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But we all have the faculty of blunting the cutting edge of truth, especially if it has been familiar, so that some novelty in the manner of its presentation, or even its repetition without novelty sometimes, may turn commonplace and impotent truth into a mighty instrument to shake and melt. So it seems to have been with Josiah. Whether new or old, the Word found him as it had never done before.
Never in his life before had he known the full meaning of fatigue, fatigue that was like a paralysis, blunting the mechanism of the brain, burning like a slow fire in his muscles, poisoning the vital fluids of his nerves. Stroke after stroke, never ceasing! The flame was high, crackling just before him. Through a rift in the trees he could see the outline of two men and the slim form of the girl.
I too have seen the day when my auditory nerves would have felt very delicately on this subject; but a wife and children have a wonderful power in blunting these kind of sensations.
He was hard-working and kind-hearted, but the perpetual divorce between thought and action, which his position made inevitable, was constantly blunting and weakening all he did. His whole life, indeed, was one long waste of power, simply for lack of an elementary frankness.
The pain occasioned by the angry elements, and the cold iron of the shafts of frost which buffetted me, and entered my aching flesh, were a relief to me; blunting my mental suffering. The horses staggered on, and the reins hung loosely in my hands. I often thought I would lay my head close to the sweet, cold face of my lost angel, and thus resign myself to conquering torpor.
The irony of wrong-doing lies much in the deception it practices on the wrong-doer, blunting his sense of danger while it blunts his conscience, leading him blindly to choose out for himself a way to destruction. The little widower was jubilant over the summons to the courthouse. "Good-morning, Baronet," he cried familiarly as soon as he was inside the door of the private office.
It was curious to notice the effect of the slave-trade in blunting the moral susceptibility: no chief in the south would treat a fugitive in this way.
It is only after long and patient study, after having pursued his sublimated ideas through their multiform ramifications, that we learn to admire sufficiently, to comprehend aright, the genius with which he has rendered his subtle thoughts visible and palpable, without once blunting their edge, or ever congealing their fiery flow.
Helen Kemble felt that her cup of bitterness had been filled anew, yet the distraction of a new grief, in which there was a certain remorseful self-reproach, had the effect of blunting the sharp edge of her first sorrow. In this new cause for dread she was compelled in some degree to forget herself.
"What you said about marriage," he said at last, "struck me rather. It's true. One loses something, but one finds something." "Marriage, even the most idealistic of marriages, must blunt the edges to a certain extent," said Judy. "You may call it growing into a saner, more wholesome, view of life, or you may call it a blunting of the edges the fact is the same.
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