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Updated: May 20, 2025
The teaching of nature comes slowly; man's lessons are mostly premature. In the former case, the senses kindle the imagination, in the latter the imagination kindles the senses; it gives them a precocious activity which cannot fail to enervate the individual and, in the long run, the race.
There are many good and conscientious persons who regard novels and novel writers with devout horror, who condemn their works, however moral in their tendency, as unfit for the perusal of responsible and intelligent creatures, who will not admit into their libraries any books but such as treat of religious, historical, or scientific subjects, imagining, and we think very erroneously, that all works of fiction have a demoralizing effect, and tend to weaken the judgment, and enervate the mind.
Accordingly the productions of this latter nature, of the tender nature, do nothing but enervate us; and without refreshing the heart, without occupying the mind, they are only able to flatter in us the sensuous nature.
Debarred from the pursuits which furnish so quickening an excitement to the other sex, she either is confined to the routine of domestic life and the quiet society of a social circle, or devotes herself to those frivolous pleasures which enervate while they excite; which, like the inspiration of the wine-cup, are transient in their joy, but deep and lasting in their evil.
The strong yet sweet odor, delicious as some dainty, seems to blend with our being, to saturate us, to intoxicate us, to enervate us, to plunge us into a sleepy, dreamy torpor. As though it were an opium prepared by the hands of fairies and not by those of druggists. This is a country of ravines.
Though Boabdil was innocent of such a crime, he felt himself guilty of the causes which led to it; and a dark memory, resting upon his conscience, served to augment his superstition and enervate the vigour of his resolves; for, of all things that make men dreamers, none is so effectual as remorse operating upon a thoughtful temperament.
Nor are we here to look for eminent heroes, colossal talents, or those marvellous exploits which the history of past times presents in such rich abundance. Those times are gone; such men are no more. In the soft lap of refinement we have suffered the energetic powers to become enervate which those ages called into action and rendered indispensable.
I was growing lazier every day I spent there; I felt energy oozing out of every pore of my body; and in the end I began to get afraid that if I stopped much longer I should only be fit to sing the song of the sluggard: "You have waked me too soon, let me slumber again." Seville is a dangerous place; it is worse than Capua; it would enervate Cromwell's Ironsides.
She sighed deeply, the sigh of one but too well accustomed to life's disappointments, and arose the determination to lose herself in her work, and to shake off if possible the sadness which seemed to paralyze her energies and enervate her whole being. The gown which she had worn upon the previous evening lay over a chair, giving out, as she lifted it, an odor of tobacco smoke.
Malezieu was learned, a member of two Academies, faintly eulogized by Fontenelle, warmly so by Voltaire, and not at all by Mlle. de Launay; but twenty-five years devoted to humoring the caprices and flattering the tastes of a vain and exacting patroness were not likely to develop his highest possibilities. There is a point where the stimulating atmosphere of the salon begins to enervate.
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