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Every early consent to its use involves a lurking pledge to repeat the poison, till soon strong cords of the intoxicant appetite bind the now yielding victim. Opium thus used lays its benumbing hand upon the brain, the mind is befogged, thought and reasoning are impossible.
Houses were pillaged and sacked, half the town was burned down, the Niemen was being crossed at all points, and it was impossible to stem the tide of fugitives. An escort was barely available for the protection of the King of Naples, the generals, and the Imperial eagles. And all amidst the cold, the intense cold, stupefying and benumbing!
For the raw brains were not yet quite calloused; they quivered from the successive benumbing shocks of the day. Hugo would not even cheat himself by trying to close his eyes. He lay quite still looking at the quietly twinkling, kindly stars. Unlike his comrades, he had not to go to hell in order to know what hell was like.
Future plans had to do with an educative course at the graded schools and other matters so strange and exalted that one could not hear them mentioned without experiencing the most benumbing abashment.
But with what different emotions did I return from the busy world, with a heavy weight of experience benumbing my imagination, to scenes, that whispered recollections of joy and hope most eloquently to my heart! The first scent of the wild flowers from the heath, thrilled through my veins, awakening every sense to pleasure.
He pleaded for the farmer, the first, the oldest, the most necessary of all the world's workers; for the man who was the foundation of civilized society, yet who was yearly gravitating downward through new depths of slighting indifference, of careless contempt, of rank injustice and gross tyranny; for the man who sowed so plenteously, so laboriously, yet reaped so scantily and in such bitter and benumbing toil; for the man who lived indeed beneath the heavens, yet must forever fasten his solicitous eye upon the earth.
"It will only haunt me. Let us walk, Philip. I must go home." She moved away, so that he was obliged to rise and follow her. "Maggie," he said, in a tone of remonstrance, "don't persist in this wilful, senseless privation. It makes me wretched to see you benumbing and cramping your nature in this way.
He would not give up the emprise, he declared again, he would not be conquered save by time itself. It was rather an instinct, in pursuance of this revival of his resolution, to seek to rid himself of his own thoughts, the constant canvass of his despair; this had necessarily a resilient effect, benumbing to the possibilities of new inspiration.
Shirley pounced upon his mate, and after a slight tussle, applied the handkerchief with the same benumbing effect. Then he rolled it up and tossed it far from him. He took a police whistle from his pocket and blew it three times.
It spoke to us in a language of its own; and with a pathos more tender than any words might bring, its mute eloquence swept down the long roll of the centuries with its tale of a vacant chair, a familiar footstep missed from the threshold, a pleasant voice gone from the chorus, a vanished form! a tale which is always so new to us, so startling, so terrible, so benumbing to the senses, and behold how threadbare and old it is!
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