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More "Sensibility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Annabel, bitterly, 'ay! they can weep. Sensibility is a luxury which they love to indulge. Their very susceptibility is our bane. They can weep; they can play upon our feelings; and our emotion, so easily excited, is an homage to their own power, ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... and withdrew, with his eyes full of tears of sensibility and gratitude. When he was gone, Sir Philip said, "I am thinking, that though young Edmund wants not my assistance at present, he may hereafter stand in need of my friendship. I should not wonder if such rare qualities as he possesses, should ...
— The Old English Baron • Clara Reeve
... a while a horse is born with as much acumen as a mule plus the sensibility of a dog. The Moose, when he felt Doug's arms about his neck, dropped from a gallop to a trot and from a trot to a walk. Shortly, when Judith called, "Whoa-up, Moose!" he stopped and stood nickering uneasily. Judith dismounted and pulled the reins over Buster's head. Then she ran up ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... of his life. Nor is he immediately undeceived. The stir and speed of the journey, and the restlessness that goes to bed with him as he tries to sleep between two days of noisy progress, fever him, and stimulate his dull nerves into something of their old quickness and sensibility. And so he can enjoy the faint autumnal splendour of the landscape, as he sees hill and plain, vineyard and forest, clad in one wonderful glory of fairy gold, which the first great winds of winter will transmute, as in the fable, ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... have had the pleasure of receiving your two favours of the 19th and 23rd of February, and hasten to dispel those fears respecting your reputation, which are excited only by an uncommon degree of sensibility. You seem to apprehend that censure, proportioned to the disappointed expectations of the world, will fall on you in consequence of the failure of the Canadian expedition. But, in the first place, it will be no disadvantage ...
— Memoirs, Correspondence and Manuscripts of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... direct and indirect action. The mind is set free from influences that narrowed its range and dimmed its vision, and refined to a keener sensibility, a juster perception, a higher power of appreciation, by far, than it had before. And then, to say nothing of religion's own peculiar sphere of enjoyment, technically religious what a field of pleasure it opens ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... of nature's finest moulding,— Those eyes, the deep night ether's blue Where sensibility its shadows Of ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... fear, that they might thus express by costly and imperishable monuments their sense of God's majesty and beauty. The modern traveller who visits the churches and convents of Florence, or the museums where are preserved the fading remains of its early religious Art, if he be a person of any sensibility, cannot fail to be affected with the intense gravity and earnestness which pervade them. They seem less to be paintings for the embellishment of life than eloquent picture-writing by which burning religious souls sought to preach the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... the color of friendship." "Abbott, you say the dearest things—but let's get back to our equation. I don't mean that Mrs. Gregory got jealous of Grace Noir—I don't know how to explain—you can't handle cobwebs without marring them." She paused. The gossamer shades of sensibility which she would have defined, threatened to become coarsened by the mere specific gravity of words—such words as have been knocked about the world so long that a sort of material ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... and in feeling. But not to all. To those who watched her long, there came moments—say when the music rose to heights of greatness—when the mouth so given over to laughter took on curves of the rarest sensibility, and a woman's lofty soul shone ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... companion had fallen asleep. Then she withdrew her arm and turned away disgusted, all the story of her happiness untold. "I verily believe," she said to herself, "that I have credited Fan with a great deal more sensibility than she possesses. To drop asleep like a plough- boy the moment I begin to talk to her—how little she cares about my affairs! I think Merton must be right in what he said about her. She is very keen and wideawake about her shop, and seems to think and ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... clearing the Calas. "It is Voltaire who is writing on behalf of this unfortunate family," said Diderot to Mdlle. Voland: "O, my friend, what a noble work for genius! This man must needs have soul and sensibility; injustice must revolt him; he must feel the attraction of virtue. Why, what are the Calas to him? What can awaken his interest in them? What reason has he to suspend the labors he loves in order to take up their defence?" From ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... rather with misjudgment, repulse, and outrage. Some readers may think that Shelley insists upon this aspect of his character to a degree rather excessive, and dangerously near the confines of feminine sensibility, rather than virile fortitude. Apart from this predominant type of character, Shelley describes his spirit as 'beautiful and swift'—which surely it was: and he says that, having gazed upon Nature's naked loveliness, he ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... shepherdess, she had the faculty as she might have had a fine voice or long hair. She couldn't spell and she loved beer, but she had two or three "points," and practice, and a knack, and mother-wit, and a whimsical sensibility, and a love of the theatre, and seven sisters,—and not an ounce of respect, especially for the H. The first thing my visitors saw was that her umbrella was wet, and in their spotless perfection they visibly winced at it. The rain had ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... therein its perfect echo nor that it may even be, in reflex, thereby accentuated or made less poignant. For some years I had felt convinced that in a perfect dandy this affinity must reach a point, when the costume itself, planned with the finest sensibility, would change with the emotional changes of its wearer, automatically. But I felt that here was one of those boundaries, where the fields of art align with the fields of science, and I hardly dared to venture further. Moreover, the theory was not easy to verify. I knew that, except ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... expulsory muscles when the latter are brought into full play during stool. Large quantities of feces do not now accumulate; consequently the pressure upon the mucous membrane and neighboring nerves is eliminated, and the bowel regains its normal sensibility and strength. There are now sold dilators in sets for self use in almost every drug store. These when used continuously ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... not enter on my list of friends (Though graced with polished manners and fine sense, Yet wanting sensibility) the man Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm. An inadvertent step may crush the snail That crawls at evening in the public path; But he that has humanity, forewarned, Will tread aside, ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... softness of outline, fixed on a canvas, he surpassed all rivals, including Raphael; and this widely attractive quality ('luscious refinement,' Mr Ruskin terms it) in connection with Correggio's ardent, if undisciplined sensibility, has rendered him one of the most valued of painters; his best paintings being highly prized and costly as the easel pictures attributed to Raphael. Sir W. Stirling Maxwell writes that an old Duke of Modena was suspected ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... intentions? Am I to cease from public prayer altogether because when engaged in it I am compelled to utter words of contrition and confession and supplication that little agree with the everyday temper and sensibility of my soul? And am I wholly to eschew pastoral work because my heart is not so absolutely clean and simple and sincere toward all my own people and toward other ministers' people as it ought to be? ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... natives of the mountainous island of his birth, and in his infancy was not remarkable for more than that animation of temper, and wilfulness and impatience of inactivity, by which children of quick parts and lively sensibility are usually distinguished. The winter of the year was generally passed by the family of his father at Ajaccio, where they still preserve and exhibit, as the ominous play-thing of Napoleon's boyhood, the model of a brass cannon, weighing about thirty pounds.[4] ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... atrocities committed on these august victims, "fortunately for him, their arrest was not owing to his orders, but to the accident of being recognised by a post-master, and to their ill arrangements." Thus the citizen ordered that which the man trembled to see fulfilled; and tardy sensibility protested ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... thing most delicate, most frail, yet steeped in feeling and significance—a child's face with its soft curls of brown hair, and the upper lip raised above the white, small teeth, as though in a young wonder; yet behind its sweetness, what suggestions of a poetic or tragic sensibility! The slender neck carried the little head with girlish dignity; the clear, timid eyes seemed at once to shrink from and trust ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the lips seemed set more firmly, and the eyes were resolute and keen. Nasmyth, so Gordon noticed, had grown since he first took up his duties as Waynefleet's hired hand. Still, though it was less apparent, the stamp of refinement and what Gordon called, for want of a better term, "sensibility," clung to him, and it seemed to the trained observer that the qualities it suggested might yet handicap his comrade in a country where the struggle with primitive forces chiefly demands from man ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... of the one had been singularly perfected by practice. The sensibility of its retina must have been as instantaneous as that of those conjurors who recognize a card merely by a rapid movement in cutting the pack or by the arrangement only of marks invisible to others. The Frenchman ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... applied to the head. The mercurial influence being established, a profuse discharge of urine occurred; the pupils which had previously been permanently dilated, became once more obedient to light; sensibility was restored, and great weakness appeared to be the only urgent symptom. The cough, however, now returned, the head became again affected, and the child sunk. Upon opening the head, about four ounces of fluid was found in the ventricles[K]. This ...
— Remarks on the Subject of Lactation • Edward Morton
... this.[1] Shakspeare had nothing of this contortion in his mind, none of that craving after violent situations, and flights of strained and improbable virtue, which I think always betrays an imperfect moral sensibility. The wit of Fletcher is excellent,[2] like his serious scenes, but there is something strained and far-fetched in both. He is too mistrustful of Nature, he always goes a little on one side of her.—Shakspeare chose her without a reserve: and had riches, power, ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... of conscience or discriminating reflection as the indigenous growth of a very vigorous physical development. Your true healthy boy has the breezy, hearty virtues of a Newfoundland dog, the wild fullness of life of the young race-colt. Sentiment, sensibility, delicate perceptions, spiritual aspirations, are plants ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... that sentiment in English dress which I hope I am not recreant in liking. Occasionally, also, there was a scarf, lightly escaping, lightly caught, which, with an endearing sash, renewed for a fleeting moment a bygone age of Sensibility, as we find it recorded in many a graceful page, on many ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... for locomotion and nerves for sensibility. Hence, says Cuvier, it was necessary that the chemical composition of the animal body should be more complicated than that of the plant; and it is so, inasmuch as an additional substance, nitrogen, enters into it as an essential element; while, ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... minor tragedies, C.I.D. men—official detectives prefer the term—are forced to view their work objectively, like doctors and journalists. All murders are terrible—as murders. A detective cannot allow his sympathies or sensibility to pain or grief to hamper him in his work. In Bolt's sense the case was terrible because it was difficult to investigate; because, unless the perpetrators were discovered and arrested, discredit would be brought upon the service and glaring contents-bills ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... age; the thing is reasonable. I do not know whether she will be happy with you or not. A young man of your disposition who declines to study the whims of an unfortunate creature like myself is scarcely likely to be possessed of much sensibility. However, perhaps your views as to a solitary residence here will change with your engagement ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of mystical, almost Gnostic sensibility that shows up even among those hackers not actively involved with neo-paganism, Discordianism, or Zen. Hacker folklore that pays homage to 'wizards' and speaks of incantations and demons has too much psychological truthfulness about it to ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... condition will last until one of two things occurs; either she must be similarly shocked back into sensibility—and I can't see how this can happen, Fenton, unless you can secure the co-operation of the man to whom you attribute the matter—or she must lie ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... to reply, and had already summoned into his face a look of most intense sensibility, when the sound he had already ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... shining among the hills and the mystery of the landscape seemed to aggravate his sensibility, and he asked himself if the guardians of the people should not fling themselves into the forefront of the battle. Men came to preach heresy in his parish—was he not ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... cities so in your literature, it is a permanent canon and standard of taste, an increased sensibility to beauty (if I may say so) that is lacking. All noble work is not national merely, but universal. The political independence of a nation must not be confused with any intellectual isolation. The spiritual freedom, indeed, your own generous ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... such rule as she has known relentless hate springs up in otherwise gracious hearts from the scattered dragons' teeth; and in other natures, where there is not quite so much of the motive temperament, a deep strain of sorrow and religious melancholy finds expression. The exquisite sensibility, delicate insight, proud reserve and brooding world-sorrow of Frederic Chopin were the inheritance of mother to son. This mother's mind was saturated with the wrongs her people had endured: she herself had suffered every contumely, for where chance ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... stockings, and knee-breeches. In this I consider Doctor Plausible was right; the above look much more scientific than Wellington trousers; and much depends upon the exterior. He was quite a ladies' man; talked to them about their extreme sensibility, their peculiar fineness of organic structure, their delicacy of nerves; and soothed his patients more by flattery than by physic. Having discovered that Miss Laura was not inclined to give up her gingerbread, he immediately acknowledged ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... he has shown of English poetry. The notion would be more plausible if there were any poetry which he has failed to appreciate. But when it is added that she was a woman of remarkable intelligence and sensibility, we recognize a fact of which the influence can neither ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... make his own comment on this whole affair.[2] My feelings were never more stirred. We were terribly shocked at Pike's murder of the Browns, those feeble, old people. But he dispatched them at once; neither, perhaps, experiencing a moment's sensibility of suffering. True, the man lived a number of hours, but was probably not sensible of pain. But Sylver, in his agonies, begging and pleading for help, was forced to pass that terrible night carefully locked in his cell, and ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... laceration of vital parts; to examine whether burning irons are felt more acutely by the bone or tendon; and whether the more lasting agonies are produced by poison forced into the mouth or injected into the veins. It is not without reluctance that I offend the sensibility of the tender mind with images like these. If such cruelties were not practised, it were to be desired that they should not be conceived; but since they are published every day with ostentation, let me be allowed once to mention them, since I mention them with ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... up between us. I am beginning to understand what it is. I have always looked upon Ruth as being somewhat different from other women because of her infirmity. It is dawning upon me now that, after all, the infirmity counts for little. She is a woman, with a woman's sensibility and all that goes with it. It troubles her to ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... a week after the events in Miss Cushing's parlor, that something occurred which sent a thrill through the souls of a good many people in Plainton, affecting them more or less according to their degree of sensibility. ...
— Mrs. Cliff's Yacht • Frank R. Stockton
... highest price was allowed that could be ascribed to the domestic animal at any moment of the year preceding his death; a similar latitude of thirty days was granted on the destruction of any other valuable effects. A personal injury is blunted or sharpened by the manners of the times and the sensibility of the individual: the pain or the disgrace of a word or blow cannot easily be appreciated by ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... even a moderate degree of sensibility must be excited by the novelty of his first 'camp-out' ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... is represented as a very bad theatrical critic. But none of those who laugh at him possess the tithe of his sensibility to theatrical excellence. He admires in the wrong place; but he trembles in the right place. It is indeed because he is so much excited by the acting of Garrick, that he ranks him below the strutting, mouthing performer, who personates the King. So, we have heard it said that, in some parts of Spain ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... by accident, it 'pears ter me a mistake—somehows—ez ef they war choused out'n time what war laid off fur them an' their'n by right." Evidently she did not lack sensibility. ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... that name in dramatic history, there is an obvious union of the salient qualities of his ancestors. The rustic luxuriance, manly vigour, careless and adventurous disposition of the first Jefferson; the refined intellect, delicate sensibility, dry humour, and gentle tenderness of the second; and the amiable, philosophic, and drifting temperament of the third, reappear in this descendant. But more than any of his ancestors, and more than most of his contemporaries, the present Jefferson is an originator ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... suspected in the effort to bring into play the extremities of emotions the debasing touch of insincerity. In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility—innocently enough, perhaps, and of necessity, like an actor who raises his voice on the stage above the pitch of natural conversation—but still we have to do that. And surely this is no great sin. But the danger lies in the writer ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... another book in illustration of slavery which ought to be read by every American. It is Fanny Kemble Butler's A Residence on a Georgia Plantation. She was a woman of unusual genius, character, and sensibility; the inheritor of a great dramatic talent, and a brilliant actress until she married Mr. Butler of Georgia, and left the stage to live with him on the plantation owned by himself and his brother. After no long period she left her husband, not taking the world into her confidence as to her domestic ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... But if, in the material appreciation of a defect, they have not been able to err, several have erred in their moral appreciation of the fact by pretending that Lord Byron, for imaginary reasons, was exceedingly sensible of this defect. This excessive sensibility was a pure invention on the part of his biographers. When he did experience it (which was never but to a very moderate extent), it was only because, physically speaking, he suffered from it. Under the sole of the weak foot he at times experienced ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... her recollections, the best glimpse of Hawthorne's mother. "Madame Hawthorne," she says, "always looked as if she had walked out of an old picture, with her antique costume, and a face of lovely sensibility and great brightness—for she did not seem at all a victim of morbid sensibility, notwithstanding her all but Hindoo self-devotion to the manes of her husband. She was a woman of fine understanding and very cultivated mind. But she had very sensitive nerves." Elizabeth, Hawthorne's ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... first seems to be uttered with an inspiration of the breath, as if the afflicted creature were just recovering its voice from the last convulsive sob of distress, and followed by three long, deep, and mournful moanings, that no person of sensibility can listen to without sympathy." "The solemn voice of sorrow," another writer calls it. All this is mere sentimentality, pure imagination; and if the writers could sit, as I have, under the tree when the bird was singing, they would change their opinion, though they would thereby ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... 1759. Her father was so great a wanderer, that the place of her birth is uncertain; she supposed, however, it was London, or Epping Forest: at the latter place she spent the first five years of her life. In early youth she exhibited traces of exquisite sensibility, soundness of understanding, and decision of character; but her father being a despot in his family, and her mother one of his subjects, Mary, derived little benefit from their parental training. She received no literary instructions ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... to him in the Gospel that sowed his tares in the night; so did they their seeds in division in the dark; and as it is a likely report that they father on him at his return, the Queen speaking to him with some sensibility of the Spanish designs on France: "Madam," he answered, "I beseech you be content, and fear not; the Spaniard hath a great appetite and an excellent digestion, but I have fitted him with a bone for these twenty years that your Majesty should have no cause to doubt him, ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... street, as she poured forth torrents of furious reproach and menace; all the time Emma stood patient and undaunted, her own anger often making terrible struggle for mastery, but ever finding itself subdued. For she, too, was of a passionate nature, but the treasures of sensibility which her heart enclosed consecrated all her being to noble ends. One invaluable aid she had in a contest such as this—her inability to grow sullen. Righteous anger might gleam in her eyes and quiver upon ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... character seemed to have been omitted from his composition. He was naturally good, naturally graceful, naturally amiable. A sense of humour was, I think, almost the only intellectual gift with which he was not endowed. Lord Beaconsfield spoke of his "picturesque sensibility," and the phrase was happily chosen. He had the keenest sympathy with whatever was graceful in literature; a style full of flexibility and colour; a rare faculty of graphic description; and all glorified ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... that Burns was permanently affected by any such mark of moral bondage. A week or two after, he is found keeping a couple of friends in drink and merriment at his table for a whole night. It is eminently the poet that is thus brought before us—a being of keen sensibility, but whose gusts of feeling are as quick in passing as they are violent while ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various
... Mr. Goodenough was in a state of delirium, in which he remained all night, falling towards morning into a dull coma, gradually breathing his last, without any return of sensibility, at ...
— By Sheer Pluck - A Tale of the Ashanti War • G. A. Henty
... head. The little play of feature that his face presented, was cut deep into it, in a few hard curves that made it more like work; and he had certain notches in his forehead, which looked as though Nature had been about to touch them into sensibility or refinement, when she had impatiently thrown away the chisel, and said: 'I really cannot be worried to finish off this man; let him go ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... a bear called Marco, of the sagacity and sensibility of which we have the following remarkable instance. During a severe winter, a boy, ready to perish with cold, thought proper to enter Marco's hut, without reflecting on the danger which he ran in exposing himself to the mercy of the animal which occupied it. Marco, however, instead of doing ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst
... youth, in which one of the principal elements of his education is, or ought to be, to give him refinement of habits; and not only to teach him the strong exercises of which his frame is capable, but also to increase his bodily sensibility and refinement, and show him such small matters as the way of handling things ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... another he kept both his eyes and ears open, and soon began to gain a general idea of the people among whom he found himself. As in all other places of resort, one type predominated: people in the prime of youth, with every show of intelligence and sensibility in their appearance, but with little promise of strength or the quality that makes success. Few were much above thirty, and not a few were still in their teens. They stood, leaning on tables and shifting on their feet; sometimes they smoked extraordinarily ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... humble as the woman's own. "I must learn—to take care of him—of them!" She nodded at the sufferer. "All my life, you see, I could never bear the sight of blood. To cut my finger, I fainted at the instant. Always they said, 'Poor child! it is her delicacy, her sensibility;' they praised me; I thought it a fine thing, to faint, to turn pale at the word even. Now—oh, Dolores, do you see? I desire to help my country, my brother, all the heroes who are risking their life, are shedding their—their blood—for ...
— Rita • Laura E. Richards
... given him to extend his visits to them. To these he has yielded all the accommodation in his power. At every designated point of rendezvous the whole population of the neighboring country has been assembled to greet him, among whom it has excited in a peculiar manner the sensibility of all to behold the surviving members of our Revolutionary contest, civil and military, who had shared with him in the toils and dangers of the war, many of them in a decrepit state. A more interesting spectacle, it is believed, was never witnessed, because none could ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 3) of Volume 2: James Monroe • James D. Richardson
... the challenge. Very delicately, with many preparatory words, to which the other listened in unbroken silence, Mr. Brock came little by little nearer and nearer to the point. Long before he had really reached it—long before a man of no more than ordinary sensibility would have felt what was coming—Ozias Midwinter stood still in the lane, and told the rector that he need say ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... pseudo-supersensitiveness. Young animals not accustomed to being handled are likely to be timorous, and one must not hastily conclude that a part is painful to the touch because the subject resents even gentle digital manipulation of such parts. In instances of this kind, one needs to compare sensibility by manipulation of different parts of the subject's body in a careful and gentle manner; and by exercising patience and good judgment in such work, it is possible to actually distinguish between normal sensibility and abnormal sensitiveness, ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... shouting he was braced to a wall for hours at a time, tightly cased in a horrible jacket and leather collar, his feet being only moveable. In this position, when exhausted almost to death, he was restored to sensibility by having buckets of water thrown over him. What wonder that within a month he hung himself. A number of similar cases of brutality were proved, and the Governor thought it best to resign, but he was not allowed to escape altogether ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... beloved aunt, the Princess Sophia Philippina Elizabeth Justina of France, which is due, as well to the eminent virtues she possessed, as to the relation in which she stood to your Majesty. We trust that our sensibility on this occasion, will be considered as a fresh proof of the interest we take in every event, which may affect your Majesty, and that our sincere condolence, when such afflictions as are the lot of humanity put it out of our power to offer more effectual consolation, will evince our earnest ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. XI • Various
... brave the ridicule of the profane to taste the raptures which his soul loved. His simple, trusting faith made him inevitably the butt of the mischievous circle. They were not slow in discovering his extreme sensibility to external influences. One muscular, black-haired, heavy-browed youth took especial delight in practicing upon him. The table, under Gershom's tremulous hands, would skip like a lamb at the command ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... thus: digging and rummaging through the heap of mould, guided perhaps by that singular sensibility of the antennae which enables the Hairy Ammophila to discover the Grey Worm (The caterpillar of the Turnip Moth. Cf. "The Hunting Wasps": chapters 18 to 20.—Translator's Note.) underground, the Scolia ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... it's a woman's business to be married. As for Dorothy, she is five-and-twenty, and she breaks my heart. Such a match, too! Ten thousand to her fortune, the best blood in the north, a most advantageous person, all the graces, the finest sensibility, excellent judgment, the Foster walk; and all these to go positively a-begging! The men seem stricken with blindness. Why, child, when I came out (and I was the dear girl's image!) I had more swains at my feet in a fortnight than our Dorothy in - O, I cannot fathom ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson
... of their amphibious hides, and resume the shape of the sons and daughters of the ocean. Their first object was to assist in the recovery of their friends, who having been stunned by clubs, had, while in that state, been deprived of their skins. When the flayed animals had regained their sensibility, they assumed their proper form of mermen or merwomen, and began to lament in a mournful lay, wildly accompanied by the storm that was raging around, the loss of their sea-dress, which would prevent them from again enjoying their native azure atmosphere, and coral mansions that lay below the deep ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... laid in the country, and not in the metropolis. The very opening of this poem refreshes the heart—and prepares us for the more edifying portions of it, connected with the performance of the religious offices of our country. This beautiful work will LIVE as long as sensibility, and taste, and a virtuous feeling, shall possess the bosoms ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... is harsh, and spirit of sense/Hard as the palm of ploughman!] In comparison with Cressid's hand, says he, the spirit of sense, the utmost degree, the most exquisite power of sensibility, which implies a soft hand, since the sense of touching, as Scaliger says in his Exercitations, resides chiefly in the fingers, is hard as the callous and insensible palm of the ploughman. ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... often mistake politeness for effeminacy, sensibility for weakness. Shad was a rough and tumble artist of a high proficiency, and he had a reputation for strength and combativeness. He was going to make short work of ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... masters of modern times. But we have the testimony of the ancients themselves, who were as enthusiastic in their admiration of pictures as they were of statues. And since their taste was severe, and their sensibility as to beauty unquestioned, we have a right to infer that even painting was carried to considerable perfection among the Greeks. We read of celebrated schools,—like the modern schools of Florence, Rome, Bologna, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... experience of practice among rich and self-conscious patients who would always rather be "interesting" than normal, it was not the first time that he had watched the bloom being rubbed off love; nine broken engagements and balked romances were born of doltish delay; but a mass of sensibility like Eric Lane had not the stamina to wait nor the placidity to ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... enough secured, without philosophical proofs of the soul's immateriality; since it is evident, that he who made us at the beginning to subsist here, sensible intelligent beings, and for several years continued us in such a state, can and will restore us to the like state of sensibility in another world, and make us capable there to receive the retribution he has designed to men, according to their doings in this life. [And therefore it is not of such mighty necessity to determine one way or the ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... love him too; but why?—because his character pleases me; he is stern and resolute, and, I believe, the fellow never shed a tear. For my part, I know very well that I have no true friends. As long as I continue to be what I am, I may have as many pretended friends as I please. Leave sensibility to women; but men should be firm in heart and purpose, or they should have nothing to do with war and government." He was thoroughly unscrupulous. He would steal, slander, assassinate, drown, and poison, as ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... be exposed too long over the vapor of bromine, the impression would be rendered wholly insensitive to the mercurial vapor. Hence this method is resorted to for restoring the sensibility of the plate when there is reason to believe that the impression would not be a desirable one; as, for example, if a likeness of a child be wanted, and it had moved before the plate had been sufficiently long exposed in the camera, the plate may be restored to its original sensitiveness by re-coating ...
— American Handbook of the Daguerrotype • Samuel D. Humphrey
... personal character, all that I have heard is, that he was eminent for bravery and skill in the sword, and that in conversation he was solemn and pompous. He had great sensibility of censure, if judgment may be made by a single story which I heard long ago from Mr. Ing, a gentleman of great eminence in Staffordshire. "Philips," said he, "was once at table, when I asked him, how came thy king of Epirus to drive ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... brick. Along the dark wall at the back of this temple or gallery were placed six niches for statues, which Odintsov had proceeded to order from abroad. These statues were to represent Solitude, Silence, Meditation, Melancholy, Modesty, and Sensibility. One of them, the goddess of Silence, with her finger on her lip, had been sent and put up; but on the very same day some boys on the farm had broken her nose; and though a plasterer of the neighbourhood undertook to make her a new nose 'twice ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... of natural emotion, gushing forth amid abstracted reverie, which enabled the family to understand this young man's sentiments, though so foreign from their own. With quick sensibility of the ludicrous, he blushed at the ardor into which ...
— The Great Stone Face - And Other Tales Of The White Mountains • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... forms of violence which minister to his personal comforts, but also make a virtue of trying to abate by legal violence some particular form of physical suffering which happens to offend in a quite special manner his individual sensibility. ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... On the way he stopped before a table covered with showy trifles, and after looking at them for a moment singled out a dim old brown and golden book which Chelles had given her. He examined it lingeringly, as though it touched the spring of some choked-up sensibility for which he had no language. "Say—" he began: it was the usual prelude to his enthusiasms; but he laid the book down and ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... consequences of the insult. He trusted, however, that Spikeman's knowledge of Indian character would place him sufficiently on his guard to make abortive any attempts against him, and determined to keep a watchful eye upon his wild companion for the present, and until time should have blunted sensibility to the injury. For this reason, and in order also to counteract, as far as might be, the effect of the incidents at the house of the Assistant, after purchasing the articles which they came out to procure, he took the savage with him on the visit to the ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... of the time, descriptions which are confirmed by contemporary writers. She was the wife of Dr. Delany, Dean of Down, the companion of duchesses and queens, and the friend of Swift. Hannah More, in a poem called 'Sensibility,' published in 1778, gives this quaint and stilted ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... way of being present at his lessons, and when they passed, as sooner or later they were sure to, into the stage I have described, she interceded for her overwrought darling, reminded Ransom that these were the signs of an exquisite sensibility, begged that the child might be allowed to rest a little, and spent the remainder of the time in conversation with the preceptor. It came to seem to him, very soon, that he was not earning his fee; besides which, it was disagreeable to him to have pecuniary relations ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... "The Lay Preacher," And as first editor of the Port Folio, He contributed to chasten the morals, and to Refine the taste of this nation. To an imagination lively, not licentious, A wit sportive, not wanton, And a heart without guile, he United a deep sensibility, which endeared Him to his friends, and an ardent piety, Which we humbly trust recommended him to his God. Those friends have erected this tribute of their Affection to his memory; To the mercies of that God is their resort For ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... muscular sensibility of the child from three to six years of age who is forming his own muscular activity which stimulates him to use the stereognostic sense. When the child spontaneously blindfolds his eyes in order to recognize various objects, ...
— Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook • Maria Montessori
... Titus, I never knew much of the tenderness you describe. Hannibal, Carthage, Rome, the saving of my country, the subduing of its rival, these filled my thoughts, and left no room there for those effeminate passions. I do not blame your sensibility; but when I went to the capitol to talk with Jove, I never ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... blooming acanthus; and from the threshold we see the church with its files of intersecting columns, its alternate courses of black and white marble and its multitude of slender and brilliant forms, rising upward like an altar of candelabra. A new spirit appears here, a more delicate sensibility; it is not excessive and disordered as in the north, and yet it is not satisfied with the grave simplicity, the robust nudity of antique architecture. It is the daughter of the pagan mother, healthy and gay, but more womanly than ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... spectators, who are ready to execrate the memory of Semiramis for the cruel art which she invented of frustrating the purposes of nature, and of blasting in the bud the hopes of future generations. In the exercise of domestic jurisdiction the nobles of Rome express an exquisite sensibility for any personal injury, and a contemptuous indifference for the rest of the human species. When they have called for warm water, if a slave has been tardy in his obedience, he is instantly chastised with ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... however powerfully they address themselves to your sensibility, are greatly outweighed by those which apply more immediately to your interest. Here, every portion of our country finds the most commanding motives for carefully guarding and preserving the union of the whole. . ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... imperfect. His powers, noble and charming as they might have been, were at once wasted and weakened through their own partial excess. His moral nature relaxed and sank, as must always be the case where sensibility is stimulated and action paralyzed; and the man of genius who, forty years before his death, administered a moral warning to all England, and commanded the sympathy and admiration of a nation, lived on, to achieve nothing ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... again, of the world, such as of music and the theatre, reach the mind, and, animating it, give a greater expression to the countenance, on which the contemplation afterwards produces a similar though a slighter effect. But in what Quakers can you see sensibility from the same cause? The dress too, of the members of this society gives them an appearance of gravity and dulness. It makes them also shy of their fellow citizens. But gravity, and dulness, and shyness, have generally, each of them, ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... if she disliked all this conversation; and she appeared at times to sniff the heavy, oppressive odors floating in the room, while casting suspicious side-glances at the furniture, as though her own exquisite sensibility warned her of some undefined dangers. Finally, however, she turned a look of ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... most suitable for visual instruments ("optical achromatism,'). In a similar manner, for systems used in photography, the vertex of the colour curve must be placed in the position of the maximum sensibility of the plates; this is generally supposed to be at G'; and to accomplish this the F and violet mercury lines are united. This artifice is specially adopted in objectives for astronomical photography ("pure actinic achromatism''). For ordinary photography, however, there is this ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... effect, when, long after the catastrophe of their love, he used to warn his hearers against permitting their feelings to obtain an ascendency over their judgment, and affirm, that the greatest misfortune of his life was owing to a very temporary predominance of sensibility over self-interest. It must be owned, if such was the case, he was long and severely punished for an offence of ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... which, after all, only men's viler side had been clearly visible—the overthrow of reason—the seemingly irredeemable memory; and still, above all, the beautiful head in which the noble lines of the race of Augustus were united to, he knew not what expression of sensibility and fineness, not theirs, and for the like of which one must pass onward to the Antonines. Popular hatred had been careful to destroy its semblance wherever it was to be found; but one bust, in dark bronze-like basalt of a wonderful perfection of finish, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... distinction which teachers and parents do not always recognize between books, which are beyond the child merely because of the hard words in which the idea is clothed and those in which the thought itself is above his comprehension. "Children possess an unestimated sensibility to whatever is deep or high in imagination or feeling so long as it is simple likewise. It is only the artificial and the complex that bewilder them," said Hawthorne, and because of his knowledge of this fact he wrote his exquisite classics for ...
— Children and Their Books • James Hosmer Penniman
... the masters and overseers on these plantations prohibit melancholy tunes or words, and encourage nothing but cheerful music and senseless words, deprecating the effect of sadder strains upon the slaves, whose peculiar musical sensibility might be expected to make them especially excitable by any songs of a plaintive character, and having any reference to their particular hardships. If it is true, I think it a judicious precaution enough—these poor ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... this evil habit. The pathological consequences of continued and prolonged pressure on any vital structure are innutrition, congestion, inflammation, and ulceration, resulting in weakness, waste of substance, and destruction of tissue. The normal sensibility of the part is also destroyed. No woman can ever forget the pain she endured when she first applied the corsets; but in time the compressed organs become torpid; the muscles lose their contractile power, and she feels dependent on the mechanical support ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... as his heart, grabbing together what he does not enjoy, and what there is no one about him to enjoy. The debtor, on the other hand, is always pictured with a wife and six fair-haired daughters, bound together in affection and misery, full of sensibility, and suffering without a fault. The creditor, it is never doubted, thrives without a merit. He has no wife and children to pity. No one ever thinks it desirable that he should have the means of living. He is a brute for insisting that he must ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... in a burning article he denounced the inter-State slave-trade as piracy, and piracy of an aggravated and cruel kind, inasmuch as those born and educated in civilized and Christianized society have more sensibility to feel the evils thus inflicted than imbruted savages. He denounced the owners of the ship and all the parties in no measured terms, and expressed his determination to 'cover with thick infamy all who were ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... a mighty master who was dominated by the vision of male beauty, and who saw the female mainly through the fascination of the other sex. The defect of his art is due to a certain constitutional callousness, a want of sensuous or imaginative sensibility for what is ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... dramas, a hundred-thousandth part of the words that would be used in real life,—that is, in Nature. He also always approaches us upon the level of our common sense and experience, and never requires us to yield it,—never breaks in or jars upon our judgment, or shocks or alarms any natural sensibility. After enlarging our souls with the stir of whatever can move us through poetry, he leaves us where he found us, refreshed by new thoughts, new scenes, and new knowledge of ourselves and our kind, more capable, and, if we ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... slept. The Indian sleeps at the stake in the intervals between his tortures; and mental torments, in like manner, exhaust by long continuance the sensibility of the sufferer, so that an interval of lethargic repose must necessarily ensue, ere the pangs which they inflict ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... it is true that the greatest situations are often attended with but little emolument; yet still they are filled. Why? Because reputation, glory, fame, the esteem, the love, the tears of joy which flow from happy sensibility, the honest applauses of a grateful country, sometimes pay the cares, anxieties, and toils which wait on great situations in the commonwealth; and in these they pay in money what cannot be paid in fame and reputation. It ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... there is a great deal of beauty and enjoyment in Miss Mitford's life. For her the absence of material happiness was made up for by the presence of warm-hearted sensibility, of enthusiasm, by her devotion to her parents. Her long endurance and filial piety are very remarkable, her loving heart carried her safely to the end, and she found comfort in her unreasoning life's devotion. She had none of the restlessness ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... may, however, be due to the debility of the young child, or to a want of sensibility in the ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... as being pathetic," said Lucian, who liked to show that he was not deficient in sensibility. "One can picture the innocent faith of the poor woman in her ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... written poems of more than common excellence; and being handsome, of good family, and large fortune, her talents made her an object of more interest than they might otherwise have done. Her poetry showed great sensibility and tenderness. If poetry be any index to the heart, you would have thought her one to love truly and deeply. Nevertheless, since she married—as girls in France do—not to please herself, but her parents, she made a mariage de convenance. Monsieur de ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... some time in this place along with Miss Wilkes to whom Made D'Holbach and I pay our best compliments. I can easily paint to my imagination the pleasure you both felt at your first meeting; everybody that has any sensibility must be acquainted with the grateful pangs ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... frail creature, tremulous as a leaf in the wind, yet making a show of courage. He had often asked himself whether he would wish to be loved as Mrs. Sarratt evidently loved her husband; whether he could possibly meet such a claim upon his own sensibility. But to-day he thought he could meet it; to-day he thought it would ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in an animated, ironical tone, Edmee burst into tears. This nervous sensibility which brought to the front all the qualities of her soul and mind, tenderness, courage, delicacy, pride, modesty, gave her face at the same time an expression so varied, so winning in all its moods, that the grave, sombre assembly ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... Towers! She had been not only visible and audible like the rest, but tangible as well, to the fullest extent of the sensibility that lay in my nerves of touch; when my hands held hers I felt as though I were drawing ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... of sensibility, she suspected nothing, saw nothing in each excuse but what was perfectly reasonable and kind; she was sure that her uncle's friends could not mean to neglect her. In short, she had an undoubting belief ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... knows when it is best to call me home. But I cannot bear that my children should shrink from all I shall leave behind, my memory. Louis is a bold and noble boy. I fear not for him. His reason even now has the strength of manhood. Mittie has very little sensibility or imagination; too little of the first I fear to be very lovable. But perhaps it will be better for her in the end. Helen is all sensibility and imagination. I tremble for her. I am haunted by a strange apprehension ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... to September, and then a progressive increase; the respiratory rate also fell from a maximum in April to a minimum maintained at exactly the same level throughout August, September, October, and November; spring was found to be the season of maximum, autumn of minimum, muscular power; sensibility to tactile and temperature impressions was also ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... all. The merest suspicion that there had been a man in the world who could have frustrated this beautiful potentiality in her had moved him profoundly. There was nothing in her experience to help her to differentiate between the sensibility of the artistic temperament and the manifestations of the more reliable emotions. The presence in the human breast of a fire that gave out light and not heat was a condition undreamed of in her philosophy. To doubt Collier Pratt's love ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... de day. Well sir, dat day was de fust day of April but pray sir, don't write me down a fool 'cause I born on dat p'ticular April Fool Day, 1852. When I gits through wid you, I wants you to say if dat birthday have any 'fect on dis old man's sensibility. ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... conversation, addicted beyond measure to sensual indulgence, fond of sauntering and of frivolous amusements, incapable of selfdenial and of exertion, without faith in human virtue or in human attachment without desire of renown, and without sensibility to reproach. According to him, every person was to be bought: but some people haggled more about their price than others; and when this haggling was very obstinate and very skilful it was called by some fine name. The chief trick by which clever ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... understands the science of the brain. It is an effort to cultivate into abnormal predominance the heroic, firm, hardy, and spiritual regions of the brain, to the neglect if not suppression of its nobler powers. In suppressing sympathy and sensibility, it impairs the foundation of our most amiable virtues, isolates man from the companionship and love of his fellow-beings and comes dangerously near to misanthropy and black magic, or the attempt to use spiritual powers and the spiritual ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various
... mystical, the least pantheistic, the least monistic, of all writers. That magical sense of the brooding Over-Soul which thrills us so in Goethe's poetry never touches his pages. The Wordsworthian intimations of "something far more deeply interfused" never crossed his sensibility; and, as far as he is concerned, ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... features as the sun at twilight will pierce through and illuminate for a few minutes a sullen cloud-bank. Miss Willis saw in a vision on the spot a refuge from hopelessness. Behind that smile there must be a winsome soul. That spiritless expression was but a veil or rind hiding the germs of sensibility and reason. This was discovery number one. After it came darkness again, so far as outward manifestation was concerned. Jimmy's attitude toward his lessons appeared to be one of utter density. He listened with blank but slightly lowered eyes. ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... occasion, will announce to the world a solicitude for a friendly adjustment of our complaints and a reluctance to hostility. Going immediately from the United States, such an envoy will carry with him a full knowledge of the existing temper and sensibility of our country, and will thus be taught to vindicate our rights with firmness and to ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 4) of Volume 1: George Washington • James D. Richardson
... more scared and miserable, than any of them; and he was sobbing so much when he took his place in the procession, that Wilmet had made Felix take Alda, that she might support him. None of his mother's steady reserve and resolute stillness had descended to him, he was all sensibility and nervousness; and Geraldine, though without saying this to herself, felt as if 'poor Edgar' might really have been nearly killed by the last few days of sadness, he could bear depression so little. She could hardly have gone through them but for Sister Constance's kindness, and that rocking ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... him an authority on municipal reform. Though an incorrigible joker, his stockfish countenance would remain perfectly grave, except for an occasional hoarse chuckle. You would have thought he had no more power of compassion than a cat, no more sensibility than a Chinese idol; but this was not so. In his wooden, shrewd, distrustful way he responded to sympathy, and was even sorry for others. I used to like very much his attitude to the young "stable-companion" who had arrived ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... suppressed my Mend's name from an apprehension of wounding his sensibility; but I would not withhold from my readers a passage which shews Mr Gamck's mode of writing as the Manager of a Theatre, and contains a pleasing trait of his domestick life. His judgment of dramatick pieces, so far as concerns their exhibition on the ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... absolutely necessary to cause the leaves to shrivel up or shrink through seeming fear. Our host even intimated that when the mimosa had become familiar with a congenial person its timidity would vanish, and it could be handled gently by that individual without outraging its sensibility. Of this, however, we saw no positive evidence. If Mr. Darwin had supplemented his chapters on the monkey by a paper relating to the mimosa, he might possibly have enabled us to find a mutual confirmation in them of some ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... perceiving and admiring more than a little, certain forms of the beautiful; but it was rendered merely ridiculous by being conjoined with the miserable ambition—poor as that of any mountebank emperor—to be himself admired for that admiration. He mistook also sensibility for faculty, nor perceived that it was at best but a probable sign that he might be able to do something or other with pleasure, perhaps with success. If any one judge it hard that men should be made with ambitions to whose objects they can never attain, I answer, ambition is but ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... will still remain in a doubtful, dependent situation, and only be, loved while ye are fair! The downcast eye, the rosy blush, the retiring grace, are all proper in their season; but modesty being the child of reason cannot long exist with the sensibility that is not tempered by reflection.... With what disgust have I heard sensible women speak of the wearisome confinement which they endured at school. Not allowed, perhaps, to step out of one broad path in a superb garden, and obliged to pace, ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... recollect ever meeting with paralysis of the fore limbs alone. Although the limbs become perfectly powerless, and are only dragged after the animal by the combined efforts of the fore legs and back, it is seldom that they lose their sensibility.—L.] ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... influences boys and girls feel the purest and simplest sentiments in a hyperesthetic manner. The girls here studied have lost an exact conception of the simple manifestations of friendship, and think they are giving evidence of exquisite sensibility and true friendship by loving a companion to madness; friendship in them has become a passion. That this intense desire to love a companion passionately is the result of the college environments may be seen by the following extract from a letter: "You know, dear, much better ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... revolution. What was Pope? Poet or not, for his title to the name has been disputed, he had one power or weakness in which he has scarcely been rivalled. No writer, that is, reflects so clearly and completely the spirit of his own day. His want of originality means the extreme and even morbid sensibility which enabled him to give the fullest utterance to the ideas of his class, and of the nation, so far as the nation was really represented by the class. But the literary class was going through a process of differentiation, as the alliance ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... man whom a woman's entreaties would turn from his purpose, more especially when that purpose was his own self-interest. This wretch had no heart within him, no sensibility, not one single feeling of pity or ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... child, an extreme sensibility. Every thing affected me violently. While yet an infant in my mother's arms, and before I had learnt to talk, I could be wrought upon to a wonderful degree of anguish or delight by the power of music. As I grew older my feelings remained equally acute, and I was easily transported ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... the velvet collar of my cape. Touching the soft yielding surface seemed to give her exquisite pleasure, and I caught the same child standing behind me when I wore the rich red dress, holding her hands up to it, as to a fire, for warmth. Poor little soul! she had sensibility and imagination both. ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... preach the sermon, was introduced. Dr. Gallaudet prefaced his sermon by saying that when a deaf mute was addressed, the words were not spelled out, but that the ideas were represented by signs. Ideas about the intellect were conveyed by a sign about the head, those relating to the sensibility by a motion near the heart; in short, the sign language was as distinct and individual as the English language. Rev. Mr. Chamberlain, of Iowa, stood up in the chancel as Dr. Gallaudet began his sermon, and interpreted the sermon to the deaf mutes who sat in a body near the front of the ...
— Anecdotes & Incidents of the Deaf and Dumb • W. R. Roe
... and from the first of her acquaintance with him, and of her having to defend herself against a certain air that he had of knowing better what was good for her than she knew herself, she had recognised the fact that perfect frankness was her best weapon. To attempt to spare his sensibility or to escape from him edgewise, as one might do from a man who had barred the way less sturdily—this, in dealing with Caspar Goodwood, who would grasp at everything of every sort that one might give ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... have we all wished to see and to thank you!" Miss Edith Millbank remarked in tones of sensibility. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... Coleridge (says the late Mr. George Dawson)[88] "holds the first place amongst English poets in this objective teaching of the vague, the mystic, the dreamy, and the imaginative. I defy any man of imagination or sensibility to have 'The Ancient Mariner' read to him, by the flickering firelight on Christmas night, by a master mind possessed by the mystic spirit of the poem, and not find himself taken away from the good regions of 'ability to account for,' and taken into ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... flow of natural emotion, gushing forth amid abstracted reverie, which enabled the family to understand this young man's sentiments, though so foreign from their own. With quick sensibility of the ludicrous, he blushed at the ardor into which he had ...
— The Great Stone Face - And Other Tales Of The White Mountains • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... hearing, trained to a most acute sensibility, caught a faint sound, almost inaudible. It came from without on the other side of the lodge. There it was again, a slight tearing sound, such as is caused by a knife when ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... imagination makes him, philosophically speaking, rather ludicrous; in practical affairs it handicaps him at the start, but once he has "got going," as we say, it is of incalculable assistance to his stamina. The Englishman, partly through this lack of imagination and nervous sensibility, partly through his inbred dislike of extremes and habit of minimizing the expression of everything, is a perfect example of the conservation of energy. It is very difficult to come to the end of him. Add to this unimaginative, practical, tenacious moderation ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking the normal path of discharge. There is no more contemptible type of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility, but never does a ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... by a week in Brittany, at any rate by a month in Manitoba, we find scarcely a trace. In the sixteenth century that sort of thing was unusual. Even in those days there were people of extraordinary sensibility for whom life was a succession of miracles, who with difficulty recognized themselves from year to year, to whom going abroad was an emotional adventure, a supreme revelation: but of these Montaigne was not one. ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... any commiseration for this young lady, on account of the alarm which she may be supposed to have experienced at seeing all those strange men in her chamber, would be sympathy thrown away, for her nerves were not of a sensibility to be affected much by such a circumstance as that. In fact, as the difficulties between the young king's government and the Parisians increased, Anne Maria played quite the part of a heroine. She went back and forth to Paris in her carriage, through the mob, when ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... Hence of all people children are the most imaginative. They abandon themselves without reserve to every illusion. Every image which is strongly presented to their mental eye produces on them the effect of reality. No man, whatever his sensibility may be, is ever affected by Hamlet or Lear as a little girl is affected by the story of poor Red Riding-hood. She knows that it is all false, that wolves cannot speak, that there are no wolves in England. Yet, in spite of her ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... he was in a condition to make any such pretensions. Love is not to be controuled, it is not to be repelled.—But in some measure to punish his temerity, he condemned himself to an eternal silence; yet, though his tongue was mute, the princess, who had as great a share of sensibility as beauty, soon perceived the effect of her charms written in his eyes, and imprinted in all his motions, and, in secret, rejoiced at the conquest she had gained. But the same reasons which obliged Thibault to conceal his sentiments, prevented ...
— The Princess of Ponthieu - (in) The New-York Weekly Magazine or Miscellaneous Repository • Unknown
... an animated, ironical tone, Edmee burst into tears. This nervous sensibility which brought to the front all the qualities of her soul and mind, tenderness, courage, delicacy, pride, modesty, gave her face at the same time an expression so varied, so winning in all its moods, that the grave, sombre assembly of judges let fall the ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... hour in weeping, "like a fair flower surcharged with dew," over the names of others of her departed friends, Guinguene, Talma, Langlois, Lanjuinais, &c., until she fortunately recollected that the climate of Paris is one that "developes a sensibility prompt, not deep." Lucky thought! She immediately threw down the visiting-book, threw up the window to let in the climate, wiped from her eyes the tears "which parted thence, as pearls from diamonds ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... the experiments of Sir G. G. Stokes (Proc. Roy. Soc., 1878), the most suitable for visual instruments ("optical achromatism,'). In a similar manner, for systems used in photography, the vertex of the colour curve must be placed in the position of the maximum sensibility of the plates; this is generally supposed to be at G'; and to accomplish this the F and violet mercury lines are united. This artifice is specially adopted in objectives for astronomical photography ("pure actinic achromatism''). For ordinary photography, however, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... state of health, different persons will have different degrees of sensibility to the electric current, depending on their varied nervous susceptibility. Again, the same person will be much less sensitive to the current when directed to the spine, particularly the lower part of it, and to the stomach, than when directed ...
— A Newly Discovered System of Electrical Medication • Daniel Clark
... scene. I shall wish only to become a principal in it, and reverse the tale my cursed folly put me upon forging here.—O Love!—tormentor!—fiend!—whose influence, like the moon's, acting on men of dull souls, makes idiots of them, but meeting subtler spirits, betrays their course, and urges sensibility ...
— The Rivals - A Comedy • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... greater sensibility to modifying causes is not imaginary may, I think, be drawn from the consideration, that while the Lepidoptera as a whole are of all insects the least essentially varied in form, structure, or habits, yet in the number of their specific ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... I pray, Captain. Just imagine yourself perfectly at home. We will show you what Southern hospitality is. We don't go upon the Yankee system of Mr. So-and-so and What-do-ye-call-'um. Our feelings are in keeping with our State pride, which, with our extreme sensibility of honor, forbids the countenance of meanness. South Carolinians, sir, are at the very top of the social ladder—awake to every high-minded consideration of justice and right. We are not moved by those morbid ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... summer thunder; Lovelace and Clarissa, the tales of David's generosity, the psalms of his penitence, the solemn questions of the Book of Job, the touching poetry of Isaiah—they were to him a source of entertainment only, like the scraping of a fiddle in a change-house. This outer sensibility and inner toughness set me against him; it seemed of a piece with that impudent grossness which I knew to underlie the veneer of his fine manners; and sometimes my gorge rose against him as though he were deformed—and sometimes I would draw away as though from something partly spectral. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... proceed in a workmanlike manner. It is not to be supposed that an artist who carves or paints is so filled with emotion by the meaning of his work—the story in it—that he forgets the abstract beauty of form and colour; and though there is more room for such sensibility in an art which is the shaping of thought and feeling, in the art of literature, still the man of letters is a craftsman, and the critic cannot be less. He must know how to handle the stuff which is continually forming in his mind while he reads; he must ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... relating to representation, and though assenting to that which was now reported by the committee, thought it inferior to, and less effective than, the one which had failed. The third section he thought too lenient. "There is," said he, "a morbid sensibility sometimes called mercy, which affects a few of all classes from the priest to the clown, which has more sympathy for the murderer on the gallows than for his victim. I hope I have a heart as capable of feeling for human woe as others. I have ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... were his portion. To bear such a burden would have been difficult to any man, but most of all to a man of his disposition. "The more tender the heart, the deeper the smart." He was not a second Elijah; he had a soft disposition, a lively sensibility; his eyes were easily filled with tears. And he who would have liked so much to live in peace and love with all, having entered into the service of truth, was obliged to become a second Ishmael, his hand against every man, and every man's hand against him. He who so ardently ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... be repeated in order to give us a comprehension of the whole experience of our kind on earth, quite ample to explain the facts of the case and solve the problem of our destiny. The grasp of our intelligence and the richness of our sensibility increase along the ages. The generalizations of our philosophy grow wider, the gropings of our sympathetic faith become vaster, the retrospection and the prevision of our science keener and longer and more inclusive, every generation. It is very significant that the further ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... under the action of touch or of pricks, some reflex phenomena. However, by a peculiarity, which is extremely interesting, she seems, by the intense horror she shows for ether, to retain a certain amount of consciousness and sensibility. If a drop of ether is put into her mouth her face contracts and assumes an expression of disgust. At the same moment her arms and legs are violently agitated, with the kind of impatient motion that a child displays when made to swallow some ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... heart of the poor mother. The remembrance of this kindness helped to calm our grief, and I confess that it is at once both an honor and a consolation to recall the august sympathy which the loss of this dear child excited in the hearts of Napoleon and Josephine. The world will never know how much sensibility and compassion Josephine felt for the sorrows of others, and all the treasures of goodness contained in ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... of a common carman the better, and his long whip ought to be inseparable. If you could add to it the sooty appearance of a coal-heaver, or a chimney-sweep, it would sit, upon this more precious than velvet garb, like spangles and lace. I need not add, that to a mind of elegance and sensibility, the emblematical allusion which this dress would carry to the secrecy and impenetrableness of the person that wears it, must be the source of a ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... artist, for whom I entertained feelings of warm friendship. He had been with me a fellow-student at C— University, where we were very much together. He had the ordinary temperament of genius, and was a compound of misanthropy, sensibility, and enthusiasm. To these qualities he united the warmest and truest heart which ever ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... at once begins to develop all the symptoms of arsenical, strychnine or prussic acid poisoning; it being afterwards found that the bottle contains the toxine whose effects have been portrayed by the subject. But not all hypnotic subjects are capable of the same degree of sensibility. ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... all the time struggling against.[247] It is quite probable, however, that there is a physiological, as well as a psychic, factor in this phenomenon, and Sollier, in his elaborate study of the nature and genesis of hysteria, by insisting on the capital importance of the disturbance of sensibility in hysteria, and the definite character of the phenomena produced in the passage between anaesthesia and normal sensation, has greatly helped to reveal the mechanism of this feature of auto-erotic ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... letter to Colonel Townsend, inclosing a slip from the "Herald," and asking a court of inquiry, has been laid before me by the Secretary of War, with the request that I would consider it. It is quite natural that you should feel some sensibility on the subject; yet I am not impressed, nor do I think the country is impressed, with the belief that your honor demands, or the public interest demands, such an inquiry. The country knows that at all events you ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... Bellairs to be entirely of one piece, subdued to what he worked in, a spy all through. As I abominated the man's trade, so I had expected to detest the man himself; and behold, I liked him. Poor devil! he was essentially a man on wires, all sensibility and tremor, brimful of a cheap poetry, not without parts, quite without courage. His boldness was despair; the gulf behind him thrust him on; he was one of those who might commit a murder rather than confess ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... to assume. As the expression of their good opinion of my conduct in the public service, I derive from it a gratification which those who are conscious of having done all that they could to merit it can alone feel. My sensibility is increased by a just estimate of the importance of the trust and of the nature and extent of its duties, with the proper discharge of which the highest interests of a great and free people are ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 3) of Volume 2: James Monroe • James D. Richardson
... enough for him It is whispered that our literary friend has played a conspicuous part in some recent events on the coast of Africa, though his extreme and well known modesty renders him indisposed to speak of the affair; but we forbear ourselves out of respect to a sensibility that we ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... the night when there was curing to be done, or some other matters of necessity. And for the rest, I thought I detected a change in the tone of Mr. Fotheringay, and some others, tho' it may have been due to sensibility on my part. I would put ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... wisdom in order to succeed. Mothers and nurses, however tender and kind-hearted, may, and oftenest do, weary and vex the nerves of children, in well-meant efforts to amuse them, and weary themselves the while. Froebel's exercises, founded on the observations of an intelligent sensibility, are intended to amuse without ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... great a wanderer, that the place of her birth is uncertain; she supposed, however, it was London, or Epping Forest: at the latter place she spent the first five years of her life. In early youth she exhibited traces of exquisite sensibility, soundness of understanding, and decision of character; but her father being a despot in his family, and her mother one of his subjects, Mary, derived little benefit from their parental training. She received no literary instructions but such ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... sir," was the reply, in a cold sarcastic tone of voice—"pray finish your account without reference to my feelings; I am not likely to alarm your sensibility by any ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... taken the signs of her shocked sensibility to mean she feared for his life. But what had sickened her was the mere idea of bloodshed ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... conferred great effect, in the display of his grief, by carrying in his arms two young children, the offspring of the deceased. A long train of mourners followed, and I question whether more tears are shed, or more sensibility exhausted, at funerals accompanied with heraldic pomp, than in this simple display of natural affection. I drew up my horse as the procession passed, and the affair threw a gloom over my spirits, in which it seemed as though the village at large partook. The funeral group, with ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... is immediately and necessarily apprehended by our consciousness. It cites, as well as confirms, the copious proof given by Professor Bain (in his work on the Senses and the Intellect) that our conception of extension is derived from our muscular sensibility: that our sensation of muscular motion impeded constitutes that of filled space: that our conception of extension, as an aggregate of co-existent parts, arises from the sense of sight, which comprehends a great number of parts in a succession so rapid as to be confounded ...
— Review of the Work of Mr John Stuart Mill Entitled, 'Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy.' • George Grote
... matter in hand at a glance, and saw the limitations and poverty of those he talked with, so that nothing seemed concealed from such terrible eyes. I have repeatedly known young men of sensibility converted in a moment to the belief that this was the man they were in search of, the man of men, who could tell them all they should do. His own dealing with them was never affectionate, but superior, ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... this letter, Marcus was conscious that the eyes of the inventor were fixed piercingly upon him. That consciousness caused his head to bow, and his cheeks to crimson with shame. It is the curse of this morbid sensibility, that righteous indignation at a foul slander upon one's good name springs up only after the victim has shown all the accepted evidences ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... pulpit. He was a young man, of delicate mould, with a pale and intellectual face. Exquisite sensitiveness was in the large gray eyes, the white brow, the delicate lips, the long slender fingers; yet will and energy and command were in them all. His was that rare union of extreme sensibility with strong resolution that has given the world its religious leaders,—its Savonarolas and Chrysostoms; men whose nerves shrank at a discord in music, but when inspired by some grand cause, were like steel to ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... Tower of London. The Pioneers. Charles O'Malley. Barnaby Rudge. Cakes and Ale. The King's Own. People I have Met. The Pathfinder. Evelina. Scott's Poems. Last of the Barons. Adventures of Mr.Ivanhoe. [Ledbury. Oliver Twist. Selections from Hood's Works. Longfellow's Prose Works. Sense and Sensibility. Lytton's Plays. Tales, Poems, and Sketches. Bret Harte. Martin Chuzzlewit.* The Prince of the House of David. Sheridan's Plays. Uncle Tom's Cabin. Deerslayer. Rome and the Early Christians. The Trials ...
— Beneath the Banner • F. J. Cross
... the plaintiff; the news soon reaches the injured husband; his wife has absconded from consciousness of guilt—he seeks her out, charges her with her crime—she confesses it—and now, gentlemen, he is forced to fly to you, to redress his wounded sensibility ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... although Botts said he'd never been used to such wickedness, for his parents were very particular. Wouldn't even give us fish-balls twice a week. But what does Murphy care? He's perfectly enthusiastic when he can tread on a man's feelin's and stamp all the moral sensibility out of him. ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... her purse. She expressed so much uneasiness, that I concluded the sum to be very great; but when I heard of only seven guineas, I was glad to find that she had so much sensibility of money. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... on my list of friends (Though graced with polished manners and fine sense, Yet wanting sensibility) the man Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm. An inadvertent step may crush the snail That crawls at evening in the public path; But he that has humanity, forewarned, Will tread aside, and let the reptile live. The creeping ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... and blisters applied to the head. The mercurial influence being established, a profuse discharge of urine occurred; the pupils which had previously been permanently dilated, became once more obedient to light; sensibility was restored, and great weakness appeared to be the only urgent symptom. The cough, however, now returned, the head became again affected, and the child sunk. Upon opening the head, about four ounces of fluid was ...
— Remarks on the Subject of Lactation • Edward Morton
... And Sense and Sensibility. By Miss Austen, complete in one volume, with an illustration by Gilbert. Foolscap 8vo., with ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... Englishwoman who offered herself to Crebillon, the son, who married her. The story of Sterne and Eliza Draper was her life and her happiness for several months. She made herself ideally the heroine of a like romance, and many a time she rehearsed in imagination the sublime role of Eliza. The sensibility so charmingly expressed in that delightful correspondence filled her eyes with tears which, it is said, were lacking in those of ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... cult which beset us in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. A bad poet or painter can no longer reap the reward of genius merely by turning his attention to ruins under moonlight. Nor does any one cause to be built in his garden a broken turret, for the evocation of sensibility in himself and his guests. There used to be one such turret near the summit of Campden Hill; but that familiar imposture was rased a year or two ago, no one protesting. Fuit the frantic factitious sentimentalism for ruins. On the other hand, the sentiment for them is as strong as ever it was. Decrepit ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... depressions, especially after any thing has occurred to occasion uneasiness, still harass me. My mind is of a very peculiar cast. I began to think too early; and the indulgence of certain trains of thought, and too free an exercise of the imagination, have superinduced a morbid kind of sensibility; which is to the mind what excessive irritability is to the body. Some circumstances occurred on my arrival at Nottingham, which gave me just cause for inquietude and anxiety; the consequences were insomnia, and a relapse into causeless dejections. It is ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... began life as an impostor. He was offered to the credulous and sympathetic family of a San Francisco citizen as a lamb, who, unless bought as a playmate for the children, would inevitably pass into the butcher's hands. A combination of refined sensibility and urban ignorance of nature prevented them from discerning certain glaring facts that betrayed his caprid origin. So a ribbon was duly tied round his neck, and in pleasing emulation of the legendary "Mary," he was taken to school by the confiding children. Here, alas the fraud was discovered, ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... merely the careful speech but something lacking when the perfect mouth moved—spirit, sensibility, who could say? And Gyp felt sorry, as at blight on a perfect flower. With a friendly nod, she turned away to Fiorsen, who was waiting to go up on to the platform. Was it at her or at the girl he had been looking? She smiled at him and slid away. In ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... who under the guidance of a sincere fellow-feeling, studies the fitnesses of speech and manner, in civility and courtesy endeavors to render to all their due, and in the least details that can affect another's happiness, does carefully and conscientiously all that the most fastidious sensibility could claim ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... all the labors of their lives."[26] Collins, like Gray, was a Greek scholar, and had projected a history of the revival letters. There is a classical quality in his verse—not classical in the eighteenth-century sense—but truly Hellenic; a union, as in Keats, of Attic form with romantic sensibility; though in Collins, more than in Keats, the warmth seems to comes from without; the statue of a nymph flushed with sunrise. "Collins," says Gosse, "has the touch of a sculptor; his verse is clearly cut ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... asked if he thought that Racine had strength sufficient to make him the equal of Corneille. "Sire," said the comic poet, "Racine has already surpassed Corneille by the harmonious elegance of his versification, and by the natural, true sensibility of his dialogue; his situations are never fictitious; all his words, his phrases, come from the heart. Racine alone is a true poet, for ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... and sensibility; and by and by became discontented with the part he was playing, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... destitute of feeling—yet we could not wonder at it, if they were. Who could expect the kindly affections to expand in such an atmosphere! Where there is no hope, the heart becomes paralyzed: it is a merciful arrangement of Divine Providence, by which the acuteness of sensibility is lessened when it becomes merely a ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... Pellico.... I cannot keep him from the bowl, the rascal. I regret that he so upset you. But the sensibility of gold-fish is not great, surely? As the peasants say, non son ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... Englishwoman,—a circumstance which has been thought to account for the appreciation he has shown of English poetry. The notion would be more plausible if there were any poetry which he has failed to appreciate. But when it is added that she was a woman of remarkable intelligence and sensibility, we recognize a fact of which the influence can ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... on his part, betrayed not the least emotion, and showed no other sign of satisfaction at the presence of his favorite counsellor than by simply bidding him welcome. The cold demeanor of the monarch contrasted strangely with the loyal sensibility of the subject.15 ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... their source, laid hold of her woman's sensibility; she was no longer a critical observer. She no longer set aside his strange inward conflict as a delusion of madness. She participated in his consciousness so far as to think that she was actually witnessing the despair ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... library. The occasion was repugnant to her feelings. The unceremonious blending of dollars and cents with the revered name of her father was extremely painful to her sensibility. It seemed like a profanation of ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... girlish carelessness of heart That kept my eyes from tears, as I went forth From this dear shelter of the orphan child. I felt that God was smiling on my lot, And made the airs his angels to convey To every sense and sensibility The message of his favor. Every sound Was music to me; every sight was peace; And breathing was the drinking of perfume. I said, content, and full of gratitude, "This is as God would have it; and he speaks These pleasant languages to ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... at Paris, an affair happened very near the hotel in which I lodged, which in its sequel displayed that high spirit and sensibility which appear to form the presiding features in the french character, to which may be attributed all the excesses which have stained, and all the glory which has embellished it. A lady of fortune, and her only daughter, an elegant ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... succeeded a sorrowful dejection. Resolute in her independence, proud in her disdain, implacable in her irony, audacious in her resistance to unjust oppression, Adrienne was yet endowed with the most acute sensibility, which she always dissembled, however, in the presence of her aunt ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... electromagnets and lamps in these respects are used to advantage by the lamp signal arrangement shown in Fig. 25. A relay is in series with the line and provides a large range of sensibility. It is able to carry any current the central-office current source can pass through it. The local circuit of the relay includes the lamp. Energizing the relay lights the lamp, and the reverse; the lamp is thus ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... think the Duchess' conduct free; Regretting much that she had chosen so bad a line, And waxing chiller in her courtesy, Looked grave and pale to see her friend's fragility, For which most friends reserve their sensibility. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... apparent harmony with anything else nor any especial sensibility about it. The boys hooted his hat, and the little girls often joined in, crying "Steeple-top! He's got it on! Meshach's loose!" But he paid no attention to anybody, until once, at court time, some carousing fellows hired Jack Wonnell to walk up to Meshach Milburn and ask to ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... Far from thy motley court I fly, Where Affectation holds her seat, And sickly Sensibility; Whose silly tears can never flow For any pangs excepting thine; Who turns aside from real woe, To steep ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... certain physical experiments. The predominance of magnetism is characterised by reproduction, that of electricity by irritability; and irritability, which first appears as muscle, gradually rises into sensibility as nerve. The limits of a mere introduction will not permit me to examine Mr. Coleridge's first principles more in detail; and I can but briefly notice their application to the successive stages of ascent, from the first rudiments of individualised Life, in the lowest classes of the mineral, ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... levity, Voltaire prosecuted the work of clearing the Calas. "It is Voltaire who is writing on behalf of this unfortunate family," said Diderot to Mdlle. Voland: "O, my friend, what a noble work for genius! This man must needs have soul and sensibility; injustice must revolt him; he must feel the attraction of virtue. Why, what are the Calas to him? What can awaken his interest in them? What reason has he to suspend the labors he loves in order to take up their defence?" ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... of changing the moral condition of a whole population must surely possess some powers of observation, and be more or less of a physiognomist; and even if the rector had no other science than that of goodness, he had just given proof of rare sensibility. He was therefore struck by the coldness with which the bishop's secretary met his courteous advances. Compelled to attribute this manner to some secret annoyance, the rector sought in his own mind to discover if he ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... whom he had intercourse could have no suspicion of such a result. When offended, his customary behaviour was exceedingly rugged. He thought only of setting the delinquent right, and humbling him for his error; and, in his eagerness to do this, overlooked the sensibility of the sufferer, and the pains he inflicted. Remonstrance in such a case he regarded as the offspring of cowardice, which was to be extirpated with a steady and unshrinking hand, and not soothed with misjudging kindness and indulgence. ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... committed the fewest errors, and the invaluable stupidity of Miss Grierson aided her toward correctness if not originality. When Dick came he was delighted with her appearance. On the way out he was ebulliently excited in his talk. Maggie averaged a fair degree of sensibility in her responses, though only her ears heard him. She was far more excited than he, and every moment her excitement mounted, for every moment she was speeding nearer the greatest ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... may also be conceded. There is in some persons a greater innate susceptibility of deriving pleasure from the works of Nature and of Art than is discoverable in others. Still we cannot imagine any one gifted with reason and sensibility to be entirely destitute of it. It is an element of reason and of sense peculiar to man. As a fabulist once represented a cock in quest of barleycorns, scraping for his breakfast, saying to himself, on discovering a precious and brilliant gem: ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... abaft the mast, and covered up with a union jack; and we then piped to breakfast. I had not recovered my appetite, which the scenes I had witnessed during the morning had taken away. Hanks rallied me on my sensibility. "Why, my boy, you should get over all those sort of feelings at a leap, or you'll never be fit for the service. I remember once upon a time having some of the queer sensations you talk of; but now, whatever happens, ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... been so lonely since he was away! She had read such of his poems as she possessed—duplicates of his printed ones, or autographs which he had kindly written out for her—over and over again, not without the sweet tribute of feminine sensibility, which is the most precious of all testimonials to a poet's power over the heart. True, her love belonged to another,—but then she was so used to Gifted! She did so love to hear him read his poems,—and Clement had never written that "little bit of a poem to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... thoughts, and seemed to speak unfavorably for the taste of the inmates. One is apt to associate the love of flowers with sweetness and gentleness of disposition, and such a passion would seem as natural, as it certainly would be becoming, to a young lady of taste and sensibility. But the sign is a very doubtful one. Taste and gentleness may satisfy themselves with other objects. A passion for books is very apt to exclude a very active passion for flowers, and it will be found, ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... we know that there is a medium permeating, in one or other of its forms, all substances whatever, and that this medium is eminently capable of exciting sensations of sight; and when we take this in conjunction with a heightened sensibility in the percipient person, rendering him aware of impulses whereof we are not cognisant, we are no longer inclined to deny a fact or suppose ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... contrary, she not only rebelled in spirit, but she often resisted with all her feeble strength, fighting, feet, hands, and teeth, with feline ferocity. Having been brought to the level of brutes, she had become a brute in instinct, in her sensibility to kindness, her pig-headedness, resentment ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... mistaken in attributing to the Hamlet of earlier days an exquisite sensibility, to which we may give the name 'moral,' if that word is taken in the wide meaning it ought to bear. This, though it suffers cruelly in later days, as we saw in criticising the sentimental view of Hamlet, never ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... became an author, putting forth the strangest books with the strangest titles; considered for a time a strange, crack-brained mixture of enthusiast and buffoon; was recognised at last as a man of infinite humour, sensibility, force, and penetration; his writings procured him friends and fame, and at length a wife and a settled pension; settled in Baireuth, where he lived thenceforth diligent and celebrated in many departments of literature, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... you wanted to say, and perhaps a little more than you would have spoken. His figure was full of gentle movement, though, somehow, without disturbing its quietude; and as he talked, he kept folding his hands nervously, and betokened in many ways a fine and immediate sensibility, quick to feel pleasure or pain, though scarcely capable, I should imagine, of a passionate experience in either direction. There was not an English trait in him from head to foot, morally, intellectually, or physically. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... warm, and even ardent; her sensibility seemed constitutionally deep; and some subtle fire of impassioned intellect apparently burnt within ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... vivacity of Lisardo, against each other, I thought the former had made a powerful impression upon the mind of Belinda, and the latter upon that of Almansa: for when the probability of a speedy revisit from both of them was mentioned the sisters betrayed unusual marks of sensibility; and upon Lorenzo's frankly confessing, though in a playful mood, that such brothers-in-law would make him "as happy as the day was long"—they both turned their faces towards the garden, and appeared as awkward as it was possible for well-bred ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... attention. They were almost always clad in new gloves, which he only took off on special occasions, at dinner, or when he had some writing to do, or when he sat down to a game of cards. As a result, his hands were almost feminine in their delicacy, the sensibility of the finger tips had reached an extraordinary degree of development, equal to that of one born blind. And those fingers were skillful, adroit, alert, their every movement carried out with that smooth, indefinable ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... with lively sensibility, but his humanity was shocked at the thought of killing a man for a trifling theft. Trying a prisoner at the Old Baily on the charge of stealing in a dwelling-house to the value of 40s.—when this was a capital offence—he advised the jury to find a gold ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... rightly regards as one of Hogarth's most successful efforts. "Nothing," he says, "can be more striking than the contrast between the extreme softness of her person and the hardened indifference of her character. The vacant stillness, the docility to vice, the premature suppression of youthful sensibility, the doll-like mechanism of the whole figure, which seems to have no other feeling but a sickly sense of pain—show the deepest insight into human nature, and into the effects of those refinements in depravity, by which ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... certain intimacy of relation. He had, he was aware, a friendly air and a certain simple charm of manner, which made it an easy thing for him to say what was in his mind. A single interview was often enough for him to make a friendship. He had an acute superficial sensibility, which made it very easy for him to divine another's tastes and emotions; and his own emotional experiences, his freedom of expression, gave him the power of interpreting and entering into the feelings of others. But his experience was always the ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... proceeding any further; I should have said that Christ is a myth. If it had been consistent, and had disclosed to me a person of mean and ambitious aims, I should have said, Christ is a deceiver. Again, if it had exhibited a person of weak understanding and strong impulsive sensibility, I should have said ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... the object to be attained. It is not a high rank in oratory, consummate eloquence. If it were, then indeed a young man might pause till he had ascertained whether he possessed all those extraordinary endowments of intellect, imagination, sensibility, countenance, voice, and person, which belong to few men in a century, and without which the great orator does not exist. He is one of those splendid formations of nature, which she exhibits but rarely; and it is not necessary to the object of his pursuit that the minister be such. The aim and ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware
... Crabshaw; which Bronzomarte no sooner heard, than he pricked up his ears, neighed, and quickened his pace, as if he had been sensible of the squire's distress, and hastened to his relief. Sir Launcelot, notwithstanding his own disquiet, could not help observing and admiring this generous sensibility of his horse. He began to think himself some hero of romance, mounted upon a winged steed, inspired with reason, directed by some humane enchanter, who pitied virtue in distress. All circumstances considered, it is no wonder that the commotion in the mind of ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... bore to him the least relationship. It was on a mild Sabbath afternoon in midsummer that we laid him to rest in the burial ground of R.; and if none of his kindred stood by to shed the tear of natural affection, there was many a cheek wet with the tear of sensibility when the coffin was lowered to its silent abode. I am unable to state his exact age, but I am certain that it considerably exceeded eighty years; and from what I can recollect of his life, I have a strong hope, that death opened to him a blessed ...
— Stories and Sketches • Harriet S. Caswell
... Dante, we know, was but nine years old when, at a May-day festival, he saw and fell in love with Beatrice; and Alfieri, who was himself a precocious lover, considers such early sensibility to be an unerring sign of a soul formed for the fine arts:—"Effetti," he says, in describing the feelings of his own first love, "che poche persone intendono, e pochissime provano: ma a quei soli pochissimi e concesso l' uscir dalla folla volgare ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... listening. His sympathetic smile and semi-droop of attention; his readiness, when occasion demanded it, to hit the key of the subject and help it on with the right word; his air of unobtrusive appreciation; his sensibility to the moment when the run of conversation depended upon him—showed inimitable art coming of natural genius; and he did not lose a shade of his superior manner the while. Mr. Serjeant Wedderburn, professionally voluble, a lively talker, brimming with anecdote, but too sparkling, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... is softened into approbation. The most generous minds are liable, from the acuteness of their sensibility, to be unjust. We are once again very ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... of healing. When he sees a patient suffering, he feels no perturbation; he feels only the desire, by means of his art, to relieve the sufferer: thus should all our humane and social sympathies be regulated, divested of their morbid sensibility, and reduced to active and ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... sufferings of which confer no credit,—a being, too, who was wearied with his many miscarriages; without friends, for friendship demands either striking merits or striking defects, and yet possessing a sensibility of soul more dreamy than profound. Surely a retired life was the course left for a young man whom pleasure had more than once misled,—whose heart was already aged by contact with a world as ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... explain the neglect to which I refer. Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. Virgil, if I remember right, refers to it several times, but with too much Roman restraint. He does not let himself go on cheese. The only other poet I can think of just now who seems to have had some sensibility on the point was the nameless author of the nursery rhyme which says: "If all the trees were bread and cheese"—which is, indeed a rich and gigantic vision of the higher gluttony. If all the trees were bread and cheese there would be considerable deforestation in any part ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... what relates to women. Women for you, by what I can make out, mean nothing. You have no imagination—no sensibility!" ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... of pity or remorse that might point toward the waste and ashes we had left behind us. We felt, too, that those efforts hardened us; but people who harden themselves for each other's sake against the rest of the world, have a great faith in their own sensibility while the process of hardening is going on. They even believe that the more callous they become, and the more completely they isolate their sympathies, the more tenderness they are capable of developing to each other. It is like people who bar up their doors and ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... ranged alongside; and they all ate together, English and Indian. No irksome caste rules on this side of the water; no hint of condescension in the friendly attitude of young Oxford. Nothing to jar the over-sensibility of young India—prone to suspect slight where no thought of it exists; too often, also, treated to exhibitions of ill-bred arrogance that undo in an hour the ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... that he could not deprive the marquis of the king's favor, he resolved to occasion him some trouble, and to wound his vanity and sensibility. He knew that the marquis was an ardent admirer of the French writer Jean Baptiste Rousseau. One day Voltaire entered the room of the marquis, and said, in a sad, sympathetic tone, that he felt it his ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... The few exceptions, one or two poor wretches, a clerk here and there, an annuitant from the Marais, could be ruled out on the score of age; and hard upon the discovery of a distinction between morning and evening dress, the poet's quick sensibility and keen eyes saw likewise that his shabby old clothes were not fit to be seen; the defects in his coat branded that garment as ridiculous; the cut was old-fashioned, the color was the wrong shade of blue, the collar outrageously ungainly, the coat tails, by dint of long wear, overlapped each ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... animosity which you have roused shows itself in a hundred ways, some of which I abhor, some of which I lament, but at none of which I can wonder. They are the natural effects of insult and injury on quick and ill regulated sensibility. You, for your own purposes, inflamed the public mind of England against Ireland; and you have no right to be surprised by finding that the public mind of Ireland is inflamed against England. You called a fourth part of the people of the United Kingdom aliens: and you must not blame them for ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... twin souls. She has thanked me again. She has scolded the parrot. She has smiled upon me as she retires to her room. It is enough. Nothing is said, but I am a man of sensibility and discernment, and I understand that she will not be offended if I seek to renew our friendship on ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... By a curious irony, two verse-makers and admirers of George Sand made it possible for the would-be man of action to find his way. The poetess, recalling the trip afterwards, wrote that she liked the prophet more than she expected, finding his "bitterness only melancholy, and his scorn sensibility." Browning himself continued through life to regard Carlyle with "affectionate reverence." "He never ceased," says Mrs. Orr, "to defend him against the charge of unkindness to his wife, or to believe that, in the matter of their domestic unhappiness, she ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... happy sensibility to the beauties of nature is preserved in young persons. It engages them to contemplate the Creator in his works; it purifies and harmonizes the soul, and prepares it for moral and intellectual discipline; it supplies an endless source of amusement, ...
— Percy - A Tragedy • Hannah More
... lavish. Letters like these reveal to us a man so avid of affection that he must of necessity erect every barrier and defence to avoid a mortal wound. His sensibility was rentree, probably as a consequence of his appalling childhood; and the indication helps us to understand not only the inordinate suspiciousness with which he behaved to Darwin, but the extent to which irony ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... feeling of anxiety about the manner in which his master might receive my application. With Mr. Fairlie's leave or without it, I must go. The consciousness of having now taken the first step on the dreary journey which was henceforth to separate my life from Miss Fairlie's seemed to have blunted my sensibility to every consideration connected with myself. I had done with my poor man's touchy pride—I had done with all my little artist vanities. No insolence of Mr. Fairlie's, if he chose to be ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... little time, when I became somewhat calmer, I reflected on the danger, which I had so fortunately escaped and my mind was so much affected that I could not refrain from tears. I endeavoured to conceal from those around me, this evidence of my sensibility and distress; but some of the women beside me, observed it, and in place of being affected with my situation, they threw sand into my eyes, to dry, as they said, my eyelids. Happily the night, that screened me from their view, saved me from the ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... imputation, for few writers have been actuated by purer and more noble motives, and it was with difficulty that he restrained his impulse to call upon the assembled company for justification.[161] This is but another instance of his extreme sensibility, for, despite the criticism more or less just, the spirit of the discourse was both kindly and complimentary, as may be seen from these closing words: "J'ai rendu justice, monsieur, a la beaute de votre genie, a sa fecondite, ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... before us was printed, George Wither was aged twenty-seven. He had just stepped gingerly out of the Marshalsea Prison, and his poems reveal an amusing mixture of protest against having been put there at all and deprecation of being put there again. Let no one waste the tear of sensibility over that shell of the Marshalsea Prison, which still, I believe, exists. The family of the Dorrits languished in quite another place from the original Marshalsea of Wither's time, although that also lay across the water ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... applications, and its methods are probably legitimate. Hypnotic sleep has had many helpful influences. It is really a change in the equilibrium of the brain and mental faculties and produces great modifications in the memory and in sensibility. Life is indeed a long series of habits to which we are accustomed; hypnotism changes these habits which in a normal condition we do not try to modify, and on awakening, all memory of the change is gone, although its effects ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... the shape or aspect of the plants characteristic of certain countries, while his last botanical effort was on the sensibility of ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... felt that I was hard-hearted to the poor simpleton, and that there was more weight in his remonstrance than I chose to be sensible of, at the time; for, like many men who have been in the habit of making playthings or tools of their imagination and sensibility, I was too rigidly tenacious of what was reasonable in the affairs of real life. And even absurdity has its rights, when, as in this case, it has absorbed a human being's entire nature and purposes. I ought to have transmitted ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the beautiful,—and who can have no other parentage,—had established themselves in the modern European mind, and have since, with varying vigor of life, upheld themselves among Christian nations. To these they are now confined. In the most advanced of Mahometan and heathen peoples sensibility to beauty is hardly awakened, and among savages it seems scarcely to exist, so deeply is ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... total annihilation of the prejudices which have established between the sexes an inequality of right, fatal even to the party which it favors. In vain might we seek for motives to justify the principle, in difference of physical organization, of intellect, or of moral sensibility. It had at first no other origin but abuse of strength, and all the attempts which have since been made to support it are idle sophisms."—"Progress of the ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... in this country, whose morbid sensibility is pandered to on the subject of negro emancipation there can be no doubt, as is proved by the experiment made by Mr. Slick, recorded in ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... the only member of that illustrious company who can profitably be compared with Burke in strength and impressiveness of personality, in a large sensibility at once serious and genial, in brooding care for all the fulness of human life. This striking pair were the two complements of a single noble and solid type, holding tenaciously, in a century of dissolvent ...
— Burke • John Morley
... erroneously ascribe to her. It is amongst the phenomena of our organization that you cannot closely rivet your consciousness on any part of the frame, however healthy, but it will soon begin to exhibit morbid sensibility. Try to fix all your attention on your little finger for half an hour, and before the half hour is over the little finger will be uneasy, probably even painful. How serious, then, is the danger to a young girl, at the ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... excellence. His contempt for 'Lycidas' is sufficiently significant upon that head. Still more characteristic is the incapacity to understand Spenser, which comes out incidentally in his remarks upon some of those imitations, which even in the middle of the eighteenth century showed that sensibility to the purest form of poetry was not by any means extinct amongst us. But there is a poetry, though we sometimes seem to forget it, which is the natural expression of deep moral sentiment; and of this Johnson has written enough to reveal very genuine power. ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... unequally divided! Why should all this sketchable adversity be lavished upon the neighborhood of a city that is so rich as Venice in picturesque dilapidation? It's pretty hard on us Americans, and forces people of sensibility into exile. What wouldn't cultivated persons give for a stretch of this street in the suburbs of Boston, or of your own Providence? I suppose the New Yorkers will be setting up something of the kind ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... richer and more glowing fancy; if his figures are less apt and striking, they are more elegant and symmetrical; if the harmonious dignity of his versification is less, its melodious sweetness is more; if he has less passion, he has more sensibility; if moral and physical grandeur are not so attractive to him, ideal and natural beauty are the only elements in which his life is endurable. We might pursue these contrasts to the end of our magazine; but if we have called the reader's ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... self-disapprobation, of censure, of blame. In vain will Spinoza tell us that such feelings, incompatible as they are with the theory of powerlessness, are mistakes arising out of a false philosophy. They are primary facts of sensation most vivid in minds of most vigorous sensibility; and although they may be extinguished by habitual profligacy, or possibly, perhaps, destroyed by logic, the paralysis of the conscience is no more a proof that it is not a real power of perceiving ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... over Wordsworth lately: which has had much effect in bettering my Blue Devils: for his philosophy does not abjure melancholy, but puts a pleasant countenance upon it, and connects it with humanity. It is very well, if the sensibility that makes us fearful of ourselves is diverted to become a cause of sympathy and interest with Nature and mankind: and this I think Wordsworth tends to do. I think I told you of Shakespeare's sonnets before: I cannot tell you what sweetness ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... them in all their enormity. They wished for a second death, that might separate them from these ministers of vengeance, as the first had separated their spirits from the body,—a death that might at once extinguish all consciousness and sensibility. They called upon the depths of hell to hide them from the persecuting beams of truth, in impenetrable darkness; but they are reserved for the cup of vengeance, which, though they drink of it forever, shall be ever full. The truth, from which they fled, has overtaken ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... uneasiness in the thought that I should be trampled upon, when dead, as I myself had done to others. With some difficulty I raised myself, and gained the platform a second time, where I presently lost all sensation; the last trace of sensibility that I have been able to recollect after my laying down, was my sash being uneasy about my waist, which I untied, and threw from me. Of what passed in this interval, to the time of my resurrection from this hole of horrors, I can give you ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... three classes of hysterical anesthesia. In the first series of facts one may place the cases due to simulation. In the second group of cases we shall range the patients in whom the disturbances of sensibility are directly due to suggestion. Finally there remains a third class of patients in whom the disturbances of sensibility seem to us to be residual ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... or habit, they show great sensibility on the death of neighbours or friends. The women cover their heads, in the funeral procession, with black veils or aprons, and the men with the pointed hood and cloak. During the whole year, after the decease of a father or mother, all the kitchen utensils are covered with a veil, and placed ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... are formed associations of praise and blame with certain actions. Then, we form further associations with the causes of praise and blame and thus acquire the sentiments of 'praiseworthiness' and 'blameworthiness.' The sensibility to praise and blame generally forms the 'popular sanction,' and this, when praiseworthiness is concerned, becomes the moral sanction.[609] Here we see that morality is regarded as somehow the product of a 'sanction'; ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... to the house where he was going to fetch away the child from the Christmas party. He wished to be in good time, so as to save the child from anxiety about his coming; but he promised himself to stop, going back, and glut his sensibility in a leisurely study of the scene. He got the child, with her arms full of things from the Christmas-tree, into the coup, and then he said to the cabman, respectfully leaning as far over from his box to listen as his thick greatcoat would let him: "When you get up there near that ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... branches of the tree of living forms, as the Greeks and Romans were branches of the stock of Japheth. The beasts may stand for the conquering Romans if you like, but the birds are the Greeks, and have advanced far beyond them in all emotional and artistic sensibility. They worship in the temple of music and beauty. And, like ourselves, they have found no subject so worthy of the highest efforts of art as their own dress. But the clothing of the body must conform more or less to the figure, and so, for a field in which invention ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... world all the still darker vices which are engendered by the constant practice of dissimulation. The truth cannot be long concealed. The public discovers that the grave persons who are proposed to it as patterns are more utterly destitute of moral principle and of moral sensibility than avowed libertines. It sees that these Pharisees are farther removed from real goodness than publicans and harlots. And, as usual, it rushes to the extreme opposite to that which it quits. It considers a high religious profession as a sure mark of meanness and depravity. On ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... as sensible of a scratch from a pin's point, as others from a push of a sword: and who can say any thing for the sensibility of such fellows? Metcalfe would resent for his sister, when his sister resented not for herself. Had she demanded her brother's protection and resentment, that would have been another man's matte, to speak in Lord M.'s phrase: but she herself thought ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... their old friend Outreville to her carriage he asked her if Waterlow's charming sitter had known who she was and if she had been frightened. Mme. de Brecourt stared; she evidently thought that kind of sensibility implied an initiation—and into dangers—which a little American accidentally encountered couldn't possibly have. "Why should she be frightened? She wouldn't be even if she had known who I was; much less therefore when I was nothing ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... personal character, stamped and characterized it for life, and how keen was the edge and how fine the play of every weapon in his full armory of sarcasm and ridicule, (of which his speech in the Senate in reply to Mr. McDuffie's personalities gives masterly exhibition,) we are thankful that his sensibility was so exquisite and his temper so sweet, that he was a delight instead of a terror, and that he was loved instead of feared. Delicacy should be commensurate to power, that each may be complete. It would seem almost impossible that a lawyer with a practice truly immense, passing a great ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... with the exercise of absolute power. The tie of affection and obligation to a wife and children is very strong with those whose general social feelings are strong, and with many who are little sensible to any other social ties; but there are all degrees of sensibility and insensibility to it, as there are all grades of goodness and wickedness in men, down to those whom no ties will bind, and on whom society has no action but through its ultima ratio, the penalties of ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... granting you six millions, has acted with dignity as well as generosity. Such gifts, so given, command both gratitude and esteem, and I think our country possesses sufficient magnanimity to receive and remember such marks of friendship with a proper degree of sensibility. I am pleased with your idea of paying whatever we owe to Spain. Their pride, perhaps, might forbid them to receive the money. But our pride has been so hurt by the littleness of their conduct, that I would in that case be for leaving it at the gate of the palace, and quit the country. ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. VIII • Various
... matter how his disfigurement affected her, she would try to put that behind her, she would make an effort to cling to him. And Hollister could see the deadly impact of his grotesque features upon her delicate sensibility, day after day, month after month, until she could no longer endure it, or him. She loved the beautiful too well, perfection of line and form and color. Restored sight must alter her world; her conception of him must become transformed. The magic of the unseen would lose its glamor. All ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... the sensibility of Mrs Piper's organism to exterior excitation is much blunted. If her arm is pricked, even severely, it is withdrawn but slowly; if a bottle of ammonia is put to her nostrils, and care is taken that it is inhaled, her ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... out at the scattered peaks, reared like conning towers over the sprawling medley of ridge and valley, a throb of fondness shook his heart. It was not sprung from esthetic appreciation of the wild and romantic landscape, though this had been sufficient to justify the stir of feeling. His sensibility was aroused by the dear friendliness of all the scene, where hollows and heights had been his constant haunts through all the days of childhood and adolescence until this hour. Of a sudden, he realized as never before a profound tenderness for this country of ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... sad, there is a great deal of beauty and enjoyment in Miss Mitford's life. For her the absence of material happiness was made up for by the presence of warm-hearted sensibility, of enthusiasm, by her devotion to her parents. Her long endurance and filial piety are very remarkable, her loving heart carried her safely to the end, and she found comfort in her unreasoning life's devotion. She had none of the restlessness which is so apt to spoil much that might be ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... certain circumstances, but seldom found in books. Besides these, and all the foregoing, there are several others, too often heard, which are unworthy to be considered parts of a cultivated language. The frequent use of interjections savours more of thoughtlessness than of sensibility. Philosophical writing and dispassionate discourse exclude them altogether. Yet are there several words of this kind, which in earnest utterance, animated poetry, or impassioned declamation, are not only natural, but exceedingly expressive: as, "Lift ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... to own the truth, a great deal stronger than, if I had been Miss Campbell, would have been at all agreeable to me. I could not excuse a man's having more music than love—more ear than eye—a more acute sensibility to fine sounds than to my feelings. How did Miss Campbell appear ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... might. She was not evil by nature. She had been well grounded in principles of righteousness. Nevertheless, though she maintained the integrity of her character, that character suffered from the taint. There developed over the girl's original sensibility a shell of hardness, which in time would surely come to make her less scrupulous in her ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... young men of courage and sensibility and enthusiasm the vindication of a clear right seems an act so simple that it is only through long and painful experience that they realize that there is nothing under the sun which is so hard to compass, or which is met by such strong antagonism. To ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
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