"Benumbed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... In his confused, sense-benumbed state, he felt that after all he had done his duty, and he recalled the calm, trusting look directed at him by Miss Linton as he passed her that morning. Then the water above him grew lighter, and he rose to the surface, ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... sensuality to encounter, willingly make use of this argument, that when it is at the height it subjects us to that degree that a man's reason can have no access... wherein they conceive that the pleasure doth so transport us that our reason cannot perform its office whilst we are so benumbed and extacied in delight.... But I know that a man may triumph over the utmost effort of this pleasure: I have experienced it in myself, and have not found Venus so imperious a goddess as many—and some more reformed than I—declare. I do not consider it as a miracle, as the Queen ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. II. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... tavern stood the young duke, motionless, with his gun in his shoulder-belt, his cap over his eyes, his benumbed hands in the pockets of his red trousers, and shivering in his sheepskin coat. He gave himself up to his sombre thoughts, this defeated soldier, and looked with sorrowful eyes toward a line of hills, lost in the fog, where could be seen ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... had felt at Mrs. Ashwood's frigid disposition of his wishes and his manuscript had benumbed him to any enjoyment or appreciation of the change in his fortune. He wandered out of the house and descended to the beach in a dazed, bewildered way, seeing only the words of her letter to Fletcher before him, and striving to grasp some other meaning from ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... morning near a tree my head was just one yard off a good-sized cobra, coiled up in the sprouts at its root, but it was benumbed with cold: a very pretty little puff-adder lay in the path, also benumbed; it is seldom that any harm is done by these reptiles here, although it is different in India. We bought up all the food we could get; but it did not suffice ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... shivering, bowing, thanking the landowner, the coachman, the peasants. He had nothing on but a green jacket with pink ribbons, and it was freezing very hard. The landowner looked at his blue and benumbed shoulders in silence, wrapped the unlucky fellow in his own pelisse, and took him home. The household ran out. They soon thawed the Frenchman, fed him, and clothed him. The landowner ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... all gone, the lights in the streets were winning on the fast-fading twilight, and Mrs. Hilbrough's reception-room was growing dusk when Millard slowly, as one whose purposes are benumbed, rose to leave. Once in the street, he walked first toward one avenue and then toward the other. He thought to go to his apartment, but he shrank from loneliness; he would go to dinner at a neighboring restaurant; then he turned ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... benumbed by these personally conducted biographies, but she was too well-bred not to ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... appearance. On this particular morning, however, he did not feel at all so proud of himself, or especially pleased with any one or anything. He had passed the long night in a wood hard by, and had been benumbed with cold. ...
— What the Blackbird said - A story in four chirps • Mrs. Frederick Locker
... benumbed him that even after that surrender he stood there, close to her, his countenance blank, his arms dangling at ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... Benumbed with cold, and half dead with terror, Paslew needed all his companion's support, for he could do little to help himself, added to which, they occasionally encountered some large stone, or stepped into a deep hole, so that it required ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... odor came through the loopholes of the windows, and the wind whirled a puff of smoke into the room. The faces of the girls blanched, and they looked at each other fearfully. The entire party seemed benumbed for the moment, then Fairfax sprang to the door ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... knees, her head thrown back and resting against the wall behind. What was the good of getting up or going to bed now? When she was thoroughly exhausted she threw herself, dressed, upon her bed. Otherwise she remained in the same position, chilled and benumbed; in her quiescent state, only her teeth chattered with the cold; she had that continual impression of a band of iron round her brows; her cheeks looked wasted; her mouth was dry, with a feverish taste, and at times a painful hoarse cry rose from her throat and was repeated ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... channel of childhood reminiscences, and she gave them utterance in a kind of monotonous recitative—slightly disconnected, but generally describing the glories of the Sultan of Sulu, his great splendour, his power, his great prowess; the fear which benumbed the hearts of white men at the sight of his swift piratical praus. And these muttered statements of her grandfather's might were mixed up with bits of later recollections, where the great fight with the "White Devil's" brig and ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... the deck of the Lively of Whitby, under circumstances of safety! They received from their townsmen the warmest congratulations; and while each individual was forward in contributing his assistance towards the restoration of their benumbed bodies, each appeared sensible that their narrow escape from death was highly providential. The forbearance of God is wonderful. Perhaps these very men a few hours before, were impiously invoking their own destruction, or venting imprecations upon their fellow beings! True it is that the goodness ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... those tortures said to be In Acheron, the deep, they all are ours Here in this life. No Tantalus, benumbed With baseless terror, as the fables tell, Fears the huge boulder hanging in the air: But, rather, in life an empty dread of Gods Urges mortality, and each one fears Such fall of fortune as may chance to him. Nor eat the vultures into Tityus Prostrate ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... Miriam. She must have had cause to dread some unspeakable evil from this strange persecutor, and to know that this was the very crisis of her calamity; for as he drew near, such a cold, sick despair crept over her that it impeded her breath, and benumbed her natural promptitude of thought. Miriam seemed dreamily to remember falling on her knees; but, in her whole recollection of that wild moment, she beheld herself as in a dim show, and could not well distinguish what was done and suffered; ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... peninsula had for its ruler a prince who sought his glory in smothering free thought among his own people, and in wasting his immense resources in vain efforts to repress it also outside of his own dominions through all Europe. From that hour, Spain became benumbed and estranged from all the advances of science and art, by means of which other nations, and especially England, developed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... silence we had come. I had felt there was much I would like, and ought, to say, but something in Tom's mood or mine, or in the situation, benumbed my thoughts so they would not come forth, or jumbled them so I knew not where to begin. Arrived upon the ground with a palpitating sense of the nearness of the event, we found ourselves still less fit for utterance of the things deepest ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... is before her, and yet she seems hardly conscious of his presence. He gazes on her with surprise, and then gently whispers her dear name. The well known voice recalls her scattered ideas, and its magic sound awakens her benumbed sensations to fresh warmth and life. She raised her head, threw aside the rich clusters of her hair, and a stream of moonlight falling on her countenance revealed to Gomez Arias ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... membranes it is necessary not only to thoroughly remove the tumor but to treat the diseased membrane at the point from which the polypus springs; otherwise another tumor may develop at the same point. The nasal passage having been thoroughly anaesthetized, or benumbed, by the use of cocaine, the nasal speculum is introduced, and by means of reflected light from the head mirror worn by the operator, the interior of the nostril is brought into view. (See ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... yet the best swimmer in the world would have been drowned ere he reached it, as the water was so bitterly cold, that when I was bailing for my life, and, consequently, in pretty violent exercise, my hands became quite benumbed ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... happened, overturning every calculation, every prevision. I am stupefied, benumbed—I was at the Marquise's, where it was darker than usual. One solitary lamp flickered in a corner, dozing under a huge shade. A fat gentleman, buried in an easy-chair, drowsily retailed the news ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... benumbed his senses. Basil, the wife, the children,—where were they? A terrible death, surely, to be torn from the warm securities of the hearth-stone, without a moment's warning, and hurled into the midst ...
— The Christmas Miracle - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... on some grassy eminence. When night fell the waters grew louder, a stinging wind swept the woods, and the carriage, staggering from rut to rut, seemed every moment about to land them in some invisible ravine. Fear and cold at last benumbed the little boy, and when he woke he was being lifted from his seat and torches were flashing on a high escutcheoned doorway set in battlemented walls. He was carried into a hall lit with smoky oil-lamps and hung with armour ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... that strange, benumbed state that had deadened for a while all his sense of suffering—coming back to a consciousness of utter bereavement and insupportable anguish—anguish written in such awful characters upon his pallid and writhen brow that Beatrice and her ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... no pain. Nor would there have been any plaudits for MARCUS CURTIUS when he leapt into the gulf, had he been so drunk as not to know what he was about. The will which depends on unscrupulousness is like the benumbed hand or intoxicated soul. Quench conscience, as a sense of right and obligation, and you can, of course, do a great deal from which another would shrink—and therefore be called "weak-minded" ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... and heaven bear sway. Paul made much of a tender conscience, else he had never done as he did, nor suffered what we read of. 'And herein,' saith he, 'do I exercise myself, to have always a conscience void of offence toward God and toward men' (Acts 24:16). But this could not a stony, benumbed, bribed, deluded, or a muzzled conscience do. Paul was like the nightingale with his breast against the thorn.[15] That his heart might still keep waking, he would accustom himself to the meditation of those things that should beget both love and fear; and would always be very chary, lest he ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... days she floated hither and thither over the sea, soaked to the skin, nigh dead with cold, and so nearly benumbed that but for little Frillikin, who snuggled to her bosom, and kept a little warmth in her, she must have perished a hundred times. She was famished with hunger, but on seeing some oysters in their shells she took and ate as many ...
— Old-Time Stories • Charles Perrault
... the Lady made better time when he was on her back. When the struggle to remount had been repeated until nature could no longer by any staggering effort be made to respond to his will, until his legs were no longer a part of his benumbed being—until below his hips he had no body answerable to his commands, but only two insensible masses of lead that anchored him to the ground—he still forced the frozen feet to carry him, in a feeble, monstrous gait beside the Lady, while he dragged with his hands ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... unusual fixtures about his collar, and learn that the poor animal has a galled shoulder, so raw and inflamed that all his first efforts in the morning are attended by pain, and that he only works well after the flesh has become benumbed by pressure. I ask his driver why he does not turn the creature into the pasture, and let the ulcer heal, and am told that he has been treated thus repeatedly, but that it always returns when labor is resumed. There is a livery stable that I visit frequently; ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... unending laurel-wreaths Beside her Cretan helmsman and her king! Wax-pale, the world stands listening and holds Its breath, benumbed with fright! ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... that we crept sideways even to the windows to look out upon the world. There was everything to repel—the cold, the frost, the hardness, the snow, dark sky and ground, leaflessness; the very furze chilled and all benumbed. Yet the forest was still beautiful. There was no day that we did not, all of us, glance out at it and admire it, and say something about it. Harder and harder grew the frost, yet still the forest-clad hills possessed a something that drew the mind open to their largeness and grandeur. ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... bear such agitation any longer; besides, it is hard even for a strong man to picture in his imagination certain images without risking the loss of his reason. Only in this way can I explain the strange hallucination which appeared before my fatigued eyes in the solitude of my cell. As though benumbed I gazed aimlessly at the tightly closed door, when suddenly it seemed to me that some one was standing behind me. I had felt this deceptive sensation before, so I did not turn around for some time. But when I turned around ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... ability of their country to effect her redemption. Some doubted the capacity, and perhaps the sincerity, of the chiefs. Some were schooled in duplicity, and under the ermine, or under the privy councillor's robe, carried fierce hearts, benumbed by mendicancy and seared by shame. But the first flash of their country's liberty would see them ranged at that country's side, repaying with the fiercest hate the beggar crumbs which England had flung from the fragments of her overloaded ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... the city parks, famished, benumbed and mute, Two hundred thousand refugees, homeless and destitute! Upon the hard, cold ground they crouch—the wrecks of Pomp and Pride; Milady and the city waifs are huddled side by side. And there, 'neath shelter rude and frail, we hear ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... made a collection of all the poisons which she could procure, and administered portions of them all, that she might see which were sudden and which were slow in their effects, and also learn which produced the greatest distress and suffering, and which, on the other hand, only benumbed and stupefied the faculties, and thus extinguished life with the least infliction of pain. These experiments were not confined to such vegetable and mineral poisons as could be mingled with the food or administered in a potion. Cleopatra took an equal ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... the culprits were dragged naked into the midst of the assembly, and at the same time all the apparatus for punishment was brought forth. They were tied to the stake, scourged with rods, and decapitated; while those who were present were so benumbed with fear, that not only no expression of dissatisfaction at the severity of the punishment, but not even a groan was heard. They were then all dragged out, the place was cleared, and the men cited by name ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... stood cold and motionless. He was stunned, benumbed, by what he saw and heard. Laura drew away from Hector, and tried to free her ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... positive discomfort, positive pain, attacked him as he stood ruefully before the porch. His perspiration had dried upon him; and though the wind had now fallen, a binding frost was setting in stronger with every hour, and he felt benumbed and sick at heart. What was to be done? Late as was the hour, improbable as was success, he would try the house of his adopted father, the chaplain ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... one were allowed to pass an opinion on the events of War, except at a moment when he is benumbed by frost, sinking from heat and thirst, or dying with hunger and fatigue, we should certainly have fewer judgments correct *objectively; but they would be so, SUBJECTIVELY, at least; that is, they would contain ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... vessel was wrecked upon the Connecticut shore. She lay some fifty yards from the land; some of the passengers got on shore something as St. Paul did upon the island of Melita. Mr. Van Wart, deeming it safer to hold to the wreck, remained until he was getting benumbed, and feared losing the use of his limbs. Letting himself down into the water, he paddled and swam amongst the broken stuff from the ship until he reached the shore. He was, however, too much exhausted to get upon the land, but some one, who had observed ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... fall from the storm-swept sky. But nothing really interested him now. Since he had heard of Lilla's death, the gloom of his remorse, emphasised by Mimi's upbraiding, had made more hopeless his cruel, selfish, saturnine nature. He heard no sound, for his normal faculties seemed benumbed. ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... have made good against the whole Christian army, over mountains whose peaks were lost in clouds, and valleys whose depths were never warmed by a sun. The winds were exceedingly bleak, and the weather inclement, so that men, as well as horses, exhausted by the fatigues of previous service, were benumbed by the intense cold, and many of them frozen to death. Many more, losing their way in the intricacies of the sierra, would have experienced the same miserable fate, had it not been for the marquis of Cadiz, whose tent was pitched on one of the loftiest hills, and who caused beacon fires to ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... could only by shaking our heads express our inability to profit by their kindness. Understanding what we meant, they immediately cut our thongs, and the youngest of the four perceiving that my arms were benumbed from having been confined so many days, and that I could not use them, showed the most lively commiseration for my sufferings. She gently chafed my wrists with her hands, and showed every sign of pity ...
— The Privateer's-Man - One hundred Years Ago • Frederick Marryat
... The hard, benumbed look in Ralph's face thawed in the warmth of her presence, and her words, though stern, touched a secret spring in his heart. He made two or three vain attempts to speak, then suddenly ...
— A Good-For-Nothing - 1876 • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... wind drove in the rain forcibly, so that the water came over my bed, and ran about the room, that I was fain to skim it up with a platter. And when my clothes were wet, I had no fire to dry them; so that my body was benumbed with cold, and my fingers swelled, that one was grown as big as two. Though I was at some charge in this room also, yet I could not keep out the wind and rain.... Afterwards I hired a soldier to fetch me water and bread, and something to make a fire of, when I was in a room where a fire ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... holding to the slippery rock in the face of the swift current was one that would have taxed the strength of the strongest man, to say nothing of the almost freezing cold water, which chilled the blood and benumbed the senses. ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Montana • Frank Gee Patchin
... She affected a great indignation, pursing her lips and putting her chin in the air as though wounded in some finer sense, changing so rapidly from one mood to another, filling the room with such shrill clamor, that McTeague was dazed and benumbed. ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... felt that he was very very nearly too late; so nearly, that perhaps in a week or two more Eden might have lost hopelessly, and for ever, all trace of self-respect—might have been benumbed into mental imbecility by the torpedo-like influence of helpless grief. Walter felt as if he had been selfishly looking on while a fellow-creature was fast sinking in the water, and as if it were only at the last possible moment that he had held out a saving hand. But, by God's grace, he did ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... found it impossible to extricate himself. To add to his disaster, the force of his fall broke off, from the main body, the section of ice on which he rested. Borne down by the current, in spite of his vain struggles to free himself, he was unable even to call for aid, his fingers moreover being so benumbed with cold that he found it impossible to unbutton the straps which confined his month. In this emergency he could only utter the strange and unintelligible moan which had reached our ears, and which, mingled ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... I felt much at ease—not chill, as I ought to have been after sitting so still for at least two hours; my cheek and arms were not benumbed by pressure against the hard desk. No wonder. Instead of the bare wood on which I had laid them, I found a thick shawl, carefully folded, substituted for support, and another shawl (both taken from the corridor where such things hung) wrapped ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... deaf to the plaintive cries of Thy feeble creature, shouldst Thou still be veiled, then I am content to remain benumbed with cold, my wings bedraggled, and once more I rejoice in ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... deep. On the Monday morning the Bacton boat made another attempt, fell in with them at ten o'clock, and landed them at Palling, more dead than alive, whence, as soon as they could be moved, they were brought to the Yarmouth Sailors' Home, their swollen limbs, benumbed frames, and ghastly countenances testifying to the sufferings they had undergone. At this Home the poor men remained several weeks, receiving every attention from the ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... in the direction of home, but when she reached the road leading to the sea, she went along it to Per Nielsen's farm. There they picked her up, benumbed with misery. "Granny's dead!" she broke out over and over again, looking from one to the other with terror in her eyes. That was all they could get out of her. When they proposed taking her home to the Crow's Nest, she began to scream, so they put ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo
... to touch.] Numbness — N. numbness &c (physical insensibility) 376; anaesthesia; pins and needles. V. benumb &c 376. Adj. numb; benumbed &c v.; deadened; intangible, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... engaged on the pier was perilous and difficult, for the lines had to be fired against a head wind. The piers were covered with ice, and the gale was so strong that the men could hardly stand, while the crews of the wrecks were so benumbed that they could make little effort to ...
— Battles with the Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... necessary, he had put off the evil moment till the postponement had become cruel. But he had lived through it so often in thought, he had so acutely suffered with her in imagination the staggering humiliation of it all, that now, when the time had come, his feelings were benumbed. As he turned into his own grounds that day it seemed to him that his deadness of emotion was such that he could carry the thing through mechanically, as a skilled surgeon uses a knife. If he found her at tea in the drawing-room he might ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... how easily acquaintances, who call themselves friends, can change, when their interest comes, in the slightest degree, in competition with their friendship. Hurried by his impatient rival, and with his hand so much benumbed that he could scarcely feel how to fix the arrow in the string, he drew the bow. The arrow was within a quarter of an inch of Master Sweepstakes' mark, which was the nearest that had yet been hit. Hal seized his second arrow. "If I have any luck," said he but just as he pronounced ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... dependent for all its power on the vigor and freshness of the religion which animated it; and as that vigor and purity departed, losing its own vitality, and sinking into nerveless rest, not deprived of its beauty, but benumbed and incapable ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... was no comprehension in them, and she looked about in wonder. Then, as her benumbed brain again took up its work, ...
— The Golf Course Mystery • Chester K. Steele
... had I possessed my overcoat it would have been bad enough to bear, but with only moderately thick clothing on, I felt the wind pierce to my very bones. I rode on, however, as long as I was able to sit my horse, but at length my limbs became so benumbed by the cold that I could ride no further. The poor beast also was almost exhausted with his exertions in plunging on through ...
— Snow Shoes and Canoes - The Early Days of a Fur-Trader in the Hudson Bay Territory • William H. G. Kingston
... state I lay. How long I know not—it must have been for several hours. I was brought to consciousness by a sense of cold. I was benumbed—a steady rain was falling, and from the condition of my clothes, which were completely saturated, must have been falling for some time previous. I rose with pain and difficulty to my feet. I was still as one stunned and stupified, by one of those extremes of suffering for which the overcharged ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... wand over his head. Instantly the sky became covered with clouds, the fire went down, snow fell in large flakes, an icy wind howled round the mountain. Amid the fury of the storm Helen added curses against her stepsister. The cloak failed to warm her benumbed limbs. The mother kept on waiting for her; she looked from the window, she watched from the doorstep, but her daughter came not. The hours passed slowly, ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... sunken prostration of her intellect, the old woman was insensible even to her consolation. She sipped and drank, it is true; but as if the stream warmed not the benumbed region through which it passed, she continued muttering in ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sleeper. Toward morning he awoke benumbed and cold. As he stirred the dying fire, the wind, which was now blowing strongly, brought to his cheek that which caused the blood ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... in the bitterness of the knowledge that he was sick, Hazel seemed to herself half benumbed; and sat stupidly dwelling on that one fact, feeling it, and yet less with a sense of pain than of an intolerable burden. A weight that made her stir and move sometimes, as if she could get away from it so. It was no use to tell her ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... will be good," and she rubbed her hands at the prospect of not having to crouch under a leaky awning when the rain came pelting down, or over a tiny fire in a brass bowl in the winter, to thaw her frozen and benumbed hands. ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... the next moment he understood. Just within the rays of the electric light, across the street, was Afternoon Tea Willie, waiting faithfully with chattering teeth and benumbed toes. He stood and stared at Roderick as they passed, and then slowly followed at a distance, the picture of abject desolation. Roderick found it almost impossible to keep from laughing, until he began to consider his own ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... for help and mercy; but, though I gave a good account of myself, and he knew my captain, who lodged hard by him, it was to no purpose. They beat and mangled me in a shameful manner, leaving me near dead. I lost so much blood from the wounds I received, that I lay quite motionless, and was so benumbed that I could not feel any thing for many hours. Early in the morning they took me away to the jail. As I did not return to the ship all night, my captain, not knowing where I was, and being uneasy that I did not then make my appearance, ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano
... repeated, and sank back benumbed. It was all theirs to the last farthing: my grandfather had died ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... perhaps because it is automatic, regard for its own comfort and well-being—it cannot be induced to tie itself into a knot. It is in mind that once in the old country a very long and very cold lethargic boa constrictor became benumbed and forgot the primal instinct of the family, and paid for its absent-mindedness with its life. But the ordinary snake under extraordinary conditions, whatsoever its length, is most careful to disentangle ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... Latin Church has its holy Latin, and a trilingual bible of "Hebrew, Latin, Greek," was said by pious fathers of that Church, to represent "Christ crucified between two thieves." The Hindoos have their sacred Sanscrit, and so of the rest. The benumbed and frozen mind of the Esquimaux, amidst the fat seals, blubber, and seas of oil in which it revels and swims, when anticipating the joys of the polar heaven, makes the tongue involuntarily speak in genuine Esquimauxan gibberish. It is, however, not surprising that the language ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... laid to, and the towering mass of the great deep-sea tramp began to be dimly seen through the darkness. There was little confusion in making the transfer of the castaways. Most of them seemed still benumbed with their recent terrible exposure. They docilely allowed themselves to be pushed into the pilot tender and again endured the experience of being lowered to the shifting waves below. Silently, like frightened ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... with a girl who was always called the shot partridge, because her eyes were supposed to be like those of a dying bird. I tried to laugh to myself as I remembered this. But I felt cold, and my senses seemed benumbed as by a great horror. I sat like a stone, with my eyes fixed upon Margot, trying painfully to read into her all that the words of Professor Black had suggested to me—trying, but with the wish not to succeed. I was ...
— The Return Of The Soul - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... upon the old man's shoulders, and he turned and went with them without a word. Through her crack in the wall Bessie watched him go till the dear old head with its fringe of white hairs and the bent frame were no more visible. Then at last, benumbed and exhausted by the horrors she was passing through, her faculties failed her, and she fell forward in a ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... should be inculcated till courage and enterprise are wholly repressed and the mind congested in perpetual inactivity by the fatal influence of frigorifick wisdom.' Is there not some danger, we ask, that the mind will be benumbed into perpetual torpidity by the influence of this soporific sapience? It is still true, however, that this Johnsonese, so often burlesqued and ridiculed, was, as far as we can judge, a genuine product. Macaulay says that it is more offensive than the mannerism of Milton or Burke, because ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... but inwardly something torments me—a gloomy presentiment, unrest, bad dreams, sleeplessness, yearning, indifference to everything, to the desire to live and the desire to die. It seems to me often as if my mind were benumbed, I feel a heavenly repose in my heart, in my thoughts I see images from which I cannot tear myself away, and this tortures me beyond all measure. In short, it is a combination of feelings that are difficult to describe...Pardon me, dear ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... each day, almost froze the noses and ears of the pedestrians, their feet began to pain them so that each step was a penance, and when they reached the open country it looked so mournful and depressing in its limitless mantle of white that they all hastily retraced their steps, with bodies benumbed and hearts heavy. ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... body from which nothing could rouse her. Her mother was in despair. Richard Gardner was too ill to come to see the girl he loved, and he did not write. The blow that had fallen upon his promising and prosperous life seemed to have shattered his nerves and benumbed his initiative. He had no words of hope for Rosalie; so he said nothing. Thus, in silence and apart, the two were suffering their young agony of wrecked hopes and ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... finish his sentence Browne set himself to climb the tree beneath which they had passed the night. His cramped limbs and benumbed fingers made this no easy task and more than once he was near losing his grasp and finishing the story by a headlong fall to the frozen earth, but this danger was passed also, and presently hastening ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... useless. The shattered masts were tied in four-sided racks. To these {187} Iberville had the wounded bound, and the crew plunged for the shore. Eighteen men perished going ashore in the darkness. On land were two feet of snow. No sooner did the French castaways build fires to warm their benumbed limbs than bullets whistled into camp. Governor Bayly of Port Nelson had sent out his sharpshooters. Luckily Iberville's other ships now joined him, and, mustering his forces, the dauntless French leader marched against the fort. Storm ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... On the outside of the wire screen clung a number of house-flies, early-hatched for the season and numb with the night's cold. As Forrest ate he watched the hunting of the meat-eating yellow- jackets. Sturdy, more frost-resistant than bees, they were already on the wing and preying on the benumbed flies. Despite the rowdy noise of their flight, these yellow hunters of the air, with rarely ever a miss, pounced on their helpless victims and sailed away with them. The last fly was gone ere Forrest had sipped his last sip of coffee, marked ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... read a paper indifferently; his even voice filled the hall with weariness, and the people, enfolded by it, sat motionless as if benumbed. Four lawyers softly but animatedly conversed with the prisoners. They all moved powerfully, briskly, and called ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... not in the sea nor in the strife We feel benumbed and wish to be no more, But in the after silence on the shore, When all is lost, except a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... death. I have seen a dog and sheep die hardly. And thus may a wicked man do, because there is an antipathy betwixt nature and death. But even while, even then, when death and nature are struggling for mastery, the soul, the conscience, may be as besotted, as benumbed, as senseless and ignorant of its miserable state, as the block or bed on which the sick lies. And thus they may die like a chrisom-child in show, but indeed like one who by the judgment of God is bound over to eternal damnation; and that also by the same judgment is kept from ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... had long before reading the wonderfully original work of Doctor Holmes reflected deeply on the moral and immoral influences which serpent worship of old, in Syria and other lands, must have had upon its followers. But Elsie Venner sets forth the serpent nature as benumbed or suspended by cold New England winters and New England religions, moral and social influences; the Ophites of old and the Cairene gypsy showed the boy as warmed to life in lands whose winters are as burning summers. Elsie ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... scales were now frozen to ice on his cheeks; his clothes were completely incrusted with the hard snow, which had been beating into them by the strength of the blast, and his joints were getting stiff and benumbed. The tumult of the tempest, the whirling of the snow-clouds, and the thick snow, now falling, and again tossed upwards by sudden gusts to the sky, deprived him of all power of reflection, and rendered him, though not altogether blind or deaf, yet incapable of forming any distinct ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... stung yet calmed with its grateful, stern menace. A thin drizzle of rain was beginning to fall, and the avenues were filled with the furious clamor of belated traffic. The clangor of the overhead trains—almost incessant at this hour—benumbed the ear, and every side-street rang with the hideous clatter of drays and express-carts, each driver, each motor-man, laboring in a kind of sullen frenzy to reach his barn before six o'clock, while truculent pedestrians, tired, eager, and exacting, ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... not afford flame itself, it would enable us to kindle a blaze. Close below it I discovered a quantity of dry leaves, and we now had the means of making what we so much required, a fire to warm our benumbed limbs. No hunter in the prairies is ever without a flint and steel, and we soon had a cheerful fire, burning away between the roots of a thick tree, round which we crouched with our buffalo robes over our shoulders, Boxer joining us to ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... if the very feelings, benumbed and congealed as they may hitherto have been, were suddenly dissolving under some happier influence, and that,—with the external sign—the weakness and pliability of childhood—we were magically regaining its singleness of ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... out the little inventor, his benumbed faculties beginning slowly to assemble themselves. "Why, there ain't a finer, better-spoken young man to ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... dark corner of the room, with his blue, dull eyes, and nervously twitching his lips, pulled toward the letter v. The general frowned at the interruption, and, after a moment's silence, took the card, put on his pince-nez and, groaning from pain in his loins, rose to his full height, rubbing his benumbed fingers. ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... shooting; but the larger animals retire at their approach and seldom are seen. Other gun people, too wise or too lifeless to make much noise, move slowly along the trails and about the open spots of the woods, like benumbed beetles in a snowdrift. Such hunters are themselves hunted by the animals, which in perfect safety follow ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... the direction of the Tuileries, and crossed the gardens with an undecided step. He walked as if he were in some desert, elbowed by men whom he did not see, hearing through all the voices of the crowd one voice alone—the voice of Death. He was lost in the thoughts that benumbed him at last, like the criminals who used to be taken in carts from the Palais de Justice to the Place de Greve, where the scaffold awaited them reddened with all the ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... that it certainly was tough. He was glad they were to land, being very sure that if an Indian did shoot him he would not feel it, so thoroughly benumbed was ...
— Lost In The Air • Roy J. Snell
... the seat of thirst is in the digestive system. When athirst (we have often felt the sensation when hunting) we feel distinctly that all the inhaling portions of the nostrils, mouth and throat are benumbed and hardened, and that if thirst be sometimes appeased by the application of fluids to other parts of the body, as in the bath, the reason is that as soon as they are absorbed they hurry rapidly to the seat of the evil and ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... herself as the outer world wexedly beholds a creature swung along to the doing of things against the better mind. An outer world is thoughtless of situations which prepare us to meet the objectionable with a will benumbed;—if we do not, as does that outer world, belong to the party of the readily heroical. She scourged her weakness: and the intimation of the truth stood over her, more than ever manifest, that the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... community, involved Bird, and he thought his neighbors looked askance at him: as if they believed he could have moved Northwick to action, if he would. Northwick could not have moved himself. He was like one benumbed. He let the days go by, and made no attempt to realize the schemes for the retrieval of his fortunes that had ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... you?" she asked, putting her face down close, while by vigorous patting and rubbing she tried to give life to the benumbed, cowering little figure, which staggered along helplessly, clutching her ...
— The Green Satin Gown • Laura E. Richards
... powerless as if the bones had been removed from his legs and arms, and as if, instead of a tongue in his mouth, there were a moist rag. He wanted to shout at her, and let her know once for all that she had no right to ask anything of him, but his heart was benumbed by craven fear, and to his lips there rose a senseless phrase which he knew to be ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... watch-gun, the camp presented a most distressing spectacle. The Arabs and negroes of the convoy were lying motionless in the open air, rolled in their burnooses. Many of these poor creatures were but lightly clad, and had the lower limbs entirely naked. They were so benumbed and stupified with cold, that they refused to rise and load the camels; they begged to be allowed to lie still and die in peace. The cattle also were in a sad condition, not only from cold, but hunger; for the snow-covered ground afforded them no pasture. As part of the provisions ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 - Volume 18, New Series, August 28, 1852 • Various
... months together in long and dangerous marches; harassed, perhaps, in his rear today; harassing others to-morrow; detached here; countermanded there; resting this night out upon his arms; beat up in his shirt the next; benumbed in his joints; perhaps without straw in his tent to kneel on, [he] must say his prayers how and when he can. I believe, said I—for I was piqued, quoth the Corporal, for the reputation of the army—I believe, an't please your reverence, ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... monkeys twitter plaintively, trembling in the chilly air. The parrots have nothing to say: they look benumbed, and sit on their ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... that had so sharply divided the two armies?" he asked himself and could not answer. "Can something bad have happened to me?" he wondered as he got up: and at that moment he felt that something superfluous was hanging on his benumbed left arm. The wrist felt as if it were not his. He examined his hand carefully, vainly trying to find blood on it. "Ah, here are people coming," he thought joyfully, seeing some men running toward him. "They will help ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... the same affectionate, quiet smile that he had shown when leaving his mother's room in former times. Then she summoned them all. They sat down again round the table while she made the tea and poured it out. But the gathering grew sad, benumbed, as it were, with lassitude. Sandoz vainly tried a diversion by admitting Bertrand, the big dog, who grovelled at sight of the sugar-basin, and ended by going to sleep near the stove, where he snored like a man. Since ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... attended with sundry interruptions and adventures, and night overtook us in the midst of a forest, uncertain where we were, and half dead from exposure to the storm; but after several hours of hard riding, we found ourselves, drenched to the skin and benumbed with the cold, before the door of a one-story log cabin, tenanted ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... failed in his estimate of her. The explanation lies no doubt in the fact that in these man-and-woman affairs instinct is a surer guide than education and intelligence, unless, indeed, the intelligence is preternaturally keen. Lockwood's student life had benumbed the elemental instinct, which in the miners, the "men," yet remained vigorous and unblunted, and by means of which they assessed Felice and her harmless blandishments at their true worth. For all Lockwood's culture, his own chuck-tenders, ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... of his plot depends on the generous confidence of his victim. Polonius is handled in the same way with special reference to Hamlet. His thinking is marked by slowness and insincerity, and when he comes in contact with the rapid current of Hamlet's mind he is benumbed; he can only mutter, "If this is madness, there is method in it." What little portable wisdom was given to him in the first Act is soon withdrawn—he stammers in his deceit, and the old indirectness having no material of thought to work upon becomes a circumlocution ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... the day, one of the older midshipmen being usually with him. "Well I remember," writes one of his officers, "that on being one day relieved to go down to my dinner, I was obliged to have some of the main-top-men to help me down the rigging, I was so benumbed with the intense cold: yet the captain was there six or seven hours at a time, without complaining, ...
— The Life of Admiral Viscount Exmouth • Edward Osler
... like a person stunned with a great blow, and Alice wished grief had had any other effect upon her. It lasted for days. A kind of stupor hung over her; tears did not come; the violent strain of every nerve and feeling seemed to have left her benumbed. She would sleep long, heavy sleeps the greater part of the time, and seemed to have no power to do ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... of sun and fair weather, and then fifty miles of bitter, aching cold, with nights of peril from the increasing chill, so that Jim dared not sleep lest he should never wake again, but die benumbed and exhausted! Yet Arrowhead slept through all. Day after day so, and then ten miles of storm such as come only to the vast barrens of the northlands; and woe to the traveller upon whom the icy wind and the blinding snow descended! Woe ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... partial insensibility sets in—I have known cases where men have slept while being subjected to the most awful tortures—and such was undoubtedly the case with me on that memorable night. My sensibility had become so benumbed that I had partially lost control of my mental processes, and my thoughts broke away at intervals to dwell for a few moments upon some entirely trivial matter which, one would have supposed, could not possibly have had the slightest interest for me, under ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... off-ward, turned the wrong way; it was anciently used of a back-handed or left-handed blow in battle, of squinting eyes, etc. Clumsy, on the other hand (from clumse, also through the Norwegian), signifies benumbed, stiffened with cold; this is the original meaning of clumsy fingers, clumsy limbs. Thus, awkward primarily refers to action, clumsy to condition. A tool, a vehicle, or the human frame may be clumsy in shape or build, awkward in motion. The clumsy man is almost of necessity awkward, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... fight ensued. Many of them lay stretched on the ground, with tomahawks deeply implanted in their skulls: and many others, as the common phrase is, were "dead drunk." This was an exceedingly fortunate circumstance for us. With their senses benumbed, of course they had forgotten their avowal to roast us, or, it may be, the Indian to whom I proposed ransom had conferred with the others, and they, no doubt, agreed to spare our lives until the morning. ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... blissful intervals would not last long. A recollection of something I had heard or read would come back to startle me out of the confident happy mood; reason would revive as from a benumbed or hypnotized condition, and the mocking voice would be heard telling me that I had been under a delusion. Once more I would abhor and shudder at the black phantom, and when the thought of annihilation was most insistent, I would often recall the bitter, ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson |
