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More "Deaden" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... morality or faith cannot but impede the harmonious development of the mind itself. Passion is the foe of reason, and may easily become strong enough to extinguish its light. He who wishes to educate himself must learn to resist the desires of his lower nature, which if indulged deaden sensibility, weaken the will, take from the imagination its freshness, and from the heart the power of loving. The task he has set himself is arduous, and he cannot have too much energy, too much warmth of soul, ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... hut, beaten about by the inky rains, ponderous songs issued. Within, tables were spread for drinkers; sailors sat before the smoking fire, the old ones drinking brandy and the young ones flirting with the girls; all more or less intoxicated and singing to deaden thought. Close to them, the great sea, their tomb on the morrow, sang also, filling the vacant night with ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... that opium killed the poet in him does not commend itself to the scientific consciousness. Opium has the tendency to stimulate rather than to deaden the poetic imagination, as the history of De Quincey can testify; and one of Coleridge's most imaginative pieces, "Kubla Khan", is said to have been occasioned by an overdose ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... temper of the man is not so grudging. His joy in your escape will help deaden his own pain. Besides, what could you do for him if you were with him at the end? 'Twould be ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... after Margaret's flight, Arthur Burdon had thrown himself again into the work which for so long had been his only solace. It had lost its savour; but he would not take this into account, and he slaved away mechanically, by perpetual toil seeking to deaden his anguish. But as the time passed he was seized on a sudden with a curious feeling of foreboding, which he could in no way resist; it grew in strength till it had all the power of an obsession, and he could not reason himself ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... service, but separated them, one going to Camp Ayer, in Massachusetts; one to Camp Bliss, in El Paso, Texas, and the rest to camps in States between. In one Middle West community a German father and son went so far as to deaden pain through cocaine and then cut off the finger of the right hand. It is generally understood that both the father and son are now in two widely separated penitentiaries, reflecting each in his own cell upon the folly of treason ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... see the sun, Illustrious orb of day, Enlightening heaven's wide expanse, Expel night's gloom away. So light into the darkest soul, JESUS, Thou dost impart, Uplifting Thy life-giving smiles Upon the deaden'd heart; Sun Thou of Righteousness Divine, Sole King of Saints ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... you die, the world, the Church, may feel your loss, and cherish your example! On its cares and duties, its trusts and responsibilities, its employments and enjoyments, inscribe the motto, "The world passeth away!" Beware of every thing in it that would tend to deaden spirituality of heart; unfitting the mind for serious thought, lowering the standard of Christian duty, and inducing a perilous conformity to its false manners, habits, tastes, and principles. As ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... o'clock and pitch dark when the column moved out of Molteno and struck across the black gloom of the veld, the wheels of the guns being wrapped in hide to deaden the rattle. It was known that the distance was not more than ten miles, and so when hour followed hour and the guides were still unable to say that they had reached their point it must have become perfectly evident that they ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... that is, not only for fear of punishment, but for conscience's sake. Even if you do not expect to be punished; even if you think no one will ever find out that you have broken the law, remember it is God's ordinance. He sees you. Do not hurt your own conscience, and deaden your own sense of right and wrong, by breaking the least or the most unjust law ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... The first and most obvious effect of opium, for example, is to deaden pain and to arouse pleasure; but while the drug is producing these soothing sensations, it interferes with bodily functions. Secretion, digestion, absorption of food, and the removal of waste matters are hindered. Continued use of the drug leads to headache, exhaustion, ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... Nothing can be greater than the contrast it affords to a plantation experience, under the suspicious and vigilant eye of a mercenary overseer or a watchful master. Day and night are not more unlike. The mandates of Slavery are like leaden sounds, sinking with dead weight into the very soul, only to deaden and destroy. The impulse of freedom lends wings to the feet, buoys up the spirit within, and the fugitive catches glorious glimpses of light through rifts and seams in the accumulated ignorance of his years of oppression. How briskly we travelled on ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... slacken the pace, but evidently the fellow fails to hear. Then he puts his head out of the window and once more elevates his voice, but the rattle of the plunging vehicle, together with the noise made by the driver himself, as he shouts at his steeds like a crazy Bedouin, combine to deaden ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... in petty sleights of bodily strength and activity? Were we, in fine, obliged ever to talk like philosophers, assigning dry reasons for everything, and dropping grave sentences upon all occasions, would it not much deaden human life, and make ordinary conversation exceedingly to languish? Facetiousness therefore in such cases, and to such purposes, may ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... a task that it wrung his heart to perform. His horse must be put out of pain. He took off his coat, rolled it over his horse's head, inserted his gun under its folds to deaden the sound and to hide those luminous eyes turned so entreatingly ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... in a harsh breath and turned to him. Young Raleigh, who had written a monograph on engineering stresses, had still much to learn about the stresses that contort and warp the souls of men and women. He learned some of it then, when he saw the girl's face deaden to a blanker white and the flame of a hungry hope leap into her eyes. He ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... happened the very next morning that Mrs. la Mode, the milliner, called upon Mrs. Ludgate. The ruling passion still prevailed, notwithstanding the miserable state to which this lady was reduced. Even palsy could not deaden her personal vanity: her love of dress survived the total loss of her beauty; she became accustomed to the sight of her distorted features, and was still anxious to wear what was most genteel and becoming. Mrs. la Mode had not a ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... undertaken to tread. Yet the deceit he was forced to practise cost him many a pang. He had succumbed to his passion, and to win the love for which he yearned had voluntarily abandoned truth and honour; but standing thus alone with his sin, he despised and hated himself. To deaden remorse and drown reflection, he had recourse to brandy, and though the fierce excitement of his hopes and fears steeled him against the stupefying action of the liquor, he was rendered by it incapable of calm reflection. In certain nervous conditions our ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... my bottom, and taking the rod, which was by her side, she raised her arm and gave me a fearful cut, which made me not only flinch, but cry out most lustily. Blow followed blow, causing at first great agony, that made me cry again in good earnest; then the very continuance of the blows seemed to deaden the parts until I hardly felt them. This was succeeded by a titillation and lascivious excitement which speedily brought my prick out in the fullest vigour. I then began to push it against Miss Frankland's thigh, and to wriggle myself nearly off her knees. Seemingly to prevent this, she passed her ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... thought heroic poets, but I think it touches Virgil less than any; he is too great a master of his art to make a blot which may so easily be hit. Similitudes (as I have said) are not for tragedy, which is all violent, and where the passions are in a perpetual ferment; for there they deaden, where they should animate; they are not of the nature of dialogue unless in comedy. A metaphor is almost all the stage can suffer, which is a kind of similitude comprehended in a word. But this figure has a contrary effect in heroic poetry; ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... tornado lasted without interruption; the sun had set, and the darkness was opaque. It was impossible to move against the force of the wind and the deluge of water which descended. Speak, we did not, but shut our eyes against the lightning, and held our fingers to our ears to deaden the noise of the thunder, which burst upon us in the most awful manner. My companion groaned at intervals, whether from fear, I know not; I had no fear, for I did not know the danger, or that there was a God to judge ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... speaks of his eldest boy, Hartley, then in his fifth year: "Dear Hartley! we are at times alarmed by the state of his health, but at present he is well. If I were to lose him, I am afraid it would exceedingly deaden my affection for any other children I may have." Then he writes the lines that we now have as the Conclusion to Part the Second; and adds: "A very metaphysical account of fathers calling their children rogues, rascals, ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... course, she being the next in the line. This vessel, remarkable, as the commander-in-chief had observed, for never being out of the way, was not long in closing, though as she luffed up on the admiral's weather-quarter, to pass to windward, she let go all her top-sail bowlines, so as to deaden her way, making a sort of half-board. This simple evolution, as she righted her helm, brought her about fifty yards to windward of the Plantagenet, past which ship she surged slowly but steadily, the weather now permitting a conversation to be held at that distance, and by means of trumpets, with ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... if frozen to death. Higher up among the rocks and cliffs and stones, we see a stripling whose ambition it is to strike the sky with his forehead, and wet his hair in the misty cloud, pursuing the ptarmigan. . . . Never shall eld deaden our sympathies with the pastimes of our fellow-men, any more than with their highest ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... the first business of the enslaver of men to blunt, deaden, and destroy the central principle of human responsibility. Conscience is, to the individual soul, and to society, what the law of gravitation is to the universe. It holds society together; it is the basis of all trust and confidence; ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... hope-inspiring, godlike words, To promise aid and safety in the fane Of his lov'd sister, who o'er Tauris rules. Thus the prophetic word fulfils itself, That with my life shall terminate my woe. How easy 'tis for me, whose heart is crush'd, Whose sense is deaden'd by a hand divine, Thus to renounce the beauteous light of day! And must the son of Atreus not entwine The wreath of conquest round his dying brow— Must I, as my forefathers, as my sire, Bleed like a victim,—an ignoble death— So be it! Better ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... temptation. My impious ire against those two had its root in the heart; that heart then I must deaden, and, Dei gratia, I shall. Shall I, a servant of Christ and of the Church, court temptation? Shall I pray daily to be led out on't, and walk into ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... and announced from the throne. Thus the people of England felt in the eighth, not in the fourth year of the war. No sighing or panting after negotiation; no motions from the opposition to force the ministry into a peace; no messages from ministers to palsy and deaden the resolution of Parliament or the spirit of the nation. They did not so much as advise the king to listen to the propositions of the enemy, nor to seek for peace, but through the mediation of a vigorous war. This address was moved in an ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... this way at her own dullness, and all the while longing for an excitement that would deaden importunate aches, she was passing through files of admiring beholders in the country-dance with which it was traditional to open the ball, and was being generally regarded by her own sex as an enviable woman. It ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... building—almost maddened by despair—to seek an outlet, he entered the kitchen, where he perceived a vessel full of water. The sight filled him with joy. Perhaps water, taken in large quantities, might deaden the effects of the poison and save Julio's life. At any rate, he had no other remedy, and as it was his only hope, he grasped at it as if it were ...
— The Amulet • Hendrik Conscience
... had entered the room with no more warning than a gentle rattle of the handle. But her warning was lost on Faith who, hot night though it was, was lying with her head buried under the bed-clothes, to deaden the sound of ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... of the open windows. At the same instant his ear caught a sort of indistinct sound on the stairs, followed by the measured tread of soldiery, with the clanking of swords and military accoutrements; then came a hum and buzz as of many voices, so as to deaden even the noisy mirth of the bridal party, among whom a vague feeling of curiosity and apprehension quelled every disposition to talk, and almost instantaneously ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... and been associated with a thousand thoughts with which the mass of mankind has never cared to connect them. The mountaineer is improved by a similar process. But I know some sceptical critics will ask, does not the way in which he is accustomed to regard mountains rather deaden their poetical influence? Doesn't he come to look at them as mere instruments of sport, and overlook their more spiritual teaching? Does not all the excitement of personal adventure and the noisy apparatus of guides, and ropes, and axes, and ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... should never forget its subordinate position in human affairs. It must not be permitted to occupy more than its legitimate place and power in society, nor to have the liberty to desecrate the poetry of life, to deaden our sensitiveness to ideals, bragging of its own coarseness as a sign of virility. The pity is that when in the centre of our activities we acknowledge, by some proud name, the supremacy of wanton destructiveness, ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... back silently into the tent and lay down again upon my sandy mattress, first lowering the door-curtain to shut out the sight of the willows in the moonlight, and then burying my head as deeply as possible beneath the blankets to deaden the ...
— The Willows • Algernon Blackwood
... a good look at the whirl now," said the old man, "and if you will creep round this crag, so as to get in its lee, and deaden the roar of the water, I will tell you a story that will convince you I ought to know something of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... broken, blundering words the good woman blurted out the truth, and tried to deaden the blow of it. But the soul lives fast, and Israel lived ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... effect from that which is wrought in a good housewife by perceiving any disorders in her kitchen; who, on such occasions, commonly spreads the disorder, not only over her whole family, but over the whole neighbourhood. —Now, these great calamities, especially when sudden, tend to stifle and deaden all the faculties, instead of rousing them; and accordingly Herodotus tells us a story of Croesus king of Lydia, who, on beholding his servants and courtiers led captive, wept bitterly, but, when he saw his wife and ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... deaden any shuffling he may have made while creeping toward the lazerette door, and for this Frank ...
— The Aeroplane Boys on the Wing - Aeroplane Chums in the Tropics • John Luther Langworthy
... himself in the water as far as he could, to deaden the blow in case of the fellow falling back on him, and screamed encouragement, threats, and promises up the well. Suddenly from above came a new voice altogether, a white ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... the phalangeal articulations are flexed and the heel slightly raised, in order to relieve the pressure of the perforans tendon on the affected area, and so obtain ease, there are others who hold that the heel is pressed firmly to the ground in order to deaden the pain. It may be, and most probably is, that both are right; but, in our opinion, there is no doubt whatever that pointing with the heel elevated is by ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... a commentary it was on "Our Father!" It was a ghastly mockery, a blasphemous farce, a satire on Christianity infinitely more sardonic and mordant than anything I ever wrote or published. Soon after returning to my cell I was glad of the substantial dinner and drowsy ale to deaden the ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... educated classes to support the ideas they prefer, and the order of existence based on them, has attained its furthest limits. They lie, and delude themselves, and one another, with the subtlest forms of deception, simply to obscure, to deaden conscience. ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of an ill of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc. Even this will naturally make you believe, and deaden your acuteness.—"But this is what I am afraid of."—And why? What have you ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... th' way ye wud ordin'ry wurruds. No, sir. Ye've got to save it up an' invist it at th' right time or get nawthin' fr'm it. It's betther thin a doctor f'r a stubbed toe but it niver cured a broken leg. It's a kind iv a first aid to th' injured. It seems to deaden th' pain. Women an' childher cry or faint whin they're hurt. That's because they haven't th' gift iv swearin'. But as I tell ye, they'se no good wastin' it. Th' man that swears at ivrything has nawthin' ...
— Observations by Mr. Dooley • Finley Peter Dunne
... field of action and enjoyment as an humble laborer; we should both have been more truly noble. I envy the peasants who have the glorious privilege of doing just that which they are best fitted to do; who are not forced to vegetate and call vegetation existence,—not compelled to waste and deaden their energies because it is an aristocratic penalty,—not doomed to glide into and out of their lives without ever living enough to ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... gave it to him, and gave it to him strong—being certain that he was past hurting by it, and hoping that it might deaden his pain. And presently, when he asked for another drink, I gave him ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... floor on which Rose's bedroom was, I stopped in the dark passage. A narrow streak of light showed me that her door was not quite shut. Then, gathering up my skirts to deaden their sound, I felt along the wall and crept softly, on tip-toe, so as to take her by surprise. With infinite precautions, I slowly pushed the door open. I first caught sight of a corner of the ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... lighted only by a skylight in such a way that prying eyes could not see into it. The two friends unstopped the flue which opened into the chimney of the stove in the workroom, where the girls heated their irons. Eve and Basine spread ragged coverlets over the brick floor to deaden any sound that David might make, put in a truckle bed, a stove for his experiments, and a table and a chair. Basine promised to bring food in the night; and as no one had occasion to enter her room, David might defy his enemies one and ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... for any one to get away," commented Foyle. "The stairs lead direct to the hall, and there are only two rooms to pass. This carpet would deaden ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... deliberately for a chance to strike—not cowering in inactivity. Defence is a condition of restrained activity—not a mere condition of rest. Its real weakness is that if unduly prolonged it tends to deaden the spirit of offence. This is a truth so vital that some authorities in their eagerness to enforce it have travestied it into the misleading maxim, "That attack is the best defence." Hence again an ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... brain stopped too, and she began to listen. A paper-boy shouted down the street; an omnibus ceased and lurched on again with the heave of duty once more shouldered; the dullness of the sounds suggested that a fog had risen since her return, if, indeed, a fog has power to deaden sound, of which fact, she could not be sure at the present moment. It was the sort of fact Ralph Denham knew. At any rate, it was no concern of hers, and she was about to dip a pen when her ear was caught by the sound of a step upon the stone staircase. She followed it past Mr. ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... however, or green, does not light up well, while ruby, or some other red, brings out the effect of glass, china, and silver to the best advantage. Old gold, or olive-brown, is also very pretty. The dining-room should be carpeted to deaden the ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... forgot Peter. He tried to deaden within him the impulses which Yellow Bird's conjuring had roused. He tried to see in them a menace and a danger, and he repeated to himself the folly of placing credence in Yellow Bird's "medicine." But his efforts were futile, and he was honest enough to admit it. The uneasiness ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... disintegrating and scattering, in this way getting ready for use in new forms, that which is hoarded and consequently serving no use. There is also a great law continually operating whose effects are to dwarf and deaden the powers of true enjoyment, as well as all the higher faculties of the one ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... your compadre smoke?" "No, sir," said the lady, astonished at this irrelevant question, and perhaps the more so, as the count's aversion to smoking was so well known, that none of his smoking subjects ventured to approach him without having taken every precaution to deaden any odour of the fragrant weed which might lurk about their clothes or person. "Does he take snuff?" said the viceroy. "Yes, your Excellency," said his visitor, who probably feared that for once his Excellency's wits were wool-gathering. "That is sufficient," ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... like that, to deaden my conscience, if I had one to deaden," Verkan Vall said. "As it is, I feel like a murderer of babes. That overgrown fool, Marnark, handled his knife like a cow-butcher. The young fellow couldn't handle a pistol at all. I suppose the old ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... than she had gone forth. Her first bright star of anticipation had faded, and she had partaken deeply of the griefs of the two whom she loved so well. Not only had she to leave the one to his gloomy lodgings in the City, and the toil that was to deaden suffering, but the other must be parted with at the station, to return to the lonely house, where not even old Ponto would meet her—his last hour having, to every one's grief, come in ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... deceive Murat and the emperor; and in this they succeeded. These details transported Napoleon with joy. Credulous from hope, perhaps from despair, he was for some moments dazzled by these appearances: eager to escape from the inward feeling which oppressed him, he seemed desirous to deaden it by resigning himself to an expansive joy. He therefore summoned all his generals, and triumphantly announced to them a speedy peace. "They had but to wait another fortnight. None but himself was acquainted with the Russian character. On the receipt of his letter ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... him was too much, and he sunk down on a rustic bench near him, and burying his head in his hands, tried to shut out sight and sound till power and calmness would return. But though he could close his eyes on all outward things, he could not deaden hearing; and words reached him which, while he strove not to hear, seemed to be traced by a dagger's point upon his heart, and from very physical agony deprived ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... still hold their places on the shelves of libraries will in the next century take their proper place in the mouldering mass which interests the antiquarian alone,—the mouldering mass which universities still cherish, and which helps to deaden the rising intelligence of the western world. Let us, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... her still buoyant freshness was gone. It was the same feeling that had come to him on the Angiolina steps, at Abbazia. He even wondered if in the stress of the life they were now following she would lose the last of her good looks, if even her ever-resilient temperament would deaden and harden, and no longer rise supreme to the exacting moment. Or could it be that she was acting a part for him? that all this fine bravado was an attitude, a role, a pretense, taken on for his sake? Could it be—and the sudden thought ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... dear Miss Gordon. It may help to deaden the merciless stings of memory, which all day long has tortured me by unrolling the past, where my Christmas days stand out like illuminated ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... Robert Peel defined Conservatism when he said, "My object for some years past has been to lay the foundation of a great party, which, existing in the House of Commons, and deriving its strength from the popular will, should diminish the risk and deaden the shock of collisions between the ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... tends to deaden this sense of the open-air is just as certain. It runs not upon Nature, but upon the presentation of Nature. I am almost ready to assert that it injures a critic as surely as it spoils a creative writer. Certainly I remember that the finest appreciation of ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... possessed by the long-used tibia. It lengthens legs because they are used in supporting the body, and shortens arms because they are used in pulling. Whether it enlarges brain if used in one way and diminishes it if used in another, we cannot tell; but it must obviously deaden nervous sensibilities in some cases and intensify them in others. It enlarges hands long before they are used, and thickens soles long before the time for walking on them. At the same time, as if by an oversight, it so delays its transmission of the habit of walking on these thickened soles, ...
— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball
... not to look, reserving a climax for our halting-place. The pathway is well marked though somewhat stony and irregular; the valley-bottom is wider here and we are close by the side of the Gave. The hemp sandals prove surprisingly useful. Their half-inch soles of rope utterly deaden the inequalities of the ground, and the pebbly, hummocky path is as a carpet beneath the feet. The bearers tramp steadily onward, the chairs sinking and rising in easy vertical motion, much more grateful than the horizontal "joggle" of the Pyrenean saddle-horse. We are ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... away from the wind, and the noise of the surf will deaden the hunter's approach; so beating their way against hurricane gales—winds that throw them from their feet at times—scrambling over rocks slippery as glass with ice, running out on long reefs where the crash of spray confuses earth and air, wading waist-deep in ice slush, ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... shower of drops from the palm-fronds; and then, on the great leaves of the Regia, which defy simile, we perceived the first feathered folk of this single tropical glimpse—spur-winged jacanas, whose rich rufus and cool lemon-yellow no dampness could deaden. With them were gallinules and small green herons, and across the pink mist of lotos blossoms just beyond, three egrets drew three lines of purest white—and vanished. It was not at all real, this onrush ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... tickled the top of Mr Bloom's gullet. Want to make good pastry, butter, best flour, Demerara sugar, or they'd taste it with the hot tea. Or is it from her? A barefoot arab stood over the grating, breathing in the fumes. Deaden the gnaw of hunger that way. Pleasure or pain is it? Penny dinner. Knife and fork ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... spattered among its rocks, without the note of a bird or the chirp of a squirrel to interrupt its monotony. Everything was dead. Now and then Rod could hear the wind whispering over the top of the chasm. But not a breath of it came down to him. Under his feet was only sufficient snow to deaden his own footsteps, and he still carried his ...
— The Wolf Hunters - A Tale of Adventure in the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... Hal; we can't shorten sail, for we should be seen; and we can't fire bow-chasers, for we should be heard—and those are all the ways I know on to deaden a vessel's speed." ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... pass from me. The weather was grey and lowering, and though the rain had ceased, the air was still heavy with it, and every bush and branch dripped with moisture. It was a poor day for hunting, for the eye could not see forty yards; but it suited my purpose, since the dull air would deaden the noise of my musket. I was hunting alone in a strange land among imminent perils, and my aim was not to glorify my skill, but to find the means of life. The thought strung me up to a mood where delight was more notable than care. I was adventuring with only my hand to guard me ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... into a deeper pang for all that the Surrey cottage stood for in her life, all the things that she had left to come to Imogen. She remembered. And, for a moment, the old vortex of whirling anguish almost engulfed her. Only long years could deaden the pang of that parting. She would not dwell on that. Eddy and Rose; to turn to them was to feel almost gay. Jack and Mary;—yes, on these last names her thoughts lingered and her gaze for them held tender presages. ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... hand Upon my heart gently; not smiting it, But as a harper lays his open palm Upon his harp to deaden its vibrations." ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... appointment and promotion, thus giving to the poor and meritorious at least an equal chance with the man of wealth and the base hireling of party. In actual service the system of exclusive seniority cannot exist; it would deaden and paralyze all our energies. Taking advantage of this, politicians will drive us to the opposite extreme, unless the executive authority be limited by wholesome laws, based on the just principles of merit ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... uplifted, delicately lighted by the moon. Her eyes shone dark with those fluttering, sweet wraiths of thoughts which we may not prison in speech, which words only deaden and crush into vapid sentimentalism. Life, held in a great unutterable calm, seemed to lie out there in the radiant, vague distance, asleep and smiling cryptically ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... the Fates had decided not as yet to break that attenuated thread, the tingling, stinging shock passed. She found strength to read the whole article, almost intelligently, though at times her mind would wander to inconsequent things, and the beat of her own heart seemed to deaden her understanding. She remembered now everything, nearly everything, till she turned from her own door, a desperate, homeless outcast. She recalled a cab going somewhere, and then after what appeared to be an interval of unconsciousness, she was walking, walking, ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... charlatanesque element in his nature regained the ascendency. "My friend," he said, addressing M. Casimir, who was lighting him out, "you must at once have some straw spread over the street so as to deaden the sound of the vehicles. And to-morrow, you must inform the ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... here a practical, not a theoretical, problem. It is not to be solved by thinking it good, for to think it good is to deaden the very nerve of action; but by destroying it and replacing ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... been traced by a hand too delicate to leave the lines visible to every vulgar eye. Like the master-touches of art, her grief, as it was beyond the sympathies, so it lay beyond the ken of those whom excellence may fail to excite, or in whom absence can deaden affections. Still her feelings were true to all who had any claims on her love. The predominance of wasting grief over the more genial springs of her enjoyments, only went to prove how much greater is the influence of the generous than the selfish qualities of our nature, ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... how to know the toughest hickory by hammering on its trunk; when twigs cut from the forest would grow, if thrust in the earth; and that secret day of all the year when an axe, stuck into the bark of a tree, would deaden ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... night of March 23, ten days after the battle, Don Pedro, accompanied by several of his knights, secretly left the fortress, the feet of their horses being bound with cloth to deaden the sound of hoofs. The sentinels, who had been instructed in advance, allowed them to pass, and they approached the camp of the French adventurers, where Du Guesclin was waiting to ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... had arrived; and he seemed to blind himself and deaden himself to all things in this mortal world except the little notch in the rifle, the shining sight, and that fawn-colored object over there. He took a long breath; he steadied and steadied the slightly trembling barrel until it appeared perfectly ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... of a safe weighing three hundredweight some burglars last week used cushions and mats to deaden the sound. We are greatly pleased to note a tendency to study residents a little. After all it is most irritating to be awakened by noisy ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 18, 1919 • Various
... majesty,' he said, when he had finished, 'the wound is beyond the power of man to heal; but though I cannot cure it, I can at least deaden the pain, and enable you to ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... drop; go by the board, go by the wayside; go up in smoke, end in smoke &c (fail) 732. render powerless &c adj.; deprive of power; disable, disenable^; disarm, incapacitate, disqualify, unfit, invalidate, deaden, cramp, tie the hands; double up, prostrate, paralyze, muzzle, cripple, becripple^, maim, lame, hamstring, draw the teeth of; throttle, strangle, garrotte, garrote; ratten^, silence, sprain, clip the wings of, put hors de combat ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... was clearly discernible except when the swiftly-flying clouds obscured the moon's light. The soughing of the wind in the tree-tops, together with the soft springy turf, helped to somewhat deaden the sound of Golightly's hoofs. The good horse scented danger in the air and in the tone of his mistress's voice, and with true instinct galloped through the wood, conscious of the caressing finger-tips which ever and ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... in the wild excitement of pleasure to kill thought and deaden his heart. But there would come quiet hours to remind him of the past, and, at times, in the middle of the night, he would start up from his couch, as if he had heard a scream, a single heart-piercing cry, which rang ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... fancy to 'Keep on Moving.' Up to this we had been snug as fleas in a blanket; but now he started to make such a noise, encoring, that I had to step down to the gallery and lean over it and request Petunia to take the cover off the piano and play something, if she could, to deaden the outcries. 'Something domestic on the loud pedal,' I suggested. 'Create an impression that we're holding a ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the surroundings incline you to good and reasonable thoughts, and for the moment deaden the rasp and jar of that busy wickedness which both working in one's self and received from others is the true source of all human miseries. Thus the time spent at Mass is like a short repose in a deep and well-built library, into which no sounds come and where you feel yourself secure ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... having procured the address from Mrs. Langton, he went on that same afternoon to Campden Hill, not knowing, nor indeed greatly caring just then, that this was not the way to deaden ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... stolid precision. What was the crucifying of another Jew or two to them? Before they lift the cross or fasten their prisoner to it, a little touch of pity, or perhaps only the observance of the usual custom, leads them to offer a draught of wine, in which some anodyne had been mixed, to deaden agony. But the cup which He had to drink needed that He should be in full possession of all His sensibilities to pain, and of all His unclouded firmness of resolve; and so His patient lips closed against the offered mercy. He would not drink because He would suffer, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... asses to carry water, and driving along with him a quantity of cattle, and also taking chariots and the people called Psylli,[744] who cure the bites of serpents by sucking out the poison with their mouths, and deaden and soothe the serpents themselves by charming them with music. Though the march was seven days in succession, Cato led at the head of his men without using horse or beast of burden. And he continued to sup in a sitting posture from the day ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... for he hath ordered the strings and tuned them after the fashion of one who is right skilled in the art." Quoth I, "It was I tuned it." "Then, God on thee," answered she, "take it and play on it!" So I took it and playing a rare and difficult measure, that came nigh to deaden the live and raise the dead, sang thereto ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... chains or ropes by which it could be swung, so that the head butted with a deadly insistence upon the masonry of the wall. Meanwhile the enemy from the ramparts are doing their best to set the shed on fire, to break off the ram's head with heavy stones, to pull it upwards by a noose, or to deaden the effect of the shock by lowering stuffed sacks or other buffer material between it and the wall. At another point, in place of the shed, there is rolled forward a lofty construction like a tower built in several stories. When this approaches the wall it will ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... positive laws is to deaden the mind to that constant and lively sense of what is just and unjust, to which it must otherwise be invariably awake, by not only encouraging but by obliging it to have recourse ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... of summer's choir. One glow-worm, flashing life's last fire. One frog with leathern croak Beneath the oak,— And the pool stands leaden Where November twilights deaden Day's unspent desire. ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice
... bedding, which crept through the thin board partition, and hovered, heavy and suffocating, above his head, became even more overpowering. His mouth watered. He shut his eyes and forced himself to think of other things, in order to deaden his hunger. Then a light, well-known step sounded on the stairs and some one knocked on the door—it was Morten. "Are you there, Pelle?" he asked. But Pelle did ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... and looking round, to his delight he saw a small arrow, with a piece of very thin string attached. The arrow was made of very light wood. Round the iron point was a thick wrapping of cotton, which would entirely deaden its sound, as it struck a wall. It was soaked in water, and Charlie had no doubt that the sound he heard was caused by its fall into the moat, after ineffectual trials to shoot through ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty
... wither in a moment. Our poet's verse does not put a spirit of youth in every thing, but a spirit of fear, despondency, and decay: it is not an electric spark to kindle or expand, but acts like the torpedo's touch to deaden or contract. It lends no dazzling tints to fancy, it aids no soothing feelings in the heart, it gladdens no prospect, it stirs no wish; in its view the current of life runs slow, dull, cold, dispirited, half under ground, muddy, and clogged with all creeping things. ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... "Kittiwake Jack," one of the crew, was seated as far as possible for'ard, vainly trying to absorb his tea and stop his ears, at one and the same time, whilst his fellow-sufferer, Bill Brown, having hastily dived below, lay in his bunk, striving to deaden the weird, wailing sounds that filled the ship. And just as Haydn's "Surprise" was half way through, for the seventh time, ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... the weight of earthly evil bent, In varied toils and woes thy days were spent; 'Till cold Misfortune, with unceasing lower, Weigh'd down thy soul, and deaden'd every power, Reflection's lamp withdrew her guiding ray, And fail'd to point thee on thy darkling way, And thy wild soul prepared to launch alone From Night's dark bosom into worlds unknown: When, sent ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... dullness and make evil artistic, and it is condoned; but vice attired in the garb of a queen is as truly vice as when clothed in rags and living in squalor. To become accustomed to evil, to garnish sin, to dim and deaden sensibility to what is right and beautiful, is to extirpate manhood and become a mere lump of flesh. No man has a right to be good friends with iniquity. In a wicked world the only people who are justified in peaceable living ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... moment the result of Socialism as a permanent policy. It means the substitution, as already shown, of government or official judgment and initiative for that of the individual. The whole process would be one to deaden and atrophy the powers of the people in general, with the result that there would follow a leveling down to a plane of mediocrity rather than a leveling up according to individual capacities and ambitions, exercised through equality ...
— Socialism and American ideals • William Starr Myers
... had been fired in the open it would have been sufficiently sharp and clear to attract the attention of the men on guard. The heavy double lining of the tent however was thick enough so to muffle and deaden the sound that it would ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... attempting to insinuate itself through the eye of a needle. In a small, low-roofed chamber, where there is barely standing-room for twenty people, it is difficult even for a highly trained choir to do itself justice. The low roof tends to deaden the pitch, and in so confined a space the singers cannot get into that instinctive touch with each other which makes the difference between a good and a bad choir; still, people in the church below told me that the ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... the tame tiger of the excited and highly respectable Adolphus Casay, shiveringly emerging from beneath the bed-clothes he had diligently wrapped round his aching head, to deaden the incessant clamour of the iron which was entering into the soul of his sleep. A hastily-performed toilet, in which the more established method of encasing the lower man with the front of the garment to the front ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 9, 1841 • Various
... Moreover, C. at his death, was two years younger than Oliver—a whole lifetime of advancement at that age frequently—indeed always I believe in leading cases. There are few indeed whom the facile enthusiasm for contemporary models does not deaden to the truly balanced claims of successful efforts in art. However, look at Watts's remodelled extracts when the vol comes out, and also at what he says in detail as to Chatterton, ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... groaned and shrieked loudly when improperly lubricated, and the whole machine rattled like a runaway tin-peddler. Ingenious mufflers have subdued the sputtering exhaust, the gears are made to run in oil or are so carefully cut as to mesh perfectly, rubber tires deaden the pounding of the wheels, and carefully designed ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday
... seems thoroughly carried out; and when the party's assembled on deck, it will hear no more noise than the buzzing of a big bee, as the exhaust is led away below the water-line. It won't be bad in the cabins either, even when they keep the sliding door open, for this screen of thick sail-cloth will deaden what sound there is. And it was a smart idea to utilize the power of the magneto to light up the whole ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... during that night. He paced his room, a prey to jealousy and envy and rage, which his calm temperament had kept him from feeling in their intensity up to this miserable hour. He thought of all that a maddened nature can imagine to deaden its own intolerable anguish. Of revenge. If Myrtle rejected his suit, should he take her life on the spot, that she might never be another's,—that neither man nor woman should ever triumph over him,—the proud ambitious man, defeated, ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... that the moral sensibilities are the most delicate part of our constitution; that as such they require to be touched with the utmost care, or rather not to be touched directly at all; and that the thrusting of instruction upon them tends to dull and deaden, not to quicken and strengthen them. For the true virtue-making power is an inspiration, not a catechism; and the truly cunning moral teacher is he who, in the honest and free enthusiasm of moral beauty, steals that inspiration into us without our knowing ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... part of England, meanwhile, there is but little chance that an earthquake will ever do much harm, because the ground here, for thousands of feet down, is not hard and rocky, but soft—sands, clays, chalk, and sands again; clays, soft limestones, and clays again—which all act as buffers to deaden the earthquake shocks, and deaden ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... as we should expect, composed of troops of the line and light troops. The former wore either short wigs arranged in rows of curls, or a kind of padded cap by way of a helmet, thick enough to deaden blows; the breast and shoulders were undefended, but a short loin-cloth was wrapped round the hips, and the stomach and upper part of the thighs were protected by a sort of triangular apron, sometimes scalloped at the sides, and composed of leather thongs ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... was abroad. He was creeping up the right-hand bank of a stream, his only chance lying in the noise of the waters, which might serve to deaden the sound of broken twig ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... silence daunted him now; but it must be gone through. Thinking to deaden fear by hurry, he caught up the lantern, leapt on board with the painter, fastened it, and crept swiftly towards ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... I know, I have not a single blood relation living—at least, none nearer than a third cousin. Two years ago I inherited my paternal estate. It was too small to support me in the manner of life to which I had been accustomed, and at the same time it was large enough to effectually deaden any inclination towards real work. As an inevitable consequent, I became a speculator. Little by little my fortune has disappeared in the abyss of stock gambling; now it is gone entirely. To add to my misfortunes, my apartments were ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... instance refused to allow the growth of in herself—the mood of one seeking an opiate, an anaesthetic. The scrubbing of hospital floors; the pacing of dreary streets on mechanical errands; the humblest obedience and routine; things that must be done, and in the doing of them deaden thought—these were what she turned to as the only means by ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and she sped away followed by the three chums. They were out of sight not a moment too soon, for as they turned a corner, running across a lawn to deaden their footsteps, they ...
— The Ranger Boys and the Border Smugglers • Claude A. Labelle
... must patrol the alley while Brainerd cuts out a pane or two of that closed-up alley window, to see if anything can be heard through the cracks of those inside boards, though it's probable they are padded to deaden sound. As for the upper rooms, they're ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... be prolonged a little beyond the usual hour, doth it not set half the audience asleep? as I question not I have by this time both my children. Well, then, like a good-natured surgeon, who prepares his patient for a painful operation by endeavouring as much as he can to deaden his sensation, I will now communicate to you, in your slumbering condition, the news with which I threatened you. Your good mother, you are to know, is dead at last, and hath left her whole fortune to her elder daughter.—This is all the ill news I ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... you advance towards a spot where you fear to enter, and from which you are ready to flee back; one foot planted on the ground and the other barely touching it. And the lamp; ought she to let the light fall on the eyes of Love? Ought she not to hold it apart, and to shield it with her hand to deaden its brightness? Moreover, that would have lighted the picture in a striking way. These good people do not know that the eyelids have a kind of transparency; they have never seen a mother coming in the night to look ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... Solomon, he says, "the man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain" (I.E., even while living) "in the congregation of the dead." Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... iii., p. 105.).—If your correspondents (Nos. 66 and 67.) who have inquired for a book called Jartuare, and for a writer named "Drachmarus," would add a little to the length of their questions, so as not by extra-briefness to deaden the dexterity of conjecturers, perhaps they might be nearer to the reception of replies. Many stranger things have happened than that Drachmarus should be renovated by the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 69, February 22, 1851 • Various
... these, in vain thy muse appears To breathe her ardours in our souls; In vain to sightless eyes, and deaden'd ears, Thy ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... society about President Monroe much as his son felt the society about President Johnson. He feared its effect on young men, with some justice, since it had been fatal to two of his brothers; but he understood the charm, and he knew that a life in Quincy or Boston was not likely to deaden it. ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... was then dark, unbroken forests, through whose tangled paths the mysterious winter wind groaned and shrieked and howled with weird noises and unaccountable clamors. Along the iron-bound shore, the stormful Atlantic raved and thundered, and dashed its moaning waters, as if to deaden and deafen any voice that might tell of the settled life of the old civilized world, and shut us forever into the wilderness. A good story-teller, in those days, was always sure of a warm seat at the hearthstone, and the delighted homage of children; and in all Oldtown ...
— Oldtown Fireside Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... dragged on, the torture grew worse, opium failed to deaden the pain, and sleep, except in the very briefest snatches, was impossible. But at last on the Thursday morning a change set in, the suffering became less intense; they knew, however, that it was only because the end was drawing near ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... pay for the bread the children cried aloud for in their young impatience of suffering. There was no breakfast to lounge over; their lounge was taken in bed, to try and keep warmth in them that bitter March weather, and, by being quiet, to deaden the gnawing wolf within. Many a penny that would have gone little way enough in oatmeal or potatoes, bought opium to still the hungry little ones, and make them forget their uneasiness in heavy troubled sleep. It was mother's mercy. The evil and ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... was earnestly needed. There was none other man than Privy Seal. Let him consider earnestly that if it tasted ill with his conscience to move this divorce, yet elsewise such great ills should strike the kingdom, that far better it were to deaden his conscience than to sacrifice for a queen of doubtful faith the best hope that they had then, all of them, in the world. He spoke for many minutes in this strain, for twice the clock struck the half-hour from the tower above ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... Sarawia and his wife Sarah at Mota, with Charles and Ellen, Benjamin and Marion. They are all Communicants, but the temptations which surround them are very great, and early familiarity with heathen practices and modes of thought may yet deaden the conscience to the quick apprehension of the first approaches of sin. They do indeed need the ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... an awkward position. How I had succeeded in arriving there without attracting attention was little short of miraculous. I durst not venture on any retrograde movement; I even pressed my mouth against the hard earth, the better to deaden the sound of breathing. I know not how long I remained thus; it was until my strained muscles appeared to cord themselves, and I could scarcely keep back a moan of pain. Yet no other sound came from that mysterious presence. Intently as I listened, not so much as ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... interest, every person present was proclaiming his views freely on a diversity of subjects, and above all could be heard the clear notes of the musical instruments by which the officials sought to encourage one another in their extremity, and to deaden the cries of ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... to cook his food and get what rest was possible. In contrast with the previous three months the men were fed well and given many kinds of articles extra to the rations. They received socks which were worn over the boots so as to deaden ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... connected with the motive power of steam, has been discovered near Marburg in Electoral Hesse; that the work bears the name of Traite des Operations sans Douleur, and that in it are examined the different means that might be employed to deaden, or altogether nullify, sensibility when surgical operations are being performed on the human body, Papin composed this work in 1681, but his contemporaries treated it with ridicule, and he abandoned the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... possible for his son to gratify his taste for sweet sounds. But through the assistance of a servant, the boy obtained an instrument, which he kept in the garret; and there, when opportunity offered, with the strings of his "clavichord" so covered with pieces of cloth as to deaden the sound, he practised music until he became a proficient in harmony. It was not, however, until his father took him on a visit to see an elder brother, who was in the family of the Prince of Saxe-Weisenfels, ...
— The Printer Boy. - Or How Benjamin Franklin Made His Mark. An Example for Youth. • William M. Thayer
... has laid his hand Upon my heart gently, not smiting it, But as a harper lays his open palm Upon his harp, to deaden its vibrations. ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... ship's sails when the wind bears against their front surfaces. They are laid aback, when this is purposely effected to deaden her way by rounding in the weather-braces; and taken aback, when brought to by an unexpected change of wind, or by inattention in the helmsman.—All aback forward, the notice given from the forecastle, when the head-sails ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... the running water. While the voice sounds resonantly in the bath-room it is not half so fine and inspiring when the song is continued in the dressing-room. The reason is that the furniture of the dressing-room tends to deaden the reverberations."—Prof. W.H. BRAGG on "The World ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... sound seemed to come from a place that might have been a granary. I went in at all risks, and there we found Juliette. With the instinct of despair, she had buried herself deep in the hay, hiding her face in it to deaden those dreadful cries—pudency even stronger than grief. She was sobbing and crying like a child, but there was a more poignant, more piteous sound in the sobs. There was nothing left in the world for her. The maid pulled the hay from her, her ...
— The Message • Honore de Balzac
... end, to retain the benefits of this procedure without its evils. There is doubtless a purism in taste, a rigid fantastical demand of perfection, a horror at approaching the limits of impropriety, which obstructs the free impulse of the faculties, and if excessive, would altogether deaden them. But the excess on the other side is much more frequent, and, for high endowments, infinitely more pernicious. After the strongest efforts, there may be little realised; without strong efforts, there must be little. That too much care does ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... the good woman blurted out the truth, and tried to deaden the blow of it. But the soul lives fast, and Israel lived a lifetime ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... to him, and gave it to him strong—being certain that he was past hurting by it, and hoping that it might deaden his pain. And presently, when he asked for another drink, I gave ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... libraries and recommend them as proper reading. It has been said with reason, that "what is improper in the nudity of a statue is the fig-leaf and not what is underneath." It is, in fact, these fig-leaves—sculptured, painted, written or spoken—which awaken lewdness rather than deaden it. By drawing attention to what they conceal, they excite sensuality much more than simple nudity. In short, the eroticism which plays at hide and seek is that which acts with greatest intensity. The directors of ballets and other similar spectacles ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... lift the cross or fasten their prisoner to it, a little touch of pity, or perhaps only the observance of the usual custom, leads them to offer a draught of wine, in which some anodyne had been mixed, to deaden agony. But the cup which He had to drink needed that He should be in full possession of all His sensibilities to pain, and of all His unclouded firmness of resolve; and so His patient lips closed against the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... reverence for ancient things, as monks show relics and call them holy, the generality of mankind are deceived into the design. Governments now act as if they were afraid to awaken a single reflection in man. They are softly leading him to the sepulchre of precedents, to deaden his faculties and call attention from the scene of revolutions. They feel that he is arriving at knowledge faster than they wish, and their policy of precedents is the barometer of their fears. This political popery, ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... each other; let us fare 630 On forest-fruits, and never, never go Among the abodes of mortals here below, Or be by phantoms duped. O destiny! Into a labyrinth now my soul would fly, But with thy beauty will I deaden it. Where didst thou melt too? By thee will I sit For ever: let our fate stop here—a kid I on this spot will offer: Pan will bid Us live in peace, in love and peace among His forest wildernesses. I have clung 640 To nothing, lov'd a nothing, nothing seen Or felt but a great dream! ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... reasons, and I am bound to think with perfect wisdom, with the Government. But anybody can see how directly, how palpably, how injuriously, an arrangement of this kind tends to weaken, and I think I may say even to deaden, the sense both of trust and responsibility in the non-official members of these councils. Anybody can see how the system tends to throw the non-official member into an attitude of peevish, sulky, permanent opposition, and, therefore, has an injurious effect on the minds and characters ...
— Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)
... seemed to Phil as if he had forgotten all about the prisoners, for the time glided slowly on, while weariness began to deaden poor Phil's hunger pains, and he grew drowsy, nodding off twice, but starting up again when the French prisoners spoke more loudly or a sharp challenge ...
— A Young Hero • G Manville Fenn
... that, to deaden my conscience, if I had one to deaden," Verkan Vall said. "As it is, I feel like a murderer of babes. That overgrown fool, Marnark, handled his knife like a cow-butcher. The young fellow couldn't handle a pistol at all. I ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... night of sound sleep we awaken refreshed and buoyant, all our forces replenished; thirsty, of course, but not hungry"—he sat down to the table and placed both hands again to his head—"and we have no need of food. Yet such is the force of custom that we deaden ourselves for the day by tanking up on coarse, loathsome stuff like bacon. Ugh! Any one would think, the way you two eat so early in the day, that you were a couple of cave-dwellers,—the kind that always loaded up when ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... which you would follow, and who are cured of an ill of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc. Even this will naturally make you believe, and deaden your acuteness.—"But this is what I am afraid of."—And why? What have you ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... of earthly evil bent, In varied toils and woes thy days were spent; 'Till cold Misfortune, with unceasing lower, Weigh'd down thy soul, and deaden'd every power, Reflection's lamp withdrew her guiding ray, And fail'd to point thee on thy darkling way, And thy wild soul prepared to launch alone From Night's dark bosom into worlds unknown: When, sent ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... the gravel; it passed below the window and stopped at the door. Some one knocked. Rachel tore open the throat of her gown. She was suffocating. Her long-drawn breathing seemed to deaden all other sounds. Nevertheless she heard it—the faint footfall of some one in the hall, a distant opening and shutting of doors. A vague, indescribable tremor seemed to run ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... dressing-gown to Faith's room. Fearing to knock, she had entered the room with no more warning than a gentle rattle of the handle. But her warning was lost on Faith who, hot night though it was, was lying with her head buried under the bed-clothes, to deaden the ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... be honest men," answered Aram, in one of those shrewd remarks which he often uttered, and which seemed almost incompatible with the tenor of the quiet and abstruse pursuits that he had adopted, and that generally deaden the mind to ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Deaden the Noise of Steam While Blowing off Through a Wrought Iron Stand Pipe.—The sound may be much modified by enlarging the end of the pipe like a trumpet or cone; which should be long, 20 or 30 times the ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... try not to look, reserving a climax for our halting-place. The pathway is well marked though somewhat stony and irregular; the valley-bottom is wider here and we are close by the side of the Gave. The hemp sandals prove surprisingly useful. Their half-inch soles of rope utterly deaden the inequalities of the ground, and the pebbly, hummocky path is as a carpet beneath the feet. The bearers tramp steadily onward, the chairs sinking and rising in easy vertical motion, much more grateful than the horizontal "joggle" of the Pyrenean saddle-horse. ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... a blister without external cause," said Serviss. "You hypnotic sharps have proved that it can also deaden nerves and heal skin diseases, ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... slightly raised, in order to relieve the pressure of the perforans tendon on the affected area, and so obtain ease, there are others who hold that the heel is pressed firmly to the ground in order to deaden the pain. It may be, and most probably is, that both are right; but, in our opinion, there is no doubt whatever that pointing with the heel elevated is by ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... all our exertions, it was impossible to save her from a collision; all that remained to be done, as soon as it became evident she could not clear some particular floe, or go about in time to avoid it, was to haul the staysail sheet a-weather in order to deaden her way as much as possible, and—putting the helm down—let her go right at it, so that she should receive the blow on her stem, and not on the bluff of the bow; while all hands, armed with spars ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... was a fringe of excitement, and farther than that fringe the inflammation had not crept as yet. In the rest of the world the stream of life still flowed as it had flowed for immemorial years. The fever of war that would presently clog vein and artery, deaden nerve and destroy brain, had still ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... however, was entirely another affair. He could neither stifle nor deaden that. It was always jabbing him with white-hot barbs, waking or sleeping. But it never said: "Tell someone! Tell someone!" Was he something of a moral pervert, then? Was it what he had lost—the familiar world—rather ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... let us see that its only practical tendency is to deaden all our present interests, not to create any new ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... one night within a prison's walls, has long ago been brutalized by the persistence of life in spite of crime; her gray hair ripples like sand under receding waves; her profile is strong and fine, but her eyes have a film of misery over them—dull and silent, they deaden her face. And Jennie, the charwoman, is she a cripple or has toil thus warped her body? Her arms, long and withered, swing like the broken branches of a gnarled tree; her back is twisted and her head bowed toward earth. A stranger to rest, she seems a mechanical creature wound up for work and ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... business of the enslaver of men to blunt, deaden, and destroy the central principle of human responsibility. Conscience is, to the individual soul, and to society, what the law of gravitation is to the universe. It holds society together; it is the basis of all trust ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... which many performers assisted, all of whom were provided with little bells, which were fastened to their legs and arms; and here, too, the drum regulated their motions. It was beaten with a crooked stick, which the drummer held in his right hand, occasionally using his left to deaden the sound, and thus vary the music. The drama is likewise applied on these occasions to keep order among the spectators, by imitating the sound of certain Mandingo sentences. For example, when the wrestling-match is about to begin, the ...
— Travels in the Interior of Africa - Volume 1 • Mungo Park
... rang out, apparently from close at hand, a loud, clear, most appallingly clear, blood-curdling cry, which, beginning in a low key, ended in a shriek so horrid, harsh, and piercing, that I felt my heart shrivel up within me, and in sheer desperation I buried my fingers in my ears to deaden the sound. ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... feeling that had come to him on the Angiolina steps, at Abbazia. He even wondered if in the stress of the life they were now following she would lose the last of her good looks, if even her ever-resilient temperament would deaden and harden, and no longer rise supreme to the exacting moment. Or could it be that she was acting a part for him? that all this fine bravado was an attitude, a role, a pretense, taken on for his sake? Could it be—and the sudden thought stung him to the quick—that ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... says, not only for wrath, that is, not only for fear of punishment, but for conscience's sake. Even if you do not expect to be punished; even if you think no one will ever find out that you have broken the law, remember it is God's ordinance. He sees you. Do not hurt your own conscience, and deaden your own sense of right and wrong, by breaking the least or the most unjust law ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... smell of burning wood and hay and clouds of smoke filled the air. Rushing to the door, Mrs. Fischer saw that the barn was wrapped in flames. With a scream for help she ran out into the yard, where she discovered the uncle and several others endeavoring to deaden the flames, but their efforts seemed ...
— The Poorhouse Waif and His Divine Teacher • Isabel C. Byrum
... a glory that was also a driving power upon which any but a man half dead could draw for practical use. For the big conceptions fan the will. The little pains of life, they make one feel, need not kill true joy, nor deaden effort. ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... of Alexander Bain. Those works were our favourite theme for satirical verse, which we did not pain our Professor by publishing. Professor Henry Morley lectured hour after hour to successive classes in a room half way down the passage, on the left. Even overwork could not deaden his enormous vitality; but I hope that his immediate successor does not lecture so often. Outside the classrooms I remember the passages, which resembled the cellars of an unsuccessful sculptor, the library, where I first read Romeo and Juliet, and the ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... the earth and lay like a log for hours. Later, he had yielded to drink when the darkness closed over him, and upon several occasions he had sat all night with a bottle of whisky in Tom Spade's store. Both methods he felt now to be ineffectual; fatigue could not deaden nor could whisky drown the bitterness of his soul. One thing remained, and that was to glut his hatred until it should lie quiet like ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... especially fatal to them; whereas their opponents, through their new regulations as to penance, softened this distinction, and that not to the detriment of morality. For an entirely different treatment of so-called gross and venial transgressions must in every case deaden the ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... a distance of about 90 miles off the land and run back before the prevailing wind, until they are about nine miles from the shore or until they lose the fish. When the fisherman gets a bite the wind is spilled out of the sail so as to deaden the boat's way. The fish is then got alongside, promptly gaffed, and got on board. Tunny sells for about three halfpence a pound in Lequeito. The season extends from June to November. Bream are taken in the winter and spring, 9 to 12 miles off the coast. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... physician is summoned, and in trouble we are at hand. Things are as we take them—the gravest face may have a wart, upon which a jest can be made. When you have once laughed at a misfortune, its sting loses its point. We deaden it—we light up the darkness—even though it be with a will 'o the wisp—and if we understand our business, manage to hack the lumpy dough of heavy sorrow into little pieces, which even a ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of the individual, his chance of self-respect, unhampered by the traditions of class, which either deaden it or irritate it in England! His chance of significance and success! And the splendid, buoyant, unused air to breathe, and the simplicity of life, and ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... handsomer, indeed, than ever; but the wild eye, the haggard brow, and the deep lines about his mouth spoke of days spent in fierce excitement—nights passed in reckless dissipation. He had never forgotten Lucy through it all, but even her image only goaded him to fresh extravagances—anything to deaden the sting of remembrance—anything to efface the maddening past. So Cousin Edward too became a Jacobite; and was there a daring scheme to be executed, a foolhardy exploit to be performed—life and limb to be ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... cooking process is completed. Fruit should be cooked by stewing, or by gentle simmering; hard boiling will destroy the fine flavor of all fruits, and especially of berries and other small fruits. Cinnamon, cloves, or other spices, should not be added, as their stronger flavors deaden or obliterate the natural flavor, which should always be preserved as perfectly as possible. If desirable to add some foreign flavor, let it be the flavor of another fruit, or the perfume of flowers. For Instance, flavor apple with lemon, pineapple, ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... palsies every virtue.'[250] The temptations to which the poor man is exposed, and the sense of injustice due to an ignorance of the true cause of misery, tend to 'sour the disposition, to harden the heart, and deaden the moral sense.' Unfortunately, the means which have been adopted to lessen the evil have tended to increase it. In the first place, there was the master-evil of the poor-laws. Malthus points out the demoralising effects of these laws in chapters ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... to present as little surface as possible to the wind, and to let the drift pass over us. The mealy snow sifted into the folds of our clothing and in many places reached the skin. We were glad at first to see the snow packing about us, hoping it would deaden the force of the wind, but it soon froze into a stiff, crusty heap as the temperature fell, rather augmenting our ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... [Fr.]. collapse, faint, swoon, fall into a swoon, drop; go by the board, go by the wayside; go up in smoke, end in smoke &c (fail) 732. render powerless &c adj.; deprive of power; disable, disenable^; disarm, incapacitate, disqualify, unfit, invalidate, deaden, cramp, tie the hands; double up, prostrate, paralyze, muzzle, cripple, becripple^, maim, lame, hamstring, draw the teeth of; throttle, strangle, garrotte, garrote; ratten^, silence, sprain, clip the wings of, put hors de combat [Fr.], spike the guns; take the wind out of one's sails, scotch ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... irrelevant question, and perhaps the more so, as the count's aversion to smoking was so well known, that none of his smoking subjects ventured to approach him without having taken every precaution to deaden any odour of the fragrant weed which might lurk about their clothes or person. "Does he take snuff?" said the viceroy. "Yes, your Excellency," said his visitor, who probably feared that for once his Excellency's wits were wool-gathering. "That is sufficient," said the viceroy; "retire ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... does not take it at all passionately. A mother weeps a day for a dead child or her husband, but death is said not to bring tears from any man. Death causes no long or loud lamentation, no tearing of the hair or cutting the body; it effects no somber colors to deaden the emotions; no earth or ashes for the body — all widespread mourning customs among primitive peoples. However, when a child or mature man or woman dies the women assemble and sing and wail a melancholy dirge, ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... discussion on a low level, and making the political test final. To take off the taxes on knowledge was to place a heavy tax on broad and independent opinion. The multiplication of journals 'delivering brawling judgments unashamed on all things all day long,' has done much to deaden the small stock of individuality in public verdicts. It has done much to make vulgar ways of looking at things and vulgar ways of speaking of them stronger and stronger, by formulating and repeating and stereotyping them incessantly from ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... No, sir. Ye've got to save it up an' invist it at th' right time or get nawthin' fr'm it. It's betther thin a doctor f'r a stubbed toe but it niver cured a broken leg. It's a kind iv a first aid to th' injured. It seems to deaden th' pain. Women an' childher cry or faint whin they're hurt. That's because they haven't th' gift iv swearin'. But as I tell ye, they'se no good wastin' it. Th' man that swears at ivrything has nawthin' to ...
— Observations by Mr. Dooley • Finley Peter Dunne
... had a good look at the whirl now," said the old man, "and if you will creep round this crag, so as to get in its lee, and deaden the roar of the water, I will tell you a story that will convince you I ought to ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... suddenly draw a concealed weapon in order to threaten his antagonist. The spectators would stop to ask themselves how he happened to have the weapon by him without their knowing it; and this self-muttered question would deaden the effect of the scene. The denouement of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler requires that the two chief characters, Eilert Loevborg and Hedda Tesman, should die of pistol wounds. The pistols that are to be used in the catastrophe are mentioned and shown repeatedly ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... was a task that it wrung his heart to perform. His horse must be put out of pain. He took off his coat, rolled it over his horse's head, inserted his gun under its folds to deaden the sound and to hide those luminous eyes turned so entreatingly ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... a practical, not a theoretical, problem. It is not to be solved by thinking it good, for to think it good is to deaden the very nerve of action; but by destroying it ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... backed away toward the door, crouching like a cat ready to spring, his beady eyes half-frightened, watching the poison deaden the faculties of the other. He leaped through the door, glanced up and down the stable street—deserted at that hour except for a few drowsy attendants lounging in front of their stalls—jerked the door shut, hooked the open padlock through the iron fastenings, ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... done; for all flesh had corrupted God's way upon the earth. But how came this to be so? Why, every imagination of the thoughts, or of the motions that were in the heart to sin, was evil, only evil, and that continuously. The imagination of the thoughts was evil—that is, such as tended not to deaden or stifle, but such as tended to animate and forward the motions or thoughts of sin into action. Every imagination of the thoughts—that which is here called a thought, by Paul to the Romans, called a motion. Now the imagination should, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... contributing to the welfare of mankind," is the characteristic opening of his first Adventurer. And when we have admired the real excellence of his heart, we must wonder at the vigour of a mind, which could so abstract itself from its own sorrows and misfortunes, which too often deaden our feelings of pity, as to sympathize with others in affliction, and even to promote innocent cheerfulness. Bowed down by the loss of a wife[6], on whom he had called from amidst the horrors of a hopeless melancholy, to "hide him from the ills of life," and ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... local anesthetic," he remarked. "This is the sort of thing that might be injected into an arm or leg and deaden the pain of a cut, but that is all. It wouldn't affect the consciousness or prevent any one from resisting a murderer to the last. I doubt if that had anything directly to do with his death, or perhaps even that this ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... and escape out of the third story window went from mouth to mouth, and her friends eagerly crowded the floor in an effort to speak to her. There were High School yells and class yells until Miss Thompson was obliged to cover her ears to deaden the noise. ...
— Grace Harlowe's Sophomore Year at High School • Jessie Graham Flower
... spirit craved. He was aware that the books he read, like the fugitive scenes on which he gazed, were merely a form of anesthetic: he swallowed them with the careless greed of the sufferer who seeks only to still pain and deaden memory. But they were beginning to produce in him a moral languor that was not disagreeable, that, indeed, compared with the fierce pain of the first days, was almost pleasurable. It was exactly the kind of drug that ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... was to achieve anything really effective, I crept back silently into the tent and lay down again upon my sandy mattress, first lowering the door-curtain to shut out the sight of the willows in the moonlight, and then burying my head as deeply as possible beneath the blankets to deaden the sound of the ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... drowsy way through all the dismal swamps and unimpressive scenery that could be found between the great lakes and the sea- coast. Yet there is variety enough, both on the surface of the canal and along its banks, to amuse the traveller, if an overpowering tedium did not deaden his perceptions. ...
— Sketches From Memory (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... abroad. He was creeping up the right-hand bank of a stream, his only chance lying in the noise of the waters, which might serve to deaden the sound of broken ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... Reformer, and to stand by that opposition." Sir Robert Peel defined Conservatism when he said, "My object for some years past has been to lay the foundation of a great party, which, existing in the House of Commons, and deriving its strength from the popular will, should diminish the risk and deaden the shock of collisions between the two branches of ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... down into a condition of hopelessness which would appal the bravest and strongest. So deplorable, indeed, was my feeling regarding the matter that then, as since, I kept on drinking for days after the appetite had left me or had been satiated, in order to deaden the horrible agony that I knew would crush me when ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... the library: two or three bored old gentlemen—martyrs to their daughters' prospects—yawning over the papers and looking at their watches. They are not here. Where can they be? Only one room yet remains—one room at the very end of the passage—the billiard-room, shut off by double doors to deaden the sound of the balls. One of the double doors is wide open, the other closed—not absolutely shut, but not ajar. Musgrave pushes it, and we look in. I do not know why I do. I do not expect to see any one. I hardly think ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... reached the floor on which Rose's bedroom was, I stopped in the dark passage. A narrow streak of light showed me that her door was not quite shut. Then, gathering up my skirts to deaden their sound, I felt along the wall and crept softly, on tip-toe, so as to take her by surprise. With infinite precautions, I slowly pushed the door open. I first caught sight of a corner of the empty ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... have crowds of people about us! Keep open house! Plunge into something that can deaden and dull ...
— Little Eyolf • Henrik Ibsen
... themselves heal a cut, but they keep out the decaying elements, air and moisture, thus helping to preserve the branch and by protecting it to promote healing in nature's way. A little lamp black will serve to deaden the color ...
— Apple Growing • M. C. Burritt
... him now; but it must be gone through. Thinking to deaden fear by hurry, he caught up the lantern, leapt on board with the painter, fastened it, and crept swiftly ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... foothold, the settler next proceeded to "girdle" or "deaden" an additional forest area, preparatory to his farming operations. This consisted in cutting a ring through the bark around the lower portion of the trunk, to prevent the sap from rising. In a short time the withered ...
— Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 - Volume 14 in the series American Nation: A History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... their morale. It would depress their cheery patience. The wonder of tobacco is that it fits itself to each one of several needs. It is the medium by which the average man maintains normality at an abnormal time. It is a device to soothe jumping nerves, to deaden pain, to chase away brooding. Tobacco connects a man with the human race, and his own past life. It gives him a little thing to do in a big danger, in seeping loneliness, and the grip of sharp pain. It brings back his cafe evenings, ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... probable that the pain of suffering is more unbearable in the shrinking expectation than when affliction actually opens her furnace door and commands us to enter. Perhaps there is a compensation of some kind in nature, a provision to deaden feeling when a death stroke falls—some merciful dispensation by which we fail to realize or to understand in its exactness the meaning of the stroke ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects. They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the proletariat. They, therefore, endeavour, and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realisation of their social Utopias, of founding isolated "phalansteres," of establishing "Home Colonies," of setting up a "Little Icaria"—duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem—and ...
— The Communist Manifesto • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
... can never replace the familiar one that is gone. There was something mournful in the lingering of this aged lady—blind, deaf, and bereaved in her latter years; but she was not mournful, any more than she was insensible. Age did not blunt her feelings, nor deaden her interest in the events of the day. It seems not so very long ago that she said that the worst of living in such a place (as the Lake District), was its making one unwilling to go. It is too beautiful to let one be ready to leave it. Within a few years the ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... fresh air of the courtyard blew upon his face, reminding him of the realities of life, that the charlatanesque element in his nature regained the ascendency. "My friend," he said, addressing M. Casimir, who was lighting him out, "you must at once have some straw spread over the street so as to deaden the sound of the vehicles. And to-morrow, you must ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... Arnot in a tone so gentle and quiet as to prove that she was under the influence of no unkindly feeling or resentment; "at least I feel that I have been much to blame for not seeing what is now but too plain. But habit and custom deaden our perceptions. The aspect of our church was that of good society—nothing to jar upon or offend the most critical taste. Your sermons were deeply thoughtful and profound, and I both enjoyed and was benefited by them. ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... and was sure Brandon would wish it. When I entered they were holding each other's hands, in silence. They had not yet found their tongues, so full and crowded were their hearts. It was pathetic to see them, especially the girl, who had not Brandon's hopelessness to deaden the pain ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... of the men finished knotting their ropes together. With weighted ends muffled to deaden their fall upon the rock floor, they began casting to get ...
— The Cavern of the Shining Ones • Hal K. Wells
... wall, drew in a harsh breath and turned to him. Young Raleigh, who had written a monograph on engineering stresses, had still much to learn about the stresses that contort and warp the souls of men and women. He learned some of it then, when he saw the girl's face deaden to a blanker white and the flame of a hungry hope leap into her eyes. ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... hands, loathing herself that she could not deaden down their shiver or the stinging pain in her head. What were these things at a time like this? Her physician was taking a different diagnosis of her disease from his first. He leaned over her, his face flushing, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... was all right. But I wa'n't going to suffer it out; why should I? A gunshot would have cured me quicker, perhaps. Then some critter might 'a' found me and called it murder. A word like that set going can hang a man. No, I just took a little to deaden the pain." ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... accuse of making points in favor of Americans. "At 5.56, having had her jib-sheet and foretopsail tie shot away, and her helm, probably from the death of the men stationed at it, being at the moment unattended to, the 'Chesapeake' came so sharp to the wind as completely to deaden her way." How extreme this deviation from her course is shown by the impression made on Broke. "As the manoeuvres of the 'Chesapeake' indicated an intention to haul away, Captain Broke ordered the helm to be put a-lee, as the 'Shannon' had fallen off a little." The "Chesapeake's" ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... admission to the reception-rooms and grand staircase are closed by tapestry of the fifteenth century, representing hunting scenes. Long cords of silk and gold loop back these marvellous hangings in the Italian style. Thick carpets, into which the feet sink, deaden the sound of footsteps. Spacious divans, covered with Oriental materials, are ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the rain had ceased, the air was still heavy with it, and every bush and branch dripped with moisture. It was a poor day for hunting, for the eye could not see forty yards; but it suited my purpose, since the dull air would deaden the noise of my musket. I was hunting alone in a strange land among imminent perils, and my aim was not to glorify my skill, but to find the means of life. The thought strung me up to a mood where delight was more notable than care. I was adventuring with only my hand to guard me in those ancient, ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... dreadful sense of coming evil he went along the Corraterie and took his way down the steep to the bridge which, far below, curbed the blue rushing waters of the Rhone. The roar of the icy torrent and of the busy mills, stupendous as it was, was not loud enough to deaden the two words that clung to his ears, "Too late! Too late!" Nor did the frosty sunshine, gloriously reflected from the line of snowy peaks to eastward, avail to pierce the gloom in which he walked. For Louis Gentilis, if it should turn ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... the house were rounded, that the wind might not scream and sigh of midnight, and the flapping of a shutter would have warranted the dismissal of the servants. Thick carpets covered the floors. My apartments lay in a remote wing, and were surrounded with double walls, filled with wool, to deaden communication. Goodly books were provided, but none which could arouse fears or passions. Fiery romances were prohibited, and histories of turmoil and war, with theology and its mournful revelations, and medicine, which revived the bitter story of my organism. My library was stocked ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... comrades had all chosen to die rather than to retreat. And the enemy must be there before us, in that wood; they must be stealing up to us noiselessly. I fancied I could see them, gliding from tree to tree, holding their rifles high, trying to deaden the sound of their footsteps among the dead leaves. Presently they would reach the dark line that stretched before us, mute and mysterious; they would mass their dense reserves in the rear, and suddenly thousands of lightning flashes ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... up our quarters in the Custom-house, which, like the other buildings, is a small square floorless hut of mangrove stakes overlaid with reeds. The soldiers complained of hunger, they had nothing to eat but a little mapira, and were making palm wine to deaden their cravings. While waiting for a ship, we had leisure to read the newspapers and periodicals we found in the mail which was waiting our arrival at Tette. Several were a ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... in the thought of the Regent at a time of ministerial complications lying prone on his bed with a sprained ankle, and taking, as was whispered, in one day as many as seven hundred drops of laudanum? Some said he took these doses to deaden the pain. But others, and among them his brother Cumberland, declared that the sprain was all a sham. I hope it was. The thought of a voluptuary in pain is very terrible. In any case, I cannot but feel angry, for Georges own sake and ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... her to shivering; she stole a glance at her husband and was not reassured, for he continued to eye her with a look she did not like. She was forced to pledge her own happiness in a glass, then in a wild moment of desperation longed to deaden herself with liquor as ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... health or morality or faith cannot but impede the harmonious development of the mind itself. Passion is the foe of reason, and may easily become strong enough to extinguish its light. He who wishes to educate himself must learn to resist the desires of his lower nature, which if indulged deaden sensibility, weaken the will, take from the imagination its freshness, and from the heart the power of loving. The task he has set himself is arduous, and he cannot have too much energy, too much ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... taught him his trade, and George was glad enough to work at it, both to deaden the stings of conscience and memory, and to procure the means of deadening them still further. But even here was something in the way of improvement, for hitherto he had applied himself to nothing, his being one of those dreamful natures capable of busy exertion for a time, ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... so that the head butted with a deadly insistence upon the masonry of the wall. Meanwhile the enemy from the ramparts are doing their best to set the shed on fire, to break off the ram's head with heavy stones, to pull it upwards by a noose, or to deaden the effect of the shock by lowering stuffed sacks or other buffer material between it and the wall. At another point, in place of the shed, there is rolled forward a lofty construction like a tower built in several stories. When this approaches the wall it will ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... the doors always deaden the sounds of late revels, so as not to break Lady Catharine's ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... said Clancy, "I was thinking it would be a good night tonight, seein' there's a strong wind blowing that would deaden ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... had paid the man and shut the door, she sat upon her box in the passage. Jill nestled beside her, whilst Mavis rested with her fingers pressed well against her ears, to deaden the continual crying of babies which came from various rooms ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... upon the educated classes of our times. The desire of the educated classes to support the ideas they prefer, and the order of existence based on them, has attained its furthest limits. They lie, and delude themselves, and one another, with the subtlest forms of deception, simply to obscure, to deaden conscience. ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... farewell in numbers? My answer was, Because I am too much occupied in seeing. There is no room and time for 'tranquillity,' since I want to go on to see something else. As Blake has it: "Natural objects always did and do, weaken, deaden and ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... was, and, if so, he would be likely to hear the grapnel when we threw it up and it hit the stones. We thought we could get over this difficulty by wrapping the grapnel in cotton wool. This would deaden the sound when it struck, but would not prevent the points of the hooks from holding to the inner edge of the wall. Everything now seemed all right, except that we had no object in view after we ...
— A Jolly Fellowship • Frank R. Stockton
... offensive spirit. Its essence is the counter-attack—waiting deliberately for a chance to strike—not cowering in inactivity. Defence is a condition of restrained activity—not a mere condition of rest. Its real weakness is that if unduly prolonged it tends to deaden the spirit of offence. This is a truth so vital that some authorities in their eagerness to enforce it have travestied it into the misleading maxim, "That attack is the best defence." Hence again an amateurish notion that defence is always stupid or pusillanimous, leading ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... his appetite, he lit a pipe and smoked. But tobacco brought no solace, no charitable thoughts. While, as a matter of fact, Cai tramped the highroads, mile after mile, striving to deaden the pain at his heart, 'Bias sat puffing and let his wrath harden down into ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... promotion, thus giving to the poor and meritorious at least an equal chance with the man of wealth and the base hireling of party. In actual service the system of exclusive seniority cannot exist; it would deaden and paralyze all our energies. Taking advantage of this, politicians will drive us to the opposite extreme, unless the executive authority be limited by wholesome laws, based on the just principles of ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... middle one to discharge the water after it has exerted its pressure. The piston has no packing. Its surface of contact has two circumferential grooves, which produce a sort of water packing acting by adhesion. A small air chamber is connected with the inlet pipe, and serves to deaden the shocks. This engine is often made with two cylinders, having their ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... at the same time, several porpoises playing about us; into one of which Mr Cooper struck a harpoon; but as the ship was running seven knots, it broke its hold, after towing it some minutes, and before we could deaden the ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... not lose his patience with it wholly, And shatter it like glass! Even here, at times, Within these walls, where all should be at peace, I have my trials. Time has laid his hand Upon my heart, gently, not smiting it, But as a harper lays his open palm Upon his harp to deaden its vibrations, Ashes are on my head, and on my lips Sackcloth, and in my breast a heaviness And weariness of life, that makes me ready To say to the dead Abbots under us, "Make room for me!" Ony I see the dusk Of evening twilight coming, and have not Completed ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... and painful labour, acquire an accurate and elegant knowledge of the ancient languages. And, unfortunately, those grammatical and philological studies, without which it was impossible to understand the great works of Athenian and Roman genius, have a tendency to contract the views and deaden the sensibility of those who follow them with extreme assiduity. A powerful mind, which has been long employed in such studies, may be compared to the gigantic spirit in the Arabian tale, who was persuaded to contract ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... between the Opera and the Exhibition of Electricity is obtained by means of twenty conducting wires, which are divided between two halls hung with carpets to deaden external noises. We represent in the accompanying engraving one of these halls, and the one which is lighted by the Lane-Fox system of lamps. As may be seen, there are affixed against the hangings, all around the room, long mahogany ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 315, January 14, 1882 • Various
... as they were gone, Elizabeth walked out to recover her spirits; or in other words, to dwell without interruption on those subjects that must deaden them more. Mr. Darcy's behaviour astonished and ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... than the buzzing of a big bee, as the exhaust is led away below the water-line. It won't be bad in the cabins either, even when they keep the sliding door open, for this screen of thick sail-cloth will deaden what sound there is. And it was a smart idea to utilize the power of the magneto to light up the whole boat with those ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... horse, on wheels covered with rags, and with cloths about the horse's hoofs to deaden their sound, Ned Cilley and his hamper went quietly away in the direction of the wharfs. In a moment, cart, horse, and driver were swallowed up in the denseness ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... Chopin with sledge-hammer fingers will deaden all sense of his poetry, charm and grace. Whoever approaches him with weak sentimentalism will miss altogether his dignity and strength. It has been said of him that he was Woman in his tenderness ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... the inhabitants, who, to the number of seventy-eight, flocked into the garrison house, when the Indians assailed the town. The house was but slightly fortified about the exterior by a few logs hastily thrown up, while inside the house was padded with feather-beds to deaden the force of the bullets. The house was soon surrounded by the enemy, and shots poured in from all directions. The beleaguered English were no mean marksmen, and they soon taught the Indians to keep at a respectful distance. ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... interruption; the sun had set, and the darkness was opaque. It was impossible to move against the force of the wind and the deluge of water which descended. Speak, we did not, but shut our eyes against the lightning, and held our fingers to our ears to deaden the noise of the thunder, which burst upon us in the most awful manner. My companion groaned at intervals, whether from fear, I know not; I had no fear, for I did not know the danger, or that there was a God ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... she sped away followed by the three chums. They were out of sight not a moment too soon, for as they turned a corner, running across a lawn to deaden their footsteps, they heard a ...
— The Ranger Boys and the Border Smugglers • Claude A. Labelle
... course, a drawback to his peace of mind, and the recollection of his recent outbreak of prevarication and deception was always a weight upon his conscience. But, to offset these, there was a changed air about the Phipps' home and its inmates which was so very gratifying that, if it did not deaden that conscience, it, at least, administered to it an effective dose ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... pang for all that the Surrey cottage stood for in her life, all the things that she had left to come to Imogen. She remembered. And, for a moment, the old vortex of whirling anguish almost engulfed her. Only long years could deaden the pang of that parting. She would not dwell on that. Eddy and Rose; to turn to them was to feel almost gay. Jack and Mary;—yes, on these last names her thoughts lingered and her gaze for them held tender ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... the building—almost maddened by despair—to seek an outlet, he entered the kitchen, where he perceived a vessel full of water. The sight filled him with joy. Perhaps water, taken in large quantities, might deaden the effects of the poison and save Julio's life. At any rate, he had no other remedy, and as it was his only hope, he grasped at it as if it were ...
— The Amulet • Hendrik Conscience
... them. The turning away by one man to his farm and by another to his merchandize is in part an evidence of their engrossment in material pursuits to the utter disregard of their sovereign's will; but it signifies further an effort to deaden their troubled consciences by some absorbing occupation; and possibly also a premeditated demonstration of the fact that they placed their personal affairs above the call of their king. The monarch executed a terrible ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... into thin air; only a stir in one of the bunks betrayed his hiding-place. At the first sight of Willie's revolver he had dived for a refuge and was now flattened against the wall, a pillow pressed over his head to deaden the expected report. ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach
... vessel, remarkable, as the commander-in-chief had observed, for never being out of the way, was not long in closing, though as she luffed up on the admiral's weather-quarter, to pass to windward, she let go all her top-sail bowlines, so as to deaden her way, making a sort of half-board. This simple evolution, as she righted her helm, brought her about fifty yards to windward of the Plantagenet, past which ship she surged slowly but steadily, the weather now permitting a conversation to be held at that distance, and by ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... door, and first thought the apartment on fire, it was so bright; but instantly saw that two lamps were burning, and that Adah lay dressed upon the bed, with her face turned toward them. By this common device she had sought to deaden the vivid lightning. Her face was white as the pillow on which it rested; her eyes were closed, and from her appearance she might have been sleeping or dead. Even though almost overwhelmed with dread, I could not help noting her wonderful beauty. In my abnormal and excited ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... this chamber for the scene of his operations; he had observed that the framework in which the bars were set seemed old and worm-eaten; that the window was but a few feet from the ground; that the noise made in the winter nights by the sighing branches of the old tree without would deaden the sound of the lone workman. Now, then, his hopes were to be crowned. Poor fool! and even thou hast hope still! All that night he toiled and toiled, and sought to work his iron into a file; now he tried the bars, and now the framework. ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VIII • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... pitch dark when the column moved out of Molteno and struck across the black gloom of the veld, the wheels of the guns being wrapped in hide to deaden the rattle. It was known that the distance was not more than ten miles, and so when hour followed hour and the guides were still unable to say that they had reached their point it must have become perfectly evident that they had missed their way. The men were dog-tired, ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... generate a stupidity that will rob you of joy and soul satisfaction. It will deaden the sensibilities of your inner nature and prevent your hearing God's footstep, and deprive you of many a blessing. Communion with the Lord and meditating upon his Word will elevate the soul to a plane all radiant with Heaven's light and love, and put a humility in your heart ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... would seem to be developed by reliance on books of method, by professional training imparted to those who have not enough originality to break through the mould, and instead of following out principles as lines for personal experiment and discovery, deaden them into rules and abide by them. The teacher's manner is much more noticeable among those who have been trained than among the now vanishing class of those who have had to stand or fall by their own merits, and find out their own methods. ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... strips of felt glued to the bottom of dining-chair legs will deaden the noise and save the ...
— Fowler's Household Helps • A. L. Fowler
... displeasing to me. If the dead are defenceless, they have this compensating advantage, that nobody can inflict upon them any sensible injury; and in beginning a book which is not to see the light until I am lying comfortably in my grave, with six feet of earth above me to deaden the noises of the upper world, I feel quite a new kind of security, and write with a more complete freedom from anxiety about the quality of the work than has been usual at the ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... ministers, "are contradictory terms, even as Christ and Mars." Particularly damaging is the effect of war upon citizens. For does it not blunt the sensibilities, harden the heart, inflame the mind with passions, and deaden the consciences of men? Said the same great English preacher, "The sword that smites the enemy abroad, also lays bare the primeval savage within the citizen at home." And again, "War is not so horrible in that it drains the dearest veins of the ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... closet, lighted only by a skylight in such a way that prying eyes could not see into it. The two friends unstopped the flue which opened into the chimney of the stove in the workroom, where the girls heated their irons. Eve and Basine spread ragged coverlets over the brick floor to deaden any sound that David might make, put in a truckle bed, a stove for his experiments, and a table and a chair. Basine promised to bring food in the night; and as no one had occasion to enter her room, David might defy his enemies one and all, or ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... prevail over this one. The screaming laughter had been modified; the unquestionable conversations stilled. But the wine, for these very reasons, was flowing faster, as each member of that company sought to deaden those strangely roused sensations which most of them had believed forever dead for them. Gregoriev perceived how many eyes remained fixed reflectively on the white face of the young Prince, in whose eyes was ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... poplars which bordered it kept up a continuous whispering, as was their wont, even on the stillest days. When Beth first heard them, they spoke a language to her which she comprehended but could not translate; but the immediate effect of her life with Dan had been to deaden her perception, so that she could not comprehend. Then the whispering became a mere rustle of leaves, appealing to nothing but her sense of hearing, and her delight in their murmur lapsed when its significance ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... human brain is a wonderful thing!—and yet by a sharp, well-directed knock with this"—and he took up from the table a paper-knife with a massive, silver- mounted, weighty horn-handle—"I could deaden it in such wise that the SOUL could no more hold any communication with it, and it would lie an inert mass in the cranium, of no more use to its ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... and, as soon as that tension is released at the highest point, a perfunctory performance with all its well-known side features, the waste and the idleness, the lack of originality and the unwillingness to take risks, must set in and deaden the work. ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... Maintenon could not refuse her distinctions and special favours, but they were accorded rarely and by moments. The King always remembered his door; Madame de Maintenon always remembered the hay and barley of Madame de Neuillant, and neither years nor devotion could deaden the bitterness of ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... gutters along the eaves, but no conductors coming down the walls, so that the water from the roofs was collected and came down once in every few yards in a torrent, bursting umbrellas, and deluging cloaks and hats. The manure spread before sick men's doors to deaden the sound of wheels was washed down the street to add to the destructive qualities which already characterized the mud of Paris. An exceptionally heavy fall of snow would entirely get the better of the authorities, ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... and shifting web of ambition and intrigue the royal Edward moved with a careless grace: simple himself, because his object was won, and pleasure had supplanted ambition. His indolent, joyous temper served to deaden his powerful intellect; or, rather, his intellect was now lost in the sensual stream through which it flowed. Ever in pursuit of some new face, his schemes and counterschemes were limited to cheat a husband or deceive a wife; and dexterous and successful no doubt they were. But a vice ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... by Tolstoy, I think, that few intellectual men would really tolerate the world as it is if it were not for smoking and drinking. Even novelists have their moments of lucidity. Certainly these things soothe the restlessness in men's minds, deaden their sceptical sensibilities. And just at the time when you were getting most ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... tame tiger of the excited and highly respectable Adolphus Casay, shiveringly emerging from beneath the bed-clothes he had diligently wrapped round his aching head, to deaden the incessant clamour of the iron which was entering into the soul of his sleep. A hastily-performed toilet, in which the more established method of encasing the lower man with the front of the garment to the front of the wearer, was curiously ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 9, 1841 • Various
... tray, a glass, and a bottle. "I could not find the aspirin," she said, "but I brought you some absinthe. It will deaden the pain, sir." ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... to deaden This pain; then Roger and I will start. I wonder, has he such a lumpish, leaden, Aching thing, in place of a heart? He is sad sometimes, and would weep, if he could, No doubt, remembering things that were,— A virtuous kennel, with plenty of food, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... insensible to your merit and forgetful of the happy days of our childhood,—the recollection of which has a thousand times made my tears flow. I thank Heaven that the evils which I have suffered have had no tendency to deaden my ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... ghastly mockery, a blasphemous farce, a satire on Christianity infinitely more sardonic and mordant than anything I ever wrote or published. Soon after returning to my cell I was glad of the substantial dinner and drowsy ale to deaden the bitter edge of ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... now came on, close under our lee, losing a little of her way in passing, an expedient probably thought of to give her a little more time to put her questions, and to receive the desired answers. I observed also, that she let go all her bow-lines, which seemed much to deaden her way, of which there still remained sufficient, notwithstanding, to carry her well clear of us. The following dialogue then passed, the Englishman asking the questions, of course, that being a privilege expressly appropriated to the public vessel on occasions ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... his drink, barely enough to cover the bottom of his glass, for that was another of Pete's ways; he could never afford to weaken his hand or deaden his eye with alcohol, and even now he stood sideways at the bar, facing Gregg and also facing the others in the room. But the larger man, with sudden scorn for this caution, brimmed his own glass, and poised it swiftly. "Here's how!" ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... know,[26] if I have great need to restrain my foes, the weapons' edge I deaden: of my adversaries nor arms ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... injunction to get rid of the habit. We must adopt the counter-habit as ours, and work for a high standard of skill in it. For example, if we come to realize that we have a bad habit of grouchiness with our best friends, it is of little use merely to attempt to deaden this habit; we need to aim at being a positive addition to the company whenever we are present, and to practise the art of being good company, checking up our efforts to be sure we are hitting {329} the right vein, and persisting in our ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
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