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Limbus   Listen
noun
Limbus, Limbo  n.  
1.
(Scholastic Theol.) An spiritual region where certain classes of souls were supposed to await the last judgment. "As far from help as Limbo is from bliss." "A Limbo large and broad, since called The Paradise of fools." Note: The limbus patrum was considered as a place for the souls of good men who lived before the coming of our Savior. The limbus infantium was said to be a similar place for the souls of unbaptized infants. To these was added, in the popular belief, the limbus fatuorum, or fool's paradise, regarded as a receptacle of all vanity and nonsense.
2.
Hence: Any real or imaginary place of restraint or confinement; a prison; as, to put a man in limbo.
3.
Hence: A state of waiting, or uncertainty, in which final judgment concerning the outcome of a decision is postponed, perhaps indefinitely; neglect for an indefinite time; as, the proposal was left in limbo while opponents and proponents refused to compromise.
4.
(Anat.) A border or margin; as, the limbus of the cornea.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Limbus" Quotes from Famous Books



... worshipers: grain, salt, oil, wine, to which were often added cooking and other utensils. It was common also to offer the flesh of animals, as, for example, among the Eskimo, the American Indians (the Pawnees and others), the Bantu, the Limbus, and the Todas of Southern India.[1838] It was supposed that the god, when he was in need of food, sometimes used means to stimulate his worshipers on earth to make him ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... it feels to be a deceived husband. Just Heavens, I do not know. It feels just nothing at all. It is not Hell, certainly it is not necessarily Heaven. So I suppose it is the intermediate stage. What do they call it? Limbo. No, I feel nothing at all about that. They are dead; they have gone before their Judge who, I hope, will open to them the springs of His compassion. It is not my business to think about it. It is simply my business to say, as Leonora's people say: "Requiem ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford

... permission. licenciar to dismiss from service. lid f. fight, combat. liebre f. hare. lienzo linen, canvas; facade. ligadura ligature, bond. ligar to bind, tie. ligero light, slight. limbo limbo (outer fringe of the infernal world). limite m. limit, boundary. limosna alms, charity. limpiar to clean. limpieza cleanliness. limpio clean, limpid. linajudo having lineage, of old family. lindante bordering. lio bundle. liquen m. lichen. liquido ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon

... quarries, the discovery of metallic alloys, the necessity of roofing larger spaces, the demand for a sedentary amusement, for music to dance to in new social gatherings—any such humble reason, besides many others, can cause one art to issue more particularly out of the limbo of the undeveloped, or out of the lumber-room of ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... supplies the ground of choice for giving to fancy and imagination, each its own sense. Cowley is a fanciful writer, Milton an imaginative poet. Then I proceed with the distinction, how ill fancy assorts with imagination, as instanced in Milton's Limbo. [3] ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge

... "Christ in Limbo" in S. Lorenzo at Florence, and the detestable picture of "Time, Beauty, Love, and Folly," in ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds

... the civilization of Greece, being a civilization of heroes, individuals, comes to us in its noble array with its solo arts, its striding heroes everywhere in front of all, and with nothing nearer to the people in it than the Greek Chorus, which, out of limbo, pale and featureless across all ages, sounds to us as the first far faint coming of the crowd to the arts of this groping world. Modern art, inheriting each of these and each of all things, is revealed to us as the struggle to express all things at once. Democracy is ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee

... confessed to an exotic strain: to Italian origin. Italy was romantic. When he obtained a line part and he appeared on the bill, he took the opportunity of changing a name linked with unpleasant associations which he did not regard as his own. Kegworthy was cast into the limbo of common things, and he became Paul Savelli. But this ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke

... by the curly, flowing glossy locks which, to his eye, called inarticulately for the tools of his trade, his undulating monologue welled forth until Coleridge might have envied him. Helwyse heard the sound, but let the words go by to that unknown limbo whither all sounds, good or bad, have been flying ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne

... two of your friends in limbo," returned Harry. "You will find it no holiday affair to keep a house for the purpose of murder and robbery. Never mind, you need say nothing, for it will not better matters in the least. Come;" and Harry Bernard led the old woman ...
— Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective - Or, The Crime of the Midnight Express • Frank Pinkerton

... he's in Tartar limbo, worse than hell. A devil in an everlasting garment hath him; One whose hard heart is button'd up with steel; A fiend, a fury, pitiless and rough; 35 A wolf, nay, worse; a fellow all in buff; A back-friend, a shoulder-clapper, one that countermands The passages of alleys, creeks, ...
— The Comedy of Errors - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare

... great incoherence. He had been wronged. He was always being misunderstood. His life had been a series of mysterious tribulations. I for one have the merest idea that Garibaldi was arrested for the theft of some peculiarly worthless trifle, and sent to the Limbo of La Ferte as a penance. This merest idea is suggested by something which happened when The Clever Man instituted a search for his missing knife—but I must introduce The Clever Man to my reader before describing ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings

... impossible to make merchandise of it, for he was every inch a gentleman. He could not burn it, for under an acrid exterior he had a kindly nature. It was believed, indeed, that he had established some limbo of his own, in which such unwelcome commodities were subject to a kind of burial or entombment, where they remained in existence, yet were decidedly outside the ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton

... said his host, looking into the wood fire. He was watching the Cherwell swirl through a narrow archway. He was conscious of heavenly blue in the white limbo ceiling above him, and the cushions of his chair ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps

... The holy flame is elicited from certain flints which are said to have been brought by a member of the Pazzi family from the Holy Land. They are kept in the church of the Holy Apostles on the Piazza del Limbo, and on the morning of Easter Saturday the prior strikes fire from them and lights a candle from the new flame. The burning candle is then carried in solemn procession by the clergy and members of the municipality ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer

... George, romantic in temperament, covetous of honour, confident of popularity, but heedless of good-will alienated and of positive ill-will created, has reached the Chancellorship of the Exchequer. Will he climb still higher in office, or will he pass to the limbo peopled by those who were and are not? Time alone can tell. But in this year of grace 1911 Mr. Lloyd George, incarnation of the hard-working middle class, is a very distinct personality in the government of the country, and his ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton

... arrangement is adopted with respect to the living: Persons of any public note may send their busts, while living, to the Val Halla, where they are deposited in a certain chamber, a kind of marble purgatory or limbo. When they die, a jury is to sit upon them, and if they are fortunate enough to have a verdict in their favour, they take their place amongst these marble immortals. As the process does not occur until the parties are beyond the reach of human disappointment, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various

... waking from a dream. Often in India I felt that I was in an enchanted land. Melancholy, monotony, austerity; a sense as of perennial frost, spite of the light and heat; a lost region peopled with visionary forms; a purgatory of souls doing penance till the hour of deliverance shall strike; a limbo, lovely but phantasmal, unearthly, over-earthly—that is the kind of impression India left on my mind. I reach China, awake, and rub my eyes. This, of course, is the real world. This is every-day. Good temper, industry, intelligence. Nothing abnormal or overstrained. The natural man, working, ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... prohibitions—in their respective degrees—of preparatory school, of Harchester, of Oxford; and, above all and through all, the control and admonitions of his father, the Archdeacon, fell away from him into the limbo of things ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... lying as ghost books, in a limbo on the banks of a certain Bristolian Styx, humanly speaking, a Canal; but the other apparatus of life is gathered about me, and performs its diurnal functions. The place pleases me better than I expected: a far lookout on all sides, over green country; a sufficient old City lying in the hollow ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle

... nature has not been generous in the endowment of our councilors. They agreed, unconsciously, in a mute love for the muddy field through which they tramped, with eyes narrowed close by the concentration of their minds. At length they drew breath, let the argument fly away into the limbo of other good arguments, and, leaning over a gate, opened their eyes for the first time and looked about them. Their feet tingled with warm blood and their breath rose in steam around them. The bodily exercise made them both feel more direct and less self-conscious ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf

... exquisite piece of Dresden china as she says it. I have seen that masculine tyrant of hers smiling knowingly to himself on such occasions, and it has not been difficult to guess why and when those historic bloomers disappeared into the limbo of lost causes. There is little doubt that when Love came in by the door, the bloomers went out, so to ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne

... essence, a very sturdy form of Protection, as we can see, if not here in Great Britain, certainly in America and in Australia."[804] "Society is constantly changing its form of living: every day some supposed old truth goes into the limbo of forgotten things, and, looking around us, those who have eyes to see and ears to hear may see and hear on all hands the death-knell of the old Manchester school ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker

... observe, that Milton has interwoven in the Texture of his Fable some Particulars which do not seem to have Probability enough for an Epic Poem, particularly in the Actions which he ascribes to Sin and Death, and the Picture which he draws of the Limbo of Vanity, with other Passages in the second Book. Such Allegories rather savour of the Spirit of Spenser and Ariosto, than of Homer ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... the dreadfull passion 280 Was overpast, and manhood well awake, Yet musing at the straunge occasion, And doubting much his sence, he thus bespake; What voyce of damned Ghost from Limbo lake,[*] Or guilefull spright wandring in empty aire, 285 Both which fraile men do oftentimes mistake, Sends to my doubtfull eares these speaches rare, And ruefull plaints, me bidding guiltlesse bloud ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser

... "and I dare say there are plenty of other men, even in this Dutch limbo, who have an eye for beauty; let them break their hearts, if they have any, but keep your ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson

... orthodox view, and had an enduring influence. All imitation of the birds by man, and further, all schemes of navigating the air in a machine dynamically supported, seemed, by Borelli's argument, to have been thrust back into the limbo ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh

... South; but the writer's experience convinced him that a constitutional amendment on this point is impossible, although one has been repeatedly proposed, notably by the late Congressman Lovering of Massachusetts, and such an amendment is still pending somewhere in that limbo of unadopted constitutional amendments for which no formal cemetery seems ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson

... were entertained on board the galleon to an impromptu luncheon, which, as it was prepared by the Spanish cook, released from the limbo of below for the occasion, and as the viands and wines were drawn from the ship's stores, was done ample justice to. Then George, accompanied by Basset, went ashore with the Governor and his followers, to be ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood

... walls for well-nigh the population of a village. There is the glass coupe in front, the drawing-room of the house. There is the interieur, which you may compare, if you please, to the dining-room, only there you do not dine; and there is the rotundo, a sort of cabin attached, the limbo of the establishment, in which you may find half-a-dozen unhappy wights for days and nights doing penance. Then, in the very fore-front of this moving castle—hung in mid air, as it were—there is the banquette. ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie

... Christians, whether the fetich be the image of a saint or the Virgin, or a verse of the Bible found at random and used much as is a penny-toss to decide minor actions. Or, to look farther south, what means the rabbit's foot carried in the pocket or the various articles of faith now hanging in the limbo between religion and folk-lore in various parts ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... suffer. He lived, in his best hours, in a world of subjects and situations; he wrote another play and made it as different from its predecessor as such a very good thing could be. It might be a very good thing, but when he had committed it to the theatrical limbo indiscriminating fate took no account of the difference. He was at last able to leave England for three or four months; he went to Germany to pay a visit long deferred to his mother ...
— Nona Vincent • Henry James

... Lortzing, who took advantage of the romantic episode of Peter's service as ship carpenter in Holland to make him the hero of one of the most sparkling of German comic operas. Lortzing had a successor in the Irishman T. S. Cooke, but his opera found its way into the limbo of forgotten things more than a generation ago, while Lortzing's still lives on the stage of Germany. Peter deserved to be celebrated in music, for it was in his reign that polyphonic music, albeit of the Italian order, was introduced into the Russian church and ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... philosophy, this motive is always attended by a "besetting" problem. Here it is the accounting for what, empirically at least, is alien to that universal character. And this difficulty is emphasized rather than resolved by Parmenides in his designation of a limbo of opinion, "in which is no true belief at all," to which the manifold of common experience with all its irrelevancies can ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry

... too, had stumbled into the trap which was Limbo, and had had a very definite part in breaking up that devilish installation, the crew of the Solar Queen had claimed as their reward the trading rights of Traxt Cam in default of legal heirs. And so here they were ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton

... I quote the Commissioners had an idea which might have animated all their labors. But they left it in limbo, they reverenced it, and they passed by. Perhaps we can raise it again and follow the ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann

... a writer was not called a historian unless he had considerable pretensions to style. Thus, men who could write, and had written, in an informal way, excellent historical accounts, were not studied by their countrymen as historians. Their writings were relegated to the limbo of antiquarian remains. The habit of writing notes of their campaigns, memoranda of their public conduct, copies of their speeches, &c. had for some time been usual among the abler or more ambitious ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell

... which made the bush alive in the desert of Horeb—the presence of the living God; now, the vision was over, the desert was dull and dry, the bush burned no more, the glowing lava had cooled to unsightly stone! There was no God, nor any man more! Time had closed and swept the world into the limbo of vanity! For a time she sat without thought, as it were in a mental sleep. She opened her eyes, and the blank of creation stared into the very heart of her. The emptiness and loneliness overpowered her. Hardly aware ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald

... I paid my respects to Master Holbrook, after a week's absence, my finger is still in limbo as you may see by the writeing. I have not paid my compliments to Madam Smith,[44] for, altho' I can drive the goos quill a bit, I cannot so well manage the needle. So I will lay my hand to the distaff, as the virtuous woman did ...
— Diary of Anna Green Winslow - A Boston School Girl of 1771 • Anna Green Winslow

... the intermediate condition. The present Christian dogma has no name for it, unless it be that nebulous limbo which is occasionally mentioned, and is usually defined as the place where the souls of the just who died before Christ were detained. The idea of crossing a space before reaching a permanent state on the other side is common to many religions, and took the allegorical ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle

... other, let us see at once that this is the maddest of the uneconomic: partridges killed by our land magnates at, shall we say, a guinea a head, to be retailed in Leadenhall at one shilling and ninepence, with one poacher in limbo for every fifty birds! our poet, maker, creator, gauging ale, and that badly, with no leisure for making or creating, only a little leisure for drinking, and such like beer-barrel avocations! Truly, a cutting of blocks with fine razors while we scrape our chins so uncomfortably with ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope

... Erin remember the Days of Old. Let Joy Alone be remembered Now. Let's take This World as Some Wide Scene. Letter from Larry O'Branigan to the Rev. Murtagh O'Mulligan. Light of the Haram, The. Light sounds the Harp. Like Morning When Her Early Breeze. Like One Who, doomed. Limbo of Lost Reputations, The. Lines on the Death of Joseph Atkinson, Esq., of Dublin. Lines on the Death of Mr. Perceval. Lines on the Death of Sheridan. Lines on the Departure of Lords Castlereagh and Stewart for the Continent. Lines on the Entry of the Austrians into Naples. ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... In a limbo of desolate waters, In the void of a flood-stricken plain, You will find them—the sons and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various

... foliis...tubo perianthii limbo subaequali, corona truncata dentibus sterilibus nullis, umbellis densis, pedicellis articulatis exterioribus ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell

... Relacion was not written by Las Casas, but was composed years later by an unknown Frenchman. This suggestion was too agreeable to Spanish susceptibilities to lack approval in Spain when it was first advanced, but it has since been consigned by general consent to the limbo of fanciful inventions. ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt

... pigeons awaits all who would violate our shores, or light up the flame of sedition in the land. If, as some philosophers aver, the pigeon does not all die, but in some tranquil limbo flutters on in an eternity of innocent cooing, it must console the poor bird to reflect that, however cheap he may be held, he has not perished altogether in vain. To serve a useful purpose is the great economy of things, to point a warning, at the cost of one's ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous

... us would it be to know that a poem of finer quality and more splendid fire than any we have ever read had once been written, if the modesty of its author had led him to keep it always in his pocket and it had finally vanished into the limbo ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke

... creatures; it moves and activates, perhaps, the very cells of our own bodily organism, which is a confederation, more or less solidary, of living beings; it moves the very globules of our blood. Our life is composed of lives, our vital aspiration of aspirations existing perhaps in the limbo of subconsciousness. Not more absurd than so many other dreams which pass as valid theories is the belief that our cells, our globules, may possess something akin to a rudimentary cellular, globular consciousness or basis of consciousness. Or that they may arrive at ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno

... could not prevent the infinite grotesque of the others from having its effect on the spectator. The monks and priesthood of France amounted to little less than a hundred and fifty thousand. All were now thrown up from the darkness of centuries before a wondering world. I had Milton's vision of Limbo ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various

... very poor and weak. But I say there is no standing room, no reality of reason, between absolute faith and absolute unbelief. Either not a sparrow falls to the ground without Him, or there is no God, and we are fatherless children. Those who attempt to live in such a limbo as lies between the two, are only driven ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald

... course, grandfather," replied Bryan, "or I suppose they would be in limbo before now; but there's quare talk about it. The Hogans is suspected, it seems. Philip was caught examinin' the hall-door the night before; ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... that he that loves her best, Durst offer but to touch her in this place! Per Jovem et Junonem! hoc Shall pash his coxcomb such a knock, As that his soul his course shall take To Limbo and Avernus' lake. In vain I watch in this dark hole; Would any living durst my manhood try, And offer to come up ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various

... precisely the same, on grounds of either logic or Scripture, as advocating the right of adultery toward a bad husband. This is not even good fooling; and, its local use past and no longer buoyed by personal liking for the author, the book sinks back into the limbo of partisan polemics with many worse ones and perhaps some better ones, dragging its real ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... dirge to the forthcoming felo-de-se—goes off with his companion to leave the water clear for Barbara Allen, who enters, takes an affecting leave of her laird lover, and straightway drowns herself. Jack Ketch is now, by a rapid change of scene, discovered in limbo, and condemned to death; why, we were too stupid to make out. The fatal cart—very likely modelled after "the best authorities"—next occupies the stage, drawn by a real horse, and filled with Sir Gregory Gash (who it seems is going to be hanged) and Jack Ketch not as a prisoner, but as an officer ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 25, 1841 • Various

... hath his art No less, Sir, than the Poet; I tell ye, I'm so blithe to-night I'd paint the old Moon's orb red! Oh, think ye that I took delight For years in baking war-bread? One shape, one colour and one size, By Government controlled? But now all this to limbo flies; What wonder that to-night I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 23, 1919 • Various

... life: they can only bear to see it through the veil of visions spun by the backward movement of time, and hear it in the echo which sends back and distorts the dead words of those who were once alive.—Christophe's friendship gradually dragged Olivier out of this Limbo of art. The sun's rays pierced through to the innermost recesses of his soul in which he ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland

... them to be harangued confidently by a woman—they who were used to watching women carry loads. There was something revolutionary about it that took their breath away, and swept their own determination into limbo. ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy

... but yesterday that the old Fifth Avenue Hotel passed to the limbo of bygone things. When "Victoria's Royal Son" came to visit us it was new and stately, and held by loyal patriots to be something for strangers from beyond the seas to behold and wonder at. But before ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice

... local superstitions,—the eggs found in the garden, and the consequent sterility of the milk, the evil eye and the cattle dying, etc., etc.,—it will take more than altar denunciations, believe me,—it will take years of vigorous education to relegate these ideas into the limbo of exploded fantasies. And the people won't be comfortable without them. You take away the poetry, which is an essential element in the Gaelic character, and you make the people prosaic and critical, which is the worst thing possible for them. Thiggin-thu? ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan

... calculations. I beg you to understand that even if you did n't exist, there could be no question of my cousin. No earthly consideration could induce me to make any sort of terms with that branch of my family—let alone a marriage. So!" A wave of the hand dismissed his cousin for ever to Crack-limbo. "But as you do exist, and as I happen to love you, and as I happen to have discovered—what I could never wildly have dared to hope—that you are not utterly indifferent to me, I may tell you that I intend to marry you—you—you. You imperial, ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland

... Johns interest, represented by that travelling man; the British interest, which is a mighty powerful one, seeing that it is supported by the English navy; the French government interest, which is likewise backed up by a fleet of warships, and the French factory interest, represented by our friend in limbo, who, though he isn't saying much just now, seems to have a pretty strong political pull. So, on the whole, the ownership appears to be muddled, and the pack itself subject to a good many conflicting claims. I expect ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe

... Blitzen" pranced into the foreground as Santa Claus' steeds, there was nothing in American nursery literature of any lasting fame. Thereafter, as the custom of observing Christmas Day gradually became popular, the perennial small child felt—until automobiles sent reindeer to the limbo of bygone things—the thrill of delight and fear over the annual visit of Santa Claus that the bigger child experiences in exploding fire-crackers on the Fourth of July. There are possibilities in both excitements which appeal to one of the child's ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey

... and nervous party of fugitives of mixed nationalities and professions—consuls, charges, attaches, and innocent, agitated citizens—was summarily grabbed and ordered into indefinite limbo. ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers

... in thee; of blasphemous wind-eloquence, at least, we shall have no more!" How many pretty men have gone this road, escorted by the beautifulest marching music from all the "public organs;" and have found at last that it ended—where? It is the broad road, that leads direct to Limbo and the Kingdom of the Inane. Gifted men, and once valiant nations, and as it were the whole world with one accord, are marching thither, in melodious triumph, all the drums and hautboys giving out their ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle

... and I pray him to say masses for their souls as far as the value of these links will carry him, and to do on trust what else may be necessary to free them from Purgatory. And hark ye, as they were just living people, and free from all heresy, it may be that they are well nigh out of limbo already, so that a little matter may have them free of the fetlocks; and in that case, look ye, ye will say I desire to take out the balance of the gold in curses upon a generation called the Ogilvies of Angus Shire, in what way soever the church may best ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott

... But other writers, no doubt just as well informed, differ from him; and while the doctors disagree, simple laymen may well hold their judgment in suspense; or, better still, dismiss Jebus, Zadek, Salem, and Jerusalem, to the limbo of learned trivialities. Counting the spots on a leopard, the quills on a porcupine, or the hairs in a cat's whiskers, is just as amusing and quite as edifying as most of the ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote

... passed into the limbo of things enjoyed, if not forgotten, and the guests had gathered in the after-cabin. "Children!" cried the mother of Georgina, Jane, and Cornelius James, "a visitor has come on board to see you!" As she spoke, a gaunt apparition appeared in the doorway. He wore ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie

... you know that old Wilkins never axed no more than threepence. Now, how we're to pay at that rate, comes to more than my knowledge. Jim hadn't the dirt, although he had brought his threepence; so his blinkers are left there in limbo." ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat

... to the loveless union of a dying consumptive? What was the use to him of having carriages and horses, liveried servants to salute him, and ninnies to give him food; it would have been far better had he never appeared in the world but had remained in the limbo of those who are never born. Like the squire of Don Quixote, who finding himself at last in the plenty of Barataria, had by his side a doctor Recio to restrain his appetite, this poor creature could never enjoy with freedom ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... a good deal of bathing these days, as there is a beautiful little river about a stone's throw away from our billets. By the way, I hope you are continuing as keen as ever on your swimming. As to leave, it has again vanished into the limbo of futurity. I am not particularly sorry. Leave is such a fleeting joy. Just as one is beginning to get into the way of things at home one has to go back again to the Front. I would much prefer to get the War completely over than get leave. After all, in my present job ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones

... dynamic, and that it may call into existence forms and pictures that may well exist for hundreds of years. For, not far removed from the region of our human life is another region where float the waste and drift of all the centuries, the limbo of the shells of the dead; a densely populated region crammed with horror and abomination of all descriptions, and sometimes galvanised into active life again by the will of a trained manipulator, a mind versed in the practices of lower magic. That this woman understood ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood

... Government that it would be necessary to annul the Letters Patent issued on March 31, 1905, and make an end of the Lyttelton Constitution. That Constitution now passes away into the never-never land, into a sort of chilly limbo that is reserved for the disowned or abortive political progeny ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill

... or Ixion's wheel, Or to the vulture of Prometheus, Rather than that this murther were undone. When as I die I'll drag thy cursed ghost Through all the rivers of foul Erebus, Through burning sulphur of the Limbo-lake, To allay the burning fury of that heat That rageth ...
— 2. Mucedorus • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]

... symbol of the desolate time when he had nothing earthly left to lean on; there is the large wooden reel which the blear-eyed old deacon sent the minister's lady, who thanked him graciously, and twirled it smilingly, and in fitting season bowed it out decently to the limbo of troublesome conveniences. And there are old leather portmanteaus, like stranded porpoises, their mouths gaping in gaunt hunger for the food with which they used to be gorged to bulging repletion; and old brass andirons, waiting until time shall revenge them on their paltry ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... his self-imposed task of counting the rifle balls, and now and then a sharp click told that another was consigned to that limbo guarded by Towse. Mrs. Dicey stood in silence for a time, gazing upon the unutterably gloomy forest, the distant, throbbing stars, and the broad, wan flashes at long intervals ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)

... Master, in no field but thine, Would build my house only upon thy rock, Yet am but a dull day, with a sea-sheen! Why should I wonder then that they should mock, Who, in the limbo of things heard and seen, Hither and thither blowing, lose the shine Of every light that hangs ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald

... William, laughing, as did all round him, "Thou art a cunning rogue enough, whoever thou art. Go into limbo, and behave ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley

... unintelligible to strangers. The upshot on the present occasion was that the Ministers remained in their places and that Mr. Monk's bill, though it had received the substantial honour of a second reading, passed away for the present into the limbo of ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope

... proof that any one of them did do it is very far from satisfactory.[167] Moreover the questions raised are often of small importance, and belong not so much to the serious workshop of history as to its limbo prepared for learned trifles, whither we will hereby ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske

... blazed into sudden ferocity. He had the look of a wild animal at bay. "You are to prosecute!" he exclaimed violently. "Do you hear? I won't have any more of your damned charity! I'll go down into my own limbo and stay there, without let or hindrance from you or any other man. If you are fool enough to offer me another chance, as you call it, I am not fool enough to take it. The only thing I'll take from you is ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell

... enforcedly ignorant public, the beauties of this line of artistic expression, and to give historical account of the development of these various picturesque athletic arts. Alas, that is not possible, for it must remain forever in the limbo of tradition. ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley

... attached to the Navy for operating captive balloons from warships. Although the Zeppelin and aeroplane forces have come to the front in Germany, and have relegated the captive balloon somewhat to the limbo of things that were, the latter section has never been disbanded; in fact, during the present campaign it has ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot

... The further side of Acheron.—Virgil leads Dante into Limbo, the First Circle of Hell, containing the spirits of those who lived virtuously but without Christianity.—Greeting of Virgil by his fellow poets.—They enter a castle, where are the shades of ancient ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri

... in the self-consciousness of his immense vitality, sweeps into the limbo of oblivion these dusty debris of the past, with no nearer approach to the romantic regret of a Malory for the glories of old time or to Villon's awestruck contemplation of the mysterious evanishment of storied beauty, than the ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford

... sense of that very elastic word. So was I. That is to say, there was a time when we both thought ourselves good mid-Victorian Liberals—a school of politicians whose ideas have now been swept into the limbo of forgotten things, the only surviving principles of that age being apparently those associated with a faint and somewhat fantastic cult of the primrose. In 1866 he wrote to his sister—and I cannot ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring

... from the necessity in advance. In the region in which he should pass his inner life there would be no occupant but himself. From the world where men and women had ties of love and pity and mutual regard they had cast him out, forcing him into a spiritual limbo where none of these things obtained. It was only lawful that he should make use of such advantages as his lot ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King

... With bitter paragraph and caustic jest, He gives to turbulence the day of rest; Condemn'd, this week, rash rancour to instil, Or thrown aside, the next, for one who will: Alike undone or if he praise or rail (For this affects his safety, that his sale), He sinks at last, in luckless limbo set, If loud for libel, and ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith

... war on one another, would today quickly face a larger foe. Already the idea of one government for all the world is taking form—there must be one Supreme Arbiter, and all this monstrous expense of money and flesh and blood and throbbing hearts for purposes of war, must go, just as we have sent to limbo the jangling, jarring, jealous gods. Also, the better sentiment of the world will send the czars, emperors, kings, grand dukes, and the greedy grafters of so-called democracy, into the dust-heap of oblivion, with all the priestly phantoms that have obscured the sun and blackened the sky. The gods ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard

... of the Cafe Cordier? He would play billiards with his nose, and a little pug nose at that, my children. When it grew greasy he would chalk it deliberately. Once he made a break of two hundred and forty-five. A champion! The Cafe Cordier itself? Swept long ago into the limbo of dear immemorable dissolute things. Then there was the Cafe du Bas-Rhin on the Boul' Mich' where Marie la Democrate drank fifty-five bocks in an evening against Helene la Severe who drank fifty-three. Where are such women now, O generation ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke

... eke to Sionward grew hot, The soldiers slain, the hardy knights were killed, Legions of sprites from Limbo's prisons got, The empty air, the hills and valleys filled, Hearting the Pagans that they shrinked not, Till where they stood their dearest blood they spilled; And with new rage Argantes they inspire, Whose heat no flames, whose ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso

... except through the ordinary channels of sensations, but, generally speaking, it is hostile even to any inquiry upon the matter. Every leading physiologist and psychologist down to the present time has relegated what, for want of a better term, has been called "Thought-Reading" to the limbo of explored fallacies."[64] A second Report by the same writers was read at a meeting of the Society in the same year. In this Report the first series of "Thought-Transference Drawings" ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett

... whether you like it or not, play you must in your appointed order. We are all unwilling competitors. Nobody asks our naked little souls beforehand whether they would prefer to be born into the game or to remain, unfleshed, in the limbo of non-existence. Willy nilly, every one of us is thrust into the world by an irresponsible act of two previous players; and once there, we must play out the set as best we may to the bitter end, however little we like it or ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen

... work enough to keep an apprentice busy, but where would he find a lad sufficiently behind the times to learn a humble trade now banished to the limbo of superseded, almost ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

... enchanter in these paper and leathern boxes; and though they know us, and have been waiting two, ten, or twenty centuries for us,—some of them,—and are eager to give us a sign, and unbosom themselves, it is the law of their limbo that they must not speak until spoken to; and as the enchanter has dressed them like battalions of infantry in coat and jacket of one cut, by the thousand and ten thousand, your chance of hitting on the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... democratic, and independent; on the other, Navarre, more priest-ridden than Rome herself, with every man a Carlist and every woman that which her confessor told her to be. In the south, Andalusia only asked to be left alone to go her own sunny, indifferent way to the limbo of the great nations. Which way should Aragon turn? In truth, the men of ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman

... question of Browning's obscurity was expelled to the Limbo of Dead Stupidities when Mr. Swinburne, in periods as resplendent as the whirling wheels of Phoebus Apollo's chariot, wrote his famous incidental passage in his "Essay ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp

... seemed moving through the gloom on a throne of gold, uplifted by a phalanx of elephants. Fudo I saw, shrouded and shrined in fire, and Maya-Fujin, riding her celestial peacock; and strangely mingling with these Buddhist visions, as in the anachronism of a Limbo, armored effigies of Daimyo and images of the Chinese sages. There were huge forms of wrath, grasping thunderbolts, and rising to the roof: the Deva-kings, like impersonations of hurricane power; the Ni-O, guardians of long-vanished temple gates. Also there were ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn

... at concealment, nor disguise. And yet no phantoms were ever more unreal than they to those who seek them. Who are they? The officers have been summoned on many occasions; but each and every time in some manner or way they had contrived to elude them. There are some who have consigned them to the limbo of illusion. But ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

... prominent Englishmen opposed the passage of these resolutions, as calculated to do infinite harm, but they were carried by a very large French Canadian majority at the dictation of Mr. Papineau. Whatever may have been its effect for the moment, this wordy effusion has long since been assigned to the limbo where are buried other examples of the ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot

... in the fir-plantations. Poor little soul! He cannot come. Perchance on a night when trees were tost, The Changeling rode with his cavalcade Among the clouds, that were tossing too, And made the little soul afraid. They hunted him madly, the howling crew, Into the Limbo of the lost, Into the Limbo of the others Who wander crying and calling ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various

... common with others of his time, in regard to changes of level of the land and the origin of the crystalline rocks, that it did contain the principles upon which modern palaeontology is founded, while those of Cuvier are now in the limbo—so ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard

... as children do, but she had never seen any member of the family from the Far Hill Place, and mentally relegated them to the limbo of the damned under the classification of "them, from the States." Their name, even, was rarely mentioned, and, while curiosity often swayed her, temptation ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock

... all dis fuss?" said Pompey, who was standing sentry over him. "You want to take us into French port—we take you into Irish port. Waterford berry nice place, and when we get dere we take you out of limbo, and ...
— The Missing Ship - The Log of the "Ouzel" Galley • W. H. G. Kingston

... Greater emphasis has been placed upon environment as a factor in ethnic development, and what has been called "the vulgar theory of race," as accounting for progress and culture, has been relegated to the limbo of exploded dogmas. One of the most perspicuous and forceful presentations of these modern conclusions of anthropology is found in the volume above quoted, a book which owes its origin to ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt

... obtained the privilege of leaving his crew on board as "prisoners" until he was ready to return to sea. Then, discharging his passengers and getting coal out of some of the ships which had arrived, he retook his crew out of limbo and carried the first regular mail back to Panama early in April. In regular order arrived the third steamer, the Panama; and, as the vessels were arriving with coal, The California was enabled to hire a crew ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman

... of slavery Douglass emerged, passed through the limbo of prejudice which he encountered as a freeman, and took his place in history. "As few of the world's great men have ever had so checkered and diversified a career," says Henry Wilson, "so it may at least be plausibly claimed that no man represents in himself more conflicting ideas and ...
— Frederick Douglass - A Biography • Charles Waddell Chesnutt

... rover, with a calmness which at the moment made his young companion upbraid him as the most merciless of human kind; "ha! I wonder how he got there? I heard that some how or other he was in limbo at Cecil Place; he wanted to make an escape, I suppose, and so took to the old earth. Ay, ay! look your last on the bright sun, that's laughing at man and man's doings—you'll never mount to where it shines, ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall

... ever again have to reproach himself with his cruel treatment of Ida. And yet why not? What had the woman to do with her? She had suffered as much as if the woman had not forgotten it all. His reckoning was with Ida—was with her. Where should he find her? In what limbo could he imagine her? Ah, that was the wildering cruelty of it. She was not this woman, nor was she dead in any conceivable natural way so that her girlish spirit might have remained eternally fixed. She was nothing. She was nowhere. She only existed in this locket and her only soul was in his ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various

... I was thinking of, mate, myself," he answered. "But you needn't thank me, for to my mind, I haven't done much for you yet. All I have had time for was to get you out of limbo, and afloat on this here river. We must now hold a council of war, to ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston

... amount of money there is some hope of getting for them. It is an unhappy fact that there is often less than no point in presenting even fine proposals for legislative consideration at a financially inappropriate point in history. Once defeated, whatever the reason, they may forever languish in limbo. ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior

... decades stood vacant save for an occasional and temporary tenant. A long time back a formal truce had been declared in the feud that had split in sharp and bitter cleavage the family connections of the Harpers and the Doanes. Back into the limbo of tradition and vagueness went the ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... the end of this pamphlet, "this is all rhetoric and declamation? There is, I dare say, something too much in that kind. What with criticizing style and correcting exercises, we college tutors perhaps may be likely, in the heat of composition, to lose sight of realities, and pass into the limbo of the factitious,—especially when the thing must be done at odd times, in any case, and, if at all, quickly. But if I have been obliged to write hurriedly, believe me, I have obliged myself to think not hastily. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various

... which real things present to the body might live and congregate. So understood, it was avowedly and from the beginning a realm of mere appearance and depended entirely on the body. It should be observed, however, that the limbo of divine and ideal things, which is sometimes also called the mind, is very far from depending obviously on the body and is said to do so only by a late school of psychological sceptics. To primitive apprehension ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... my outfit in fact almost everything. When my ammunition was expended—I mean used up—I threw my rifle away and took to the brush and ran for it—I mean the chance of life. Lately I have heard that Mr. Greely has handed in his chips—that is passed in his checks—I mean gone to limbo you know. I'm sorry for the old man but we must all go some time you know. and now miss what I want to know is will you instead of your father send me a breech loading rifle. If you do I shall be much obliged to you and if you ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland

... takes the Catholic side of the controversy. The ugly traits of Mary's character, while we cannot say that they are concealed with partisan intent, are so wrought into the picture that they do not impress the imagination as ugly at all. They are consigned to the dim limbo of the past and have the effect of winning for her that sympathy which human nature is always ready to bestow, in art if not in life, upon the Magdalen type. On the other hand, the ignoble traits of Queen Elizabeth are brought into the foreground and made the most of, while her great qualities ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... massiveness gave place to grace, and brightness of colour to a soft modified brilliancy that was very engaging. In the Georgian copies heaviness again obtained favour, and gradually the designs deteriorated, and were eventually temporarily lost in "the limbo of the past." The vogue for lace work in the reign of William and Mary influenced the stitches in the crewel embroidery, and in Queen Anne's day the variety of stitches was reminiscent of the earlier period, some of the fillings ...
— Jacobean Embroidery - Its Forms and Fillings Including Late Tudor • Ada Wentworth Fitzwilliam and A. F. Morris Hands

... DE VRIESE. Calyx superus, limbo obsoleto. Corollae quinquefidae tubo hine fisso, lobis majoribus margine utroque auriculato- crispis, alatisve, duobus minoribus lanceolatis, interne appendice proprio cuculliformi instructis. Antherae imberbes, cohaerentes. Filamenta libera, quandoque subflexuosa. Ovarium uniovulatum; ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell

... Excelsior Studio the faint possibility of a job. She was already thinking in the terms that went with the old gray rag and the battered hat, and had come back to them as to her mother-tongue. In forsaking paradise for the limbo of outcast souls she was at least supported by the fact that in the limbo of outcast ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King

... is nothing more than "Hollanders;" a name used by the Malays, from whom they received it. We had most fortunately a small collection of words, made by Mr. Gilbert when at Port Essington; so that we were enabled to ask for water (obert); for the road (allun); for Limbo cardja, which was the name of the Harbour. I wished very much to induce them to become our guides; and the two principal men, Eooanberry and Minorelli, promised to accompany us, but they ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt

... hand he raises the axe to chop the offender's head off, thinks better of it, twirls Picard swiftly around, and using the flat of the chopper spanks the rear of the Picard anatomy, sending him sprawling into the limbo. ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon

... appreciate them. We have had Mr. Pickwick in England and we can imagine him in France. We have had Mrs. Lirriper in France and we can imagine her in Mesopotamia or in heaven. The subtle character in the modern novels we cannot really imagine anywhere except in the suburbs or in Limbo. ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton

... treated as criminals for going about with legs bare up to the knees, and shoulders and chest uncovered! Public follies such as these have been responsible for much of the bodily and mental disease and suppression just mentioned, and the sooner they are sent to limbo the better. No sensible person would advocate promiscuous nakedness any more than promiscuous sex-relationship; nor is it likely that aged and deformed people would at any time wish to expose themselves. ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter

... first coveting and the last desire, and she knew not how she then learned that by the eyes can flow in a subtle essence, causing such powerful corrosions in all the veins of the body, recesses of the heart, nerves of the members, roots of the hair, perspiration of the substance, limbo of the brain, orifices of the epidermis, windings of the pluck, tubes of the hypochondriac and other channels which in her was suddenly dilated, heated, tickled, envenomed, clawed, harrowed, and disturbed, as if she had a basketful of needles in her inside. This ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac

... mental strife, success, failure, all equally feverish and unsatisfactory, into some past century, where the business was to rest,—to drag on dreamy days, looking at things through half- shut eyes; into a limbo where things were put away, shows of what had once been, now somehow fainted, and still maintaining a sort of half- existence, a serious mockery; a state likely enough to exist just a little apart from the actual world, if we only know how to find our way into it. Scenes and events that ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... Did Christ's soul descend into the hell of the damned? A. The hell into which Christ's soul descended was not the hell of the damned, but a place or state of rest called Limbo, where the souls of the just ...
— Baltimore Catechism No. 2 (of 4) • Anonymous

... compelled the evacuation of the forts early in April. Even after these staggering blows at the Confederacy, Carleton expatiated on the mighty work that yet remained to be done before Secessia should become one of the curiosities of history in the limbo of things exploded. ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis

... secession that he should have determined if compelled to leave the Church of England (a contingency which from the growth of heresy in that Church he distinctly contemplated) to go not into the communion of the Church of Rome but out of all communion whatever. He would have gone we suppose into some limbo like the phantom Church of the Nonjurors. It is difficult to see how such a course can have logically commended itself to the mind of any member of the theological school which held that the individual reason afforded no sort of standing ground and that the one thing indispensable ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith



Words linked to "Limbus" :   complex body part, body structure, structure, bodily structure



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