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More "Blight" Quotes from Famous Books



... the Union to the ingress of slavery; the other arraigned the bill as "a gross violation of a sacred pledge; as a criminal betrayal of precious rights." In ominous words, fellow citizens were besought to observe how the blight of slavery would settle upon all this land, if this bill should become a law. Christians and Christian ministers were implored to interpose. "Let all protest, earnestly and emphatically, by correspondence, through the press, by memorials, by resolutions of public meetings and legislative ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson

... promise of health, happiness, and usefulness to many an unfortunate little waif, whose earthly inheritance is utter blackness, and whose moral blight can be outgrown and succeeded by a development of intelligence and ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

... the porch of the world— (Why should the door be shut?) The grey wolf waits at his heel, (Why is the window barred?) Wild is the trail from the Kimash Hills, The blight has fallen on bush and tree, The choking earth has swallowed the streams, Hungry and cold is the Red Patrol: (Why should the door be shut?) The Scarlet Hunter has come to bide— (Why is the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... constituted to forget. He was constituted to remember, and to remember with all his soul. Every day of his life he had missed her; never was there a night that she was not in his thoughts before he dropped to sleep. What would have been his career had fate brought them together before the blight fell upon her? What intimacies, what enjoyment, what ideals nurtured and made real. And the companionship, the instant sympathy, the sureness of an echo in her heart, no matter how low and soft his whisper! These thoughts were never absent from ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith

... conscious of them herself; while at every demonstration of her father's tenderness, the feelings which she knew to be rebels to his dearest wishes would seem to spring up and accuse her of ingratitude. This struggle could not last; at length the fond father became suddenly aware that some strange blight had fallen upon his darling, and his whole soul was convulsed at the thought that evil might possibly threaten her; he felt ready to send a proclamation through the world to summon all its skill to spend itself for her restoration. Upon second thoughts he made up his mind ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various

... the first time how the relative position of these two women had shifted. Laura Bowman wasn't red-headed for nothing; out from under the blight of Bowman and that hateful marriage, she had already thrown off some of her physical frailness; the nervous tension showed itself now in energy. She was moving swiftly about putting to rights after ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan

... had a right to keep her spancelled in the asylum. She would begrudge any respectable person to be walking the street. She'd hoot you, she'd shout you, she'd clap her hands at you. She is a blight ...
— New Irish Comedies • Lady Augusta Gregory

... regretfully, and said decidedly that "A.E." could not be his Messiah, as he abhorred the Absolute above everything else. He was infected with Pater's Relative, said Mr. Russell, "which has fallen like a blight on all English literature." So the boy—he was not yet twenty-one—went out into the night with, I suppose, another of ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt

... relentless, may shed ruins o'er the earth, May strew our path with sorrow, make a desert of our hearth— Change may blight our fairest blossoms, shroud our clearest light in gloom; But the flow'ry fields of early years shall never lose ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... Capitalist System. That atrocious system which, having attained to the fullest measure of detestable injustice and cruelty, was now fast crumbling into ruin, inevitably doomed to be overwhelmed because it was all so wicked and abominable, inevitably doomed to sink under the blight and curse of senseless and unprofitable selfishness out of existence for ever, its memory universally execrated ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell

... an outhouse pointed out to him by his friend the gardener, and thence to dress for a dinner that he looked forward to with dread, and Philip to make his way home. As he passed up through the little flower-garden at the Abbey House, he came across his daughter, picking the blight from her ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard

... Evan Lamotte had flung away his last rag of respectability for his sister's sake. Henceforth he would appear in the eyes of the people doubly blackened, doubly degraded, the destroyer of his sister's happiness, the blight upon her life, and yet, he was innocent of this; he was a martyr; ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch

... it seems, does not always consort with a powerful frame," he said; "but how come you to have scraped acquaintance with these pirates, whose existence is a blight upon the commerce of the Mediterranean, and ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne

... him think that I accepted this statement as gospel, but in my heart I thought I had never seen a sadder face than that of Gladys Hamilton; to me it looked absolutely joyless, as though some strange blight had fallen on her youth. I kept these thoughts to myself, like a wise woman, and when Max looked at me rather searchingly, as though he expected a verbal assent, I said, 'Yes, you are right, some girls are like that,' and left him to glean ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... Wood," where he enters a copse dreaming that, in that realm of "sylvan peace," Nature would offer "a soft release from man's unrest." He immediately observes that the pine and the beech are struggling for existence, and trying to blight each other with dripping poison. He sees the ivy eager to strangle the elm, and the hawthorns choking the hollies. Even the poplars sulk and turn black under the shadow of a rival. In the end, filled with horror at all these crimes of Nature, the poet flees from the copse ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... case,—if you had taught her, from the dawn of her intelligence, with your utmost energy and might, that there was such a thing as daylight, but that it was made to be her enemy and destroyer, and she must always turn against it, for it had blighted you and would else blight her;—if you had done this, and then, for a purpose, had wanted her to take naturally to the daylight and she could not do it, you would ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens

... made and meant to do; and however incomplete may be its attainments, the lowest form of a God-fearing, God-obeying life is higher and more nearly 'perfect' than the fairest career or character against which, as a blight on all its beauty, the damning accusation may be brought, 'The God in whose hand thy breath is, and whose are all thy ways, thou hast ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... amongst the people; neither cheap pamphlets nor cheap magazines written for their amusement or instruction; but this is less owing to want of attention to their interests on the part of many good and enlightened men, than to the unsettled state of the country; for the blight of civil war prevents the best systems ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca

... to be indifferent and ignorant as to the existence of social vice in the community. The only escape from moral blight and confusion is by active conflict with the forces of evil. The wrong training of youths who grow up in the presence of tolerated evils, cannot be overcome in a single generation, nor in a single century. There is a confusion of the moral ...
— Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers • Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell

... war The peasant Joan and others; arts of grace Sappho and others vied with any man: And, last not least, she who had left her place, And bowed her state to them, that they might grow To use and power on this Oasis, lapt In the arms of leisure, sacred from the blight Of ancient influence and scorn. At last She rose upon a wind of prophecy Dilating on the future; 'everywhere Who heads in council, two beside the hearth, Two in the tangled business of the world, Two in the liberal offices of life, Two ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson

... he answered. "Do not blight my hopes and your own happiness a second time. Your father is about to shut up his house for a twelvemonth, if the plague lasts so long. This done, we shall meet no more, for access to you will be impossible. Do not hesitate, ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth

... soon found that though he was dignified by the king, he had shorn himself of all his honours in the sight of the people. The influence which the Earl of Bute was supposed to have had over him tended still more to blight his fair fame. He was taunted with being a willing agent of men whom he did not esteem, and his acceptance of a peerage was a never-failing source of invective. Moreover, in his negociations with his brother-in-law, Lord Temple, he had quarrelled ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... the rain was heavier than before, the fall increased after every flash, however distant, and the surface of the pond was threshed by the drops which bore down with them many leaves weakened by blight. ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies

... weary duties, cold and formal, came to meet her, With the life within departed that had given them each a soul; And her sick heart even slighted gentle words that came to greet her, For grief spread its shadowy pinions like a blight upon the whole. A. ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall

... Jimmy looked furtively out of the slit at the edge of the door to see that the train was passing through a region of cottages dusted black by smoke, through areas of warehouse and factory, through squalor and filth and slum; and vacant lots where the spread of the blight area had been so fast that the outward improvement had not time to build. Eventually the scene changed to solid areas of railroad track, and the trains parked there thickened until he could no longer see ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith

... which it is entirely covered during a great part of the year seems to have cast a blight upon it. The very few palms have a drooping and tragic air. The ground has a gangrened appearance, and much of it shows a crawling mass of unwholesome-looking plants, which seem crouching down as if ashamed of their brutal exposure ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens

... little case, and again was checked by the consideration: 'It is certain, now, that I am to give it back to him; then why should I tell her of it?' That pretty sympathetic nature which could be so sorry for him in the blight of their childish hopes of happiness together, and could so quietly find itself alone in a new world to weave fresh wreaths of such flowers as it might prove to bear, the old world's flowers being withered, would be grieved by those ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens

... he replied, "unless to deplore it to the last hour of your life. You can never know unless you outrage my will. I have the power to make you wretched forever, to blight and destroy you. And if you treat my warning with contempt, I will do it without fail, without mercy, without remorse. The jester who has contributed so largely to your entertainment, and furnished such a delectable ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various

... cried Roger. "Do not be frightened by anything that priest may have said to you. Though my wife's confessor is a man to be feared for his power in the congregation, if he should try to blight our ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac

... to help them! No! no!—I have done my duty to those who ever did their duty to me, and I trust that my own conscience will prove my reward, and check that repining which we are too apt to feel when it pleases Heaven to blight what appears to be our fairest prospects ... I say, my good fellow," said Alfred, after a while, to a man in a boat, "what is the name of that ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat

... the sun, unkindly hot, My garden makes a desert spot; Sometimes the blight upon the tree Takes all my fruit away from me; And then with throes of bitter pain Rebellious passions rise and swell— But life is more than fruit or grain, And so I sing, and ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson

... true; you would think it a pleasant magic if you could flush your flowers into brighter bloom by a kind look upon them; nay, more, if your look had the power, not only to cheer but to guard them:—if you could bid the black blight turn away and the knotted caterpillar spare—if you could bid the dew fall upon them in the drought, and say to the south wind, in frost—"Come, thou south, and breathe upon my garden, that the spices of ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... Bertie Mayo, 'oo's allus a turr'ble far-seeing sort of chap, 'e says, "Reckon the trolley 'ull be along fust thing i' the marnin' from the brewery, Missus?" An' when Mrs. Izod 'er says as 'er didn't know, but 'twas to be 'oped as 'twud, a sort of a blight settled down on the lot on us, which I reckon is a pretty fair way o' puttin' it, for a blight allus ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, August 1, 1917. • Various

... Charles Barclay was on his way to Canada, vigorously intent on the new life before him. Agnes drew strength and comfort from the steadfast look of her brother's eyes, as he whispered to her, "Don't fear. Trust God, and be patient." The blight fell away from her, after that. If she was never a light-hearted girl again, she became something even sweeter and nobler. They never talked together about him, for the father had forbidden it; and, indeed, they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various

... arrived at what they consider the highest state of a respectable and civilised life, reside in houses which, in 99 cases out of 100, are in the lowest and most degraded part of the towns, among the scum and offscouring of all nations, and like locusts they leave a blight behind them wherever they have been. Others have their tents and vans, and there are many others who I have tents only. A tent as a rule is about 7ft. 6in. wide, 16ft. long, and 4ft. 6in. high at the top. They are covered with pieces of old cloth, sacking, &c., to keep the rain and snow ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith

... as other days had ended, a wave of animation swept through the waiting room and the casting office. "Swell cabaret stuff" was the phrase that brought the applicants to a lively swarm about the little window. Evening clothes, glad wraps, cigarette cases, vanity-boxes—the Victor people doing The Blight of Broadway with Muriel Mercer—Stage Number Four at 8:30 to-morrow morning. There seemed no limit to the people desired. Merton Gill joined the throng about the window. Engagements were rapidly made, both through the window and over the telephone ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson

... Has lock'd them in a tearless grave, For lack of consecrating song. 'Twixt worth and baseness, lapp'd in death, What difference? YOU shall ne'er be dumb, While strains of mine have voice and breath: The dull neglect of days to come Those hard-won honours shall not blight: No, Lollius, no: a soul is yours, Clear-sighted, keen, alike upright When fortune smiles, and when she lowers: To greed and rapine still severe, Spurning the gain men find so sweet: A consul, not of one brief year, But ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace

... me, O pity me! Alas! how soon is the cup of bliss dashed from the lips of us poor mortals. I can hardly write, hardly hold my pen, or hold my head up. I cannot bear that, from my hand, you should be informed of the utter blight of all our hopes which blossomed so fully. Alas! alas! but it must be. O my head, my poor, poor head—how it swims! I was sitting at the fireside, thinking when you would return, and trying to find out if the wind was fair, when I heard a knock at the door. It was so like yours, that my ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat

... faculties, not deficient in themselves, but contracted and nipped by the circumstances which she had not known how to turn to good account. Such a fresh stage in middle life comes to some few, like the midsummer shoot to repair the foliage that has suffered a spring blight; but it cannot be reckoned on, and Mrs. Pringle would have been a more effective and self-possessed woman, a better companion to her husband, and with more root in herself, had Maria Meadows learnt to tune her nerves and ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge

... struggle, in an epoch of wild literary competition, to obtain novelty of material. The varieties of aspect and color in healthy fruit, be it sweet or sour, may be within certain limits described exhaustively. Not so the blotches of its conceivable blight: and while the symmetries of integral human character can only be traced by harmonious and tender skill, like the branches of a living tree, the faults and gaps of one gnawed away by corroding accident can be shuffled into ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... looking away from him across the water. The sun slipped behind a cloud, and a grey shadow spread like a blight over the summer sea. It lay leaden and dull, tufted with little white ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler

... heard the strokes of the midnight bell As they thrilled the quiet air, And saw the soft, white curtains wave In the lamp's uncertain glare; And felt the breath of the July night, Laden with fragrance and warmth and blight. ...
— Indian Legends and Other Poems • Mary Gardiner Horsford

... they had never invented the like for them. The chief, Mankambira, likewise treated us with kindness; but wherever the slave-trade is carried on, the people are dishonest and uncivil; that invariably leaves a blight and a curse in its path. The first question put to us at the lake crossing- places, was, "Have you come to buy slaves?" On hearing that we were English, and never purchased slaves, the questioners put on ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone

... furtive manner, his hints and innuendoes, ending only the day before in a positive demand for money. It was too certain that there was a chain of events there leading direct to the horrible encounter in the laboratory. His money had cast a blight where he had hoped to ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle

... curtain upon some scene of tragedy which was all the more impressive because it seemed somehow mixed with shame. This poor girl, whom he had pitied as an invalid, was a sufferer from some spiritual blight more pathetic than broken health. He pulled his mind away from the conjecture that tempted it and went on: "One of the advantages of going over the fourth or fifth time is that you're relieved from ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... industry affords one of the most remarkable instances of rapid development of an agricultural pursuit. Coffee used to be the dominating crop in the island, until "coffee blight" ruined the industry. Tea was then experimented with. In 1875 barely a thousand acres were under tea; now the acreage is 385,000. A journey from Kandy to Nuwara Eliya, in the mountains, is through an interminable tea-garden, and on every hand is proof of substantial investment ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield

... beasts that had drawn them. Dead horse or mule or bullock, decomposing in the sun, seemed to have nothing of offence for Republican noses. The yellow smear of lyddite was everywhere, and, looking over the rock-rampart upon the works below, you saw it like a blight, or yolk of egg spilt ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... light Might ebb, drawn backward from their eyes, and night Hide for one hour the imperishable faces. That they might rise up sad in heaven, and know Sorrow and sleep, one paler than young snow, One cold as blight of dew and ruinous rain, Rise up and rest and suffer a little, and be Awhile as all things born with us and we, And grieve as men, and like slain ...
— Atalanta in Calydon • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... jaunting about in his little cart, and frequenting both church and meeting, our worthy neighbour begins to feel the weariness of idleness. He hangs over his gate, and tries to entice passengers to stop and chat; he volunteers little jobs all round, smokes cherry trees to cure the blight, and traces and blows up all the wasps'-nests in the parish. I have seen a great many wasps in our garden to-day, and shall enchant him with the intelligence. He even assists his wife in her sweepings and dustings. Poor man! he is a very respectable person, and would be a very happy ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford

... Contending for his people on that Mount, Nor spared God's foes; for as old minster towers Besieged by midnight storm send forth reply In storm outrolled of bells, so sent he forth Defiance from fierce lip, vindictive chaunt, And blight and ban, and maledictive rite Potent on face of Spirits impure to raise These plague-spots three, Defeat, Madness, Despair; Nor stinted flail of taunt—"When first my bark Threatened your coasts, as now upon the hills Hung ye in cloud; as now, I raised this Cross; Ye fled before it and again ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere

... we may plunge our years In fatal penitence, and in the blight Of our own soul, turn all our blood to tears, And colour things to come with hues of night; The race of life becomes a hopeless flight To those who walk in darkness: on the sea, The boldest steer but where their ports invite; But there are wanderers o'er eternity, ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt

... see in the early dawn the young patrician standing upon the steps of his paternal portico, his mother with her arms wreathed about his neck, looking up to his noble countenance, sometimes drawing auguries of hope from features so fitted for command, sometimes boding an early blight to promises so prematurely magnificent. That she had something of her son's aspiring character, or that he presumed so much in a mother of his, we learn from the few words which survive of their conversation. He addressed to her no language that could tranquillize ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey

... great deal to war with in the habits of thought acquired by their mothers from their own early life. Everywhere the fatal spirit of imitation, of reference to European standards, penetrates, and threatens to blight whatever of original growth ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller

... where alders, cottonwoods and quaking aspens may not be found. In 1913 either the lack of water, some adverse climatic condition, or some fungus blight caused the aspen leaves to blotch and fall from the trees as early as the beginning of September. As a rule they remain until late in October, changing to autumnal tints of every richness and hue and reminding ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James

... move him. Rest and care were the things required; and the constant ministrations of a physician would have been of little benefit. Kate prayed for a change; and it came, but not as she had hoped. One morning she went to her father to find him terribly altered. It was as if some blight had fallen upon him in the night. His face was gray in hue, his pulse barely fluttering, though his eyes were keener than they had been, as if a sudden danger had brought back his old force and comprehension. Even the tone in which he addressed her had more of its old-time quality. It was the accent ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie

... tubs of water; the suction-pipe of the engine was inserted in these, the hose and branch attached, and the slaughter of the insects began down between the rows of hop-poles, where the blackened, blight-covered hops ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn

... almost sure you did—that you were sitting with him ON that tomb. Good God!' he cried, suddenly starting up in anger, 'are you telling me untruths? Why should you play with me like this? I'll have the right of it. Elfride, we shall never be happy! There's a blight upon us, or me, or you, and it must be cleared off before we marry.' Knight moved away impetuously as if ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy

... crowd of gypsies came the oldest of them all, who was the King's great-grandmother, and she looked from the angry parents to the unhappy lovers and said, "You can blight the tree and make the lantern dark; nevertheless you cannot extinguish the flower and the light of love. And till these things lift the curse and are seen again united among you, there will be no Lords in Gay Street nor Kings ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon

... "and I thank God for this great compensation that has survived all my other pleasures. There is no wretchedness, I think, like that which must fill the heart of a mother whose children have strayed away from her loving, clinging solicitude into the by-ways of folly or vice. It is a dark blight upon the most buoyant heart that ever swelled with maternal devotion. I sometimes think I would rather have never existed, that I could forfeit all the grand privileges of a created being destined for a noble end, ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"

... Sandys' ideas—maybe set out a few grapevines or mulberries, as they had been instructed to do. There was good reason for the growing fear among the leading adventurers in London that tobacco might put a blight on all ...
— The Virginia Company Of London, 1606-1624 • Wesley Frank Craven

... don't know!" said Kenneth. "Of course I'm devoted to these two girls, but I'm not going to let it blight my young existence and crush my whole career, just because I have to live without them ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells

... rows three feet apart. Cultivate deeply until the plants are eight to ten inches high and then shallow but frequently. As the vines begin to spread, hill up moderately, making a broad, low ridge. Handle potato-bugs and blight as directed in Chapter XIII. ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell

... will blight my name, And Hate will trample me, Will load me with a coward's shame— A ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair

... fear of complications, be careful about descending from the lofty heights of logic to the common level of impulse and affection. Many years before, Warwick, when a lad of eighteen, had shaken the dust of the town from his feet, and with it, he fondly thought, the blight of his inheritance, and had achieved elsewhere a worthy career. But during all these years of absence he had cherished a tender feeling for his mother, and now again found himself in her house, amid the familiar surroundings of his childhood. His visit ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt

... eightpence a gallon, and freight and leakage comes to half a crown, while I am expected to sell it at twelve shillings, it matters little to me who is King of England. Give me a king that will prevent the hop-blight and I am his man.' Those were the landlord's politics, and I dare say a good many more were of his ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle

... soul to the core All other depths are shallow: essences, Once spiritual, are like muddy lees, Meant but to fertilize my earthly root, 910 And make my branches lift a golden fruit Into the bloom of heaven: other light, Though it be quick and sharp enough to blight The Olympian eagle's vision, is dark, Dark as the parentage of chaos. Hark! My silent thoughts are echoing from these shells; Or they are but the ghosts, the dying swells Of noises far away?—list!"—Hereupon He kept an anxious ear. The humming tone Came louder, and behold, there as he lay, ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats

... under the necessity of keeping a gardener; so that every cabbage that I before put on my table for one penny cost me one shilling, and I bought my dessert at the dearest hand; but I was in it—I found myself happy—in a profusion of fruit, and a blight was little less ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XIII, No. 370, Saturday, May 16, 1829. • Various

... cultivated in terraces rising one above the other on hilly slopes. An occasional tea plantation lay here and there, and some traces of coffee plantations; the cultivation of the bean has been partly abandoned owing to the blight about ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck

... of the short commons to which they have reduced him, they will discharge a volley of abuse at his grave and trouble themselves about him no more. However, if, not content with refusing his valuable assistance in the chase, the ghost should actually blight the crops or send wild boars into the fields to trample them down, the patience of the long-suffering people is quite exhausted: the vials of their wrath overflow; and snatching up their cudgels in a fury they belabour his grave till his bones ache, or even drive him with blows and curses ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer

... atmosphere is equally potent to blight and to shrivel. Not time, but man, is the great destroyer. History is full of the ruins of cities and empires. "Innumerable Paradises have come and gone; Adams and Eves many," happy one day, have been "miserable exiles" the next; and always because some satanic ambition ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis

... ideals appear the dreams of bygone halcyon days, useless and worse amid the threats of gathering tempest. An essentially human apprehension, be it understood. The vulgarities of hysterical pietism Emily had never known; she did not fear the invasion of such blight as that; the thought of it was noisome to her. Do you recall a kind of trouble that came upon her, during that talk in the hollow, when Wilfrid suggested the case of her being called upon to make some great sacrifice in her ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing

... instances of what may be called dry-rot or local blight on the civilised world's culture the decline appears to be due not to a positive infection of a malignant sort, so much as to a failure of the active cultural ferment, which has fallen below the critical point of efficacy; perhaps through an unintended ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen

... they had the worst side of the argument, and therefore seldom said anything worth remembering. Moreover, their hearts were faint and feeble; for they felt that the people scorned and detested them. They had no friends, no defence, except in the bayonets of the British troops. A blight fell upon all their faculties, because they were contending against the rights of ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... her goodly root; Let mildew blight the rye, Give to the worm the orchard's fruit, The ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... is that all? I do not know this tertian fever, love, Of which too oft my comrades groan and sigh, This green-sick blight, which turns a lusty soldier To a hysterical girl. Wed without love? One day I needs must wed, though love I shall not. And if it were indeed to serve the State, Nay, if 'twould smooth one wrinkle from thy brow, Why, it might be to-morrow. ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris

... pure young love as she gives you. The man doesn't live who is clean enough in heart and in life to be worthy of such a treasure. But I do expect you to be, Felix, and I must assure myself that you are, clean enough and honorable enough not to blight all the rest of her life. What is past is past, but from now on there must be nothing that will not bear the ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly

... Shagbark Hickory, Carya ovata (Mill.) K. Koch. in Central New York—David H. Caldwell 29 The Control of the Hickory Weevil (Curculio caryae) 39 Round Table Discussion—What's Your Problem 43 The International Chestnut Commission and the Chestnut Blight Problem in Europe, 1953—G. Flippo Gravatt 52 Rooting Chestnuts from Softwood Cuttings—Roger W. Pease 56 Evaluating Chestnuts Grown under Forest Conditions—Jesse D. Diller 59 Panel Discussion—Chestnuts 62 Development of the Nut Industry in ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various

... Britta,—sole daughter of my sole daughter,—is she not stolen, and kept from me? Has not her heart been utterly turned away from mine? All through that vile witch,—accursed of God and man! She it is who casts the blight on our land; she it is who makes the hands and hearts of our men heavy and careless, so that even luck has left the fishing; and yet you hesitate,—you delay, you will not fulfill your promise! I tell you, there are ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli

... years, and her advancing years in no way lessened his love, which was independent of beauty. Whether Stella was satisfied, who shall say? Mrs. Oliphant thought that few women would be disposed to pity Stella, or think her life one of blight or injury. Mr. Leslie Stephen says, "She might and probably did regard his friendship as a full equivalent for the sacrifice.... Is it better to be the most intimate friend of a man of genius or the wife of a commonplace ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift

... knowledge, and in goodness,— That hope could scarce enjoy its golden dreams So soon fulfilment realised them all! Enough. You came to womanhood. Your heart, Pure as the leaf of the consummate bud, That's new unfolded by the smiling sun, And ne'er knew blight ...
— The Hunchback • James Sheridan Knowles

... anxiety with which they all saw the change in him. His wife was a quiet, gentle woman, saying little at any time, perhaps feeling less than her stern husband. They all sorrowed, but it was on the father that the blight fell heaviest. ...
— Shenac's Work at Home • Margaret Murray Robertson

... the studio, but there was more smoke about than tranquillity. Sarle seemed distrait. Belle Helene sometimes cast an uneasy glance at April, who, still very pale, sat by herself on the lounge. Only Clive and Kenna talked racily, but in jerks, of cattle, fruit-blight, mules, and white ants. But presently all subjects of conversation seemed to peter out, leaving a dark pool of silence to form between them in the room. Kenna it was who threw the stone ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley

... a tree or flower; But, if I had, I beg to say The blight, the wind, the sun, or shower Would soon have withered it away. I've dearly loved my Uncle John, From childhood to the present hour, And yet he will go living on— I would he were ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various

... morning on these ancient ramparts, I watch the sun rise over this land which, once so rich and fertile, now shows hardly a sign of human habitation, this country where not a tree nor a house has been allowed for many years to stand, over which the blight of misrule has lain as a curse for centuries and I see yet one more army going forth to battle; once again columns of armed men sweep forth to encounter similar columns, to kill and to capture within sight of the Median Wall. And watching these columns ...
— With a Highland Regiment in Mesopotamia - 1916—1917 • Anonymous

... Swiss, by Mr. Brown Agricultural progress —— statistics Aphides, to kill, by Mr. Creed Asparagus, French Berberry blight Birds, instinct of, by the Rev. F. F. Statham Books noticed Bouyardias, scarlet British Association Calendar, horticultural —— agricultural Camellia culture Charlock Corn averages and rents, by Mr. Willich Cuttings, to strike Diastema quinquevulnerum Draining clay Fibre, woody Fork, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 207, October 15, 1853 • Various

... on you!' says Mr. Aldobrand, his voice being not so high as when he cried out last, but in his usual squeak; and then he repeated, 'a blight on you,' just for a parting shot as we went ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner

... she strays, through blight or blooth, one fadeless flower she wears, A little gift God gave my youth,—whose petals dim were fears, Awes, adorations, songs of ruth, hesitancies, ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody

... stretched off into the dim distance—and how sweet the music of childhood's ringing laugh, heard from the far-off shore—or how Aunty thought 'twas such a pity that sin, and tears, and sorrow, should ever blight so fair ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern

... likenesses. The grouping of these persons is managed with admirable artistic skill. Old Maid Pyncheon, concealing under her verjuice scowl the unutterable tenderness of a sister—her woman-hearted brother, on whose sensitive nature had fallen such a strange blight—sweet and beautiful Phebe, the noble village-maiden, whose presence is always like that of some shining angel—the dreamy, romantic descendant of the legendary wizard—the bold, bad man of the world, reproduced at intervals in the bloody Colonel, and the unscrupulous ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various

... yer humble, Dicko Smith, in gaudy putties girt, With sand-blight in his optics, and much leaner than he started, Round the 'Oly Land cavorting in three- quarters of a shirt, And imposin' on the natives ez one ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson

... piteous moan; As he eagerly listens—but listens in vain, To catch the loved tones of his mother again! The curse of the broken in spirit shall fall On the wretch who hath mingled this wormwood and gall, And his gain like a mildew shall blight and destroy, Who hath torn from his mother the ...
— The Liberty Minstrel • George W. Clark

... manner for a long time. At last came a very wet summer, and everything went wrong in the country around. The hay had hardly been got in when the haystacks were floated bodily down to the sea by an inundation; the vines were cut to pieces with the hail; the corn was all killed by a black blight; only in the Treasure Valley, as usual, all was safe. As it had rain when there was rain nowhere else, so it had sun when there was sun nowhere else. Everybody came to buy corn at the farm, and went away pouring maledictions on the Black Brothers. They asked what they liked, and got it, except ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes

... fancy. Of the original bearer of the name she knew nothing. Waiting on table at the Golden Nugget and later bearing children and helping on the ranch had not left her time for historical study. When her son, waking to the blight she had so innocently put upon him, asked her where she had found the name, she had answered, "In a book," but beyond that could give no data. When, unable to bear his shame, he had abbreviated it to "Mark D.L." she had ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner

... him—whether under such circumstances as those now in question, the ordinary social rules were not ordinarily broken—whether a countess should not call on a clergyman's wife first, although the countess might be the stranger; but she did not dare to do as she would have done, had no blight attached itself to her name. She gave, therefore, no hint; she said no word of Mrs. Sturm, though her heart was longing for a kind word from some woman's mouth. But she allowed herself to feel no anger against ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope

... it befell that, in London, he was stricken with influenza and with subsequent sorrow. The attack was short but sharp—had it lasted Addie would certainly have come to his aid; most of a blight really in its secondary stage. The good ladies his sitters—the ladies with the frizzled hair, with the diamond earrings, with the chins tending to the massive—left for him, at the door of his lodgings, flowers, soup and love, so that with their assistance he pulled through; but ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James

... have I committed in a previous existence—Karma, again!—that I must perforce study the writings of impious men? Yet I submitted myself as a candidate for the task, to save my brethren in Christ from soiling their hearts. Heaven preserve me from the blight of spiritual pride, but I believe that I am now a scapegoat for the offences of my fellow-monks, and, thus, may redeem my ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker

... through that sacred land, over which the Crescent now waves, one is amazed at the number of ruins that stud the landscape, and show what must once have been the natural fertility of the country. Whence has come the change? Is the blight natural and permanent? or has it been caused by accidental and artificial circumstances which may be only temporary? Doubtless, each ruin has its tale of horror, but all trace their destruction to Islamism, and especially to the blighting and ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various

... tree die; borers enter; rabbits and mice gnaw the bark in winter; loads of fruit and burdens of ice crush the tree; wind storms play mischief; bad pruning leaves long stubs, and rot develops; cankers produce dead ragged wounds; fire-blight destroys the tissue; a poorly formed tree with bad crotches splits easily; grafts fail to take, and long dead ends are left; the tree is injured by pickers; vandals wreak their havoc. All these accidents must be met and the damages repaired. ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey

... the witch," the mob screamed out, for she had now come to the place of her conflict. "We'll pay you off for blight and pestilence! Where's our bread, where's the maize and barley, where are the grapes?" And they uttered fierce yells of execration, and seemed disposed to break through the line of apparitors, and to tear her to pieces. Yet, after all, it was not a very hearty uproar, but got up for ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman

... fought out the war against King George; they now took up the pen against King Mob, and placed themselves in rank with the friends of order, good government, and union. Hence the "Anarchiad." An ancient epic on "the Restoration of Chaos and Substantial Blight" was dug up in the ruins of an old Indian fort, where Madoc, the mythical Welsh Columbus, or some of his descendants, had buried it. Colonel Humphreys, who had read the "Rolliad" in England, suggested the plan; Barlow, Hopkins, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various

... was frequent intelligence of the going over of another patient to Mr Walcot; the summer was not a favourable one, and everybody else was complaining of unseasonable weather, of the certainty of storms in the autumn, of blight, and the prospect of scarcity; yet, though Mr Grey shook his head, and the parish clerk could never be seen but with a doleful prophecy in his mouth, Morris's young master and mistresses were gay as she could desire. She was piously thankful for Margaret's engagement; for she ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau

... to the light that was one time as the sun, and, again, above the sun's brightness. Naturally, with this comes a renewed fertility of the earth's soil, and the removal of the curse upon vegetation. Before the healing light and heat the poisonous growth, the blight of drought and of untempered heat disappear. There is to be a new earth and above it a ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon

... I heard it sigh, Hollow and sad, as night crawled sluggishly: Hollow and sadly sighed the corn while I Moved darkly in the midst, a blight Darkening ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner

... the blight of the potato crop in 1846 the cottiers and small farmers managed to eke out a subsistence by the sale of their pigs and any little effects they had. But pigs, fowl, furniture, and clothing soon went, ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin

... often we, like Hagar, mourn, When some unlook'd for blight Drives us away, no more to turn To joys we fancied bright! Forced from our idols to retreat, And seek the Almighty's care, Perchance we are sent forth ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous

... and cold: not a cloud floated across the sky, nor did there rise above the horizon one of those clouds (portentous forerunners of evil!) to which novelists refer as being "no larger than a man's hand". Heaven knew right well that the blight of evil was approaching fast enough, but there was no visible indication on her face that glorious November morning. Doubtless you are familiar with history and have read all about what great personages did just before calamity swooped down on them. The Trojans laughed at the wooden horse; I don't ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath

... It was very well to undertake to give him a proof of loyalty; the real fact was that the knowledge of his expecting a thing raised a presumption against it. It was as if he had had the evil eye; as if his presence were a blight and his favour a misfortune. Was the fault in himself, or only in the deep mistrust she had conceived for him? This mistrust was now the clearest result of their short married life; a gulf had opened between them over which they looked at each other with eyes that were on either side a declaration ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James

... all! Not at all!" said Allan heartily. "I am glad that I could put that matter straight for you. It would blight like black frost to have Stonewall Jackson's hand and mind set against you—and Richard Cleave is not the least ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston

... but for the sake of others; for since the virtue of holiness or taboo is, so to say, a powerful explosive which the smallest touch may detonate, it is necessary in the interest of the general safety to keep it within narrow bounds, lest breaking out it should blast, blight, and destroy whatever it ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer

... action. It was therefore with no little anxiety that the council of Henry VIII. perceived his male children, on whom their hopes were centred, either born dead, or dying one after another within a few days of their birth, as if his family were under a blight. When the Queen had advanced to an age which precluded hope of further offspring, and the heir presumptive was an infirm girl, the unpromising aspect became yet more alarming. The life of the Princess Mary was precarious, for her health was weak from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... other Roman Catholic countries have witnessed, were to succeed in discrediting the priesthood and lowering them in public estimation, it would be followed by a moral, social, and political degradation which would blight, or at least postpone, our hopes of a national regeneration. From this point of view I hold that those clergymen who are predominantly politicians endanger the moral influence which it is their solemn duty to uphold. I believe however, that the ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett

... like that?" Sir Richard looked a trifle wistfully at the younger man, envying him his superior youth and more robust physique. "For my part I confess to a distrust of the desert. It seems to me as though there were a blight on these huge tracts of sand, as though the Creator had regretted their creation, yet was too perfect a Worker to try, by altering the original purpose of His handiwork, to turn them into something for which ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes

... was at one time celebrated for its wines, but a blight came on the vines and the business of wine-making is greatly reduced; besides, Madeira wine has gone out of fashion ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne

... He seized Ona tah, the Spirit of the Corn, and sent one of his monsters to blight her fields. The killing winds swept over the hill, and the spirits of the squash and ...
— Stories the Iroquois Tell Their Children • Mabel Powers

... worse was the moral curse, That came like a deadly blight Through men who seized whate'er they pleased, On the plea that might makes right, Till the fatal seed of selfish greed Made life ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard

... to look quite bright. The sweet peas will soon be in flower, the stocks, too, are showing buds. This week we expect to pick a dish of peas, though the plants look very poor after the blight ...
— Three Years in Tristan da Cunha • K. M. Barrow

... Though man be too weak to put them down, Christ is not. Though man neglect to put them down, Christ will not. If man dare not fight on the Lord's side against sin and evil, the Lord's earth will fight for Him. Storm and tempest, blight and famine, earthquakes and burning mountains, will do His work, if nothing else will. As He said Himself, if man stops praising Him, the very stones will cry out, and own Him as their King. Not that the blessed Lord is proud, or selfish, or revengeful; God forbid! ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley

... is practically free from blight; the coddling moth is under perfect control. There is nothing, Mr. Pederstone, and you know it too, nothing in the world to prevent the Valley's production of fruit from increasing year by year as the younger orchards come to bearing age ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson

... way he flipped a rosebud covered with blight, kicked off a snail which was crawling on the path; then, halfway down the path, he suddenly raised his head and gave a look ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... wish to blight his faith in the superlative Mr. Shaw, and said nothing. This evidently pained him, and as we stood leaning on the rail in the shadow of the deck-house, watching the blue water slide by, he continued to sound the praises of his idol. It seemed that as soon as Miss Browne had beguiled ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon

... another side to the country's history. The rainy weather in the summer brought to sudden hideous maturity the lurking potato disease. Any one who recalls the time and the aspect of the fields must retain a vivid recollection of the sudden blight that fell upon acres on acres of what had formerly been luxuriant vegetation, under the sunshine which came late only to complete the work of destruction; the withering and blackening of the leaves of the plant, the sickening foetid odour of the decaying bulbs, which tainted the heavy air for ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler

... a wishy-washy platform much like Burbank's—if anything, weaker. I saw Goodrich's blight upon it. But the victory cost him dear. That night the delegates realized what a blunder they had made—or thought they realized it after Merriweather and his staff had circulated among them. Few of them had been trusted by Beckett with the ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips

... Oh, but she was glad; and small wonder. What she had done was as nothing; it shrank into insignificance under the glamourous light of the change that had come over the home. What a magic wand was deserved success; how it touched with fairy aspect all that drooped with the fearsome blight of anticipated decay! And even then they did not know the full extent of her endeavor. Mingled with her mother's gentle welcome, and her father's full-throated thanks, was praise for the, to him unknown, boy that ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser

... warmth delight:— What of Winter and its blight? Snowy fields and forests cold? Flowers are ...
— What Sami Sings with the Birds • Johanna Spyri

... when the illusions first vanish; and our balked imagination, or our mortified vanity, first intimates to us that we are neither infallible nor irresistible. Happily 'tis the season of youth for which the first lessons of experience are destined; and bitter and intolerable as is the first blight of our fresh feelings, the sanguine impulse of early life bears us along. Our first scrape generally leads to our first travel. Disappointment requires change of air; desperation change of scene. Egremont quitted his ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli

... of the moist and damp soil, the bitter-sweet of wetted weeds, the aromatic flavor that shell-life yields, and the smells also of rotten and decaying fish—all these were inextricably blended in the air, that was of the keenness of a frost-blight for freshness, and yet was warm with the ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd

... the scribe cried after him. "I would not have thee blight my chances with the full blaze of ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller

... wise writer, George Eliot, expressed her matured views on the subject of religious opinions in these words: "I have too profound a conviction of the efficacy that lies in all sincere faith, and the spiritual blight that comes with no faith, to have any negative propagandism left in me." This had not always been her attitude, for in her youth she had had a good deal of negative propagandism in her; but the experience ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward

... of all, shall we find any thing to repay us for the swelling extacy of our young hearts, as those who have cradled and loved us grow proud in our successes? For myself, a life that has failed in every prestige of those that prophesied favourably—years that have followed on each other only to blight the promise that kind and well-wishing friends foretold—leave but little to dwell upon, that can be reckoned as success. And yet, some moments I have had, which half seemed to realize my early dream of ambition, and rouse my spirit within me; but what were they all compared to my boyish glories? ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)

... useless to throw good money after bad. Fruit farming is a lottery in which the prizes go to those who take the most tickets. In other words, it is a question of acreage. A small man may lose his crop through blight, drought, a hundred causes. The larger man has a better chance by reason of the extent of his crop. Now I should take it, you could do better for your son by obtaining all the facts, sorting them out and then deciding what to do. My experience ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum

... is born in blight, Victim of perpetual slight: When thou lookest on his face, Thy heart saith 'Brother, go thy ways! None shall ask thee what thou doest, Or care a rush for what thou knowest. Or listen when thou repliest, Or remember where thou liest, ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... why he fevered me so much. Must I say it?—He had ceased to entertain me. Instead of a comic I found him a tragic spectacle; and his exuberant anticipations, his bursting hopes that fed their forcing-bed with the blight and decay of their predecessors, his transient fits of despair after a touch at my pulses, and exclamation of 'Oh, Richie, Richie, if only I had my boy up and well!'—assuming that nothing but my tardy recovery stood ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... of this cleared spot, which looked swampy and unwholesome, were serried rows of trees, every one of which was dead as if from a blight, and offering with their gaunt, leafless branches a sharp contrast to the green leafiness of the rest ...
— The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone • Richard Bonner

... Agriculture, or a speedy way to grow rich" concerning which he wrote to his agent. It deals with a great variety of subjects, such as of roots and leaves, of food of plants, of pasture, of plants, of weeds, of turnips, of wheat, of smut, of blight, of St. Foin, of lucerne, of ridges, of plows, of drill boxes, but its one great thesis was the careful cultivation by plowing of such annuals as potatoes, turnips, and wheat, crops which hitherto had been tended ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth

... been tacitly understood that this sprinkling of water established a claim for a return, and this both father and son had solemnly promised. Its magic turned everything they touched to gold, but it brought a blight on the peace of the household. One branch, which had grown up in the traditions of the old Macedonian stock, had separated from the other; and her husband's great lie lay between them and the family still living in the Canopic way, like a wide ocean embittered with the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... tongues can ne'er reveal, By smiles, and sighs, and tears. The days are gone! no more, no more, The cruel fates allow; And, though I'm hardly twenty-four, I'm not a lover now. Lady, the mist is on my sight, The chill is on my brow; My day is night, my bloom is blight— I'm not a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 288, Supplementary Number • Various

... find one a false prophet. not realize one's hope, not realize one's expectation. [cause to be disappointed] disappoint; frustrate, discomfit, crush, defeat (failure) 732; crush one's hope, dash one's hope, balk one's hope, disappoint one's hope, blight one's hope, falsify one's hope, defeat one's hope, discourage; balk, jilt, bilk; play one false, play a trick; dash the cup from the lips, tantalize; dumfound, dumbfound, dumbfounder, dumfounder (astonish) 870. Adj. disappointed &c v.; disconcerted, aghast; disgruntled; out ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... especially efficacious in dealing with the butcher and even the bishop, to say nothing of the effect it always had upon the commonplace nobodies who go to the butcher and the bishop for the luxuries of both the present and the future life, and it had seldom failed to wither and blight the most hardy of masculine opponents. It was not always so effective in crushing the members of her own sex, for there were women in New York society who could look straight through Mrs. Tresslyn without even appearing to suspect that she was in the range of vision. She had ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon

... country people—who are so kind to one another, and to tramps and beggars, that they seem to live by the rule of an old woman in a Galway sweet-shop: 'Refuse not any, for one may be the Christ'—speak of a visit of the tinkers as of frost in spring or blight in harvest. I asked why they were shunned as other wayfarers are not, and I was told of their strange ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others

... incurring observation and provoking suspicion. His enemies had triumphed, his Queen was cold and unjust, and now his dearly-loved friend, his adviser and confidant, the sharer of his sorrows, his consoler and encourager, was no more. A blight had fallen upon ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies

... laid along the waters of the Cumberland, the lair of moonshiner and feudsman. The knight is a moonshiner's son, and the heroine a beautiful girl perversely christened "The Blight." Two impetuous young Southerners' fall under the spell of "The Blight's" charms and she learns what a large part jealousy and pistols have in the ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman

... be under the spontaneous action of many competitors. The gain in productive power which the strenuous race for perfection insures is retarded, and may conceivably be brought to a standstill, by the advent of corporations largely exempt from such competition. There is threatened a blight on the future of labor, since the standard of wages, set by the productivity of labor, does not rise as it should, and the actual rate of wages lags behind the standard by an unnaturally long interval. There is too much difference between what labor produces and what it ought ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark

... red spider out along the south wall—ugh, ugh," persisted Simon, without seeming to hear her; "and your new g'raniums a'most covered wi' blight. I wur a tacklin' one of 'em just ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes

... energies and flagging purpose, rises up before me, darkly and reproachfully reminding me of what I might have done, have been! O Heaven! what bitter years of suffering and crushing disappointment, years on which the tracks of time have left their blight and mildew, have passed since first I listened to the bird-like warbling of its simple strains. Then was the blissful May-time of my existence, when I was governed by youth's generous impulses, led captive by its sweet delusions, when ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... something horrible to Glenn aside from wrecking his health. Shell-shock, they said! I don't understand that. Out of his mind, they said! But that never was true. Glenn was as sane as I am, and, my dear, that's pretty sane, I'll have you remember. But he must have suffered some terrible blight to his spirit—some blunting of his soul. For months after he returned he walked as one in a trance. Then came a change. He grew restless. Perhaps that change was for the better. At least it showed he'd roused. ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey

... Songs They used to Sing A Vision of Sandy Blight Andy Page's Rival The Iron-Bark Chip "Middleton's Peter" The Mystery of Dave Regan Mitchell on Matrimony Mitchell on Women No Place for a Woman Mitchell's Jobs Bill, the Ventriloquial Rooster Bush Cats Meeting Old Mates Two Larrikins Mr. Smellingscheck ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson

... at all, covered only with their Christmas dress of snow and icicles—these trees were clothed with the loveliest foliage, fresh and green and feathery, which no winter's storms or nipping frosts had ever come near to blight. And in the little space between the door where Hugh stood and these wonderful trees was drawn up, as if awaiting him, the prettiest, queerest, most delicious little carriage that ever was seen. It was open; the cushions with which it was lined were of rose-coloured plush—not velvet, I think; at ...
— The Tapestry Room - A Child's Romance • Mrs. Molesworth

... burning sun All thy body's strength doth blight, When the midnight stars and moon Dazzle with their brilliant light, Then His hand of mighty pow'r, Shades thee in the ...
— Paul Gerhardt's Spiritual Songs - Translated by John Kelly • Paul Gerhardt

... with tears and his weakening voice was choked,—"your friendship moves me deeply—to the soul. But science can do nothing for me: science has not yet sufficient knowledge of the principle on which I lived. Would you have me, then, live on,—passing to and fro among mankind merely as a blight, taking the energy of life, even from whomsoever I would not? No, I must die! Death ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban

... miss thine own dear voice In Summer's soft, bright eve; A blight will rest on tree and flower— The hue of things that grieve; And when the wintry hour hath come, And 'round the blazing hearth Shall cluster faces we have loved— Lost—lost thy ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various

... was quite plentiful in different sections of the southern hardwood belt. It was valued quite highly for the nuts. It has been killed out by the chestnut blight and it is very rarely ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association

... been led more fully to appreciate the advantage of seeing all of the branches of intellectual culture led out of the ruts of routine, away from plagiarism and from disorder and anarchy, one word upon the most distasteful and effectual blight to which art is subject—the loss of naturalness, viz., affectation. Can anything be more irritating than an affected actor or singer, ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various

... superficial charm—a bright eye, a blooming cheek, a soft voice, or a voluptuous form—I would warn you to beware; I would tell you that beauty is but a passing gleam of the morning, a perishable flower; that accident may becloud and blight it, and that at best it must soon pass away. But were you in love with such a one as I could describe; young in years, but still younger in feelings; lovely in person, but as a type of the mind's beauty; soft in voice, in token of gentleness ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving

... Everything grew wrong from the first to last, and if my father's manures intensified nothing else, they certainly intensified the Primordial Curse. The peas were eaten in the night before they were three inches high, the beans bore nothing but blight, the only apparent result of a spraying of the potatoes was to develop a PENCHANT in the cat for being ill indoors, the cucumber frames were damaged by the catapulting of boys going down the lane at the back, and all your cucumbers were mysteriously embittered. That lane ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... Deanery of St. Paul's, that frowning and melancholy house in a backwater of London's jarring tide, where the dust collects, and sunlight has a struggle to make two ends meet, and cold penetrates like a dagger, and fog hangs like a pall, and the blight of ages clings to stone and brick, to window and woodwork, with an adhesive mournfulness which suggests the hatchment of Melpomene. Even the hand of Grinling Gibbons at the porch does not prevent one from recalling ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie

... natures which have their roots in the sexual impulse. Frustrations of childhood, failures, hurts, jealousies, misinterpretations of childish love affairs, play episodes for which society has such swift punishment, clandestine sex knowledge—these are the experiences which leave their blight on the later love responses. Life as a whole with its conventions and social codes does not present an open highway to the goal of sexual maturity. But forward-looking parents can, by granting knowledge, understanding, ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various

... little girl who had become so dear was really his brother's child, and joint heir with Donald to his and his brother's estates; and how Eben Slade actually had come to claim her and take her away, threatening to blight the poor child by proving that she was his niece, Delia Robertson, and not Dorothy ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge

... to give himself to the most important improvements, that he may cultivate his sense of justice, his benevolence, and the desire of perfection. Toil is the school for these high principles; and we have here a strong presumption that, in other respects, it does not necessarily blight the soul. Next, we have seen that the most fruitful sources of truth and wisdom are not books, precious as they are, but experience and observation; and these belong to all conditions. It is another ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various

... are right. You could not know how mean I am. I did not know it myself till now. And now,' she pursued, with flashing eyes, with a look in her splendid face that seemed to blight and wither him, with all her beauty, all her womanhood, up in arms against him, 'and now to punish you for having kept the truth from me, I will tell you the truth—plainly. I have never cared one straw for you. I thought I did while I still believed you Brian Wendover of the Abbey. I was dazzled ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon

... quarries. So incorrigible an optimist was Milton Caukins that any slight degree of success, which might attend the promotion of any one of his numerous schemes, caused an elation that amounted to hilarity. On the other hand, the deadly blight of non-fulfilment, that annually attacked his most cherished hopes for the future development of his native town, failed in any wise to depress him, or check the prodigal casting of his optimistic daily bread on the placid social waters where, as ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller

... who pass their days as do those who now live in the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf." They are free from invidious jealousies and the blight of avarice toward each other, free from doubt of the rectitude of their daughters and relieved from solicitude that the future of their sons, if they remain in the valley, will be influenced by dissipation or dishonesty—a people who find in ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan

... a very long walk with my father through some of the most beautiful ways hereabouts; the day was cold with an iron, windy sky, and only glorified now and then with autumn sunlight. For it is fully autumn with us, with a blight already over the greens, and a keen wind in the morning that makes one rather timid of one's tub when it finds its ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Wilbur were busy days, even if he had not settled far enough down to suit either Sam Pickering, Porter Howgill—who did everything, if asked—or the First-Class Garage. And the blight put upon him by a creature as false as she was beautiful proved not to be enduring. He was able, indeed, to behold her without a tremor, save of sympathy for one compelled to endure the daily ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson

... whom thy brooding parents love For what thou art, and what they hope to see thee, Unhallow'd sprites, and earth-born phantoms flee thee; Thy soft simplicity, a hovering dove, That still keeps watch from blight and bane to free thee, With its weak wings, in peaceful care outspread, Fanning invisibly thy pillow'd head, Strikes evil powers with reverential dread, Beyond the sulphurous bolts of fabled Jove, Or whatsoe'er of amulet or charm ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... promise, who had just died. Like many Southern verse-writers of his generation, he had lived and written under the inspiration of Poe. Asbury surprised me by the almost bitter remark that Poe's influence had been a blight upon the younger Southern poets, inasmuch as it had tended to over-subjectivity, to morbid sensibility, and to a pre-occupation with purely personal emotions. He argued, as he has since done so courageously in his Texas ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry

... tasted her sweet soul to the core All other depths are shallow: essences, Once spiritual, are like muddy lees, Meant but to fertilize my earthly root, 910 And make my branches lift a golden fruit Into the bloom of heaven: other light, Though it be quick and sharp enough to blight The Olympian eagle's vision, is dark, Dark as the parentage of chaos. Hark! My silent thoughts are echoing from these shells; Or they are but the ghosts, the dying swells Of noises far away?—list!"—Hereupon He kept an anxious ear. The humming tone Came louder, and behold, ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats

... weapons and piled them all in one corner, farthest from the door, where I now proposed to set about getting free. With the fearful blight of uncovered treason in his soul, Broussard obeyed me cringingly as a servant, and worked as hard, for his safety lay in mine. We went first to the door by which we entered, and after a tedious examination failed to find any means by which ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson

... is entirely covered during a great part of the year seems to have cast a blight upon it. The very few palms have a drooping and tragic air. The ground has a gangrened appearance, and much of it shows a crawling mass of unwholesome-looking plants, which seem crouching down as if ashamed of their brutal exposure by the receded river, and of harsh and yellow-green grass, ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens

... Iconoclasm, which did so much to devastate the East, and which, by the emigration of some {162} 50,000 Christians, cleric and lay, to Calabria, exercised so important an influence on the history of Southern Italy, might have cast a fatal blight on the Church in Constantinople had it not been for the stand made by the Monks of the Studium. [Sidenote: The Monks of the Studium and the Iconoclastic Controversy.] The age of the Iconoclasts was the golden age of the Studite monks. Persecuted, expelled from their house by ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton

... find acceptance, not for myself, but for her, I ask that peace which the world cannot give; shower down thy blessings upon her, alleviate her sorrows, and erase from her memory the existence of such a being as myself. Let not my hateful image hang as a blight ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat

... and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right, And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various

... oleanders; and through them you can catch glimpses of banana-orchards, which look like dishevelled patches of gigantic cornstalks. The fields of Easter lilies do not quite live up to their photographs; they are presently suffering from a mysterious blight, and their flowers are not frequent enough to lend them that sculpturesque effect near to, which they wear as far off as New York. The potato-fields, on the other hand, are of a tender delicacy of coloring which compensates for the lilies' lack, and the palms give no just cause for complaint, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... sometimes crushing each other. Out of the remains of the dead arises a new generation, with an increase of vital impulse. It seems as though the ice-crowned Andes looked down with envy on the luxuriant vegetation of the forests, and sought to blight it by sending down cold, nightly winds. The low temperature of the night counteracts that extreme development which the humidity of the soil and the great heat of the day promote. But what the vegetation loses in upward growth it gains in superficial extension, and thereby ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi

... exorbitant growth of London that many an ill has spread over the land? London is the antithesis of the domestic ideal; a social reformer would not even glance in that direction, but would turn all his zeal upon small towns and country districts, where blight may perhaps be arrested, and whence, some day, a reconstituted national life may act upon the great centre of corruption. I had far rather see England covered with schools of cookery than with schools of the ordinary ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing

... shouting, half weeping. "Never, s'help me God! She's my sister from this hour—no more, no less. And may the red blight fall on my arm and my heart, if I or any man takes her from you—any man!" he cried, his temples flushing and his eye glittering; "sooner than a hundred men should take her from you while I am here I'd die at their feet a ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade

... perhaps hadn't done things as regular as you thought. And that you hadn't the papers you ought to have for proof. And it might take too much time to search for them now. And—and—Oh, my love, he's a good man, for all you've hated him so! He won't let a child be born with shame to blight it. And he's given you and it—poor helpless innocent—his own name, God ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... haven't the means of independence or a chance of winning it; and all that's open to them, if they've made a bad cast for a mate—and good Lord! how are they to know before it's too late!—they haven't a choice except to play tricks or jump to the deuce or sit and "drape in blight," as Colney has it; though his notion of the optional marriages, broken or renewed every seven years!—if he means it. You never know, with him. It sounds like another squirt of savage irony. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... encounter so much difficulty and privation by themselves, when I have a strong arm to help them! No! no!—I have done my duty to those who ever did their duty to me, and I trust that my own conscience will prove my reward, and check that repining which we are too apt to feel when it pleases Heaven to blight what appears to be our fairest prospects ... I say, my good fellow," said Alfred, after a while, to a man in a boat, "what is the name ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat

... to remember with all his soul. Every day of his life he had missed her; never was there a night that she was not in his thoughts before he dropped to sleep. What would have been his career had fate brought them together before the blight fell upon her? What intimacies, what enjoyment, what ideals nurtured and made real. And the companionship, the instant sympathy, the sureness of an echo in her heart, no matter how low and soft his whisper! These thoughts were ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith

... price, especially early in the season, but jam fruit sells at an average of 2-1/2d. per lb., at which price it pays fair wages, but is not a bonanza. As a rule the plants are very healthy, and any fungus pests to which they are subject, such as leaf blight, are easily kept in check by spraying, a knapsack pump being used for this purpose. The ground is kept well worked and free from weeds, whilst the plants are fruiting, and occasionally the ground is mulched, as is the case in the plot shown in the illustration. No special knowledge is ...
— Fruits of Queensland • Albert Benson

... hood enveils their eyes * Right soon, but from our eyes is fair of flight: When night-falls, dread and drear to those who love, * We mourn; they joy to see departing light: Had they but dree'd the weird, the bitter dole * We dree, their beds like ours had bred them blight.' ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton

... live in peace and love as the sisters and brothers in one great household. My eye deceives me if like this live you. You are divided into envious, brawling factions, each one of which tries to injure, and blight the reputation of the other. If one of you fall upon evil times he is left without the sympathy and succour of the others. In politics and in social grades you are divided, and in every respect you are such that I should mourn the day when our peaceable, simple, contented people on ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins

... judgment; But He strikes with the hands of men, And His blight would wither our manhood If we smote not ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various

... the usual blight to all such enterprises: a spy or a traitor revealed everything to Wirz. One day a guard came in, seized Baker and took him out. What was done with him I know not; we never heard of him after he passed the ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy

... "Peace!" cried Luke; "you blight everything—even this smiling landscape you would turn to gloom. Does not this morn awaken a happier train of thoughts within your mind? With me it makes amends for want of sleep, effaces resentment, and banishes every black misgiving. ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth

... reply, that of course her magic did not compare with his, since hers was powerful only over the bodies of men and beasts, whereas Dom Manuel's magic had so notably controlled the hearts and minds of kings. Still, as Alianora pointed out, she could blight corn and cattle, and raise tempests very handily, and, given time, could smite an enemy with almost any physical malady you selected. She could not kill outright, to be sure, but even so, these lesser mischiefs ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell

... humming bees, Thy sickened children, old guitar, Thy words and airs. What evil pest, What blight is eating ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas

... were devoted exclusively to "books printed in the Fifteenth Century: of which they possessed about fifteen hundred." This intelligence recruited my spirits; and I began to look around with eagerness. But alas! although the crop was plentiful, a deadly blight had prevailed. In other words, there was number without choice: quantity rather than quality. Yet I will not be ill-natured; for, on reaching the third of these rooms, and the last in the suite, Monsieur Thiebaut placed before me ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... adequate housing for low-income families. The Administration will propose authority to contract for 35 thousand additional public housing units in each of the next 2 fiscal years for communities which will participate in an integrated attack on slums and blight. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Dwight D. Eisenhower • Dwight D. Eisenhower

... promise you that Wenceslas shall never set foot in that woman's house. I ask you to make the sacrifice, if it is a sacrifice to forgive the husband you love so small a fault. I ask you—for the sake of my gray hairs, and of the love you owe your mother. You do not want to blight my later years with ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac

... usually disport themselves about the streets, stand crouched in little knots in some projecting doorway, or under the canvas blind of a cheesemonger's, where great flaring gas-lights, unshaded by any glass, display huge piles of blight red and pale yellow cheeses, mingled with little fivepenny dabs of dingy bacon, various tubs of weekly Dorset, and ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens

... London summer dies, in days of feverish sunlight and breathless languor. Everywhere there was the same torpor, the same wornout, desiccated life in death. It was in the streets with their sultry pallor, in the parks and squares where the dust lay like a grey blight on every green thing. Everywhere the glare accentuated this toneless melancholy. It was the symbol of the decadence following the brilliant efflorescence of the season, the exhaustion after that supreme effort of Society to ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair

... a long time, happily absorbed, and Mrs. Orton Beg's memory, as she watched her, slipped back inevitably to her own love days, till tears came of the inward supplication that Evadne's future might never know the terrible blight which had fallen upon ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand

... was willing to take a cue, and he took it from the head of the family. He thought that so many years of town life might have made her a little less rustic in the end: the York State of 1835 or of 1840 need not have remained York State so immitigably. And if there was a domestic blight on the house he was willing to believe that she was two thirds to blame: behind the old soul was a pack of poor relations. Particularly a brother-in-law—a bilious, cadaverous fellow, whom I saw once, and once was enough. He had been an itinerant ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller

... a blight of the gravest character upon the local industry of the inhabitants, and it is a suicidal and unstatesmanlike policy that crushes and extinguishes all enterprise. What Englishman would submit to such a prying and humiliating position? And still it is ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... further enunciation of this joyous theory of life, Young naturally replies in characteristic terms, emphasizing life's evanescence and joy's certain blight. But Sterne, though acknowledging the transitoriness of life's pleasures, denies Young's deductions. Yorick's conception of death is quite in contrast to Young's picture and one must admit that it has no justification in Sterne's writings. On the contrary, Yorick's life ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer

... asceticism which is so repulsive to us, and with reason, and which marked the illustrious saints of the fourth century, was simply the protest against the almost universal materialism of the day,—that dreadful moral blight which was undermining society. As luxury and extravagance and material pleasures were the prominent evils of the old Roman world in its decline, it was natural that the protest against these evils should assume ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord

... announced one day in public, that in consequence of the impiety of the Omaguas, he should retire to a neighboring tribe, of more religious turn of mind; and taking with him the precious instrument, leave their palms to blight, and themselves to ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... which I had not thought it capable. 'That is so to an extent of which you do not dream. No man likes to have his hand forced, especially by one whom he regards—may I say it?—as a possible rival. But I will tell you this much. If the blight which has fallen on my life is likely to continue, I would not wish,— God forbid that I should wish to join her fate with mine,—not for all that ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh

... god of form, an idol crushing me. Unlike the church, I look on marriage as A civil contract, not a sacrament,[6] Indissoluble, spite of every wrong; The high and holy purposes of marriage Are not fulfilled in instances where each Helps to demoralize or blight the other; Let it then stand, like other contracts, on A basis purely ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent

... Dissolute Nouns, And Particles picked from the kennels of towns, With Irregular Verbs for irregular jobs, Chiefly active in rows and mobs, Picking Possessive Pronouns' fobs, And Interjections as bad as a blight, Or an Eastern blast, to the blood and the sight: Fanciful phrases for crime and sin, And smacking of vulgar lips where Gin, Garlic, Tobacco, and offals go in - A jargon so truly adapted, in fact, To each thievish, obscene, and ferocious act, So fit for the brute with the human shape, Savage ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley

... from the corners of the eyes to the corners of the mouth a deep channel of tears. The snow lighted up the corpse. Winter and the tomb are not adverse. The corpse is the icicle of man. The nakedness of her breasts was pathetic. They had fulfilled their purpose. On them was a sublime blight of the life infused into one being by another from whom life has fled, and maternal majesty was there instead of virginal purity. At the point of one of the nipples was a white pearl. It was a ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... you and I have lectured, but never after dinner. We do it when we have promised it, and when those who are present expect it. After dinner, I agree with you, it is the most doleful blight that can fall ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock

... for which she had become his wife. He might have read in it that, ever baring her own head for the lightning of her own contempt and pride to strike, the most innocent allusion to the power of his riches degraded her anew, sunk her deeper in her own respect, and made the blight and waste within her ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens

... your eye there is death; There is frost in your breath Which would blight the plants. * * * * * In the heart of the garden the merry bird chants; It would fall to the ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

... was so pretty and blonde and gentle, and enjoyed her because she was always so willing to do whatever Georgina wished. And now to think that instead of being the like-everybody-else kind of a young lady she seemed, she was like a heroine in a book who had lived through trouble which would "blight her whole life." ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston

... and noxious outlines into undulating and propitious curves, rescue whole districts from the devastations of flood or pestilence, and "scatter plenty o'er a smiling land" which might otherwise have known the blight of poverty and the pangs of want. To perform such miracles it is merely necessary to build pagodas at certain spots and of the proper height, to pile up a heap of stones, or round off the peak of some ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles

... few such prospects of town and village, woodland and cultivated field, steeples and country seats, as we beheld from this unhappy spot. No blight had fallen on old Essex; all was prosperity and riches, healthfully distributed. Before us lay our native town, extending from the foot of the hill to the harbor, level as a chess board, embraced ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... casting, Ye know not your puissant influence, lifting and lasting; Nothing factitious, self-conscious or impious bides in you; On your high serenities No hollow amenities Nor worldly impurities cast their dread blight; August and courageous, you stand for the right; The gods love you and lend you their ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various

... know the way is mingled flower and thorn, That not one from partner to porter may bear all I have borne. So Jasper thinks I am sad; how the wintry winds whistle to-night! Heaven grant no poor woman or children are out in this sleety blight. I cannot read this eve; what ails me? "Chronicle," "Tribune" and "Times," Lie looking coaxingly at me, I heed not their prose or rhymes, Is it thinking so much of Arthur, brings Aimee before me here, Aimee, my idol, my darling, my ...
— Victor Roy, A Masonic Poem • Harriet Annie Wilkins

... and I were as frisky as they, We laugh'd at their biting, and kiss'd all the time, For the spring of her beauty was just in its prime! But now for their frolics I never can sleep, So I crack 'em by dozens, as o'er me they creep: Curse blight you! I cry, while I'm all over smart, For I'm bit by the arse, while I'm stung ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer

... diverge, and listless stray Into some thought, feeling, or dream unright, O Watcher, my backsliding soul affray; Let me not perish of the ghastly blight. Be thou, O Life eternal, in me light; Then merest approach of selfish or impure Shall start me up alive, ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald

... Frightened, repentant, maybe, Hua himself fled to Hawaii, and his retainers scattered themselves in Molokai, Oahu, and Kauai. They could not escape the curse. Like the Wandering Jew, they carried disaster with them. Blight, drouth, thirst, and famine appeared wherever they set foot, and though the wicked king kept himself alive for three and a half years, he succumbed to hunger and thirst at last, and in Kohala his withered frame ceased to be animate. To this day "the rattle ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner

... an individual or a nation, the latter is half concealed. Fear is more demonstrative, and as it is essentially destructive, its effects are more sudden and visible. In its acuter forms, as Fright and Terror, it may blanch the hair in a night, blight the mind and destroy the life of the individual. As Panic, it is eminently epidemic, carrying crowds and armies before it; while in the aggravated form of Despair it swallows up all other emotions and prompts to self destruction. Its physiological effect ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton

... on the last morning of his journey he waked up within a hundred miles of home, and less than half that far from his own mountain lands, his new-found comfort quickly changed to a keen anxiety. For he saw at a glance that the country was under the blight of drought. The hills that should have borne a good crop of gramma grass at this time of the year, if the rains had been even fair, were nothing but bare red earth from which the rocks and the great roots of the pinion ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson

... Mrs. Channing, her own tears dropping upon the fair young face, as she gathered it to her sheltering bosom. "What have you done that this blight should extend to you?" ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood

... like the Old World,—and in New England more than elsewhere,—has her note of decadence, of disillusion, of autumnal brightness and transiency. Some sections of the country, and notably the slave-holding states in the forty years preceding the Civil War, have suffered widespread intellectual blight. The best talent of the South, for a generation, went into politics, in the passionately loyal endeavor to prop up a doomed economic and social system; and the loss to the intellectual life of the country cannot be reckoned. Over ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry

... touch'd upon, but with the greatest emotion.—The least hint of it was enough to make the blood fly into his face;—but when my father enlarged upon the story in mixed companies, which the illustration of his hypothesis frequently obliged him to do,—the unfortunate blight of one of the fairest branches of the family, would set my uncle Toby's honour and modesty o'bleeding; and he would often take my father aside, in the greatest concern imaginable, to expostulate and tell him, he would give him any thing in the ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne

... Katherine Turner anymore than on anyone else?" said Mrs. Hayden almost sternly; then suddenly softening her tone she added, "Dear heart, we must not let self judgment or self condemnation creep in upon us to leave their blight of discouragement or failure. No, the only way is to keep our eyes fixed on the mark of the high calling, resisting nothing, carrying on our lips, success, in our hearts love, in our lives truth. By the outer we judge nothing: by the ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson

... evident suffering of his mother, and the equally evident though silent contempt of his father, we need not wonder that Richard grew up in what seemed to him a conviction that religion was worse than a thing of nought, was an evil phantom, with a terrible power to blight; a miasm that had steamed up from the foul marshes of the world, before man was at home in it, or yet acquainted with the beneficent laws of Nature. It was not merely a hopeless task to pray to a power which could not be entreated, because ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald

... flight, bird's song, wind in the ash-trees and the corn, tall lilies glistening, the evening shadows slanting out, the night murmuring of waters. There is no other genuine dream; without it to sweeten all, life is harsh and shrill and east-wind dry, and evil overruns her more quickly than blight be-gums the rose-tree or frost blackens fern of a cold June night. We elders are past re-making England, but our children, even these crippled children here, may yet take ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy

... seemed to have been of a serious cast of mind, which led to speculation, criticism, and the cultivation of the exact sciences. From Ferrara came Savonarola, the fanatical prophet who appeared during the moral blight which characterized the age of the Borgias, and Lucretia must frequently have recalled this man in whom her father, by the executioner's hand, sought to stifle the protestations of the faithful and upright against the immorality ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius

... emphasize her words. "Am I not left deserted in my age? The child Britta,—sole daughter of my sole daughter,—is she not stolen, and kept from me? Has not her heart been utterly turned away from mine? All through that vile witch,—accursed of God and man! She it is who casts the blight on our land; she it is who makes the hands and hearts of our men heavy and careless, so that even luck has left the fishing; and yet you hesitate,—you delay, you will not fulfill your promise! I tell you, there are those in ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli

... period were strong Tories. Such were Johnson, the Lake poets after their brief swing to the opposite extreme, and Scott. All these except the first belong as well to the time of successful reform, and Johnson may be claimed by the eighteenth century; which serves to illustrate the blight cast upon British literature by the prolonged resistance of British statesmen to the prevailing current—a resistance which took its keynote from the dying recantation and protest ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various

... was still attractive, stamped with the most cruel passions, her eye burning with the greed of evil. It was not from her appearance, I believe, but from some emanation of her soul, that I recoiled in a kind of fainting terror; as we hear of plants that blight and snakes that fascinate, the woman shocked and daunted me. But I was of a brave nature; trod the weakness down; and forcing my way through the slaves, who fell back before me in embarrassment, as though in the presence of rival mistresses, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... been so affected by the malattia or blight, that the yield being small, the fruit to an extent was not pressed in the vineyards, and the juice only brought up to the town in goat-skins as usual; but the fruit itself was carried up, by those having the proper places, and was pressed in tubs in the cantine or rooms on the ground-floor, where ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... more horrible than to see this man, upon whose life such a terrible blight was about to fall, so bright and full ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau

... and will reap corruption, just as surely as the liar and adulterer. No matter how "polite" and "refined" and "respectable" the seed may be, no matter how closely it resembles the good seed, its true nature will out, the blight of corruption will ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Dwight Moody

... felt this, too. Perhaps even these hardened men and the more than hardened woman whose presence was in itself a blight, recognized heroism when they saw it; for when the lawyer, with a certain obvious reluctance, laid his hand on the bolts of the door with the remark: "This is not my work, you know; I am but following out instructions very minutely given me," the smothered growls and grunts which rose ...
— The House in the Mist • Anna Katharine Green

... passion for the weak and defenceless, who from the first has cultivated a chivalrous loyalty to women, putting far from him the lowering talk, the cynical expression, the moral lassitude of society, and guarding his high enthusiasm from the blight of worldly commonplace, has no need to fight against the lower instinct that would degrade them or wrong the weak and defenceless. The conflict is there, but it is removed to a nobler and higher battle-field, a battle against the sacrifice ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins

... Margaret, for the wrong I did you. I should never have spoken love to you at all, or if I did, I should have told you of the blight upon it; but the sky and the trees and the hill were clothed that night in the beauty that wrapt my soul and I thought that God had forgotten and had shrived me in the same sacred light. But He does ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles

... great freedom of the sorrow that brooded over Lincoln's home. Some knowledge of the blight which this cast upon his life is necessary for a right interpretation of the gloomy moods that constantly oppressed him and left their indelible impress on his face and character. Mr. Lamon states unreservedly that Lincoln's marriage was an unhappy ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne

... of Greek philosophy was the insistence on intelligence and knowledge, and by these means it reached its pinnacle of reasoning. The blight that exterminated all scientific progress, with the fall of the Roman Empire, carried with it the neglect of the Greek thinkers. Similar to the retrogression of scientific thought, traced in former chapters, is the corresponding retrogression in philosophic thought. ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks

... stamped with the impress of our own feelings, and we gather the whole of creation into our own pained being—"the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now." The world you complain of as impure and wrong is not God's world, but your world; the blight, the dullness, the blank, are all your own. The light which is in you has become darkness, and therefore the light ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson

... Domingo, where once existed beautiful homes and luxuriant fields, happy families and general progress; all this wealth, happiness, and prosperity had been swept away from those islands as by a deadly blight. Ruin, squalor, and beggary now stalks ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert

... fault, and may the curse of a broken man put a blight on her and set the blood rotting in her veins! It's not that I want to clear myself. I know that I went back to drink, like the beast that I was. But she would have forgiven me; she would have stuck as close to me as a rope to a block if that woman ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... gettin' pretty tight on farms now. It means about sixteen hours hard graft a-day to make not half what a railwayman makes in eight hours. If you happen to have grapes or oranges, if they manage to escape the frost, an' hail, an' caterpillar, then the blight ketches 'em, or there's a drewth, and there ain't none; an' if there's any, there's so much that there ain't no sale for 'em; and the farmer's life I reckon ought to be stopped as gamblin', for a gambler's life ain't one ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin

... The 'apple-blight' of the Calvados must obviously have extended into the neighbouring department of the Eure, or at least into the great and busy arrondissement of Bernay, which gave the Monarchist candidate in September 1889 the tremendous majority of 5,550 votes in ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... varied rubbish into the open fire, leaned a broom against the mantel, readjusted the towel that protected her gray hair from the dust—hair on week days exposed with never a qualm to all manner of dust—cursed all Chinamen on land or sea with an especial and piquant blight invoked upon the one now in hiding, then took from the back of a chair where she had hung it the moment before a riding skirt come to feebleness and decrepitude. She held it up before critical eyes as one scanning the morning paper for ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson

... adopted, pledging the denomination to raise $100,000, and to the holding of a delegate convention in New York. The president appointed, as members of the committee of arrangements for the convention, Rev. Henry W. Bellows, Messrs. A.A. Low, U.A. Murdock, Henry P. Kidder, Atherton Blight, Enoch Pratt, and Artemas Carter, Rev. Edward E. Hale, and Rev. Charles ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke

... and penny he looks upon, from this day forth for evermore, be a blight to his eyes, and a canker to his heart! But I can't wish him a worse canker than what he has there already. Yes, he has a canker at heart! Is not he eaten up with envy? as all who look at him may read in that evil eye. Bad luck to the hour ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth

... with those who long to realize the ideal in this world. Had he discovered the warning signs of the misfortunes which were to come upon his family? Had he come to see that the necessities of life were to sully and blight his dream? Had he seen in the check of his missions in Syria and Morocco a providential indication that he had to change his method? We do not know. But about this time he felt the need of turning to St. Clara and ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier

... this angry aspect of the waters has been acclaimed as one of the origins of that river-dragon idea which used to be common in south Italy, before the blight of Spaniardism fell upon the land and withered up the pagan myth-making faculty. There are streams still perpetuating this name—the rivulet Dragone, for instance, which falls into the Ionian not far from ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas

... Sammy lay sprawling in the helpless attitude in which he had fallen down the night before, after a season of drunken riot. He was in a heavy sleep, with his still innocent-looking features tinged with the first blight of dissipation. ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne

... a little higher in the world. I protest, before Jupiter, that to save others like you from such loss, I feel tempted to hunt over the statute books for some law, now obsolete and forgotten, but not legally dead, that may be brought to bear upon this mischief, and give it another Decian blight, which, if it do not kill, may yet check, ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware

... her relations through her illness—the greatest peacemaker in families, save death; and for her sake they made a show of tolerating her husband, after they had given him some bad hours behind her back. But the whole affair was like a blight on Redford, which was never the same place again. Mr Pennycuick had a slight "stroke" on hearing all the bad news at once. It was light enough to be passed over and hushed up, but his vigour and ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge

... Thou fell blight, thou eastern blast, thou overspreading mildew, that destroyest the early promises of the shining year! that mockest the laborious toil, and blastest the joyful hopes, of the ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson

... forever the Southern and Catholic provinces from the Northern confederacy. So long as the Prince remained alive, he was the father of the whole country, the Netherlands—saving only two Walloon provinces—constituting a whole. Notwithstanding the spirit of faction and the blight of the long civil war, there was at least one country, or the hope of a country, one strong heart, one guiding head, for the patriotic party throughout the land. Philip and Granvella were right in their estimate of the advantage to be derived from the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various

... and was shaking with laughter. I had never in my life heard anything so bitter as that noise. It fell like a blight on all the merriment about donkeys, pyramids, bazaars, or what not. Along the whole dim length of the gallery the voices dropped, the pale blotches of faces turned our way with one accord, and the silence became so profound that the clear tinkle of a teaspoon ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad

... taxing him to support such publications, is the fostering patron to which he owes his difficulties. Thus does America nip her young genius in the bud; and when it perchance comes to flower and fruit, she is not behind-hand with a blight. The unknown production of the American author is brought into a depressing competition with works which have been tried in England, and found certain of success in America. The popular British author, whom the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various

... sighed. When but a blighted bud was left, Which Indra's hand in seven had cleft:(213) "No fault, O Lord of Gods, is thine; The blame herein is only mine. But for one grace I fain would pray, As thou hast reft this hope away. This bud, O Indra, which a blight Has withered ere it saw the light— From this may seven fair spirits rise To rule the regions of the skies. Be theirs through heaven's unbounded space On shoulders of the winds to race, My children, drest in heavenly ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI

... mother's life now; knew that there had been a blight upon it, of which a bad unscrupulous man had been the cause. And that man was ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon

... I know," said De Valence, "in search of a more enterprising lover than one who is so willing to interpret every air of frost as a killing blight to his hopes; perhaps she seeks the Black Douglas, or some such hero of the Thistle, to reward with her lands, her lordships, and beauty, those virtues of enterprise and courage, of which John de Walton was at one time thought possessed. But, seriously, events are passing ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott

... him, grasped him by the throat, and thrusting him fiercely down on the steps of the dais, placed one foot on his prostrate body. Then drawing his gigantic sword he lifted it on high, . . the blight blade glittered in air...an audible gasp of terror broke from the throng of spectators, . . another second and Khosrul's life would have paid the forfeit for his temerity...when crash! ... a sudden and tremendous ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... girl, "he could be so much to me and I to him! His touch, even in thought, would never be coarse and unfeeling; and I have seen again and again that I can inspire him, move him, and make him happy. Why must a wretched blunder thwart and blight ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe

... tinge to the eye; at the same time, in too many instances, the head is found flaccid to the touch, and possessing no substance. The barley crop, too, in many places, exhibits the effect of a powerful blight. In some places, also, where turnips have been grown, they present—as, indeed, has been the case in other parts of the county—a healthier exterior in top and skin, but, on being opened, are found deeply impregnated ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... Constitutionnel; yet nothing could extinguish his debts, those debts which he had been so long carrying like a cross. "Why," said he, "I have been bowed down by this burden for fifteen years, it hampers the expansion of my life, it disturbs the action of my heart, it stifles my thoughts, it puts a blight on my existence, it embarrasses my movements, it checks my inspirations, it weighs upon my conscience, it interferes with everything, it has been a drag on my career, it has broken my back, it has made me an ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet

... did during the earlier part of her life, and that everything which she published during the forty-three years which preceded her death lowered her reputation. Yet we have no reason to think that at the time when her faculties ought to have been in their maturity, they were smitten with any blight. In "The Wanderer," we catch now and then a gleam of her genius. Even in the memoirs of her father, there is no trace of dotage. They are very bad; but they are so, as it seems to us, not from a decay of power, but from a total perversion of power. The truth is, that ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay

... this return, and to labor gratefully for the destitute and the dying. It was expected, and justly too, that the land of apostolic revivals would be the first to imitate the apostles in the work of saving the heathen. A failure to do this may bring a blight upon the churches, if it has not brought ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble

... more smoke about than tranquillity. Sarle seemed distrait. Belle Helene sometimes cast an uneasy glance at April, who, still very pale, sat by herself on the lounge. Only Clive and Kenna talked racily, but in jerks, of cattle, fruit-blight, mules, and white ants. But presently all subjects of conversation seemed to peter out, leaving a dark pool of silence to form between them in the room. Kenna it was who threw the stone disturbing those ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley

... Nineveh of Sennacherib or hundred-gated Thebes, is but inadequately to depict the situation, for it was a longer step than that. Such chances do not come twice to mankind, for when two grades of culture so widely severed are brought into contact, the stronger is apt to blight and crush the weaker where it does not amend and transform it. In spite of its foul abominations, one sometimes feels that one would like to recall the extinct state of society in order to study it. The ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady

... side to the apartment and, as he did so, the blight moonlight fell upon his face, enabling Mr. Chillingworth to see, without the shadow of a doubt, that it was, indeed, Varney, the vampyre, who was thus stealthily making his entrance into Bannerworth Hall, according to the calculation which had been made by the admiral ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest

... hardly hears the colonel's words. He is thinking—thinking with a bursting heart and whirling brain. For a time all sense of the loss of his only son seems deadened in face of this undreamed-of, this almost incredible shadow that has come to blight the sweet and innocent life that is so infinitely dear to him. What can he say to Bessie when he meets those beautiful, pleading, trusting, anxious eyes? She has borne up so bravely, silently, patiently. Their journey has been trying and full of fatigue, but ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King

... low is elevated, when all that was dark is illumined, and all that was earthly is transfigured. Books have no touch of personal infirmity—theirs is undying bloom, immortal youth, perennial fragrance. Age cannot wrinkle, disease cannot blight, death cannot pierce them. The personal image of the author is quite as likely to be a hindrance as a help to his book. The actor who played with Shakespeare in his own "Hamlet" probably did but imperfect justice to that wonderful play, and the next-door neighbor of a popular author will ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various

... pessimism. Even if we could, it would not be well to repeat the formulas of art accomplished, born as they were of certain conditions, social as well as technical. Other days, other plays. And that is the blight on all academic art. "Traditional art," says Frank Rutter, "is the art of respectable plagiarism," a slight variation on Paul Gauguin's more revolutionary axiom. No fear of any artist being too original. "There is no isolated truth," exclaimed Millet; ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker

... from being no more than adequate, suddenly became oppressively redundant. It required, however, another drop to make the full cup run over. The potatoes had become, as I have shown, the staple food of the Highlander; and when, in 1846, the potato-blight came on, the people, most of them previously stripped of their little capitals, and divested of their employment, were deprived of their food, and ruined at a blow. The same stroke which did little more than slightly impinge on the comforts of the people ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... spider out along the south wall—ugh, ugh," persisted Simon, without seeming to hear her; "and your new g'raniums a'most covered wi' blight. I wur a tacklin' one of 'em just ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes

... Tai-yue in dowager lady Chia's suite of rooms, he naturally became comparatively more friendly with her than with his other cousins; and this friendliness led to greater intimacy and this intimacy once established, rendered unavoidable the occurrence of the blight of harmony from ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... youth, its rosy visions, its smiling dreams, all sparkled in his blight blue eye, in the glad, free, ringing joyance of his deep rich voice, his cloudless smiles. And oh, who is there can resist the witchery of life's young hopes, who does not feel the warm blood run quicker through ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar

... the wisdom that shall lighten and direct their lives. You cannot dissociate yourselves from the labouring masses, and in particular from the women and girls of England. They are your sisters; and a blight and a curse rests on you if you ignore them, and grasp at all the pleasures and sweetness and cultivation of your life with no thought or toil for them. Their lives are the foundations on which ours rest. It is horrible ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson

... in fact, the unifying force of the brain faculties, called here Intuition. The founders of this society reckoned, too, with the fact that psychology as it has been taught from a material basis in schools and colleges is a blight. One can't, as a purely physical being, relate himself to mental processes; nor can one approach the super-mental area by the force of ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort

... Then haste to honest, joyous Marriage Bands, A newborn Race is rear'd by careful Hands: Thro' num'rous Ages thus they'll happy move In active Bus'ness, and in chastest Love. The Nymphs and Swains appear in Streets and Bowers As morning fresh, as lovely as the Flowers. As blight as Phoebus, Ruler of the Day, Prudent as Pallas, and as Flora gay. A Spire majestic roars its solemn Vane, Where Praises, Pray'r and true Devotion reign, Where Truth and Peace and Charity abound, Where God is fought, ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase

... both!" he exclaimed, while his hands clinched involuntarily. "What right had they to blight and ruin my life? What right had they to live as they did, and let the stigma, the shame, the curse of it all fall on me? A few months since I had the honor and respect of my classmates and associates; to-day, not one will recognize me, and ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour

... all of us, or nothing," he replied. "But the false interpretation of renunciation of the early Church has cast its blight on Christianity even to our day. Oriental asceticism, Stoicism, Philo and other influences distorted Christ's meaning. Renunciation does not mean asceticism, retirement from the world, a denial of life. And the early Christian, since he was not a citizen, since he took the view ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... you know as much about certain features of this chestnut disease as I do myself; for I have only worked over certain sides of the whole question. I also presume that you are all acquainted with the fact that this disease, which is known as chestnut blight or the chestnut bark disease, is without doubt the most serious disease of any forest tree which we have had in this country at any time, that is, so far as its inroads at ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Second Annual Meeting - Ithaca, New York, December 14 and 15, 1911 • Northern Nut Growers Association

... happy. I breathe through his lips, I live in his life, his passions are my own; and it is impossible for me to know noble and pure emotions excepting in the heart of this being unsoiled by crime. You have your fancies, here I show you mine. In exchange for the blight which society has brought upon me, I give it a man of honor, and enter upon a struggle with destiny; do you wish to be ...
— Vautrin • Honore de Balzac

... (receding). Alas! alas! Like a vapor the golden vision Shall fade and pass, And thou wilt find in thy heart again Only the blight of pain, And ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... bound to make; (2) it came to signify a pledge of military fidelity, a voluntary oath; (3) then the exacted oath of allegiance; (4) any oath whatever; (5) in early Christian use any sacred or solemn act, and especially any mystery where more was meant than met the ear or eye" (Blight's "Select Sermons of St. Leo on the Incarnation," ...
— The Church: Her Books and Her Sacraments • E. E. Holmes

... Preparation of Soil. Planting of Seeds. Budding, Grafting, and Transplanting. Training the Limbs. Attention to the Soil. Manuring. Filberts. Figs. Currants. Gooseberries. Raspberries. Strawberries. Grapes. To Preserve Fruit; Modes of Preserving Fruit-Trees. Fire Blight. Worms, 347 ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher

... everything went wrong in the country around. The hay had hardly been got in when the haystacks were floated bodily down to the sea by an inundation; the vines were cut to pieces with the hail; the corn was all killed by a black blight; only in the Treasure Valley, as usual, all was safe. As it had rain when there was rain nowhere else, so it had sun when there was sun nowhere else. Everybody came to buy corn at the farm, and went away pouring maledictions on the Black Brothers. They asked what they liked, and got it, except ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes

... creative power. As for the first of these, the black death, the famines, the hundred years' war, the free companies, the abasement of the church, the great schism—these things were misfortunes to which our modern time can find no parallel. They came suddenly upon Western Europe and defiled it like a blight.... They have made the mediaeval idea odious to every half-instructed man and have stamped even its ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell

... Forty-five), Ireland contained more than eight millions of people. But a very large proportion of them managed merely to exist—lodging in miserable cabins, clothed in miserable rags, and with potatoes only as their staple food. When the potato-blight came, they died by thousands. But it was not the inability of the soil to support so large a population that compelled so many to live in this miserable way, and exposed them to starvation on the failure of a single root-crop. On the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard

... will return, but cold and altered, Like all whose hopes too soon depart; Like all on whom have beat, unsheltered, The bitter blasts that blight the heart. ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell

... in 1758, when it was desired to drive the entering wedge of disestablishment and razee the parsons—we are prepared to believe that the iron business was not flourishing. Under a despotism tempered so very moderately by bribes, a similar blight fell upon all other branches of manufacture. Among these, wool, flax, paper, hats and leather are specified in a Parliamentary report as interfering with "the trade, navigation and manufactures" of the mother-country. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various

... Wis. Sargeant H. Wellman has some young trees at Topsfield, Mass. F. H. Frey has young tree in yard at Chicago, but it has not borne nuts as yet. Foliage is beautiful, leaves being rather broad but some kind of blight seems to turn them dark and they curl up ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association

... oasis in the desert of gloom through which he had traveled, and that had been on his interminable trip across the continent, when for ten brief minutes his blight had been lifted, and he had caught a breath of the incense for which his ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice

... advancing years in no way lessened his love, which was independent of beauty. Whether Stella was satisfied, who shall say? Mrs. Oliphant thought that few women would be disposed to pity Stella, or think her life one of blight or injury. Mr. Leslie Stephen says, "She might and probably did regard his friendship as a full equivalent for the sacrifice.... Is it better to be the most intimate friend of a man of genius or the wife of a commonplace Tisdall?" Whatever ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift

... their plot of land into broad estates; but it had been tacitly understood that this sprinkling of water established a claim for a return, and this both father and son had solemnly promised. Its magic turned everything they touched to gold, but it brought a blight on the peace of the household. One branch, which had grown up in the traditions of the old Macedonian stock, had separated from the other; and her husband's great lie lay between them and the family still living in the Canopic way, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... of France enjoyed it, or ought to have enjoyed it"—what a blight of regret was in the very seed that in its flower of to-day makes one wish for some delicate beauty or subtle fragrance that is not there, because the Kings of France did not let ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley

... is the prevalence of a narrow and mean type of character; the decay of energy; the excessive devotion to a petty ideal of personal comfort; and the systematic attempt to turn our eyes away from the dark side of the world. A smug, placid, contemptible optimism is creeping like a blight over the face of society, and suppressing all the grander aspirations of more energetic times. But in proportion to Fitzjames's general agreement upon the nature of the evil was the vehemence of his dissent from the suggested ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... from himself can flee?[100] To zones though more and more remote,[di] Still, still pursues, where'er I be, The blight of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron

... race was Kano Indara; the last of a mighty line of artists. Even in this material age his fame spread as the mists of his own land, and his name was known in barbarian countries far across the sea. Tokyo might fall under the blight of progress, but Kano would hold to the traditions of his race. To live as a true artist,—to die as one,—this was his care. He might have claimed high position in the great Art Museum recently inaugurated ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa

... weeks after the blight of the potato crop in 1846 the cottiers and small farmers managed to eke out a subsistence by the sale of their pigs and any little effects they had. But pigs, fowl, furniture, and clothing soon went, one after ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin

... with our two patches at an early stage. Everything grew wrong from the first to last, and if my father's manures intensified nothing else, they certainly intensified the Primordial Curse. The peas were eaten in the night before they were three inches high, the beans bore nothing but blight, the only apparent result of a spraying of the potatoes was to develop a PENCHANT in the cat for being ill indoors, the cucumber frames were damaged by the catapulting of boys going down the lane at the back, and all your cucumbers were mysteriously embittered. That lane with its occasional passers-by ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... an investigation had to be made, and as a result the man was sent to jail for a year. People have been a long time learning that thoughts are things to heal, upbuild, strengthen; or to wound, impair, or blight. After all we cannot do very much for many people, no matter how hard we try, but we can contribute to their usefulness and happiness by holding for them a kind ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung

... would be able to make the festive Eskimo bask in the sun and sing in chorus when there wasn't any sun and it was altogether too cold to open their mouths wide in the open air. In fact the priests are not the cause of the blight where it exists, just as they are not the cause of the jolliness, when there is any. But Orthodoxy is Chesterton's sincerest book. It is perhaps the only one of the whole lot in the course of which he would not be justified in repeating a remark which begins one of the Tremendous ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West

... with abstracts and notes, the pemmican of school-boy learnings, are more or less a weariness and a bore; but the youth who comes out from the admiring circle of sisters and aunts with the airs of a man of the world and the blight of a premature ennui is peculiarly insufferable. Of course he has never known at home any grown-up people beyond the chrysalis stage of undergraduatism, except to receive from them patronising hospitalities and little attentions in the shape of guineas and stalls at the ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay

... kind of peculiar stillness and languor. Fenitchka gave no sign of her existence; she sat in her little room like a mouse in its hole. Nikolai Petrovitch had a careworn air. He had just heard that blight had begun to appear in his wheat, upon which he had in particular rested his hopes. Pavel Petrovitch overwhelmed every one, even Prokofitch, with his icy courtesy. Bazarov began a letter to his father, but tore it up, and threw ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

... when he saw that he was to receive no answer; withering blight dried up its joy. But he recovered ...
— A Cathedral Singer • James Lane Allen

... ovata (Mill.) K. Koch. in Central New York—David H. Caldwell 29 The Control of the Hickory Weevil (Curculio caryae) 39 Round Table Discussion—What's Your Problem 43 The International Chestnut Commission and the Chestnut Blight Problem in Europe, 1953—G. Flippo Gravatt 52 Rooting Chestnuts from Softwood Cuttings—Roger W. Pease 56 Evaluating Chestnuts Grown under Forest Conditions—Jesse D. Diller 59 Panel Discussion—Chestnuts 62 Development of the Nut Industry in the Middle West—J. F. Wilkinson 70 Some Aspects ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various

... when the Plague swept over Kennons. That mysterious blight, rising in the orient, traveling darkly and surely unto the remotest West, laid its blackened hand upon the ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee

... severe attack of sandy blight in both eyes, so had to ride a horse which was tied to the bullock dray. I was hors-de-combat for over a week. Not having any eye-water, the only relief I could get was cold tea leaves at night. Both eyes were so swollen that I was completely blind. ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield

... the window at the procession of smokeless factory chimneys. The blight had already fallen on the ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde

... decision, in propriety practically withdrawn from their personal acquaintance. Of the kaleidoscope of the oncoming civilization his eye caught but little. There had again fallen upon his life a season of blight, or self-distrust, of dull dissatisfaction with the world and with living. As in earlier years he had felt unrest and known the lack of settled purpose, so now, after having seen all things apparently set in order before him for progressive accomplishment, he had fallen back ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough

... withhold her goodly root; Let mildew blight the rye, Give to the worm the orchard's fruit, The wheat field ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... The game's up: we must save the swag. (TO DUMONT.) Sir, since your key, on which I invoke the blight of Egypt, has once more defaulted, my feelings are unequal to a repetition of yesterday's distress, and I shall simply pad the hoof. From Turin you shall receive the address of my banker, and may prosperity attend your ventures. (TO BERTRAND.) Now, boy! (TO DUMONT.) Embrace my fatherless ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson

... turned, everybody did just nothing. They knew very well that he could not make them do anything; and what was more, in some of the very worst cases, the evil was past remedy now, and better left alone. For the drought went on pitiless. A copper sun, a sea of glass, a brown easterly blight, day after day, while Thurnall looked grimly aloft and mystified the ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley

... furnish forth the Cape Cod cottage with no unnecessary additions. Here were eight cane-seated chairs of the late Empire years. Four had been painted a dirty brown to simulate black walnut; four represented the white enamel blight which, in turn, had chipped enough to display the "grained" painting of the golden oak years beneath. A scraper applied to a leg revealed the mellow tone of honey-colored maple. Patience and paint remover did the rest. Brought up in the natural finish, they blended beautifully with ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley

... stricken by a bullet through the heart; or powerfully touched by some electric fluid. It was the well-known and devilish war-cry of the savages, startling the very air through which it passed, and falling like a deadly blight upon the spirit. With a mechanical and desperate effort at courage, the unhappy girl turned her eyes below, and there met images of death in their most appalling shapes. Hurry and confusion and despair were every where visible; for a band ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson

... was made to be eaten, not to be drank, To be husked in a barn, not soaked in a tank; I come as a blessing when put in a mill, As a blight and a curse when run through a still. Make me up into loaves, and your children are fed; But made into drink, I will starve them instead. In bread I'm a servant the eater shall rule, In drink I'm a master, the drinker a fool. Then remember my warning; my strength I'll ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg

... upon my soul the jest, Falleth upon my pen a blight. The daily task has lost its zest, And everything is flat and trite. There's nothing humorous in sight; Don't mind if I am dull to-day. For every column is a fight When woods are but ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor

... products of those golden hours, when all that was low is elevated, when all that was dark is illumined, and all that was earthly is transfigured. Books have no touch of personal infirmity—theirs is undying bloom, immortal youth, perennial fragrance. Age cannot wrinkle, disease cannot blight, death cannot pierce them. The personal image of the author is quite as likely to be a hindrance as a help to his book. The actor who played with Shakespeare in his own "Hamlet" probably did but ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various

... underlay the fundamental views and principles of Puritanism. The early records of our General Court are thickly strown with appointments of Fast-Days that the people might discover the especial occasion of God's anger toward them, manifested in the blight of some expected harvest, or in a scourge upon the cattle in the field. Some among us who claim to hold unreduced or softened the old ancestral faith have been twice in late years convened in our State-House, by especial call, to legislate upon the potato-disease and the pleuro-pneumonia ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various

... thorn, That not one from partner to porter may bear all I have borne. So Jasper thinks I am sad; how the wintry winds whistle to-night! Heaven grant no poor woman or children are out in this sleety blight. I cannot read this eve; what ails me? "Chronicle," "Tribune" and "Times," Lie looking coaxingly at me, I heed not their prose or rhymes, Is it thinking so much of Arthur, brings Aimee before me here, Aimee, my ...
— Victor Roy, A Masonic Poem • Harriet Annie Wilkins

... you, is it, you wretched blight, you miserable weed!" said Mr. Brewster, having recovered enough breath to be going on with. He glowered at his son-in-law despondently. "I might have, expected it! If I was at the North Pole, I could ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse

... casting office. "Swell cabaret stuff" was the phrase that brought the applicants to a lively swarm about the little window. Evening clothes, glad wraps, cigarette cases, vanity-boxes—the Victor people doing The Blight of Broadway with Muriel Mercer—Stage Number Four at 8:30 to-morrow morning. There seemed no limit to the people desired. Merton Gill joined the throng about the window. Engagements were rapidly made, both through the window and over the telephone ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson

... in the neighbourhood of the encampment he ranged with growing thoroughness and care, without finding so much as a mouse with which to satisfy his appetite. Even Koala and Echidna were nowhere to be found. It was as though a blight had descended upon the countryside, and the only living thing Finn saw that morning, besides the crows, was a laughing jackass on the stump of a blasted stringy-bark tree, who jeered at him hoarsely as he passed. ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson

... 's a foe to the peace o' this bosom, That glows sae devoutly, dear lassie, for thee; Alas! that e'er poortith should blight love's young blossom, When riches nae ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... shudder of the pain she had passed through, of the horror of that terrible discovery. It was all over now, thank Heaven. It had never been any brand or stigma to her; she had never felt any false shame over it; she had never bowed her bright head as though a blight had passed over her. She said to herself it was not her fault, she was not in the least to blame. She had believed herself in all honor to be the wife of Lord Chandos, and she could not feel that the least shadow of blame ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay

... unfit for England; if false, England was unfit for me. I withdrew; but this was not enough. In other countries—in Switzerland, in the shadow of the Alps, and by the blue depth of the lakes—I was pursued and breathed upon by the same blight. I crossed the mountains, but it was the same; so I went a little farther, and settled myself by the waves of the Adriatic, like the stag at bay, who betakes him to ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... blight, hangs on the briars, And from the clammy ground suspires A sweet frail sick autumnal scent Of stale frost furring weeds long spent; And wafted on, like one who sleeps, A feeble vapour hangs or creeps, Exhaling on the fungus mould A breath ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various

... this the only cause that operated to disappoint the reasonable hopes and to blight the fair prospects under which the original compact was formed. The effects of discriminating duties upon imports have been referred to in a former chapter—favoring the manufacturing region, which was the North; burdening ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis

... "Parsifal" and "Salome," but there were humiliating ones, like the prostitution of a great establishment for the performance of "Die Fledermaus" and "Der Zigeunerbaron" to deck out the Herr Direktor's benefits. The blight of commercialism had fallen on the institution. On February 11, 1908, Mr. Conried resigned, and announcement was officially made of a reorganization of his company, and the engagement of Giulio Gatti-Casazza and Andreas Dippel as managers ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... longed to have a future—a future with hope in it. To be shut up entirely to the past and present, is abhorrent to the human mind; it is to the soul—whose life and happiness is unceasing progress—what the prison is to the body; a blight and mildew, a hell of horrors. The dawning of this, another year, awakened me from my temporary slumber, and roused into life my latent, but long cherished aspirations for freedom. I was now not only ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass

... what I know," said De Valence, "in search of a more enterprising lover than one who is so willing to interpret every air of frost as a killing blight to his hopes; perhaps she seeks the Black Douglas, or some such hero of the Thistle, to reward with her lands, her lordships, and beauty, those virtues of enterprise and courage, of which John de Walton was at one time thought possessed. But, seriously, events are passing ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott

... This system is a blight of the gravest character upon the local industry of the inhabitants, and it is a suicidal and unstatesmanlike policy that crushes and extinguishes all enterprise. What Englishman would submit to such a prying and humiliating position? ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... Will they suffer this hell-blight to come upon them? Will they wait till violence and suspicion are the only principles retaining power among them? Will they look on while the Repeal movement—the educating, the ennobling, the sacred effort for liberty—is superseded by the buzz of assassination and vengeance? Or will they now ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis

... seem victorious, War may waste and famine blight, Still from out the conflict glorious, Mind comes forth with ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof

... Then smiled with grimace of derisive craft, And in a most repugnant manner, laughed, But all the knight discerned with eye and ear, Was his own maudlin laugh and drunken leer. "Breathe thou thy message," shrieked the frantic knight "Discharge thy purpose, though it blast and blight, I charge thee, speak, by all that is most fair. By all most foul, I charge thee to declare; By my bright armor and my trusty sword; I charge thee, speak, by Holy Rood and Word!" He sank exhausted, ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King

... little bamboo rods supporting a long cord from which long straws hang down, like a fringe, and paper cuttings, which are symbols (gohei) are suspended at regular intervals. This is the shimenawa, sacred emblem of Shinto. Within the consecrated space inclosed by it no blight may enter—no scorching sun wither the young shoots. And where the white arrows glimmer the locust shall not prevail, nor ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn

... tacking about to catch the erratic breeze, the gay little brig made merry and rapid way over the sparkling Mediterranean, at a rate that promised our arrival at Palermo by the sunset of the following day. As the evening came on the wind freshened, and by the time the moon soared like a large blight bird into the sky, we were scudding along sideways, the edge of our vessel leaning over to kiss the waves that gleamed like silver and gold, flecked here and there with phosphorescent flame. We skimmed almost under the bows of a magnificent yacht—the ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli

... should ever be without 'em)— And, just conceive the bliss— There is so little of the goose about 'em, One's safe from any hiss! Ah! who can paint that first great awful night, Big with a blessing or a blight, When the poor dramatist, all fume and fret, Fuss, fidget, fancy, fever, funking, fright, Ferment, fault-fearing, faintness—more f's yet: Flushed, frigid, flurried, flinching, fitful, flat, Add famished, ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... majority of her people? This, of course, was only preliminary to the larger question: Shall the National Government, under lead of the Slave Oligarchy, be given power to spread over new territory, at will, the blight and curse of human bondage? Upon this foremost question of the day, Senator Broderick stood side by side with Stephen A. Douglas in opposition to the Buchanan Administration, and its mad attempt to force slavery upon the people of the New West. The attitude of California politicians on ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds

... go out of her sight, Under the coffin lid—out through the door; Somebody finds only darkness and blight All through the glory of summer-sun light; Somebody's baby will ...
— Poems of Sentiment • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... back, and crouching and groaning for an hour or so in the darkest corner of the travellers' hut, tortured by the demon of sandy blight. It was too hot to travel, and there was no one there except ourselves and Mitchell's cattle pup. We were waiting till after sundown, for I couldn't have travelled in the daylight, anyway. Mitchell had tied a wet towel ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson

... in London, he was stricken with influenza and with subsequent sorrow. The attack was short but sharp—had it lasted Addie would certainly have come to his aid; most of a blight really in its secondary stage. The good ladies his sitters—the ladies with the frizzled hair, with the diamond earrings, with the chins tending to the massive—left for him, at the door of his lodgings, flowers, soup and love, so that with their assistance he pulled through; but his ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James

... bitter-sweet of wetted weeds, the aromatic flavor that shell-life yields, and the smells also of rotten and decaying fish—all these were inextricably blended in the air, that was of the keenness of a frost-blight for freshness, and yet was warm with the softness ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd

... hours She has a voice of gladness and a smile And eloquence of beauty, and she glides Into his darker musings with a mild And healing sympathy, that steals away Their sharpness ere he is aware. When thoughts Of the last, bitter hour come like a blight Over thy spirit, and sad images Of the stern agony and shroud and pall And breathless darkness and the narrow house Make thee to shudder and grow sick at heart,— Go forth under the open sky, and list To Nature's teachings, while from all around— Earth and ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg

... constantly said, is the prevalence of a narrow and mean type of character; the decay of energy; the excessive devotion to a petty ideal of personal comfort; and the systematic attempt to turn our eyes away from the dark side of the world. A smug, placid, contemptible optimism is creeping like a blight over the face of society, and suppressing all the grander aspirations of more energetic times. But in proportion to Fitzjames's general agreement upon the nature of the evil was the vehemence of his dissent from the suggested remedy. ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... measure the coming forces of Freedom. Rosalie Leese, the pioneer white child of California, born in 1838, at Yerba Buena, was the first of countless thousands of free-born American children. In the unpolluted West the breath of slavery shall never blight a single human existence. Old Captain Richardson and Jacob Leese, pioneers of the magic city of San Francisco, gaze upon the beautiful ranks of smiling school-children, in happy troops. They have no regrets, like ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage

... came the blight Of a little thoughtless fight; Then, alas! each passing day Farther ...
— Ballads of Peace in War • Michael Earls

... one glance of undue reproach upon you. Aye, and my very heart would break within me rather than it should foster one sentiment that was not love for you, and yet, feeling thus, I was driving you to ruin and wreck. Instinct taught you the terrible truth, and you would blight your life rather than not suit the whims of a thoughtless old man. How can I ever look you in the face again? Oh! my dearest child, this indeed is too much—too much—too much" and sobbing violently, the bowed head, with its snow-white locks, fell on ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera

... hearts and make the whole world bright. 'Tis this that thralls my heart in love's delight, Not thy clear face of beauty glorious; For he who harbours virtue, still will choose To love what neither years nor death can blight. ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds

... four thousand millions of property specially protected by law. It was for the existing generation of the governing class in the South to vote themselves into bankruptcy and penury. Far beyond this, it was in their judgment to blight their land with ignorance and indolence, to be followed by crime and anarchy. Their point of view was so radically different from that held by a large number of Northern people that it left no common ground for action,—scarcely, ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... unsparing discharge of their duty in searching out and punishing the guilty. "It is come to our ears," says the bull, "that numbers of both sexes do not avoid to have intercourse with the infernal fiends, and that by their sorceries they afflict both man and beast; that they blight the marriage-bed, destroy the births of women, and the increase of cattle; they blast the corn on the ground, the grapes of the vineyard, the fruits of the trees, the grass and herbs of the field." For which reasons ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott

... the dullness of the prophecy, the evident suffering of his mother, and the equally evident though silent contempt of his father, we need not wonder that Richard grew up in what seemed to him a conviction that religion was worse than a thing of nought, was an evil phantom, with a terrible power to blight; a miasm that had steamed up from the foul marshes of the world, before man was at home in it, or yet acquainted with the beneficent laws of Nature. It was not merely a hopeless task to pray to a power which could ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald

... air of finality. He was to leave her here, she said. He was to go back to his own country. How badly had his reception fared so far? Why not, then, leave Mexico to ingratitude, and have done? The romantic land of roses was notoriously a blight to hopes. Why should he seek to thrive despite the mysterious curse that seemed to hover over all ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle

... a woman, who has cursed my life, blasted my prospects, and ruined my youth; a woman who gained my early affection only to blight and wither it; a woman who should be nearer to me and dearer than all else, and yet who is further than the uttermost depths of hell from me in sympathy or feeling; a woman that I should cleave to, but from whom I have been flying, ready to face shame, disgrace, oblivion, even that death which ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte

... enquire and give such information as his local knowledge enables him to supply. Or again, a foreign country will sometimes make regulations which hinder the importation of English products. English oats may, for instance, be affected with a blight which Italy fears may infect her crops if she allows their importation. It may then become the duty of the British Embassy at Rome to make arrangements with the Italian Government in order that English farmers may not suffer by losing the ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,

... whole connections and evolution. At first it was merely learned that we had to do with an unstable, adolescent girl who had engaged for apparently no purpose whatever in false self-accusations which would naturally blight her career. ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy

... destruction had overtaken him. And Berenice had been crushed by the divine vengeance which had so deservedly fallen on him. He groaned in anguish, seeming to see how she had perished through the blight of his passion. Not by fire, O God! Not by fire! How long would it be possible to breathe in this stifling reek, heavy with unspeakable odors? It was his crime that had brought her to this death. He, a man set apart and consecrated to the work of God, had ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates

... "O thou eternal one; whose presence blight All space doth occupy—all motion guide— Thou from primeval nothingness didst call First chaos, then existence. Lord, on thee Eternity had its foundation: all Sprung forth from thee—of light, joy, harmony, Sole origin: all life, all beauty thine. Thy word created all, and doth create; Thy splendor ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren

... industries are the ones occupying most attention, the workers in the Department of Agriculture have not been unmindful of other native nut-bearing plants, such as the native black walnuts, the hickories and the chestnut up to the time of the very destructive attack of blight. The chestnut, however, has not passed out of our sphere of activity, because at the present time, (and I think you will see tomorrow at the Bell Station, some interesting possibilities in the future of chestnut culture in this country), the Chinese forms, which are ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting • Various

... around the unhappy island. The first symptoms of the dread potato disease showed themselves in the autumn of 1845, and even that year there was much suffering, though a trifle to what was to follow. Many remedies were tried, both to stop the blight and save the crops, but all alike proved unavailing. The next year the potatoes seemed to promise unusually well, and the people, with characteristic hopefulness, believed that their trouble was over. The summer, however, was very ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless

... he knows no guest— No hand will touch him, none! Nor woman mild nor happy child Greets him when day is done; And he walks the night, a poison blight, An outcast ...
— Selected Poems • William Francis Barnard

... at the birthday now, by the light of what happened afterwards, I am half inclined to think that the cursed Diamond must have cast a blight on the whole company. I plied them well with wine; and being a privileged character, followed the unpopular dishes round the table, and whispered to the company confidentially, "Please to change your mind and try it; for I know it will do you good." Nine times out of ten they changed their ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins

... to blight the fruits of my students. A faith- [1] ful student may even sometimes feel the need of physical help, and occasionally receive it from others; but the less this is required, the better it is for ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy

... when a sceptical philosophy came down like a blight, and destroyed the bloom of his art and faith, he thus recognized that growing knowledge was an essential condition of growing goodness. Pompilia shone with a glory that mere knowledge could not give (if there were such a ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones

... thin clumps of birch, poplar, and spruce—all of them (but the spruce especially) ragged and stunted in growth. For the rest this burnt land resembled a neglected pasture, being carpeted for the most part with moss and blueberry. A mysterious blight lay over all, and appeared to extend to the ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... "O King of blight and sorrow, send me not away till I have brought back the light and joy that will make your dark home bright and beautiful again. Let me call back to the desolate gardens the fair forms that are gone, and their soft voices blessing you will bring to your breast ...
— Flower Fables • Louisa May Alcott

... can parents co-operate to check the looseness and rudeness and sinful practice that blight ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall

... hyperbolical profession of a passion which, however well acted, was not half so deeply grounded as he had led the unsuspecting object of it to believe. That he really loved her was to some extent true. That his love was earnest and pure, such as the blight of coldness and inconstancy would render painful, was not true,—far from it. He had sought her hand, not to lay at her feet the offering of a hallowed affection, but to realize the object we have before mentioned,—to enable him, by the possession of ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton

... The backwaters, creeks and side channels of both are exceedingly beautiful, and here one can get a glimpse of the fertility that must have belonged to Mesopotamia when it was a network of streams and when the forests abounded within its borders. Centuries of neglect and the blight of the unspeakable Turk have dealt hardly with this country. It is indeed a Paradise Lost and it will be many a long day before it ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell

... fire; and no matter how quickly or how far removed, no matter how heavy the dews that empearl it, how fresh and cool the wind that sweeps over it, how bright the sun that feeds its pulses,—the curled petals are never smoothed, the hot blasts leaves its ineffaceable blight. To me, the thought of marriage comes no more than to one who knows death sits waiting only for the setting of the sun, to claim his own. That phase of life is as inaccessible and uninviting to me, as Antartic circumpolar lands; and even in thought, I have no temptation to explore it. My future ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... own bitterness," he answered. "Don't pay the least attention to me. You mustn't let moodiness of mine cast a blight upon your high spirits." ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various

... it seems! Alas, alas! What is this thing, that they call death? Oh, would That I, this day, the mystery could solve, And my defenceless head withdraw from Fate's Relentless hate! I still am young, and still Feel all the blight and misery of age, Which I so dread; and distant far it seems; But, ah, how little different from age, The flower of my years!"—"We both were born," She said, "to weep; unhappy were our lives, And heaven took pleasure in our sufferings." "Oh if my eyes with tears," I added, ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi

... answered the dark man impressively, "who return to blight the living with the spectacle of our ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... Dutch art died before the subject had appeared. It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that the subject really began to make itself felt, and, like the potato blight or phylloxera, it soon became clear that it had come to stay. I think Greuze was the first to conceive a picture after the fashion of a scene in a play—I mean those domestic dramas which he invented, and in which ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore

... during the earlier half of her life, and that everything which she published during the forty-three years which preceded her death lowered her reputation. Yet we have no reason to think that at the time when her faculties ought to have been in their maturity they were smitten with any blight. In The Wanderer we catch now and then a gleam of her genius. Even in the Memoirs of her father there is no trace of dotage. They are very bad; but they are so, as it seems to us, not from a decay of power, but from ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... passional value of a peacetime year, was here at hand, an ever-ministering angel to them and to their hero; yet they never included him and Flora in one thought together but to banish it, though with tender reverence. Behind a labored disguise of inattention they jealously watched lest the faintest blight or languor should mar, in him, the perfect bloom of that invincible faith to, and faith in, the faithless Anna, which alone could satisfy their worship of him. Care for these watchers brought the two much together, and in every private moment they talked of the third one; Flora still fine in ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable

... She would hate you! And I will tell her! Ay, I will! You will be respectable, will you? A model husband! Wait till I tell her my story—till I send some of these poor women to tell theirs. You kill my love; I'll blight and ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke

... creation an inexplicable shadow. If we were made merely to be happy, why this hostility all around us? Why these sharp oppositions of pain and difficulty? Why these writhing nerves, these aching hearts, and over-laden eyes? Why the chill of disappointment, the shudder of remorse, the crush and blight of hope? Why athwart the horizon flicker so many shapes of misery and sin? Why appear these sad spectacles of painful dying chambers, and weary sick-beds?—these countless tomb-stones, too-ghastly witness to death ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin

... to myself: 'I will ravage and riot in my Kingdoms. I will rage like the Caesars, and be a withering blight where I pass like Sennacherib, and wallow in soft delights like Sardanapalus. I will build me a palace, vast as a city, in which to strut and parade my Monarchy before the Heavens, with stones of pure molten gold, and rough frontispiece of diamond, and cupola of amethyst, and pillars ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel

... sure. There is still mademoiselle, with her new-formed friends in Paris—may a pestilence blight them all! There are still the lands of La Vauvraye to lose. The only true end to our troubles as they stand at present lies in your marrying this ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini

... the vendors of beauty, We the purveyors for hell; The carnal bliss of a purchased kiss And the pleasures that blight, we sell. God pity us; God ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... was left, Which Indra's hand in seven had cleft:(213) "No fault, O Lord of Gods, is thine; The blame herein is only mine. But for one grace I fain would pray, As thou hast reft this hope away. This bud, O Indra, which a blight Has withered ere it saw the light— From this may seven fair spirits rise To rule the regions of the skies. Be theirs through heaven's unbounded space On shoulders of the winds to race, My children, drest in heavenly forms, Far-famed as Maruts, Gods of storms. One God to ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI

... conversation had been prospering hitherto, if, at Holy Mass or jovial supper board, Laurence so much as breathed a question concerning the subject next his heart, an instant blight passed over the gaiety of his companions. Fear momently wiped every other expression from their faces, and they answered with lame evasion, or more ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett

... her where the bait is worth taking. Let us not mince matters, but admit between ourselves that we are sending Frances to court to make a good marriage. No one less than a rich duke or a wealthy earl will satisfy me. If you wish to allow a mere jealous fear in your heart to blight her prospects, she will be the sufferer, and hereafter may thank your folly for ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major

... very wet summer, and everything went wrong in the country round. The hay had hardly been got in, when the haystacks were floated bodily down to the sea by an inundation; the vines were cut to pieces with the hail; the corn was all killed by a black blight; only in the Treasure Valley, as usual, all was safe. As it had rain when there was rain nowhere else, so it had sun when there was sun nowhere else. Everybody came to buy corn at the farm, and went away pouring maledictions on the Black ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester

... home on branch in morning light, * But shakes my very frame with sorrow's killing might: No lover sigheth for his love or gladdeth heart * To meet his mate, but breeds in me redoubled blight I bear my plaint to one who has no ruth for me, * Ah me, how Love can part man's mortal ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... o'er the spirit of my dream. The wanderer was alone as heretofore, The beings which surrounded him were gone, Or were at war with him; he was a mark For blight and desolation, compassed round With hatred and contention; pain was mixed In all which was served up to him, until, Like to the Pontic monarch of old days, He fed on poisons, and they had no power, But were a kind of nutriment; he lived Through that which had been death to many men, And made ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various

... looked contented and prosperous. Mingling with them were teamsters, many as neatly dressed as their masters, though some wore blue-jean and saffron-colored shirts; and there were railroad-hands, mechanics, and store-keepers. All of them were cheerful; a few good years, free from harvest frost and blight, had made a marked improvement ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss

... would have complained about their war-time coffee, made from chicory and acorns, had they once tasted the Java product. Yet I was assured that this was the choicest coffee grown in Java. I might add that, as a result of a blight which all but ruined the industry in the '70s, fifty-two per cent of the total acreage of coffee plantations in the island is now planted with the African species, called Coffea robusta, and thirteen ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell

... water. Nature herself Makes war on her own loveliness and slays Her children like Medea. Nay but, my Lord, Look closer still. Why in this damask here It is summer always, and no winter's tooth Will ever blight these blossoms. For every ell I paid a piece of gold. Red gold, and good, The ...
— A Florentine Tragedy—A Fragment • Oscar Wilde

... worse, the islands offering a dead-level of mediocrity which I have never seen equalled except in the workingmen's cottages of Ampere, New Jersey, the home of the General Electric Company.] Add to the geographic sameness the universal blight of white civilization with its picture post-cards, professional hula and ooh-la dancers, souvenir and gift shops, automat restaurants, movie-palaces, tourists, artists and explorers, and you have some idea of the boredom which had settled down over ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock

... bit of woods—and Jims loved the woods, though he scarcely ever saw them. Then, past the pines, were roses just breaking into June bloom—roses in such profusion as Jims hadn't known existed, with dear little paths twisting about among the bushes. It seemed to be a garden where no frost could blight or rough wind blow. When rain fell it must fall very gently. Past the roses one saw a green lawn, sprinkled over now with the white ghosts of dandelions, and dotted with ornamental trees. The trees grew so thickly that they almost hid the house ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... retract what you insinuated had become of it? I'll willingly make it up to you, if it takes every cent I earn; but I'll not have a blight upon my reputation, ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa

... demented Eunice prove to be a wiser prophet than the hopeful, irrepressible Earl; should the good people of America, North and South, grow busy, confused or irresolute and fail, to the subversion of their ideals, to firmly entrench the Negro in his political rights, the denial of which, and the blight incident thereto, more than all other factors, cause the Ethiopian in America to feel that his ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs

... something which is not a means to the attainment of happiness, which is happiness itself. It is an inner sympathy of hearts and souls and minds, a perfect union of all that is most worthy in the natures of man and woman; it is a plant so sensitive that a breath of unkindness will hurt it and blight its beauty, and yet it is a tree so strong that neither time nor tempest can overthrow it when it has taken root; and if you would tear it out and destroy it, the place where it grew is as deep and as wide as a grave. ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford

... Josephus, the mandrake is tamed. {152b} These passages prove that the classical peoples had the same extraordinary superstitions about women as the Bushmen and Red Indians. Indeed Pliny {152c} describes a magical manner of defending the crops from blight, by aid of women, which is actually practised in America by ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang

... Colonel Preston's recollections cast a suggestive light upon the causes which rendered unhappy the lad's early life and tended to blight his prospective hopes. Although mixing with members of the best families of the province, and naturally endowed with hereditary and native pride,—fostered by the indulgence of wealth and the consciousness of intellectual superiority,—Edgar ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe

... is shattered, her dream dispelled,—now, it is too late! Gentlemen, my client's answer is—and it is one which will only command your increased respect:—"No. He has broken my heart, undermined my belief in human nature, cast a blight upon my existence. (Miss M. sobs audibly, here, and JAB. is visibly affected.) Much as I should like to recover my old belief in him, much as it would be to my worldly advantage to marry a wealthy Bengali barrister with talents and influence ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey

... in the air. Beauty—the arts— are to give place to barbarity. In a world of war, how can we taste life delicately? We cannot. Already, my friend, the blight has fallen upon you. Your nerves are harsh and jangled. I think"—she folded her hands and sank back on her green cushions—"I shall make ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale

... with her weary smile, Just as of old; She looked around a little while, And shivered at the cold. Her passing touch was death to all, Her passing look a blight; She made the white rose-petals fall, And turned the red ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various

... self to turn to: my natural unenslaved feelings with which to communicate in moments of loneliness. There would be recesses in my mind which would be only mine, to which he never came, and sentiments growing there fresh and sheltered which his austerity could never blight, nor his measured warrior-march trample down: but as his wife—at his side always, and always restrained, and always checked—forced to keep the fire of my nature continually low, to compel it to burn inwardly and never ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte

... and rather than forgive such a sin, he would blight his own life and break the heart of the wife he adored. Such was the state of mind in which the master of Harcourt Manor had remained since the sad night when his only child had gone off to be married at a neighbouring church to the young ...
— Little Frida - A Tale of the Black Forest • Anonymous

... himself to have all been treated "like dogs," begged me to give him my opinion as to what course he had better pursue; for he must, in the first instance, report the whole circumstances to the king, and could not march at once. This was a blight on our prospects, and appeared very vexatious, in the event of Budja waiting for an answer, which, considering Mtesa had ordered his Wakungu to accompany us all the way to Gani, might stop our ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke

... (not two) may in a single season produce a billion. And at last when autumn comes, won back from the cold god to his hot mother, they know love and wedlock, and die like all married things. These are the Aphides—sometimes unprettily called plant-lice, and vaguely spoken of by the uninformed as "blight"—and they nourish themselves on vegetable juices, that thin green blood which ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson

... ministering in the service of song in God's house. Scripturally this seems incontestable; and as to the teaching of experience, we should hardly know how to name any custom which has brought a sorer blight upon the life of the church, or a heavier repression upon its spiritual energy, than the habit, now so general, of introducing unsanctified, unconverted, and even notoriously worldly persons into the choirs of ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon

... man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right, And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various

... generations back, a single case of feeble-mindedness, nor of disease that would undermine the nervous organization. Close scrutiny does not reveal a single assignable cause. She came, as an accident, to blight an otherwise ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague

... just what she wanted. It would help show the listening Abner that the wearing of the social uniform was nothing very formidable after all, and did not necessarily doom one's moral and spiritual fibre to utter blight and ruin. ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller

... a few strokes in the right direction, I asked her to get me a cigar from an inside pocket of my coat, which was on the seat in front of her. Then came the blight to our bliss. She looked in the wrong pocket and instead of producing a cigar, she extracted ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates

... earth withhold her goodly root, Let mildew blight the rye, Give to the worm the orchard's fruit, The ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck

... the Deanery of St. Paul's, that frowning and melancholy house in a backwater of London's jarring tide, where the dust collects, and sunlight has a struggle to make two ends meet, and cold penetrates like a dagger, and fog hangs like a pall, and the blight of ages clings to stone and brick, to window and woodwork, with an adhesive mournfulness which suggests the hatchment of Melpomene. Even the hand of Grinling Gibbons at the porch does not prevent one from recalling ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie

... days of her life;' an accident which, in a fatal hour of weakness, she concealed; an accident which threw her into the power of those who, in hatred, or under the impulse of a guilty passion, sought to blight her peace, and ruin her virtue. That love which you doubt, in the place of a higher principle, saved her from guilt, and only left her a prey to the most protracted agony. Read this letter—it is from the man who vainly sought to gain her love, by wringing ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton

... of heaven," replied Mistress Nutter, "and devote yourself to Satan. You will then be baptised in his name, and become one of his worshippers. You will have power to afflict all persons with bodily ailments—to destroy cattle—blight corn—burn dwellings—and, if you be so minded, kill those you hate, or who molest you. Do you desire ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth

... good with it. I have hired men to seek out good objects for me, and I have tried my best to find for myself causes and institutions and persons who might be helped without hindering others as worthy, but sometimes it seems as if every dollar of my money carried a blight with it, and infected whoever touched it with a moral pestilence. It has reached a sum where the wildest profligate couldn't spend it, and it grows and grows. It's as if it were a rising flood that had touched my lips, and would go over my head before I could reach the shore. ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells

... them had had crop failures before. All of them had seen the labour of months go for naught in the blight of an evening's frost, or the sweep of a prairie fire. So here on this virgin isle, in soil whose sod had never been turned, they sowed from the bins of the slumbering ship. Wheat and oats and flax, brought from the Argentina plains; potatoes, squash and beet-root; even beans and ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon

... comes nearer to it than anything. How much more fertile a Nature, at least, has Grecian mythology its root in than English literature! Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted, before the fancy and imagination were affected with blight; and which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigor is unabated. All other literatures endure only as the elms which overshadow our houses; but this is like the great dragon-tree of the Western Isles, as old as mankind, and, whether ...
— Walking • Henry David Thoreau

... of temperance are not contented with taking the property of their fellow-men as they often do in different ways, they are not even satisfied with inflicting bodily injury and suffering upon those who oppose their ways, but they would blight their reputation, and this, too, is no small injury, for in the ...
— The Story of a Dark Plot - or Tyranny on the Frontier • A.L.O. C. and W.W. Smith

... levity into frigid and brittle sarcasm and gay defiance. For a while, accordingly, the feelings of the observer were deeply moved. Yet this did not make the character of Stephanie less detestable. The blight remains upon it—and always must remain—that it repels the interest of the heart. The added blight likewise rests upon it (though this is of less consequence to a spectator), that it is burdened with moral sophistry. Vicious conduct in a woman, according to Stephanie's logic, is not more culpable ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter

... afternoons, there is a small mounted lens in a leather loop alongside, which has often to be used. The compass {22} itself is so placed that you can see it well while either sitting or standing up, or when lying at full length on the deck, with the back against a pillow propped by the mizen mast, the blight sun or moon overhead, and a turn or two of the mainsheet cast about your body to keep the sleepy steersman from rolling over into the water, as shown ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor

... on its haughty height, And came to know its starry joys, Its sudden blackness, and the withering blight Of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various

... the Thing of every sinister soul and of the weak and the unbalanced, mystics and carnivores of humanity alike; for well I knew that, once loosed, not any nation could hold this devil-god for long and that swiftly its blight would spread! ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt

... "Legislation and education. Legislation for the old and hardened, and education for the young and tender. I would tell the schoolboys and schoolgirls that alcohol will destroy the framework of their beautiful bodies, and that cruelty to any of God's living creatures will blight and destroy ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders

... lest I myself mislead By blind desire wherewith my heart is torn, E'en while I speak away the moments speed, To me and pity which alike were sworn. What shade so cruel as to blight the seed Whence the wish'd fruitage should so soon be born? What beast within my fold has leap'd to feed? What wall is built between the hand and corn? Alas! I know not, but, if right I guess, Love to such joyful hope has only led To plunge my weary life in worse ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch

... infinite variety of interests in the mundane mind to become one of the earthly viceroys of God. And the chosen were few. Nor had Warner, consciously or not, been indifferent to the sacredness of his wardship. Never for a moment had it felt the blight of his wild and often gross and sordid life. He had been passionate but never sensual, romantic and primal, but never immoral. He had consoled thousands for the penance of living, and he had written much that would ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton

... till breakfast for my contemplation. I heard the faint reveille at Camp Thomas, but to me it was a call for more bed, and I pushed and pulled the grain-sack until I was able to distribute myself and in a manner doze, shivering in my overcoat. Not the rising of the sun upon this blight of sand, nor the appearance of a cattle herd, and both black curly and yellow driving it among its dust clouds, warmed my frozen attention as I lay in a sort of spell. I saw with apathy the mountains, extraordinary in the crystal prism of the air, ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister

... without limit, extending as it does along the St. Lawrence, Lake Erie, and Lake Ontario, to Windsor, with a vast expanse of country to the north and west. The hops, which are an article of recent cultivation, are of very superior quality, and have hitherto been perfectly free from blight. ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird

... to-day a very long walk with my father through some of the most beautiful ways hereabouts; the day was cold with an iron, windy sky, and only glorified now and then with autumn sunlight. For it is fully autumn with us, with a blight already over the greens, and a keen wind in the morning that makes one rather timid of one's tub when it finds ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... seemed piteous enough that her life with her parents should so soon have become a mere matter of duty and endurance, but there was a feeling of perpetually treading on eggs in the Barrington house. Kate could have screamed with exasperation as one eventless day after another dawned and the blight of caution and apprehension was never lifted from her mother and Martha. She writhed with shame at the sight of her mother's cajolery of the tyrant she served—and loved. To have spoken out once, recklessly, to have entered a wordy combat without rancor ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie

... [crushingly]. We will omit tradesman-like references! What Lord Hawcastle wished me to impress on you is not only that you will ruin yourself, but put a blight upon the life of the young lady whom you are pleased to consider your ward. We make this suggestion because we conceive that you have a preposterous sentimental interest yourself in ...
— The Man from Home • Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson

... no untimely blight fall on thy garland of love, no thorns be found with its glowing blossoms, no canker-worm of jealousy feed on ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz

... thousand millions of property specially protected by law. It was for the existing generation of the governing class in the South to vote themselves into bankruptcy and penury. Far beyond this, it was in their judgment to blight their land with ignorance and indolence, to be followed by crime and anarchy. Their point of view was so radically different from that held by a large number of Northern people that it left no common ground for action,—scarcely, indeed, an opportunity for ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... and during two following seasons, New South Wales suffered a serious drought, which increased in severity. Rivers were exhausted, and their beds left dry. Not only the want of rain was felt, but a withering blight, travelling in a defined current over the cultivated districts, cut off their harvests. In two years the cultivation of wheat in Van Diemen's Land increased from twenty to thirty thousand acres, and the average price of ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West

... preconceptions or prejudices, there can be but one answer to that question. Oriental superstition cast its blight upon the fair field of science, whatever compensation it may or may not have brought in other fields. But we must be on our guard lest we overestimate or incorrectly estimate this influence. Posterity, in glancing backward, is always prone to stamp any given age of the past ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... expedition which five of us made into the heart of the nearer mountainous district, attended by some mounted natives. Mr. K., from whose house we started, has the finest mango grove on the islands. It is a fine foliaged tree, but is everywhere covered with a black blight, which gives the groves the appearance of being in mourning, as the tough, glutinous film covers all the older leaves. The mango is an exotic fruit, and people think a great deal of it, and send boxes of mangoes as presents to their ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird

... claims our tender, grateful, gay delight; Winter our sympathy and sacred fear; And sure the Hearts that pay not Pity's rite O'er wide calamity; that careless hear Creation's wail, neglect, amid her blight, THE SOLEMN ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward

... Fifteenth Century: of which they possessed about fifteen hundred." This intelligence recruited my spirits; and I began to look around with eagerness. But alas! although the crop was plentiful, a deadly blight had prevailed. In other words, there was number without choice: quantity rather than quality. Yet I will not be ill-natured; for, on reaching the third of these rooms, and the last in the suite, Monsieur Thiebaut placed before me the following ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... along the waters of the Cumberland, the lair of moonshiner and feudsman. The knight is a moonshiner's son, and the heroine a beautiful girl perversely christened "The Blight." Two impetuous young Southerners' fall under the spell of "The Blight's" charms and she learns what a large part jealousy and pistols have in the love making of ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman

... not thought it capable. 'That is so to an extent of which you do not dream. No man likes to have his hand forced, especially by one whom he regards—may I say it?—as a possible rival. But I will tell you this much. If the blight which has fallen on my life is likely to continue, I would not wish,— God forbid that I should wish to join her fate with mine,—not for all that the world ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh

... traitor. Southern sympathizers declare that such a proceeding would be an abominable crime: the steadiest, most thorough, and most confiding adherents of the North believe, that, whatever else it might be, it would, at any rate, be most deplorable,—an ugly blight-spot upon laurels won arduously and gloriously, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various

... for another morn And another night In this soul-sick blight; And I wonder much As I sit, why such A ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy

... and despair swept over Ireland when it was at last announced that Crowe had sold the pass. For some days the people were in the same dazed and helpless condition of mind that followed the potato blight of '46. In that terrible year one of the strange and most universally observed phenomena was that the people looked, for days after the advent of the blight that brought the certainty of hunger and death, silent and motionless and apathetic. And so it was now, when there came a blight, less ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various

... bud," thought the good woman, "but it may wither even without the blight of fashion; so I will try to secure for ...
— Be Courteous • Mrs. M. H. Maxwell

... handsome incomes until about twenty years ago, when the blight, more devastating than the cotton boll weevil, came with destruction as swift as that which befell Sennacherib. I heard the story of an old plantation near Lipa, whose high-bred Castilian owner once lived in splendor, his imported horses gay in harness made of ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe

... guilty, and governed all by terror. Thus did that state, oppressed by slavery, rue bitterly its insane mirth. Within our memory, when victorious Sylla commanded Damasippus and his crew, who had grown up a blight to the republic, to be put to the sword's edge, who did not praise the deed? Who did not exclaim earnestly that men, factious and infamous, who had torn the republic by their tumults, were slain justly? And yet that deed was the commencement of great havoc. For, when one envied the city mansion ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert

... Bulls formulated against the witches who were denounced, not for moral offences, but for the destruction of fertility. The celebrated Decree of Innocent VIII, which in 1488 let loose the full force of the Church against the witches, says that 'they blight the marriage bed, destroy the births of women and the increase of cattle; they blast the corn on the ground, the grapes of the vineyard, the fruits of the trees, the grass and herbs of the field'. ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray

... tree or flower; But, if I had, I beg to say The blight, the wind, the sun, or shower Would soon have withered it away. I've dearly loved my Uncle John, From childhood to the present hour, And yet he will go living on— I would he ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various

... no tyranny of caste, but we all live in peace and love as the sisters and brothers in one great household. My eye deceives me if like this live you. You are divided into envious, brawling factions, each one of which tries to injure, and blight the reputation of the other. If one of you fall upon evil times he is left without the sympathy and succour of the others. In politics and in social grades you are divided, and in every respect you are such that I should ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins

... harangues of Fox, the Quaker, who sojourned among them with gratifying results. Their prejudice against towns continued, and one must walk far to visit them, with only marks on the forest trees to guide. They were inveterately contented, and having emancipated themselves from the blight of the Model Constitution, rapidly became prosperous. The only effect of Messrs. Locke and Shaftesbury's scheme of an aristocratic Utopia was to make the settlers conscious of their strength and devoted to their freedom. Indeed, the North Carolinians were in great part men who ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne

... suffered much from a mysterious "disease" for the last few years, and the most careful study has failed to find any fungus blight or insect at the bottom of this. We have had summer after summer of severe and long continued drought. It is now believed that this has weakened the trees so that they could not withstand the winter cold and have been "winter killed." With the drought we had several winters of infrequent ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard

... civilization. These pages are written in no spirit of vindictiveness, for all who give the subject consideration must concede that far too serious is the condition of that civilized government in which the spirit of unrestrained outlawry constantly increases in violence, and casts its blight over a continually growing area of territory. We plead not for the colored people alone, but for all victims of the terrible injustice which puts men and women to death without form of law. During the year 1894, there were 132 persons executed in the United States by due form of ...
— The Red Record - Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States • Ida B. Wells-Barnett

... gypsies came the oldest of them all, who was the King's great-grandmother, and she looked from the angry parents to the unhappy lovers and said, "You can blight the tree and make the lantern dark; nevertheless you cannot extinguish the flower and the light of love. And till these things lift the curse and are seen again united among you, there will be no Lords in Gay ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon

... a clump of silver birches bent over with the strain of last year's snow; and all along, near by the water, beech and basswood, blue-gum and pin-oak, ash, and even chestnut flourishing still, in defiance of blight. Nor have I ever seen such sheets of water-lilies as starred the swampy thickets, in which elder and hazels and every conceivable bush and shrub and giant grass and cane make wildernesses pathless indeed save to the mink ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne

... discredited underlay the fundamental views and principles of Puritanism. The early records of our General Court are thickly strown with appointments of Fast-Days that the people might discover the especial occasion of God's anger toward them, manifested in the blight of some expected harvest, or in a scourge upon the cattle in the field. Some among us who claim to hold unreduced or softened the old ancestral faith have been twice in late years convened in our State-House, by especial call, to legislate upon the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various

... curbed by the reflection of possible evil. Ronald would have served Maurice at all hazards, and by all means in his power, or out of his power. He was expressing to his mother the chagrin he felt at the sad position of his friend, and his fear that it would throw a blight over his ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie

... scarcely seventeen when the Plague swept over Kennons. That mysterious blight, rising in the orient, traveling darkly and surely unto the remotest West, laid its blackened hand upon ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee

... how this fatal foolishness casts its blight over his entire character. Reckoning without God, of course, he has no sense of Divine ownership. Quite naturally, therefore, he thinks because he possesses a farm, he owns a farm. Possession and ownership mean exactly the same thing to a man who begins by ignoring God. When you hear this man ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell

... war, and slip right back into our old ways,—our old peaceful ways,—and let men go on ruling the world, and war will come again and again. Men have done their very best,—I am not feeling hard to them,—but I know, and the thoughtful men know, that men alone can never free the world from the blight of war; and if we go on, too gentle and sweet to assert ourselves, knitting, nursing, bringing children into the world, it will surely come to pass, when we are old, perhaps, and not able to do anything,—but suffer,—that war will come ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung

... free delirium! O, Heaven! I struggled with it, but it mastered me! I fought against it, but it beat me down! I prayed, I wept, but Heaven was deaf to me; And every tear rolled backward on my heart, To blight and poison! ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker

... "you blight everything—even this smiling landscape you would turn to gloom. Does not this morn awaken a happier train of thoughts within your mind? With me it makes amends for want of sleep, effaces resentment, and banishes every black misgiving. 'Tis a joyous thing thus ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth

... is a blight of the gravest character upon the local industry of the inhabitants, and it is a suicidal and unstatesmanlike policy that crushes and extinguishes all enterprise. What Englishman would submit to such a prying and humiliating position? And still it is ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... discovery. All that remained, therefore, was to return and report the success of their enterprise to the governor at Panama. Pizarro acquiesced in the reasonableness of this demand. He had now penetrated nine degrees farther than any former navigator in these southern seas, and, instead of the blight which, up to this hour, had seemed to hang over his fortunes, he could now return in triumph to his countrymen. Without hesitation, therefore, he prepared to retrace his course, and ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott

... heard her looked shocked. But that was the tone of everyone of importance in the dark years that followed the Napoleonic wars. That is just one survivor of the old tradition. Another is Blight the solicitor, who goes about bewailing the fact that we writers are "holding out false hopes of higher agricultural wages after the war." But these are both exceptions. They are held to be remarkable people even ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells

... has happened, to ask any of my friends to receive her. Naturally, she shrinks from speaking of that terrible time, but I understand that she spent no less than three nights alone in the mountains with him. And that fact in itself would be more than sufficient to blight any girl's career from a social standpoint. I often think that the rules of our modern etiquette are very rigid, though I know well that we cannot afford to disregard them." Again came that soft, regretful ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell

... had been some ghastly blight over the whole affair. Why, why had Marcia appeared pale and distressed? And what was far more puzzling, why had she begged him not to show the photographs of the mine upon Penfield's request? Was it that she did not wish ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

... body and mind; and the instilling of those first principles of duty and religion which do not need to be taught out of any books. Even if you do not permanently injure the young brain and mind by prematurely overtasking them,—even if you do not permanently blight the bodily health and break the mind's cheerful spring, you gain nothing. Your child at fourteen years old is not a bit farther advanced in his education than a child who began his years after him; and the entire result of your stupid driving has been to overcloud some days which should ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various

... I determined to go and call upon the editor of the journal for which, in happier days, before the blight of "His Wife's Deceased Sister" rested upon me, I used most frequently to write, and, having frankly explained my condition to him, to ask his advice. The editor was a good man, and had always been my friend. He listened ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton

... for once in my life—for once in my life!' It was in the dark, in a carriage, coming back from a hunt ball. Eleven miles we had to drive! And then suddenly the bitterness of the endless poverty, of the endless acting—it fell on me like a blight, it spoilt everything. Yes, I had to realize that I had been spoilt even for the good time when it came. And I burst out crying and I cried and I cried for the whole eleven miles. Just imagine me crying! And just imagine me making a fool of the ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford

... have sometimes shifted places. I was unable to divine why he fevered me so much. Must I say it?—He had ceased to entertain me. Instead of a comic I found him a tragic spectacle; and his exuberant anticipations, his bursting hopes that fed their forcing-bed with the blight and decay of their predecessors, his transient fits of despair after a touch at my pulses, and exclamation of 'Oh, Richie, Richie, if only I had my boy up and well!'—assuming that nothing but my tardy recovery stood in the way of our contentment—were ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... had cried in a smothered shriek. "Get thee gone, accursed! Even now thou mayest have brought the curse upon me also. A creature born a hunchback comes on earth with the blight of Jehovah's wrath upon him. Go far! Go as far as thy limbs will carry thee! Let no man come near enough to thee to see it! If thou go far away before it is known, it will be forgotten that ...
— The Little Hunchback Zia • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... in silence, the corners of her mouth wilting, he would have declared, had he the words, like a field flower in the hands of a picnicker. Marylin could droop that way, so suddenly and so whitely that almost a second could blight her. ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst

... those who do not live there to realise the cross between canker and blight that has settled on England for the last couple of years. The effects of it are felt throughout the Empire, but at headquarters we taste the stuff in the very air, just as one tastes iodoform in the cups and bread-and-butter of a hospital-tea. So far as one can come at things in the present ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling

... had been wont to drive him from London at the approach of November. When the first fog blackened against his windows, he merely lit the lamp and wrote on, indifferent. Two years ago he had declared that a London November would fatally blight his soul; that he must flee to a land of sunshine, or perish. There was little time, now, to ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing

... acquaintance with those among whom I had dwelt, contempt by respect, and dislike by the warmest, most grateful affection. I had scorned her poverty, and hated her turbulence. The first I now knew to be no poverty of soil, of natural resources, of mind, talent, or energy, but the effect of a blight, permitted to rest alike on the land and people, through the selfishness of an unjust, crooked policy, that made their welfare of no account in its calculations, nor would stretch forth a hand to deliver them from the dark dominion of Popery. Their turbulence was the natural fruit ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth

... you we appropriate one hundred dollars to put with the Butterfly's money for Mr. Munroe," said William Blight, and Charles had lost the ...
— All Aboard; or, Life on the Lake - A Sequel to "The Boat Club" • Oliver Optic

... her imperious states, she froze, and never thawed again. She put her hands to her head one night, uttered a cry, stiffened, lay in that attitude certain hours, and died. And he had got no compensation from her in Money, yet. Blight and Murrain ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens

... to London, some blight had fallen on the inhabitants, death seemed everywhere, not seen but hinted at. Stray recollections of weird stories by H. G. Wells passed through the mind of Jones. He recalled the city of London when the Martians had done with ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole

... learning: a Royal University, founded in 1733, a medical and law school, and chairs of all the natural sciences. In spite of their liberal purposes and capabilities, however, there is a blight hanging over them. Pupils enlist cautiously and reluctantly. Among other schools there is a Royal Seminary for girls, scarcely more than a name, a free school of sculpture and painting, and a mercantile school, with a few private institutions of learning. There is a fairly good museum of natural ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou

... and early autumn months attention should be given to the spraying of plants for blight and for injurious insects. The potato is commonly affected by a fungous disease which causes the stalks to blacken and die before the tubers have matured. This disease may be prevented in large measure by the use of a fungicide known as Bordeaux mixture. ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education

... my departure to-night. The cause hangs upon it. A blight on my evil luck!" he cried. "Were Colonel Myddelton at home, I should not be fleeing from my own country empty-handed. I shall be writing to him most of this day, but a spoken word is worth a ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas

... wealth, her beauty, and the blight on these,— Of all she is aware: luxuriant woods, Fresh, living, sunlit, in her dream she sees; And ever midst those verdant solitudes The soldier's wooden cross, O'ergrown by creeping tendrils ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus

... to them whose sorrows grow, Beneath its fruit of virtue bending low; Father to good men; virtue's touchstone he; The mirror of the learned; and the sea Where all the tides of character unite; A righteous man, whom pride could never blight; A treasure-house, with human virtues stored; Courtesy's essence, honor's precious hoard. He doth to life its fullest meaning give, So good is he; we others ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka

... against the followers of Mendelssohn, because of the latitudinarian habits of the Maskilim, who "despise the counsel of their betters, and go after the dictates of their hearts."[35] Both saw in Haskalah a deadly foe to their dearest ideals, a blight upon their most cherished hopes, and, like Elizabeta Petrovna, they would not derive even a benefit from the ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin

... literally destroyed, while over a very wide surface the oat crop presents an unnatural lilac tinge to the eye; at the same time, in too many instances, the head is found flaccid to the touch, and possessing no substance. The barley crop, too, in many places, exhibits the effect of a powerful blight. In some places, also, where turnips have been grown, they present—as, indeed, has been the case in other parts of the county—a healthier exterior in top and skin, but, on being opened, are found deeply impregnated with a taint similar to that which has smitten the potato, to such an extent, that ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... magazines written for their amusement or instruction; but this is less owing to want of attention to their interests on the part of many good and enlightened men, than to the unsettled state of the country; for the blight of civil war prevents the ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca

... with luxuriant clusters of roses and purple amorphas. Over them wandered the buffalo herds, and the elk and the roebuck; Over them wandered the wolves, and herds of riderless horses; Fires that blast and blight, and winds that are weary with travel; Over them wander the scattered tribes of Ishmael's children, Staining the desert with blood; and above their terrible war-trails Circles and sails aloft, on pinions majestic, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... said before, you much better let Cynthia alone," declared Madam Lee emphatically. "At her age disappointments are not fatal, and she will probably live to thank you for it. In any case it is better to blight ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett

... why all the world is not as pleased with their personalities as they are themselves, suggesting, if you are willing to waste your time listening to their twaddle, that there is something radically wrong in any innovation, that both "Church and State" will be imperilled if things are altered. No blight, no mildew is more fatal to a plant than the "complacent" are to the world. They resent any progress and are offended if you mention before them any new standards or points of view. "What has been ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory

... "There was some fellow who discovered the cause of the wheat blight in the south a few years ago, and somebody else is trying to land whatever is killing our chestnuts off. Kit, you're a bully pal. If it wasn't for you, I don't know whether I'd ever have seen a chance to win out or not, but you do spur a ...
— Kit of Greenacre Farm • Izola Forrester

... finality. He was to leave her here, she said. He was to go back to his own country. How badly had his reception fared so far? Why not, then, leave Mexico to ingratitude, and have done? The romantic land of roses was notoriously a blight to hopes. Why should he seek to thrive despite the mysterious curse that seemed to hover over all ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle

... Would that he could be whipped back to the House of God—with scorpions, if necessary! There is a cowardice, a lack of sportsmanlike feeling, if I may so express it, in these fallings away from the Church of our fathers. It denotes a failing of intellect amid the centres of human activity. There is a blight of unbelief abroad—a nebulous, pestilential rationalism. Acquaint him with these facts; they may serve to re-establish one whose temperament must be regarded as abnormal in the light of his great eccentricity of action. Now farewell, and God ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts

... Annie looked, and was, dirty with exertion; and even the steam that wreathed upwards from the washbowl added a sense of uncleanness to the air. Ishmael was too young to be depressed by dirt, which he rather liked, but the greyness of it all settled on him like a blight. ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse

... one is born in blight, Victim of perpetual slight When thou lookest in his face Thy heart saith, 'Brother, go thy ways None shall ask thee what thou doest, Or care a rush for what thou knowest, Or listen when thou repliest, Or remember where thou liest, Or how thy supper is sodden;' And another ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... "It was the most miserable place within the ring of Ireland. It lay under the blight of a good landlord, no better. That was its misfortune, and especially my misfortune. If the Gobstown landlord was not such a good landlord it's driving on the box of an empire I would be to-day instead of whacking tips on the heels of ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly

... own presence. But if the greater part of the officer corps were ever to become absorbed in the business of taking men apart to see what makes them tick, thereby superinducing self-consciousness all down the line, an irremediable blight would come upon the services. There is no need to look that deeply. What matters mainly is that an officer will know how men are won to accept authority, how they can be made to unify their own strength, how they can be helped to ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense

... we supported the Sirdar named Shere Ali at Candahar seemed to blight his authority over the tribesmen in that quarter. All hope of maintaining his rule vanished when tidings arrived that Ayub Khan, a younger brother of the deported Yakub, was marching from the side of Herat to claim the crown. Already the new pretender had ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose

... are raising the standard of their herds. When the farmers come into Sleepy Eye they go to the school. Perhaps they have milk to be tested; perhaps they are looking for suggestions regarding soil or blight; perhaps they want to know the latest facts about the scale or rust; perhaps they want some advice about farm implements. In any case ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing

... a weakness, but it is too deeply rooted in my nature ever to be eradicated. When I look about the world and see girls disgracing themselves by improper marriages, elopements, often social crimes, which must blight their lives and those of all connected with them, I think what I should do under ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens

... befell that, in London, he was stricken with influenza and with subsequent sorrow. The attack was short but sharp—had it lasted Addie would certainly have come to his aid; most of a blight really in its secondary stage. The good ladies his sitters—the ladies with the frizzled hair, with the diamond earrings, with the chins tending to the massive—left for him, at the door of his lodgings, flowers, soup and love, so that with their assistance he ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James

... Alas, alas! What is this thing, that they call death? Oh, would That I, this day, the mystery could solve, And my defenceless head withdraw from Fate's Relentless hate! I still am young, and still Feel all the blight and misery of age, Which I so dread; and distant far it seems; But, ah, how little different from age, The flower of my years!"—"We both were born," She said, "to weep; unhappy were our lives, And heaven ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi

... personation of such characters as those of the melancholy Dane; or of Antonio, in the Merchant of Venice, after the turn of the tide in his fortunes, when the vengeful figure of the remorseless Shylock rests upon his life to blight and to afflict it. ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie

... look longingly afar, but there is no flutter of her gossamer robes over the distant hills. No white cloud floats down the blue heavens, a chariot of state, bringing her royally from the court of the King. The earth is mourning her absence. A blight has fallen upon the roses, and the leaves are gone gray and mottled. The buds started up to meet and greet their queen, but her golden sceptre was not held forth, and they are faint and stunned with terror. The censer which they would have swung on the breezes, to gladden ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton

... garden; "out of Weathersfield" Wethersfield (the modern spelling), Connecticut, was famous for its onions (there is still a red onion called "Red Weathersfield"), until struck by a blight about 1840; "old Egyptians" ancient Egypt was proverbial for worshiping ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper

... much cold water in the soil. It would seem, by the remarks of those who till the earth, as if there were never a season just right—as if Providence had bidden us labor for bread, and yet sent down the rains of heaven so plentifully as always to blight our harvests. It is rare that we do not have a most remarkable season, with respect to moisture, especially. Our potatoes are rotted by the Summer showers, or cut off by a Summer drought; and when, as in the season of 1856, in New England, they are neither seriously diseased nor dried ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French

... scheme would go to nothing. To prevent this I determined to take my measures with such thought and fore-thought, such cautions and precautions, that all the malignant planets in the hemisphere should be unable to blight my designs .... Heaven and Earth! must I remember? my damned star wheeled about to the zenith, by whose baleful rays Fortune took the alarm.[15a] ... In short, Pharaoh at the Red Sea, Darius at Arbela, Pompey at Pharsalia, Edward at Bannockburn, Charles ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns

... could ever have been so maddened and deluded. To use the words of the learned and indefatigable Horst,[35] "the world seemed to be like a large madhouse for witches and devils to play their antics in." Satan was believed to be at every body's call to raise the whirlwind, draw down the lightning, blight the productions of the earth, or destroy the health and paralyse the limbs of man. This belief, so insulting to the majesty and beneficence of the Creator, was shared by the most pious ministers of religion. Those who in their morning and evening prayers ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay

... be avoided is monotony in colour. Who can not recall barren rooms, without a spark of attraction despite priceless treasures, dispersed in a meaningless way? That sort of setting puts a blight on any gathering. "Well," you will ask, "given the task of converting such a sterile stretch of monotony into a blooming joy, how should one begin?" It is quite simple. Picture to yourself how the room would look ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood

... (2) it came to signify a pledge of military fidelity, a voluntary oath; (3) then the exacted oath of allegiance; (4) any oath whatever; (5) in early Christian use any sacred or solemn act, and especially any mystery where more was meant than met the ear or eye" (Blight's "Select Sermons of St. Leo on ...
— The Church: Her Books and Her Sacraments • E. E. Holmes

... The pear blight has destroyed whole orchards of pear trees in the Western states. The citrus canker is now threatening the orange orchards of ...
— Conservation Reader • Harold W. Fairbanks

... to note, with profound astonishment, that Drake was stepping hastily aside, so that not even his coat sleeve might be brushed by the advancing figure of the elderly, retired judge. And before Judge Marshall had time to speak, Dundee saw that a blight had touched, at last, the solid friendship of the women; that they did not look at each other with that air of standing together whatever happened, but that their eyes, not meeting at all, ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin

... came a very wet summer, and everything went wrong in the country around. The hay had hardly been got in when the haystacks were floated bodily down to the sea by an inundation; the vines were cut to pieces with the hail; the corn was all killed by a black blight; only in the Treasure Valley, as usual, all was safe. As it had rain when there was rain nowhere else, so it had sun when there was sun nowhere else. Everybody came to buy corn at the farm, and went away pouring maledictions on the Black Brothers. They asked what they liked, and got it, except from ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes

... help but think of the chestnut blight that has worked havoc throughout our state and some other states. It has occasioned a big material loss. Yet I think too of another side of the loss and that is the spiritual side because our "chestnut parties" are ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various

... have sent no wild goat in a week. Though Feathers of the Sun compels the traders to buy copra at the old price, the people sell not, for they will have none of the paper money. Only to-day have I sent messengers to twenty houses. There are no eggs. Has Feathers of the Sun put a blight upon the hens? I do not know. All I know is that there are no eggs. Well it is that those who drink much eat little, else would there be a palace famine. Tell your soldiers to receive their pay. Let it be in ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London

... and your judgment frame By her just standard, which is still the same, Unerring nature, still divinely blight, One clear, unchanged, and universal light, Life, force, and beauty must to all impart, At once the source, and end, and ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith

... was said, and Marina passed long hours there on her knees alone, tracing the coming horror to its most dread issue, trying to understand it wholly, that she might pray with all her soul against it—this Curse which was to blight the lives of all she loved, and of which her dearest seemed to feel no dread! She scarcely ate nor slept—watching, for the morning, when a new intercession for mercy should rise from the oratory in her palace; waiting for the evening, when she might go with her maidens to vespers in ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull

... that loved so well The world, despairing in her blight, Uplifted with her least delight, On me, as on the earth, there fell New happiness of mirth and might; I strode the valleys pied and still; I climbed upon the ...
— Lyrics of Earth • Archibald Lampman

... were amazing; countless as the tears shed for perfidious lovers. Far abroad on both flanks, they swam in long lines, tier above tier; the water alive with their hosts. Locusts of the sea, peradventure, going to fall with a blight upon some green, mossy province of Neptune. And tame and fearless they were, as the first fish that swam in Euphrates; hardly evading the hand; insomuch that Samoa caught many without lure ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville

... sooner touched the flower than the whole plant suffered a blight, its leaves turning coal-black as if by the agency ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various

... surgery is the struggle, in an epoch of wild literary competition, to obtain novelty of material. The varieties of aspect and color in healthy fruit, be it sweet or sour, may be within certain limits described exhaustively. Not so the blotches of its conceivable blight: and while the symmetries of integral human character can only be traced by harmonious and tender skill, like the branches of a living tree, the faults and gaps of one gnawed away by corroding accident can be shuffled into senseless change like the ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... produce the 3,000,000 child laborers of the United States; child slaves who undergo hardships that blight them physically and mentally, leaving them fit only to produce human beings whose deficiencies and misfortunes ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger

... of Yorkshire, it seemed as if a blight hung over the land and the people. Men dodged about their daily business with hatred and suspicion in their eyes, and many a curse went over the sea to the three fatal ships lying motionless at anchor three miles off Monkshaven. When first Philip had heard ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. II • Elizabeth Gaskell

... unseasonable drought, a frost too long continued or too suddenly broken up with rain and tempest, the blight of the spring or the smut of the harvest will do more to cause the distress of the belly than all the contrivances of all statesmen can do to relieve it. Let government protect and encourage industry, secure property, repress violence, and discountenance fraud, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... may seem victorious, War may waste and famine blight, Still from out the conflict glorious, Mind comes forth with ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof

... was reconquered was not the land that had revolted. A ghastly ruin accompanied by a numbing blight on thought and energy settled on the once happy lands of Flanders and Brabant. The civil wars had so wasted the country that wolves prowled even at the gates of great cities. The coup de grace was given to the commerce of Antwerp by the barring of the Scheldt by Holland. Trade with the ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... beautiful, but the memory of the hotel leaves a blight over all. We were happy indeed when our motor started off again with the steady, powerful hum that so delights the soul of the driver, and it seemed fairly to tremble with impatience to make up for its enforced ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy

... the asceticism which is so repulsive to us, and with reason, and which marked the illustrious saints of the fourth century, was simply the protest against the almost universal materialism of the day,—that dreadful moral blight which was undermining society. As luxury and extravagance and material pleasures were the prominent evils of the old Roman world in its decline, it was natural that the protest against these evils should assume the greatest outward antagonism. Luxury and a worldly life were deemed utterly inconsistent ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord

... wan, as he had looked yesterday in the church. He offered his arm to Bessie at his wife's bidding, without a word. Mr. Jardine followed, with Lady Palliser and Ida; and the little party of five sat down to dinner with a blight upon them, the awful shadow of domestic misery. There are many such dinners eaten every day in England—than which the Barmecide's was a more cheerful feast, a red herring and bread and butter in a garret a ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon

... six million years hence, therefore, it is prophesied, the earth will fall into the grip of an ice age. There will descend on all living things the blight of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, August 11, 1920 • Various

... what they absorb from the atmosphere, and thus forms food for the vine and fruit. It is the leaves, and not the fruit, which need the sun: the leaves are the lungs, upon the action of which the life and health of the fruit depend. Blight of the leaves destroys the fruit, and a frequent repetition of it destroys the vine. Grape-vines should not be pruned at all until three years old, as it retards the growth of the roots, and thus weakens the vines. Older vines should ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden

... achieve a few strokes in the right direction, I asked her to get me a cigar from an inside pocket of my coat, which was on the seat in front of her. Then came the blight to our bliss. She looked in the wrong pocket and instead of producing a cigar, she extracted two letters with ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates

... the ragged boys who usually disport themselves about the streets, stand crouched in little knots in some projecting doorway, or under the canvas blind of a cheesemonger's, where great flaring gas-lights, unshaded by any glass, display huge piles of blight red and pale yellow cheeses, mingled with little fivepenny dabs of dingy bacon, various tubs of weekly Dorset, and cloudy ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens

... instances, and still more extraordinary ones, in which this process takes place naturally, in a more hidden, a more recondite kind of way. You are all of you familiar with those little green insects, the 'Aphis' or blight, as it is called. These little animals, during a very considerable part of their existence, multiply themselves by means of a kind of internal budding, the buds being developed into essentially asexual ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley

... thine own dear voice In Summer's soft, bright eve; A blight will rest on tree and flower— The hue of things that grieve; And when the wintry hour hath come, And 'round the blazing hearth Shall cluster faces we have ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various

... length behold me in the position to which my immense talents have raised me, in despite of 'those laws which press so fatally on dramatic genius,' and blight the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 12, 1841 • Various

... France and Italy, who condemn the demand for these precautions as un-Christian and impolitic. Such laxness is the soil in which thrives the upas tree whose shade has so long darkened the organs of our empire and now threatens to blight the ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon

... it is entirely covered during a great part of the year seems to have cast a blight upon it. The very few palms have a drooping and tragic air. The ground has a gangrened appearance, and much of it shows a crawling mass of unwholesome-looking plants, which seem crouching down as if ashamed ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens

... grass grew rare, A blight lurked in the darkening air, The very moss grew hueless and spare, The last daisy stood all astunt; Behind his back the soil lay bare, ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti

... unkindly hot, My garden makes a desert spot; Sometimes the blight upon the tree Takes all my fruit away from me; And then with throes of bitter pain Rebellious passions rise and swell— But life is more than fruit or grain, And so I ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson

... increase the embarrassments of the Government, individual and State credit had been nearly stricken down and confidence in the General Government was so much impaired that loans of a small amount could only be negotiated at a considerable sacrifice. As a necessary consequence of the blight which had fallen on commerce and mechanical industry, the ships of the one were thrown out of employment and the operations of the other had been greatly diminished. Owing to the condition of the currency, exchanges between different parts of the country had become ruinously high and trade had to ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson

... leafmeal lie; And yet you will weep and know why. Now no matter, child, the name: Sorrow's springs are the same. Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed What heart heard of, ghost guessed: It is the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins

... not so fast; Oh, let me cling To thy white garments floating past; Even to shadows which they cast I cling, I cling. Show me thy face Just once, once more; a single night Cannot have brought a loss, a blight Upon its grace. ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various

... live in his life, his passions are my own; and it is impossible for me to know noble and pure emotions excepting in the heart of this being unsoiled by crime. You have your fancies, here I show you mine. In exchange for the blight which society has brought upon me, I give it a man of honor, and enter upon a struggle with destiny; do you wish to be of my ...
— Vautrin • Honore de Balzac

... may cultivate his sense of justice, his benevolence, and the desire of perfection. Toil is the school for these high principles; and we have here a strong presumption that, in other respects, it does not necessarily blight the soul. Next, we have seen that the most fruitful sources of truth and wisdom are not books, precious as they are, but experience and observation; and these belong to all conditions. It is another ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various

... that any sweeping statement in regard to its character should be true if that character be regarded as uniform. To say that the Rig Veda represents an age of childlike thought, a period before the priestly ritual began its spiritual blight, is incorrect. But no less incorrect is it to assert that the Rig Veda represents a period when hymns are made only for rubrication by priests that sing only for baksheesh. Scholars are too prone to-day to speak ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins

... by him, a whole divine population is brought out of the darkness and forgetfulness where it had been sleeping perhaps for centuries: the little gods who work in the fields, who make the corn grow and keep off the blight, those who watch over children, who aid women in labour, who protect the hearth, who guard the house. It was impossible to take a step among the pagans, to make a movement, without the help of a god or goddess. Men and things were as if fettered ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand

... Arc. 48-53, Ham. iii. 4. 64, "Here is your husband; Like a mildew'd ear Blasting his wholesome brother." A mildew blast is one giving rise to that kind of blight called mildew (A.S. meledeaw, honey-dew), it being supposed that the prevalence of dry east winds was ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton

... the woods. But the rain was heavier than before, the fall increased after every flash, however distant, and the surface of the pond was threshed by the drops which bore down with them many leaves weakened by blight. ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies

... is liable to several diseases, which affect the flour made from it, and render it unfit for good bread. The principal of these are the blight, mildew, and smut, which are occasioned by microscopic fungi, which sow themselves and grow upon the stems and ears, destroying the nutritive principles, and introducing matter of a deleterious kind. The farmer is at the utmost pains ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... out along the south wall—ugh, ugh," persisted Simon, without seeming to hear her; "and your new g'raniums a'most covered wi' blight. I wur a tacklin' one of 'em ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes

... imagination from height to height, but the small boulders of difficulty trip them up, for they are hopelessly unpractical; they have neither strength of purpose nor fortitude, and their best-laid schemes are always frustrated at the critical moment, by either the incurable blight of vacillation, or by the determination to amplify their scheme ere it has proved successful, sacrificing probable ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs

... to you so! How could I! Oh, that some blight may come upon this unhappy tongue! I, who have had nothing but good from you! I to insult you, who are the author of all my happiness! Oh, sire, forgive me, forgive me! ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle

... best and the most enjoyable."[FN91]—"One in winning ways excelling and in comeliness exceeding and in speech killing: one whose brow glanceth marvellous bright to whoso filleth his eyes with her sight and to whom she bequeatheth sorrow and blight; one whose breasts are small whilst her hips are large and her cheeks are rosy red and her eyes are deeply black and he lips are full-formed; one who if she look upon the heavens even the rocks will be robed in green, and if she look upon ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... urge that patronage is the curse and blight of all such endeavours, and to impress upon the working men that they must originate and manage for themselves. And to ask them the question, can they possibly show their detestation of drunkenness better, or better strive to get rid of it from among them, than to make it a hopeless disqualification ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens

... pretty and blonde and gentle, and enjoyed her because she was always so willing to do whatever Georgina wished. And now to think that instead of being the like-everybody-else kind of a young lady she seemed, she was like a heroine in a book who had lived through trouble which would "blight her ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston

... there a long time, happily absorbed, and Mrs. Orton Beg's memory, as she watched her, slipped back inevitably to her own love days, till tears came of the inward supplication that Evadne's future might never know the terrible blight which had fallen ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand

... our grasp all the elements of prosperity. We are free from the thousand time-honoured evils and abuses that afflict and retard the nations of the Old World. Not even our neighbours of the United States occupy an equal position of advantage, for we have not the canker-worm of domestic slavery to blight our tree of liberty. And greater than these, we are but commencing our career as a people, our institutions have yet to be established. We are free to look abroad over the earth and study the lessons of wisdom taught by the history of older countries, and choose those systems ...
— George Brown • John Lewis

... miss that jagged line of snows just beyond the back of poppa's head, dear one. Quick! they are melting away!"—but the next tunnel was quicker. "Put down that the dazzling purity of these lovely peaks must be realised, for it cannot be"—darkness, and the blight of another tunnel. It was very hard on momma's imagination, and she finally accepted the Senator's warning that it would be thrown completely out of gear if she went on, and abandoned the attempt to form complete sentences ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... which she now held up beseechingly to Jennie, who stooped to embrace her, and taking the withered tokens, hastened to hide her emotion in the furthest recess of the carriage that bore her away from the home of her kindred. It seemed to those who watched the receding travelers, as if a blight had fallen upon their pleasant things; as if the winter had suddenly come and frozen up all the springs of pleasure and delight, for that young girl's presence, though unobtrusive in its influence, had diffused warmth and gladness all about her, and now that she was gone ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith

... college, give no more lectures to entranced audiences. In the interests of science, ought I to refuse, and sacrifice my heart's affections for the cause of mathematics? But if I say 'No,' I must give up—him; sacrifice his happiness too, and blight his life. Was ever anyone so perplexed? Science, aid thine obedient servant! May I not determine this vital question by thine ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson

... rafter groan and sway,— The harmless gossip of the passing day: Good country talk, that says how so-and-so Lived, died, or wedded: how curculio And codling-moth play havoc with the fruit, Smut ruins the corn and blight the grapes to boot: Or what is news from town: next county fair: How well the crops are looking everywhere:— Now this, now that, on which their interests fix, Prospects for rain or frost, and politics. While, all around, the sweet smell of the meal Filters, ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein

... of the midnight bell As they thrilled the quiet air, And saw the soft, white curtains wave In the lamp's uncertain glare; And felt the breath of the July night, Laden with fragrance and warmth and blight. ...
— Indian Legends and Other Poems • Mary Gardiner Horsford

... is of the opinion that rust is but an earlier stage of mildew or blight, the one form of parasite being capable of development into the other, and the fructification characteristic of the two supposed genera having been evolved on one ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883 • Various

... pair of plump forearms and wielding a rolling pin in front of a good hot fire. Covered with flour—her face very red—she would have been in her element. . . . As it was, the dictates of fashion had cast their blight over ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile

... seated herself beside the fire and next the easy-chair into which the duchess had sunk, and gazed dreamily over the screen which she held in her hand. Some of the ladies gathered in little groups, others turned to the books and albums, one or two yawned almost openly. A kind of blight seemed falling upon them. Nell, who was unused to the phenomena of dinner parties, looked round, aghast. Were they all going to sleep? Suddenly she realized that it was at just such a moment as this that she was supposed to come in. She went up ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice

... that?" Sir Richard looked a trifle wistfully at the younger man, envying him his superior youth and more robust physique. "For my part I confess to a distrust of the desert. It seems to me as though there were a blight on these huge tracts of sand, as though the Creator had regretted their creation, yet was too perfect a Worker to try, by altering the original purpose of His handiwork, to turn them into something for which they were ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes

... rapidly, but with equal pace, unheeding whether, as a "swift-winged and beautiful angel," he opens flowers on the way for some, or, as a "relentless, unsparing destroyer," he nips the budding hopes and scatters the blight of disappointment on others; but still bearing the record of each minute to eternity, the gliding hours are silently working for all. Their passage had seemingly, as yet, brought no change in the circumstances of our little shoemaker; unloved and unloving, as at first, the days ...
— Watch—Work—Wait - Or, The Orphan's Victory • Sarah A. Myers

... Others believed that she concealed herself in the top of the highest mountain that was near them, and by a commerce with invisible, malignant beings, still exercised the same gloomy temper in more potent, and therefore more inauspicious harm. The blight that overspread the meadows, the destructive contagion that diffused itself among the flocks, the raging tempest that rooted up the oak, when the thunder roared among the hills, and the lightning flashed from pole to pole, they ascribed to the machinations and the sorcery of Rodogune. Their ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin

... other loves than those of childhood—that new affections may usurp the place of old ones—that there may come a time, dear Edith, when I shall see an arm, not my own, about your waist; and the eyes that would look on no prospect if you were not a part of it, may be doomed to that fearfullest blight of beholding your lips smiling and pressed beneath ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms

... this grateful task of labouring in his heavenly Master's garden, some blight, some tempest, may chance to take away a favourite young blossom in a ...
— The Annals of the Poor • Legh Richmond

... everybody did just nothing. They knew very well that he could not make them do anything; and what was more, in some of the very worst cases, the evil was past remedy now, and better left alone. For the drought went on pitiless. A copper sun, a sea of glass, a brown easterly blight, day after day, while Thurnall looked grimly aloft and mystified the ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley

... gained heaven if they were possessed of Madeleine's wealth, her jewels, her carriages, her dresses; but were the veils that shroud the hypocrisy of human joy raised for the warning of the uninitiated, many a noble heart like Madeleine's would show the blight of disappointment, with the thorns thick and sharp under the flowers that are strewn on their path. The sympathy of manhood, ever flung over the couch of suffering beauty, must hover in sighs of regret over ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly

... fairest of the year: For thee the Graces lead the dancing hours, And Nature's ready pencil paints the flowers: When thy short reign is past, the feverish sun The sultry tropic fears, and moves more slowly on. So may thy tender blossoms fear no blight, Nor goats with venomed teeth thy tendrils bite, As thou shalt guide my wandering feet to find The fragrant greens I seek, my brows to bind." His vows addressed, within the grove he strayed, Till Fate or Fortune near the place ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden

... oath—to die, if need be, but never cross the fatal line. The struggle was manfully maintained, but at last the chief priest fell, pierced to the heart with a spear, and the unlucky omen fell like a blight upon the brave souls at his back; with a triumphant shout the invaders pressed forward—the line was crossed—the offended gods deserted the despairing army, and, accepting the doom their perjury had brought upon them, they broke and fled over the plain where Honolulu stands now—up the beautiful ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... nobles were come to ninepence." Now, they were challenged to establish a society of their own principles; now, they were recommended to the mercy of the Attorney-General, and again commended to the hatred of the people. Meantime a blight had fallen on the earth, and a whole people's food, in one night, perished. To the new Government, the famine that ensued was an assurance of subsistence and success. Hunger would waste the bodies of the people, as the dearth of truth had wasted their ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny

... man doesn't whine at his losses, A man doesn't whimper and fret, Or rail at the weight of his crosses And ask life to rear him a pet. A man doesn't grudgingly labor Or look upon toil as a blight; A man doesn't sneer at his neighbor Or sneak from a cause that ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest

... October or November. Figs we have till late into the winter, and they begin again early; we are very fond of them. Oranges, lemons, and shaddocks grow fairly well, and are fruiting all the year round. Apples do badly, being subject to blight, though the young trees grow rapidly, and, if freely pruned, will yield enormous crops. To obviate the blight we keep a constant succession of young trees to replace those that are killed. Pears are not subject to the blight, and do well. ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay

... have launched us upon the current of the months from the snowy banks of January. I love better to count time from spring to spring; it seems to me far more cheerful to reckon the year by blossoms than by blight. ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell

... white queen on a ruined throne, A lily bowed with blight; In her eyes the darkness about was blown By flashes of liquid light; Her skin with very whiteness shone; Back from her forehead loosely thrown Her hair was ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald

... that the light Might ebb, drawn backward from their eyes, and night Hide for one hour the imperishable faces. That they might rise up sad in heaven, and know Sorrow and sleep, one paler than young snow, One cold as blight of dew and ruinous rain, Rise up and rest and suffer a little, and be Awhile as all things born with us and we, And grieve as men, and like slain ...
— Atalanta in Calydon • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... many small shops; but the only stock in trade appeared to be heaps of children, who, even at that time of night, were crawling in and out at the doors, or screaming from the inside. The sole places that seemed to prosper amid the general blight of the place, were the public-houses; and in them, the lowest orders of Irish were wrangling with might and main. Covered ways and yards, which here and there diverged from the main street, disclosed little knots of houses, where drunken men and women were positively ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens

... year there came a blight; the woods died away, the springs ran dry; and the scene, which had once been the joy of every traveler, was in autumn standing waste, naked, and bald, scarcely showing here and there, in the sea of sand, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... oh! men of the Sagalie Tyee, or I shall blight you with my evil eye. Care for yourselves and do not follow me." On and on she danced through the thickest of the wilderness, on and on they followed until they reached the very heart of the seagirt neck of land ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson

... very long walk with my father through some of the most beautiful ways hereabouts; the day was cold with an iron, windy sky, and only glorified now and then with autumn sunlight. For it is fully autumn with us, with a blight already over the greens, and a keen wind in the morning that makes one rather timid of one's tub when it ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... veins would kill me. You may think this pride a weakness, but it is too deeply rooted in my nature ever to be eradicated. When I look about the world and see girls disgracing themselves by improper marriages, elopements, often social crimes, which must blight their lives and those of all connected with them, I think what I should do under ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens

... baffled again and again, until at last he had given himself up to a dull hope that the little girl who had become so dear was really his brother's child, and joint heir with Donald to his and his brother's estates; and how Eben Slade actually had come to claim her and take her away, threatening to blight the poor child by proving that she was his niece, Delia Robertson, and not Dorothy ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge

... over the threshold of the door to keep out the Evil One. Sometimes they are tied round the necks of camels, and even placed on trees, especially at the time when bearing fruit, for the purpose of preserving the camel from mange, or the tree from blight. These talismans usually have a diagram of this and other shapes, with certain Arabic signs, letters, words, and ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... temperance are not contented with taking the property of their fellow-men as they often do in different ways, they are not even satisfied with inflicting bodily injury and suffering upon those who oppose their ways, but they would blight their reputation, and this, too, is no small injury, for ...
— The Story of a Dark Plot - or Tyranny on the Frontier • A.L.O. C. and W.W. Smith

... Of course, people have different ways of showing blight. Mr. Redgrave, it is rumoured, hides his head in a hermitage, somewhere in the north of Italy, by one of the lakes. No doubt he lives on olives and macaroni, and broods over what might have been. Did you ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing

... been residing in that country, as was learned from Paolo. Now everybody knows that the evil eye is not rarely met with in Italy. Everybody who has ever read Mr. Story's "Roba di Roma" knows what a terrible power it is which the owner of the evil eye exercises. It can blight and destroy whatever it falls upon. No person's life or limb is safe if the jettatura, the withering glance of the deadly organ, falls upon him. It must be observed that this malign effect may follow a look from the holiest personages, that is, if we may ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... eat, thou hast bread; Drink, drink, thou hast water; On that day, dust possesses the earth, On that day, a blight is on the face of the earth, On that day, a cloud rises, On that day, a mountain rises, On that day, a strong man seizes the land, On that day, things fall to ruin, On that day, the tender leaf is destroyed, On that day, the dying eyes are ...
— The Maya Chronicles - Brinton's Library Of Aboriginal American Literature, Number 1 • Various

... by love. No publisher may say to it: "Buy my books, not those of my rival"; no scientist may forbid it to give his opponent a hearing; no religious body may dictate to it; no commercial influence may throw a blight over it. It ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick

... seems so fair and sweet, Yet tyranny is stalking here, And hate and lust and foul deceit Hang heavy on the atmosphere. Injustice seeks to throttle right, And laughter's stifled to a sigh. If death can take so great a blight From human ...
— Over Here • Edgar A. Guest

... middle of this month, until the end of May, is the best season for sowing wheat in the districts of Richmond Hill, Phillip, Nelson, and Evan, as it is not so subject to the caterpillar, smut, rust, and blight. Oats may also be sown now for a general crop. Asparagus haulm should also be cut and carried off the ground, and the ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann

... efficacious in dealing with the butcher and even the bishop, to say nothing of the effect it always had upon the commonplace nobodies who go to the butcher and the bishop for the luxuries of both the present and the future life, and it had seldom failed to wither and blight the most hardy of masculine opponents. It was not always so effective in crushing the members of her own sex, for there were women in New York society who could look straight through Mrs. Tresslyn without even appearing to suspect that she was in the range of ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon

... men forgive force in the woman? and when do women ever forgive the woman's greatness? and when does every cur fail to snarl at the life that is higher than its fellows? It is by the very genius in her that you have had such power to wound, such power to blight and to destroy. By so long as her name shall be spoken, so long will the wrong you have done her cling round it, to make it meet for reproach. A mere woman dies, and her woe and her shame die with her, and the earth covers ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... feelings bind them to every heart capable of generous emotions; those in whom we see life most beautified, most glad. Oh, it is so sad to see them weep; to feel that even on them sorrow hath cast its blight, and paled the cheek, and dimmed the laughing eye, the speaking smile, and the first grief in such as these is agony indeed: it is the breaking asunder of every former joy. They shrink from retrospection, for they cannot bear to feel they are not now as then, and the future shares ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume II. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes • Grace Aguilar

... the colonel. He had never seen the man, and yet his influence was everywhere. He seemed to brood over the country round about like a great vampire bat, sucking the life-blood of the people. His touch meant blight. As soon as a Fetters mortgage rested on a place, the property began to run down; for why should the nominal owner keep up a place which was destined in the end to go to Fetters? The colonel had heard grewsome tales of Fetters's convict labour ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt

... go to nothing. To prevent this I determined to take my measures with such thought and fore-thought, such cautions and precautions, that all the malignant planets in the hemisphere should be unable to blight my designs .... Heaven and Earth! must I remember? my damned star wheeled about to the zenith, by whose baleful rays Fortune took the alarm.[15a] ... In short, Pharaoh at the Red Sea, Darius at Arbela, Pompey at Pharsalia, ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns

... to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right, And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley

... men of the world. The profession of singing in public, then, presupposed that the singer was no longer the more or less imaginary young girl, the hothouse flower of the social garden, whose perfect bloom the merest breath of worldly knowledge must blight for ever. Margaret might smile at the myth, but she could not ignore the fact that she was already as much detached from it in men's eyes as if she had entered the married state. The mere fact of realising that the hothouse blossom was part of the social legend ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford

... laugh on the wrong side of one's mouth; find one a false prophet. not realize one's hope, not realize one's expectation. [cause to be disappointed] disappoint; frustrate, discomfit, crush, defeat (failure) 732; crush one's hope, dash one's hope, balk one's hope, disappoint one's hope, blight one's hope, falsify one's hope, defeat one's hope, discourage; balk, jilt, bilk; play one false, play a trick; dash the cup from the lips, tantalize; dumfound, dumbfound, dumbfounder, dumfounder (astonish) 870. Adj. disappointed &c. v.; disconcerted, aghast; disgruntled; out of one's reckoning. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... ruthless eye had mark'd me for her prey: They bade me seek in foreign climes her wasting hand to stay; They told me of an altered form, an eye grown ghastly bright, And called the crimson on my cheek the spoiler's hectic blight. ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins

... had an idea of starting a dairy. First, the cows' eyes got bad, and he sought the advice of a German cocky, and acted upon it; he blew powdered alum through paper tubes into the bad eyes, and got some of it snorted and butted back into his own. He cured the cows' eyes and got the sandy blight in his own, and for a week or so be couldn't tell one end of a cow from the other, but sat in a dark corner of the hut and groaned, and soaked his glued eyelashes in warm water. Germany stuck to him and nursed ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson

... but not alone; she held, within, A second principle of Life, which might Have dawned a fair and sinless child of sin;[dz] But closed its little being without light, And went down to the grave unborn, wherein Blossom and bough lie withered with one blight; In vain the dews of Heaven descend above The bleeding flower and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... shall pass away, By winter overtaken, Thoughts of the past will charms display, And many joys awaken. When time shall every sweet remove, And blight thee on my bosom, Let beauty fade!—to me, my love, Thou'lt ne'er be out ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry

... She is marked with the gallows. Ill-luck attaches to her. There has been a blight on her from the beginning. I mind when her father chucked her down all among the fly-poison. Now she has got the Broom-Squire, she may count herself lucky, and ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould

... that we know of nowadays. But then, nobody knew what to do for her, poor lady. To be 'crossed in love,' as it was called, was a thing that admitted of no cure, unless the patient were willing to be cured. People spoke of Phoebe Montfort under their breath, and called her 'a blight,' meaning a person whose life has been blighted. The world has gone on a good deal in the two generations since then, ...
— Three Margarets • Laura E. Richards

... vainest of all vain things, the most unseemly and revolting of all forms of pride, is the pride of disbelief in God and immortality. And the maddest if not the wickedest of all occupations, is to labor to destroy the faith and blight the hopes of others. What good, humane, or merciful motive can a man have to impel him to such ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker

... of with things. The loss of vision is never compensated for by the gain of sight; to see a thing one must use his mind quite as much as his eye. It too often happens, as the result of our educational methods, that in training the observer we blight the poet; and the poet is, after all, the most important person in society. He keeps the soul of his fellows alive. Without him the modern world would become one vast, dreary, soul-destroying Coketown, and man would sink to the ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various

... the dawn of her intelligence, with your utmost energy and might, that there was such a thing as daylight, but that it was made to be her enemy and destroyer, and she must always turn against it, for it had blighted you and would else blight her;—if you had done this, and then, for a purpose, had wanted her to take naturally to the daylight and she could not do it, you would have ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens

... Observed in Shagbark Hickory, Carya ovata (Mill.) K. Koch. in Central New York—David H. Caldwell 29 The Control of the Hickory Weevil (Curculio caryae) 39 Round Table Discussion—What's Your Problem 43 The International Chestnut Commission and the Chestnut Blight Problem in Europe, 1953—G. Flippo Gravatt 52 Rooting Chestnuts from Softwood Cuttings—Roger W. Pease 56 Evaluating Chestnuts Grown under Forest Conditions—Jesse D. Diller 59 Panel Discussion—Chestnuts 62 Development of the Nut Industry in the Middle West—J. F. Wilkinson 70 Some Aspects ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various

... I answer; mark a soothfast word, Not the true parent is the woman's womb That bears the child; she doth but nurse the seed New-sown: the male is parent; she for him, As stranger for a stranger, hoards the germ Of life; unless the god its promise blight. And proof hereof before you will I set. Birth may from fathers, without mothers, be: See at your side a witness of the same, Athena, daughter of Olympian Zeus, Never within the darkness of the womb Fostered nor fashioned, but a bud more bright Than ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus

... neither promise nor confession, but allowing love to cherish its fairest hopes without fear or torment! How pure a memory for life! What a free blossoming of all the flowers that spring from the soul, which a mere trifle can blight, but which, at that moment, everything warmed ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac

... bird's song, wind in the ash-trees and the corn, tall lilies glistening, the evening shadows slanting out, the night murmuring of waters. There is no other genuine dream; without it to sweeten all, life is harsh and shrill and east-wind dry, and evil overruns her more quickly than blight be-gums the rose-tree or frost blackens fern of a cold June night. We elders are past re-making England, but our children, even these crippled children here, may ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy

... fetched from the lumber-rooms and distributed among their owners, when a letter arrived from Mother saying that the two little boys had sandy blight, and that Laura would not be able to come home under two or three weeks, for fear of infection. These weeks she was to spend, in company with Pin, at a watering-place down the Bay, where one of her aunts ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson

... ornamental flower garden; "out of Weathersfield" Wethersfield (the modern spelling), Connecticut, was famous for its onions (there is still a red onion called "Red Weathersfield"), until struck by a blight about 1840; "old Egyptians" ancient Egypt was proverbial for worshiping ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper

... the uniform was unauthorized and the insignia an invention of Sticky Smith, aiming to counteract any social stigma that might blight his sojourn in France. ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers

... treated with greater care than are our ancient monuments in stone. Smaller creatures, birds like the dodo and the great auk and a whole troop of others less familiar, have disappeared and are disappearing under the human blight. Even some beautiful insects—the great copper butterfly and the swallow-tail butterfly—have been exterminated in England by human "progress" in the shape of the drainage ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester

... together with new power sources to replace the fossil fuels on which factory, home, and vehicle now depend, might also all but eliminate the growing smog and air-pollution blight. ...
— The Practical Values of Space Exploration • Committee on Science and Astronautics

... was constituted to remember, and to remember with all his soul. Every day of his life he had missed her; never was there a night that she was not in his thoughts before he dropped to sleep. What would have been his career had fate brought them together before the blight fell upon her? What intimacies, what enjoyment, what ideals nurtured and made real. And the companionship, the instant sympathy, the sureness of an echo in her heart, no matter how low and soft his whisper! These thoughts were never ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith

... morning had dawned. The daylight seemed to pry into the secrets of the past night. I would fain shun it—the garish light disturbed me. The morning sun, which had ever been my delight, seemed now a mocking imp of curiosity; the house and grounds looked bare and desolate; a blight had ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn

... tending his flocks, and bringing forth rich harvests from the earth. For him the bees wrought their sweetest honey; for him the sheep gave their softest wool; for him the cornfields waved with their fullest grain. No blight touched the grapes which his hand had tended; no sickness vexed the herds which fed in his pastures. And they who dwelt in the land said, "Strife and war bring no such gifts as these to the sons of men; therefore let ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... spells weave; Trust not too deeply—they may deceive! Hope with her Dead Sea fruits is there, Sin is spreading her gilded snare, Disease with a ruthless hand would smite, And Care spread o'er thee her withering blight. Hate and Envy, with visage black, And the serpent Slander, are on thy track; Falsehood and Guilt, Remorse and Pride, Doubt and Despair, in thy pathway glide; Haggard Want, in her demon joy, Waits to degrade thee and then destroy; And Death, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various

... will retract what you insinuated had become of it? I'll willingly make it up to you, if it takes every cent I earn; but I'll not have a blight upon my reputation, even ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa

... and still more extraordinary ones, in which this process takes place naturally, in a more hidden, a more recondite kind of way. You are all of you familiar with those little green insects, the 'Aphis' or blight, as it is called. These little animals, during a very considerable part of their existence, multiply themselves by means of a kind of internal budding, the buds being developed into essentially asexual animals, which are neither male nor female; ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley

... paired these Cinaedes sans shame Mamurra and Caesar, both of pathic fame. No wonder! Both are fouled with foulest blight, One urban being, Formian t'other wight, And deeply printed with indelible stain: 5 Morbose is either, and the twin-like twain Share single Couchlet; peers in shallow lore, Nor this nor that for lechery hungers more, As rival wenchers who the maidens claim Right ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus

... ago, about a friend of ours, a young Southern poet of distinct promise, who had just died. Like many Southern verse-writers of his generation, he had lived and written under the inspiration of Poe. Asbury surprised me by the almost bitter remark that Poe's influence had been a blight upon the younger Southern poets, inasmuch as it had tended to over-subjectivity, to morbid sensibility, and to a pre-occupation with purely personal emotions. He argued, as he has since done so courageously in his Texas Nativist, [Footnote: ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry

... have dared to venture, after what has happened, to ask any of my friends to receive her. Naturally, she shrinks from speaking of that terrible time, but I understand that she spent no less than three nights alone in the mountains with him. And that fact in itself would be more than sufficient to blight any girl's career from a social standpoint. I often think that the rules of our modern etiquette are very rigid, though I know well that we cannot afford to disregard them." Again came that soft, regretful sigh; and then ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell

... highest of the White Mountains, stood up round and bare, rimmed bright gold in the last glow of the setting sun. Then, as the fire dropped behind the domed peak, a change, a cold and darkening blight, passed down the black spear-pointed slopes over all that ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey

... as often as he glanced at Allen, who stood behind him, or bent his gaxe upon any of his other fellow-prisoners. O'Brien was born, near Ballymacoda, County Cork, the birthplace of the ill-fated and heroic Peter Crowley. His father rented a large farm in the same parish, but the blight of the bad laws which are the curse of Ireland fell upon him, and in the year 1856, the O'Briens were flung upon the world dispossessed of lands and home, though they owed no man a penny at the time. Michael O'Brien was apprenticed to a draper in Youghal, ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown

... relations with America, was hamstringing the British fleet, was rendering almost impotent its control of the sea, and was thus throwing away the greatest advantage which Great Britain possessed in its life and death struggle. "Some blight has been at work in our Foreign Office for years," said the Quarterly Review, "steadily undermining our mastery ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick

... air; but when we are in good health they are absolutely innocuous, our nature offers no hold or resting place for them. The grouse disease only makes headway when there has been a wet season, and the young birds are too weakened by the damp to resist its attack. The potato blight is always lying in wait, till the potato plants are deteriorated by a long spell of rain and damp; it is only then that it can effect its fell purpose. The microbes of consumption and cancer are probably never far away from us, but are powerless to hurt us, till our system has become ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer

... would make her ideals appear the dreams of bygone halcyon days, useless and worse amid the threats of gathering tempest. An essentially human apprehension, be it understood. The vulgarities of hysterical pietism Emily had never known; she did not fear the invasion of such blight as that; the thought of it was noisome to her. Do you recall a kind of trouble that came upon her, during that talk in the hollow, when Wilfrid suggested the case of her being called upon to make some great ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing

... neatly dressed as their masters, though some wore blue-jean and saffron-colored shirts; and there were railroad-hands, mechanics, and store-keepers. All of them were cheerful; a few good years, free from harvest frost and blight, had made a marked ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss

... Take care! The great white witch rides out to-night. Trust not your prowess nor your strength, Your only safety lies in flight; For in her glance there is a snare, And in her smile there is a blight. ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson

... people—who are so kind to one another, and to tramps and beggars, that they seem to live by the rule of an old woman in a Galway sweet-shop: 'Refuse not any, for one may be the Christ'—speak of a visit of the tinkers as of frost in spring or blight in harvest. I asked why they were shunned as other wayfarers are not, and I was told of their strange customs and ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others

... those days, the bearded Russ and red-haired Dane, the Norwayer, and the Hollander, laden with merchandise, furled their sails in that deserted harbor, where now scarcely a fisherboat is seen; for on Crail, as on all its sister towns along the coast, fell surely and heavily the terrible blight of 1707, and now it is hastening rapidly to ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various

... will rob the tender joys That bless the little lintwhite's nest; And frost will blight the fairest flowers, And love ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... side of a bed on which his son Sammy lay sprawling in the helpless attitude in which he had fallen down the night before, after a season of drunken riot. He was in a heavy sleep, with his still innocent-looking features tinged with the first blight of dissipation. ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne

... condition of Godfrey Cass in this six-and-twentieth year of his life. A movement of compunction, helped by those small indefinable influences which every personal relation exerts on a pliant nature, had urged him into a secret marriage, which was a blight on his life. It was an ugly story of low passion, delusion, and waking from delusion, which needs not to be dragged from the privacy of Godfrey's bitter memory. He had long known that the delusion was partly due to ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot

... good time for once in my life—for once in my life!' It was in the dark, in a carriage, coming back from a hunt ball. Eleven miles we had to drive! And then suddenly the bitterness of the endless poverty, of the endless acting—it fell on me like a blight, it spoilt everything. Yes, I had to realize that I had been spoilt even for the good time when it came. And I burst out crying and I cried and I cried for the whole eleven miles. Just imagine me crying! And just imagine me making a fool of the poor dear chap like that. It certainly ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford

... eclipses occur, but that are not referable to any known eclipsing body. Of course there is no suggestion here that these darknesses may have been eclipses. My own acceptance is that if in the nineteenth century anyone had uttered such a thought as that, he'd have felt the blight of a Dominant; that Materialistic Science was a jealous god, excluding, as works of the devil, all utterances against the seemingly uniform, regular, periodic; that to defy him would have brought on—withering by ridicule—shrinking away by publishers—contempt of friends and family—justifiable ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort

... did so much to devastate the East, and which, by the emigration of some {162} 50,000 Christians, cleric and lay, to Calabria, exercised so important an influence on the history of Southern Italy, might have cast a fatal blight on the Church in Constantinople had it not been for the stand made by the Monks of the Studium. [Sidenote: The Monks of the Studium and the Iconoclastic Controversy.] The age of the Iconoclasts was the golden age of the Studite monks. Persecuted, ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton

... omit tradesman-like references! What Lord Hawcastle wished me to impress on you is not only that you will ruin yourself, but put a blight upon the life of the young lady whom you are pleased to consider your ward. We make this suggestion because we conceive that you have a preposterous sentimental ...
— The Man from Home • Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson

... is that I owe my station to the esteem I profess for the cultivation of hair, and to my persecution of the clippers of it. And in this kingdom is no one that beareth such a crop as I, saving one, a clothier, an accursed one!—and may a blight fall upon him for his vanity and his affectation of solemn priestliness, and his lolling in his shop-front to be admired and marvelled at by the people. So this fellow I would disgrace and bring to scorn,—this Shagpat! for ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... reborn. For this end had Ireland been kept faithful and pure for centuries, just that she might be at last the witness to the spiritual in a materialized world. For this end had the Church in Ireland gone through the storm of persecution, suffered the blight of the world's contempt, that she might emerge in the end entirely fitted ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham

... over the land? London is the antithesis of the domestic ideal; a social reformer would not even glance in that direction, but would turn all his zeal upon small towns and country districts, where blight may perhaps be arrested, and whence, some day, a reconstituted national life may act upon the great centre of corruption. I had far rather see England covered with schools of cookery than with schools of the ordinary kind; the issue would be infinitely ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing

... revival is needed for an intellectual renaissance. All students must be baptized with a passion for social service, before studies that enrich the mind and enlarge the character will be pursued with eager devotion. The blight of irresponsibility is almost universal upon the students in the higher educational institutions of ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin

... led more fully to appreciate the advantage of seeing all of the branches of intellectual culture led out of the ruts of routine, away from plagiarism and from disorder and anarchy, one word upon the most distasteful and effectual blight to which art is subject—the loss of naturalness, viz., affectation. Can anything be more irritating than an affected actor or ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various

... remnant of their self respect. One need not be a prophet to foresee that out of all this injustice and inequality God's avenging angel will come some day with sword, double-edged and deadly with disease and crime, to smite and to blight this land where white people having eyes refuse to see whither all their race injustice is leading, and ears but who are deaf to the prayer of Christ's little ones crying for a man's chance to get with others into the sun and to grow the free and beautiful life which God ...
— The Ultimate Criminal - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 17 • Archibald H. Grimke

... Tip answered, his eyes very blight; in his heart he sang "Glory!" And the angels in heaven sang for joy; for that night there had been laid aside a white robe and a crown ...
— Tip Lewis and His Lamp • Pansy (aka Isabella Alden)

... example to all the youth of the land, and the churches will ring with his praises. But what has been the effect of his life on the moral, social capital of the community? Is the world better or worse for his life? He has all his life been disseminating the germs of a soul-blight more infectious and deadly ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler

... strong arm to help them! No! no!—I have done my duty to those who ever did their duty to me, and I trust that my own conscience will prove my reward, and check that repining which we are too apt to feel when it pleases Heaven to blight what appears to be our fairest prospects ... I say, my good fellow," said Alfred, after a while, to a man in a boat, "what is the name of that ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat

... have trod— Flowers in the desert bloom; and fields, for God, Are white to harvest. Skeptics may ignore; Yet on the conquering Word, from shore to shore, Like flaming chariot, rolls. Ask ocean isles, And plains of Ind, where ceaseless summer smiles; Speak to far frozen wastes, where winter's blight Remains;—they tell the love, attest the might Of Him whose messengers across the wave To them ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer

... thou spearhead in my side, Thy father's first-born, and his shame; Unstable as the rolling tide, A blight has fall'n upon thy name. Decay shall follow thee and thine. Go, outcast of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various

... returned, Charles Barclay was on his way to Canada, vigorously intent on the new life before him. Agnes drew strength and comfort from the steadfast look of her brother's eyes, as he whispered to her, "Don't fear. Trust God, and be patient." The blight fell away from her, after that. If she was never a light-hearted girl again, she became something even sweeter and nobler. They never talked together about him, for the father had forbidden it; and, indeed, they needed not. Openly, and before them all, Everett would say when he heard from his friend. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various

... attic contents were to furnish forth the Cape Cod cottage with no unnecessary additions. Here were eight cane-seated chairs of the late Empire years. Four had been painted a dirty brown to simulate black walnut; four represented the white enamel blight which, in turn, had chipped enough to display the "grained" painting of the golden oak years beneath. A scraper applied to a leg revealed the mellow tone of honey-colored maple. Patience and paint ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley

... parts of the world it is not so. In Blantyre, for example, according to MacDonald, "to be called a liar is rather a compliment." Once more: English sentiment is such that the mere suspicion of incontinence on the part of a woman is enough to blight her life; but there are peoples whose sentiments entail no such effect, and, in some cases, a reverse effect is produced: "Unchastity is, with the Wetyaks, a virtue." It seems, then, that in respect of all the leading divisions of human conduct, different races of men, and the same races at different ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord

... and we gather the whole of creation into our own pained being—"the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now." The world you complain of as impure and wrong is not God's world, but your world; the blight, the dullness, the blank, are all your own. The light which is in you has become darkness, and therefore ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson

... fortiori all argumentative works on history or on administrative policy of any kind. The old Tartar blood and Tartar sympathies of the First August Emperor must surely re-appear in a policy so incompatible with all orthodox teaching? In one sense the blight upon Chinese civilization was akin to the blight cast upon that of Eastern Europe 500 years ago by the "unspeakable Turk." The new ruler boldly said: "The world begins afresh, with me. No posthumous condemnatory titles for me! My successor will be 'August Emperor Number Two,' ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker

... other people happy. I breathe through his lips, I live in his life, his passions are my own; and it is impossible for me to know noble and pure emotions excepting in the heart of this being unsoiled by crime. You have your fancies, here I show you mine. In exchange for the blight which society has brought upon me, I give it a man of honor, and enter upon a struggle with destiny; do you wish to be of ...
— Vautrin • Honore de Balzac

... hospitality, gave him a large popularity; but his alliance with President Johnson was fatal to his political fortunes. He had placed himself in a position from which he could not with grace retreat, and to go forward in which was still further to blight his hopes of promotion in his party. It was an extremely mortifying fact to Mr. Raymond that with the power of the Administration behind him he could on a test question secure the support of only one Republican member, and he a colleague who was bound to him by ties ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... management. They form a long covered walk, with a row of plantains on the W. side, to diminish the effects of the hot winds, but even with this screen, the fruit on that side are inferior to that on the opposite trellis. Easterly winds, again, being moist, blight these and other plants, by favouring the abundant increase of insects, and causing the leaves to curl and fall off; and against this evil there is no remedy. With a clear sky the mischief is not great; under a cloudy one the prevalence of such winds is fatal ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker

... blind loyalty. He felt that herein lay his own real danger. Yes, to bolt again, as he had done that time before, would be an easy way out. But its selfishness was too obvious. He could not do it. To do so would be to drag them in his train of disaster, to blight their lives and leave them under the ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum

... his eye Grew kindled with a fierce and flaming blight, Red-lowering like the sky, When, heralding the tempest in his might, The muttering clouds march forth and form on high. With sable banners and grim majesty. Beneath his frowning brow a shaft of fire, That told the lurking ire, Shot ever forth, outflashing ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various

... moans from home on branch in morning light, * But shakes my very frame with sorrow's killing might: No lover sigheth for his love or gladdeth heart * To meet his mate, but breeds in me redoubled blight I bear my plaint to one who has no ruth for me, * Ah me, how Love can part man's mortal ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... Felicia agreed. "But I'd much better go after I get through telling her what I'm going to pretend she is! She's exactly like the Black Blight—that horrid black thing that makes the green leaves droop and the gay little flowers shrivel up—there's only one thing to do to keep it from killing the whole garden—that's to burn ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke

... the subject; I've felt the influence of this nocturnal blight upon our city, but I never thought to analyse it before. I can see now that your 'Man About Town' should have been classified long ago. In his wake spring up wine agents and cloak models; and the orchestra plays 'Let's ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry

... written in no spirit of vindictiveness, for all who give the subject consideration must concede that far too serious is the condition of that civilized government in which the spirit of unrestrained outlawry constantly increases in violence, and casts its blight over a continually growing area of territory. We plead not for the colored people alone, but for all victims of the terrible injustice which puts men and women to death without form of law. During the year 1894, there were 132 persons executed ...
— The Red Record - Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States • Ida B. Wells-Barnett

... about the stage-door, to find his enemy or not to find him, as the case might be, but in either event to eat his heart in jealousy and impatience. When he found him he burned to insult him by asking him what tailor he advertised, or by addressing him as the Housemaid's Terror or the Nursegirl's Blight. He ground tegmenta of 'Maud' between his teeth as he looked at him. 'His essences turn the live air sick,' and 'that oiled and curled Assyrian bull, smelling of musk and of insolence.' And it happened one night ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray

... of which I had not thought it capable. 'That is so to an extent of which you do not dream. No man likes to have his hand forced, especially by one whom he regards—may I say it?—as a possible rival. But I will tell you this much. If the blight which has fallen on my life is likely to continue, I would not wish,— God forbid that I should wish to join her fate with mine,—not for all that the world could ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh

... from time to time supplied labour to these islands, so that the besetting trouble of the latter is nonexistent there." He adds: "I am decidedly of opinion that some such scheme as this is the only cure for the blight that has fallen on the island of Principe." It would require greater local knowledge than any to which the writer of the present article can pretend to discuss the merits of this proposal, but at first sight it would certainly ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring

... all!" said Allan heartily. "I am glad that I could put that matter straight for you. It would blight like black frost to have Stonewall Jackson's hand and mind set against you—and Richard Cleave is not the least ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston

... "'The Blight of Respectability,' by Geoffrey Mortimer, is well worth reading, and by more of us, perhaps, than imagine it. The shoddy god has votaries in England, where one would least expect ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson

... fruit so that spores of fungi have difficulty in finding foothold. But if water brings fogs, dews and humidity, as does the Pacific, grapes must be planted inland; otherwise leaf, bloom and fruit are born in the blight of fungi. The benign influences of water are felt in the eastern grape regions at distances of one to four miles, seldom farther. These narrow belts about the eastern waters are bounded on the landward side by high bluffs over which many showers fail to ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick

... are laid along the waters of the Cumberland, the lair of moonshiner and feudsman. The knight is a moonshiner's son, and the heroine a beautiful girl perversely christened "The Blight." Two impetuous young Southerners fall under the spell of "The Blight's" charms and she learns what a large part jealousy and pistols have in the love making of ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck

... accomplished the evil they had set out to do, made shift to sail away. And then, just after the palms of the island had sunk from sight below the water's edge, the unspeakable had happened. The Death that was not Death had arisen from out the sea and stood before the ship, and over it, and the blight of the thing lay along the decks like mould, and the ship sweated in the terror of that which ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris

... prejudices, there can be but one answer to that question. Oriental superstition cast its blight upon the fair field of science, whatever compensation it may or may not have brought in other fields. But we must be on our guard lest we overestimate or incorrectly estimate this influence. Posterity, in glancing ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... Boulogne, in happier times, had been a watering place, less fashionable than some on the French coast, but the pleasant resort of many in search of health and pleasure. And like Folkestone it had suffered the blight of war. The war had laid its heavy hand upon the port. It ruled everything; it was omnipresent. From the moment when we came into full view of the harbor it was impossible to think ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder

... Leading them astray, No false heart within That would them bewray, Nought to tempt them in An evil way; And if canker come and blight, Nought will ever ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.

... event:—Angela Bradley's marriage with Errington and Katherine's with Lord de Burgh,—might come off on the same day, even in the same church: that would be a culmination of excitement! Now some mysterious blight had fallen on all her schemes. What had happened? What could they have quarrelled about? Then when Katherine emerged from her refuge she was hopelessly mysterious; there was no penetrating the reserve ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander

... about their war-time coffee, made from chicory and acorns, had they once tasted the Java product. Yet I was assured that this was the choicest coffee grown in Java. I might add that, as a result of a blight which all but ruined the industry in the '70s, fifty-two per cent of the total acreage of coffee plantations in the island is now planted with the African species, called Coffea robusta, and thirteen per cent with another African species, Coffea liberia, ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell

... economic effects of Commercial Selection in soils and sites, and by Malthus of a competition for subsistence which he attributed to pressure of population on available subsistence, had already brought political science into that unbreathable atmosphere of fatalism which is the characteristic blight of Darwinism. Long before Darwin published a line, the Ricardo-Malthusian economists were preaching the fatalistic Wages Fund doctrine, and assuring the workers that Trade Unionism is a vain defiance of the inexorable laws of political economy, just as the Neo-Darwinians ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw

... knows they are bad enough, but they are by no means so bad as you thought. And I'm your wife, Stephen. That thing you did was brutal; those men will talk. I was guilty, no doubt, in my thoughts, but I'm young, and you have no right to blight my life and my reputation—yes, and yours—by a thing like that. We will have to meet those men. What are you going ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach

... session will be held after the meeting, as many are here to hear the paper on the chestnut blight, so we will proceed at once to the order of business and listen to the ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association

... sometimes the tangle descends on us like a net of blight on a rose-bush. There is then an instant choice for us between courage to cut loose, and desperation if we do not. But not many men are trained to courage; young women are trained to cowardice. For them to front ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... sake, don't be too hasty! Give me opportunity for explanation. I admit that I did wrong, but there are extenuating circumstances. Let me explain, I entreat you, before you thus blight my ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan

... you must, but never hate: Man is but grass and hate is blight, The sun will scorch you soon or late, Die wholesome then, ...
— Country Sentiment • Robert Graves

... Then came the usual blight to all such enterprises: a spy or a traitor revealed everything to Wirz. One day a guard came in, seized Baker and took him out. What was done with him I know not; we never heard of him after he ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy

... slowly and silently they rode home, - Rohtraut, Beauty Rohtraut! The boy was lost in his delight: 'And, wert thou Empress this very night, I would not heed or feel the blight; Ye thousand leaves of the wild wood wist How Beauty Rohtraut's mouth I ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... do they serve Him?" inquired the child. "If He is the great God Father Jamay teaches He can do everything, have everything. It is all His. Then why does He not keep people well, so they can work, and not blight the crops with fierce storms. Sometimes great fields of maize are swept down. And the little children die; the Indians kill each other, and at times the white ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas

... Mendelssohn, because of the latitudinarian habits of the Maskilim, who "despise the counsel of their betters, and go after the dictates of their hearts."[35] Both saw in Haskalah a deadly foe to their dearest ideals, a blight upon their most cherished hopes, and, like Elizabeta Petrovna, they would not derive even a benefit from the enemies ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin

... And yet I must choose This time to vex thee. O, I am the curse And blight of the existence, which to bless Is all my thought! Alarcos, dear Alarcos, I pray thee pardon me. I am so wretched: This fell suspense is like a frightful dream Wherein we fall from heights, yet never reach The bottomless abyss. It wastes my spirit, Wears down my life, ...
— Count Alarcos - A Tragedy • Benjamin Disraeli

... if the state assumed control of industry the blight of business could be removed. But in the transfer we would not necessarily gain opportunity to enjoy the adventure which industry holds out. Industry as a creative experience, it is safe to predict, would be as rare a personal experience ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot

... in especial, Rudolph. That would be precisely the theme of my story of the real Lichfield if I were ever bold enough to write it. There seems to be a sort of blight upon Lichfield. Oh, yes! it would be unfair, perhaps, to contrast it with the bigger Southern cities, like Richmond and Atlanta and New Orleans; but even the inhabitants of smaller Southern towns are beginning to buy excursion ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell

... Johannesburg, little white landmarks like milestones made their appearance, and these, we were told, were new claims pegged out. The thought suggested itself that this part of South Africa is in some respects a wicked country, with, it would almost seem, a blight resting on it: sickness, to both man and beast, is always stalking round; drought is a constant scourge to agriculture; the locust plagues ruin those crops and fruit that hailstones and scarcity of water ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson

... fair," replied Godwin; "and worthy of you, who are the most honest of men. Yet, Wulf, I am troubled. See you, my brother, have ever brethren loved each other as we do? And now must the shadow of a woman fall upon and blight that love which is so ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard

... that frowning and melancholy house in a backwater of London's jarring tide, where the dust collects, and sunlight has a struggle to make two ends meet, and cold penetrates like a dagger, and fog hangs like a pall, and the blight of ages clings to stone and brick, to window and woodwork, with an adhesive mournfulness which suggests the hatchment of Melpomene. Even the hand of Grinling Gibbons at the porch does not prevent one from recalling Crabbe's ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie

... think that much good may be done by its investigation. The really skilful and judicious steer clear of it from a fear of compromising their credit for commonsense; and while the caution necessarily attendant upon habitual scientific studies, dissuades the best men from meddling with that which may blight their hardly-earned laurels, the public is left to be swayed to and fro by an under-current of fallacious half-truths, far more seductive and dangerous than absolute falsehoods. We cannot undertake to say, thus ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various

... longer saw the first-line troops, the army in battle array. Instead he saw the base camps, the non-combatant followers of the army, a great deal that was confused and sordid, very little that was glorious or fine. It might conceivably have been possible for him to curse the whole army and cast a blight upon its enterprise, when his eyes rested only on the camp-followers, the baggage trains, the mobs of cattle, the maimed and unfit men; when the fine show of the fighters was out of sight. Plainly if a curse of any ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham

... by the goblins of the abyss. Others believed that she concealed herself in the top of the highest mountain that was near them, and by a commerce with invisible, malignant beings, still exercised the same gloomy temper in more potent, and therefore more inauspicious harm. The blight that overspread the meadows, the destructive contagion that diffused itself among the flocks, the raging tempest that rooted up the oak, when the thunder roared among the hills, and the lightning flashed from ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin

... love as she gives you. The man doesn't live who is clean enough in heart and in life to be worthy of such a treasure. But I do expect you to be, Felix, and I must assure myself that you are, clean enough and honorable enough not to blight all the rest of her life. What is past is past, but from now on there must be nothing that will not bear the ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly









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