Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 13, 2025
In our New England the great Andover discussion and the heretical missionary question have benumbed all sensibility on this subject as entirely, as completely, as the new local anaesthetic, cocaine, deadens the sensibility of the part to which it is applied, so that the eye may have its mote or beam plucked out without feeling it, as the novels of Zola and Maupassant have hardened the delicate nerve-centres of the women who have fed their imaginations on the food they have furnished.
Thus government and individual alike, when advised in time of something wrong with the system, can seek out and correct the cause before serious consequences ensue. But the nation that represses honest criticism with severity, like the individual who deadens his symptoms with dangerous drugs, is likely to be lulled into a false security that may prove fatal.
Sometimes, tragic news deadens the senses, like the brief numbness that follows the sudden cutting off of a limb, the pain not manifesting itself until some time afterward. But with me, the fact of Jim's death clawed and tore at the very foundation of my brain. It stamped itself into my sensibilities with such crushing force that I writhed under the burden of its bitter actuality.
Then, before his very eyes, and long ere he could unscrew the metal stopper, he saw the contents of the closed glass phial sink and lessen as though some one were drinking violently and greedily of the liquor within. "Thanks! Enough! It deadens the vibrations!" cried the faint voice in his interior, as he withdrew the flask and set it back upon the mantelpiece.
So Maud got a book, and sat down over by the stove, quite distant from the bed, and read to him from "The Lady of the Lake," while the mother, like a piece of tireless machinery, moved about the house at the never-ending succession of petty drudgeries which wear the heart and soul out of so many wives and mothers, making life to them a pilgrimage from stove to pantry, from pantry to cellar, and from cellar to garret a life that deadens and destroys, coarsens and narrows, till the flesh and bones are warped to the expression of the wronged and cheated soul.
That modesty infused into the convictions of every one, or, to speak more clearly, that insinuated inferiority, a sort of daily and constant depreciation of the mind so that, it may not be raised to the regions of light, deadens the energies, paralyzes all tendency toward advancement, and at the least struggle a man gives up without fighting.
Imagination had become her broader life, and on such an earth, under such skies, a husband who is not the fountain of it, certainly is a foreign animal: he is a discordant note. He contracts the ethereal world, deadens radiancy. He is gross fact, a leash, a muzzle, harness, a hood; whatever is detestable to the free limbs and senses.
He ordered six hundred war chariots to be prepared, called together his commanders, bound around his body his broad crocodile-leather belt, filled the two quivers in his car with arrows and javelins, drew on his wrist his brazen bracelet which deadens the vibration of the cord, and started, followed by a nation of soldiers.
When a man ceases to venerate he ceases to worship. Extravagance, exaggeration, and coarseness are dangers incident to all popular teachers, and these things pass easily into a strain which shocks the moral sense and deadens the instinct of piety.
And yet we enjoy the opal sunset at Versailles and smile at the quaint appearance of the camouflaged bronzes! Thus custom deadens all painful recollections and so are we able to live. I wonder what Louis XIV would say if he could return and be among us? He, with all his faults being a well bred person, would probably adapt himself to circumstances, as the Duchesse does.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking