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More "Torpor" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... patches; it traced designs in a bluish green tint over the shining mirror, and scattering in trails, these fanned out or branched off like a coral tree; all very rapidly with a low murmur; it was like a signal of awakening foretelling the end of this intense torpor. The sky, its veil being rent asunder, grew clear; the vapours fell down on the horizon, massing in heaps like slate-coloured wadding, as if to form a soft bank to the sea. The two ever-during mirrors between which the fishermen lived, the one ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... encountered wandering in search of water in the jungle; but generally, during the extreme drought, when unable to procure their ordinary food from the drying up of the watercourses, they bury themselves in the mud, and remain in a state of torpor till released by the recurrence of the rains.[4] At Arne-tivoe, in the eastern province, whilst riding across the parched bed of the tank, I was shown the recess, still bearing the form and impress of the crocodile, out ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... door opposite the bench creaked slightly, and a gentleman entered. The woman's wondering eyes passed over him. In an instant her torpor was shaken off. She riveted her gaze on the new-comer. Her features contracted with lines of pain. She drew the child aside, as if to hide it from sight. Then her face twitched, and she staggered back into the arms of the constable behind her. She was now insensible. Through the dense ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... to the Universities of England, they will pronounce that the true policy to be observed there would be simply to let the schools of Theology alone. Most unfortunate it is that they have been roused from the state of decadence and torpor in which they lay some twenty or thirty years ago. Up to that time, a routine lecture, delivered once to successive batches of young men destined for the Protestant Ministry, not during their residence, but when they ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... and prejudice; when the smoke of passion blinds the intelligence and suffocates the senses; it is then that the will, fashioned in the school of pliant energy, seizing the reins with a firm and vigorous grasp, snatches the imagination from its torpor by bringing it to bear on objects capable of arousing it; it is then that the will animates the heart with generous and noble sentiments, and applies the mind to the consideration of truths which enlighten and ...
— Serious Hours of a Young Lady • Charles Sainte-Foi
... were forthcoming, and not even a description of the man to be had, no emphasis would have been laid upon this story had it not transpired that the moment a report of it had come to Mrs. Hammond's ears (why is there always some one to carry these reports?) she roused from the torpor into which she had fallen, and in ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... imaginary Capitalist press and the fierce denial that industrial strife was ever assisted by foreign agencies—it all sounds like a voice from ancient history. One rubs one's ears at it. Eventually militant Socialism wearies John as much as academic torpor had done, and to escape from both he marries a wife. More atmosphere, this time of a dreary little seaside town and its so-called society. But John fares no better here; and at last, on his return from a walking holiday, he finds that Mrs. John, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 1, 1916 • Various
... by persistent constipation; frequently the strongest purgatives have no effect whatever on the movement of the bowels. In the absence of symptoms of indigestion, or special diseases implicating the intestinal canal, torpor of the bowels must be attributed to deficient innervation. This condition may depend upon brain affections or be due to reflex paralysis. Sudden checks of perspiration may induce excessive action of ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... cringing cowardice; sordid cupidity and the most lavish, reckless prodigality. With her, every act is the result of deep, cool calculation. No generous impulse ever beat within her breast; and love, except for self, never yet was awakened from its deathlike torpor. She married me because I was reputed rich; she deserted me because she deemed me ruined. What motive impelled her to follow you to Mexico, I know not. But of this I warn you, rest assured it is not love for you—you perchance, may be useful to her; the necessary instrument to further ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... June, M. Catalan, a councillor, appointed as a commissioner by the Parliament of Toulouse, arrived at Ganges, together with all the officials required by his commission; but he could not see the marquise that night, for she had dozed for some hours, and this sleep had left a sort of torpor upon her mind, which might have impaired the lucidity of her depositions. The next morning, without asking anybody's opinion, M. Catalan repaired to the house of M. Desprats, and in spite of some slight ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE GANGES—1657 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... an hour of this strange repose, understanding at last that the despair she had invoked would not come, she shook off her torpor and murmured: "It is strange: I ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... neither passionate nor dispassionate, neither sentimental nor unintelligent, neither nervous nor senseless. It is well known as a cure to all sorts of mental disease, occasioned by nervous disturbance, as a nourishment to the fatigued brain, and also as a stimulus to torpor and sloth. It is self-control, as it is the subduing of such pernicious passions as anger, jealousy, hatred, and the like, and the awakening of noble emotions such as sympathy, mercy, generosity, and what not. It is ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... nor moved. Nothing stirred the horrible torpor of her resignation to her fate. She knew that the time ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... of speech. But the heart knew it, and the pulses beat strongly responsive to it. Faith ruled the world. Some tiny bulbous thing at her feet that had impeded her step caught her attention. It was coming up from the black earth, and the buried darkness, and the chill winter's torpor, with all the impulses of confidence in the light without, and the warmth of the sun, and the fresh showers that were aggregating in the clouds somewhere for its nurture—a blind inanimate thing like that! ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... Whig houses had ever since the Revolution kept in their grasp. The real significance of his entry into the ministry was that the national opinion entered with him. He had no strength save from his "popularity," but this popularity showed that the political torpor of the nation was passing away, and that a new interest in public affairs and a resolve to have weight in them was becoming felt in the nation at large. It was by the sure instinct of a great people that this interest and resolve gathered themselves ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... himself, "very much a virgin," and he found himself giggling softly, notwithstanding the twinges of pain from his legs. He felt suddenly as if his spirit had awakened from a long torpor. The spell of dejection that had deadened him for months had slipped off. He was free. The thought came to him gleefully, that as long as he stayed in that cot in the hospital no one would shout orders at him. ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... apparent torpor and for some moments unobserved, until the Duke signaled to a passing waiter and indicated the toreador with a glance. The waiter came over to Blanco. "The Senor will find another table," he said with the ingratiating courtesy of one paying a compliment. "It is ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... to the rain, they sat and smoked in silence. Before the door of the stove several pairs of thin legs were extended to catch the heat, and a thread of steam curled up from the toes of the owners' boots. A heavy torpor seemed to weigh upon all this assemblage of pallid, ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... unwholesome, and ungentle somnolence, fruitful in heavy heads and heavy eyes at morning. You cannot sleep; well, I can best explain my state thus: I cannot wake. Sleep, like the lees of a posset, lingers all day, lead-heavy, in my knees and ankles. Weight on the shoulders, torpor on the brain. And there is more than too much of that from an ungrateful hound who is now enjoying his first decently competent and peaceful weeks for close upon two years; happy in a big brown moor behind him, and an incomparable burn by his side; happy, above all, in some work—for at last I ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that could not be brought off, it was decided that working parties at her house led to too much giddiness from suppressed giggles or torpor from too much food. So she relapsed once more into loneliness. Unfortunately air-raids were now becoming events of occasional fright and anxiety in London, and this deterred Cousin Sophie from Darlington, Cousin Matty from Leeds, Joseph's wife from Northallerton or old, married ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... train. My neighbors talk about crops and sunshine and rain. Others, scoffers and Parisians, speak of popular people and principally of music-hall singers. Others sleep, lying somehow or other on the wood. Their open mouths make murmur, and the oscillation jerks them without tearing them from their torpor. I go over in my thoughts the details of the last day, and even my memories of times gone by when there was ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... which is already a good answer; then, having recovered the use of speech, she defends herself cleverly. The world would fall into a torpor without Meed; knights would no longer care for kings; priests would no longer say masses; minstrels would sing no more songs; merchants would not trade; and even beggars would no ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... were walking up and down Broadway wrapped up in warm shawls. It appeared as if it required twice the heat we have in our own country, either to create a free circulation in the blood of the people, or to stimulate nature to rouse after the torpor of a protracted and severe winter. In a week from the period I have mentioned, the trees were in full foliage, the belles of Broadway walking about in summer dresses and thin satin shoes; the men calling for ice, and rejoicing in the beauty of the weather, ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... had intended. Nevertheless his troops profited by it. They had not realized until they stopped how near they too had come to utter exhaustion, and for several days they were in a kind of physical torpor while their strength came ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... of my course; I have broken my rules; I have lost the very power of feeling them. And now, after a dreadful occurrence, you have again made clear to me my situation, which is more pitiable than the first. While lying in a half torpor on your lap, I have again, as if out of another world, heard every syllable which you uttered. I know from you how all is with me. I shudder at the thought of myself; but again, as I did then, in my half sleep of death, I have marked out ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... to the recent event occupying the minds of all. Mrs. Jerrold and her sister had expected that Grey would feel his loss keenly and possibly be noisy in his boyish demonstrations of grief, but they were not prepared for the torpor which seemed to have settled upon him, and which kept him indoors all day sitting by the fire over which he shivered as if in a chill, though his cheeks were crimson, and he sometimes wiped the drops of sweat from his lips and forehead. His head was still aching terribly, and he was cold and ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... about eleven o'clock. Dick Sand then felt that a kind of torpor, if not a true sleep, was going to overcome him. It would, however, be rest. But, just as he was yielding to it, the thought came to him that, by the settling of the clay, washed in, the lower orifice was likely to be obstructed. All passage ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... already covered with a layer of snow, and I suppose it was the frigid pressure on my forehead that caused the dream. It is, however, probable that, had it not been for the hideous vision that shook my nerves free of paralysing torpor, I should never have awakened ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... with swift resolution. "Do you know what you are bringing upon yourself? Do you want to go mad, and so be at the mercy of John Burrill? It is what will come upon you if you don't throw off this torpor. Your eyes are as dry as if tears were not meant to relieve the overburdened heart. Let your tears flow; shake off this lethargy; battle royally for your life; it is worth more than his; do not let him put your reason to flight, and ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... the spiritual side of his mind there was no torpor. He loved to explain the sense of the prayers to his willing pupil, and to tell him the Gospel story, dwelling on whatever could waken or carry on the Christian life; and between the tiltyard and the oratory Hal spent ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... continued, until my supporters fell, and I myself was nailed to the mast. The mutineers, however, also sank under their wounds, and soon my ship was but one vast grave. My eyes also closed, my breath stopped—I thought I was dying. But it was only a torpor which held me chained: the following night, at the same hour in which we had cast the Dervise into the sea, I awoke, together with all my comrades; life returned, but we could do and say nothing but what had been done and said on that fatal night. Thus we sailed ...
— The Oriental Story Book - A Collection of Tales • Wilhelm Hauff
... a knowledge also of this torpor in Miss Fenton's nature, from which he formed the purpose of breaking with her; for Lord Elmwood still retained enough of the sanctity of his former state to have yielded up his own happiness, and even that of his beloved ward, rather than have plunged ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... of Prince Frederic dissolved the faction which, under his guidance, had feebly striven to annoy his father's government. His chief followers hastened to make their peace with the ministry; and the political torpor became complete. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... papers, more messengers than one came from the Palace regarding the state of the august patient there lying. At midday she was somewhat better; at evening the torpor again seized her, and she wandered in her mind. At night Dr. A—— was with us again, with a report rather more favourable: no instant danger at any rate was apprehended. In the course of the last two years her Majesty had had many ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... from his kneeling position, he obeyed my movement like a tired child, and again sat on the low pallet, in a state of motionless and unresisting torpor. The damp sweat stood on my own forehead, though not so cold as on his; and I poured myself out a small portion of wine, to ward off the exhaustion which I began to feel unusually strong upon me. I prevailed upon the poor wretch to swallow a little with me; and, as I ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 374 • Various
... long, but this lengthening of time is fortunately not true of all the melancholy scenes of life, nor is it peculiar to things that are painful. An invalid life with its almost unbroken monotony, and with the large measure of torpor that often accompanies it, usually flies very quickly, and most persons must have observed how the first week of travel, or of some other great change of habits and pursuits, though often attended with keen enjoyment, appears disproportionately ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... stole in shadow from the hall, my heart pounding, but my purpose very steady, and passed silently through passages and corridors where here and there lay one in besotted sleep, until at last I came out in a little court by the postern. The warders were long since guzzled to a torpor in their quarters, so there was neither let nor hindrance when I slid the bolt and welcomed in Avenging Justice in the shape of him who stood without, my old lord of Aragon, uncle and protector to my lady. ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... recesses of the house a sleeping bell woke and jangled. Silence followed. The three of them waited upon the road in the slant of the sunshine, aware of the odor of hot dust, trees, and water. Herr Haase stood, in the contented torpor of service and obedience, holding the heavy suit-case to one side of the gate; to the other, the Baron and Von Wetten stood together. Von Wetten, with something of rigidity even in his ease and insouciance, stared idly at the windows through which, as through stagnant eyes, the silent house seemed ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... shall notice very briefly a second and a third, which are, that the elevation of spirits produced by opium is necessarily followed by a proportionate depression, and that the natural and even immediate consequence of opium is torpor and stagnation, animal and mental. The first of these errors I shall content myself with simply denying; assuring my reader that for ten years, during which I took opium at intervals, the day succeeding to that on ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... light enough to see, a pale and heavy-lidded Natalie crept noiselessly out of her tent. In front of the door she saw Garth on his knees preparing to build a fire; but the hand that held the hatchet-helve had dropped nervelessly to the ground; and his eyes, fixed and staring in the torpor of miserableness, had forgotten what he had set out to do. At the sight, a rapturous peace came back to Natalie's harried soul; for, she thought, if he were so unhappy as that, he must love her in spite of all. And Garth, ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... off its torpor, And it spread each gauzy wing, As it flew to tell the flowers Of the coming of ...
— The Child's World - Third Reader • Hetty Browne, Sarah Withers, W.K. Tate
... names (as bulimia, dromomania, etc.) and been scientifically disposed of as "episodic syndromata of hereditary degeneration." But it turns out that Janet's cases are all what he calls psychasthenics, or victims of a chronic sense of weakness, torpor, lethargy, fatigue, insufficiency, impossibility, unreality and powerlessness of will; and that in each and all of them the particular activity pursued, deleterious though it be, has the temporary result of raising the sense of vitality and making the patient feel ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... faces at the words. The whole roomful began to whisper to each other, and turned their eyes upon the invalid, as though he had given some serious offence. Raphael, who had never quite managed to rid himself of the bashfulness of his early youth, felt a momentary confusion; then he shook off his torpor, exerted his faculties, and asked himself the meaning of ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... of the storm rather than sleep where he did. The place was alive with a squirming mass of hideous reptiles, hissing and gliding about at being disturbed. They were probably in their winter quarters and the fire had roused them from their torpor. Quickly throwing the burning wood amongst them, he dropped the planks and seizing the Baby, quitted the den and was in the water like a flash. Many miles below, in a sharp bend that headed him toward the northwest ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... 21, 1476) at Morat and once more the chivalry of Burgundy suffered complete defeat. Charles fled from the field, half insane with rage and disappointment, when the news that Duke Rene had reconquered Lorraine roused him from his torpor. He hastily gathered together a fresh army and laid siege to Nancy. But in siege operations he had no skill, and in the depth of winter (January 5, 1477) he was attacked by the Swiss and Lorrainers outside the walls of the town. A panic ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... by fatigue and a dull stupor; the silence, the darkness, the warmth of the shawl wrapped closely around her, the motionless position which her narrow hiding-place required, exerted a drowsy influence, and she soon sank into a torpor which imperceptibly passed into an uneasy, agitated half slumber, visited by terrible dreams. Panna saw horrible shapes dancing around her, which grasped her with their icy hands and dragged her away; sometimes it seemed as if her brother was brought out and a bullet fired ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... I, as it were, dally with the temptation, either from inadvertence or torpor, or slothful unwillingness to reject and repel it, is not that in a way taking pleasure in it?" "The evil of temptation is not measured by its duration: it may be working against us all our life long, but while it displeases us it cannot make us fail into ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... deficiencies, and supersede some erroneous processes of our methods, by the play of their own powers of investigation upon and about their subject. To these, a false method can bring perplexity and delay, but not repression nor veritable intellectual torpor. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... strength in government itself. In these times, it is essential, far more than during peace, that the newspaper should circulate very freely, stimulating the public, aiding government and the war, and keeping the mind of the country in living union. Nothing would more rapidly produce a torpor—and there is too much torpor now—than a measure which would have the effect of killing off perhaps one half of the country press, the great mass of which is barely able to live as it is. 'Let the press be as free as possible. Let it be ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... from its terrible power. His blood slowly chilled, as if vein by vein it froze throughout his person, until from head to foot the vital current was congealed. At times he strove to move, or more properly sought, in the mysterious make-up of our composition, to rouse the will from its torpor, but with the same result as follows the effort of the sufferer to use his paralyzed limb. The will seemed to make a feeble twitch or two and then subside, unable to break the fatal spell spreading over ...
— Adrift in the Wilds - or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys • Edward S. Ellis
... nervous troubles. During her crisis she heard everything. She quoted some Latin words that Mr. Franck had used. Her most fearful agony had been to hear the preparations for her burial without being able to get rid of her torpor. Medical dictionaries are full of anecdotes of this nature, but I shall ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... famishing; bitter to see his children famish. It was bitter for him to be a beggar, a liar and a knave. Nay, if that dreary Greenland-wind of benighted Want, perennial from sire to son, had frozen him into a kind of torpor and numb callosity, so that he saw not, felt not, was this, for a creature with a soul in it, some assuagement; or the cruellest ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... a mysterious fact. In every day and hour of his own life he was brought face to face with a double experience. At moments he felt himself full of life, health, and joy; at other moments he felt himself equally subject to torpor, malaise, and suffering. What it was that made these two classes of experience clear to him he could not tell; but there was no questioning the fact that at times he was the subject of experience of a pleasant kind, which he would have prolonged if he could; while at times he ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... joy" . . . . (she becomes confused. But what is this? Icy torpor coldly fastens On my hands; the lute drops from me, And my ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... has aroused her from the torpor following Charles Miller's departure the night before. She writhed even at the recollection of her scene with him. Again and again she had been on the point of sending for the police and denouncing him, but remembrance of the forty-eight ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... awakened to its error, and either recalled to some former track, or receives some fresh impulse, which it follows with the same eagerness, and admits to the same monopoly. Thus in the 13th century the first science which roused the intellects of men from the torpor of barbarism, was, as in all countries ever has been, and ever must be the case, the science of Metaphysics and Ontology. We first seek what can be found at home, and what wonder if truths, that appeared to reveal the secret depths of our own souls, should ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... especially so at the present day. For a multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the encreasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth
... famine and anarchy. The madness of the monks and the folly of the king expelled the Moors in 1609, and the loss of a million of the best mechanics and farmers of Spain struck the nation with a torpor like that of death. In 1650 Sir Edward Hyde wrote that "affairs were in huge disorder." People murdered each other for a loaf of bread. The marine perished for want of sailors. In the stricken land nothing flourished but the rabble of monks and ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... the active breath of life Should stir our dull and sluggard wills; For are we not created rife With health, that stagnant torpor kills? ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... blow decided the battle. The ponderous pericranium of General Jan Risingh sank upon his breast; his knees tottered under him; a deathlike torpor seized upon his frame, and he tumbled to the earth with such violence that old Pluto started with affright, lest he should have broken through the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... lungs freely, and there were no symptoms of pulmonary engorgement beyond slight basic hypostasis; the pulse remained at 140, and the heart sounds reduplicated; she was semiconscious, very drowsy, in a state of mental torpor, with confused ideas when roused, and she complained of rheumatic-like pains all ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... Lat. aestivare, to spend the aestas, or summer; the word is sometimes spelled "estivation''), literally "summer residence,'' a term used in zoology for the condition of torpor into which certain animals pass during the hottest season in hot and dry countries, contrasted with the similar winter condition known as hibernation (q.v..) In botany the word is used of the praefloration or folded arrangement of the petals ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... entirely disappeared before morning, the whole night being devoted to feeding. The quantity of meat that a hungry native can consume is something astounding, but in this case beat anything that any of the whole party had ever seen. The natural result was a semi-torpor ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine
... idea shall occur to me. A swarm of loose thoughts flutter about in my head. The feeling of declining day makes me downcast, sentimental; autumn is here, and has already begun to hush everything into sleep and torpor. The flies and insects have received their first warning. Up in the trees and down in the fields the sounds of struggling life can be heard rustling, murmuring, restless; labouring not to perish. The down-trodden existence of the whole ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... mornings spent in reading, by the light of a misplaced window, or age-long afternoons, drowsed through in that torpor, mental as well as physical, that overwhelms the victim of a prolonged sojourn in bed, Larry used to find himself looking forward to the conversations between Nurse Brennan and Mrs. Mangan that arose at tea-time, and followed, stimulated by the early darkness of January, in the firelight; ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... the stirring of the East, its entrance into the field of Western interests, not merely as a passive something to be impinged upon, but with a vitality of its own, formless yet, but significant, inasmuch as where before there was torpor, if not death, now there is indisputable movement and life. Never again, probably, can there ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... part at least, from the general indisposition to stir up mooted questions. Men were disposed to rest satisfied with 'our happy establishment in Church and State;' and it was quite as much owing to the spiritual torpor which overtook the Church and nation after the third decade of the eighteenth century, as to strength of conviction, that the Trinitarian question ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... spread out under that, by way of diffusing his weight over as much surface as possible, was the work of only a few minutes. But by that time the perishing man was almost incapable of helping himself. The great difficulty that the rescuer experienced was to rouse Lumley once more to action, for the torpor that precedes death had already set in, and to get on his knees on the edge of the ice, so as to have power to raise his friend, would only have resulted in the loss of his own life as well. To ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... The torpor and composure of a somnambulist had come upon Frederick, who with his shirt sleeves rolled up was ceaselessly washing his arms and hands and brushing his finger nails, all at the bidding of a will not his own. He was acting in a state of will-lessness, of auto-suggestion. ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... and a chronicle of the old times "before the war." It was some time before he could get into the regular track of gossip, or could be made to comprehend the strange events that had taken place during his torpor. How that there had been a revolutionary war—that the country had thrown off the yoke of old England—and that, instead of being a subject of his Majesty George the Third, he was now a free citizen of the United States. Rip, in fact, was no politician; the changes of states ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... danger—or rather the great danger of being made to appear ridiculous—which he had just passed through, contributed to rouse him from his torpor. He exerted himself to turn the conversation, and was quite ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... terrestrial events than any of those which proceed from the discord, the distress, or the passions of nations. By annihilations they awaken new life; and when the tumult above and below the earth is past, nature is renovated, and the mind awakens from torpor and depression to the consciousness of ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... curious than admirable. There is something brutal in this Pope; through his grey beard, which is so thin, you can see his projecting chin. The good gentleman was of a marked prognathism, a type of degeneration, indifference, intellectual torpor, and nevertheless, he reached the top. Perhaps in the Church it's the same as in water, only ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... it is to look upon, yet brings with it a callousness to endure all inflictions, and a recklessness that can seize with avidity whatever coarse fragments of pleasure the day or the hour may afford. But this poverty applies itself to nerves strung for the subtlest happiness. No torpor here; no moments of rash and unscrupulous gratification—unreflected on, unrepented of—which being often repeated make, in the end, a large sum of human life; but the heart incessantly demands a genuine and enduring happiness, and is incessantly denied. It is a poverty which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... up rather early, had a talk with the village bailiff, visited the threshing-floor, ordered the chain to be taken off the yard dog, who only barked a little but did not even come out of his kennel, and returning home, sank into a kind of peaceful torpor, which he did not shake off ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... returned to see how Leo was getting on, Billali saying that he must now wait upon She, and hear her commands. On reaching Leo's room we found the poor boy in a very bad way. He had woke up from his torpor, and was altogether off his head, babbling about some boat-race on the Cam, and was inclined to be violent. Indeed, when we entered the room Ustane was holding him down. I spoke to him, and my voice seemed to soothe him; at any rate he grew much quieter, and was persuaded to swallow ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... nodded. The physician hurried off with short steps. Yegor threw back his head, closed his eyes and sank into a torpor, motionless save for the twitching of his fingers. The white walls of the little room seemed to radiate a dry coldness and a pale, faceless sadness. Through the large window peered the tufted tops of the lime trees, amid whose dark, dusty foliage yellow stains ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... great poet was to come, and although Bjoernson had as yet published nothing to justify the expectation, he found the public of Copenhagen ready to recognize in him the man who was to rouse the North from its long intellectual torpor, and usher in a new era in its literature. It is needless to say that he did not discourage this belief, for he himself fervently believed that he would before long justify it. The first proof of his strength he gave in the tale "Synnoeve Solbakken" (Synnoeve Sunny-Hill), which he ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... aroused himself from his torpor, although he did not open his eyes. "Aye, truly I repent me of my sins," he whispered mildly, "for any unkindness done ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... which now without let or ceasing has its full sway over them. "I will not this time," quoth conscience, "be drowned in beer, or blinded by rewards, or deafened by song and good company, or hushed or stupified by a thoughtless torpor; now I will be heard, and never shall the truth, the stinging truth, cease dinning in your ears." The will creates a desire for the lost paradise, the memory reproaches them with the ease wherewith it might have ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... indeed an extraordinary book, manifesting a degree of genius, research, and spiritual knowledge, exceeding even that displayed in the 'Pilgrim's Progress.' To use the words of Mr. J. Montgomery, 'It is a work of that master intelligence, which was privileged to arouse kindred spirits from torpor and inactivity, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... no precise attack, no assault to which a name can be given, but without any definite reason they languish and die suddenly, like a taper, blown out. The torpor of the ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... the animosities of their souls silenced at length, and their hands no longer clenched in deadly enmity against each other; but that is the peace of death. If our peace be but the peace of the sensualist satisfying pleasure, if it be but the peace of mental torpor and inaction, the peace of apathy, or the peace of the soul dead in trespasses and sins, we may whisper to ourselves, "Peace, peace," but there will be no peace; there is not the peace of unity nor the peace of God, for the peace of God is ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... A day of torpor in the sullen heat Of Summer's passion: In the sluggish stream The panting cattle lave their lazy feet, With ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... his eldest son, the engineer captain, the same whom Wilmet had taken for the doctor, sat at the other end of the room; while Lance lay, sometimes babbling school tasks mixed with anthems and hymns, sometimes in something between sleep and torpor, but always moaning ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... old ideas of science and gave a new meaning to the Baconian method of investigation. It revolutionized the commerce of the world, and greatly stimulated the intellect of Europe, already awakening from the long torpor of the Dark Ages. It opened the doors of a new world, through which the oppressed and overcrowded population of the Old World might enter and make homes, build states, and develop a higher ideal of freedom than the world had ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... very little, because just now she was being excited by everything. She found at once that talking to him was the easiest thing in the world. Mr. Morris did not say very much; he smiled gently, and when Miss Burnett, awaking suddenly from her torpor, said, "You'll have some tea, Miss Brandon, won't you?" he, ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... very tight hold of Kitty's hand when first the little girl had proposed to fetch her mother, but now, in the kind of torpor of pain into which she had sunk, she relaxed the firm grip, and Kitty found that by a very gentle movement she could release her ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects, and, lying sunk in the tasselled meadow-grasses, one looks up through a level roofing ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... darkness of their sleeping places, for we cannot call them homes, and long for the morning to come. The cold weather is very hard upon them. They love the warm sun, and during the season of ice and snow are in a constant state of semi-torpor. You see them on the street, in their thin, ragged garments, so much overpowered by the cold that they can scarcely strike or utter a note. Sometimes they are permitted by the keeper of some saloon to approach his stove for a moment or two. These are the bright periods ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... him at five o'clock, as he was on the point of donning his coat. From five to six, he had remained in a torpor of disappointment, continually wondering whether Phil's sister would care. At six, his own boarding house being closed for the recess, he had trudged through the snow to a restaurant in the square, and had dined miserably on lukewarm turkey and lumpy mashed potatoes. ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... meets some private individuals, they are merely the last representatives of a scattered crowd of worshippers. The church dominates all; each street is one of its veins; the town has no other breath than its own. On that account, this spirit of another age, this religious torpor from the past, makes the cloistered city which surrounds it redolent with a savoury perfume ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... course did not appear. But it was just as well; blood poured down Vogt's face, and when Klitzing awakened from his torpor he was seized with a kind of convulsive attack. He threw himself down, weeping and shrieking before his brave comrade, embracing his knees, and ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... from numbness, torpor, narcotism: the flowers, being loved by the infernal gods, were offered to the Furies. Narcissus and Hippolytus are often assumed as types of morose voluptas, masturbation and clitorisation for nymphomania: certain mediaeval writers ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... into whose hands the manuscript at first fell; the singular and yet actual pleasure that is caused generally enough in the minds of all men by the exclusive possession of any object whatever; that kind of torpor, servitude, and terror in which the tyrannical power of the priests then held all minds—even those who by the superiority of their talents ought naturally to be the least disposed to bend under the odious yoke of the ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... Lawson assumed their green legs and strode over Wimbledon with pompous, majestic tread. The Woman's Rights Reform shook off its sluggish torpor, and rose a mighty shape of masculine vigor, strength and power. As in atonement for past sloth and inertness, the reformists became more active in their several departments than ever before. Lectures were delivered, ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... practice when the early publication of a piece is deemed a matter of importance, before the composition was finished. When Mary had arrived at about the middle of her work, she was seized with a temporary fit of torpor and indolence, and began to repent of her undertaking. In this state of mind, she called, one evening, as she was in the practice of doing, upon her publisher, for the purpose of relieving herself by an hour or two's conversation. ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... period of religious infidelity, moral torpor, fashionable mediocrity, unthinking pleasure-seeking, and royal orgies; when the people were spurned, insuited and burdened,—Frederic ascends an absolute throne. He is a young and fashionable philosopher. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... remained motionless, with the stolidity of the veteran hunter waiting to make sure. Torpor rapidly seized on Parker's mind. He shouted as best he could, but his voice was hoarse from hours of shouting into the vastness of the deserted woods. His faculties were growing befogged. He dared not exert himself ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... innocent gaiety of the children seems obscured as by a gathering thunder-cloud; as when the air grows close and still over some scene of rustic merriment, and the blitheness of the revellers sinks into torpor and faintness, not knowing what ails them. One feels that the performers of the dance will be rewarded with kisses and sweetmeats, and that they will draw the poison into ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... what day it was, then answered, 'I thought it would have been nice to have died yesterday,'—it was the first time she mentioned death. Averil told her she was better, but half repented, as the child sank into torpor again; and Averil, no longer the bewildered girl who had been so easily led from the death scene, knew the fitful breath and fluttering pulse, and felt the blank dread stealing over ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... melancholy, such black despair, that in that hell in which she rolled on from sin to sin, desperate and unsatisfied, she had taken to drinking to escape herself, to save herself from the present, to drown herself and founder for a few moments in the heavy slumber, the lethargic torpor in which she would lie wallowing across her bed for a whole day, just as she fell when she tried to make it. The miserable creature! how great an incentive, how many motives and reasons she found for devouring her suffering, ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... he was out of pain for awhile, the doctor's innate insensibility to what other people might think of him, or might say to him, resumed its customary torpor in its own strangely unconscious way. He seemed only to understand that Ovid's curiosity was in search of information about trifles. Well, there would be less trouble in giving him his information, than in investigating his motives. So ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... of the surplice woke Scotland from its torpor, and alarm at once spread through the country. Quarterly meetings were held in parishes with fasting and prayer to consult on the dangers which threatened religion, and ministers who conformed to the new ceremonies were rebuked and deserted by their ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... creaking ladder into the wireless-room. Harrison was in a torpor, muttering inanely and pleadingly as his long, white fingers opened and closed, ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... left him forlorn and desolate. Then, as the years passed, darker and darker gloom settled upon his spirit. Disease crept over both mind and body, he was tortured by pain, and when at length the pain left him he sank into torpor. It was not madness that had come upon him, but a dumb stupor. For more than two years he lived, but it was a living death. Without memory, without hope, the great genius had become the voiceless ruin of a man. But at length a merciful ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... which they were hastening. The dark trunks of the trees rose from the pure white of the snow in regularly formed shafts, until, at a great height, their branches shot forth horizontal limbs, that were covered with the meagre foliage of an evergreen, affording a melancholy contrast to the torpor of nature below. To the travellers there seemed to be no wind; but these pines waved majestically at their topmost boughs, sending forth a dull, plaintive sound that was quite in consonance with the rest of ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... shaking off the torpor of sleep, remembered his pledge, he thought of buckling on his armour. But, seeing that a little of the darkness of night yet remained, and wishing to wait for the hour of dawn, he began to ponder the perilous business at hand, when sleep stole on him and sweetly seized him, so that he took ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... low vitality. He had the bright-eyed pallor of the man knocked down into the abyss and now crawling up a few paces (only a few, tremulous, hesitating) to get his foothold on the ground again. He was largely silent, not, it sometimes seemed, from weakness, but the torpor of a tired mind. He was responsive to their care for him, ready with the fitting word and look and yet, underneath the good manners of it ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... who did the work were without exception their own peasants, who were unemployed during the winter time, and who, but for the timely occupation provided for them, would have spent the cold months in that state of half-starved torpor peculiar to the indigent agricultural labourer when he has nothing to do—at that bitter season when father and mother and shivering little ones watch wistfully the ever-dwindling sack of maize, ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... this year Greece received her youthful monarch. Otho was welcomed by the various chiefs and populace with all due marks of respect and obedience; and awakening from the torpor of ages, Greece took her place among the civilized nations of Europe. The kingdom was divided into ten departments:—1. Argolis and Corinth; 2. Achaia and Elis; 3. Messene; 4. Arcadia; 5. Laconia; 6. Acarnania and AEtolia; ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... of bitterness was now full to overflowing. Crawling out of the stream, he sank down on the bank in a species of lethargic torpor, from which he awakened next morning in a raging fever. Delirium soon rendered him insensible to his sufferings. The sun rose like a ball of fire, and shone down with scorching power on the arid plain. What mattered it to Dick? ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne
... hope was to walk till he was physically exhausted, so that he might come home almost fainting with fatigue, but ready to fall asleep the moment he got into bed. He passed the mornings in a kind of torpor, endeavoring to avoid thought, to occupy his mind with the pattern of the paper, with the advertisements at the end of a book, with the curious greyness of the light that glimmered through the mist into his room, with the muffled voices that rumbled now and then from the street. ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... have become endeared to us by a lifetime of intimacy. The salient characteristics of our great cities, the accepted traditions of our mining-camps, the contrast between East and West, the still more familiar contrast between the torpor of Philadelphia and Brooklyn ("In the midst of life," says Mr. Oliver Herford, "we are—in Brooklyn") and the uneasy speed of New York,—these things furnish abundant material for everyday American humour. There is, for example, the encounter between the Boston girl and ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... fire began to dwindle and the shadows to encroach with a dominion of somberness over the room. It seemed to the figure in the bed as he struggled against rising tides of torpor and exhaustion that his own resolution was waning with the firelight and that the murk of death approached with ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... sleeping pine-forests, moved slowly and cold, like some human voice weary with preaching to unbelieving hearts of a peace on earth. This man's heart was unbelieving; he chafed in the oppressive quiet; it was unfeeling mockery to a sick and hungry world,—a dead torpor of indifference. Years of hot and turbid pain had dulled his eyes to the eternal secret of the night; his soul was too sore with stumbling, stung, inflamed with the needs and suffering of the countless ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... stories of the Corsican. Owing to financial difficulties she was leading a rather retired and melancholy life, and the brilliant and colorful language of Balzac, fifteen years her junior, aroused her heart from its torpor, and her friendship for him took a peculiar tinge of sentiment which she allowed to increase. It had been many years since she had been thus moved, and this new feeling, which came to her as she saw the twilight of her days approaching, was for her ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... mother. As we passed her on the deck she looked at Romayne with compassionate interest so vividly expressed in her beautiful face that I imagined they might be acquainted. With some difficulty, I prevailed sufficiently over the torpor that possessed him to induce him to ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... collected whatever movables I could carry thither, and piled them against the doors, so as to assist me in whatever attempts I should make to resist the entrance of those without. I then returned to the bed and endeavoured again, but fruitlessly, to awaken my cousin. It was not sleep, it was torpor, lethargy, death. I knelt down and prayed with an agony of earnestness; and then seating myself upon the bed, I awaited my fate with ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... the Spaniard turned upon the American one of his sudden, staring, half-lunatic looks; then, relapsing into his torpor, answered, ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... the world's temptations; From tribulations; From that fierce anguish Wherein we languish; From that torpor deep Wherein we lie asleep, Heavy as death, cold as ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... fever, waking to intervals of consciousness, so Old Tarwater awoke, cooked his moose-meat, and fed the fire; but more and more time he spent in his torpor, unaware of what was day-dream and what was sleep-dream in the content of his unconsciousness. And here, in the unforgetable crypts of man's unwritten history, unthinkable and unrealizable, like passages of ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... by this means that Parry established a character for ready and happy expedients, accompanied by a sound judgment, which kept alive the active powers of the mind, and prevented it from falling into the worst of all conditions,—a state of morbid torpor. His plan was completely successful, and the crew, as well as the officers, were as happy as, under the circumstances, could ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... he is one himself. A very notable oculist, Himly, was the first to have made the observation that in the diseased excitability of the retina every color is a tone higher. Luminous black looks blue, blue looks violet, violet looks red, red looks yellow. Torpor of the retina inverts ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... The pain and torpor of her last short illness were already overmastering her. Maggie was alarmed at the burning touch of her hand, but she had no experience to guide her and her own great joy to ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... send a painless death to those she rode to save, and when the prayer passed her failing senses a new terror awakened her, for she found herself falling out of the saddle. With excruciating torment she recovered her poise. Reeling from side to side, she fought the torpor away. Her mind grew clearer and her tears had ceased. She prayed for a light. The word caught between her stiffened lips and she mumbled it till she could open them wide and scream it out. Then came a sound like the beating of great drums in her ears. It was the ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... had supped—the Duke, de' Alvari, Gismondo Santi, Messer Valdicampo, his wife and two daughters, and a couple of friends, potential citizens of Cagli, whom he had invited, that they might witness the honour that was being done his house. It waxed late, and the torpor that ensues upon the generous gratification of appetite was settling upon the company when Armstadt—Gian Maria's Swiss captain—entered and approached his master with the air of a man who is the bearer of news. He halted a pace or two from the Duke's high-backed chair, and stood ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... advantages. Above all, it saves the East from stagnation. It is one among many of those salutary shocks which, in the political as in the natural world, are needed from time to time to stimulate action and prevent torpor ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... could carry thither, and piled them against the doors, so as to assist me in whatever attempts I should make to resist the entrance of those without. I then returned to the bed and endeavoured again, but fruitlessly, to awaken my cousin. It was not sleep, it was torpor, lethargy, death. I knelt down and prayed with an agony of earnestness; and then seating myself upon the bed, I awaited my fate with a kind of ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... gratitude, but meekly obedient to their new masters, and testifying now and then by a sign or a grunt, their surprise at not being beaten, or made to carry their captors. Some, however, caught sight of the little calabashes of coca which the English carried. That woke them from their torpor, and they began coaxing abjectly (and not in vain) for a taste of that miraculous herb, which would not only make food unnecessary, and enable their panting lungs to endure that keen mountain air, but would rid them, for ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... laugh,' it is that he who mourns may turn to eternity for comfort, and he who rejoices may bless God for the happy hour. Ah, my brethren, were it possible to annihilate the inequalities of human life, it would be the banishment of our worthiest virtues, the torpor of our spiritual nature, the palsy of our mental faculties. The moral world, like the world without us, derives its health and its ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... can grow cotton if she will. England and Germany manufacture nearly all the few fabrics of cotton or wool worn here, because those who should lead, instruct, and employ this people, are blind to their duty or recreant to its obligations. Italy, once the light of the world, is dying of aristocratic torpor and popular ignorance, whence come indolence, superstition, and wide-spread demoralization ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... swift resolution. "Do you know what you are bringing upon yourself? Do you want to go mad, and so be at the mercy of John Burrill? It is what will come upon you if you don't throw off this torpor. Your eyes are as dry as if tears were not meant to relieve the overburdened heart. Let your tears flow; shake off this lethargy; battle royally for your life; it is worth more than his; do not let him put your reason to flight, and so conquer. ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... like a strong, free element which incites man to lead an independent life. Thus, in the beautiful prose poem, "The Moment," in which the action passes in Spain, it is the ocean beating against the prison walls that arouses Diatz from his torpor and makes him attempt ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... were many evidences of religious torpor there were none more marked and unmistakable than the preaching of that time. The pulpit being an invariable index of the state of the national heart, it was not less the case during the present period. The preaching was of the most formal and methodical texture. It assumed a rhetorical and ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... found, since he himself was not aware that he was in the corral. But at any rate he would be in a position to give an account of what had taken place before this terrible execution. The next day Ayrton awoke from his torpor, and his companions cordially manifested all the joy they felt, on seeing him again, almost safe and sound, after a hundred ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... not frighten my little one!' he said to his mother; and she went to the kitchen, where, frozen with grief, she remained all morning in a kind of torpor. Martha was afraid she would have a stroke. But she dared not speak to Edward, for, hovering in the passage, she had seen his face as he ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... renewed vigor through the evenings that followed; then French Janin sank back into a torpor, varied by acute depression. ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... excuse to remain, and went away slowly and regretfully. When she reached her room she was at a loss what to do with the kettle. Then suddenly within her there came a burst of passionate love. The torpor which had held her in a state of semi-unconsciousness gave way to a wave of glowing feeling, the rush of which thrilled her as with fire. She quivered, and memories returned to her—memories of her passion ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... and worked out by minds who will, I am sure hereafter, be able fully to develope, from study, and practice of the art of teaching, the great principles of spiritual truths, intellectual vigour, and the moral strength of the coming generations, which have been allowed to remain in a state of torpor in the present.] ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... standing on thy watch-tower, be more faithful than ever at thy post. Remember what is implied in watching. It is no dreamy state of inactive torpor: it is a holy jealousy over the heart—wakeful vigilance regarding sin—every avenue and loophole of the soul carefully guarded. Holy living is the best, the only, preparative for holy dying. "Persuade yourself," says Rutherford, ...
— The Words of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... It would do her good, he said to himself, if she could cry. He wondered whether it was wise to leave her to her terrible torpor; whether he ought to speak to ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... to explore. They are, however, greater terrestrial events than any of those which proceed from the discord, the distress, or the passions of nations. By annihilations they awaken new life; and when the tumult above and below the earth is past, nature is renovated, and the mind awakens from torpor and depression to the consciousness ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... this period were not without their effect on Schlegel's mind, and in 1813 he came forward as a political writer, when his powerful pen was not without its effect in rousing the German mind from the torpor into which it had sunk beneath the victorious military despotism of France. But he was called upon to take a more active part in the measures of these stirring times, and in this year entered the service of the Crown Prince of Sweden, as secretary ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... the trials that we have to endure as beginners is a joyless, flat, ungracious condition; a kind of paralysis of the soul, a dreary torpor. When we would approach God—pray to Him—He is nowhere to be found: He has disappeared, and everything to do with finding Him is become hard work, such hard work that it suddenly seems to us quite unprofitable: ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... health, had come to Beryl activity of those artistic instincts, which for a time, had slumbered in the torpor of despair; and when her daily task of work had been accomplished, the prisoner leaned with folded arms on the stone ledge of the window, and studied every changing aspect of earth and atmosphere. By degrees the old ambition stirred, and she began to sketch the slow panorama of July clouds, built ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... prowess. Never had they witnessed such power of mastication, and such marvellous capacity of stomach, as in this native and uncultivated gastronome. Having, by repeated and prolonged assaults, at length completely gorged himself, he would wrap himself up and lie with the torpor of an anaconda; slowly digesting his way ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... child of the city, All blind to the glory of earth and of skies? Is it fate, or ill fortune, hath woven about you Strong meshes which ye are too helpless to break? Shall we scornfully wonder, or angrily flout you, Or strive from their torpor your minds ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... crust of egotism gone, with every nerve of life exposed, with conscience struggling to its feet from the torpor of thirty-odd vacant years, he was as two men in one, with different lives and different souls, yet as inseparable in their misery as those poor victims of Gallic tyranny, chained back to back and thrown ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Ireland. Meantime, what was it that made him an object of peculiar interest to Lady Carbery? It was the singular revolution which, in one whom all his friends looked upon as sold to constitutional torpor, suddenly, and beyond all hope, had kindled a new and nobler life. Occupied originally by no shadow of any earthly interest, killed by ennui, all at once Lord Massey had fallen passionately in love with a fair young ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... his nose and wipe them; and he told himself that he would do better to rest for a little, that there would be time enough later on, and settled back into his corner with as little curiosity, with as much torpor as the drowsy traveller who pulls his cap down over his eyes so as to get some sleep in the railway-carriage that is drawing him, he feels, faster and faster, out of the country in which he has lived for so long, and which he vowed that he would not allow to slip away from him without ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... most intimate councillors and domestics. This treachery pleased him (as it had pleased that King) because it induced him to keep idle, now from fear, now from interest, now from disdain, and now from policy. This torpor was agreeable to him because it was in conformity with his humour and his tastes, and because he regarded those who counselled it as good, wise, and enlightened people, not blinded by their private ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... at last invaded and dispelled the drugged torpor of his brain: the voice of Zyarulla murmuring: "Sahib—Sahib," with the ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... before me, and I looked forward to it with dread. It is my habit when forced to travel in France, the part of France chiefly affected by the war, to resign myself to a period of misery. I relapse into a condition of sulky torpor. Railway Transport Offices may amuse themselves by putting me into wrong trains. Officers in command of trains may detach the carriage in which I am and leave it for hours in a siding. My luggage may be—and generally is—hopelessly ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... shaken off the torpor of winter. The queen started laying again in the very first days of February, and the workers have flocked to the willows and nut-trees, gorse and violets, anemones and lungworts. Then spring invades the earth, and cellar and stream with honey and pollen, while each day beholds the ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... been ill. The paroxysms occasionally recur, and become more frequent, as the disease progresses. Afterwards the intermissions are shorter, and a close succession of paroxysms begins. If the progress of the complaint has been slow, and regular, the patient sinks into a state of torpor, and dies without suffering great distress. If, on the contrary, its progress has been rapid, the dyspnoea becomes excessive; the pain and stricture about the praecordia are insupportable; a furious delirium ...
— Cases of Organic Diseases of the Heart • John Collins Warren
... at once to the War Office," said she, rousing herself from this torpor; "try to send out a commission; it must be done. Get round the Marshal. And on your return, at five o'clock, you will find—perhaps—yes! you shall find two hundred thousand francs. Your family, your honor as a man, as a State ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... the sequel to this remarkable fight that roused the people from their torpor. Large quantities of provisions were found not only in the camp but in the hotel and houses of the neighbourhood. The news spread like wildfire, and a great paean of triumph went up from a thousand throats. ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... with it a callousness to endure all inflictions, and a recklessness that can seize with avidity whatever coarse fragments of pleasure the day or the hour may afford. But this poverty applies itself to nerves strung for the subtlest happiness. No torpor here; no moments of rash and unscrupulous gratification—unreflected on, unrepented of—which being often repeated make, in the end, a large sum of human life; but the heart incessantly demands a genuine and enduring happiness, and is incessantly denied. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... as her bulk. But Miss Burleigh experienced a thrill of alarm. The possibility of being made fun of by a little simple girl had never suggested itself to the mind of her august relative, but there was always the risk that her native shrewdness might wake up some day from the long torpor induced by the homage paid to her rank, and discover the humiliating fact that she was not always imposing. By good luck for Miss Fairfax's favor with her, Pascal's maxim recurred to her memory—that though it is not necessary to respect grand people it is necessary to ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... part of the whole incident was this incapacity of action, and the more I reasoned about it the more I was mystified by the utter failure of nerve force. Indeed, while the mind was actively at work on this problem the physical torpor continued, a languor not unlike the incipient drowsiness of anaesthesia came gradually over me, and, though mentally protesting against the helpless condition of the body, and struggling to keep awake, I fell asleep, and ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... occurs to a very considerable degree; but it is far more common and more complete among cold-blooded creatures, whose bodies do not need to be kept heated to the same degree, and with whom, accordingly, hibernation becomes almost a complete torpor, the breathing and the action of the heart being still further reduced to very nearly zero. Mollusks in particular, like oysters and mussels, lead very monotonous and uneventful lives, only varied as a rule by the welcome change of being cut out of their ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... wonder women were such featherheads, so long as, whatever brittle follies they cultivated, they could get men to come and sit on fences for them. Doctor Prance told him Miss Birdseye noticed nothing; she had sunk, within a few days, into a kind of transfigured torpor; she didn't seem to know whether Mr. Ransom were anywhere round or not. She guessed she thought he had just come down for a day and gone off again; she probably supposed he just wanted to get toned up a little by Miss Tarrant. Sometimes, out in the ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... of Socrates' life, thus devoted to awakening them that sleep out of their moral torpor; the enmities that his keen and trenchant questionings of quacks and pretenders of every kind induced; the devotion of some of his friends, the unhappy falling away of others; the calumnies of interested enemies, the satires of poets; ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... that he had heard, all that he had seen, all the misery and horror that might yet be to come, had stunned his mind. The unspeakable dangers of his present position were too tremendous to be realized. He could only feel them vaguely in the weary torpor that oppressed his heart; while in every other direction the use of his faculties, physical and mental, seemed to have suddenly and totally ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... cheerfully, but Eden had other correspondents in the servants' hall, who dwelt sensationally on the danger, as towards Whitsun week the fever began to run higher towards the crisis, the strength was reduced, the torpor became heavier; and anxiety increased as to whether there would be power of rally in a man who, though healthy, ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... at that time that a great poet was to come, and although Bjoernson had as yet published nothing to justify the expectation, he found the public of Copenhagen ready to recognize in him the man who was to rouse the North from its long intellectual torpor, and usher in a new era in its literature. It is needless to say that he did not discourage this belief, for he himself fervently believed that he would before long justify it. The first proof of his strength he gave in the tale "Synnoeve Solbakken" (Synnoeve Sunny-Hill), which he published ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... beginning of the new year. At birth the cubs are very small, weighing but little more than a pound and a half, and there are from one to four in a litter. Two, however, is the usual number. The mother, although in a state of semi-torpor, suckles these cubs in the den, and they remain with her all that year, hole up with her the following winter, and continue to follow her until the second fall, when they leave her and ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... in one branch of our duties, does not unfit us for the performance of all the rest, unless we suffer the dark spot to spread over our whole nature, which may happen almost unobserved in the torpor of despair. This kind of despair is chiefly grounded on a foolish belief that individual words or actions constitute the whole life of man; whereas they are often not fair representatives of portions even ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... adventurer; and years after, when he had become rich, the favorite of the bey, and thought of settling down, his mind reverted to her. The child had changed into a stout, heavy, sallow girl. Her intellect, never of a high order, had become still more obtuse in the torpor of such a life as dormice lead, in the neglect of a father whose whole time and thought were given to business, and in the use of tobacco saturated with opium and of sweetmeats,—the torpor of her Flemish blood conjoined with Oriental indolence; and with all the rest, ill-bred, gluttonous, ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... the processes of digestion had released my escort from its torpor. Some had eaten until their abdomens were so distended that I thought they must burst, for beside the thag there had been fully a hundred antelopes of various sizes and varied degrees of decomposition, which they had unearthed from burial beneath the ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... comfort or elegances of life. But it is otherwise with genius. It sinks in the progress of society, as much as science and the arts rise. The country of Homer and AEschylus sank for a thousand years into the torpor of the Byzantine empire. Originality perishes amidst acquisition. Freshness of conception is its life: like the flame, it burns fierce and clear in the first gales of a pure atmosphere; but languishes and dies in that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... followed, it was almost impious to deny, or even to doubt. Thus, on the first page of my book, I observe, as if it were axiomatic, that, at a given moment, toward the opening of the sixteenth century, "Europe burst from her mediaeval torpor into the splendor of the Renaissance," and further on I assume, as an equally self- evident axiom, that freedom of thought was the one great permanent advance which western civilization made by all the agony and bloodshed ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... lips, and he swallowed it mechanically without any sign of conscious appreciation. White as white marble, and aged by many years, he remained stretched in his rigid corpse-like attitude, his eyes always fixedly upturned, till one day he was roused from his deepening torpor by the sound of sobbing. With a violent effort he brought his gaze down from the ceiling, and saw a figure kneeling by his bed, and a mass of bronze brown hair falling over a face concealed by two shapely white hands through ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... lovely in it. And as for Mr. Fenwick, he looked just like Hercules and Sir Walter Raleigh, after being out skating all day long in the cold. And Sally's wisdom had not been in the least increased by what was, after all, only a scientific experiment on poor Mr. Fenwick's mental torpor when her mother, the goozler and old Prosy having departed, got out her music to sing that very old song of hers to him that he had thought the other day seemed to bring back a sort of memory of something. Was it not possible ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... so easy a matter as the first time when he awoke the sleep-waker; with difficulty she appeared to rouse herself; and even after having spoken a few words to us, and risen from her chair, she suddenly relapsed into a state of torpor, and fell prostrate to the ground, as if perfectly insensible. Mr K——, entreating us not to be alarmed, raised her up—placed her in a chair, and supported her head with his hand. It was then that I ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... the body. It presents almost as many varieties in the dog as it does in man; and it has some peculiarities observable in the dog only. Rheumatism never exists in a dog without affecting the bowels. There will be inflammation or painful torpor through the whole of the intestinal canal. It is only in some peculiar districts that this occurs; it pervades certain kennels only; and but until lately there has been little or almost no explanation of the cause of the ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... blew strongly from the North West, drove the shattered bark up the Channel, at the same time gradually nearing her to the French coast. After twenty-four hours' driving before the storm, during which Willy never once awoke from his torpor, the vessel was not many leagues from the port of Cherbourg. It was broad daylight when our hero awoke; and after some little time necessary to chase away the vivid effects of a dream, in which he fancied himself to be on shore, walking in the fields ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... presence of such an array of great minds in all departments of intellectual activity as can rarely be matched in a single period. If, when the human mind in the middle ages was warmed into life after the winter of its long torpor, under the genial influence of the revival of literature, the renewal of its power was marked by a disposition to throw off the trammels which had bound it in the night of its darkness, how much more might such a result be expected when it ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... from that absorbing torpor by my poor horse, who was busy licking my ears. The faithful animal suspected something was wrong, for usually at such a time I would sing Spanish ditties or some Indian war-songs. Sunset was also the time when I brushed and patted him. The intelligent ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... morning was well aired with the sun, and the black men had recovered from the torpor which the cold seemed to produce on them as it does on lizards and snakes, I struck out for Jid Ali, hoping to surprise the Abban, and thereby counteract, if possible, his various machinations. But this ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... unconsciously absorbed and held the whole, and a skill that was never outdone in its time had made memory itself visible on the canvas. Something that was neither a 'harmless illness' nor a 'miracle' had waked Angela from her torpor. ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... dreaming that her head ached, and her hands seemed too heavy to move, and that Edith sat by the window near a table covered with medicine bottles and glasses? Margot blinked her eyes, and stared curiously around. No! it was no dream; she was certainly awake, and through the dull torpor of her brain a remembrance began slowly to work. Something had happened! She had been tired and cold; oh, cold, cold, cold; so cold that it had seemed impossible to live. She had wandered on and on, through an eternity of darkness, which had ended in the blackness of night. Her head throbbed with ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... sight, and try to take some of them, the strongest disinclination to make any such attempt was evinced, and it was only after much argument and persuasion, and by direct personal appeals to us individually, that he overcame this strange torpor, and induced us to take ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... battle. The ponderous pericranium of General Jan Risingh sank upon his breast; his knees tottered under him; a death-like torpor seized upon his frame, and he tumbled to the earth with such violence that old Pluto started with affright, lest he should have broken through the ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... spend the aestas, or summer; the word is sometimes spelled "estivation''), literally "summer residence,'' a term used in zoology for the condition of torpor into which certain animals pass during the hottest season in hot and dry countries, contrasted with the similar winter condition known as hibernation (q.v..) In botany the word is used of the praefloration or folded ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... he remained there, crouched before the motionless body, he does not know; only that he tried many times to shake the dying youth from the terrible torpor in vain. Senior breathed ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... the sign of the Lion, then the decay of his strength as he pales and sickens in the autumn, and at last his restoration to youth and vigor after he has passed the Waters of Death—Winter, the death of the year, the season of nature's deathlike torpor, out of which the sun has not strength sufficient to rouse her, until spring comes back and the circle begins again. An examination of the Accadian calendar, adopted by the more scientifically inclined Semites, shows that the names of most of the ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... into other bodies and to fancy the new and profound life which he might lead there. Who, as he watched a cat basking in the sun, has not passed into that vigilant eye and felt all the leaps potential in that luxurious torpor? Who has not attributed some little romance to the passer-by? Who has not sometimes exchanged places even with things inanimate, and drawn some new moral experience from following the movement of stars or of daffodils? All this is idle ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... later he returns homeward the same way, roused from his melancholy torpor by his ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... that Damascene's (De Fide Orth. ii, 14) division of sorrow into four species is incorrect; viz. into "torpor, distress," which Gregory of Nyssa [*Nemesius, De Nat. Hom. xix.] calls "anxiety,"—"pity," and "envy." For sorrow is contrary to pleasure. But there are not several species of pleasure. Therefore it is incorrect to assign ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... self-flagellations, so as to overthrow the legion of demons who, he said, barred the Messiah's advent. Sometimes he terrified me by addressing these evil spirits by their names, and attacking them in a frenzy of courage, smashing windows and stoves in his onslaught till he fell down in a torpor of exhaustion. And, though he was so advanced in years, my father could not deter him from joining in the great pilgrimage that, under Judah the Saint, set out for Palestine, to await the speedy redemption of Israel. Of this Judah the Saint, who boldly ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... expected; a lot of jerked beef, dry and hard. He filled his pockets, his mouth already full. On a table was a flour sack; he put into it the bulk of the remaining beef, some coffee and sugar, a couple of cans of milk. Then he looked out at the Mexican. The man still lay in the gorged torpor ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... practises Pratyahara, a kind of voluntary trance, which is recognizable by the full suspension of all the senses. After this stage the Yogis study the process of Dharana; this not only stops the activity of physical senses, but also causes the mental capacities to be plunged into a deep torpor. This stage brings abundant suffering; it requires a good deal of firmness and resolution on the part of a Yogi, but it leads him to Dhayana, a state of perfect, indescribable bliss. According to their own description, in this state they swim in the ocean of ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... notice very briefly a second and a third; which are, that the elevation of spirits produced by opium is necessarily followed by a proportionate depression, and that the natural and even immediate consequence of opium is torpor and stagnation, animal and mental. The first of these errors I shall content myself with simply denying; assuring my reader that for ten years, during which I took opium at intervals, the day succeeding ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... with a mysterious fact. In every day and hour of his own life he was brought face to face with a double experience. At moments he felt himself full of life, health, and joy; at other moments he felt himself equally subject to torpor, malaise, and suffering. What it was that made these two classes of experience clear to him he could not tell; but there was no questioning the fact that at times he was the subject of experience of a pleasant kind, which he would have prolonged if he could; while at times he ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... turned upon the American one of his sudden, staring, half-lunatic looks; then, relapsing into his torpor, answered, "Doubtless, ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... Our torpor deadlier than death He knew not; whatsoe'er he saith Flashes with life: He spurreth men, he quickeneth To ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... benumbed, her lips blue, her flesh gray. It was plain to him that she had reached the limit of endurance, that she was ready to sink into the last torpor. He ripped open his overcoat and shook the snow from it, then gathered her close so that she might get the warmth of his body. The rugs from the automobile he wrapped round ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... some division of opinion as to the expediency of the more ambitious plan of sending abroad for a colossal instrument. There was a majority report in its favor, and a verbal minority report advocating a more modest instrument of home manufacture. Then followed the anaconda-torpor which marks the process of digestion of a huge and as yet crude project ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... afternoon of the third day, there was some unusual activity on board the ship, which roused our hero from his torpor. The bell in the bows rang out... the heavy boots of the sailors could be heard running on the deck... "Engine ahead!... engine astern!." Shouted the hoarse voice of ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... dreary, monotonous whiteness; not merely for days or weeks, but for more than half a year together. Whichever way the eye is turned, it meets a picture calculated to impress upon the mind an idea of inanimate stillness, of that motionless torpor with which our feelings have nothing congenial; of anything, in short, but life. In the very silence there is a deadness with which a human spectator appears out of keeping. The presence of man seems an intrusion on the dreary solitude of this wintry ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... in a kind of peaceful monotony, broken by the frequent visits of Nurse Brown and the house surgeon, with his grave face and preoccupied air; and for some time Ida lay in a kind of semi-torpor, feeling that everything that was going on around her were the unreal actions in a dream; but as she grew stronger she began to take an interest in the life of the great ward and her fellow-patients; and ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... short, now lived, safe from the sorrows and temptations of this world, Jacqueline seemed for the first time to understand why Giselle regretted that she might not share forever the blessed peace enjoyed in the convent. A torpor stole over her, caused by the dimness, the faint odor of the incense, and the solemn silence. She imagined herself in the act of giving up the world. She saw herself in a veil, with her eyes raised to Heaven, very pale, standing behind the grille. ...
— Jacqueline, v1 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... of the real cause of malaria, eucalyptus trees were planted in the belief that they would filter and disinfect the air. How was it that no one asked himself how it was possible that the plasmodia could enter the current of the blood from the air? What was the species of torpor which took possession of the intelligence of persons who had specialized in intellectual work? Here was a colossal sum of intelligence, ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... down the creaking ladder into the wireless-room. Harrison was in a torpor, muttering inanely and pleadingly as his long, white fingers opened and closed, ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... contact with the world outside. To gaze at the motionless face of a sleeper temporarily rapt from the life of sight, sound, and movement—which, being common to all, binds us together in mutual recognition and social action—has always something awe-inspiring. This external inaction, this torpor of sense and muscle, how unlike to the familiar waking life, with its quick responsiveness and its overflowing energy! And then, if we look at dreams from the inside, we seem to find but the reverse face of the mystery. How ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... into nonentity." Sir Isaac Newton is "the developer of the skies in their embodied movements;" and Mrs. Thrale, when a party of clever people sat silent, is said "to have been provoked by the dulness of a taciturnity that, in the midst of such renowned interlocutors, produced as narcotic a torpor as could have been caused by a dearth the most barren of all human faculties." In truth, it is impossible to look at any page of Madame D'Arblay's later works without finding flowers of rhetoric like these. Nothing in the language of those jargonists at whom ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... offered a soft couch for Susy, who seemed to have fallen quite naturally into her usual afternoon siesta, and in a measure it shielded her from a cold breeze that had sprung up from the west. Utterly exhausted himself, but not daring to yield to the torpor that seemed to be creeping over him, Clarence half sat, half knelt down beside her, supporting himself with one hand, and, partly hidden in the long grass, kept his straining eyes fixed ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... what whispers me of times to come? What if it be the mission of that age My death will usher into life, to shake This torpor of assurance from our creed?" (vol. ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... it may be seen, understood and appreciated. The title of this pamphlet is Germany in her Deepest Degredation. It is an outcry of my grief, by which I intend arousing the German people, so that they may wake up at last from their long torpor, seize the sword and rise in the exuberance of their vigor for the purpose of expelling the tyrant. But, alas! where shall I find one who will dare to print it; a censor who will not expunge its most powerful passages; ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... that were prevalent in most weathers; but this was a still, autumnal Sabbath evening. As Ruth's limbs fell, so they lay. She had no strength, no power of volition to move a finger. She could not think or remember. She was literally stunned. The first sharp sensation which roused her from her torpor was a quick desire to see him once more; up she sprang, and climbed to an out-jutting dizzy point of rock, but a little above her sheltered nook, yet commanding a wide view over the bare, naked sands;—far away below, touching the rippling ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... is a dull, animal happiness, the content of the full belly. The dominant note of their lives is materialistic. They are stupid and heavy, without imagination. The Abyss seems to exude a stupefying atmosphere of torpor, which wraps about them and deadens them. Religion passes them by. The Unseen holds for them neither terror nor delight. They are unaware of the Unseen; and the full belly and the evening pipe, with their regular "arf ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... half-formed, savage mind, the slave of her body—as her body was the slave of another's will—forgot the faint and vague image of the ideal that had found its beginning in the physical promptings of her savage nature. She dropped back into the torpor of her former life and found consolation—even a certain kind of happiness—in the thought that now Nina and Dain were separated, probably for ever. He would forget. This thought soothed the last pangs of dying jealousy that had nothing now to ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... through the operation of external historical conditions, but it has also arisen partly through the tendency in certain academic circles to look down upon technical knowledge and ability as something inferior. The exclusiveness and the torpor of the older Universities in many cases has been a further cause tending to the creation of the Technical College separated from ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... frozen corpses, and soon experienced an inclination to sleep, to which I yielded the more willingly as at that moment it seemed delicious. Fortunately I was aroused from that incipient somnolency—which infallibly would have brought on torpor—by the cries and oaths of two soldiers who were violently striking a poor exhausted horse that ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... can[58] the mind that rules and directs us do, if it be relaxed in sleep or drowned in wine or crushed beneath the weight of disease? Nay, as the sword acquires its sheen by usage, and rusts if it lie idle, so the voice is dulled by its long torpor if it be hidden in the sheath of silence. Desuetude must needs beget sloth, and sloth decay. If the tragic actor declaim not daily, the resonance of his voice is dulled and its channels grow hoarse. Wherefore he purges his huskiness by loud and repeated recitation. However, ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... little slumber overcame him. Fatigued and appeased, he sank into a sort of gentle and uncertain torpor. As he fell asleep, he decided he would await a favourable opportunity, and his thoughts, fleeting further and further away, lulled him to rest with ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... did not appear. But it was just as well; blood poured down Vogt's face, and when Klitzing awakened from his torpor he was seized with a kind of convulsive attack. He threw himself down, weeping and shrieking before his brave comrade, embracing his knees, and no talking could ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... reflected with its green and flowery crown. A warm, balmy breeze that had passed over the orange trees of Sorrento and Amalfi felt deliciously refreshing to the inhabitants of the capital, who had succumbed to torpor in the enervating softness of the day. The whole town was waking from a long siesta, breathing freely after a sleepy interval; the Molo was covered with a crowd of eager people dressed out in the brightest colours; the ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - JOAN OF NAPLES—1343-1382 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... by the fireside, the old man dropped from torpor to torpor, apart and unaware of them. When he waked they would have ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... of good food, fun and excitement; even Father Rielle is happy, in his work, having conquered his passion for Miss Clairville, and perhaps when a few years have flown and her health is restored the dweller against her will in the gloomy house of her fathers will emerge from her torpor and engage in some active work that will afford her restless spirit a measure of happiness. Often she cries in ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... in any well-directed school we should have been a wretched fourth class. I was never at the bottom; emulation spurred me on until I surpassed or equalled the head boy; but as soon as I reached the top, I fell back into a state of torpor. I was perhaps to be excused, as nothing could equal the dryness and insipidity of our studies. It is true that we translated Cornelius Nepos; but none of us, probably not even the master himself, knew who the men were whose lives we were translating, nor their countries, nor the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... not so. The wild goats that leap along those rocks have as much passion of joy in all that fair work of God as the men that toil among them. Perhaps more. Enter the street of one of those villages, and you will find it foul with that gloomy foulness that is suffered only by torpor, or by anguish of soul. Here, it is torpor—not absolute suffering,—not starvation or disease, but darkness of calm enduring; the spring known only as the time of the scythe, and the autumn as the time of ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... fleeting. It seemed as if the whole population of the place, a population among the most numerous in Christendom, had been composed of hybernating animals suddenly awakened by the balmy sunshine from their long winter's torpor. Through every hour of the golden morning the streets were resonant with female parties of young and old, the timid and the bold, nay even of the most delicate valetudinarians, now first tempted to lay aside their wintry clothing together with their fireside habits, whilst the whole rural ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... would justify far higher expectations than that of Sicily." Yet Sicily's past history has been brilliant in the extreme, and her commerce to-day is great. Dr. Gryzanowski has his own theory of the historic torpor of these favored isles. He thinks they stagnated because they never gained political autonomy, being always owned by some Continental power. I will not dispute the theory; but I will ask, Why did they not gain it? and answer immediately: Simply ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... gone, except a gleam or two now and then. What he said was much in the spirit of his former mind as far as the matter and meaning went, but the tone of strength and elasticity was wanting. The appearance was that of a placid languor, sometimes approaching to torpor, but not otherwise than cheerful. He is thin and shrunk in person, and that extraordinary face of his has no longer the fire and strength it used to have, though the singular cast of the features, and the habitual expressions, make it still a ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... negative existence that they constitute. There is vitality there and positive strength, in those lanes and cellars, put forth for evil if not drawn towards the good. We must not confound ignorance with torpor of spirit or bluntness of understanding. One of the most remarkable characteristics of vagrant children is a keen, precocious intellect. A boy of seven in the streets of a city is more developed in this respect than ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... no one could feel without being stirred the illumination of Montesquieu; and Rousseau's questions, even if they proved unanswerable, were stuff for thought. The work of the forty years before the French Revolution is nothing so much as a preparation for Bentham. The torpor slowly passes. The theorists build an edifice each part of which a man whose passion is attuned to the English nature can show to be obsolete and ugly. If the French thinkers had conferred no other benefit, that, at least, would have ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... for the king to entreat, and as useless for him to try to overcome her depression: the poor girl was completely overwhelmed,—the appearance of an angel would hardly have awakened her from her torpor. ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... almost made me forget grief for the departed. For five days and five nights I have watched, and his bloodshot eye has not closed, no, not for a moment, from its horrible task of gazing on the dead face of the father that cursed him. He sleeps now, if sleep it can be called, that is rather the torpor of exhaustion; but his rest is taken on that father's death-bed. Oh! young man, feel for me! Do your task in such a manner, that my wretched boy may not awake till it is over, and the blessing of the widow be on you for ever!' To this strange prayer I could only offer ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 540, Saturday, March 31, 1832 • Various
... fed with meat and drink, The flesh thou ne'er dost mortify, The mind, that spark of sacred flame, By pleasure dulled, must fail and die, And pent in its gross prison-house The soul in shameful torpor lie. ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... a kind of hopeless gratitude on her face, which was nearly as white as those of her sons. The doctor soon saw that Friedel was past human aid; but, when he declared that there was fair hope for the other youth, Friedel, whose torpor had been dispelled by the examination, looked up with his ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... years the country awoke from its torpor, feeling the blood tingle in its strong limbs once more, and rubbing its eyes in wonder at its own folly. Some said the spirit of hope was due to the gold basis; some said it was the good crops; some said it was the prospect of national expansion. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... to feel that what before was to rest is now to rot; that your years are gliding from you unenjoyed and wasted; that the contrast between the animal life of passionate civilisation and the vegetable torpor of motionless seclusion is one that, if you are still young, it tasks your philosophy to bear,—feeling all the while that the torpor may be yours to your grave? And when your guest has left you, when you are again alone, ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... him together in their arms, and bearing him to the rear laid him softly on the grass. They asked if he would have a surgeon, but he shook his head and answered that all was over with him. His eyes closed with the torpor of approaching death, and those around sustained his fainting form. Yet they could not withhold their gaze from the wild turmoil before them, and the charging ranks of their companions rushing through fire and smoke. ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... toil of the worker was filched by some inexplicable process, he was immediately voted "balmy." They were not ripe for fighting. There was as yet no clearly seen Cause that would rouse them from their torpor. But one day the flood would burst the dam of besotted ignorance, and the human cataract would descend with ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... was soon darkened. On the 8th of November, poor Ritchie was again attacked by illness, and after lying for three or four days in a state of torpor, without taking any refreshment, he again became delirious, and on the 20th expired. The two survivors of this ill-fated party were themselves reduce to the lowest state of debility, and the only prospect ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... gryphon, met, Their eyes upon the marvel set. In senseless hush the world was chained While Rama's hand the bow retained, And Jamadagni's son amazed And powerless on the hero gazed. Then when his swelling heart had shrunk, And his proud strength in torpor sunk, Scarce his voice ventured, low and weak, To Rama lotus-eyed, to speak: "When long ago I gave away The whole broad land to Kasyap's sway He charged me never to remain Within the limits of his reign. Obedient to my guide's behest On earth by night I never rest. ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... Torpor, ebes sensus, scola parua labor minimusque Causant quo minimus ipse minora canam: Qua tamen Engisti lingua canit Insula Bruti Anglica Carmente metra iuuante loquar. Ossibus ergo carens que conterit ossa loquelis Absit, et interpres ...
— Confessio Amantis - Tales of the Seven Deadly Sins, 1330-1408 A.D. • John Gower
... strongly responsive to it. Faith ruled the world. Some tiny bulbous thing at her feet that had impeded her step caught her attention. It was coming up from the black earth, and the buried darkness, and the chill winter's torpor, with all the impulses of confidence in the light without, and the warmth of the sun, and the fresh showers that were aggregating in the clouds somewhere for its nurture—a blind inanimate thing like that! ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... us, that even when the intellectual energy of Greece was signalizing itself by efforts which have commanded the admiration of after ages, it should still remain a popular dogma in medicine "that persons labouring under bodily infirmity, might be thrown into a state of charmed torpor, in which, though destitute of any previous medical knowledge, they would be enabled to ascertain the nature of their malady, as well as of the diseases of others, and devise the means of their cure." Upon this dogma was ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... crisis of its last despairing prostration. Reader! it is not exaggeration—many a heart will bear witness in silence that it is not—if I should say that men exist, who would gladly pay down thirty years of life in exchange for powers so heavenly for redressing earthly wrongs. To the infamous torpor on that occasion, and the neglect of the fleeting hour that struck the signal for delivery and vengeance, are due many hundreds of the piteous outrages that have since polluted Bengal. Do I mean that, if the rebel capture of Delhi had been prevented, no subsequent outrages would have followed? ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... stars; and when he sought Ione in that chamber in the inmost recesses of his mysterious mansion to which he had consigned her—when he found her overpowered by blow upon blow, and passing from fit to fit, from violence to torpor, in all the alternations of hysterical disease—he thought more of the loveliness which no frenzy could distort than of the woe which he had brought upon her. In that sanguine vanity common to men who through life have been invariably successful, whether in fortune or love, he flattered himself ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... hoarded gold came knowledge and culture, which he had obtained from the Saracen. Now, these germs had been revived by direct contact with the sources of ancient knowledge in the East during the Crusades; and while the long mental torpor of Europe was rolling away like mist before the rising sun, England felt the warmth of the same quickening rays, and Oxford took ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... people; but, though they had done their best to afford me instruction on religious points, I had either paid no attention to what they endeavoured to communicate, or had listened with an ear far too obtuse to derive any benefit. But my mind had now become awakened from the drowsy torpor in which it had lain so long, and the reasoning powers which I possessed were no longer inactive. Hitherto I had entertained no conception whatever of the nature and properties of God, and with the most perfect indifference had heard the Divine name proceeding from ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... fooleries at home, wars abroad: sometimes terror, sometimes torpor, or stupid sloth: this is thy daily slavery. By little and little, if thou doest not better look to it, those sacred dogmata will be blotted out of thy mind. How many things be there, which when as a mere naturalist, thou hast barely ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... decadence of the Moslem world is altogether too puerile. The truth is that nations have their day; and to a period of glorious splendour succeeds a time of lassitude and slumber. It is a law of nature. And then one day some danger threatens them, stirs them from their torpor and they awake. ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... say that the main difference was this,—distress always seemed to accumulate round Sir Sedley, and vanish from the presence of Trevanion. Where the last came, with his busy, active, searching mind, energy woke, improvement sprang up. Where the first came, with his warm, kind heart, a kind of torpor spread under its rays; people lay down and basked in the liberal sunshine. Nature in one broke forth like a brisk, sturdy winter; in the other like a lazy Italian summer. Winter is an excellent invigorator, no doubt, but we ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... silent, thinking about her meeting of the morning, which she wished to hide from him; but without apparent cause or transition, in the kind of torpor that had come over her, the words she would have kept back rose invincibly ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... yet been able to rouse her from this torpor, which will, no doubt, naturally disappear at a given moment. She will then return to conscious life as she quitted it. It is probable that she will not retain any recollection of her present condition, that all notion of time will fail her, and that she will ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... Anita that it was a Christian act to continue her visits to Mrs. Lawrence, who still remained weak and nerveless and ill, and Anita was ready enough to do so. Mrs. Lawrence never mentioned Broussard's name and, in fact, spoke little at any time. A mental and bodily torpor seemed to possess her, and she was never able to do more than walk feebly, supported by Mrs. McGillicuddy's strong arm, to a bench, sit there for an hour or two, and return to her own two rooms. Occasionally she asked if she should give up her quarters, but as the surgeon ...
— Betty at Fort Blizzard • Molly Elliot Seawell
... turned away. He had some two and a half hours of grace, before the sun should set again and darkness release the colossus from its torpor. There was only one thing he could do: place the diameter of the sphere between the thing and himself, and try to exist through another ...
— The Planetoid of Peril • Paul Ernst
... he shook off the torpor that had for a time overpowered him; his eyes brightened, and, with a gesture of defiance, he left the steps, crossed the open square and walked down the Rue de l'Ancienne-Comedie. He strode onward now with the brisk, determined step of ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... innocent had meant nothing to her more than that he would inform and rally all of her friends. That he could know anything that would throw light on the evil mystery did not seem possible. She was then too miserable and depressed to do much more than wait, in a sort of stunned torpor, for what might next occur. Mechanically she answered such questions as were put to her in order that a record of the case might be made, and then was led to the cells below. She shuddered as she saw the dimly lighted ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... This deep torpor does not usually persist indefinitely. The commonest evidence of some form of consciousness persisting is probably to be seen in blinking when the eye is threatened or the sclera or cornea actually touched. A very large number of patients, when otherwise ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... you have. You've been in a torpor, haven't you? Well, to be in a torpor, is to torp. Now I'm going to do it all over again, and if you interrupt this time, ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... activity and progressiveness? I believe that the difference between 'the people that sit in darkness' and 'the people that walk in the light is that one has the light and the other has not, and activity befits the light as torpor befits ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... have been exposed to the effects of inordinate passion. Borrelli relates the case of a French gentleman, who was thrown into prison, and on whom fear operated so powerfully as to change his hair completely grey in the course of one night. Dr. Darwin ascribes this phenomenon to the torpor of the vessels, which circulates the fluids destined to nourish the hair. Nothing will, perhaps, demonstrate more fully the effects of moral causes in producing disease than the structural alterations discoverable in the bodies of those who have died whilst labouring ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various
... not revive. Although these results are too few to enable us to determine the laws with respect to the influence of temperature on insects, they may serve a purpose, in shewing that the effect is not that gradual one of hybernation, where activity and torpor ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... the torpor that follows rest after exhaustion. The warm July sun, the breeze from the Lake, the flash of light from the roadside water, these were all he had room for among his perceptions. He was content to enjoy them, ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... attracted by a young English lady—traveling, apparently, with her mother. As we passed her on the deck she looked at Romayne with compassionate interest so vividly expressed in her beautiful face that I imagined they might be acquainted. With some difficulty, I prevailed sufficiently over the torpor that possessed him to induce him to look ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... hold upon him, and waving their caps began to yodel in a transport of joy. They were there! This spot in immaculate space, this white crest, somewhat rounded, was the goal, and for that good Tartarin the end of the somnambulic torpor in which he had wandered ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... air that he was breathing, the shadow of night that enwrapped him, the imposing tranquillity that reigned around, all conspired to beget the desire for repose. He felt his eyelids gradually grow heavier and heavier; and after a while an invincible torpor seized ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... my 'calm grit'!" laughed Jack, grimly—almost hysterically. "Doesn't the scoundrel know that I'm all but frozen into the torpor of dread?" ...
— The Submarine Boys for the Flag - Deeding Their Lives to Uncle Sam • Victor G. Durham
... Koran is studied as a dead language, even in the birth-place of the prophet. Not a printing-press at this day is to be found throughout the whole Arabian Peninsula. Even in Spain, in Christian Spain, alas! the contrast is scarcely less degrading. A death-like torpor has succeeded to her former intellectual activity. Her cities are emptied of the population with which they teemed in the days of the Saracens. Her climate is as fair, but her fields no longer bloom with the same rich and variegated husbandry. Her most interesting ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
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