"Torpid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... all these torpid men start like a sudden flick of a whip. Then again, motionless where they lay, the force of habit made some of them repeat the order in hardly audible murmurs. Captain Allistoun glanced down at his crew, and several, with fumbling fingers and hopeless movements, tried to cast themselves adrift. ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... discussion in Spain,"—exclaims proudly an eminent Spanish writer. Spectacles like that which we have just seen were one of the elements which in a barbarous and unenlightened age contributed strongly to the consolidation of that unthinking and ardent faith which has fused the nation into one torpid and homogeneous mass of superstition. No better means could have been devised for the purpose. Leaving out of view the sublime teachings of the large and tolerant morality of Jesus, the clergy made his personality the sole object of worship and reverence. By dwelling almost exclusively upon ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... its roots in an honourable past; its theory is fine; not all the big names of the British aristocracy can be traced back to strong ales or weak (Lucy) Waters. Even those who desire the abolition of the House of Peers, or look on it, with Bagehot, as "a vapid accumulation of torpid comfort," cannot deny that it is an institution that has grown up naturally with the country, and that it is only now (if even now) that it is felt with anything like universality to be an anomaly. The American society which is typified by the four hundred ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... had strongly felt the silence and vacancy of the depriving day on which you vanished. How prone are our hearts perversely to quarrel with the friendly coercion of employment at the very instant in which it is clearing the torpid and injurious mists of unavailing melancholy!' Then follows a sprightly attack before which Johnson may have quailed indeed. 'Is the Fe-fa-fum of literature that snuffs afar the fame of his brother authors, and thirsts for its destruction, to be allowed to ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... arrived at Bahia Blanca, September 7th, 1832, we thought nature had granted scarcely a living creature to this sandy and dry country. By digging, however, in the ground, several insects, large spiders, and lizards were found in a half-torpid state. On the 15th, a few animals began to appear, and by the 18th (three days from the equinox), everything announced the commencement of spring. The plains were ornamented by the flowers of a pink wood-sorrel, wild peas, cenotherae, and geraniums; ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... quietly from the deepest fortress of Love to these simple and generous natures, who live in each other's lives. I tried to picture to myself what my own thoughts would be if condemned to this sad condition; I could only foresee a fretful irritability, a wild anguish, alternating with a torpid stupefaction. "I seem to love the old books better than ever," my friend had said, smiling softly, in the course of the afternoon; "I used to read them hurriedly and greedily in the old days, but now I have time to think over them—to reflect—I never knew what a ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Those nations that are partly civilized exhibit more or less industry, and are acquainted with some of the arts; but barbarous nations are acquainted with none of the improvements that elevate society, and exhibit a state of lounging indolence and torpid inactivity. If there be noise, it is not the rattle and whirl of business, or the hum of industry; but the noise of giddy mirth, boisterous and unmeaning laughter, or fierce and angry contention. If ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble
... subject. Doctor Holmes kept a rattlesnake in a cage for a pet, and was accustomed to stir it up with an ox-goad. A New York doctor lost his life by fooling with a poisonous snake, and another in Liverpool frightened a whole congregation of scientists with two torpid rattlesnakes which suddenly came to life on the president's table. Does it arise from their custom of dealing with deadly poisons, or is it because they officiate as ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... the freedom and natural movement of the thoughts. My reason, however, for noticing this peculiarity in Isocrates, is by way of fixing the attention upon the superiority, even artificial ornaments, of downright practical business and the realities of political strife, over the torpid atmosphere of a study or a school. Cicero, long after, had the same passion for numerositas, and the full, pompous rotundity of cadence. But in Cicero, all habits and all faculties were nursed by the daily practice of life and its impassioned realities, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... with dances after their fashion, and made some rude attempts at performing a sort of pantomime. I may now close this detail with observing that the natives of this mountainous region have stronger animal spirits than those of the plains, and pass their lives with more variety than the torpid inhabitants of the coast; that they breathe a spirit of independence, and being frequently engaged in warfare, village against village, they would be better prepared to resist any ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... the greenest of cloaks thrown over them, lifting up their heads and sharing in the general rejoicing, in the glory of their annual resurrection. Is it in summer, with its myriads of blooms, and its thousand thousand happy voices, the silent torpid river, basking in the light of the sun, and responding only to the fishes as they frisk near the surface? Or is it in the autumn, with its many shades, with its long avenues on which nature has lavished whole tubes of burnt sienna and vermilion; when you tread on gorgeous paths heavy ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren
... answer, which betrayed a perfect insensibility, convinced me that intelligence resulting from methodical and practical study is preferable to the torpid insanity incident ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... which he is not writing. He has got to take it easy somehow, and the question is what is he to do. He can't, as a rule, do much in the way of hard exercise. Violent exercise in the open air is pleasant enough, but it leaves the brain torpid and stagnant. A man who really makes a business of writing has got to live through ten or twelve hours of a day when he isn't writing. He can't afford to read very much—at least he can't afford to read authors whom he admires, because they affect his style. ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Arias formed the source from which the drooping frame of Monteblanco gathered life. His wrongs, instead of accelerating the progress of death, seemed instantly to check its strides, while the desire of revenge so powerfully operated on his mind, that it warmed the torpid ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... that of rest. Though the artillery of the left wing of the Russians kept up a steady fire on this mass,—visible like a stain now black, now flaming, in the midst of the trackless snow,—this shot and shell seemed to the torpid creatures only one inconvenience the more. It was like a thunderstorm, despised by all because the lightning strikes so few; the balls struck only here and there, the dying, the sick, the dead sometimes! Stragglers arrived in groups continually; but once here those perambulating corpses ...
— Adieu • Honore de Balzac
... people a trivial price for obtaining a revolution. A cheap, bloodless reformation, a guiltless liberty, appear flat and vapid to their taste. There must be a great change of scene; there must be a magnificent stage effect; there must be a grand spectacle to rouse the imagination, grown torpid with the lazy enjoyment of sixty years' security, and the still unanimating repose of public prosperity. The preacher found them all in the French Revolution. This inspires a juvenile warmth through his whole frame. His enthusiasm kindles as he advances; and when ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... seemed to him bound by formalism and incredibly blind to the immense and vivid interest of the news whereby it was surrounded, as if a man, set down in a meadow full of deep and clear springs, should elect to drink from a shallow, torpid, and muddy trickle. Legislation, taxes, transportation problems, the Greatness of Our City, our National Duty (whatever it might be at the time—and according to opinion), the drink question, the race problem, labor and capital; these were ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... deaf," explained the captain. "She's only a little slow. Constitutionally torpid—if I may use the expression. I am merely loud with her (and I beg you will honor me by being loud, too) as a necessary stimulant to her ideas. Shout at her—and her mind comes up to time. Speak to her—and she drifts miles away ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... can become weak, and his courage die out, and his zeal become torpid apathy and cowardly wish to shuffle off responsibility and shirk work, who shall stand? The lessons of self-distrust, of the nearness to one another of the most opposite emotions in our weak natures, of the depth of gloom into which the boldest and brightest servant of God may fall as ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... incessant vibrating sound that came from the arteries of her throat was painful to those near her. With heavy feet and enfeebled body, she dragged herself along, as if life were too heavy a burden for her. Her faculties and her senses were so torpid that she swooned for no cause at all, for so small a matter as the fatigue of ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... dragging to their nests—show the greatest avidity for sweet liquids. They are capable of absorbing large quantities, which they disgorge into the mouths of their companions. In winter time, when the ants are nearly torpid and do not require much nourishment, two or three ants told off as foragers are sufficient to provide for the whole nest. We all know how ants keep their herds in the shape of aphides, or ant cows, which supply ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... "Quarterly Review", the calumnies which pursued him, and the coldness of all but a very few friends, checked his enthusiasm for composition. Of this there is abundant proof in his correspondence. In a letter to Leigh Hunt, dated January 25, 1822, he says: "My faculties are shaken to atoms and torpid. I can write nothing; and if "Adonais" had no success, and excited no interest, what incentive can I have to write?" Again: "I write little now. It is impossible to compose except under the strong excitement of an assurance of finding sympathy in what you ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... reflection upon the Swedish race. They are industrious and energetic when occasion requires, but, like all people who live at the extreme North, acquire tropical habits of indolence from the climate. During the tedious winters, when the days are but six hours long, all who can afford it become torpid, like frogs, and lie up in their houses till the summer sun thaws them out. Balls, parties, and sleigh-riding occasionally rouse them up, but lethargy is the general rule. The warm weather comes very suddenly, and then the days are eighteen hours long. This being the ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... of the creation to our eye are the winged insects, and they are not so originally. They acquire that form and that inimitable brilliancy by progressive changes. The slow and creeping caterpillar worm of to day, passes in a few days to a torpid figure, and a state resembling death; and in the next change comes forth in all the miniature magnificence of life, a splendid butterfly. No resemblance of the former creature remains; every thing is changed; all his powers are new, and life is to him another ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... any attention to Prophet Elias, who had been crawling like a torpid caterpillar. For some moments he had been rigidly motionless in one spot. He was leaning against the front of the vault, his ear closely pressed to the crevice at ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... Pip and Dough-Boy made a match, like a black pony and a white one, of equal developments, though of dissimilar color, driven in one eccentric span. But while hapless Dough-Boy was by nature dull and torpid in his intellects, Pip, though over tender-hearted, was at bottom very bright, with that pleasant, genial, jolly brightness peculiar to his tribe; a tribe, which ever enjoy all holidays and festivities with finer, freer relish than any other race. For blacks, the year's calendar should ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... in favour of annual Parliaments. Though a believer in universal suffrage, he prefers to advance by degrees; it would not do to abolish aristocracy and monarchy at one stroke, and to put power into the hands of men rendered brutal and torpid by ages of slavery; and he proposes that the payment of a small sum in direct taxes should be the qualification for the parliamentary franchise. The idea, of course, was not in the sphere of practical politics at the time, but its sobriety shows how far Shelley was from ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... drawn vividly and distinctly, and without exaggeration. We acquire a lively idea of that wonderful combination, that luxuriant growth—of that insular life which is based in boundless wealth and civil freedom, in universal monotony and manifold diversity; formal and capricious, active and torpid, energetic and dull, comfortable and tedious, the envy and derision of the world. Like other unprejudiced travellers of modern times, our author is not very much enchanted with the English form of existence: his cordial and sincere admiration is often accompanied by unsparing ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... to that walk home for a moment—was of stepping on a snake, as there are a great many about, and one especial variety, a small poisonous brown adder, is of so torpid and lazy a nature that it will not glide out of your way, as other snakes do, but lets you tread on it and then bites you. It is very marvelous, considering how many snakes there are, that one hears of so few bad ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... His torpid eyes, sunk in fat, were fixed upon the ikon stand. He saw the long familiar figures of the saints, the verger Matvey puffing out his cheeks and blowing out the candles, the darkened candle stands, the threadbare carpet, the ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... augury, foretoken, adumbration, presage, indication. Simple, innocent, artless, unsophisticated, naive. Skilful, skilled, expert, adept, apt, proficient, adroit, dexterous, deft, clever, ingenious. Skin, hide, pelt, fell. Sleepy, drowsy, slumberous, somnolent, sluggish, torpid, dull, lethargic. Slovenly, slatternly, dowdy, frowsy, blowzy. Sly, crafty, cunning, subtle, wily, artful, politic, designing. Smile, smirk, grin. Solitary, lonely, lone, lonesome, desolate, deserted, uninhabited. ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... torpid monk seek heaven comfortless and alone, God speed him! For my own part, I fear I should never so find the way; let me be wise and religious, but let me be man; wherever Thy Providence places me, or whatever be the road I ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... sea-sickness during the night, my stomach was quite empty. My erotic inconvenience made me very uncomfortable, my mind felt deeply the consciousness of my degradation, and I did not possess a groat! I was in such a miserable state that I had no strength to accept or to refuse anything. I was thoroughly torpid, and I followed the ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... wrung out of simple or medicated hot water is a great relief for acute suffering, such as neuralgia, rheumatic pain, biliousness, constipation, torpid liver, ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... left her. It was getting to be more than a passing whim with Arobin to see her and be with her. He had detected the latent sensuality, which unfolded under his delicate sense of her nature's requirements like a torpid, torrid, sensitive blossom. ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... did not listen. Torpid with comfort and impressed by the sight of the ocean covered with vessels rushing to and fro like wild beasts about their den, they sat speechless, somewhat awed by the soothing and gorgeous sunset. Roland alone talked on without end; he was one of those whom ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... the mass of half-dead humanity became so dense, so deaf, so torpid,—or perhaps it should be said so happy—that Marshal Victor, their heroic defender against twenty thousand Russians under Wittgenstein, was actually compelled to cut his way by force through this forest of men, so as to cross the Beresina ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... sat up to revel in the ecstasy of woe. I went along swimmingly into the little hours, but by two o'clock there was a great sameness about it, and I grew desperately sleepy. I was not going to give it up, however, so I shocked myself into a torpid animation with a cold bath, it being mid-winter, and betwixt bath and bathos, managed to keep agoing till daylight. Once since then I was very happy, and could not keep my eyes shut. Those are the only two times I ever sat ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... have given rise to it. A swollen condition of the mucous membrane of that part of the bowel called the duodenum may produce jaundice, as that mechanically closes the orifice of the biliary duct. In constipation there is an inactive or torpid condition of the bowel, and the bile which passes into the intestine may be absorbed and cause the yellow staining of jaundice. Jaundice is one of the symptoms of Texas fever. It may also arise from the ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... and let not such torpid indifference prevail in your councils.—Slavery, the most implacable enemy to your country, is harboured amongst you; it makes a rapid progress, and ...
— Anti-Slavery Opinions before the Year 1800 - Read before the Cincinnati Literary Club, November 16, 1872 • William Frederick Poole
... disease thy torpid veins invade, Nor Melancholy's phantoms haunt thy shade; Yet hope not life from grief or danger free, Nor think the doom of man reversed for thee— Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes, And pause awhile from Letters to be wise; There mark ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... fair and rounded arm, No crimson stream gush'd o'er its spotless snow; Vainly they sought the frozen heart to warm, And bid its chill'd and torpid currents flow; Vainly they practised every learned charm To call into the veins life's ruddy glow; Stirless, they laid her on that bridal bed, Stirless, she lay, ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... entered the room to inform her mistress that Aunt Judy was ready for her, stood in rigid uprightness, her torpid eyes settled upon the lady. "I reckon," so ran the thought within the mazes of her dark little interior, "dat Miss Rob's wuss disgruntled dan she was dat ebenin' when I make my cake, fur she got two dif'ent kinds o' ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... each other. Selfishness is the offspring of ignorance and mistake; it is the portion of unreflecting infancy, and savage solitude, or of those whom toil or evil occupations have blunted or rendered torpid; disinterested benevolence is the product of a cultivated imagination, and has an intimate connexion with all the arts which add ornament, or dignity, or power, or stability to the social state of man. Virtue is thus entirely a refinement of civilized life; a creation of the human ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... animals and insects are safe from freezing. Where the ground is packed hard, the flinty combination of ice and grit goes deepest, though even in exposed situations only to a depth of three feet or so. The woodchucks asleep in their burrows, the snakes, torpid in their holes, are as safe from frost-bite as if they had migrated to the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. The rootlets of small, perennial herbs may be encased in ice to their tips, but they do not freeze. The heat which the surrounding ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... companion—a noisy stream flowing through breezy hills, and villages, and vineyards—having loitered to draw its circle about the city walls, had fallen under a spell. It met me here a featureless, brimming ditch, and wound away in torpid coils to the monotonous horizon. And now this shrunken city, its edges dead and fallen to decay, these naked levels, where not even a bittern's voice had courage to startle the stillness, filled me, in spite of myself, with a vague apprehensiveness. ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... easy-chairs and lighting a fat Perfecto. His smooth brown head rested in what seemed an accustomed hollow of the chair back. His wide, thin lips were pursed in sybaritic enjoyment of his cigar. He stretched himself in the warmth of the fire, sleek, torpid, and loathsome. ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... instead of that milk-and-water puppet of Wall Street, we'd be shooting those murderers down in Cuba as we ought to be. The President and the whole Republican party," he shouted, "are a lot of hogs who've chawed so much gold their digestion won't work and their brains are torpid; and there's nothing to do but to kick them into this war—the whole greedy, white-livered, Trust-owned, thieving lot of them, including that great immaculate Joss up at the White House with his manners. Damn his manners! They come ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... listen more willingly to the world than to God, and more easily follow the appetite of the flesh than God's good pleasure. The world promises small and temporary things, and is served with great eagerness; I promise supreme and eternal things, but the hearts of mortals are torpid. Who serves and obeys Me in everything with so great care as the world and its lords are served? Men run a long way for a trifling reward, but for eternal life many scarcely lift a foot ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... fire, which is never wholly to be extinguished, break out afresh; let but the human creature be rouzed; whether he have lain heedless and torpid in religious or civil slavery—have languished under a thraldom, domestic or foreign, or under both these alternately—or have drifted about a helpless member of a clan of disjointed and feeble barbarians; let ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... wanted above all, the contempt of his true antagonists; and he used it as a cloak to hide his real power. For four consecutive months his face wore a torpid expression, like that of a snake as it gulps and digests its prey. But at times he would rush into the garden with Colleville or Flavie, to laugh and lay off his mask, and rest himself; or get fresh strength ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... said the other, 'and in that he is a beastly glutton. He gorges himself with it till all his faculties are overpowered and his mind becomes torpid. It's twice worse than drinking. I wonder whether he'll do a bit of speculation before he ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... on those bodies which we call living, the effects are much different; let us take for example a very simple instance.—Snakes, at least some species of them, pass the winter in a torpid state, which has all the appearance of death; now heat, if applied to dead matter, will only produce motion, or chemical combination; but if it be applied to the snake, let us see what will be the consequence; the reptile first ...
— A Lecture on the Preservation of Health • Thomas Garnett, M.D.
... of questions to every student of speculative politics at the present hour is—Whither will this portent direct its energies? Will it press onward towards some yet mightier endeavour, or, mastered by some hereditary taint, sink torpid and neglectful, leaving its vast, its practically inexhaustible forces to ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... attendants refilling the pipes—similar to those used in China, a cane holder with earthenware pipe in which tiny pills of opium were inserted and consumed over the flame of a small lamp. Several of the men were in such a torpid state that they mechanically inhaled the opium smoke when the pipes were pressed to their lips, but were hardly cognizant of what went about around them. The opium-den keeper in the meantime did a roaring business, and ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... luxury, is usually in its excellence the sign of culminating strength in the people; while fine sculpture, requiring always submission to severe law, is an unfailing proof of their being in early and active progress. There is no instance of fine sculpture being produced by a nation either torpid, weak, or in decadence. Their drama may gain in grace and wit; but their sculpture, in days of decline, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... somewhat torpid mental powers quickened. The house being on the main highway, there was always something to look at against the background of the beautiful common, and she conceived a vivid interest in the passing show. An active in lieu of a passive mind ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... on the tester's canopy, And there the heap grew, hidden in the darkness; I slept beneath a dome of history. All day the heap lay quiet, but at night, When I was sleeping, it began to stir, And from the pages clamorous with battles. The battles issued, stretching torpid wings; And laurels showered upon my slumbering eyes. Austerlitz gleamed among my curtains, Jena Glowed in the gilded tassels holding them And on a sudden lapsed into my dream. Till once, when Metternich was gravely telling His version of my father's ...
— L'Aiglon • Edmond Rostand
... which declined gently to the water's edge. It was one of those cheering days in early autumn, which sometimes burst upon us with the warmth and brilliancy of summer, and seem, for a brief space, to reanimate the torpid energies of nature. The sun glowed in mid-day fervor, and myriads of the insect tribes, revived by his delusive smile, wheeled their giddy circles in the light, and sent their busy hum upon the calm, clear air. The ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... themselves in the centre of their delicate nets, and they are hurried off in a panic to be converted into preserved provisions. Each cell being closed, the whole nest is cemented over with a thick covering of clay. In due time the young family hatch, eat their allowance of spiders, undergo their torpid change, and emerge from ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... brook running through it, though we do not see it," replied Rose; "a torpid little brook, to be sure; but, as you say, it has heaven in its bosom, like Walden Pond, ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... sense of complete prostration seized upon her as soon as she found herself at home. Day after day she lay in bed, in a darkened room, unwilling to lift her voice above a whisper, waiting in a kind of torpid dread for the intelligence that she knew ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... kinds remain and lay their eggs at this time—for instance, the ground doves (Chamaepelia). The trees retain their verdure throughout, and many of them flower in the dry months. Lizards do not become torpid, and insects are seen both in the larva and the perfect states, showing that the aridity of the climate has not a general influence on the development of the species. Some kinds of butterflies, especially the little hairstreaks ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... have liked that grocer's young man yourself. But you wouldn't have given him your heart, because you are saving it for a riding-master, or a shoe-manufacturer with a torpid liver, or something quiet but rich in gray tweeds at Palm Beach. Oh, I know about it. So I am glad the grocer's young man was for Celia, ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... Peart,[14] has been considered by many as a specific capable of neutralizing the scarlatinous poison, whilst others have used it only as a powerful tonic in torpid cases. Experience has shown that it is not a specific, and that its use as a tonic, requiring a great deal of care and discrimination, is a good deal more dangerous than the mode of treatment I am going to recommend in cases where ...
— Hydriatic treatment of Scarlet Fever in its Different Forms • Charles Munde
... steering it prudently to its station in the stable yard. Then he went to find the defeated Starling Tucker. That stricken veteran sat alone amid the ruins of his toppled empire in the little office, slumped and torpid before the cold, rusty stove. He refused to be comforted by his devotee. He said he would never touch one of them things again, not for no man's money. The Darwinian hypothesis allows for no petty tact in the process ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... affairs at the Foss River Ranch when Lablache put into execution his threats against the Hon. Bunning-Ford. The settlement had returned to its customary torpid serenity. The round-up was over, and all the "hands" had returned to the various ranches to which they belonged. The little place had entered upon its period of placid sleep, which would last until the advent of the farmers to spend the proceeds of their garnered ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... together: An attack is half repulsed. Shafts of broken sunlight dissolving Convolutions of torpid cloud. ...
— Japanese Prints • John Gould Fletcher
... gaining upon its deep and fresh waters of the lifeless, impassable, unvoyageable plain, how little could we have understood the purpose with which those islands were shaped out of the void, and the torpid waters enclosed with their desolate walls of sand! How little could we have known, any more than of what now seems to us most distressful, dark, and objectless, the glorious aim which was then in the mind of Him in whose hand are ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... liver begun to feel curus again, and my chum said his liver was getting torpid some more, and we both took another dose, and started home and we got generous, and give our nuts all away to some boys. Say, does liver medicine make a feller give away all he has got? We kept taking medicine every five blocks, and we locked arms and went down a back street ...
— Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa - 1883 • George W. Peck
... sake, my child,' said he, with a dignity that was only tremulous from the acute sensitiveness of his character; 'I must do what my conscience bids. I have borne long with self-reproach that would have roused any mind less torpid and cowardly than mine.' He shook his head as he went on. 'Your poor mother's fond wish, gratified at last in the mocking way in which over-fond wishes are too often fulfilled—Sodom apples as they are—has brought ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... loose Delight, Nor Praise relax, nor Difficulty fright; Should tempting Novelty thy Cell refrain, And Sloth's bland Opiates shed their Fumes in vain; Should Beauty blunt on Fops her fatal Dart, Nor claim the Triumph of a letter'd Heart; Should no Disease thy torpid Veins invade, Nor Melancholy's Phantoms haunt thy Shade; Yet hope not Life from Grief or Danger free, Nor think the Doom of Man revers'd for thee: Deign on the passing World to turn thine Eyes, And pause awhile from ...
— The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and Two Rambler papers (1750) • Samuel Johnson
... inflammation, and ulceration, resulting in weakness, waste of substance, and destruction of tissue. The normal sensibility of the part is also destroyed. No woman can ever forget the pain she endured when she first applied the corsets; but in time the compressed organs become torpid; the muscles lose their contractile power, and she feels dependent on the mechanical support of the corset. But the mischief is not limited to local weakness and insensibility. The general strength and general sensibility correspond with the breathing capacity. If she has diminished her ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... Shuttleworthy wouldn't come in the natural way, and explain his reasons for sending his horse on before. I dare say you have often observed this disposition to temporize, or to procrastinate, in people who are labouring under any very poignant sorrow. Their powers of mind seem to be rendered torpid, so that they have a horror of any thing like action, and like nothing in the world so well as to lie quietly in bed and "nurse their grief," as the old ladies express it—that is to ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... I now am angry, but that I have so long been torpid. A little phrensy has restored the palsied soul to life, and again has put its powers in motion. I'll play no more at questions and commands—Or, if I do, it shall only be to make sure of my game. I have been reproved, silenced, tongue-tied, brow-beaten; have made ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... summer that followed her first winter at Santa Barbara the little town sank into a semi-torpid state. Strangers disappeared. With many of the permanent residents to kill time was the main object of languid effort. To Madge the season brought varied opportunity. The old professor gave her much of his time. While others slept she read and studied. The heat, ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... works its effect. In such a situation, the old man is kind and genial, mellow, more gentle and generous, and wider-minded than ever before. But if left to himself, or wholly to the society of his contemporaries, the ice gathers about his heart, his hope grows torpid, his love—having nothing of his own blood to develop it—grows cold; he becomes selfish, when he has nothing in the present or the future worth caring about in himself; so that, instead of a beautiful object, he is an ugly one, little, mean, and torpid. I suppose one chief ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... fashions of society. There is very little harmony or relation between the exquisite joints of a refined nature, the swift and flexible movements of an elegant organism, and the evolutions clumsily executed by torpid limbs, ankylosed, as it were, by labor ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... hearing her exclamations, I became torpid. It occurred to me, what savage tyrant could wound so beautiful a lady! what [demon] possessed his heart, and how could he lift his hand against her! she still loves him, [114] and even in this agony of death, she recollects him! I was muttering this to myself; the sound reached ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... meal I withdrew torpid as a gorged snake, but luckily I had half an hour in which to get my courage back,—and besides, there was always the stirring power of father's clarion call. His energy appeared superhuman to me. I was in awe of ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... cousin of mine—no drop of your sluggish blood stagnates in my veins—no spark of the liquid fire of my life's current burns in your torpid arteries, else at this insult would it set you in a flame! Never dare to call me cousin again." And so saying, she flung herself out of the building and into her saddle, put whip to her horse and galloped ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... travelled road. He is alarmed, and knows not how to guide them; nor, if he knew, has he the power. Then, for the first time, the Great and Little Bear were scorched with heat, and would fain, if it were possible, have plunged into the water; and the Serpent which lies coiled up round the north pole, torpid and harmless, grew warm, and with warmth felt its rage revive. Bootes, they say, fled away, though encumbered with his plough, and ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... classed according to any particular style or quality of composition. They may characterized generally, as well suited to affect the public mind—to rouse into healthful activity the conscience of this nation, stupified, torpid, almost dead, in relation to HUMAN RIGHTS, the high theme ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... the unfeeling man who reported the Torpid races for "Bell's Life" had the unkindness to state in cold print; "Worcester succeeded in making the bump at the Cherwell, in consequence of No. 3 of the Brazenface boat suffering from fatigue." And on the copy of the journal sent to Mrs. Green of Manor Green, her son sadly ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... for that was the sound which always waked the torpid brain of Yusef since Wassef the camel-driver's skull had crackled under ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... from Benares, Hastings was more violent than he would otherwise have been, in his dealings with Oude. Sujah Dowlah had long been dead. His son and successor, Asaph-ul-Dowlah, was one of the weakest and most vicious even of Eastern princes. His life was divided between torpid repose and the most odious forms of sensuality. In his court there was boundless waste, throughout his dominions wretchedness and disorder. He had been, under the skilful management of the English government, gradually sinking from the rank of an independent prince ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... more of a Divine Revelation to the torpid frivolous children of men, if they were not to sink altogether into the ape condition. And in that whirlwind of the Universe,—lights obliterated, and the torn wrecks of Earth and Hell hurled aloft into the Empyrean; black whirlwind, which made even apes serious, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... weary with a very few steps, and the water breaks its boundaries in some degree. The asthma, however, has remitted; my breath is still much obstructed, but is more free than it was. Nights of watchfulness produce torpid days; I read very little, though I am alone; for I am tempted to supply in the day what I lost in bed. This is my history; like all other histories, a narrative of misery. Yet am I so much better than in the beginning of the year, that I ought to be ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... primitive notions of the Shokas, that inside the earth lives in a torpid condition an evil spirit in the shape of a gigantic reptile. The rumbling preceding an earthquake is, to the Shoka mind, nothing else than the heavy breathing of the monster previous to waking, whereas the actual ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... Lance Cooper was back home again. The Cosmos XII re-materialized out of hyperspace in the neighborhood of the Solar System with its fuel tanks scarcely a third depleted, but its pilot a drained man. Lance, truthfully, not only felt weary and torpid, ...
— Next Door, Next World • Robert Donald Locke
... at Nevers presents nothing but cheerful bustle and an aspect of prosperity, here you approach the Allier through scenes of squalor and torpid neglect. The poorer inhabitants, too, are very un-French in appearance, wanting that personal tidiness characteristic of their country people in general. An aristocratic place, means an Ultramontane place, and every third man you meet in Moulins ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... (is or are) able, can. Dow, a dove. Dowf, dowff, dull. Dowie, drooping, mournful. Dowilie, drooping. Downa, can not. Downa-do (can not do), lack of power. Doylt, stupid, stupefied. Doytin, doddering., Dozen'd, torpid. Dozin, torpid. Draigl't, draggled. Drant, prosing. Drap, drop. Draunting, tedious. Dree, endure, suffer. Dreigh, v. dreight. Dribble, drizzle. Driddle, to toddle. Dreigh, tedious, dull. Droddum, the breech. Drone, part of the ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... appearance and in your power over others to be very like the flat torpedo fish, who torpifies those who come near him and touch him, as you have now torpified me, I think. For my soul and my tongue are really torpid, and I do not know how to answer you; and though I have been delivered of an infinite variety of speeches about virtue before now, and to many persons—and very good ones they were, as I thought—at this moment I cannot even say what virtue is. And ...
— Meno • Plato
... to be presumed that he returned to his mother at Raymond, for Christmas; and at that time he heard a story of how an Otisfield man named Henry Turner had killed three hibernating bears which he discovered in a cave near Moose Pond, not a difficult feat when one comes upon them in that torpid condition. This would place the killing of the bears at about the first of December, which would be probable enough, and the fact itself has been substantiated by Samuel Pickard. The next succeeding entry relates to ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... giant Gulliver bound down to the earth by chains of creed and custom, of bureaucracy and perverted public opinion. Like Gulliver, it was bound when asleep, and it must continue fettered while its intellect remains torpid. Some day it will awake, stretch its mighty limbs, burst its feeble bonds, and hurl in disarray to the earth the whole host of liliputian officials and dignitaries who are strutting in the pride of ownership on its great body, the czar ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... When melancholy gnaws the heart, when trouble poisons our solitude, when we are disgusted with the world, and a thousand worries oppress us, or when our energies are destroyed by over-exercise, the stage revives us, we dream of another sphere, we recover ourselves, our torpid nature is roused by noble passions, our blood circulates more healthily. The unhappy man forgets his tears in weeping for another. The happy man is calmed, the secure made provident. Effeminate ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... he thought: the same uncouth-looking effort of humanity that he had been at Yale. No wonder the Northern boys jeered him, with his sloth-ways, his mouthed English, torpid eyes, and brain shut up in that worst of mud-moulds,—belief in caste. Even now, going up and down the tan-bark, his step was dead, sodden, like that of a man in whose life God had not yet wakened ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... Torpid lay Aravaipa in a coma of sunheat. Its adobe-lined streets basked in the white glare of an Arizona spring at midday. One or two Papago Indians, with their pottery wares, squatted in the shade of the buildings, ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... or, as called by Mr Townshend, sleep-waking; i.e. certain faculties rendered torpid while others ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... I loved books and was indifferent to exercise and nourishment. No doubt if I had been turned out into the world to fare for myself I should have gone into a decline. Therefore, it was sheer luck that betrayed me into matrimony, for although my mental energies were torpid for several years my first child seemed to dissipate the shadows that lay in my blood, and at twenty-five I was a normally strong woman. We lived in the country. My husband looked after the servants, ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... irritations and of internal sensations; for the heart and arteries continue to beat, and we experience variety of passions, and even hunger and thirst in our dreams. Hence I conclude, that our nerves of sense are not torpid or inert during sleep; but that they are only precluded from the perception of external objects, by their external organs being rendered unfit to transmit to them the appulses of external bodies, ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... Antecessors, finishing his long narrative of it, "this Camp is Nothing; and after all this expense of King August's and mine, it flies away like a dream. But alas, were the Congresses of Cambrai and Soissons, was the life-long diplomacy of Kaiser Karl, or the History of torpid moribund Europe in those days, much of a Something? The Pragmatic Sanction, with all its protocolling, has fled, like the temporary Playhouse of King August erected there in the village of Strohme. Much talk, noise and imaginary ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... movements of the bowels are promoted, and the circulation through the liver is more vigorous. More food is taken to supply the force necessary for the maintenance of the mechanical movements. Ample exercise also checks the tendency towards a torpid circulation in the larger digestive organs, as the stomach and the liver, so common with those who eat heartily, but lead sedentary lives. In short, exercise may be regarded as a ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... the hands of that unjust steward she received two empty bird-cages, together with a detailed account of the manner in which the occupants had effected their escape, and a bullfinch that seemed to be suffering from torpid liver. The condition of the geraniums was ascribed to worms in the ...
— Ship's Company, The Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... her in bed at first, recommended absolute quiet, and exhausted his formula with as beneficial a result as could be expected considering it attacked the secondary cause only, and was impotent to heal the suffering mind reacting upon the body. Bluebell continued in a torpid condition, scarcely giving any signs of life. One day, Mrs. Markham, who nursed her with unremitting zeal, quickened, perhaps, by the interest of her discovery, observed the patient's hand steal to her neck, and then she glanced uneasily about, as if ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... comfort in the house occupied the soul of lady Ann: it was that she heard nothing of the bookbinder fellow! She had grown so torpid, that while Danger was not flattening his nose against the window-pane, she was at peace. For the rest, a lawyer of her own had the will in his keeping, and she had come upon no ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... not all appear in any one period of the disease, or in one case, but at one time or other all of them, as well as those which follow: the flesh becomes cold to the touch, though the patient does not himself perceive it; the limbs grow numbed and torpid, the breathing dull and slow, and the voice hollow; and usually the appetite in this period declines, and comes almost to nothing: night sweats come on, black swellings appear on the veins, the flesh wastes and the breast becomes flat and hollow: the mouth is full of a thin ...
— Hypochondriasis - A Practical Treatise (1766) • John Hill
... the Baron spoke, And waited for my answer. All in vain I strove for strength to utter that one word My mind dictated. Moments rolled away - Until at last my torpid heart awoke, And forced my trembling lips to say him nay. And then my eyes with sudden tears o'erran, In pity for myself and for this man Who stood before me, lost in pained surprise. "Dear friend," I cried, "dear generous friend, forgive A troubled woman's weakness! As I live, In ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... or starvation, the thing confined in the hollow tube of this awful duplicate was become torpid. Otherwise, no power on earth could have saved me from the fate of Abel Slattin; for the creature was an ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... habit of treating her as a child, playing some imaginary character. She seemed less demented than walking in a dream, her faculties asleep. It was somnambulism rather than madness. She had not the expression of insane people, the shifty eyes, the cunning and perverseness, the animal and torpid presence. ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... tracks—sharp, nervous, and wiry—have their histories also. But how rarely we see squirrels in winter! The naturalists say they are mostly torpid; yet evidently that little pocket-faced depredator, the chipmunk, was not carrying buckwheat for so many days to his hole for nothing: was he anticipating a state of torpidity, or providing against the demands of a very active appetite? Red and gray squirrels ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... seventeen he was sent by his uncles to Cambridge University. Here also the things which most appealed to him were rather the new revelations of men and life than the formal studies, and indeed the torpid instruction of the time offered little to any thoughtful student. On leaving Cambridge he was uncertain as to his life-work. He said that he did not feel himself 'good enough' for the Church, he was not drawn toward law, ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... and women,' soliloquized Mrs. Marston as she hoisted herself upstairs with the candlestick very much aslant in a torpid hand, 'are not ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... of treaty, and that there is a probability that we may at length do something under our commissions, which may produce a solid benefit to our constituents. I as much rejoice, that it is not to be negotiated through the medium of the torpid, uninformed machine, at first made use of. I conjecture, from your relation of the conference with the Chevalier de Pinto, that he is well informed and sensible. So much the better. It is one of ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... had, for she was quite willing that he should be happy in his own way, poor thing, so long as he secluded his divagations from the world—and she could trust him to do that! Now that she had ceased to be the complaisant bored wife with dull nerves and torpid imagination she would be the last to condemn him. Human Nature was an ever opening book to her these days, and she wondered what would happen to herself if any of several men she liked were capable of making her love him, whipping up a personal storm in those emotional gulfs which had ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... disappointment, all combined to shake her mind to its very foundations. She felt for the first time, that she could no longer bear up against the torture of her singular position. Her energy was entirely exhausted; she was no longer capable of making the slightest exertion; she took refuge in that torpid resignation that ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... return, Andrea began to attack Meyerbeer's work, in order to wake up Gambara, who sat sunk in the half-torpid state ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... ludicrous which flows in from the world and the body, and leads to the love thereof; that in this case conjugial love also is driven into banishment, is evident; for in consequence of sloth and ease the mind grows stupid and the body torpid, and the whole man becomes insensible to every vital love, especially to conjugial love, from which as from a fountain issue the activities and alacrities of life. Conjugial cold with such is different from what it is ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... favourable, also, for perpetual warfare. Those temporary chief magistrates did not enjoy their dignity long enough to become torpid or careless, but were interested in distinguishing themselves by the activity of their conduct while in office; whereas, in hereditary power, or elective monarchy, the personal feelings of the chief, which must have an influence upon ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... the dull throng, and stagger into state. Lo! proud Flaminius at the splendid board, The easy chaplain of an atheist lord, Quaffs the bright juice, with all the gust of sense, And clouds his brain in torpid elegance; In china vases, see! the sparkling ill, From gay decanters view the rosy rill; The neat-carved pipes in silver settle laid, The screw by mathematic cunning made: Oh, happy priest! whose God, like Egypt's, lies At once the deity and ...
— Inebriety and the Candidate • George Crabbe
... be gained from foreign arts. These differences in character have given rise to a remarkable difference in results. The Japanese have been alert in availing themselves of all things new, the Chinese torpid and slow, sluggishly resisting change, hardly yielding even to the logic ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... and not suitable for the barricade, he had been left in possession of it. He was still in the same posture, with his breast bent over the table, his head lying flat on his arms, surrounded by glasses, beer-jugs and bottles. His was the overwhelming slumber of the torpid bear and the satiated leech. Nothing had had any effect upon it, neither the fusillade, nor the cannon-balls, nor the grape-shot which had made its way through the window into the room where he was. Nor the tremendous ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo |
