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They have frozen each other by their primness; and your faculties feel the numbing effects of the atmosphere the moment you enter it. All those thoughts, so nimble and so apt awhile since, have disappeared have suddenly acquired a preternatural power of eluding you. If you venture a remark to your neighbour, there comes a trite rejoinder, and there it ends.
It defeats the steady habit of exertion, but it creates spasms of irregular exertion; it ruins the natural power of life, but it develops preternatural paroxysms of intermitting power.
Fear or terror, whose influence is often so strange, sudden, and unaccountable seizing even the bravest spreading through numbers with all the speed of an electric sympathy and deciding in a moment the destiny of an army or the ruin of a tribe is another of those passions, easily supposed the afflatus of some preternatural power, and easily, therefore, susceptible of personification.
I was ashamed of my weakness. Besides, what aid could be afforded me by a lamp? My fears had pictured to themselves no precise object. It would be difficult to depict, in words, the ingredients and hues of that phantom which haunted me. An hand invisible and of preternatural strength, lifted by human passions, and selecting my life for its aim, were parts of this terrific image.
She uttered incoherent sentences, with breaks and pauses, that were filled up with preternatural efforts and distorted gestures; while the priests stood by, carefully recording her words, and then reducing them into a sort of obscure signification. They finally digested them for the most part into a species of hexameter verse.
And then turning to me with an odd little sharp stare: "My cousin's friend is my friend." Miss Searle lowered her fan. The first thing that struck me in Mr. Searle's appearance was his very limited stature, which was less by half a head than that of his sister. The second was the preternatural redness of his hair and beard.
I felt the old thrill of excitement, the vain hope of something preternatural and impossible, and I do not know what could have kept me from that circus as soon as I had done lunch. I expected to be kept a long while from the ticket-wagon by the crowd, but there was no crowd, and perhaps there never used to be much of a crowd.
"With God's help I'll be the instrument for their destruction." He frowned with a preternatural severity. Eh if he could turn a trick like that, it would pull him up! There would be no more jeers and laughter. What credit and standing it would give him! His thoughts slipped along this fresh channel. What a prosecution he would conduct what a whirlwind of eloquence he would loose!
It is not at all the very close friendship which has existed for so many years between us which prompts the assertion that, of all historical scholars I have ever known, he is among the very foremost, by his powers of research, his tenacity of memory, his almost preternatural accuracy, his ability to keep the whole field of investigation in his mind, and his fidelity to truth and justice.
Fairies danced in the moonlight glade; and something preternatural perpetually occurred to fill the living with admiration and awe. All this gradually reduced itself into a system.
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