"Deadened" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with newer interest as they passed down the room, and so to a tight little office the walls of which were specially deadened against the ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... of the soul which were deadened by the fall, and man again saw heaven, and angels descending and ascending to ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... his footsteps deadened in the soft pile of the Brussels carpet. She regarded his approach with cold, impassive demeanor, nodding slightly as he paused near the carved rosewood table above which hung an exquisitely wrought silver lamp, suspended by four silver chains ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin
... a high degree of power by enforcing a method seemingly quite at variance with the Provencial temperament, by teaching the doctrine and the discipline of a mystic death, of absolute passiveness, of entire forgetfulness of self. The dreadful crisis through which they had just passed had deadened their spirits, and weakened hearts already unmanned by a kind of morbid languor. Under Girard's leading, the Carmelites of Marseilles carried their mysticism to great lengths; and first among them was Sister Remusat, ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... off the roof and fell into the road with a deadened thud, whilst white flakes of straw and wood-ash were flying in the wind like feathers. At the same time two of the cottages adjoining, upon which a little water had been brought to play from the rector's engine, were seen to be on fire. The attenuated spirt of water was as nothing upon the heated ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... of October in this year, she went to pay a visit to her friend; but her enjoyment in the holiday, which she had so long promised herself when her work was completed, was deadened by a continual feeling of ill-health; either the change of air or the foggy weather produced constant irritation at the chest. Moreover, she was anxious about the impression which her second work would produce on the public mind. For obvious reasons an author is more susceptible to opinions pronounced ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... the burgomaster's house. Green tufts of grass bordered the shining pavement, and no one would have thought of tearing them away, for they deadened the noise ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... of that dense gloom one ray there was, feeble indeed at first as if human suffering had deadened even that, but brightening and strengthening with every passing day. It was the sincerity of her faith—the dearer, more precious to its followers, from the scorn and condemnation, in which it was held ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... air was partially destroyed. She lost her interest in the novelty of her surroundings, and as she says in one of her last letters, stayed much at home. But her perceptive faculties were not wholly deadened. She notes with her usual precision the indolence and dulness of the Danes, and the unwavering devotion of the Hamburgers to commerce, and describes the towns of Hamburg and Copenhagen with graphic force. These descriptions are well ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... flogging the intellectual interest in this strange conception distracted his mind from the pain of the blows; also his bare back was protected by the idol and his leggings and trousers deadened the lashes. A moment more he hesitated. But he was unarmed and had voluntarily taken on the adventure, so he would see it through. As he broke into a shuffling run, for the idol fortunately was lighter than the previous one and he was a more ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... in the evening when the Baroness, dressed for dinner, passed from her own room into the small drawing-room adjoining. Crossing a carpet so thick and soft that it deadened the sound of footsteps, she pressed the button of an electric bell beside the fireplace. A major-domo, of the ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... the plantation, two frequented some bushes beside a pond near by, some stayed in scattered willows farther down the stream. They sang so much they scarcely seemed to have time to feed. While approaching one that was singing by gently walking on the sward by the roadside, or where thick dust deadened the footsteps, suddenly another would commence in the low thorn hedge on a branch, so near that it could be touched with a walking-stick. Yet though so near the bird was not wholly visible—he was partly concealed behind a fork of ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... cocked my ear to pick out the patter of Margaret's mare from the heavier, longer strides of Sultan. Yes, there she was, doubtless murmuring Italian love-ditties to her happy inmost self and thinking of —Pshaw! This was romancing, and another's romance at that, and it deadened me against my will, while here was a man's work to do. So I turned ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... Cavendish seemed vaguely to feel the suspense, for she finally took her stand beside a frost-rimed window and engaged herself in tracing patterns thereon with the tip of her finger. An occasional stormy murmur of voices, deadened by the thick log partition, indicated that Laure and her inquisitor were ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... from picking pockets or famishing. To the former decent alternative she knew Paul's great and jejune aversion; and she consequently had little fear for his morals or his safety, in thus abandoning him for a while to chance. Any anxiety, too, that she might otherwise have keenly experienced was deadened by the habitual intoxication now increasing upon the good lady with age, and which, though at times she could be excited to all her characteristic vehemence, kept her senses for the most part plunged into a Lethean stupor, or, to ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... finding his enemy did not get on his beam, put his helm a-lee and luffed up, firing his guns from aft forward as they bore. For ten minutes the ship and the brig lay abreast, not twenty yards apart, while the cannonade was terribly destructive. The concussion of the explosions almost deadened what little way the vessels had on, and the smoke hung over them like a pall. The men worked at the guns with desperate energy, but the odds in weight of metal (3 to 2) were too great against the Reindeer, where both sides played their parts so manfully. Captain Manners stood at his post, ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... hated her, or was angry with her, I could not be sure the feeling would not die. As it is, she has deadened me into a creature of indifference. So you just revise your viewpoint a little, Elnora. Cease thinking it is for you to decide what I shall do, and that I will obey you. I make my own decisions in reference to any woman, save you. The question you are to decide is whether I may remain here, associating ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... out of them under convoy of loquacious ciceroni. I forget just how I apportioned the responsibility, of intrusion, for it was not long before fellow- tourists and fellow-countrymen became a vague, deadened, muffled presence, that of the dentist's last words when he is giving you ether. They suffered mystic disintegration in the dense, bright, tranquil air, so charged with its own messages. The Cathedral and its companions are fortunate indeed in everything—fortunate in the spacious angle ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... in the season of Spring which peculiarly excites the feelings of devotion. The dreariness of winter has passed, and with it, the deadened affections of our nature. New life, new vigor, arises within us, as we walk abroad and feel the genial gales of April breathe upon us; and our hopes, our wishes, awaken with the revival of the vegetable world. It is then that the heart, which has been impressed ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... engaged in all affairs, because he had not power to resist the importunities of those who drew him in for their own advantage, and came off always with shame for want of courage to go on. His suspicious temper, even from his childhood, deadened those lively, gay colours which would have shone out naturally with the advantages of a fine, bright genius, an amiable gracefulness, a very honest disposition, a perfect disinterestedness, and an incredible easiness ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... discovery; he told himself that he was not made of the human stuff that can forgive bitter wrongs or forget them until cancelled. He painted in lurid colours his past griefs; through a ghastly morass of revenge grown stale, of memories deadened by time, he tried to struggle back to his original starting-point in vanished years, and feel as he felt when he flung ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... this was as little to them as to the lizards that crept along the walls or the sweeps they handled with their hardening hands. Years after, Nicholas recalled those nights and those mornings and knew that something that sat within his deadened brain had been alive and had stored the memories for him. But he did not ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... suddenly shot forth to the neck of his assailant. His muscular fingers closed in a deft and vice-like pinch directly below the silk handkerchief. It was the pneumogastric nerve, which he reached: a nerve which, when deadened by Oriental skill, paralyzes the vocal chords. Not a sound emanated from the mysterious man, even when Shirley's right hand shot forward, under the chin of the other, for a deft blow across the thorax. The ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... the purpose of towing her off, but two of the boats were struck and swamped, and many of those in them were drowned before help could be rendered by those on board. Just as the flames seemed about to catch the "Torbay" they suddenly decreased, and were deadened. It seemed almost like a miracle; but when the men afterwards examined the fire-ship, she was found to be loaded with snuff, which immediately the fire reached it completely ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... o'clock, and the night was dark. The tumult of the city was silent on account of the thick carpet the winter had spread for it, and which deadened the sound of the wheels over the stones, and of the feet of men and horses. In a narrow street that winds round the old church of St. Eustache, a man, enveloped in his cloak, slowly walked up and down, constantly watching for the appearance of some one. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... upon the table; in the draft from the tunnel the candles flickered drunkenly. But of the man for whom he sought, for whom he was risking his life, there was no sign. With a cry of amazement and alarm Roddy ran to the iron door of the cell. It was locked and bolted. Now that the wall no longer deadened the sound his ears were assailed by all the fierce clamor of the battle. Rolling toward him down the stone corridor came the splitting roar of the siege guns, the rattle of rifle fire, the shouts of men. Against these ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... practised toward her a hypocrisy that grew steadily more disgraceful, yet grew so gradually that there was no single moment at which he could conveniently halt and "straighten the record." At first he was often and heartily ashamed of himself; but by degrees this feeling deadened into cynical insensibility and he was only ashamed to let her see him as he really was. She had kept her self-respect. She esteemed self-respect at the exalted valuation he had formerly put upon it. What if she should find ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... 10th, 1891, was the day set for Mr. Barnum's funeral. The morning was cold, gray, and dismal. Nature's heart, with the spring joy put back and deadened, symboled the melancholy that had fallen upon Bridgeport. No town was ever more transformed than was this city by one earthly event. On the public and private buildings were hung the habiliments of woe; flags were at half mast, and, in the store windows ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... all by himself and indulge in his morose reflections. His eye wandered around the elegant appointments of his dwelling. These fine paintings on his walls; this handsome and costly furniture, most of it carved in solid oak; the soft Oriental rugs underfoot which deadened every sound and made his bachelor home so comfortable and cosy; those heavy, discreet hangings of finest velvet which shut out the intrusive light and kept his apartments in that epicurean chiaroscuro which his sybarite taste demanded—what a pity, what an infernal ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... great sickness seized me so that I sank weakly to my knees and crouched thus a while, and with no strength nor will to move. At last, and very slowly, I made my way a-down the rocks, and being within the little cove, found myself all trembling and holding my breath. Then, though the soft sand deadened all sound of my going, I crept forward. So came I where she lay, her wet draperies clinged fast about her; and standing above this stilly form I looked down upon her slender shapeliness yet feared to touch her. And now I saw that one sleeve was torn away and upon her round, ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... direction of a door hung with curtains, from which there came at intervals the deadened drumming of voices, and ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... to the colour, if in becoming smoked it has lost its proper value, it has retained a harmony preferred by delicate minds for the freshness and brilliancy of its shadows. The tones have deadened in such perfect sympathy that the result is a kind of neutral, abstract, ideal, and mysterious tint which clothes the forms like a celestial veil and sets them ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... but the beer had deadened his senses and his jealous anger had evaporated. Half an hour later his wife crossed the street cautiously and went inside. Doughy saw her and, having reached the maudlin stage, got up and lurched across the street, anxious to make it up and ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... practiced so frequently, and continued for so many years, he acquired a premature and unnatural dexterity in the combination of words, which must of necessity have diverted his attention from present objects, obscured his impressions, and deadened his genuine feelings. Not the thing on which he was speaking, but the praises to be gained by the speech, were present to his intuition; hence he associated all the operations of his faculties with words, and his pleasures with the surprise ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... angry curses at the obstinate mules, the rumbling of ponderous machinery, the clink of picks and reports of frequent blasts, the deadened sound of escaping steam, the barking of dogs, the whining of horses—all these sounds are now to ...
— Deadwood Dick, The Prince of the Road - or, The Black Rider of the Black Hills • Edward L. Wheeler
... preferring mild food and water for drink. Those who lead an interior life sedentary and contemplative need not gross pabulum, but would find their inward joy at the contemplation and discovery of truth seriously qualified and deadened by it. Spare fast is the companion of the ecstatic moods of a high truth-seeker such as Newton, Malebranche, etc. Immanuel Kant was almost the only profound speculative thinker who was decidedly convivial, and given to gulosity, at least at his dinner. Asceticism ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... greatly changed in the short time since Cecily had seen her. Ceaseless pain had worn away the last traces of her girlish beauty; the drawn features, the deadened eyes, offered hope that an end must come before long. She gave a look of recognition as the visitor approached her, but did not attempt ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... were occasioned, it is said, by some sentiments contained in a communication from Mrs. Dunlop. That excellent lady was sorely tried with domestic afflictions for a time, and to these he appears to allude; but he deadened the effect of his sympathy, when he printed the stanzas in the Museum, changing ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... screened, and taking a black silk muffler fastened it securely over the knob of the hall door. The window and door of his private bathroom were likewise draped. Finally satisfied that he was secure from observation and all sound deadened, Miller took from his overcoat pocket four porcelain castors, and dropping on his knees by the side of his brass bed, he deftly inserted them in place of the bed's ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... other use of my arms than to defend my head and face from further disfigurement. The mere pain arising from the blows he inflicted upon my person was of course transient, and my clothing to some extent deadened its severity, as it now hides all ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... said to myself, "That woman has not deadened her conscience; she has tried and failed. There is more good ...
— The Tragedy of the Chain Pier - Everyday Life Library No. 3 • Charlotte M. Braeme
... here must I love and be loved. My tears will then be wiped away, my groans be turned to another tune, my cottage of clay be changed to this palace, my prison rags to these splendid robes'; 'for the former things are passed away.'" I can not think that Samuel Rutherford impoverished his spirit or deadened his affections, or diminished his labors by mental pilgrimages such as he counsels to Lady Cardoness: "Go up beforehand and see your lodging. Look through all your Father's rooms in heaven. Men take a sight of the lands ere they buy them. I know that Christ ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... fifty acres of it were in timber. We decided to clear up as rapidly as possible all the forest land and cultivate it in corn. Now comes the crime which Dr. Knapp wants me to expose and I am going to confess it. We deadened probably a hundred of as fine pecan trees as you ever saw, from six to eighteen inches in diameter, and Dr. Knapp heard about it and visited our farm, and it was on his account principally that we quit cutting the pecan trees. Now if anybody else cuts them we have them ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifth Annual Meeting - Evansville, Indiana, August 20 and 21, 1914 • Various
... when a curious sound checked me. It followed directly upon the opening of the front door. I heard White's footsteps crossing the hall, then the click of the latch, and then—a sound that I could not define. The closed door of the classroom deadened it, but for all that it was audible. It resembled the thud of a falling body, but I knew it could not be that, for in peaceful England butlers opening front doors ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... herself to the kitchen. Her slippers deadened the sound of her footsteps, and she reached the threshold unheard by either maid or soldier. Zephyrin was seated in his corner over a basin of steaming broth. Rosalie, with her back turned to the door, was occupied in cutting some long sippets ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... once a black hole in the hillside verdure, was curtained by a veil of creepers. There was game and there was water and there he stayed. At first he rested, then idle and inert lay among the ferns on the top of the dump, staring at the distance, squinting up at the sky, deadened with the weight of the interminable, ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... a flame that drenched down her body like fluid lightning and gave her a perfect, unutterable consummation, unutterable satisfaction, she brought down the ball of jewel stone with all her force, crash on his head. But her fingers were in the way and deadened the blow. Nevertheless, down went his head on the table on which his book lay, the stone slid aside and over his ear, it was one convulsion of pure bliss for her, lit up by the crushed pain of her fingers. But it was not ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... eyes of comrades are upon him, puts a man upon his mettle and upon his pride, and compels him oftentimes to simulate a contempt for danger which he does not feel. The senses are too, in some sort, deadened to the hazards of the scene and, in battle, one finds himself doing with resolute will things which under normal conditions would fill ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... with its bare floors, its shrouded furniture, its screened book cases, its blank pictures swaddled in linen bags, its long, gaunt shadows, and its deadened air, suggested itself horribly and ridiculously as a fitting scene for a crime. He might kill Claude with a blow, and if he turned out the lights and shut the door and stole back to his hotel no one would ever suspect him as the ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... say, with no politeness at all, that he did, and to repeat his refusal in stronger terms, when his ear caught the same sound which had revealed so much to him a few minutes earlier at the foot of the stairs. It came more faintly this time, deadened by the closed door of the staircase, but to his enlightened senses it proclaimed so clearly what it was—the echo of a cracked, shrill voice, of a laugh insane, uncanny, elfish—that he trembled lest Louis should hear it also and gain the ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... confronted the pioneers in the first American "West." There every jewel of promise was ringed round with hostility. The cheap land the pioneer had purchased at a nominal price, or the free land he had taken by "tomahawk claim"—that is by cutting his name into the bark of a deadened tree, usually beside a spring—supported a forest of tall trunks and interlacing leafage. The long grass and weeds which covered the ground in a wealth of natural pasturage harbored the poisonous copperhead and the rattlesnake and, being shaded by the overhead foliage, they held the ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... namely, a firmly welded, suitably regulated constitution, must by no means be regarded as one originally belonging and essential to Christianity. The depotentiation to which Christianity was here subjected appears still more plainly in the facts, that the Christian hopes were deadened, that the secularising of the Christian life was tolerated and even legitimised, and that the manifestations of an unconditional devotion to the heavenly excited suspicion or were compelled to confine themselves ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... on the misty afternoon when young Mr. Walter a Cleeve passed him unawares, Jim had been standing for twenty minutes flat against a tree on the upper outskirts of the plantation, sunk in a brown study. The apparition startled him, for the thick air deadened the sound of footsteps; and the sound, when it fell on his ears, held something unfamiliar. (Jim was unacquainted with sabots.) He stood perfectly still, let it go by, and at once prepared to follow—not that his suspicions ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... proceedings of the next morning; proceedings which I shall not describe to you—but which I shall tell you of presently, not as a matter of conjecture but of actual fact. Meantime returning to that evening altercation in deadened tones within the private apartment of Miss de Barral's governess, what if I were to tell you that disappointment had most likely made them touchy with each other, but that perhaps the secret of his careless, railing behaviour, was ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... particularly liable to accidents, and suffers immensely in "wet seasons" from the "rust" and "rot." The first named affects the leaves, giving them a brown and deadened tinge, and frequently causes them to crumble away. The "rot" attacks ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... to us; they speak to us from our childhood upward, and we learn to understand their language. But let a man ask himself whether or not every strange creature, torn out of its natural environment, does not at first sight make a sort of painful impression upon him, which is only deadened by custom. It is a mark of a motley, dissipated sort of life, to be able to endure monkeys, and parrots, and black ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the canoe for some minutes, a suspicion of the truth dawned upon the youth. Even when under the water he was able to hear the deadened reports of the rifles above, and he believed that one of the shots must have reached the occupant of the boat, ...
— The Phantom of the River • Edward S. Ellis
... pleasure-loving nature and standards of virtue unattainably high. And when he remembered that she was doomed to the seclusion of a convent, that this life, with every promise of being exceptionally rich and full, was to be crushed, deadened and forever lost to the outer human world, his resentment became difficult to suppress. He wondered, in a hot, disjointed way, if there was no possibility of ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... a great weight. It deadened him. It smothered him. He paced the streets and eventually found himself before a restaurant. He remembered then that he had not eaten for a long time. He went in and ordered oysters. That was about the only meat you could buy in The Pass and be sure of not eating ...
— The Wealth of Echindul • Noel Miller Loomis
... this view, leaving the main road that ran through Rewtham, Bratham, and Isleworth to Roxham, she turned up a little bye-lane which led to the foot of the lake. Just as she did so, she heard the deadened footfall of a fast-trotting horse, accompanied by the faint roll of carriage-wheels over the snow. As she turned half involuntarily to see who it was that travelled so fast, the creeping mist was driven aside by a puff of wind, and she saw a splendid blood- horse drawing ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... with that purpose in mind, not going upon the path, because she would have been in the full moonlight, and in sight of the two upon the piazza. She passed silently along by the high hedge, concealed in its shadows, and her footsteps deadened by the grass. She was as quiet as possible, wishing to be in the summer-house without ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... beings were at my elbow, if not talking with me— since I had left home. My better nature returned strong upon me. Everything was in accordance with my state of feeling, and I experienced a glow of pleasure at finding that what of poetry and romance I ever had in me had not been entirely deadened by the laborious life, with its paltry, vulgar associations, which I had been leading. Nearly an hour did I sit, almost lost in the luxury of this entire new scene of the play in which I had been so long acting, when I was aroused by the distant shouts of my companions, and ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... as soon as daybreak began to replace night with melancholy, we buried ourselves methodically in the depth of the caverns there. Only a deadened murmur penetrated to them, but the rock moved by reason of the earthquakes. When some one lighted his pipe, by that gleam we looked at each other. We were fully equipped; we could start away at any minute; it was forbidden to take ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... on that night of all nights in the year! He knew, through Jack McEvoy, that she had promised her grandfather never to speak to him again. She had broken faith with him. All through these weary weeks in prison, the anguish of this thought had deadened all his other sufferings and anxieties, but in any case, how could he ever expect her, amid her new grandeurs, to think of him as she used to do? She had the best heart in the world, he knew that, and wouldn't ask to do anything that ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... the Life Guards, had been made to retire, that the old General, whose heir he was, might keep him in attendance on him. Already self-indulgent and extravagant, the idleness of the life he led with the worn-out old roue had deadened his better feelings, and habituated him to dissipation, while his debts, his expensive habits, and his dread of losing the inheritance, had bound him over to the General. Both had been saved from the fire in the Ninon, whence they were picked ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... alarm was felt in consequence of a heavy sea that struck the ship, almost filling the waist, and pouring down into the berths below, through every chink and crevice of the hatches and skylights. From the motion being suddenly checked or deadened, and from the flowing in of the water above, every individual on board thought that the ship was foundering—at least all the landsmen were fully impressed with ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... lapse of years to seem beautiful in my eyes, but haying was a season of well-defined charm. In Iowa, summer was at its most exuberant stage of vitality during the last days of June, and it was not strange that the faculties of even the toiling hay-maker, dulled and deadened with never ending drudgery, caught something of the superabundant glow and throb ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... used such a cartridge as I have here, made with smokeless powder, and the coat would have concealed the flash of the shot very effectively. There would have been no smoke. But neither this coat nor even a heavy blanket would have deadened the report ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... attachment to your person, and to that best of political Constitutions which is hourly threatened, will ever lead me to sacrifice every private feeling to your service. I must, however, say, and say truly, that every feeling of ambition is deadened by these times and circumstances; and that a public situation has none of those charms for me which have brought forward this unprincipled coalition. But I have, and ever must retain those feelings of duty and affection which will urge me to obey your Majesty's commands in ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... feeling; and too volatile to attain to the pathetic, that higher quality of genius, he was so imbued with the petty elegancies of society that every impression of grandeur in the human character was deadened in the breast of the ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... boy stepped lightly aboard. His footfalls were deadened by the wet, so that he gained the forward end of the "shanty" without attracting attention. The door was closed, and Winn was startled to note how very familiar that gable end of the building looked. He raised his hand to knock at the door, when suddenly it ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... bathed, dressed, brushed and arranged her dishevelled hair. The face she saw in the mirror excited her amaze and pity. Then she went out in answer to the call for dinner. But she could not eat. The ordinary functions of life appeared to be deadened. ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... and Chip was placed upon a bed. The room was sumptuously, even elegantly, furnished. Pictures adorned the walls, a heavy carpet deadened the sound of the feet, and rich curtains kept back the ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... once more shut up, and the cottage leveled to the ground. It was not, however, until fifty years had in some measure deadened the memory of the terrible transaction, that the ground was cultivated. It is now a fine field ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... Forgetting his unhappiness, Mowgli sang aloud with pure delight as he settled into his stride. It was more like flying than anything else, for he had chosen the long downward slope that leads to the Northern Marshes through the heart of the main Jungle, where the springy ground deadened the fall of his feet. A man-taught man would have picked his way with many stumbles through the cheating moonlight, but Mowgli's muscles, trained by years of experience, bore him up as though he were a feather. ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... moment came a distant sound from without, in which Eveline thought she could distinguish cries, blows, the trampling of horse, the oaths, shouts, and screams of the combatants, but all deadened by the rude walls of her prison, into a confused hollow murmur, conveying such intelligence to her ears as we may suppose the dead to hear from the world ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... Mounting the deadened stairway noiselessly to her sister's room, groping for the door in the dark of the landing, she called: "Iole!" And again: "Iole! Come to me! It ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... set," ordered his friend to send him a "fluted pot," i.e., a helmet ridged and furrowed on the surface, and suited to break, by its protuberant lines, the force of a blow, so that the vibrations of the stroke would reach the body of the metal deadened and flat. Now, the outer table of the scale of the Holoptychius was a "fluted pot." The alternate ridges and furrows which ornamented its surface served a purpose exactly similar with that of the flutes and fillets of Cromwell's ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... but just then a sound smote upon the girl's ear which deadened all others. In spite of herself she began to tremble. Even her lips seemed to her to move with the weakness of her fear. She looked up, and the man was just coming toward the door; but her eyes grew dizzy, and a faintness ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... Gabriel wondered, his thoughts seeming to hum and roar in his head, in harmony with the shuddering diapason of the muffler-deadened exhaust. "No way of telling, now. Each man for himself—and ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... impart, pervaded the ship. A landsman, seated in the cabin, might have fancied himself, although surrounded by a crew of lawless and violent men, in the solitude of a deserted church, so suppressed, and deadened, were even those sounds that were absolutely necessary. There were heard at times, it is true, the high and harsh notes of some reveller who appeared to break forth in the strains of a sea song, which, as they issued from the depths of the vessel, ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... fighting and concentrated fire. In the words of Hannay, "It marked the beginning of that fierce and headlong yet well calculated style of sea fighting which led to Trafalgar and made England undisputed mistress of the sea."[1] It marked, therefore, the end of the Fighting Instructions, which had deadened the spirit as well as the tactics of the British navy for ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... had now been a long time awake, and this, with the prostration of my strength from mental suffering, had at length deadened the nerve of pain; so that, despite all my ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... situation. They regularly sit down to write letters: and if the business of life consisted in letter-writing, and was carried on by the post (like a Spanish game at chess), human nature would be what Richardson represents it. All actual objects and feelings are blunted and deadened by being presented through a medium which may be true to reason, but is false in nature. He confounds his own point of view with that of the immediate actors in the scene; and hence presents you with a conventional and factitious nature, instead ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... back, there, on the broad, soft, old-fashioned sofa, and with the river breeze upon her brow, and the song of its waters in her ears, and the deadened hum of the ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... her acquiescence more sure; and his shock of disappointment was sharpened by surprise to a quick displeasure when, her eyes passing from his face and resting for long on the shadowy woods, she said in a deadened voice, a voice strangely lacking ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... Philadelphus offered as a bribe his daughter Berenice, with a large sum of money under the name of a dower. Antiochus was already married to Laodice, whom he loved dearly, and by whom he had two children, Seleucus and Antiochus; but political ambition had deadened the feelings of his heart, and he agreed to declare this first marriage void and his two sons illegitimate, and that his children, if any should be born to him by Berenice, should inherit the throne of Babylon and ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... the end would really be—gathered more and more darkly over my mind. Poignant as it was, the sense of suffering caused by the miserable end of my brief, presumptuous love seemed to be blunted and deadened by the still stronger sense of something obscurely impending, something invisibly threatening, that Time was holding over ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... however strong their smell and pungent their taste, that grew in the Nile mud in Egypt. He who has tasted the higher sweetnesses of God will have his heart's desires after lower delights strangely deadened and cooled. Get near God, and open your hearts for the entrance of that divine Spirit, and then it will not seem foolish to empty your hands of the trash that they carry in order to grasp the precious things ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the system of his thoughts, and to subordinate it to the organic relative unity of his insight, which is vast and ever-growing. By this means his own thought, like the bass in an organ, always takes the lead in everything, and is never deadened by other sounds, as is the case with purely antiquarian minds; where all sorts of musical passages, as it were, run into each other, and the fundamental tone is ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Everybody knew that the Gulla Kutta Mullah had his outpost huts on the reverse side of the hill, and everybody expected by the time that the Major had sworn himself into a state of quiet that the watchmen there would open fire. When nothing occurred, they said that the gusts of the rain had deadened the sound of the horses, and thanked Providence. At last the Major satisfied himself (a) that he had left no one behind among the cairns, and (b) that he was not being taken in the rear by a large and powerful body of cavalry. The men's tempers were thoroughly spoiled, the horses were ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... with deepest sympathy through the "Inferno" and the "Purgatorio;" and when I emerged from the infernal slough, I washed myself, as does the poet, with the water of the sea at the foot of the Mountain of Purgatory. I enjoyed the divine morning, the pure air. I rose step by step, deadened one passion after the other, battled with the wild instinct of life, till at last, arrived at the fire, I relinquished all desire of life, and threw myself into the glow in order to sink my personality in ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... the stock so grows the vociferousness of their proprietors, and soon the ear becomes deadened by the striving rush of sound. Every stall and shop has its wide-mouthed laureate, singing its present glories and adding lustre to its ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... the energy degenerated into impudence, evading the shame of spendthrift bankruptcy to-day by shifts that were sure to bring a more degrading exposure tomorrow; and the whole ended at last in a suicide whose tragic pang is deadened to us by the feeling that so much of the mixed motive that drove him to it as was not cowardice was a hankering after melodramatic effect, the last throb of a passion for making his name the theme of public talk, and his fate the centre of a London day's sensation. Chatterton makes us ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... without works is dead." The foundation of enlightened faith is Christ's teachings and practice. It was our Master's self-immolation, his life-giving love, healing both mind and body, that raised the deadened conscience, paralyzed by inactive faith, to a quickened sense of mortal's necessities,—and God's power and purpose to supply them. It was, in the words of the Psalmist, He "who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who ...
— Pulpit and Press • Mary Baker Eddy
... been the ingrained prejudice of the Restoration period against "metaphysical" verse that deadened Dryden's ear to the charm of such passages as these. Another less notable poet and playwright of the time showed more discrimination. This was Thomas D'Urfey, who in 1691 brought out a revised version of the play at the Theatre Royal. In a dedication to Lord Carlisle which ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... carriage was so confined and crowded—dread proximity! The dream deepened; it became a trance—that strange trance that sometimes falls upon the victim in the midst of his sufferings held Ishmael's faculties in abeyance and deadened his sense ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... time an utterly broken and disgraced old man; wishful, of all things, to get away and hide himself and his miseries from the public gaze; probably with his senses deadened and stupefied by the mental sufferings he had undergone, and no longer able to think or care about anything—except perhaps his daughter,—certainly not about any ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... wondered how he could have regarded him for years with a respect almost amounting to veneration. In a curious unformulated way Doggie felt that he had authority over this man so much older than himself, who had once been his master. It tickled into some kind of life his deadened self-esteem. Here at last was a man with whom he could converse on sure ground. The khaki uniform caused ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... of the projectile's departure, sent for a 32-inch mortar from Pensacola Arsenal. It was installed upon the quay of Hillisboro Harbour, in order that the bomb might fall into the sea, and the shock of its fall be deadened. He only wished to experiment upon the shock of its departure, not ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... about the Tennessee plantation was dirty, out of order, and in general higgledy-piggledy condition. And the method of farming was slovenly in the extreme. The cultivated land had been cleared by cutting away the underbrush and small trees, while the big ones had merely been "deadened," by girdling them near the ground. These dead trees were all standing in ghastly nakedness, and so thick in many places that it must have been difficult to plow through them, while flocks of crows and ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... mercifully atrophied his rebellious nerves. These visions he was seeing were terribly true, but they somehow gave him no physical torture. It was as though one saw an operation performed upon one's body with the nerves stilled and deadened by ether. Yet he was cruelly conscious of the disaster which had come to him. For a time at least. Then his mind seemed less acute, the visions came, then without seeing them go, they went. And others came in broken ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... winter, the Williamses heard the wolves howling round them in the woods, and this music was familiar to the ears of all the Ohio pioneers, who trusted their rifles for both the safety and support of their families. They deadened the trees around them by girdling them with the ax, and planted the spaces between the leafless trunks with corn and beans and pumpkins. These were their necessaries, but they had an occasional luxury in the wild honey from the ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... curb the French desire for recovery. The French, obviously inferior before this triple alliance, gradually persuaded the Russians to support them; but the Russians would not support the French in provoking another great war, and with the French themselves the old feeling gradually deadened. It did not disappear—any incident might have revived it—but the anxious desire for immediate war when the opportunity should come got less and less, and at the end of the process, say towards 1904, when a new generation had grown up in all the countries concerned, there was a sort of deadlock, ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... bell with a deadened tone due to a cracked rim, can be given its original clear ringing sound by sawing out the crack with a common hacksaw. Make the saw cut along the line of the crack. The opening caused by the saw will allow the free vibration of the metal. ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... feeling of responsibility for so many of those with whom he came in contact every day and hour. When most members of a man's household or estate are absolutely at his mercy, when he has no feeling of any contractual relation with them, his sense of duty and obligation is inevitably deadened, even towards others who are not thus in his power. Can we doubt that the lack of a sense of justice and right dealing, more especially towards provincials, but also towards a man's fellow-citizens, ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... what captive thing, Could up toward God through all its darkness grope, And find within its deadened heart to sing These songs of sorrow, love, and faith, and hope? How did it catch that subtle undertone, That note in music heard not with the ears? How sound the elusive reed so seldom blown, Which stirs the soul or ...
— Fifty years & Other Poems • James Weldon Johnson
... all was quiet and deserted. The snow, driving in white sheets down the mountains, was tinged with a faint glow, where, in a blinding mist it whirled across the yards; it had come too late to save the lumber, but it had checked and deadened the flames, so that the few unburned planks ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... not endure to be humiliated in Apollonius' presence till she was nothing but dirt under his feet. Her husband held her with a savage grip. He seized her with the swoop of a bird of prey. She would have had to scream aloud if her mental torture had not deadened ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... over and the torch quivered in his hand. He had seen men die in the Great War. He had been near death himself. But never before had he been near death in so horrible a form. The sodden noises in the mud, the deadened flopping of the sinking body—mud-plastered hands beating frantically on mud, spattering, agonising in darkness—"My God," he breathed, "anything but that—anything ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... once more we began work, out in the silence of that beautiful valley, digging, washing, and examining, as we picked out the soft deadened golden scales, beads, grains, and ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... heard the shooting, the sound of which had been deadened to those in the dining room by the breaking glass and china. But within a few minutes a useless pursuit was abandoned. The fusillade had come from a car which halted close to the garden railings on the far ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... infected with the terror of the plain. They jerked their heads back; they neighed mournfully; some left the grass and began to gallop aimlessly across the field. The shells came in a stream, great, hurtling missiles. Where they struck flesh or ploughed into the earth, it was with a deadened sound; when they burst in air, it was like crackling thunder. The blue sky was gone. A battle pall wrapped the thousands and thousands of men, the guns, the horses, forest, swamp, creeks, old fields; ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... of the engine and the clank of the chain of the cage in the shaft deadened the wind's shrill whistle. The smoke from the bank shot up and swirled away like ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... hours of waiting, watching, hoping, despairing. The deadened consciousness trembled on the edge of the great void; and neither doctor, nurse, nor relative left the still room in which the soul still delayed. Now and again, after the administration of some stimulant, one of the three, Michael, Vassily, or Caroline ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... of Lance sounded too clearly in Roy's brain; and the more intimate pain, deadened a little by illness, struck at his heart like ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... patch of sunlight lay on the stone floor of the small cell allotted to Christian Vellacott. The thick oak door deadened the sounds of life in the monastery, such as they were, and the strong, laboured breathing of the young Englishman alone ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... double report of Jan Cuxson's rifle deadened the lad's horrible screaming and the growling of the wounded beast as it crouched flat, almost hidden behind the human body in the undergrowth, with tail lashing, and great claws tearing the boy's shoulder, as the rest ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... of art, a repository of "bigotry and virtue." On its orderly rows of shelves must be immediately accessible the right word for the right place: no superfluity, no disorder, no circumambient margin for effect. Homocea-like, it "touches the spot," and having deadened the ache of incomprehensibility, has done its ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... we heard the elevator door clang and waited expectantly, but nothing happened. I began to wonder whether, even if some one had a pass-key to the suite, we could hear him enter if he was quiet. The outside hall was thickly carpeted, and deadened every footfall if one exercised only reasonable care. The rooms ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve
... on its face in time gone, it turned to him to-day nothing but stagnation, a great death. He wondered idly, looking at it, (for the old Huguenot brain of the man was full of morbid fancies,) if it were winter alone that had deadened color and pulse out of these full-blooded hills, or if they could know the colder horror crossing their threshold, and forgot to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... was talking, held her breath, expecting every moment to hear the guns go off with a loud roar, not aware how much the sound would be deadened before it reached the hold. Neither she nor Gerald had at first observed the increased motion of the ship, or that she was heeling over to larboard considerably more than at first. ...
— The Missing Ship - The Log of the "Ouzel" Galley • W. H. G. Kingston
... to the balcony, I close at her heels. The shadows veiled us, the thick carpet deadened the sound of our tread, or certainly we must have been detected by the man who entered the room we ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... dart in the shadow of the gate. The broken-nosed pirate had fired at me. The report, deadened in the vault, hardly reached my ears. Don Balthazar's arm seemed to swing me back. Then I felt him lean heavily on my shoulder. I did not know what had happened ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... mother," she cried, "if I have failed to express the full delight I experience in my restitution to you. The shock of your sad tale at first deadened my joy, while the suddenness of the information respecting myself so overwhelmed me, that like one chancing upon a hidden treasure, and gazing at it confounded, I was unable to credit my own good fortune. Even now I am quite bewildered; and no wonder, for many thoughts, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the reel deadened now, and the stride of Miltiades was perceptibly lessened and then became but a vigorous up-and-down hop, while the tense line sang ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... of her old woman, and noiselessly, while Crawford lay in a half slumber, Alexa continued making the chamber more comfortable. Chintz curtains veiled the windows, which, for all their narrowness, had admitted too much light; and an old carpet deadened the sound of footsteps on the creaking boards—for the bones of a house do not grow silent with age; a fire burned in the antique grate, and was a soul to the chamber, which was chilly, looking to the north, with ...
— The Elect Lady • George MacDonald |
