ford gripped the benumbed arm ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... is necessary not only to thoroughly remove the tumor but to treat the diseased membrane at the point from which the polypus springs; otherwise another tumor may develop at the same point. The nasal passage having been thoroughly anaesthetized, or benumbed, by the use of cocaine, the nasal speculum is introduced, and by means of reflected light from the head mirror worn by the operator, the interior of the nostril is brought into view. (See ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... mixture of terror and joy. My gestures and looks enjoined upon her silence. I stooped down, and, taking another hatchet, cut asunder the deer-skin thongs by which her wrists and ankles were tied. I then made signs for her to rise and follow me. She willingly complied with my directions; but her benumbed joints and lacerated sinews refused to support her. There was no time to be lost; I therefore lifted her in my arms, and, feeble and tottering as I was, proceeded with this burden along the perilous steep ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... withdraw before having patiently and prayerfully sought to inculcate a true Christian spirit among those to whom you owe and have promised Christian fidelity. You know that I have not very long been the pastor of this church, but I have already felt that something was amiss. I have been oppressed and benumbed with a certain coldness and formality in our church life. At the same time I admit, with contrition, that I have given way to my besetting sin. I am naturally a student, and when once in my study I forget the outside world. I am prone to become wholly occupied with the thought ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... not hear what Mary Phillips said. Perhaps my senses were benumbed. Perhaps the wind was carrying away her words. That it was blowing from me toward her soon became too evident. The steamer was receding from the Sparhawk. The instant I became aware of this my powers of ...
— The Rudder Grangers Abroad and Other Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... smooth, for an off-shore breeze soon carried me beyond reach and sight of land, where I must quickly have been swamped had there been any waves moving. After awhile I became so thoroughly chilled and benumbed that I thought I should perish with the cold, as indeed I should, had I not bethought me of the canvas hood on the back of my tub. This, after infinite labor, and the most careful balancing to prevent an upset, I finally managed to obtain. Wrapped ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... then all appeared to float once more before Edward's eyes—the form was lost in mist, the monument, the fir-grove, the moonlight, disappeared; a long, gloomy, breathless pause followed. Edward lay, half sleeping, half benumbed, in a confused manner; portions of the dream returned to him—some images, some sounds—above all, the petition for the restitution of the ring. But an indescribable power bound his limbs, closed his eyelids, and silenced his voice; ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... the hollow of a tree. I put my hand in and broke off a lump. Though it would not afford flame itself, it would enable us to kindle a blaze. Close below it I discovered a quantity of dry leaves, and we now had the means of making what we so much required, a fire to warm our benumbed limbs. No hunter in the prairies is ever without a flint and steel, and we soon had a cheerful fire, burning away between the roots of a thick tree, round which we crouched with our buffalo robes over our shoulders, Boxer joining us to enjoy the ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... awed, sat like a graven image, looking at the floor. He was not there because he wanted to be, but because a rather praiseworthy allegiance to Anne had mastered his repugnance. Somewhere in his benumbed intelligence flickered a spark of light which revealed to him his responsibility as the head of the family. Anne was his sister. She was lovely. He would have liked to be proud of her. If it were not for the ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... which his ability was directed to economy in the raw material, as in the case of the dyes which rotted Mr. Vincy's silk. And now, when this respectability had lasted undisturbed for nearly thirty years—when all that preceded it had long lain benumbed in the consciousness—that past had risen and immersed his thought as if with the terrible irruption of a new sense overburthening ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... trains, and in whose presence you grope about after common interests and shrink back into your shell on finding that you have none. Then a frost slowly settles down on me and I grow each minute more benumbed and speechless, and the babies feel the frost in the air and look vacant, and the callers go through the usual form of wondering who they most take after, generally settling the question by saying that the ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... he could recover his legs, he was washed off by the surge. He now supported himself by swimming, until a returning wave dashed him against the back part of the cavern. Here he laid hold of a small projection in the rock, but was so much benumbed that he was on the point of quitting it, when a seaman, who had already gained a footing, extended his hand, and assisted him until he could secure himself a little on the rock; from which he clambered on a shelf ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... a spiritlessness in this man that surprised me. I had not thought to find the faculties of Salamon Sweers so quickly benumbed by what was indeed a wild and dangerous confrontment, yet not so formidable and hopeless as to weaken the nerves of a seaman. I yearned for a bottle of rum, for any sort of strong waters indeed, guessing that a dram would help us both; and after I had made a meal off some raw pork ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... minds at peace. Even the refuge in God does not always secure us from external suffering. The heart may be quite happy and strong when the hands are benumbed with cold. Yes, the heart even may grow cold with coming death, while the man himself retreats the farther into the secret place of the Most High, growing more calm and hopeful as the last cold invades the house of his body. I believe that all troubles come to drive us into ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... became stronger in the close air of the house. "I can't touch him. I don't care what happens I can't touch him," she told herself, while she placed the flannel robe on the rug, and hurried back to the kitchen. Her whole body was benumbed and chilled, not from cold, but from disgust, yet her mind was almost unnaturally active, and she found herself thinking over and over again: "So this is the man I loved, this is the man I ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... bewildered and benumbed under the shock of this calamity; but the cup of her misery was not full. There was revolution in England. James II., the friend and ally of France, had been driven from his kingdom, and William of Orange ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... while the slaves grew fainter and yet fainter in their horrible workroom, and the lash of the whips resounded the more often. Hernando was lashed twice, for no real reason that his companions could discover. The second blow curled across the muscle of his arm and benumbed it for a while, and Johnnie whispered him to move in rhythm with them, whilst he and Jeffreys did the actual rowing. The fellow was grateful, and vowed by the Virgin never to forget ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... road, which was uphill all the way, ran between woods where the wolves, descending from the vaster forests of Black Prigord, often howled in winter. She told me it frequently happened when she reached the market that her arms and hands were so benumbed with the cold that she could not take the basket of fish from her head. As a widow, she had lived for a while with a married son, but the young woman soon turned the old one out. Poor Suzette told the story without bitterness; she recognised the law ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... how cold it was in that dark water! Hardy though the pair were, it seemed impossible to live in that fearful cold; but they struck out valiantly into midstream, and presently the exercise of swimming brought a little life into their benumbed limbs. But glad indeed was Paul to reach the side of the little wherry which they intended to purloin, and it was all that their united efforts could do to clamber in and cut the cord which bound it ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... sound of their voices had died away, then he stretched his cramped, benumbed limbs, heaved a deep sigh of relief, and rose ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... true decision. Nature craves All dues be rend'red to their owners. Now, What nearer debt in all humanity Than wife is to the husband? If this law Of nature be corrupted through affection; And that great minds, of partial indulgence To their benumbed wills, resist the same; There is a law in each well-order'd nation To curb those raging appetites that are Most disobedient and refractory. If Helen, then, be wife to Sparta's king— As it is known she ...
— The History of Troilus and Cressida • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... of the saddle and placed him on the ground, but his legs buckled under him, and he fell forward on his face. Any of the three could have saved him, but the spectacle of the terrible old man's helplessness benumbed their ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... had skated till she was tired and hot, then stood watching others till she was chilled; tried to get up a glow again by trotting up and down the road, but failed to do so, and finally cuddled disconsolately under a pine-tree to wait and watch. When she at length started for home, she was benumbed with cold, and could hardly make her way against the wind that buffeted the ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... as well as traitor! If thou hast the slightest spark of manhood in thee, cause these thy fellows to unbind my hands, give me back my father's sword, stand face to face against me on the greensward, and, benumbed and frozen as I am, thou shalt yet feel ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... over a blue gingham dress, and rose from time to time to replenish the platters. The Governor chaffed her familiarly, and Archie edged into the talk with an ease that surprised him. His speculative faculties, all but benumbed by the violent exercise to which they had been subjected since he joined the army of the hunted, found new employment in an attempt to determine just how much this cheery, handsome girl knew of the history ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... while at the same time the flames rose so high as to be seen on both sides of the ridge as far as the storm permitted. The horses were sheltered as well as possible, and heavily blanketed. As the men thawed out their benumbed forms, Webb exclaimed, "Great God! what chance has Burt in such a storm? and what chance ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... wind knocking at the walls of the house with a vast club, so that we crept sideways even to the windows to look out upon the world. There was everything to repel—the cold, the frost, the hardness, the snow, dark sky and ground, leaflessness; the very furze chilled and all benumbed. Yet the forest was still beautiful. There was no day that we did not, all of us, glance out at it and admire it, and say something about it. Harder and harder grew the frost, yet still the forest-clad hills ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... disappeared; even their footprints of a moment before were filled up by the piling snow; they were isolated in this stony upland, high in air, without a rock or tree to guide them across its vast white level. They were bitterly cold and benumbed. The stimulus of the storm and chase had passed, but Julian kept driving them before him, himself driven along by the furious blast, yet trying to keep some vague course along the waste. So an hour passed. Then the wind seemed ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... book of poems, breathing faith and worship at all points, and in all attitudes of heavenward contemplation, within the circle of the Christian Year, would, he hoped, restore in many minds to many a benumbed ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble
... light to fall from the storm-swept sky. But nothing really interested him now. Since he had heard of Lilla's death, the gloom of his remorse, emphasised by Mimi's upbraiding, had made more hopeless his cruel, selfish, saturnine nature. He heard no sound, for his normal faculties seemed benumbed. ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... Two of these I would give every thing I have to possess. One of them is a winter scene, representing the portico of an old Gothic church. At the base of one of the pillars a woman is seated in the snow, half-benumbed, clasping an infant to her breast, while immediately in front stands a boy of perhaps seven or eight years, his little hands folded in prayer, while the chill wind tosses the long curls from his forehead. There is something so pure and holy in the expression of his childish countenance, ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... twilight. Throughout the whole sick tangle there went a twisting thread of wonder, of striving for understanding. What was this thing which had come clutching sweetly at her heart, which had stilled the very life in her with holy mystery, and whose swift passing had left her benumbed within as some old woman mumbling in the sun on a door-sill? Where was the glory of the spring? What had come upon the face of the waters, that the light had gone from them? What was this thing that the good God wished her to learn, where ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... crept from under my net much benumbed with cold, there were about eleven people in the room, who all made their graceful salutation. It did not seem as if they had ever heard of washing, for, when water was asked for, Shinondi brought a little in a lacquer bowl, and ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... waited, dumb under the surging confusion in her brain. A sort of incredulous horror benumbed her, through which she still heard ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... appropriate mantras. And causing the hearts of all the snakes to tremble with fear, they poured clarified butter into the mouth of Agni uttering the names of the snakes. And the snakes thereupon began to fall into the blazing fire, benumbed and piteously calling upon one another. And swollen and breathing hard, and twining each other with their heads and tails, they came in large numbers and fell into the fire. The white, the black, the blue, the old and the young—all ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Keppel must be drowned, and he did not seem to care, but to think that the object of his birth was that. If the stupid little fellow would have only stepped forward, the hands of his mistress, though cramped and benumbed, might perhaps have unbuckled his stiff and sodden reins, or even undone their tangle; on the other hand, if he would have jerked with all his might, something or other must have given way; but stir he would not from one fatuous position, which kept all his head-gear on ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... Severe pain in abdomen; No emetic. Milk or odor of carbolic acid, flour and water; white of mucous membrane in eggs. around mouth white and benumbed; cold and ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... hirundines in general pay no attention to the business of nidification, but play and sport about either to recruit from the fatigue of their journey, if they do migrate at all, or else that their blood may recover its true tone and texture after it has been so long benumbed by the severities of winter. About the middle of May, if the weather be fine, the martin begins to think in earnest of providing a mansion for its family. The crust or shell of this nest seems to be formed of such dirt or loam as comes most readily to hand, and is ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... around on the half frozen ground till she found a long rail, which she placed against a window; then climbing up, she raised the sash, and in a moment was in the schoolroom. The atmosphere of the room was still comfortable and she stopped for a moment at the stove to warm her benumbed fingers, then groping her way to her desk, she easily found her books and made her way out of the house in the same manner that ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... Grace to understand that witches and sorcerers within these last few years are marvelously increased within your Grace's realm, Your Grace's subjects pine away even unto the death, their colour fadeth, their flesh rotteth, their speech is benumbed, their senses ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... was rubbing up the snow, was heard outside. The gallant captain instantly divined its cause, seized, loaded, and cocked his gun, and ordered the tent door to be opened, upon which a huge bear was seen outside. Captain Ommaney fired at the animal, but, whether from the benumbed state of his limbs, or the dim glimmering light, he unfortunately missed him, and shot away the rope that supported the tent instead. The enraged monster then poked his head against the poles, and ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... out of that strange, benumbed state that had deadened for a while all his sense of suffering—coming back to a consciousness of utter bereavement and insupportable anguish—anguish written in such awful characters upon his pallid and writhen brow ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... the voice of doom, 'in the starboard sofa-locker; beer under the floor in the bilge. I'll see her round that buoy, if you wouldn't mind beginning.' I obeyed with a bad grace, but the close air and cramped posture must have benumbed my faculties, for I opened the port-side locker, reached down, and grasped a sticky body, which turned out to be a pot of varnish. Recoiling wretchedly, I tried the opposite one, combating the embarrassing heel of the boat and the ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... possible, Booth rushed to the hole and fired his revolver at the old devil, but failed to hit him. While he was trying to get in another shot, an arrow came flying through from the left side of the Trail, and striking him on the inside of the elbow, or "crazy-bone," so completely benumbed his hand that he could not hold on to the pistol, and it dropped into the road with one load still in its chamber. Just then the mules gave an extraordinary jump to one side, which jerked the wagon nearly from under him, ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... was hottest. They seized bomb-shells while they were yet in the air, warmed their hands upon them, and then threw them back into the enemy's camp, where they exploded with great carnage. They did not even know when they were killed, so benumbed by the cold had they become. In short, those days on the Alps made us invincible. No wonder, then, that in 1804, when I got permanently back to Paris, I found the people ready for an emperor! They were bloody years, those from 1800 to 1804, but it was not entirely my fault. I shed ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... one infallible, perhaps because it is automatic, regard for its own comfort and well-being—it cannot be induced to tie itself into a knot. It is in mind that once in the old country a very long and very cold lethargic boa constrictor became benumbed and forgot the primal instinct of the family, and paid for its absent-mindedness with its life. But the ordinary snake under extraordinary conditions, whatsoever its length, is most careful to disentangle itself even when knots are designed for the special purpose of embarrassing it. Though the ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... But which, benumbed at birth By momentary chance or wile, has missed its hope to be Embodied on the earth; And undervoicings of this loss to man's futurity May wake ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... 5 To guide the wanderer's steps aright, Yet not enough from far to show His figure to the watchful foe. With cautious step, and ear awake, He climbs the crag and threads the brake; 10 And not the summer solstice there, Tempered the midnight mountain air, But every breeze that swept the wold, Benumbed his drenched limbs with cold. In dread, in danger, and alone, 15 Famished and chilled, through ways unknown, Tangled and steep, he journeyed on; Till, as a rock's huge point he turned, A watch-fire close ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... reads like one sentence, and is generally read at one sitting. Sir Joshua Reynolds, meeting it in a country inn, began to read it while standing with his arm leaning on a chimney-piece, and was not able to lay it aside till he had finished it, when he found his arm totally benumbed. In 1745, Johnson issued proposals for a new edition of Shakspeare, but laid them aside for a time, owing to the great expectations entertained of the edition then promised ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... voluntary gift (of money), cruel favors or obnoxious prerogatives, the prolonged persecution of Protestants, the censorship of intellectual speculation, and the right of controlling schools and education.[2305] Such was the case with the universities benumbed by routine; with latest provincial "Etats," constituted in 1789, as in 1489. Such was the case with noble families subjected by law to the antique system of substitutions and of primogeniture, that is to say, to social constraint which, devised long ago for private ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... stopped suddenly, perhaps eight feet below. The floor above closed silently over her head, and she found herself alone with the inky man in almost total darkness. She was too badly frightened to scream, or even to speak, and stood in silence, awaiting with benumbed senses ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major
... was surrounded by the huntsmen. It was bitterly cold; the wind howled through the firs, and drove the light snow-flakes right in my face, so that when at length it came on to be dusk I could scarcely see six paces before me. Quite benumbed by the cold, I left the place that had been assigned to me and sought shelter deeper in the wood. There, leaning against a tree, with my firelock under my arm, I forgot the wolf-hunt entirely; my thoughts ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... among the golden grapes of sunny France, and when later I wandered with my father in the Holy land, in Italy and Egypt. I also thought of the Shoshones, of Roche and Gabriel, and I sighed. It was a moral agony; for the physical pain had subsided, and my leg was almost benumbed ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... flinty road with steel-shod hoofs, racing with the racing clouds, thundering across the pontoon, where benumbed soldiers huddled to stare, then bounding forward through the narrow lanes of hamlets, where pinched faces peered out at us from hovels, and gaunt dogs fled from us ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... floated hither and thither over the sea, soaked to the skin, nigh dead with cold, and so nearly benumbed that but for little Frillikin, who snuggled to her bosom, and kept a little warmth in her, she must have perished a hundred times. She was famished with hunger, but on seeing some oysters in their shells she took and ate ...
— Old-Time Stories • Charles Perrault
... summit of his power; France lay bleeding, trembling at his feet; fear had silenced even his enemies; no one dared touch the dreaded man whose mere contact was death; whose look, when coldly, calmly fixed on the face of any man, benumbed his heart as if he had read his sentence of death in ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... two follow me, that I may see what deeds have been done. I heard the voice of my venerable mother-in-law, and to myself the heart within my breast leaps up to my mouth, and the limbs under me are benumbed. Surely some evil is now near the sons of Priam. O that the word may be [far] from my ear! I dread lest brave Achilles, having already cut off noble Hector alone from the city, may drive him towards the plain, and even now have made him desist from the fatal valour which possessed ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... saw all the danger attending such an attempt; and it appeared to him, that they could scarcely expect to succeed in crossing the ice through a dense fog and heavy snow-storm, without any knowledge of the way, without a guide, and exhausted as they were by mental and bodily suffering, and benumbed with cold. ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... future except to join his ancestors in another life, was now a pauper notwithstanding all his quest for the treasures of the mines; and his chief solace, if it be comfort indeed to have the senses benumbed periodically, or daily, and then wake up to the consciousness of loss and with a feeling of despair betimes, was in his opium pipe, which he smoked fifty times a day at the cost of half a dollar, the offering of charity, the dole received from his ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... nature of another kind of fish. Perhaps the crews of the aforesaid ships have been benumbed into idleness by the touch of a torpedo, by which the right hand of him who attacks it is so deadened—even through the spear by which it is itself wounded—that while still part of a living body it hangs down benumbed without sense or motion. I think some such misfortunes ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... of loneliness, a dread, unaccountable in its nature, that seemed to haunt me. There was nothing so very uncommon or marvellous in my situation; yet the horror I endured is unutterable. The demon of fear seemed to possess my frame, and benumbed every faculty. I saw, or thought I saw, shapes hideous and indistinct rising before me, but so rapidly that I could not trace their form ere they vanished. I felt convinced it was the mind that was perturbed, acting outwardly upon the senses, rendered ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... them ever down toward where it rushed furiously through the timbers. But at last he managed to climb higher and rest, panting, upon the sloping mass of woodwork, with the water streaming from him and the hot sunshine beginning to send a glow into his benumbed limbs. ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... his seat. He had remained motionless, glued to his chair for more than three hours, and his legs were benumbed. ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... and found her clinging to the balusters, and pointing at the floor, with eyes protruding and full of horror. Her candle-stick had fallen from her benumbed hand; but the hall-lamp revealed what her finger was quivering and pointing at: a dark fluid trickling slowly out into the lobby from beneath ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... snows of a Canadian winter lay upon the ground as these forces of destruction sallied forth. Leaving Montreal, the first party passed down the frozen St. Lawrence, and into the wintry ravines of the Richelieu, and after a march of terrible hardship, now plunging through snow-drifts, now benumbed by frost, wading knee-deep through the melting swamps, they came at last to the unguarded palisades of the Dutch settlement of Corlaer, or Schenectady. It was midnight as they stole through the streets of the sleeping village, now suddenly wakened by a hideous war-whoop, the ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... attack of the Carthaginian horsemen, and, without waiting for food, moved out of camp, chasing the horsemen toward the river. Into its icy waters the Romans waded breast-high, and when they came up on the opposite bank they were benumbed with cold. As soon as Hannibal knew that the Romans had crossed the river he attacked them fiercely with all his troops. Two thousand men whom he had placed in ambush fell upon the rear of their line. Their allies were frightened by a charge ...
— Introductory American History • Henry Eldridge Bourne and Elbert Jay Benton
... with a glance and the same affectionate, quiet smile that he had shown when leaving his mother's room in former times. Then she summoned them all. They sat down again round the table while she made the tea and poured it out. But the gathering grew sad, benumbed, as it were, with lassitude. Sandoz vainly tried a diversion by admitting Bertrand, the big dog, who grovelled at sight of the sugar-basin, and ended by going to sleep near the stove, where he snored like a man. Since the discussion on Fagerolles there ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... a moment until his benumbed brain took in her words and all their meaning; then he said: "All right, Jinnie, just wait a second till I have another horn with these ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... it has often happened, that both have been overruled by the last, and neither Head nor anybody else can do more than conjecture what has really been the secret history of our Colonial policy. Glenelg, however, was evidently feeble, and his faculties seem to have been entirely benumbed ever since the flagellations he got from Brougham in the beginning of last session. His terror of Brougham is so intense that he would submit to any humiliation rather than again expose his back to such a ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... I repeated, and sank back benumbed. It was all theirs to the last farthing: my grandfather had died too soon ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... Florence, as she stood before the window, blowing her benumbed fingers, "I don't think we shall have any occasion to open our trunks, for there is not a frock in mine I could venture to put on, unless I was willing to be frozen to death within ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... Swanson was incapable of replying. His senses were benumbed and he hardly realized what was going on around him. Staggering to his feet he reeled to and ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... words have sufficed to show that Ina Klosking's heart was all benumbed and deadened; and, with the help of insult, treachery, loss of blood, brain-fever, and self-esteem rebelling against villainy, had outlived its power of suffering ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... sacrificial, and other meats, reeking to the sky. The child, who was concerned for the sorrows of one of [200] those Northern captives as he passed by, and explained to his comrade—"There's feeling in that hand, you know!" benumbed and lifeless as it looked in the chain, seemed, in a moment, to transform the entire show into its own proper tinsel. Yes! these Romans were a coarse, a vulgar people; and their vulgarities of soul in full evidence here. And Aurelius himself ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... really effective weapons of the Holy Office, the real curses with which it afflicted the people, can be looked for in its dungeons and its confiscations, in the humiliating penances of the saffron crosses, and in the invisible police with which it benumbed the heart and soul of every man who had once fallen into its hands."[588] It is evident that these means of tormenting and coercing dissenters went much further to cause them to disappear than autos-de-fe and other ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... negligent indolence, for I know it is nothing worse, step in between us and bar the enjoyment of a mutual correspondence? We are not shapen out of the common, heavy, methodical clod, the elemental stuff of the plodding selfish race, the sons of Arithmetic and Prudence; our feelings and hearts are not benumbed and poisoned by the cursed influence of riches, which, whatever blessing they may be in other respects, are no friends to the nobler qualities of the heart: in the name of random sensibility, then, let never the moon change on our silence any more. I have ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... to determine the latitude of the place by the passage of Fomalhaut over the meridian; but the observation was lost, owing to the time I employed in taking the level of the artificial horizon. It was midnight, and I was benumbed with cold, as were also our guides: yet the thermometer kept at 19.7 degrees. At Cumana I have never seen it sink below 21 degrees; but then the house in which we dwelt on the Imposible was 258 toises above the level of the sea. At the Casa de la Polvora I determined the ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... steamer's side, deep in the waves. He goes down suddenly, cold, frightened, benumbed. He feels that some one is trying to pull the rope out of his hands. It must be Lockwin. The drowning man clutches with a hundred forces. The tug increases. The struggling man will lose the rope. Lockwin is ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern
... was thrilled as she heard in her memory the murmur of the orchestra accompanying the song of tenderness inspired by Spring; the rustle of the forest branches benumbed by the winter, now swaying with the new sap that had flowed into them like a torrent of vitality; and out on the brightly lighted plazoleta she could almost see Sigmund and Siglinda clasping in an eternal unseverable embrace, as she had seen them from the wings of the opera, where ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... death. He was beset by robbers, and sometimes nearly perished from thirst. Once he was stripped of all that he possessed, and left to travel hundreds of miles on foot through the mountains, the snow beating in his face, and his naked feet benumbed by contact with the ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... however mistaken, in supposing he could excite the benumbed faculties of the Doctor, by provoking a discussion. From that time, henceforth, he was never known, except on one occasion, to utter a word that indicated either the species, or the genus, of the animal. He obstinately ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... too strong to be benumbed by an overwhelming agony, as is sometimes the case with those who are fortunate enough to be weaker, so she had to suffer and endure. Life itself, yes, life a thousand times, was slipping away from her. She must be doing something or she would ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... cold and motionless. He was stunned, benumbed, by what he saw and heard. Laura drew away from Hector, and tried to free her ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Imperceptibly fatigue benumbed his senses, blunted the keen edge of his emotions; even the care for Quain became a mere dull ache in the back of his perceptions; of physical suffering he was unconscious. He fell a prey to freakish fancies—could stand aside and watch himself, ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... of Whitby, under circumstances of safety! They received from their townsmen the warmest congratulations; and while each individual was forward in contributing his assistance towards the restoration of their benumbed bodies, each appeared sensible that their narrow escape from death was highly providential. The forbearance of God is wonderful. Perhaps these very men a few hours before, were impiously invoking their own destruction, or venting imprecations upon their fellow beings! True it is that the goodness ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... brilliantly. Numbers of people were arriving on foot, and in carriages, hastening in to witness the happy scene. She only, with her poor blind brother, was rudely pushed back by the guards. Poor Raphael began to feel the cold painfully, and Madelaine perceiving that his hands were benumbed, untied her apron, and rolled them up ...
— The Young Emigrants; Madelaine Tube; The Boy and the Book; and - Crystal Palace • Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick
... step. He walked as if he were in some desert, elbowed by men whom he did not see, hearing through all the voices of the crowd one voice alone—the voice of Death. He was lost in the thoughts that benumbed him at last, like the criminals who used to be taken in carts from the Palais de Justice to the Place de Greve, where the scaffold awaited them reddened with all the blood spilt here ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... Houseman on Lower Broadway. Every day of these twenty-odd years, if we except Sundays and holidays, Mr. Neal had spent an hour and a half on subway trains. An hour and a half every day for more than twenty years he had spent in the great underground system of the Interborough. Its ceaseless roar benumbed his senses as he was hurtled from the Bronx, where he had a room, to the Imperial Building, where he worked, and back again. This, as he had often computed, amounted to fifty-eight and a half working days each year, or about two months' time. Such was the fee he paid to Time for ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... them the thermometer was only twenty below, and, when they cooked, rose to zero. A pleasant time of it they must have had there on the ice, for those three days, in their bags smoking and sleeping! No wonder that on the fourth day they found they moved slowly, so cramped and benumbed were they. This morning a new sledge came to them from the ship; they got out of their bags, packed, and got under way again. They were still running along shore, but soon sent back the relief party which had brought the new sled, and in a few days more set out to cross ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... suppress all complaints; it would have cost her too much to confess that she was not as strong as a boy. During the first few leagues of the march Silvere gave her his arm; then, seeing that the standard was gradually slipping from her benumbed hands, he tried to take it in order to relieve her; but she grew angry, and would only allow him to hold it with one hand while she continued to carry it on her shoulder. She thus maintained her heroic demeanour with childish stubbornness, smiling at the young man each time he gave her ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... Dwight had well-nigh perished, the guide lost the path in a snow-storm, and declared it impossible to go on. The snow was too deep for the horses. Turning back was out of the question, as their tracks were obliterated by the wind, which would then be in their faces. Though benumbed and feeble, the courage of Dr. Grant did not fail. He could not tell how deliverance would come, but had a sweet assurance that God would send it, and encouraged his companions to new effort. Just then four mountaineers ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume I. • Rufus Anderson
... along better in the world than I have done." If getting along well with the world consists only in hoarding up dollars and cents till every feeling of tenderness and benevolence toward the rest of mankind becomes benumbed and deadened, then truly Mr. Judson had got along remarkably well. His door was but a sorry place to ask charity, as every one could testify who ever tried the experiment. It was reported that a poor woman once called at the house and asked for food. The farmer chanced to be from ...
— Walter Harland - Or, Memories of the Past • Harriet S. Caswell
... fight both to the front and rear while their baggage, horses, and selves were wafted over. Having got safely over, they found it necessary to go to the town, as one of their comrades was quite benumbed in passing the river. Believing the Spaniards more numerous than they really were, the Indians only defended their town till their wives and children were got away to a place of safety, and then abandoned the place, of which Anasco took possession. The ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... levies are for the moment inert,—that we are now marshalling, arming, and drilling our raw recruits; let us concede that the giant of the North has not yet put forth his energies,—that, although roused from his torpor, one of his arms is still benumbed, and that his lithe and active opponent is for the moment pommelling him on every side, and has a momentary advantage; let us admit that our go-ahead nation is indignant at the idea of one step backward in this great contest: still it is safe ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... drew nearer, and one of the men stood up and looked around. We watched with breathless suspense for the reappearance of the brave young swimmer, but we watched in vain. Poor boy! who can know what was the agony of those ten minutes, while the icy waves gradually benumbed and dragged down the young life that struggled with such desperate energy to keep its place in the world! The men sat down and rowed back, bringing only his cap, which they had found floating on the sea. "Ah!" said Hildebrand, with tears in his eyes, "I did not want to take him this voyage, but ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... sudden joy filled Scraggy's heart. Her benumbed love for Lem Crabbe grew mighty in a moment and rushed over her. His words were softly spoken with an old-time inflection. She sank down with a cry. She was so near him that the cat rose and spat venomously. Lem's curses brought Scraggy ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... a light sleeper. Toward morning he awoke benumbed and cold. As he stirred the dying fire, the wind, which was now blowing strongly, brought to his cheek that which caused the blood ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... feet. You awake half-frozen, for Ganguernet always chooses a cold damp night for this trick, draw up the covering, wrap yourself carefully up, and very innocently resume your slumbers; then Ganguernet, gently pulling his cord, again strips you naked; again you are benumbed with cold; and when you begin to utter imprecations in the dark, his detestable voice is heard bawling through the hole: 'What a ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... and field, and what hair-breadth escapes! A strong swarm during the honey season loses, on an average, about four or five thousand per month, or one hundred and fifty per day. They are overwhelmed by wind and rain, caught by spiders, benumbed by cold, crushed by cattle, drowned in rivers and ponds, and in many nameless ways cut off or disabled. In the spring the principal mortality is from the cold. As the sun declines they get chilled before ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... the blast. Hubert Delrio essayed to shout, but his voice was gone, or was blown away. He understood that a vessel must be above him. Would it finish all by running him down? He perceived that he was bidden to catch something. A rope! His benumbed hands and the heaving of the boat made him fail once, twice, and he was being swept away as at last he did grasp a rope, and was drawn, as it ground his hands, close to the dark wall that ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... would have submerged and sunk them with their weight; in a word, warring even to the death with cold, the greatest enemy of life. This marvelous feat was accomplished by our French pontoon corps. Many perished, borne away by the current or benumbed by the cold. The glory of this achievement, in my opinion, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... slipped into the bosom of her dress. Even the contact with the packet did not shake her nerves as she had half-expected it would. She seemed encased in a strong armour of indifference, as though the vigorous exertion of her will had finally benumbed ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... which I had been brought.' He lay in bed until ten o'clock every morning to prolong the semi-oblivion of sleep. Work was impossible. If he read, it was without any object beyond semi-forgetfulness. He was too much benumbed and stupefied to calculate the future. He went through the forms of lecturing, but the life and spirit were gone. Teaching became as odious to him as it had once been delightful. His Satan, as he calls the most active of ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... Hull and Joseph, shrinking away from the icy water, but too benumbed to cry! Small wonder that they quickly yielded up their souls after the short struggle for life so gloomily and so coldly begun. Of Judge Sewall's fourteen children but three survived him, a majority dying in infancy; ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... refugees were in a pitiable condition when rescued. They were benumbed by the cold and suffering ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... early in January, and then no word afterwards. February went by gray and with showers of sleet: no word came. In the first week of March there came a great storm, with snow pelting on the furious wind. All the fishing boats were drawn high on the land, and the fishers sat in their cottages benumbed, despite the fires on the hearth, for the wind roared through doors and windows and often seemed minded to take up the little houses and smash them on the rocks as an angry child smashes a flimsy toy. No one went out of doors, and the Cassidys sat with their feet on the turf embers and ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... a manner almost helpless. The mind within me was as if the faculty of its thinking had been frozen up, and about the dawn of morning I walked in a willess manner, the blood in my veins not more benumbed in its course than was the fluency of my spirit in ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... on the open, windy heights it froze to a cake of ice, and before long our clothes on the windward side were converted into a thick cuirass which prevented every movement. At last we were practically frozen fast in the saddle. Our hands were benumbed, the reins fell on the horses' necks, our eyes were sore from the snowstorm which dashed straight into our faces. I was so stiff that I lost all feeling in my arms and legs, tumbled off my horse, and went on foot, but I had to hold on to the animal's ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... nice, I think," said Ben, drawing them on; "and I am much obliged to you. I was just wishing I had a pair of gloves to keep my fingers warm to-day, for I never can shoot well when my hands are benumbed. Look, Hal; you know how ragged these gloves were; you said they were good for nothing but to throw away; now look, there's not a hole in them," ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... notice that Russia is a country of the plains. Its southern boundary seems to follow the mountain barriers which divide Asia into two parts. Does it not seem as if long billows of earth roll down toward the Arctic Ocean, where they rest benumbed by the eternal cold? These mountains branch off toward the south, east or west, but scorn to throw so much as a spur northward. It is true that a solitary chain, the Urals, runs north and south, but it stands by itself, and is nothing more than what the word Ural signifies, ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... eyes, and nervously twitching his lips, pulled toward the letter v. The general frowned at the interruption, and, after a moment's silence, took the card, put on his pince-nez and, groaning from pain in his loins, rose to his full height, rubbing his benumbed fingers. ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... thanking God in an audible voice as he did so, and carried the child to a spot which was sheltered in some degree by a mass of cliff from the blinding spray and furious gale. Here he laid her with her face downwards on a grassy place, and proceeded to warm his benumbed frame. ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... life of one little mill hand? And what is one tot of them from another? And if one die one month and another the next, and another the next and the next, year in and year out, who remembers it save some poverty-hardened, stooped and benumbed creature, surrounded by a scrawny brood calling ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... engagement to-day was the simple backsliding of a believer, Tess's words, as echoed from Angel Clare, had made a deep impression upon him, and continued to do so after he had left her. He moved on in silence, as if his energies were benumbed by the hitherto undreamt-of possibility that his position was untenable. Reason had had nothing to do with his whimsical conversion, which was perhaps the mere freak of a careless man in search of a new sensation, and temporarily impressed by ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... south, and far in front a line of woods seemed inviting us to refreshment and repose. When we reached them, they were glistening with prismatic dewdrops, and enlivened by the song and flutterings of a hundred birds. Strange winged insects, benumbed by the rain, were clinging to the leaves and the bark of ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... is about done for!" muttered Harriet Burrell. She turned Tommy over on her back and, placing a hand under the little girl, began swimming slowly. The added burden was almost more than Harriet, in her benumbed state, was able to handle. She knew that she could not support Grace and herself through the rest of that long, dark night. She knew, too, that unless they were rescued, her companion would be past ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls by the Sea - Or The Loss of The Lonesome Bar • Janet Aldridge
... animated with a true and profound faith, in which each man, using his best efforts to communicate his convictions to his brethren, respects the while that which belongs to God in the inviolable asylum of the conscience of others. But woe to the society formed by sophists, in which opinion, benumbed by doubt and indifference, arouses itself only to devote to hatred or to contempt every ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... Welshman's head reappeared above water, about a fathom away from the boat, his face grey and distorted with fear, and his skinny hands outstretched in a vain endeavour to reach the gunwale of the boat. Then, almost in the self- same instant, and before one's benumbed senses found time to realise the ghastly tragedy, there was a rapid swirl of water alongside, an ear- splitting yell, and the miserable man was dragged down, an ensanguined patch in the deep crystalline blue, and a few transitory air-bubbles alone marking the spot from which he had ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... he drank the hemlock as if it had been a cup of wine: he then walked up and down the room for a little while, bade his pupils remember that this was the real deliverance from all disease and impurity, and then, as the fatal sleep benumbed him, he lay down, bidding Krito not forget a vow he had made to one of the gods; and so he slept into death. "Thus," said Plato, "died the man who, of all with whom we were acquainted, was in death the noblest, in life ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... what she seemed to be—that was the unshaped thought in the back of his brain. There were explanations to make which had not yet been made. If he told himself that he had solved the problem by leaving the house, he knew in reality that he had not done so. He was benumbed, bewildered. He must get back his reasoning faculties, and then he would see more clearly, both as to what had been done and what he must set ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... and wretched, and my physical sufferings were added to those of my mind. Somehow I had lost my hat and scarf overboard. I had to endure the chill wind that swept over me, the damp piercing blast that came over the waters, without any possibility of shelter. At last I grew so cold and benumbed that I lay down in the bottom of the boat, with the hope of getting out of the way of the wind. It was indeed somewhat more sheltered, but the shelter at best was but slight. I had nothing to cover myself with, ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... was obscured by mists," Trelawney writes, "it was oppressively sultry. There was not a breath of air in the harbor. The heaviness of the atmosphere and an unwonted stillness benumbed my senses. I went down into the cabin and sank into a slumber. I was roused up by a noise overhead, and went on deck. The men were getting up another chain-cable to let go another anchor. There was a general ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... stray lock of hair which had escaped from her radiant crop, "I am not clever enough for that. It is a dream. Your great-uncle Ralph had ridden too long and too far in the sun, and imagined the treasure, which has driven your Uncle Malcolm crazy, and his housekeeper dumb, and has benumbed you so that you sit around waiting, waiting, when you ought to be working, working! No, Ben, I like you ever so much, but you will never take me to New York with your Uncle Ralph's money, nor will you ever earn enough to take me with your own. You must ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... sense of something wrong, as if we had suffered a personal tragedy, and then as we came to clear consciousness we said, "O yes, the War!" The days have passed into weeks, the weeks into months and years: inevitably we become benumbed to the long continued disaster. It is impossible to think deaths and mutilations in terms of millions. Even those who stand in the immediate presence of it and suffer most terribly become calloused to it: much more must we who stood so long apart and have not yet felt the brunt of it. ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... freezing-point, for water in a vessel soon became a block of ice. No clothes seemed to oppose any obstacle to the air; I suffered very much from the cold, so that I could not sleep, and in the morning rose with my body quite dull and benumbed. ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... is there now." Jimmy lifted his right foot and held it from the ground. The warmth of the room was bringing pain to the benumbed member into which something had been stuck. "She told me to tell you please, 'm, to come if you could. Mrs. Cotter says she can't die until she sees you, and she's so tired trying to hold out. She won't have breath left to talk, mother says, if ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... first crocuses and snowdrops that opened beside a snow-drift still lingering on a shaded bank; and to watch the first benumbed honey-bees who greeted every flower that bloomed in that cherished spot, and who buzzed in bleak March winds over the purple crocus and "blue flushing" grape-hyacinth as cheerfully as though they were sipping the scarlet ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
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