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More "Decay" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stony and gradually descending trail, and we are making our way across the usual chequered area of desert, patches, abandoned fields, and old irrigating ditches that so often tell the tale of decay and retrogression in the East. These outlying evidences of decay, however, soon merge into green fields of wheat and barley, poppy gardens, and orchards, and flowing ditches; and two hours after obtaining the first view of ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... which enclose the Temple Church lies a very unpretending slab of marble. Rising but a few inches above the level, one corner sunken and green with earth-mould, it is but a single remove from the general decay around it. No fence protects it, children play and fight their mimic battles thereon, and when last we saw it a group of workmen employed near by were discussing their noontide bread and cheese and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... turn unto decay, Fall, and die, and pass away. Sinketh tower and droppeth wall, Cloth shall fray and horse shall fall, Flesh shall die and iron rust, Pass and perish all things must. Well I understand and say, All shall die, both priest and lay; ...
— Our Little Lady - Six Hundred Years Ago • Emily Sarah Holt
... Greece outnumber all That dwell within the town; but to their aid Bold warriors come from all the cities round, Who greatly harass me, and render vain My hope to storm the strong-built walls of Troy. Already now nine weary years have pass'd; The timbers of our ships are all decay'd, The cordage rotted; in our homes the while Our wives and helpless children sit, in vain Expecting our return; and still the work, For which we hither came, remains undone. Hear then my counsel; let us all agree Home to direct our course, since ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... been said or thought of life is accepted without being brought to the test of Jean-Christophe's own life. What is not true for him does not exist; and, as there are very few of the processes of human growth or decay which are not analysed, there is disclosed to the reader the most comprehensive survey of modern life which has appeared ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... poisoning by poisons so slow in their operation as to make the victim appear, to ordinary observers, as if dying from a gradual decay of nature, has been practised in all ages. Those who are curious in the matter may refer to Beckmann on secret poisons, in his History of Inventions, in which he has collected several instances of it from the Greek ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... an episode was only too characteristic of the decay which seemed inevitably to fall on each of the monastic Orders. The wealth and privileges of Cluny made its failure all the more conspicuous. A few years after the expulsion of Pontius, St. Bernard wrote to the ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... we considered certain aspects of the attitude assumed by our Aryan forefathers towards the great processes of Nature in their ordered sequence of Birth, Growth, and Decay. We saw that while on one hand they, by prayer and supplication, threw themselves upon the mercy of the Divinity, who, in their belief, was responsible for the granting, or withholding, of the water, whether of rain, or river, the constant supply ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... consequently, I am not merely a sensitive or passive, but also an active or intelligent being. The freedom of my thought and action guarantees to me the immateriality of my soul, and is that which distinguishes me from the brute. The life of the soul after the decay of the body is assured to me by the fact that in this world the wicked triumphs, while the good are oppressed. The favored position which man occupies in the scale of beings—he is able to look over the universe and to ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... decay of nations is "the social evil"—a thing wholly due to the androcentric culture. Another steady endless check is warfare—due to the same cause. Largest of all is poverty; that spreading disease which grows ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... (Phylloxera vastatrix), injures the grape by feeding on its roots. Decay usually follows its work on the roots and is often more injurious than the harm done directly by the parasite. This decay is always much more serious on European vines than on those of our native species. The phylloxera is a native of the United States east of the Rocky ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... whose home and patrimony it had been; and her husband, a retired Austrian officer, and two grown-up daughters did not lighten her task. Every year the fortunes sank lower; the upper storey of the house was already falling into decay, and the fine old furniture passing into the brokers' or private buyers' hands. It still, however, afforded sufficiently comfortable, and, by reason of its very drawbacks, desirable quarters to Mr. Browning. It perhaps turned the scale in favour ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... a proper perch. Hissing noises supervened, and then a hoot, proclaiming that a brood of young owls were residing there in the company of older ones. In spite of the habitable and more modern wing, neglect and decay had set their mark upon the outworks of the pile, unfitting them for a more positive light than that of the ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... were dazzlingly bedecked with the party-colored wings of jays, yellow-birds, woodpeckers, kingfishers, and the poly-tinted wood-duck. Yet in that dry, highly-rarefied atmosphere, there was not the slightest suggestion of odor or decay. ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... education? This is a disturbing phenomenon which students of mental disease[30] will study later, but on the examination of which we cannot here embark. It is not for us to seek the pathological cause for this moral decay—this decadence. We have ...
— Their Crimes • Various
... reason why we think that God, who gives us good, wholesome food, did not intend alcohol to be a drink for man, else He would have put it into the delicious ripe fruit, and not made it impossible to get until they decay. ...
— Object Lessons on the Human Body - A Transcript of Lessons Given in the Primary Department of School No. 49, New York City • Sarah F. Buckelew and Margaret W. Lewis
... the administration of religion. When Henry died the Protector abolished the old creed, and created a new and perilous cleavage between Protestant and Catholic, and, while England needed the protection of a navy more than ever, allowed the fine fleet which Henry had left to fall into decay. The spirit of enterprise grew with the Reformation. Merchant companies opened trade with Russia and the Levant; adventurous sea captains went to Guinea for gold. Sir Hugh Willoughby followed the phantom of the North-west Passage, turning eastward round the North Cape to ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... Tohfut-ul-mujahideen, 'their tyrannical and injurious usage proceeded to a length that was the occasion {206} of a general confusion and distraction amongst the population of the country. This continued for a long period, for nearly eighty years, when the affairs of the Moslems had arrived at the last stage of decay, ruin, poverty and wretchedness; since whilst they were too ill-practised in deceit to dissemble an obedience which was not sincere, they neither possessed the power to repel nor means to evade the evils that afflicted them. Nor did the Muhammadan princes ...
— Rulers of India: Albuquerque • Henry Morse Stephens
... parcelled out like slaves, to toil for their conquerors in the mines; the flocks were scattered, and wantonly destroyed; the granaries were dissipated; the beautiful contrivances for the more perfect culture of the soil were suffered to fall into decay; the paradise was converted into a desert. Instead of profiting by the ancient forms of civilization, Pizarro preferred to efface every vestige of them from the land, and on their ruin to erect the institutions of his own country. Yet these institutions did ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... skill, The practiced dental surgeon learns to fill Each morbid cavity, by caries made, With pliant tin; when thus the parts decayed Are well supplied, corrosion, forced to yield To conquering art the long-contested field, Resigns its victim to the smiles of peace, And all decay ...
— Tin Foil and Its Combinations for Filling Teeth • Henry L. Ambler
... addressed to me at any rate; for though I suppose God's quiver is never empty of arrows, and that some are always found to do His work, it may be that saving this country from a gradual decline of greatness and decay of prosperity may not be work for which He has appointed hands, and which therefore ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... of all life, every being, Brief bloom of its spring! Honor th' eternal, our human lot freeing From fetters that cling! Adding your mite, With the eternal unite! Though you decay, Breathe as a moment you may, Air ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... great chair, and drifted on in reverie through the still, tropical day, it was as if his soft, dreamy eye had passed into my soul. My grandmother cherished his memory with tender regret. A violent passion of grief for his loss was no more possible than for the pensive decay of the year. We have no portrait of him, but I see always, when I remember him, that peaceful and luxuriant palm. And I think that to have known one good old man—one man who, through the chances ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... When again the rocks are lifted to form land the process will begin anew; again they will crumble and creep down slopes and be washed by streams to the sea. Let us begin our study of this long cycle of change at the point where rocks disintegrate and decay under the action of the weather. In studying now a few outcrops and quarries we shall learn a little of some common rocks ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... the tree. It was an old oak. Well up its trunk a limb had broken or rotted away, and the resulting decay of the stub had made a hole in the tree itself. What instantly riveted the attention of the two boys was something black and tapering that projected from the hole and that slowly waved ...
— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... of God the race is soon to be extinct, let not injustice, oppression, or war, increase their woes or hasten their decay. ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... must be borne in mind if foods are to be kept in a good condition. Most foods change easily. Vegetables and fruits lose water, wilt, and become unfit to eat. Flour and corn-meal become mouldy. Potatoes decay and sprout. Some foods, such as milk, turn sour. Eggs become tainted, and fat grows rancid. With proper care in handling, storing, and keeping, ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Household Science in Rural Schools • Ministry of Education Ontario
... as to require us to act without waiting for the decision of the responsible advisers of the Crown. But the danger may be upon us before we are aware of its being near; for, as I said in a former letter, the sudden decay of potatoes dug up in an apparently sound state sets all calculation at defiance. Some precautionary measures must be adopted, and adopted promptly, for there is ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... provide ourselves with his Itinerarium; compare what has been, with what is; contemplate in their decay the castles and abbeys, which he saw in their strength and splendour; and, while you were sketching their remains, I would dispassionately inquire what has ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... his magnificent self-sacrifice, by which the man who has conquered his shameful past goes back willingly to the horrible life he has fled from that he may save from a like degradation and from an inevitable moral decay the one friend he has in the world, all unworthy as this friend is—contrast this with the story of the gigantic deeds "My Friend Meurtrier" boasts about unceasingly, not knowing that he has been discovered in his little round of daily ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... you had known me better than to interpret my silence into a decay of affection, especially as your behaviour has always been such as rather to increase than diminish it. Don't imagine, because I am a bad correspondent, that I can ever prove an unkind friend and brother. I must do myself the justice to ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... Audrey, as she regarded the drooping buds and leaves; 'my poor beautiful roses, and they were Cyril's gift, too. What a pity that flowers must die, and we must grow old—that in this world there must always be decay and change! Shall I ever be happier than I am to-night, with Cyril to love me, and Michael—dear Michael—to be my friend? What makes him so grave? He is always grave now.' And then she sighed and laid down her flowers, and took the ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... that led them to seats in the parquet. Gradually, their eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and they could distinguish the vast windowless cave, with its rows of seats, its galleries and painted ceiling. The air, smelling of dust and decay, lay heavily on Frederick's lungs. There were recesses in the great grotto that made the impression of gloomy holes for coffins. Some of them were hung with grey canvas, and canvas lay spread over the whole parquet, with the exception of a few rows left free for seats for the visitors. ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... corpse began to decay, and John felt that it was necessary to get rid of it, but he dared not venture to throw it into the sea. It was well known that Dorkin had been a quarrelsome man, and he feared that if he could not produce the body when the relief came, he might be deemed a murderer. ...
— The Story of the Rock • R.M. Ballantyne
... is affirmed to surpass that of all other created beings; and it is supposed they are, to a great extent, exempted from the diseases to which the flesh of other animals is heir. In place of suffering from the rigidity of age, which is the cause of the natural decay of those that "live and move and have their being" on the land, their bodies continue to grow with each succeeding supply of food, and the conduits of life to perform their functions unimpaired. The age of fishes has ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... describe how, under such circumstances, the artificial barriers would decay, and the delicate inhabitants of the garden would perish under the assaults of animal and vegetable foes. External forces would reassert themselves and wild nature would resume its sway. While, in a sense, he had strenuously ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... in the mouldering remains of Grecian elegance and Roman magnificence; but what is it compared to this? The eternal youth, the undecaying grandeur of nature, illumined by that celestial light which lends glory to ruins, and throws the illusion of beauty over the features of decay! ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... dolefully impressed by the decay and destruction of all material things and by the evanescent nature of beauty, he has no doubt whatever of the immortality of the verses he is writing. He vaunts as boldly as ever Horace did—indeed, in words that suggest ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... endurance, thy great army of martyrs; for achievement, thy chosen band of worthies. Deity unquestioned, thine essence foils decay! ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... writing, if you think proper, and send you a tolerably correct transcript of my thoughts tomorrow morning. I can easily repeat them, assisted by some memorandums that I have already made, and by the strength of my recollection and my feelings, which I think are in no danger of a sudden decay. ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... every ecclesiastical work throughout Ireland; after having bestowed jewels and food upon the mighty and the needy; after having founded churches and monasteries, for by him was repaired in Ireland every church which had been consigned to decay and neglect, and they had been neglected from times remote;—after leaving every rule and every good moral in the churches of Ireland in general; after having been the second time in the legateship; after having been fourteen years in ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... I see Rome while it yet exists: before a great number of years are elapsed, I question whether it will be worth seeing. Between the ignorance and poverty of the present Romans, every thing is neglected and falling to decay; the villas are entirely out of repair, and the palaces so ill kept, that half the pictures are spoiled by damp. At the villa Ludovisi is a large oracular head of red marble, colossal, and with vast foramina for the eyes and mouth: ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... all that is—all atoms, all stars, each grain of sand and all the constellations, each thought and dream of animal and man, all matter and all force, all doubt and all belief, all virtue and all crime, all joy and all pain, all growth and all decay—is all there is. It does not act because it is moved from without. It acts from within. It is actor ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... high. It had one window, or rather a small frame in which a window might perhaps once have been, but which was now empty. The door was exceedingly low, and formed of rough boards, and the roof was covered with broad cocoa-nut and plantain leaves. But every part of it was in a state of the utmost decay. Moss and green matter grew in spots all over it. The woodwork was quite perforated with holes; the roof had nearly fallen in, and appeared to be prevented from doing so altogether by the thick matting of creeping-plants and the interlaced branches which years of neglect had allowed to ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... rivals had ever failed to wish it smaller, and not one of its owner's satellites had ever seen it without praise. They somewhat avoided the roadway passing under the huge, misshapen, ragged trees, and through fern brakes, ruddy and crisp in their decay. On reaching a suitable eminence, the father and son stood still to look upon the many-chimneyed building, or rather conglomeration of buildings, to which these groves and glades ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... descendants of the (p. 121) families that had flourished before the Revolution, and had sought after it to keep up distinctions and exclusiveness which the very success of the struggle in which they had been concerned doomed to an early decay. This was especially noticeable in New York. In such a city social rank must tend, in the long run, to wait upon wealth. The result may be delayed, it cannot be averted. Wealth, too, in most cases, will find its way to the hands of those carrying on great commercial undertakings. That this class ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... century. At the date of Pope's letter, it was the seat of Simon Harcourt, first viscount, but Simon's father, Sir Philip Harcourt, for many years was the last of the family actually to live there, his widow afterward permitting the buildings to fall into the state of decay which Pope describes. In the tower is an upper chamber over the chapel which still bears the name of "Pope's Study." It was there, in 1718, that Pope finished the fifth volume of his translation of Homer. Simon, the first viscount, had taken up his residence at Stanton Harcourt a short time before ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... the stem and branches all through the changes of season, like the leaves of the pine and box, while evergreens look fresh through the entire year and are generally cone-bearing and resinous trees. 'These change their leaves annually, but, the young leaves appearing before the old ones decay, ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... soldiers' graves, singly or sometimes combined into small cemeteries. The Russians bury their dead with devotion. Double-armed Greek crosses betray their burial places.... But not always did they find time during their retreat. Occasionally a penetrating odor of decay announces the fact that some of their dead had to be deprived of burial. Then, very rarely only, indeed, one comes across black, swollen corpses, so terribly gnawed and disfigured by millions of small crawling animals, ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... people: but to tell them that they may die in a fit of drunkenness, and shew them how dreadful that would be, cannot fail to make a deep impression. Sir, when your Scotch clergy give up their homely manner, religion will soon decay in that country.' Let this observation, as Johnson meant it, ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... 24th.—What one gains in the beauty and abundance of vegetable life here, one loses in its rapid and premature decay. Fruit gathered in the morning is scarcely fit to eat at night, and the flowers brought on board yesterday evening were dead to-day at 4.30 a.m.; whilst some of the roses we brought from Cowes lasted until we reached Madeira, though it must be owned so many fell to ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... she had a spell beyond Cheap dinners and Advertisement's array Of polychrome, of which Trade seems so fond. Alas! the Dogeless city's silent sway Will lessen momently, and fade away, When the Rialto echoes to the roar Of vaporetti, and in sad decay The Gondola, its swan-like flittings o'er, Neglected ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 3, 1887 • Various
... health had been the only object in going there, and the main consideration while they remained. She returned, if not well, at any rate not worse. She had got through the winter, and her lungs were still pronounced to be free from those dreadful signs of decay, the name of which has broken so many mothers' hearts, and sent dismay into the breasts of so many fathers. During her sojourn at Torquay she had grown much, and, as is often the case with those ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... compartment of which the middle portion has been painted by Giulio Romano[107] in fresco, and at each of the ends there is a figure painted by Raphael in oil. The fresco painting has been so often repaired in consequence of decay, that not a vestige of the original work remains; while the two figures painted by Raphael in oil still stand out in all their original freshness, and even improved from what they were ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... in which we were, was one of those built by the Romans when their colonies spread over the northern shores of Africa. The town had long fallen into decay, the sands of the Desert having gradually encroached on it till the greater portion of the land fit for cultivation had been overwhelmed. The only habitable houses were one story in height, composed of sunburned bricks, and with flat roofs, on which the occupants ...
— Saved from the Sea - The Loss of the Viper, and her Crew's Saharan Adventures • W.H.G. Kingston
... eyes slowly push its way up that it might gaze at the little black hurrying atoms as they crossed and recrossed the grey bridge. There are many places in Petrograd where life is utterly dead; where some building, half-completed, has fallen into red and green decay; where the water lies still under iridescent scum and thick clotted reeds seem to stand at bay, concealing in ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... I feel as if I had spent the last half-hour in a magnificent sepulcher. Yes, it is a tomb in which hope, joy and the power of acting nobly lie buried. Every beautiful description, every deep thought glides insensibly into the same mournful chant of the brevity of life, of the slow decay and dissolution of all earthly things. The poet's bright, fond memories of love, youth and beauty are but the funeral torches shedding their light on this tomb, or to modify the image a little, they are the flowers that bloom on it, watered with ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... very important to understand here that there were two courses of action still open to the disappointed capitalist confronted by the new peril of this real or alleged decay. First, he might have reversed his machine, so to speak, and started unwinding the long rope of dependence by which he had originally dragged the proletarian to his feet. In other words, he might have seen ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... five-and-twenty yards of good purple, superfine, marketable cloth in them—with large flowing folds and doubles, and in a great style of design.—All which plainly shews, may it please your worships, that the decay of eloquence, and the little good service it does at present, both within and without doors, is owing to nothing else in the world, but short coats, and the disuse of trunk-hose.—We can conceal nothing under ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... one of the very great artists of the world, and the most rapid workman in the whole Renaissance period. There are to-day, after centuries of decay, fire, theft, and repainting, yards upon yards of Tintoretto's canvases rotting upon the walls of the Venetian churches. He produced an enormous amount of work, and, what is to be regretted, much of it was contract ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... the lowest degree of distress—he worked according to size for the petty dealers who sell daubs on the bridges, and export them to semi-civilised countries. They bought his pictures at two and three francs a-piece, according to the regulation dimensions. This was like physical decay, it made him waste away; he rose from such tasks feeling ill, incapable of serious work, looking at his large picture in distress, and leaving it sometimes untouched for a week, as if he had felt his hands befouled and unworthy of ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... never proved that copper has been transformed into lithium—both members of the hydrogen-gold group, you will observe. Copper to lithium is going backward, so to speak. It has remained for me to devise this protodyne apparatus by which I can reverse that process of decay and go forward in the table, so to put it—can change lithium into copper and copper into gold. I can create and destroy matter ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... dwelling, and to offer his services! and the first sight of his master, the once noble Timon, in that abject condition, naked as he was born, living in the manner of a beast among beasts, looking like his own sad ruins and a monument of decay, so affected this good servant, that he stood speechless, wrapt up in horror, and confounded. And when he found utterance at last to his words, they were so choaked with tears, that Timon had much ado to know him again, or to make out who it was ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Boston streets, that they wore an air of encouraging reform, and suggested a future of greater and greater domesticity. Whole blocks of these downtown cross-streets seemed to have been redeemed from decay, and even in the midst of squalor a dwelling here and there had been seized, painted a dull red as to its brick-work, and a glossy black as to its wood-work, and with a bright brass bell-pull and door-knob ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Brotherton, and 1432, when John duke of Norfolk died seised of the castle, manor and borough of Struguil. In 1524 Charles, first earl of Worcester and then lord of the Marches, granted a new charter of incorporation to the bailiffs and burgesses of the town, which had fallen into decay. This was sustained until the reign of Charles II., when, some dispute arising between the earl of Bridgwater and the burgesses, no bailiff was appointed and the charter lapsed. Chepstow was afterwards ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... thorns, and even trees, between the courses of stone, after the population ceased; or rain and snow detaching small pieces, which were followed by larger; also sometimes a sinking of the ground; and besides these common causes of decay, there ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... city of Kayrawan, which dates from the Arab conquest in the eighth century, preserves the remains of some noble buildings, but of their other capitals or royal residences no traces of art or architecture remain to bear witness to the taste of their founders. Each began to decay as soon ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... paying tithes, May 22, 1582, and was "excommunicated." "Of Henry Shaxper, for not labouring with teems for the amending of the Queen's Highway, 2/6." "Of Henry Shaxper for having a dich between Redd Hill and Burmans in decay for want of repair, Oct. 22nd, 1596." Probably the man was ill and dying then. He was buried ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... of yours," said his friend, glancing at him. "If he had been a countryman of mine there would have been less marvel. But here is none of the sadness of decay none of the withering if the tokens of old age are seen at all it is in the majestic honours that crown a glorious life the graces of a matured and ripened character. This has nothing in common, Rossitur, with those dull moralists who are always dinning ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... whose gracious providence Is watchful for our good, guard me from men, From their deceitful tongues, their vows and flatteries; Still let me pass neglected by their eyes: Let my bloom wither and my form decay, That none may think it worth their while to ruin me, And fatal love may never ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... contest unusually bloody, exhausting, and calamitous, in which the evils of foreign war have been aggravated by domestic convulsion and insurrection; in which many of the arts most useful to society have been exposed to discouragement and decay; in which scarcity of subsistence has imbittered other sufferings; while even the anticipations of a return of the blessings of peace and repose are alloyed by the sense of heavy and accumulating burthens, which press upon all the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of George Washington • George Washington
... very midst of the pampered and enervated over-refinement of Roman decay, Constantine did something more than merely turn the conquering eagle back, against the course of the heavens, for which Dante seems to blame him,[2] when he established his capital at Byzantium; for there at once upon the new soil, and in less than ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... eglantine than like what we generally call a garden, with trimly-cut beds and parterres of brilliant roses. There was a beautiful wildness about it and yet it was perfectly in order—there was no sign of withering or decay, no dead leaves lying about, no broken or dried-up branches on the trees, though they were high and massive and covered with foliage—it was all fresh and blooming as if nothing hurtful or troubling had ever entered it. The water of the streams was pure and clear as crystal, ...
— The Boys and I • Mrs. Molesworth
... within the old tender place and we both struggled to nourish our phantom joy. Counterfeit though we both discerned it, yet it passed unchallenged between us and at least kept our souls' commerce from decay. Counterfeit I have called it, for the tenure of another's love was upon her; and her stay with us was like that of a sailor lad who is for a time ashore, waiting ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... past hath strength to sway The immortal hope which swells within the breast, That this new earth matures not toward decay, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... haunts the "Manse" and as it rains and darkens and the sky glooms through the dusty attic windows, he is likely "to muse deeply and wonderingly upon the humiliating fact that the works of man's intellect decay like those of his hands" ... "that thought grows moldy," and as the garret is in Massachusetts, the "thought" and the "mold" are likely to be quite native. When the same anyone puts his poetry into novels rather than essays, he is likely to ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... arms, and was raised, by degrees, to the highest military rank. I have traversed wide countries, at the head of my troops, and seen many battles and sieges. At last, being disgusted by the preferment of a younger officer, and feeling, that my vigour was beginning to decay, I was resolved to close my life in peace, having found the world full of snares, discord, and misery. I had once escaped from the pursuit of the enemy by the shelter of this cavern, and, therefore, chose ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... has fallen and been destroyed; and yet the nation does not die, but gives promise of a better and more enduring life. What we cherished we have lost; what we did not ask or expect has come to us; the effete old is passing away, and out of the ashes of its decay is springing forth the young and vigorous new. Change, transition, every where and in all things: how can society fail to be disrupted, and who can speak, write, or think with the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... overlapping, and covered by a layer of flat stones. It is remarkable that the lintels of the doorways are of wood, known as Sapote wood. Many of them are still hard and sound, and in their places; but others have been perforated by wormholes, their decay causing the fall of ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... threw back his head, sniffing the soft breeze, heavy with the mysterious thrill of unplowed acres, the wondrous existence of primordial jungle, where life has rioted unceasingly above unceasing decay. It was dry with the fine dust of waste places, and wet with the warm mists of slumbering swamps; it seemed to Gideon to tremble with the songs of birds, the dry murmur of palm leaves, and the almost inaudible whisper of the gray moss that festooned ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... strain to all the host assembled; That strain untired has trembled through all time! It swells with such sweet choruses unnumbered, Decay and Death ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... August, the carpenter examined the pumps, and to our great mortification, found them all in a state of decay, owing, as he said, to the sap's being left in the wood; one of them was so rotten, as, when hoisted up, to drop to pieces, and the rest were little better; so that our chief trust was now in the soundness of our vessel, which ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... number of guests entertained within them, to the silence which one feels astonished to find in them after so many flourishes of trumpets, to the immobility of their luxurious furniture, which attests by the aspect of age and decay it gradually assumes the transitory character of dynasties, the eternal wretchedness of all things; and this exhalation of the centuries, enervating and funereal, like the perfume of a mummy, makes itself felt even in untutored brains. Rosanette ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... heavelye, remayning euer synce in a deepe melancholye, w^{th} conceipte of her own death, and complayneth of many infirmyties, sodainlye to haue ouertaken her, as impost[u]mecon in her head, aches in her bones, and continuall cold in her legges, besides notable decay in iudgem^t and memory, insomuch as she cannot attend to any discourses of governm^t and state, but delighteth to heare some of the 100 merry tales, and such like, and to such is uery attentiue; at other tymes uery impatient, and ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 69, February 22, 1851 • Various
... which, having from the first been massive and richly sombre, had mellowed into a darker sombreness and richness as it had stood unmoved amid London years and fogs. The grandeur of decoration and furnishing had been too solid to depreciate through decay, and its owner had been of no fickle mind led to waver in taste by whims of fashion. The rooms were huge and lofty, the halls and stairways spacious, the fireplaces furnished with immense grates of glittering steel, which held in winter beds of scarlet glowing coal, kept scarlet glowing ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... should have been glad if they had been written a quarter of a century earlier; then, at least, I should have understood why the thoughts seem to be so bleached, and why they are so redolent of resuscitated antiquities. But that a thing should have been written in 1872 and already smell of decay in 1872 strikes me as suspicious. Let us imagine some one's falling asleep while reading these chapters—what would he most probably dream about? A friend answered this question for me, because he happened to have had the experience himself. He dreamt of a wax-work show. The ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... chivalrous lord and noble dame have turned to dust. But there is a faith more precious than the faith in old song and legend; and the golden-haired child, who flourishes so fresh and fair amidst all this ruin and decay, stands forth to my mind as an emblem of that power which renovates earth and defies time. Had she been a pattern child, had her instructors (whoever they were) succeeded in moulding her into a mere machine, she might not so vividly have roused my interest; but there was something in her saucy independence, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... man frowned. His face was a collection of lines. When he frowned, all the lines pointed to hell, the grave, decay ...
— The Last Place on Earth • James Judson Harmon
... the beautiful Chateau d'O. This sixteenth century mansion like so many to be seen in this part of France, is in a somewhat pathetic state of disrepair, but as far as one may see from the exterior, it would not require any very great sum to completely restore the broken stone-work and other signs of decay. These, while perhaps adding to the picturesqueness of the buildings, do not bring out that aspect of carefully preserved antiquity which is the charm of most of the houses of this period in England. The great expanse of water in the moat is very ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... the fact of wretched circumstances beyond our control, of natural decay and death, and loss of our nearest and dearest; the universe has made it excessively difficult, nay, impossible, for us to follow constantly its calm behest, "Be as healthy as possible." It is all very fine to say be healthy. Of course we should be willing ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... them, till bold and sacrilegious hands despoiled them, adorned with sculptures which, surviving the destruction of the people who raised them, the wanton rage of barbarous enemies, and the inroads of the elements for near two thousand years, sill remain, in their decay, the wonder and admiration of the world, the models of modern sculptors, and the greatest treasure of art a nation ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... water, she called in a more vigorous element, the Slav from Dalmatia and Bosnia. Meanwhile the towns, in which were the descendants of those who had come from Italy in the days of the Roman Empire, fell more profoundly into decay. Those western towns looked on the Slav with disdain, they would not mingle with the rural population; but as these were much more active and were often strengthened by fresh immigrants, one thought that they would gradually ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... sketch of the best-known methods of preserving Nature's greatest handiwork—Man—I may mention that the Egyptians also devoted their energies to the preservation of those things more intimately connected with our theme, namely, mammals, birds, etc. A people who knew how to preserve and arrest from decay the carcase of so immense an animal as the hippopotamus (a mummy of which was discovered at Thebes), or the various bulls, cows, dogs, cats, mice, ichneumons, hawks, ibises, fishes, serpents, crocodiles, and other sacred animals (mummies of which have been and are constantly found), ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... those silly people, the French. The idea made me very uneasy, for I thought how near Oulton lay to the coast. You cannot imagine what a magnificent old town Venice is; it is clearly the finest in Italy, although in decay; it stands upon islands in the sea, and in many places is intersected with canals. The Grand Canal is four miles long, lined with palaces on either side. I, however, shall be glad to leave it, for there is no place to me like Oulton, where live two of my ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... certain, however, that the mind did not share in this decay of the bodily strength. 'Persuasion' was not finished before the middle of August in that year; and the manner in which it was then completed affords proof that neither the critical nor the creative powers of the author ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... Pharisees, hypocrites, politicians, and priests, artists, authors, dancers of death; inwardly you are all full of decay and dead men's bones. Truly you are the sons of them that slew Christ, and like them you lay on men's shoulders burdens grievous to be borne, which you yourselves would not touch with the end of your fingers. Crucifiers are you like them, and those who come ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... take an example or two of its style: dealing with the excuses people make for not hearing the Gospel, "O, saith one, I dare not for my master, my brother, my landlord; I shall lose his favour, his house of work, and so decay my calling. O, saith another, I would willingly go in this way but for my father; he chides me and tells me he will not stand my friend when I come to want; I shall never enjoy a pennyworth of his goods; he will disinherit me—And I dare not, ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... many centuries old, and of a style of architecture not seen by the Americans elsewhere in Hili-li. The building had an eerie look, and as the party drew near to it Peters observed that but one of its wings was inhabited, the remainder of the mansion being in a state of almost complete decay. They all entered by a side doorway into the inhabited wing. Pym and Peters were motioned to seats in the hallway, the Duke remarking, in hushed tones, 'The home of Masusaelili,' as he and Diregus passed through a broken and decaying doorway ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... happier times. As for my protection, we must tarry till the tide turns ere it will in any sort avail thee. But if thou canst lie concealed for a few days or weeks, I have little doubt that the churchmen, who, by siding with the Duke of Albany in court intrigue, and by alleging the decay of the purity of Catholic doctrine as the sole cause of the present national misfortunes, have, at least for the present hour, an irresistible authority over the King, will receive a check. In the mean while, however, ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... company, that he is the Prince of Wales, and that he is the Almighty. Moral perversion is a common symptom, and the patient is often guilty of criminal assaults, indecent exposures, bigamous marriages, and the like. It is accompanied with progressive bodily and mental decay. Women are comparatively rarely affected by it, and it generally commences in men about middle age, and its duration is from a few months to three years. It is commonly parasyphilitic in origin. Paralytic symptoms first appear in the tongue, lips, and face; the speech becomes thick and hesitating. ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... their connections, nor success.' Horace Walpole's Letters, vi. 134. Of one Southwark election Mrs. Piozzi writes (Anec. p. 214):—'A Borough election once showed me Mr. Johnson's toleration of boisterous mirth. A rough fellow, a hatter by trade, seeing his beaver in a state of decay seized it suddenly with one hand, and clapping him on the back with the other. "Ah, Master Johnson," says he, "this is no time to be thinking about hats." "No, no, Sir," replies our doctor in a cheerful tone, "hats are of no use now, as you say, except to throw up in the air and ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... galleries or the airing-courts, nursing their morbid irritability, while others lounged on the benches or crept into corners, and so drifted downwards through the dreary stages of physical and mental decay. It does not require much consideration to show that it would tend to improve all such patients, both in their bodily and mental health, if they were engaged in some regular occupation during a reasonable ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... for that century we must consider as the decay of old ways of believing, the preparation afar off for new, better, and wider ways an inevitable thing. We will not blame men for it; we will lament their hard fate. We will understand that destruction of old forms is not destruction of everlasting ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... exist without the presence of this all-important insect. She is just as necessary to its welfare, as the soul is to the body, for a colony without a queen must as certainly perish, as a body without the spirit hasten to inevitable decay. ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... air and the sky and sun; therefore, cotton—and not corn, which draws its life from the clay and mud and decay which ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... George More, whose patience God hath been pleased to exercise with many temporal crosses; I have maintained my own mother, whom it hath pleased God, after a plentiful fortune in her younger days, to bring to great decay in her very old age. I have quieted the consciences of many, that have groaned under the burden of a wounded spirit, whose prayers I hope are available for me. I cannot plead innocency of life, especially of my youth; but I am to be judged by a merciful God, who ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... however noblie donne, And thoughts do as themselves decay; But wise words, taught in numbers for to runne Recorded by the Muses, live for ay; Ne may with storming showers be washt away, Ne bitter breathing windes with harmful blast, Nor age, nor envie, shall them ever ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... the boys used to declaim, their Yankee hearts throbbing under their roundabouts? 'Happy, proud America!' Somehow in that way. 'Cursed, abased America!' better if they had said. Look at her, in the warm vigor of her youth, most vigorous in decay! Look at the dregs of nations, creeds, religions, fermenting together! As for the theory of self-government, it will muddle down here, as in the three great archetypes of the experiment, into ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... name," she murmured, "though the sound of it is beautiful. Rouille! It signifies, for the moment, the decay of hopes, a mould of rust obscuring ambition. But in a little while the steel of your courage will shine bright once more. I am Madame Gilbert; my husband was of the Territorial Army—a Captain also." She had thought to have made him a Colonel on General Castelnau's ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... when the monument on Grand Island had fallen into decay, Hushiel saw the cornerstone of the dream city, Ararat, displayed in one of the rooms of the Buffalo Historical Society. He was no longer a sensitive boy, yet the tears sprang to his eyes as he re-read the old inscription which you may still ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... velvet and satin, and hunting suits of scarlet—all faded and falling to pieces—stood the picture of Tyrrel Rawdon, with its face turned to the wall. The Squire made a motion to his descendant, and the young American tenderly turned it to the light. There was no decay on those painted lineaments. The almost boyish face, with its loving eyes and laughing mouth, was still twenty-four years old; and with a look of pride and affection the Squire lifted the picture and placed it in the hands of the Tyrrel ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... lighted in the tripod-pan, to keep the Banqueting-Hall as warm as circumstances would admit. As soon as the old gentleman's anxieties were set at rest the rooms were shut up again, and "Freeze-your-Bones" was once more abandoned for weeks and weeks together to damp, desolation, and decay. The last of these temporary migrations had taken place only a few days since; the admiral had satisfied himself that the rooms in the east wing were none the worse for the absence of their master, and he might now be safely reckoned ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... no new phase in human experience. It characterised all the civilisations of ancient times, at the height of their prosperity, and was really the beginning of their decay. ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... Derbend better than a coffin to me? Does not my heart feel its decay, without power to escape it? Here is only my corpse: my ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... ought to be kept slightly tempered with warmth, both night and day, a condition very favorable to the introduction and change of atmospheric currents. The invigorating tendencies of a dry, pure atmosphere are remarkably beneficial, while air charged with moisture and decay is exceedingly baneful, introducing diseases under ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... forcibly struck me. I felt that I was on the lands of a rich, intelligent, and beneficent proprietor. Entering the park, and passing before the manor-house, the contrast between the neglect and the decay of the absentee's stately Hall and the smiling homes of his villagers ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... upon the Territories of the Goilaus, and having forced them to share this delightful Country, settled themselves there under the Name of Kranfs. These new Conquerors were for some Time molested by the Manoris, but as Luxury had brought their flourishing Empire to Decay, the Kranfs forced them to desist, and remained in quiet Possession of ...
— The Amours of Zeokinizul, King of the Kofirans - Translated from the Arabic of the famous Traveller Krinelbol • Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crbillon
... earth and was so hot that not a single one of the now existing plants and living beings could then exist, the life in that ocean and on its bottom was so infinitely grand in its proportions that men can now form no adequate conception of the same. The force of growth as well as of decay was immense, and all that was grown or made by its decay only increased ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... another and distant quarter of the globe. This, politically and commercially speaking, was a great error; but it has been committed, and it would be a greater error to leave those people, now free British subjects, and the large British capital there vested, to decay, misery, and general deterioration. They must be supported, and it is fortunate that they can be supported, through their present difficulties, without inflicting a grievous wrong on Africa, by taking her children from her by wholesale to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... asunder. Plato and Carlyle are both possessed with the idea that they are living in a degenerate age, and they attribute its degeneracy to the same causes:—Laissez faire; the growth of luxury; the effeminate preference of Lydian to Dorian airs in music, education, and life; the decay of the Spartan and growth of the Corinthian spirit; the habit of lawlessness culminating in the excesses of Democracy, which they describe in language as nearly identical as the difference of the ages and circumstances admit. They propose ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... my bosom grieves, To view thy sadly drooping leaves: For, while their tender tints decay, The rose of Fancy fades away! As pilgrims, who, with zealous care, Some little treasur'd relic bear, To re-assure the doubtful mind, When pausing memory looks behind; I, from a more enlighten'd shrine, Had made this sweet memento mine: But, lo! its fainting head reclines; It folds ...
— Poems • Matilda Betham
... disregard for private interests, and for the moral welfare and improvement of the people, both Greece and Rome destroyed the vital elements on which the prosperity of nations rests, and perished by the decay of families and the depopulation of the country. They survive not in their institutions, but in their ideas, and by their ideas, especially on the art ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... would fright my ear With the destruction and decay Of things familiar and dear, And vaunt of a swift-running day That sweeps the fair old Past away; Whatever else be strange and new, All other things may go or stay, So that there ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... with some difficulty that he found the way to his own house, which he approached with silent awe, expecting every moment to hear the shrill voice of Dame Van Winkle. He found the house gone to decay—the roof fallen in, the windows shattered, and the doors off the hinges. A half-starved dog that looked like Wolf was skulking about it. Rip called him by name, but the cur snarled, showed his teeth, and passed on. This was an unkind cut indeed. ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... little good to tell of the White man's treatment of them. Self-government by the stronger people always falls hard on the weaker, and Mission after Mission has been extinguished by the enmity of the surrounding Whites and the corruption and decay of the Indians. A Moravian Mission has been actually persecuted. Every here and there some good man has arisen and done a good work on those immediately around him, and at the present time there are some Indians living upon the reserves ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... to think that even in decay there's life," the painter murmured. "The falling apart of rotten wood breeds sentiency, there's force and motion in the falling of a dying leaf, in the breaking up and crumbling of everything indeed. ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... unlovely in the worldliness that ingulfed her and bore her onward. I do not know that there is anything singular in her history. But the pain of it to us was in the certainty—and it seemed so near—that in the decay of her higher life, in the hardening process of a material existence, in the transfer of all her interest to the trivial and sensuous gratifications—time, mind, heart, ambition, all fixed on them—we should never regain our Margaret. What I saw in a vision of her future was a ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... little. Another said this must be the very place where Lot's wife was turned into a pillar of salt, and the pillar been broken up and spread around the country. He said if a man was to die he would never decay on account of the salt. Thus the talk went on, and it seemed as if there were not bad words enough in the language to properly express their contempt and bad opinion of such a country as this. They treated me to some of their meat, a little better ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... He thought there was a pleasing contrast between Adelaide and myself, referred to Diana, mentioned that my hair was remarkably thick, and proceeded with a dissertation on the growth and decay of the hair, when she returned with ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... a "find" of more than 200 Jersey Gaulish coins, which are in the possession of R. R. Lempriere, Esq. They were turned up by the plough on his manor of Rozel; and whatever covering had enclosed them had either gone to decay, or become broken up, as they were quite loose. He had cleaned a few of them. Even to the eye the metallic composition varied greatly—some being of the colour of silver, and some lowering to that ...
— The Coinages of the Channel Islands • B. Lowsley
... all, this is nothing, in fact, but what is perfectly natural; and, in this respect, marriage only follows the eternal law of nature in all earthly existence. Every form of life carries in itself decay and dissolution—a poisonous snake-king[3] gnaws even at the root ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... spirit live and act and have a body. Let our enemies prevail over our armies; let them destroy; yet shall all that is good in our institution be preserved even by our enemies; for a true idea is imperishable and nothing can decay but ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... exercised with a view to individual immortality. That seemed to me to mean so much that I've built up quite a little creed on it. It's the principle, isn't it, upon which the whole scheme of the world hinges? A million leaves fall and decay to enrich the soil wherefrom two million more may spring. An infinity of little shell-fish die, and the ages grind their shells to powder to make the sands and the chalk cliffs. Countless raindrops sacrifice their identity ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... it; yea, will itself be a spring of life, in the very heart of him that drinks it. Ah! it will be such a preservative also to spiritual health, as that by its virtue the soul shall for ever be kept, I say, the soul that drinks it, from total and final decay; it shall be in them a well of living water, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... which had been among the family possessions for about a quarter of a century. It had once been a fine equipage, and had been drawn by a spirited team in the days before Felipe Delcasar lost all his money, but now it had a look of decay, and the team consisted of a couple of rough coated, low-headed brutes, one of which was noticeably smaller than the other. The coachman was a ragged native who did odd jobs ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen in decay with thee, then thou shalt relieve him, yea, though he be a stranger or a sojourner, that he may live with thee: Take thou no interest of him, or increase; but fear thy God that thy brother may live with thee. Thou shalt not give him any ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... might not have been the case. At any rate there was the body of a man in a wonderful state of preservation, kept from decay by the action of the peat; and, judging from the clothing, the body must have been in its position there for many ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... still shown as the shop which Peter occupied while he was there. It is a small wooden building, leaning and bent with age and decrepitude and darkened by exposure and time. Within the last half century, however, in order to save so curious a relic from farther decay, the proprietors of the place have constructed around and over it an outer building of brick, which incloses the hut itself like a case. The sides of the outer building are formed of large, open arches, which allow the hut within to be seen. The ground on which the hut stands has also been ...
— Peter the Great • Jacob Abbott
... of poisoning by poisons so slow in their operation as to make the victim appear, to ordinary observers, as if dying from a gradual decay of nature, has been practised in all ages. Those who are curious in the matter may refer to Beckmann on secret poisons, in his History of Inventions, in which he has collected several instances of it from the Greek and Roman writers. Early in the sixteenth century the crime seems to ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... rough stone floor laid, on which the bundled or folded remains were placed and at least partially covered with earth and gravel. Other flat rocks were then laid over them, either directly on the earth or more probably supported by poles placed across, whose decay had allowed them to fall into the confusion ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... many minutes, when a break in the wood gave me a view of the old mansion, and at once dispelled the illusion that was momentarily gaining upon me. "They could not be the Callonbys." The house was old; and though it had once been a fine and handsome structure, exhibited now abundant traces of decay; the rich cornices which supported the roof had fallen in many places, and lay in fragments upon the terrace beneath; the portico of the door was half tumbling; and the architraves of the windows were broken and dismantled; the tall and once ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... was annexed to the ancient bounds of the empire." In accordance with this statement, the same historian entitles the first part of his history up to the victory over the Poles in 1672 the History of the Growth of the Othman Empire, and the remaining portion, The Decay of ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... indeed, trampled down by the living; the place thereof shall know them no more, for that place is not in the hearts of the survivors, for whose interest they have made way. But adversity and ruin point to the sepulchre, and it is not trodden on; to the chronicle, and it does not decay. Who would substitute the rush of a new nation, the struggle of an awakening power, for the dreamy sleep of Italy's desolation, for the sweet silence of melancholy thought, her twilight time of ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... to understand here that there were two courses of action still open to the disappointed capitalist confronted by the new peril of this real or alleged decay. First, he might have reversed his machine, so to speak, and started unwinding the long rope of dependence by which he had originally dragged the proletarian to his feet. In other words, he might have seen that the workmen had more ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... desolate—when their worldly comforts fail and their hopes decay, they are directed to return to God and put their trust in him; and also to bring with them, those for whom they feel interested—their helpless dear ones, and he hath promised them protection. "Leave thy fatherless children, and I will preserve them alive, ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... his own request was ordered to join Beauregard. S. D. Lee was absent from his corps by reason of a wound he had received at Nashville, and Hill was assigned to its temporary command. [Footnote: Id., pp. 1002, 1003, 1272, 1317.] The growing decay of discipline and organization was shown by the irregularity of reports, and for the few weeks the war still went on, Johnston had to content himself with abbreviated returns, which contained only the numbers ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... Ah, memory, make it clear— (It was not long ago, but yesterday,) So little and so helpless and so dear Let not the song be lost, the flower decay! His voice, his waking eyes, his gentle sleeping: The smallest things are safest in thy keeping. Sweet memory, keep our child with ...
— Music and Other Poems • Henry van Dyke
... the head of the social life of Worcester as a matter of course. I remember one night, when a party was breaking up, I said to the person next to me, in some jesting fashion: "I am sorry to see the decay of the old aristocracy." The Governor, who was getting his coat at the other end of the room, overheard the remark, and called out: "Who is lamenting ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... to Parliament—who knows? It is something of a risk, perhaps, to leave all this pretty coin here, but then it's a greater risk to carry it in the schooner"—he argued both ways—"and then, again, damp does not decay pure metal. But," thought Captain Brand, "suppose somebody should discover this little casket in the rock. Ah! that's not probable, for no soul besides myself knows of it, and even the very man who made the door did not ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... are rapidly diminishing. The 'Coligans,' once a numerous and powerful people, inhabiting the fertile region of Lake 'Colac,' are now reduced, all ages and sexes, under forty, and these are still on the decay. The Jarcoorts, inhabiting the country to the west of the great lake 'Carangermite,' once a very numerous and powerful people, are now reduced to under sixty. But time would fail, and I fear it would ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... nuisance. It is going through so much for so little. It is as bad as the campaign before a parliamentary election. It offends one's sense of proportion. In a well-regulated universe there would be no tedious process of decay, either before or after death. You would go about your daily avocation unconcerned and unwarned, and then at the moment appointed by an inscrutable Providence for your dissolution—phew!—and your clothes would remain standing ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... are, in Carolina, at least, four sorts. The Pitch-Pine, growing to a great Bigness, most commonly has but a short Leaf. Its Wood (being replete with abundance of Bitumen) is so durable, that it seems to suffer no Decay, tho' exposed to all Weathers, for many Ages; and is used in several Domestick and Plantation Uses. This Tree affords the four great Necessaries, Pitch, Tar, Rozin, and Turpentine; which two last are extracted by tapping, and the Heat of ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... became apparent that all orders and all parts of Germany were in a state of ferment. The next manifestation of the revolutionary spirit was the rebellion of the knights. This class, now in a state of moral and economic decay, had long survived any usefulness it had ever had. The rise of the cities, the aggrandizement of the princes, and the change to a commercial from a feudal society all worked to the disadvantage of the smaller nobility and gentry. ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Yet something more protects her; a certain common sense, which now and then very nearly achieves wit. For an instance—But yesterday a certain pompous lady lamented to her in my hearing (and with intention, as it seemed to me, who am grown suspicious), the rapid moral decay of Boston society. "Alas!" sighs my heroine; "but what a comfort, ma'am, to think that neither of us belongs to it!" Add to this that she has learning enough to equip ten precieuses—and hides it: has read Plato and can quote her Virgil by the page—but ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... designed for the nation over which it was to extend, to be able to connect himself with the future progress of an agile and ambitious people, was certainly a rare and happy fortune, and must be considered, when we claim superiority for him over those who were placed in the midst of apathy and decay. His influence upon us may be seen in the material, but still more distinctly in the social and moral action of the country. With those laws which here restrain turbulent forces and stimulate beneficent ones,—with the bright visions of peace and freedom which the unhappy of every ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... of the constitution—went all to pieces. First, decay appeared in the brace buttons; then the straps got out of order. They did say it was owing to the heels of the French-polished boots going down on one side, but the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... is clearly marked. No love but pure love burns on the altar of any soul, and any one who wishes may stop to kindle the fires or warm himself thereat. There is no bodily contact, no decay, no weakening. This love is enrapturing, uplifting, ever drawing the lover and the loved nearer to ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... which make tearless Lima, the strangest, saddest city thou can'st see. For Lima has taken the white veil; and there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro, this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new; admits not the cheerful greenness of complete decay; spreads over her broken ramparts the rigid pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its own distortions. I know that, to the common apprehension, this phenomenon of whiteness is not confessed to be the prime agent in exaggerating the terror of objects otherwise terrible; nor to the ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... ideal was performed in former times by these great men and more especially by those great men whom legend, myth and superstition converted into gods. But with the decay of the old faiths the only possible fruitful ideal left is the ideal upheld by Socialism, the ideal of the Co-operative Commonwealth in which the economic conditions will give birth to the highest, purest, most altruistic ethics the ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... few French chairs of tarnished gilt, a rifle in the corner, a presentation sword in a mahogany case, a few classical prints on the walls, and one or two iron deed-boxes marked "El Dorado Bank," were the principal objects. A mild flavor of dry decay and methylated spirits pervaded the apartment. Yet it was scrupulously clean and well kept, and a few clothes neatly brushed and folded on a chair bore witness to the servant's care. As Paul, however, glanced behind the sofa, he was concerned to see a coat, which had evidently ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... The windows, doors, mantle-pieces, bannisters, and every portable thing had been removed from the house by the blacks, who had squatted in the neighbourhood; even the chimneys had been taken down for the bricks. The swallows were the sole tenants; the barn had fallen a prey to decay and storms, and the roof lay comparatively uninjured at some distance on the ground. A pair of glistening eyes, peeping through a broken board at the end, showed me that the foxes had appropriated it to their own use. The horse-stable, coach-house, ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... they wont to put up with their plainness, hence the fancy trimmings. The development of the American pie is a curious analogy in this respect. We see in this the intricate working of human culture, its eternal strife for perfection. And perfection is synonymous with decay. The fare of the Carthusian monks, professed, stern vegetarians, underwent the same ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... and a wan but beautiful form, clasping an urn to her breast, appeared stretched on a litter, and was borne toward the spot. It was Helen, brought from the adjoining nunnery, where since her return to these once dear shores, now made a desert to her, she had languished in the gradual decay of the fragile bonds which alone fettered her mourning ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... happen that these roots sent down into the cavity of a decaying trunk may, after a time, become completely concealed within it, by the gradual formation and extension of new wood over the orifice of the cavity formed by the death and decay of the old wood. Such is presumed to be the explanation of a specimen of this kind in the possession of the writer, and taken from a cavity in an apparently solid block of rosewood; externally there were no marks to indicate the existence of a central ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... between the several savage tribes, leaving, occasionally, no vestige of once powerful nations and villages. Have we not seen in our day a once warlike and princely race—the Hurons— dwindle down, through successive decay, to what now ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... Mausolus, King of Caria, who made that noble sepulchre at Halicarnassus; while she lived, she lived in grief, and died of it, being worn out by it, for that opinion was always recent with her: but you cannot call that recent which has already begun to decay through time. Now the duty of a comforter is, to remove grief entirely, to quiet it, or draw it off as much as you can, or else to keep it under, and prevent its spreading any further, and to divert one's attention to other matters. There are some who think, with ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... I garnered autumn's gain, Out of her time my field was white with grain, The year gave up her secrets, to my woe. Forced and deflowered each sick season lay In mystery of increase and decay; I saw the sunset ere men see the day, Who am too wise in all I should ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... families of the same kind. There is thus a striking analogy, which has not escaped the philosophical biologist, between the ant colony and the cell colony which constitutes the body of a Metazoan animal; and many of the laws that control the cellular origin, development, growth, reproduction, and decay of the individual Metazoan, are seen to hold good also of the ant society regarded as an individual of a higher order. As in the case of the individual animal, no further purpose of the colony can be detected than that of maintaining itself in the face of a constantly changing environment ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... head was white with years of wisdom and experience, spoke to the despairing assemblage of creatures. From his lofty perch above the world the Eagle had looked down upon centuries of change and decay. He knew every force of nature and all the strange things of life. The hoary-headed sage said that the Good Hunter could not be restored until his scalp was found. Then all the animals clamored that they ...
— The Curious Book of Birds • Abbie Farwell Brown
... never expected to act at all. No one counted on your awakening. No one dreamt you would ever awake. The Council had surrounded you with antiseptic conditions. As a matter of fact, we thought that you were dead—a mere arrest of decay. And—but it is too complex. We dare not suddenly—-while you are still ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... year 1786, as will be remembered, being then poor and in debt, he declined another election to the governorship, and set himself to the task of repairing his private fortunes, so sadly fallen to decay under the noble neglect imposed by his long service of the public. One of his kinsmen has left on record a pleasant anecdote to the effect that the orator happened to mention at that time to a friend how anxious he was under the great burden of his debts. "Go back ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... vessels, and thereafter it was not worth while to take the blubber to Spitzbergen to be boiled; and the different nations, having carried home their coppers, left the apparatus of those fishing stations to decay. ...
— Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage • Richard Hakluyt
... followed, have produced? Have they never visited that neighbouring country, which still presents to the eye, even of a passing stranger, the signs of a great dissolution and renovation of society? Have they never walked by those stately mansions, now sinking into decay, and portioned out into lodging rooms, which line the silent streets of the Faubourg St Germain? Have they never seen the ruins of those castles whose terraces and gardens overhang the Loire? Have they never heard that from those ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... lighten the burden which was pressing her down to the grave. But, poor child, she was never again the same light-hearted girl. She grew pale and thin and in the hectic flush and faltering tread I read the death sign of early decay, and I felt that my misguided young friend was slowly dying of a broken heart. Then there came a day when we were summoned to her dying bed. Her brothers and sisters were present; all their resentment against her had vanished in the presence of death. She was their dear sister about ...
— Trial and Triumph • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... materialist, looking outward, sees that the world is made up of force-driven matter, of gas, carbon and mineral; and he says, "Even so am I made up." He studies an object, sees that it has its appointed cycle of growth and decay, and concludes, "Even so do I appear and vanish." To him the world is the only reality, and the world perishes, and man is but a part ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... remarking upon the great number that were in ruins, the officer replied that it was considered so much more meritorious an action to build a pagoda than to repair one that, after the death of the founder, they were generally suffered to fall into decay. ...
— On the Irrawaddy - A Story of the First Burmese War • G. A. Henty
... disgraced by the characteristics of a slavish populace, a mean selfishness, a mad frivolity, and fawning adulation on the ruler who dispenses panem et circenses. Such has been the course of many a political reaction, from the time of degenerate Athens and imperial Rome down to the decay of Medicean Florence and the orgies of ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... the late invasion, the persons who are objects of the grant of public money now before you had so diverted the supply of the pious funds of culture and population, that everywhere the reservoirs were fallen into a miserable decay.[39] But after those domestic enemies had provoked the entry of a cruel foreign foe into the country, he did not leave it, until his revenge had completed the destruction begun by their avarice. Few, very few indeed, of these magazines of water that are not either totally destroyed, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... in the impotence of rottenness, they lie outstretched over knoll and hollow, like moldering reptiles of the primeval world, while around, and on and through them, springs the young growth that fattens on their decay—the forest devouring its own dead. Or, to turn from its funereal shade to the light and life of the open woodland, the sheen of sparkling lakes, and mountains basking in the glory of the summer noon, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... produced, according to Theophrastus, by heat acting upon moisture. For this reason the hottest and driest regions of the earth produce the most aromatic perfumes, because the sun dries up that moisture which causes most substances to decay. ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... my mouth. And I have no device to aid me. But it were easier, when I long for a meal, to escape my own thoughts than them, so swiftly do they fly through the air. But if haply they do leave me a morsel of food it reeks of decay and the stench is unendurable, nor could any mortal bear to draw near even for a moment, no, not if his heart were wrought of adamant. But necessity, bitter and insatiate, compels me to abide and abiding to put food in my cursed ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... well appeareth this day, To fetch to thy fold thy first sheep going astray. Most mighty Maker, thou castest not yet away Thy sinful servant, which hath done most offence. It is not thy mind for ever I should decay, But thou reservest me, of thy benevolence, And hast provided for me a recompence, By thy appointment, like as I have received In thy strong promise here openly pronounced. This goodness, dear Lord, is of me undeserved, I so declining ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... faced the sea, and I alighted to watch the steaming horses being replaced by a trio of fresh ones. The place was Dadendal, I was informed, and the proprietor of the place, when I entered and tossed off a liqueur-glass of cognac, pointed out to me a row of granite buildings fallen much to decay as the ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... first went into the past to look for treasure. It is a treasure buried in Arden Castle by the sea, which is their home. They want the treasure to restore the splendor of the old Castle, which in your time is fallen into ruin and decay, and to mend the houses of the tenants, and to do good to the poor and needy. But you know that now they have used their magic to get back their father, and can no longer use it to look for treasure. But your magic will hold. And if you lay out ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... boys used to declaim, their Yankee hearts throbbing under their round-aborts? 'Happy, proud America!' Somehow in that way. 'Cursed, abased America!' better if they had said. Look at her, in the warm vigour of her youth, most vigorous in decay! Look at the germs and dregs of nations, creeds, religions, fermenting together! As for the theory of self-government, it will muddle down here, as in the three great archetypes of the experiment, into a paling, ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... it said that too much brushing will injure the teeth, but don't you believe it! The sooner you become accustomed to a moderately stiff brush, that will do its work well and thoroughly, the better. All foreign matter must be constantly removed, else decay will come as sure as fate. A perfect state of cleanliness cannot be unless the teeth have proper and constant attention. By this I do not mean that you must cease all other occupations and take up that of eternal scrubbing. Simply keep your teeth clean. Toothpicks must not be used ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... house of Virginia's Parliament, in session at Williamsburg, became exercised about the tobacco trade and "Resolved, That an humble address of this house be presented to His Majesty, and a Petition to the Parliament of Great Britain; representing the distressed state and decay of our Tobacco Trade, occasioned by the Restraint on our Export; which must, if not speedily remedied, destroy our Staple; and there being no other expedient left for Preservation of this Valuable Branch of the British Commerce, to beseech His Majesty and His Parliament, ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore
... and Pessimism, 33. How reconcile with life one bent on suicide? 38. Religious melancholy and its cure, 39. Decay of Natural Theology, 43. Instinctive antidotes to pessimism, 46. Religion involves belief in an unseen extension of the world, 51. Scientific positivism, 52. Doubt actuates conduct as much as belief does, 54. To deny ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... been a roadhouse with its roulette wheels, its bar, its dining tables and its champagne, but which now, barely furnished in only a few of its rooms, inhabited by mountain rats and fluttering bats and general decay for the most part, formed the uncomfortable ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... house, and a barouche-and-pair was waiting for us in the sunny road outside. We drove along a road that crossed the moor, until we came to a little village of scattered houses, with a fine old church—at one end of which an ancient sacristy seemed mouldering slowly to decay. We drove past the gates of two or three rather important houses, lying half-hidden in their gardens, and then turned sharply off into a road that went up a hill, nearly at the top of which we came to a pair of noble old carved iron gates, surmounted with a ...
— Milly Darrell and Other Tales • M. E. Braddon
... that never tires When human strength gives way— There is a love that never fails When earthly loves decay." ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... merrier multitude; White-armed Nuala, Aengus of the birds, Feacra of the hurtling foam, and him Who is the ruler of the Western Host, Finvarra, and their Land of Heart's Desire, Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, Time an endless song. I kiss you and the world ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... vast labours our horizon has broadened beyond the backstairs of the Palace and the benches of the Senate House in Rome to the wide lands north and east and south of the Mediterranean, and we have begun to realize the true achievements of the Empire. The old theory of an age of despotism and decay has been overthrown, and the believer in human nature can now feel confident that, whatever their limitations, the men of the Empire wrought for the betterment and the ...
— The Romanization of Roman Britain • F. Haverfield
... inlaid with patines of bright gold. There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st But in his motion like an angel sings, Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims. Such harmony is in immortal souls; But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in, we cannot ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... tree. I will wear you for my crown; I will decorate with you my harp and my quiver; and when the great Roman conquerors lead up the triumphal pomp to the Capitol, you shall be woven into wreaths for their brows. And, as eternal youth is mine, you also shall be always green, and your leaf know no decay." The nymph, now changed into a Laurel tree, bowed its head in ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... off, say'st thou? Decay of time, believe me Mark; for wit Is wine, and wine is poured into a cup Of sparkling gold, and not into a crack'd Old jug, and thou, illustrious cousin, art Become a broken ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... the midst of the ages. It is very composed of them. I can't think why they do it. Nor why I have written a real letter. If you write a real letter back, damme, I'll try to correspond with you. A thing unknown in this age. It is a consequence of the decay of faith; we cannot believe that the fellow will be at ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... you doing in London? Are you ripening as fast for the grave as I am? How should we lay out every moment for God? For some days I have had the symptoms of an inward consumptive decay—spitting of blood, etc. Thank God! I look at our ...
— Fletcher of Madeley • Brigadier Margaret Allen
... vain—the all-composing hour Resistless falls: the Muse obeys the power. She comes! she comes! the sable throne behold Of Night primeval and of Chaos old! Before her, Fancy's gilded clouds decay, And all its varying rainbows die away. Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires, The meteor drops, and in a flash expires. As one by one, at dread Medea's strain, The sickening stars fade off th' ethereal plain; As Argus' eyes, by ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... October night in the high wolds beyond Wiltshire, with a north wind chaunting of winter, with the old leaves letting go their hold one by one from branches and dropping down to decay, with a mournful sound of owls, and in fearsome loneliness, there trudged in broken boots and in wet and windy rags an old man, stooping low under a sack of emeralds. It were easy to see had you been travelling late on that inauspicious night, ...
— Tales of Three Hemispheres • Lord Dunsany
... sorrow came in the death of Elisabeth, the wise, gentle, and quiet invalid sister who had been always part of Mr. Keble's life, and seemed, above all, to diffuse about her an atmosphere of peace and holiness. After a gradual, almost imperceptible decay, she sank to sleep on the 7th of August 1860. Mrs. Keble's always frail health began to fail more and more, so that winters in a warmer climate became necessary. Dawlish, Penzance, and Torquay were resorted to in successive winters, ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... under the heading of "The Prison of Cervantes," calls attention to the alarming state of decay of the house in Argamasilla del Alba, in the cellar of which, as an extemporized dungeon, tradition asserts that Cervantes was imprisoned, and where he penned at least a portion of his work. It was ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... 'tis the Fashion now-a-days, if a Citizen get but a little Money, one goes to building Houses, and brick Walls; another must buy an Office for his Son, a third hoists up his Daughter's Topsail, and flaunts it away, much above her breeding; and these things make so many break, and cause the decay of Trading: but I am for the honest Dutch way of breeding their Children, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... Aurungzeb each erected scores of buildings that have survived the ravages of time and the more destructive work of greedy mercenaries in time of war. In and around Delhi are scores of these tombs in various stages of decay. Those which have been cared for are splendid specimens of the best architecture of ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... green fish, hewing them out of the frozen mass with the axe. The young man had fished here the previous summer, had cached the fish caught too late to dry in the sun, and they had remained where he left them for four or five months. Most of them had begun to decay before they froze, but that did not impair their value as dog food, though it rendered the cooking of them a disagreeable proceeding to white nostrils. This caching of food is a common thing amongst both natives and whites, and it is ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... anything, for it was so dingy, so battered, so broken, that its raison d'etre had come to be a matter of speculation. Into this seat I now inducted our visitor. He was as shabby as the funeral coach itself, but had kept up more gentility in his decay. I had not seen him for four years, and the lack of any change in his appearance surprised me. There he was, as well shaven, as threadbare, as jaunty and well-mannered, as in the old days when we used to play the siege of Troy, using an old packing-case for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... Fate had not spared her. The beautiful face—beautiful even in age and decay—changed suddenly as she looked at them—the mouth became distorted, the eyes fixed: and then the heavy head fell back upon the pillow—the paralysed form, wholly paralysed now, lay like a thing of stone. ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... grows and increases in size. Generation and regeneration take place through this layer. I have called it the girdle of perpetual youth. It never grows old. It is annually renewed. The heart of the old apple-tree may decay and disappear, indeed the tree may be reduced to a mere shell and many of its branches may die and fall, but the few apples which it still bears attest the fact that its cambium layer, at least over a part of its surface, ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... during the late war had produced such large emissions of paper money, that a considerable depreciation took place, and specie disappeared. The consequent rise of exchange, instead of being attributed to its true cause, was ascribed to the decay of trade. ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... natural world when things reach the highest point of development, they begin to decay or deteriorate; but this is not true in the spiritual world. Never in this life and possibly never in that life which is to come shall we reach the fulness of the type, or, in other words, the highest point of development. As the acorn or the little chick bears in its nature ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr
... into the considerably different position of parents and child we have known, which doubtless attained its climax nearly a century ago. Feudal conditions, with the large households so well adapted to act as seminaries for youth, began to decay, and as education in such seminaries must have led to frequent mischances both for youths and maidens who enjoyed the opportunities of education there, the regret for their disappearance may often have been tempered for parents. Schools, colleges, and universities began to spring up and develop ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... doubt, original differences in teeth, as in other parts of the human system, some being more liable to decay than others; but the simple means we have pointed out, if adopted in season and perseveringly applied, will preserve almost any teeth, in all their usefulness and reality, till old age. If yours have been neglected, and some of ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... count. By the miracle of Penicillium Roqueforti a new cheese was made. It is placed historically back around the eighth century when Charlemagne was found picking out the green spots of Persille with the point of his knife, thinking them decay. But the monks of Saint-Gall, who were his hosts, recorded in their annals that when they regaled him with Roquefort (because it was Friday and they had no fish) they also made bold to tell him he was wasting the best part ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... soldiers, and other representative classes. The method adopted for discovering the qualities in question is to consider groups of individuals, and to compare the qualities that distinguish such groups as flourish or prosper from others of the same kind that decline or decay. This method has the advantage of giving results more free from the possibility of bias than those derived from ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... foreign with our domestic policy, we shall experience after the close of the war the darkest and most difficult days of our existence. The crisis through which we are passing is the gravest we have yet encountered. Let us make it a crisis of growth, not a symptom of irreparable senile decay. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... social polity. And of course we must be fair in our comparisons, and not set a Chinese coolie in the concrete against an English statesman, nor any concrete example of another kind of culture in its decay with the highest bloom to which we believe our own type to be able ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... wretched, as the king alone, and members of the royal family, enjoyed the privilege of having glazed windows, whitened walls, and tiles; the palace, and some of the Buddhist temples, are the only ancient edifices which remain, and even these are crumbling to decay. The chief temple was one built to contain the tooth of Buddha. Not that the original tooth really exists, because that was burned by the Portuguese. The present relic worshipped by all the Buddhists is more like the tooth of a crocodile than that of a man. It is preserved in an inner chamber, without ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... two nymphs, now almost classic with decay. One of them, toppling helplessly, quenched her bronze torch in weeds. Her sister stood erect in grief like a daughter of Niobe wept ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... aspect of terrific struggle. In Maine, for example, it gives a pleasant impression of comfortable prosperity. Wherever the trees have room to grow, they are full and stocky, and even where they are crowded together their slender upspringing trunks look alert and energetic. The signs of death and decay, indeed, appear everywhere in fallen trunks, dead branches, and decayed masses of wood, but moss and lichens, twinflowers and bunchberries so quickly mantle the prostrate trees that they do not seem like tokens of weakness. Then, too, ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... promptly as possible; for the pleasure of climbing into this queerest of cities on foot is not the least part of the entertainment of going there. Then you appreciate its extraordinary position, its picturesque- ness, its steepness, its desolation and decay. It hangs - that is, what remains of it - to the slanting summit of the mountain. Nothing would be more natural than for the whole place to roll down into the valley. A part of it has done so - for it is not unjust to suppose that in the process of decay the crumbled particles have sought the ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... result Jefferson and Gallatin deliberately neglected to make ordinary preparations against attack; fortifications were abandoned, skilled officers dismissed, ships allowed to decay at the wharves or on the stocks, and the accumulation of military material ceased. The only offset to this neglect was the creation of a military school at West Point in 1802, and the training gained by the naval wars against the ...
— Formation of the Union • Albert Bushnell Hart
... frown. His heart, devoted to indolence, seems to have thought that there is wealth enough in happiness, but seldom happiness in mere wealth. The cheerfulness, indeed, with which he brightens his old age is interesting and endearing; like his own rose, he is fragrant even in decay. But the most peculiar feature of his mind is that love of simplicity, which be attributes to himself so feelingly, and which breathes characteristically throughout all that he has sung. In truth, if we omit ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... behind. I believe that historians have not yet reckoned sufficiently with the disastrous influence which this worship of insanity,—for it is often nothing less—has exercised on the fortunes of peoples and on the development or decay of their institutions. ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... just completed, of which the new Council Chamber was the nucleus, was now habitually known in Venice as the "Palazzo Nuovo;" and the old Byzantine edifice, now ruinous, and more manifest in its decay by its contrast with the goodly stones of the building which had been raised at its side, was of course known as the "Palazzo Vecchio." That fabric, however, still occupied the principal position in Venice. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... fourteen feet one inch; a gain so slight that the rings of annual growth must be difficult to trace—an evidence of waning vital force. The grand subdivisions of the trunk are all sadly crippled; unsightly bandages of zinc mask the progress of decay; the symptoms of approaching dissolution are painfully evident, especially in the winter season. In summer, the remaining vitality expends itself in a host of branchlets which feather the limbs, and give rise to a false ...
— Bay State Monthly, Volume I, No. 2, February, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... following manuscript. It was placed in my hands by this kindly stranger, who in so doing explained that it had been written by the last occupant of the old inn I was so nearly on the point of investigating. She had been its former landlady, and had clung to the ancient house long after decay had settled upon its doorstep and desolation breathed from its gaping windows. She died in its north room, and from under her pillow the discolored leaves were taken, the words of which I now place ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... that nations, like the individuals composing them, have fixed periods of growth, manhood, decay, decrepitude, and death—more or less rapid, according to the stock and situation. Those who accept that dogma argue that all that is necessary in order to predict the fate of a nation is a correct calculation ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... gardeners' tidy souls could not abide the gold and green and russet pattern on the grass. The gravel paths must lie unstained, ordered, methodical, without knowledge of the realities of life, nor of that slow and beautiful decay which flings crowns underfoot to star the earth with fallen glories, whence, as the cycle rolls, will leap again ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... "We are the lords of the kingdom of mind! We are the stem which can never decay!" —Students' Song, ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... soon may I follow When friendships decay, And from love's shining circle The gems drop away. When true hearts lie withered, And fond ones are flown, Oh! who would inhabit ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... soil. The vines were laden with dark purple grapes, and the slender twigs of the maple, then tasseled with their clusters of small red flowers, now hung out a gorgeous display of leaves stained by the frost with burning crimson. On every side we saw the tokens of maturity and decay where all had before been fresh and beautiful. We entered the forest, and ourselves and our horses were checkered, as we passed along, by the bright spots of sunlight that fell between the opening boughs. On either side the dark rich masses of foliage almost ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... with flowers around their fingers. Memory was not even troubled by the decay of the dead, for there remained of them only a handful of ashes. The soul, mingled with the boundless ether, ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... this gradual decay, an action was witnessed exhibiting something of antique energy. Two marines of the guard were cut off from their column by a band of Cossacks, who seemed determined to take them. One became discouraged, and wished to surrender; ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... evidence of a general fire over the Rockies about the time that the Indian's tradition places it, but in this forest there were no indications that there had ever been a fire. Trees were in all stages of growth and decay. Humus was deep. Here I found a stump of a Douglas spruce that was eleven feet high and about nine feet in diameter. It was so decayed that I could not decipher the rings of growth. This tree probably required at least a thousand years to reach maturity, and many years must ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... thought in England is against any association of a schoolmaster with matrimonial irregularity. And also Mr. Benham remarried. It would certainly have been better for him if he could have produced a sister. His school declined and his efforts to resuscitate it only hastened its decay. Conceiving that he could now only appeal to the broader-minded, more progressive type of parent, he became an educational reformer, and wrote upon modernizing the curriculum with increasing frequency to the TIMES. He expended a considerable fraction of his dwindling capital upon a science ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... clenched his fists, and looked with a vindictive scowl at the strangers. A second glance induced him to unclench his fists and reel round the corner on his way to a neighbouring grog-shop. Whatever other shops may decay in that region, the grog-shops, like noxious ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... dying, and he lay In all the weakness of decay. A numerous progeny, with groans, Attended ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... something more to be said, and the life that is thus futile is also, as it seems to me, inexplicable if you believe in God at all. If man, being what he is, is wholly subject to that law of mutation and decay, then not only is he made 'a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death,' but he is also inferior to that persistent, old mother-earth from whose bosom he has come. If all that you have to say of him is, 'Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return,' ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... same sort of continuity and unity in thought The preoccupations of man are the same in all ages—to provide for his material needs, and to speculate what can possibly happen to his spirit, when the body, broken by accident or disease or decay, can no longer contain his soul. The best thought of man has always been centred on trying to devise some sort of future hope which could encourage him to live eagerly, to endure patiently, to act rightly. ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and there was a "'Change," where merchants met every day, as in the Royal Exchange in London. Public dinners were given here also with great magnificence; but from the marshy nature of the ground on which the building had been set up, it fell to decay in 1797, and a new Sessions-house ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... Rome. The extension of the Roman dominion in the south of the peninsula had brought the state into connection with the Greek cities, which at one period were so numerous and powerful as to give to this part of Italy the name of Magna Graecia.[25] Many of these cities had now fallen into decay through internal dissensions and the conquests of the Lucanians and other Sabellian tribes; but Tarentum, originally a Lacedaemonian colony, still maintained her former power and splendor. The Tarentines naturally regarded with extreme jealousy the progress of the Roman arms in the south ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... ploughshare and the yellow grain; And rising ports along the busy shore Protect the vessel from old Ocean's roar— All, all must perish. But, surviving last, The love of letters half preserves the past: True,—some decay, yet not a few survive, Though those shall sink which now appear to thrive, As custom arbitrates, whose shifting sway Our life and language ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... learned may The western abbey give! Like theirs, his ashes must decay, Like theirs, his fame ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... intelligence, would be to do him an injustice. He was not a man of whom it could properly be said that he was ever startled, or shocked; but he certainly had a sense within him, that if his wife should sicken and decay, he would be very sorry, and that he would find a something gone from among his plate and furniture, and other household possessions, which was well worth the having, and could not be lost without sincere regret. Though it would be a cool, business-like, gentlemanly, ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... being no proper place for the public religious and literary exercises of the members of the seminary, the apartment of the old building falling into decay and ruin, he undertook, made arrangements, provided the means, and erected by contract, in five months, a chapel, near the new college edifice. It is fifty feet by thirty-six, of two stories height, arched within and completely finished, and painted without—convenient, ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... I do not pester you with decrepit pages, and insist upon your accepting them as full of the old spirit and vigour. That trouble perhaps still awaits you, after I shall have reached a further stage of decay. Seriously, my mind has, for the time, lost its temper and its fine edge, and I have an instinct that I had better keep quiet. Perhaps I shall have a new spirit of vigour if I wait quietly for it; perhaps not." The winter passed away, but the "new spirit ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... empty but for the sleeping dogs, where the signs swung and the upper stories leaned together, and where the common life had been transacted since the birth of the town and would continue till its decay. And beyond lay the cool round hills, with their dark dewy slopes, over which he had ridden a year ago, and all England beyond them again, with its human life and affairs and interests; and over all hung the serene stars whence God ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... as well as other vegetables, brought to our city markets in this country, is utterly unfit to be eaten. Sometimes it is immature; sometimes it has a hot house maturity; sometimes it has been picked so long that it has begun to decay. Many fruits—berries especially—are in perfection for a very short period only. Mulberries, for example—one kind especially—are not in perfection long enough to carry to the market house, even though the ...
— The Young Mother - Management of Children in Regard to Health • William A. Alcott
... thinking the Almighty put us into this land of rocks and holds, and scalloped coast, cold, hunger, and the chase, just to keep ourselves warm by quarrelling with each other. If we had not the recreation now and then of a bit splore with the sword, we should be lazily rotting to decay. The world's well divided after all, and the happiness as well as the dule of it. It is because I have never had the pleasure of wife nor child I am a little better off to-day than the weeping folks about me, and they manage to make up their share of content with reflections ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... dependable. But, to avoid hairsplitting, what we call "modern" English literature may be said to date from about 1885. A few writers who are decidedly "of the period" are, as a matter of strict chronology, somewhat earlier. But the chief tendencies may be divided into seven periods. They are (1) The decay of Victorianism and the growth of a purely decorative art, (2) The rise and decline of the AEsthetic Philosophy, (3) The muscular influence of Henley, (4) The Celtic revival in Ireland, (5) Rudyard Kipling and the ascendency of mechanism ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... nature's nest of boxes: the heavens contain the earth; the earth, cities; cities, men. And all these are concentric; the common centre to them all is decay, ruin; only that is eccentric which was never made; only that place, or garment rather, which we can imagine but not demonstrate. That light, which is the very emanation of the light of God, in which the saints shall ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... the general of yesterday to act as a corporal to-day, if his services can be useful to his country; holding that to be false pride, which postpones the public good to any private or personal considerations. But I am past service. The hand of age is upon me. The decay of bodily faculties apprizes me that those of the mind cannot be unimpaired, had I not still better proofs. Every year counts by increased debility, and departing faculties keep the score. The last year it was ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... good I cannot denay Yet prayse your selfe so muche ye may For welth oftentimes doth decay 30 And welth is ...
— The Interlude of Wealth and Health • Anonymous
... the close of the Civil War our navy was suffered to fall into neglect and decay. The thirty-seven cruisers, all but four of which were of wood; the fourteen single-turreted monitors built during the war; the muzzle-loading guns, belonged to a past age. By 1881 this was fully realized and the ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... of the sweetest of your boyhood illusions! You seek Fiammetta in the delusive hope of finding her in the person of Mrs. Henry Boggs; there is but one Fiammetta, and she is the memory abiding in your heart. Spare yourself the misery of discovering in the hearty, fleshy Lincolnshire hussif the decay of the promises of years ago; be content to do reverence to the ideal Fiammetta who has built her little shrine in your ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... training as the poor wretches who were lying under its leaves. The features of the surrounding picture were, a church with hoarding and scaffolding about it, which had been under suppositious repair so long that the means of repair looked a hundred years old, and had themselves fallen into decay; a quantity of washed linen, spread to dry in the sun; a number of houses at odds with one another and grotesquely out of the perpendicular, like rotten pre-Adamite cheeses cut into fantastic shapes and full of mites; and a feverish bewilderment of windows, with their lattice-blinds all hanging ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... dangerous hemorrhage last spring. I am almost glad to have seen death so close with all my wits about me, and not in the customary lassitude and disenchantment of disease. Even thus clearly beheld, I find him not so terrible as we suppose. But, indeed, with the passing of years, the decay of strength, the loss of all my old active and pleasant habits, there grows more and more upon me that belief in the kindness of this scheme of things, and the goodness of our veiled God, which is an excellent and pacifying compensation. I trust, if your health continues to trouble you, you may ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... him; and would be profoundly taciturn for days together. The process of this alteration was so easy that almost as soon as it began to be observed it was complete. But Mr Pecksniff saw it first, and having Anthony Chuzzlewit fresh in his recollection, saw in his brother Martin the same process of decay. ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... state of irritation and suspense consequent upon his daughter's relations with her lover must greatly have aggravated his troubles. It was assumed by the prosecution, on the ground of Mr. Blandy losing his teeth through decay, that he had begun to manifest the effects of poison soon after Cranstoun left Henley in November, 1750, but from the evidence given at the trial it seems improbable that anything injurious was administered ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead
... the spot to which Martin pointed, and there saw a human skeleton in the last stage of decay, with a large pearl shell under the skull. Not far-off more ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... reason plain why no organism can permanently outlive its experience of past lives. The death of such a body corporate as the crayfish is due to the social condition becoming more complex than there is memory of past experience to deal with. Hence social disruption, insubordination, and decay. The crayfish dies as a state dies, and all states that we have heard of die sooner or later. There are some savages who have not yet arrived at the conception that death is the necessary end of all living beings, and who consider even the gentlest ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... persisted, "must sometimes have looked into futurity. You must have seen the slow decay of national pride, the nations of the world growing closer and closer together. Can't you bear to strike a blow for the great things? You and I see so well the utter barbarism of warfare, the hideous waste of our mighty armaments, draining the money ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of this lengthy report, I may be permitted to add a few lines concerning the great houses themselves. Their mode and manner of construction and occupation I have already discussed; it is their abandonment and decay to which I wish to refer. This decay is the same in both houses; the path of ruin from S.S.E. to N.N.W. indicates its progress. It shows clearly that, as section after section had been originally added as the tribe increased in number, so cell after cell (or section after ...
— Historical Introduction to Studies Among the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico; Report on the Ruins of the Pueblo of Pecos • Adolphus Bandelier
... that time, speaks of some old folks who spoke Cornish only, and would not understand a word of English; but he tells us at the same time that Sir Francis North, the Lord Chief Justice, afterwards Lord Keeper, when holding the assizes at Lanceston in 1678, expressed his concern at the loss and decay of the Cornish language. The poor people, in fact, could speak, or at least understand, Cornish, but he says, "They were laughed at by the rich, who understood it not, which is their own fault in not endeavoring after it." About the beginning of the last century, Mr. ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... vegetation in the different degrees of its development. We there found lichens cleaving the rock, and collected in crusts more or less thick; little portions of sand nourishing succulent plants; and lastly layers of black mould deposited in the hollows, formed from the decay of roots and leaves, and shaded ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... the poorest and vilest quarter of the great city—among reeking smells, and horrible sounds, and disgusting sights. The house she entered was tottering to decay—a dreadful den by day and by night, thronged with the very scum of the London streets. Up and up a long stair-way she flew, paused at a door on the third landing, opened it, ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... long lived, and some are still living that are known to be hundreds of years old. Certain kinds of wood, too, seem almost incapable of decay ...
— Harper's Young People, June 1, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... a discussion on reform, yet Lord John Russell called the attention of the commons to the unrepresented towns, many of which had risen into great commercial wealth and importance, while certain boroughs which sent representatives to parliament, had fallen into decay. His lordship adduced examples from history, to show that the principle of change had been often acknowledged, and the suffrage withdrawn and conferred on various occasions. He proposed several resolutions in accordance with them, the last being for ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... of fallen timber lying upon the island prompted the curiosity of Flinders. Trunks of trees lay about in all directions "and were nearly of the same size and in the same progress towards decay; from whence it would seem that they had not fallen from age nor yet been thrown down in a gale of wind. Some general conflagration, and there were marks apparently of fire on many of them, is perhaps the ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... volume of "Principles of Biology," it was remarked by the author that the phenomena presented by the organic world as a whole cannot be properly dealt with apart from the phenomena presented by each organism in the course of its growth, development, and decay. The interpretation of either class of phenomena implies interpretation of the other, since the two are in reality parts of one process. Hence the validity of any hypothesis respecting the one ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... faut," he said, "que l'artiste mene une vie splendide." Therefore, till the right lady was found, Balzac toiled unceasingly; and when in Madame Hanska the personification of his ideal at last appeared, he redoubled his efforts, till overwork, and his longing for her, caused the decay of his physical powers, and his ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... which the worn and invalid Earl had witnessed at Sir Thomas Gourlay's were so exhausting to his weak frame that they left very little strength behind them. Yet he complained of no particular illness; all he felt was, an easy but general and certain decay of his physical powers, leaving the mind and intellect strong and clear. On the day following the scene in the baronet's house, we must present him to the reader seated, as usual—for he could not be prevailed ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... remained beautifully fine, and, until near the capital, our ride was very pleasant. During the last part of the journey, however, my cheerfulness was dashed by the universal signs of desolation and decay. The ground lay bare and unfilled, the fat beeves and sturdy oxen had vanished, to be replaced here and there by a lean scraggy beast or two, all skin and bone; the yards were destitute of ricks, the hovels ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... strengthening cordial of life's gall. The lightning's stroke or the fierce tempest blast Which fells the green tree to the earth to-day Is kinder than the calm that lets it last, Unhappy witness of its own decay. May no man ever look on me and say, "She lives, but all her ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... back from the road. To the manager's dismay, however, the door was locked and boards were nailed across the windows. Even the water pail, hospitably placed for man or beast, had been removed from its customary proximity to the wooden pump. Abandoned to decay, the tenantless inn was but another evidence of traffic diverted from the old stage roads by the Erie Canal Company. Cold was the fireplace before which had once rested the sheep-skin slippers for the guests; ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... antiquities and religious institutions; but he afterward visited them in a more sweeping manner by the suppression of its monasteries, chantries, etc., so that, says Milner, "these being dissolved, and the edifices themselves soon after pulled down, or falling to decay, it must have worn the appearance of a city sacked by a hostile army." Through his reign and that of Edward VI., the destruction of the religious houses, and the stripping of the churches, went on to a degree which must have rendered Winchester an object ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... consciences to the safety deposit company of a great political party or religious organization and taking the key in our pocket, let us have individual charge of this useful little instrument and be able finally to answer for its growth or decay. ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... turn, squeezes out of them the sums of which he stands in need, to satisfy his own exigencies and those of the state. In America, from a like cause, the government of the Union has gradually dwindled into a state of decay, approaching nearly to annihilation. Who can doubt, that the happiness of the people in both countries would be promoted by competent authorities in the proper hands, to provide the revenues which the necessities of the public might ...
— The Federalist Papers
... Rocca, with the insurgent Corsicans, carried it by assault. The Genoese then erected the fortress at Bastia, which, with the town growing up under its protection, became the chief seat of their power in the island, and Biguglia fell to decay. ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... the washed-out gulches or sleepy village like harried bees around the ruins of their hive. "We have no industry left now," they told me, "and no men; everybody and everything hereabouts has gone to decay. We are only bummers—out of the game, a thin scatterin' of poor, dilapidated cusses, compared with what we used to be in the grand old gold-days. We were giants then, and you can look around here and see our tracks." But although these lingering pioneers are perhaps ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... then have a curious appearance. The underwood being dead, the forest-trees rise from a mass of dry sticks like thin hop-poles. The roots of these plants very soon decay, and a few weeks of high wind, howling through the forest, levels the whole mass, leaving the trees standing free from underwood. The appearance of the ground can now be imagined-a perfect chaos of dead sticks and poles, ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... same year of decay and decline (1819) belongs a small slip of yellow paper, inscribed with the following lines in a tremulous and feeble handwriting, which is jealously preserved by ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... destructive outbreaks, to stresses and disorder culminating in revolution. It is useless to dream of going on now for much longer upon the old lines; our civilisation, if it is not to enter upon a phase of conflict and decay, must begin to adapt itself to the new conditions of which the first and foremost is that the wages-earning labouring class as a distinctive class, consenting to a distinctive treatment and accepting life at a disadvantage is going to disappear. ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... Islam on the west, and the civilization developed in the country by fifteen centuries of intensive and undisturbed Hellenization was completely blotted out. The cities wore isolated from one another till their commerce fell into decay. The elaborately cultivated lands around them were left fallow till they were good for nothing but the pasturage which was all that the nomad required. The only monuments of architecture that have survived in Anatolia above ground are the imposing khans or fortified rest-houses ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... said Trent in a melancholy tone, at the first sound of which the man within turned round with startling swiftness. "From childhood's hour I've seen my fondest hopes decay. I did think I was ahead of Scotland Yard this time, and now here is the largest officer in the entire Metropolitan force already ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... process and made it impossible? Why did the day, which began with a certain amount of separation and decay, end with a closer consolidation than ever, so that they were, for the most part, gathered in the upper room; and forty days after they were all with one accord in one place? Why was it that they who had been like timid deer, before He died, became as lions against the ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... be carefully guarded against, the latter by picking them by the hand from out of the ground, and the former by the use of lime laid round the young plants in a circle. When the summer months prove dry, the beds should be plentifully watered. As soon as the leaves decay in the autumn they should be cleared away, and the beds be covered with light fresh earth and sand to the thickness of an inch; the compost thus used having laid some time in a heap, and been turned several ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... buildings toward Regent's Park. It was long and narrow, a well-lit, well-ventilated, quiet gallery of small tables and sinks, pervaded by a thin smell of methylated spirit and of a mitigated and sterilized organic decay. Along the inner side was a wonderfully arranged series of displayed specimens that Russell himself had prepared. The supreme effect for Ann Veronica was its surpassing relevance; it made every other atmosphere she knew seem discursive and confused. ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... illustrious statesmen and eloquent orators, whose words had vibrated upon the ear of Europe, were transformed into the most revolting aspect of beggared and haggard misery. Their clothes, ruined by the humid filth of their dungeons, moldered to decay. Unwashed, unshorn, in the loss almost of the aspect of humanity, they became repulsive to each other. Unsupported by any of those consolations which religion affords, many hours of the blackest ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... patron, the Bishop of Cambray, gave him a small allowance, and the authorities at Steyn were prevailed upon to consent. His purpose was to obtain a Doctor's degree in Theology; and so he entered the College of Montaigu at Paris, which had been founded in 1388, but had fallen into decay and only recently been revived. In 1483 a certain John Standonck had volunteered to become Principal. By his efforts the college buildings were restored; and by taking in rich pupils he secured means to maintain the Domus Pauperum attached ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... their zeal in the public service, and exhorted them to a discharge of their duties in their several counties. He was, no doubt, extremely pleased with such an issue of a session that had began with a very inauspicious aspect. His health daily declined; but he concealed the decay of his constitution, that his allies might not be discouraged from engaging in a confederacy of which he was deemed the head and chief support. He conferred the command of the ten thousand troops destined for Holland upon the earl of Marlborough, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... maid, had instantly a great desire to let him draw a troublesome tooth of hers which, she took pains to assure us, was not impaired by natural decay, but only accidentally broken in cracking a cherry-stone. "The edge is so rough," said she, "that it hurts my tongue; and since this honest gentleman can extract it painlessly, I have a great mind ...
— Jacques Bonneval • Anne Manning
... Britons understood the manufactory of iron. Perhaps history cannot produce an instance of any place in an improving country, like England, where the coarse manufactory of iron has been carried on, that ever that laborious art went to decay, except the materials failed; and as we know of no place where such materials have failed, there is the utmost reason to believe our fore-fathers, the Britons, were supplied with those necessary implements ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... back to their lair. And, indeed, the Madigan house seemed little more than a lair. It had been rather a fine house once, and had been built for the occupancy of the man who owned the fairgrounds; but he choosing finally to live in the village, had permitted the house to fall into decay, until only a family with no sense of order or self-respect ...
— Painted Windows • Elia W. Peattie
... the miracle of Penicillium Roqueforti a new cheese was made. It is placed historically back around the eighth century when Charlemagne was found picking out the green spots of Persille with the point of his knife, thinking them decay. But the monks of Saint-Gall, who were his hosts, recorded in their annals that when they regaled him with Roquefort (because it was Friday and they had no fish) they also made bold to tell him he was wasting the best part of the cheese. So he tasted again, found the ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... can be put in two ways. You can either say: 'It was just chance that the Tower fell at that particular moment when So-and-so was under it.' Or you can say, with rather more reflection but not any more common sense: 'It fell because of a definite chain of causes, a certain degree of progressive decay in the building, a certain definite pressure, &c. ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... a small dilapidated square. The houses there had a sinister air in the midst of their dirt and decay. Boris looked round, and Tommy drew back into the shelter of a friendly porch. The place was almost deserted. It was a cul-de-sac, and consequently no traffic passed that way. The stealthy way the other had looked round stimulated Tommy's imagination. From the shelter of the doorway ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... over the surrounding country. The summit of this height was crowned, at the close of the fifteenth century, by a celebrated mansion. Time and the ravages of man have long since thrown this mansion to the ground; but its foundation, overgrown with moss and fast crumbling to decay, still marks the site of the ancient structure, and from the midst of the ruins rises a rough-hewn stone bearing the name Gustavus Vasa. On this spot he was born, May 12, 1496.[1] The estate was then ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... the sins and follies of others and sublimely unconscious of our own until one day—ah, yes—one day we meet Ourselves face to face and see beneath all our pitiful shams and hypocrisies and know ourselves at last for what we really are—behold the decay of faculties, the degeneration of intellect bred of sloth and inanition and know ourselves at last—for exactly ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... said more than one, as with her accustomed grace Rose entered the brilliant drawing-room. And truly Rose was beautiful that night, but like the gorgeous foliage of the fading autumn 'twas the beauty of decay, for death was written on her blue-veined brow, and lurked amid the roses on her cheek. But little thought she of that, as with smiling lip and beaming eye she received the homage of ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... though bound up with inconceivable firmness, from the vigour of innate fixed salts and sulphurs. In seeking to discover the elixir of life, then," continued he, "we seek only to apply some of nature's own specifics against the disease and decay to which our bodies are subjected; and what else does the physician, when he tasks his art, and uses subtle compounds and cunning distillations, to revive our languishing powers, and avert the stroke of ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... is akin to the genetic, but traces the decay or demoralization of mental life instead of its growth. It traces the gradual decline of mental power with advancing age, the losses due to brain disease, and the maladaptations that appear in insanity and other disturbances. ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... different—strangely, utterly different. Then, I knew what it was that made it appear so strange. It was bare: there was not a piece of furniture in the room; not even a solitary fitting of any sort. Gradually, my amazement went, as I remembered, that this was but the inevitable end of that process of decay, which I had witnessed commencing, before my sleep. Thousands of ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... to bind the coils of his grass-made baskets together. He obtained fibre in great abundance from the century-like plant. He found if he broke off the long leaves of this plant and allowed them to decay there remained a long, tough fibrous substance out of which strong cords could be twisted or yarn made for weaving a coarse cloth ...
— An American Robinson Crusoe • Samuel B. Allison
... Eagle, whose head was white with years of wisdom and experience, spoke to the despairing assemblage of creatures. From his lofty perch above the world the Eagle had looked down upon centuries of change and decay. He knew every force of nature and all the strange things of life. The hoary-headed sage said that the Good Hunter could not be restored until his scalp was found. Then all the animals clamored that they might be allowed to go and ...
— The Curious Book of Birds • Abbie Farwell Brown
... hath bent him o'er the dead Ere the first day of death is fled,— The first dark day of nothingness, The last of danger and distress, (Before Decay's effacing fingers Have swept the lines where beauty lingers,)— And marked the mild angelic air, The rapture of repose that's there, The fixed yet tender traits that streak The languor of the placid cheek, And—but for that sad shrouded eye, That fires not, wins not, weeps not ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... not easy to account for the long continuance of this attitude of the Irish mind towards Irish problems, which seems unworthy of the native intelligence of the people. The truth probably is that while we have not allowed our intellectual gifts to decay, they have been of little use to us because we have neglected the second part of the old Scholastic rule of life, and have failed to develop the moral qualities in which we are deficient. Hence we have developed our critical faculties, not, unhappily, along constructive ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... his interests are radically hostile to theirs, whereas it is only his conduct that is so. Accordingly, in proportion to their alertness and self-sufficiency, they clamour for the right to govern themselves, and usually secure it. Democratic government is founded on the decay of representative eminence. It indicates that natural leaders are no longer trusted merely because they are rich, enterprising, learned, or old. Their spontaneous action would go awry. They must not be allowed to act without control. Men of talent may be needed and ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... begin. First come thorns and cusps and lanceolate forms without foliage. Then, not perfect leaves, but buds. In due time the bud opens, at first into the profile coil, and by-and-by into the full-spread leaf. Then comes the flower, and finally the fruit. After that, rottenness and decay. It is curious that this should actually take place through a course of centuries. That it should be reflected in book illumination is simply the usual order of things—the fact has been frequently observed, and as it is curious, we call attention to it. But, as we have said, ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... returned Kiddie. "Look at his thigh bone—the only bone that's left intact. It's longer'n mine, an' I ain't a pigmy. Must have been taller'n I am. Look at the teeth: they're not an old man's teeth. There ain't a speck of decay on 'em, they're not worn down any, an' they're well separate one from another, not crushed together like an old man's. Must sure ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... scoffs at as a 'radical,' an 'abolitionist,' and a 'fanatic,' by education and intuition believes in his very soul that the holding of men in bondage, forcing from them involuntary labor, and the consequences thereof, are pregnant with moral and political ruin and decay. The system, not the men, is offensive to his eyes. Is he to blame for this opinion, provided it be well founded in his mind? Admit it eroneous in logic, still, if he believes it, is he to be condemned for holding the belief, and would he not be contemptible in his own eyes if he feared to express ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the cloud must be far enough removed to show the reflected light, before it will yield any of the stuff of which songs are made. And this light that gathers in song, what is it but hope behind the sorrow—hope so little recognized as such, that it is often called despair? It is reviving and not decay that sings even the ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... bound to morter and decay, Our bodies bound to morter and decay, Our bodies bound to morter and decay, But us souls ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves. - Texas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... minutes they pressed ahead in silence; then some subtle excitement made them break into a run. Thus they rounded the turn. The cabin came in sight. Its door swung wide on complaining hinges. The last of the rickety fence had fallen. The desolation and decay of a deserted house ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... minds be directed to any object more worthy of their liberality and encouragement, than that of laving a foundation in the rising generation for their becoming good and useful men? remembering what was formerly enjoined, 'If thy brethren be waxen poor, and fallen in decay with thee, then thou shalt relieve him; yea, though he be a stranger, or a sojourner; that he may live ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson
... in lexicography as to forget that 'words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.' Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... to be overworked, Jervis," he remarked, as we turned out of the gate after tea, on the day of his arrival, for a stroll on the shore. "Is this a new practice, or an old one in a state of senile decay?" ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... paused as if expecting recognition. Concha threw away his cigarette and raised his hand to his hat. He had not lifted it except to ladies of the highest quality for some years, out of regard to symptoms of senile decay which had manifested themselves at the junction of the brim ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... Jim had alluded as the scene of Sam's punishment by the overseer, was a one-story shanty in the vicinity of the stables. Though fast falling to decay, it had more the appearance of a human habitation than the other huts on the plantation. Its thick plank door was ornamented with a mouldy brass knocker, and its four windows contained sashes, to which here ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... impracticable, for its author had turned away in despair from existing politics. He has no proposals, in that dialogue at least, for making the best of things as they are. The first lesson his philosopher has to learn is to turn away from this world of becoming and decay, and to look upon the unchanging eternal world of ideas. Thus his ideal city is, as he says, a pattern laid up in heaven by which the just man may rule his life, a pattern therefore in the meantime for the individual and not ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... held possession of Pegu, Ava and Arakan. They made their capital at Pegu, and to this dynasty belong the gorgeous [v.04 p.0844] descriptions of some of the travellers of the 16th century. Their wars exhausted the country, and before the end of the century it was in the greatest decay. A new dynasty arose in Ava, which subdued Pegu, and maintained their supremacy throughout the 17th and during the first forty years of the 18th century. The Peguans or Talaings then revolted, and having taken the capital Ava, and made the king prisoner, reduced the whole country to submission. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... and distant ports. The coasting trade has been overlooked in song and story; yet, since the year 1859, its fleets have always been larger and more important than the American deep-water commerce nor have decay and misfortune overtaken them. It is a traffic which flourished from the beginning, ingeniously adapting itself to new conditions, unchecked by war, and surviving with splendid vigor, under steam and sail, ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... house was as dreary as it was within. Poverty had set its mark on all things, like a blight. Decay was visible everywhere—in the wood-work, in the stone-work, in hinges and handles, thresholds and lintels, ceilings and plastered walls. It would have cost a thousand pounds to put the manor house in decent habitable order. To have restored it to its original dignity and comeliness would have cost ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... legpet to those salabawan, "Though you are legpet, you can do nothing if I am not," said the gakot, "because you fall," said the gakot to the legpet who are quarreling. "And what can you all do if I am not, who am grass? you all decay if I am not," said the grass (roof) to those who are quarreling. "Therefore we are all the same use to the house of the Ipogau; we will unite our thoughts and breath, so that in the same manner the thoughts of the Ipogau are united, ...
— Traditions of the Tinguian: A Study in Philippine Folk-Lore • Fay-Cooper Cole
... eyes the woods of Roscarna, the river, and the lake took on a melancholy tinge. Though this aspect of them was new to her, it is hardly strange that she should have seen them thus, for the beauty of Roscarna is really of an elegiac kind, an autumnal beauty of desertion and of decay. As for Slieveannilaun, she ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... which furnished them with "delicious food." They must have been excessively hungry, or blessed with powerful imaginations, for, on cross-examination, these "wild turkeys" proved to be TURKEY BUZZARDS, or carrion vultures, most filthy creatures, which, in many places where the decay of animal matter is common, act faithfully the part of scavengers, and their flesh is strongly tinctured with the ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... came to the throne, she, without loss of time, took measures to restore the navy, which had been allowed to fall into decay during the reign of her wretched sister Mary. Timber was stored up for building, numerous pieces of brass cannon cast, and gunpowder, which had hitherto been brought from abroad, was manufactured ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... been detached until the ligaments had decayed, and if it had been separated after the decay of the soft parts, the bones would have been thrown into disorder. But the egg-patches are all on the palmar surface, showing that the bones were still in their normal relative positions. No, Berkeley, that hand was thrown into the pond separately ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... rectangular, stands on the north bank of the White River. Decay has long been at work upon it, yet it is still weather-proof. It was built long before planks were used in the Bad Lands of Dakota. It was built by hands that aimed only at strength and durability, caring nothing for appearances. Thus it has survived where a lighter ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... before, all claiming a slice of the deceased man's land, and of course all claiming the best. Suppose it was bounded by a "stake and stones" as of old here, minus the stones which are absent; suppose some of the claimants think best to set up a new stake where one has gone to decay, and suppose they are not over exact in placing it; or suppose, as is more than likely, their neighbor thinks the new stake encroaches on him and pulls it up entirely, stamping on the hole and putting it in according to his own ideas, etc., etc., ad infinitum. ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... early Moslem caliphs, who corrupted the name to Haila or Ailat. In the 10th century an Arab geographer described it as the great port of Palestine and the emporium of the Hejaz. In the 12th century the town suffered at the hands of Saladin and thereafter fell into decay. In 1841 the town was recognized by Turkey, together with the Sinai peninsula, as part of Egypt. At that time Egyptian pilgrims frequented Akaba in large numbers. In 1892, on the accession of the khedive Abbas II., Turkey ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... process. Happily there is an essence which neither one nor the other can destroy, which survives triumphant over death; so, lads, when you mourn the loss of a friend, think of him as living in that essence, not in the mortal frame you see torn to pieces or mouldering in decay." A new light seemed to burst on me as the doctor said this. The idea aided me to get over the horror I had felt at seeing the fate of the missionary captain, and enabled me better to bear the first remark which the pirate leader deigned to make ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... otherwise the inheritance would be lost to the paternal gens. The division in gentes, phratries and tribes constituted in Rome for centuries the foundation of the military organization, and also of the exercise of the rights of citizenship. But with the decay of the paternal gentes and the decline of their significance, conditions shaped themselves more favorably for woman. She could not only inherit, but had the right to administer her own fortune. She was, ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... man, at the tender mercies of the weakest creature in the household, that is, his grandchild, Valentine; a dumb and frozen carcass, in fact, living painlessly on, that time may be given for his frame to decompose without his consciousness of its decay." ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... breathe thy poison in my soul, Till all that had been wholesome, pure, and true Shewed its decay, and stained and wasted grew. Though sundered as the distant Northern Pole From his far sister, I should bear thy blight Upon me as I passed into ...
— A Woman's Love Letters • Sophie M. Almon-Hensley
... Blossholme was a peaceful place, a long, grey-gabled house set under the shelter of a hill and surrounded by a high wall. Within this wall lay also the great garden—neglected enough—and the chapel, a building that still was beautiful in its decay. ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... the micro-organisms do all that his most imaginative predecessors had suspected, and more. Without them, he proved, there would be no fermentation, no putrefaction—no decay of any tissues, except by the slow process of oxidation. It is the microscopic yeast-plant which, by seizing on certain atoms of the molecule, liberates the remaining atoms in the form of carbonic-acid and alcohol, thus effecting fermentation; it is another ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... the fall of Robespierre; party of the committees; Thermidorian party; their constitution and object—Decay of the democratic party of the committees—Impeachment of Lebon and Carrier—State of Paris —The Jacobins and the Faubourgs declare for the old committees; the jeunesse doree, and the sections for the Thermidorians—Impeachment ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... bliss, And by self-murder seeking higher life; On one foot standing till the other pine, Arms stretched aloft, fingers grown bloodless claws, Or else, impaled on spikes, with festering sores Covered from head to foot, the body wastes With constant anguish and with slow decay.[12] "Can this be wisdom? Can such a life be good That shuns all duties lying in our path— Useless to others, filled with grief and pain? Not so my father's god teaches to live. Rising each morning most exact in time, ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... on it from the heavy trees, were doleful in the last degree; the house was ill-placed, ill-built, ill-planned, and ill-fitted. It was damp, it was not free from dry rot, there was a flavour of rats in it, and it was the gloomy victim of that indescribable decay which settles on all the work of man's hands whenever it's not turned to man's account. The kitchens and offices were too large, and too remote from each other. Above stairs and below, waste tracts of passage intervened between patches of fertility represented ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... alternative remained but to remove the iron bridge entirely, and patch up the old wooden bridge until a new one of wood was built. That bridge, which is the present old bridge, continued to stand, with various repairs and alterations, until the year 1828, when, in consequence of the decay of the piles, and the continual heavy expenses required to uphold it, the Commissioners determined to build a new one of more durable materials. Messrs. Rennie were therefore applied to for designs, and a bill was brought into Parliament to authorize ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 548 - 26 May 1832 • Various
... must be noble and lovable. Nothing that is puny or artificial can ever wear the investiture of that colossal sorrow. McCullough embodied Lear as, from the first, stricken in mind—already the unconscious victim of incipient decay and dissolution; not mad but ready to become so. There is a subtle apprehensiveness all about the presence of the king, in all the earlier scenes. He diffuses disquietude and vaguely presages disaster, and the observer looks on him with solicitude and pain. He is not yet decrepit ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... that pass that way in their periodical migrations. It was melancholy to contemplate the gigantic, yet feeble, efforts of a whole primitive nation, in their anxiety to provide subsistence, forsaken and going to decay." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 388 - Vol. 14, No. 388, Saturday, September 5, 1829. • Various
... The rapid decay of iron through rust—rapid, that is to say, in comparison with other metals—is often found to have taken place when the discovery of old armour has been made; so that gold ornaments, belonging to a sword or other weapon, may be found in excavating, while ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... such as—gaiety, joy, melancholy, truthfulness, fickleness in some things, fickleness in all things, an exalted mind, poetry, domestic peace, hatred, jealousy, morbid sensibility, pardon, receiving again into favour, flowers, decay of health, sickness, returning health, love in a gentle degree, love in a sublime degree, doubting, also trusting love, ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... other. Wherever Time has gnawed one of the stones, you see the mark of his tooth just as plainly in the sunken reflection. Each is so perfect, that the upper vision seems a castle in the air, and the lower one an old stronghold of feudalism, miraculously kept from decay in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... settlement in Canada. Examine the gum "blisters" in the bark of the balsam tree. From this source the "Canada Balsam" gum of commerce is taken. The gum and resin in the wood and bark help to preserve the wood from decay. ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... disintegration which followed the intense life of the Elizabethan age. Shakespeare battles against the ills of society as the Greek dramatists had done, by showing sin and wickedness as destroyers of life, and once this is done, by firing mankind to resistance against the forces of ruin and decay. "To hold the mirror up to nature," that men may see the devastation which evil and vice bring about in the social body. And to do this he does not, like some modern writers, shun moralizing. He warns against ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... caravans of the ants, journeying to and from tiny chinks in the masonry;—the bees gathering honey from the crimson blossoms of the crete-de-coq, whose radicles sought sustenance, perhaps from human dust, in the decay of generations:—all that rich life of graves summoned up fancies of Resurrection, Nature's resurrection-work—wondrous transformations of flesh, marvellous bans migration of souls! ... From some forgotten crevice of that tomb roof, which alone intervened between her and the vast ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... would have agreed with Patmore that "you can see the disc of Divinity quite clearly through the smoked glass of humanity, but no otherwise." He found "harmony in immortal souls, spite of the muddy vesture of decay." ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... earthly mould, degrading them into kindred with the lowest, and even with the very brutes, like whom their visible frames return to dust. In this manner, selecting it as the symbol of his wife's liability to sin, sorrow, decay, and death, Aylmer's sombre imagination was not long in rendering the birthmark a frightful object, causing him more trouble and horror than ever Georgiana's beauty, whether of soul or sense, had given ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... only occasionally and capriciously exercised. It is much easier, however, to indicate the meaning and origin of the jurisdiction confided to the Comitia Calata, than to trace its gradual development or progressive decay. ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... his father had left him, a neat, slim little figure in an Eton suit and straw hat, and the walls were lined by big lads in kilts, knickers, tweed suits, and tailless Highland bonnets in various stages of roughness and decay. ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... of architecture not seen by the Americans elsewhere in Hili-li. The building had an eerie look, and as the party drew near to it Peters observed that but one of its wings was inhabited, the remainder of the mansion being in a state of almost complete decay. They all entered by a side doorway into the inhabited wing. Pym and Peters were motioned to seats in the hallway, the Duke remarking, in hushed tones, 'The home of Masusaelili,' as he and Diregus passed through a broken and decaying doorway ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... still alive, but most of them more or less advanced toward putrefaction - a stage hastened, it is thought, by a secretion within the bladders; for the plant cannot digest fresh food; it can only absorb, through certain processes within the bladder's walls, the fluid products of decay. The little insectivorous sundew (q.v.), on the contrary, not only digests, but afterward absorbs, animal matter. Tiny aquatic creatures, ever seeking shelter from larger ones ready to devour them, enter the pop-weed bladders by bending inward the free edge of ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... the Eighteenth Century. Her Political and Social Aspects. Her Military Condition. France. Her Power and Importance. Signs of Decay. The Court, the Nobles, the Clergy, the People. The King and Pompadour. The Philosophers. Germany. Prussia. Frederic II. Russia. State of Europe. War of the Austrian Succession. American Colonies of France and England. Contrasted Systems and their Results. Canada. Its Strong Military ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... Occident."[36] He discusses at length Indian, Persian, Greek, Roman, and European cultures; in each case, he concludes, the culture is created by the ruling Nordic element and declines through the racial decay of the Nordics resulting from their intermixture with ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... Zeus, O gods who age not nor decay! Let e'en two hundred ages roll away, But at the last these tidings let me learn, Borne o'er the fatal pool whence none return:— "By every tongue thy constancy is sung, Thine and thy favourite's—chiefly by the young." But lo, the future is in heaven's high ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... compassion came over Selwyn. He rebelled against the cruelty of vice that could fasten its claws on anything so fine, when there was so much human decay to feed upon. ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... surprised me much that Mother Alianora lay and hearkened, and said nought. Neither was she asleep, for I glanced at her from time to time, and always saw her awake and listening. Truly, she had little need of nurses, for it was no set malady that ailed her—only a gentle, general decay from old age. Why two of us were set to watch her I could not tell. Had I thought it possible that Mother Gaillarde could do a thing so foreign to her nature, I might have fancied that she sent us two there that night just in order that we might ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... is growing weaker, older, less incisive mentally, as the man approaching old age. There are no other states. Frequently there is a period between the cessation of youthful accretion and the setting in, in the case of the middle-aged man, of the tendency toward decay when the two processes are almost perfectly balanced and there is little doing in either direction. Given time enough, however, the balance becomes a sagging to the grave side. Slowly at first, then with a modest momentum, and at last the graveward process is in the full swing. So it ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... also a matter for surprise that in Paris, among so many sources of carbonic acid, the furnace fires, the respiration of men and animals, and the spontaneous decomposition and decay of organic substances, the quantity of carbonic acid ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... doubt, the father of a family had fanned himself with a palm-leaf fan on Sunday afternoons, watching the surreys go by, and where his daughter listened to mandolins and badinage on starlit evenings; but, although youth still held the veranda, both the youth and the veranda were in decay. The four or five young men who lounged there this afternoon were of a type known to shady pool-parlours. Hats found no favour with them; all of them wore caps; and their tight clothes, apparently from a common source, showed a vivacious fancy for oblique ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... the degree that they strike the balance between the life of the mind and the spirit—all the finer forces and emotions of life—and their outer business organisation and activities. When the latter become excessive, when they grow at the expense of the former, then the inevitable decay sets in, that spells the doom of that nation, and its time is tolled off in exactly the same manner, and under the same law, as has that of all the other nations before it that sought to reverse the ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... enactments;" all that they sought was plenty of rigorous imprisonment, ruinous fining, and diligent espionage.[197] If the reader is revolted by the rashness of Diderot's expectation of the speedy decay of the belief in a God,[198] he may well be equally revolted by the obstinate infatuation of the men who expected to preserve the belief in a God by the spies of the department of police. Much had no doubt been done for the church ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... disablement, acute pain, and listlessness. My fear will be that at last my pieces show indooredness, and being chain'd to a chair—as never before. Only the resolve to keep up, and on, and to add a remnant, and even perhaps obstinately see what failing powers and decay may contribute ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... period, 1813-1816, he had become familiar with all the phases of London society, "tasted their pleasures," and, towards the close, "felt their decay." His associates in those years were of two classes—men of the world, and authors. Feted and courted in all quarters, he patronized the theatres, became in 1815 a member of the Drury Lane Committee, "liked the dandies," including Beau Brummell, and was introduced to the ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... people of Munich had fed upon stenches so long that they could not be satisfied with the ordinary smells of the houses and streets, but must seek the fountain-head of corruption to still their morbid craving for the odors of decay. During the height of the cholera epidemic of the winter of 1873-74 an article appeared in one of the newspapers, written by a citizen who signed himself "A Constant Visitor of the Dead-houses;" and the article was answered by an opponent who signed himself "Another ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... centuries, so when sampling the chapels themselves, after finding half a dozen running which are of inferior merit, we approach the others with a bias against them. Moreover, all of them have suffered more or less severely from decay. Rain and snow, indeed, can hardly get right inside the chapels, or, at any rate, not inside most of them, but they are all open to the air, and, at a height of over two thousand feet, ages of winter damp have dimmed the glory even of the best-preserved. In many cases the hair and beards, with ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... together sat, Conferring thus in solemn chat: "How is the modern taste decay'd! Where's the respect to wisdom paid? Our worth the Grecian sages knew; They gave our sires the honour due: They weigh'd the dignity of fowls, And pry'd into the depth of Owls. Athens, the seat of earned fame, With gen'ral voice revered our ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... sat, worn spare, and yellow like themselves; the rugged font where children had their names, the homely altar where they knelt in after life, the plain black tressels that bore their weight on their last visit to the cool old shady church. Everything told of long use and quiet slow decay; the very bell-rope in the porch was frayed into a fringe, and ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... cavities! But she did. And if she cheated on her perfect diet, bad food could not have amounted to more than two percent of her total caloric intake from birth to age ten. I was a responsible mom and I made sure she ate right! Now my daughter was demanding to know why she had tooth decay. Fortunately, I now know the answer. The answer is rather complex, but I can ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... two phrases lies all the power of revolutionary faith. And how like phrases out of the gospels, those older expressions of the hope and misery of another society in decay. That is the spirit that, for good or evil, is stirring throughout Europe to-day, among the poor and the hungry and the oppressed and the outcast, a new affirmation of the rights and duties of men. ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... and which continues to give off its inward light without change throughout eternity—shall endure through endless cycles of time after the metal of the ring which holds it shall have crumbled in decay: even so shall your spirits, formerly two, now one and indissoluble, progress in ever-ascending evolution throughout eternity after the base material which is your bodies shall have returned to the senseless ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... standing, being neglected by him entirely. Smells of pomace, and the hiss of fermenting cider, which reached him from the back quarters of other tenements, revealed the recent occupation of some of the inhabitants, and joined with the scent of decay ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... scallions, leeks, nor onions in our gardens, by the authority of Thestilis in Virgil,—and of the millers, who are generally thieves,—and of the bakers, who are little better. Is this small saving or frugality? Besides the mischief and damage of the field-mice, the decay of barns, and the destruction usually made by weasels ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... Southwark election Mrs. Piozzi writes (Anec. p. 214):—'A Borough election once showed me Mr. Johnson's toleration of boisterous mirth. A rough fellow, a hatter by trade, seeing his beaver in a state of decay seized it suddenly with one hand, and clapping him on the back with the other. "Ah, Master Johnson," says he, "this is no time to be thinking about hats." "No, no, Sir," replies our doctor in a cheerful tone, "hats are of no use now, as you say, except to throw up in the air and ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... of Time May pluck the blossoms of their prime; Envy may talk of bloom decay'd, How lilies droop and roses fade; But Constancy's unalter'd truth, Regardful of the vows of youth, Affection that recalls the past, And bids the pleasing influence last, Shall still preserve the lover's ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... the ceilings were beautifully decorated, and must have cost a good deal of money in their day, but they were now rapidly falling into decay. ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... beautiful church of Notre Dame, or Ste. Marie, serves now as the stables of the garrison, and all its fine remains are hidden from public view; parts of its exterior still attract the eye, and make one regret that it has fallen into such utter decay. It was once covered with statues of great beauty, some of which remain; but that of Geoffrey Martel, its founder, is destroyed, with a host of others, once its pride; enough, however, is to be seen which is well worthy of attention; but, from its present occupation, we did not do more than ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... be truth in this, there might be depth of reasoning; but Englishmen did not see enough in the argument to induce them to withdraw their confidence from the present arrangements of the government, and Dr Anticant's monthly pamphlet on the decay of the world did not receive so much attention as his earlier works. He did not confine himself to politics in these publications, but roamed at large over all matters of public interest, and found everything bad. According to him nobody was true, and not only nobody, ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... taught to call Him the Father by Christ, to whose instructions it yields a joyful obedience, it revolves around the Supreme Being as its light and security, through its relation to whom it is safe amidst the world's commotions and blessed in life's decay. ...
— The Religion of Politics • Ezra S. Gannett
... traveled swiftly through the forest, and about noon came to the site of the village, but to his disappointment found that the jungle had overgrown the plantain fields and that the thatched huts had fallen in decay. There was no sign of man. He clambered about among the ruins for half an hour, hoping that he might discover some forgotten weapon, but his search was without fruit, and so he took up his quest once more, following up the stream, ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... hence. At Weston she had kept tolerable health, but certainly her constitution was not strong, and the slavery of Walworth Road threatened her with premature decay. Her sisters counselled wisely. Coming to London was a mistake. She would have had better chances at Weston, notwithstanding the extreme discretion with which she was obliged to ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... dead? I dare not think That thus the solemn truth can be; And broken is the only link That chain'd youth's pleasant thoughts to me! Alas! that thou couldst know decay, That, sighing, I should live to say 'The cold grave ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... tell which if any one among these four may be to the others as a sun; for in this special tract of heaven "one star differeth" not "from another star in glory." From each and all of them, even "while this muddy vesture of decay doth grossly close [us] in," we cannot but hear the harmony of ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... upon him, he, thinking the Change of Air would afford him Relief, sold his House, and went again to Basil, to the House of Frobenius; but he had not been there above nine Months before his Gout violently assaulted him, and his strength having gradually decay'd, he was seized with a Dysentery, under which having laboured for a Month, it at last overcame him, and he died at the House of Jerome Frobenius, the son of John the famous Printer, the 12th of July 1536, about Midnight, ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... I recognised clearly that I had committed a crime as bad as murder. My conscience tormented me. To stifle this unbearable feeling, I assured myself that everything was nonsense and vanity, that Kisotchka and I would die and decay, that her grief was nothing in comparison with death, and so on and so on . . . and that if you come to that, there is no such thing as freewill, and that therefore I was not to blame. But all these arguments only irritated me and were extraordinarily ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... deliberately misplaced: energy directed against the course of things, the infinite development, the will of God. Sin is corruption, and desolation, and decay. Death broods over the spirit of man, unless a Redeemer come. The unredeemed ages hang over history like a pall. In them there are monumental oppression, cruelties, and crimes. The breath of myriad millions went out in darkness, ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... hospitable Jove! And every god inspiring social love! And witness every household power that waits, Guard of these fires, and angel of these gates! Ere the next moon increase or this decay, His ancient realms Ulysses shall survey, In blood and dust each proud oppressor mourn, And the lost glories of his ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... in quest of adventures with your trusty friend Thor Helwyse, the yellow-bearded Scandinavian? Do you fancy this fresh, unwrinkled face a mate to your own? and is it but the vision of a restless night,—this long-drawn life of dull routine and gradual disappointment and decay? Open those dim eyes of yours, good sir! stir those thin old legs! inflate that sunken chest!—Ha! is that cough imaginary? those trembling muscles,—are they a delusion is that misty glance only a momentary weakness There is no youth left in you, Mr. MacGentle; ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... there was little. It would appear that the monks had forsaken their home even before the Reformation, for the first Lanison had acquired in the Eighth Henry's reign a property "long fallen into ruinous decay," according to an old parchment. Possibly the writer of this description had not seen the Abbey, trusting, perchance, to the testimony of a man who had not seen it either, for certainly much of ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... symphonic sauces, they say. But again, eating is a useful art; primarily it serves to nourish the body. When man was wholly wild—he is a mere barbarian to-day—his sense of smell guarded him from his foes, from the beasts, from a thousand dangers. Civilization, with its charming odours of decay,—have you ever ventured to savour New York?—cast into abeyance the keenest of all the senses. Little wonder, then, that there was no art of perfume like the arts of vision and sound. I firmly believe the Hindoos, Egyptians, and the ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... was laid away in the grave, where our bodies shall decay. But since Christ was "the Holy One of God," His body could not ...
— An Explanation of Luther's Small Catechism • Joseph Stump
... for fear of Snobs. People pine away lonely under the tyranny of Snobs. Honest kindly hearts dry up and die. Gallant generous lads, blooming with hearty youth, swell into bloated old-bachelorhood, and burst and tumble over. Tender girls wither into shrunken decay, and perish solitary, from whom Snobbishness has cut off the common claim to happiness and affection with which Nature endowed us all. My heart grows sad as I see the blundering tyrant's handiwork. ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... conceived to be a mixture of two elements. In virtue of its higher spiritual nature it participates in the world of ideas, the life of God: and in virtue of its lower or animal impulses, in the corporeal world of decay. These two dissimilar parts are connected by an intermediate element called by Plato thymos or courage, implying the emotions or affections of the heart. Hence a threefold constitution of the soul is conceived—the rational powers, the emotional desires, ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... in the New World. The spirits of the dead crowd me in most solitary places. Here and there, gleam churches or shrines. The little town, much ruined, lies on the slope of a hill, with the houses of the barons gone to decay, and unused churches, over whose arched portals are faded frescoes, with the open belfry, and stone wheel-windows, always so beautiful. Sweet little paths lead away through the fields to convents,—one of Passionists, another of Capuchins; and the draped figures ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... and ambition were no less demoralizing to humanity and civilization, than those that brought decay and ruin to the potentates of old. He graced them with all the luxury and exuberance that modern civilization, without arousing rebellious complaint among his subjects, would permit. His gatherings appeared to be arranged for the bringing together of the ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... turning slowly from right to left as he menaced the crowd with his sinister gaze. Already a close observer might have marked upon his face a heaviness and looseness of feature, the first signs of that physical decay which in a very few years was to stretch him, a helpless wreck, too weak to utter his own name, upon the causeway of the London streets. At present, however, he was still an unbeaten man, the terror of the Ring, and as his ill-omened face ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... morality—and every philosopher hitherto has believed that he has given it a basis; morality itself, however, has been regarded as something "given." How far from their awkward pride was the seemingly insignificant problem—left in dust and decay—of a description of forms of morality, notwithstanding that the finest hands and senses could hardly be fine enough for it! It was precisely owing to moral philosophers' knowing the moral facts imperfectly, in an arbitrary epitome, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples" have but a brief career on earth. It is chiefly the incessant action of water and of air that makes them vanish like the "baseless fabric of a vision." On the moon these causes of disintegration and of decay are all absent, though perhaps the changes of temperature in the transition from lunar day to lunar night would be attended with expansions and contractions that might compensate in some slight degree for the absence of more ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... Yehoshua, says, "Since the destruction of the Temple a day has not passed without a curse; the dew does not come down with a blessing, and the fruits have lost their proper taste." Rabbi Yossi adds, "Also the lusciousness of the fruit is gone." Rabbi Shimon ben Elazar says, "With the decay of purity the taste and aroma (of the fruit) has disappeared, and with the tithes and richness of the corn." The sages say, "Lewdness ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... cohesion. The remarkable duration of the Fujiwara rule, as compared with others, may perhaps be accounted for by the fact that the Fujiwara represented a religious, rather than a military, aristocracy. Even the marvellous military structure devised by Iyeyasu had begun to decay before alien ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... that was June, And cold is August's panting heart of fire; And in the storm-dismantled forest-choir For thine own elegy thy winds attune Their wild and wizard lyre: And poignant grows the charm of thy decay, The pathos of thy beauty, and the sting, Thou parable of greatness vanishing! For me, thy woods of gold and skies of grey With ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... Reforms of 1886. 213 Cost of Spanish Insular Government. The Provincial Civil Governor's duties. 214 The position of Provincial Civil Governor. Local Funds. Provincial poverty. 216 Highways and Public Works. Cause of national decay. 218 Fortunes made easily. Peculations. Town Local Government. 220 The Gobernadorcillo (petty-governor). The Cabeza de Barangay (Tax-collector). 222 The Cuadrillero (guard). The Fallas (tax). The Cedula personal. ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... examine the tree. It was an old oak. Well up its trunk a limb had broken or rotted away, and the resulting decay of the stub had made a hole in the tree itself. What instantly riveted the attention of the two boys was something black and tapering that projected from the hole and that slowly ...
— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... did, and hearing her complaints of shortness of breath, (which she attributed to inward decay, precipitated by her late harasses, as well from her friends as from you,) he was for advising her to ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... to mount his horse with a bottle in his hand. She recalled him perfectly. He had been her girlish ideal of manly beauty. Now here he was, old and mangy with drink at forty. In a most vivid and appealing sense he measured the change in her as well as the decay of the old-time cowboy. His incoherent salutation as his eyes fell upon her was like the final blasphemous word from the rear-guard of a savage tribe, and she watched him ride away reeling limply in his ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... date both of their birth and death was registered in the public monuments: That, if their works were duly considered, they were yet less to be accounted for omnipotent: That having not been able, after their decease, to preserve their stately palaces and magnificent sepulchres from decay, there was no appearance that they had built the fabric of the universe, or could maintain it in its present state. Lastly, that this appertained alone to the true God, who is worshipped by the Christians; and that, considering the beauty of the heavens, the ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... Geoffrey Chaucer in Westminster Abbey is fast mouldering into irretrievable decay. A sum of One Hundred Pounds will effect a perfect repair. The Committee have not thought it right to fix any limit to the subscription, they themselves have opened the list with a contribution from each of them of Five Shillings; ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 38, Saturday, July 20, 1850 • Various
... unaffected, life and health may be restored to almost all the other parts of the body; but if the heart be chilled, or smitten with any serious disease, it seems matter of necessity that the whole animal fabric should suffer and fall into decay. When the source is corrupted, there is nothing, as Aristotle says, [Footnote: De Part. Animal., iii.] which can be of service either to it or aught that depends on it. And hence, by the way, it may perchance be why grief, and love, and envy, ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... prime, Or drunk the strengthening cordial of life's gall. The lightning's stroke or the fierce tempest blast Which fells the green tree to the earth to-day Is kinder than the calm that lets it last, Unhappy witness of its own decay. May no man ever look on me and say, "She lives, but all ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the lane which later debouched upon the main thoroughfare of Poketown, it was evident to the most casual glance that the old Day house was not the only dwelling far along in a state of decay. ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... "forward," because the hand of the master is conspicuously firmer and his touch more daring. The Laughingstocks themselves are fifteen in number, tragical stories of division and isolation, of failures in passion, of the treason of physical decay. No landscape of Mr. Hardy's had been more vivid than the night-pictures in "The Revisitation," where the old soldier in barracks creeps out on to the gaunt down, and meets (by one of Mr. Hardy's coincidences) his ancient mistress, and no picture more terrible ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... dome- like appearance. It is composed of granite resting on an elevated plateau of soft friable gneiss. This last in mouldering away, leaves numerous rounded boulder-like masses of granite on the surface, which from their hardness, resist the action of the atmosphere amidst the surrounding decay ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... country. The land on the Mexican side was about the same as that on the Texan, but it seemed different to him. He beheld again that aspect of infinite age, of the long weariness of time, and of physical decay. ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... early girlhood; and tens of thousands of young women that are dawning upon us from school and seminary, that are going to bless the world with good and happy homes, that shall eclipse all their predecessors, a fact that will be acknowledged by all men except those who are struck through with moral decay from toe to cranium; and more inexcusable than the Samson of the text is that man who, amid all this unparalleled munificence of womanhood, marries a fool. But some of you are abroad suffering from such ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... while he thinks of the missions. He bows in prayer. Neglected vineyards and general decay reign over ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... universally, upon the whole science of college discipline and instruction, and thus aids in infusing a continually renewed life and vigor into those venerable seats of learning that might otherwise sink into decrepitude and decay. By going, however, to some new field, establishing some new and fanciful institution, you take yourself from such a sphere; you exert no influence over others, except upon feeble imitators, who fail in their attempts, ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... hearts of men to clip; * Close-veiled, far-hidden mystery dark and deep: O thou whose beauties sham the lustrous moon, * Wherewith the saffron Morn fears rivalship! Thy beauty is a shrine shall ne'er decay; * Whose signs shall grow until they all outstrip; [FN467] Must I be thirst-burnt by that Eden-brow * And die of pine to taste that ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... what she said to him, half disappointed and depressed, yet also half incredulous. He had always been obstinate, and the approach of death had emphasised his few salient qualities, as decay had emphasised the bodily frame. He said to himself stubbornly that he would find some way yet of testing the matter in spite of her. He would think ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the spell of this reverend Ghost who haunts the "Manse" and as it rains and darkens and the sky glooms through the dusty attic windows, he is likely "to muse deeply and wonderingly upon the humiliating fact that the works of man's intellect decay like those of his hands" ... "that thought grows moldy," and as the garret is in Massachusetts, the "thought" and the "mold" are likely to be quite native. When the same anyone puts his poetry into novels rather than essays, he is likely to have more to say about the life around him—about ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... in the tail, are light of finger; and of these the most pernicious are those who beggar you inchmeal. If a maid is a downright thief she strips you, it once, and you know your loss; but these retail pilferers waste you insensibly, and though you hardly miss it, yet your substance shall decay to such a degree, that you must have a very good bottom indeed not to feel the ill effects of such ...
— Everybody's Business is Nobody's Business • Daniel Defoe
... though by circling deeps together held, Minds combat minds, repelling and repell'd; Ferments arise, imprison'd factions roar, Represt ambition struggles round her shore, Whilst, over-wrought, the general system feels Its motions stopt, or phrenzy fires the wheels. Nor this the worst. As social bonds decay, As duty, love, and honour fail to sway, Fictitious bonds, the bonds of wealth and law, Still gather strength, and force unwilling awe. Hence all obedience bows to these alone, And talent sinks, and merit weeps unknown; Till ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... where honest men starve; Empty the mart, and shipless the bay; Out of our want the Oligarchs carve; Foreigners fatten on our decay! Disunited, Therefore blighted, Ruined and rent by the Englishman's sway; Party and creed For once have agreed— Orange and Green will carry the day! Boyne's old water, Red with slaughter! Now is as pure as an infant at play; So, in our ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... lives. The death of such a body corporate as the crayfish is due to the social condition becoming more complex than there is memory of past experience to deal with. Hence social disruption, insubordination, and decay. The crayfish dies as a state dies, and all states that we have heard of die sooner or later. There are some savages who have not yet arrived at the conception that death is the necessary end of ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... passionately that he could not bear to have any part of the current of her soul diverted from him. As he looked forward through the years, it was Maud and himself, in scene after scene; other relations, other influences, other surroundings might fade and decay—but children, however beautiful and delightful, making the house glad with life and laughter, he was not sure that he wanted them. Yet he had always thought that he possessed a strong paternal instinct, an interest in young life, in opening problems. Had that all, ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the lamp of the fabulist, though it may waste itself for years amidst the depths of solitude, and the silence of the tomb, shall live and burn immortal and undimmed, when all around it is rottenness and decay! ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... come thorns and cusps and lanceolate forms without foliage. Then, not perfect leaves, but buds. In due time the bud opens, at first into the profile coil, and by-and-by into the full-spread leaf. Then comes the flower, and finally the fruit. After that, rottenness and decay. It is curious that this should actually take place through a course of centuries. That it should be reflected in book illumination is simply the usual order of things—the fact has been frequently observed, and as it is curious, we call attention to it. But, ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... given circumstances, but Merlin can handle large-group behavior with absolute accuracy. If we made public Merlin's prognosis, the end would come, not in two centuries but in less than one, and it wouldn't be a slow, peaceful decay; it would be a bomb-type reaction. Rebellions. Overthrow of Federation authority, and then revolt and counterrevolt against planetary authority. Division along sectional or class lines on individual planets. Interplanetary wars; what we fought the Alliance to prevent. Left in ignorance ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... great luxuriance. I saw also many other plants found at the Illawarra, on the eastern coast of the colony of New South Wales. The summit was full of wombat holes and, unlike that side by which I had ascended, it was covered with the dead trunks of enormous trees in all stages of decay. ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... the street, with the quadrangle deserted and overgrown; the Mohune image and superscription was on everything from the church to the inn, and everything that bore it was stamped also with the superscription of decay. And here it is necessary that I say a few words as to this family badge; for, as you will see, I was to bear it all my life, and shall carry its impress with me to the grave. The Mohune shield was plain white or silver, and bore ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... pool that lies in the autumn forest, Of the moon that descends the steeps of the soughing twilight, Toss, sparkles of day and dusk—toss on the black stems that decay in the muck, Toss to the moaning gibberish of the ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... has made thirty-five complete rounds of its orbit since its first detection in 1786, it shows no certain signs of decay. Variations in its brightness are, it is true, conspicuous, but they do not ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... suggestion of dewy shade, only served to bring out the shabbiness of broken plaster and paintless window; a shamefaced yet aggressive shabbiness, where high-arched doorways and wide entries spoke to better days, and also to a subsequent decay, now openly admitted in the little placards which dotted them here and there, bearing the bold-typed words GARCON LOGIS, and dangling bravely yellow from the windows of the cheap lodgings they proclaimed vacant. It was very still; the hoarse voice of a fruit-seller ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... the Dublin people, that Dublin was being "let down" by her citizens. His first impression of the city was that it was noble, even beautiful, in spite of its untidiness, its distress. He would wander about the streets, gazing at the fine old Georgian houses, tumbling into decay, and feel so much anger against the indifferent citizens that sometimes he felt like hitting the first Dublin man he met ... hitting him hard so that he ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... amid this exuberance of musical resources, in this thick jungle of technical facilities, was a controlling element of correct taste, a right sense of the proper function of music as an interpretative art. On the very threshold of its modern development, music had fallen into early decay owing to the misapplication of the means so copiously provided by nature and by exercise. A man of genius and of substantial intuition into the real ends of vocal music was demanded at this moment, who ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... at seventy thousand by Capt. Alexander, who saw Guiana in 1831; and a later American scientific expedition, having visited them in their homes, reported them as still enjoying their wild freedom, and multiplying, while the Indians on the same soil decay. The beautiful forests of Surinam still make the morning gorgeous with their beauty, and the night deadly with their chill; the stately palm still rears, a hundred feet in air, its straight gray shaft and its head of verdure; the mora builds its solid, buttressed trunk, a pedestal for the ...
— Black Rebellion - Five Slave Revolts • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... of them making the mystery more profound, for they flitted on noiseless wings, emitting neither song nor chirp, and they were mottled with morbid colours, having all the seeming of orchids, flying blossoms of sickness and decay. ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... could scarcely see and had to grope their way after the young man that led them to seats in the parquet. Gradually, their eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and they could distinguish the vast windowless cave, with its rows of seats, its galleries and painted ceiling. The air, smelling of dust and decay, lay heavily on Frederick's lungs. There were recesses in the great grotto that made the impression of gloomy holes for coffins. Some of them were hung with grey canvas, and canvas lay spread over the whole parquet, with ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... the people is the shortest road to their heart and understanding, that he has prepared a catechism and Christian doctrine in the modern Mixtec, which has been printed. The town itself is desolate; the plaza is much too large, and dwarfs the buildings which surround it, and signs of desolation and decay mark everything. With the fondness which Mexicans show for high-sounding and pious inscriptions, the municipality has painted, upon the side of the town-house, in full sight for a long distance, the words, "Nations to be great and free must be educated." From here to ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... and wash away all your complaints; the sea air and such an oriental season must cure every thing but positive decay and decrepitude. On me they have no more effect than they would have on an Egyptian queen who has been embowelled and reserved in her sycamore etui ever since dying was first invented, and people notwithstanding liked to last for ever, though ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... friction, comets may be dissolved into their component gases as they near the sun, water may be changed into vapour by the heat of the summer sun, vegetation may be produced from apparently dead matter, and then that vegetation may itself decay and return to the dust by which it had been built up, but throughout all these processes of birth and death, of evolution and devolution, the sum-total of active living energy which is associated with all the phenomena, remains unalterable and unchangeable. Such is the teaching of the great ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... latter about to fall. I thought that only Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks Could so forget his handiwork on which He spent himself, the labour of his axe, And leave it there far from a useful fireplace To warm the frozen swamp as best it could With the slow smokeless burning of decay. ...
— North of Boston • Robert Frost
... the youth of the nation after this fashion with all the facts and fancies that may happen to suit the weaknesses of the national constitution, is exactly the way in which to bring about the decay of both Government and country. Merely from a political standpoint, therefore, nothing could be more disastrous to the State than to make use of its power of educational control in order to ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... specially attracted their attention. It was a small room, which the guide said was an ancient torturing room. There was a large wooden post in the centre of the room, extending from the floor to the vault above. The post was worn and blackened by time and decay, and there were various hooks, and staples, and pulleys attached to it at different heights, which the guide said were used for securing the prisoners to the post, when they were to be tortured. The post itself was burned in many places, as if ...
— Rollo in Geneva • Jacob Abbott
... Italian process with the identical substances used by the liutaros would be absolutely necessary for perfect or near success; it must be borne in mind that old varnish near the spot with its partial decay, probably from many causes, has to be imitated, and that what would be a great success with regard to a small space, might in all probability prove a signal failure when the ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... acquainted with my lady Barrymore, pray tell her that in less than two hours t'other night the Duke of Cumberland lost four hundred and fifty pounds at loo; Miss Pelham won three hundred, and I the rest. However, in general, loo is extremely gone to decay; I am to play at Princess Emily's to-morrow for the first time this winter, and it is with difficulty ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... sweet discourse Gave to my feelings all their cordial force: Hence mindful, how her tender spirit blest Thy salutary air, and balmy rest; Thee, as profuse of recollections sweet, Fit for a pensive veteran's calm retreat, I chose, as provident for sure decay, A nest for age in life's declining day! Reserving Eartham for a darling son, Confiding in our threads of life unspun: Blind to futurity!—O blindness, given As mercy's boon to man from pitying Heaven! Man could not live, if his prophetic eyes View'd all afflictions, ere they will arise. Think, ...
— Poems on Serious and Sacred Subjects - Printed only as Private Tokens of Regard, for the Particular - Friends of the Author • William Hayley
... of Palmyra was due to the trade along this route, and its decay began when the route was abandoned. The present town of Tadmor is near the ruins ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... was then quite an Oriental town; but now the haughty parvenu spire of the cathedral, a new and large, but tasteless structure, with a profusely gilt bell-tower in the Russian manner, throws into the shade the minarets of the mosques, graceful even in decay. Many of the bazar shops have been fronted and glazed; the Oriental dress has become much rarer; and houses, several stories high, in the German fashion, are springing up every where." The Turkish governor was at this time Hafiz Pasha, the unsuccessful commander at ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... debility, resultant on her long watches during the eight weeks of Singleton's illness, and the extreme anxiety she had experienced for the safety of her friend. But when the malady remained obstinate to his prescriptions, and other insidious symptoms set in, pointing to a gradual decay of the vital energies, he divined that the ill was a mental one which would baffle his art unless he could ascertain its cause from the patient herself. Her confession of it would be half the cure. But he did not succeed in extracting this confession. ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... well is it with those who quietly reach the fifth act of their lives, with only the usual and inevitable decay and dropping off of all beloved things which time must bring; the sudden catastrophe of adverse circumstance, wrecking a whole existence in the very middle of its course, is a more terrible ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... could not be long wanting in such a situation, and a week after the taking of Carthage the whole camp was full of fever and dysentery, till the living had not strength to bury the dead, but heaped them up in the vaults and the trenches round the camp, where their decay added to the infection of the air. The Moors charged up to the lines, and killed the soldiers at their posts every day; and a poet within Tunis made the menacing verses: "Frank, knowest thou not that Tunis is the sister of Cairo? Thou wilt find before this town ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... projects twelve or fifteen feet, there is a spring to which cattle come from the near fields to drink. The old earth builders used material of very unequal hardness and durability when they built these hills, their contracts were not well supervised, and the result has been that the more rapid decay of the softer material has undermined the harder layers and led to their downfall. Every fifty or a hundred or two hundred feet in the Catskill formation the old contractors slipped in a layer of soft, slatey, red sandstone which introduces an element of weakness ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... nobility in particular persons; it is a reverend thing, to see an ancient castle or building, not in decay; or to see a fair timber tree, sound and perfect. How much more, to behold an ancient noble family, which has stood against the waves and weathers of time! For new nobility is but the act of power, but ancient nobility is the act of time. Those that are first raised ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... the lapse of four centuries the villas of the great cardinals of the Renaissance retain their supremacy over their Italian sisters, not, as once, by reason of their prodigal magnificence but in the appealing charm of their picturesque decay. ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... was marvellously fine—one of those days in August when heat possesses the world and holds it tranced and still, but has in the very strength of its possession some scent of the decay and chill of autumn that is to follow so close upon its heels. There was no breeze, no wind from the sea, only a sky utterly without cloud and a world ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... any use to you here, doctor, in the way of dissection, for the flesh is one mass of decay. What a horrible ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... (broke his neck), the plate was seized at the suit of his wine-merchant; and as the heir next in succession got the property in a ruinous condition, it was impossible to keep a stud of horses along with a wife and a large family, so the stables and kennel went to decay, while the ladies and family apartments could only be patched up. When the house was dilapidated, the grounds about it, of course, were ill kept. Fine old trees were there, originally intended to afford shade to walks which were ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... some years in sight of the great elm stump. It appeared like a giant, with a great hump on his back, overlooking the surrounding stumps. It was about eight feet high. But it was doomed to decay, and ...
— The Bark Covered House • William Nowlin
... scarred and swarthy veterans returned to their homes on the border there were no marks of neglect to be erased, no evidences of dilapidation and decay. "They found their farms in as good a condition as when they enlisted. Enhanced prices had balanced diminished production. Crops had been planted, tended, and gathered, by hands that before had been all unused to the hoe and the rake. The sadness lasted only in ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... trampling on it. Still less can a woman bury herself in her nursery, and come out without harm. But the years should have done her great good. This world is not made for a tomb, but a garden. You are to be a seed, not a death. Plant yourself, and you will sprout. Bury yourself, and you can only decay. For a dead opportunity there is no resurrection. The only enjoyment, the only use to be attained in this world, must be attained on the wing. Each day brings its own happiness, its own benefit; but it has none to spare. What escapes to-day is escaped ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... lately stated that uranium may possibly produce an emanation, but that its rate of decay must be too swift for its presence to be verified ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... years younger, Laetitia might have been the instrument. To think of her now was preposterous. Beside Clara she had the hue of Winter under the springing bough. He tossed her away, vexed to the very soul by an ostentatious decay that shrank from comparison with the blooming creature he had to scourge in self-defence, by ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... seat of life beginning in 1835, that I succeeded in ascertaining the absolute falsity of the doctrines on this subject maintained by all scientific biologists at the present time, and demonstrating that the human body is only a tenement, of which life is the builder, and which drops into decay when life deserts it to meet its more congenial home in ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... measures for our joint action. Therefore, you shall descend with me into the depths of my heart and see the result to which I have been led by many years' reflection concerning the causes and progress of the great convulsions of our day, and by my own grief at the political decay of Germany. The result is the firm belief that it would be by far better for Germany to be united into one state. Oh, do not look at me in so surprised and angry a manner! I know very well, and I have reflected a great deal about it, how salutary ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... the day of the decree, was the period at which commenced the final decay of the Company, and of the bank, and the extinction of all confidence by the sad discovery that there was no longer any money wherewith to pay the bank notes, they being so prodigiously in excess of the coin. After this, each step ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... number of what seemed like bundles of straw, as though a farmer in a great loaded wagon had driven over the surface and had here and there in many places pitched out large forkfuls and left them to decay. ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... that the ice and the boys sliding were also very fine? To such a picture the "Deserted Village" bears a great resemblance. It is made up of incongruous parts. The village in its happy days is a true English village. The village in its decay is an Irish village. The felicity and the misery which Goldsmith has brought close together belong to two different countries; and to two different stages in the progress of society. He had assuredly never seen in his native island such a rural paradise, such a seat of plenty, content, and ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... impossible even for the good and innocent to behold this universal dissolution and decay without remembering that they themselves must pass through some such temporary experience. But upon those who carry guilty secrets in their hearts these impressions descend with crushing weight. David felt them to the full when at last ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... case the wish cannot induce belief! For now I remember another thing which Nature said—that earthly excellence can come in no way but one, and the ending of passion and strife is the beginning of decay. It is indeed a hard saying, and the hardest lesson we can learn of her without losing love and ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... better bear like men than vainly seek to shun." Nor of my bonds," said Palamon again, Nor of unhappy planets I complain; But when my mortal anguish caused my cry, The moment I was hurt through either eye; Pierced with a random shaft, I faint away, And perish with insensible decay: A glance of some new goddess gave the wound, Whom, like Actaeon, unaware I found. Look how she walks along yon shady space; Not Juno moves with more majestic grace, And all the Cyprian queen is in her face. If thou art Venus (for thy charms ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... point nearest Clarence, and called Kilo. For a while the new station was merely a sidetrack on the level prairie, a convenience for the men of Clarence, but before Clarence knew how it had happened Kilo was a flourishing town, and the older town on the hill had begun to decay. Even while Clarence was still sneering at Kilo as a sidetrack village, Kilo had begun to sneer at Clarence as a played-out crossroads settlement. Clarence, when Mrs. Tarbro-Smith visited it, was no more typical of middle Iowa than a ...
— Kilo - Being the Love Story of Eliph' Hewlitt Book Agent • Ellis Parker Butler
... of applying his prudential check; his originality; his phrase of misery check is in many cases too severe; decaying races and the cause of decay. ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... may have a house in each of two or more villages, and a chief or very important man is allowed two or three houses in the same village. On a house being pulled down and not rebuilt, or being abandoned and left to decay, the site reverts to the village, and another person may build a house upon it. [65] Houses are never sold, but the ordinary life of a house is only ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... not in any sense a pessimist, I cannot but tremble in some measure for the future because of the decay of home religion. And this decay, while traceable in some measure to the madness for money and pleasure among men, is traceable even more to this same madness among women. The woman of to-day is in a state of transition. She ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... procure other organs, other modes of feeling, than the meanest of his subjects; if he has an advantage over them, it is by the grandeur, the variety, the multiplicity of the objects with which he can occupy himself; which by giving perpetual activity to his mind, can prevent it from decay; from falling into sloth. If his soul is virtuous, if his mind is expansive, his ambition finds continual food in the contemplation of the power he possesses, to unite by gentleness, to consolidate by kindness, ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... Delos; but the wars of Mithridates put an end to it; and in a very short period afterwards, it seems to have been entirely abandoned by the merchants of all nations, and, as a commercial place, to have fallen into utter neglect and decay. ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... principalities of greater note, and a large number of smaller dependencies. During the vigorous youth of the dynasty, the sovereign or lord paramount exercised an effective control over the various chiefs, but with the lapse of time there came weakness and decay. The chiefs — corresponding somewhat to the European dukes, earls, marquises, barons, &c. — quarrelled and warred among themselves, and the stronger among them barely acknowledged their subjection to the sovereign. A similar condition of things prevailed in each particular ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) Unicode Version • James Legge
... have short time to stay as you, We have as short a spring, As quick a growth to meet decay, As you or anything. We die, As your hours do, and dry Away, Like to the summer's rain, Or as the pearls of morning dew, ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... interrupted by such originators as Gregory VII or St. Francis of Assisi. Ignorant of History, they allowed themselves to be governed by the unknown Past; ignorant of Science, they never believed in hidden forces working onwards to a happier future. The sense of decay was upon them; and each generation seemed so inferior to the last, in ancient wisdom and ancestral virtue, that they found comfort in the assurance that the end of the world ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... received L10 a year each. The master and wardens also gave from the Company's bounty quarterly sums of money to about fifty or sixty other poor persons. In cases where members of the court fell into decay, they received pensions during the court's pleasure. One person of high repute, then recently deceased, had received the sum of L200 per annum, and on this occasion the City had given him back his sheriff's fine. The attendance fee ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... prediction: at present Britain flourishes, and shows no signs of decay. Yet a knowledge of its decay seems necessary, to justify any one in asserting the given premise. If it is a question whether Britain will decay, to attempt (while several empires still flourish) to settle the matter ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... restoration the walls were entirely of the local red sandstone, very similar in quality and appearance to that of which Chester Cathedral was built, and the extent of its decay, especially on the tower, was as grievous. Hardly a piece of external moulding or carving preserved its original profile or form, and some of the tower buttresses had lost so large a proportion ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Churches of Coventry - A Short History of the City and Its Medieval Remains • Frederic W. Woodhouse
... bounds of the empire." In accordance with this statement, the same historian entitles the first part of his history up to the victory over the Poles in 1672 the History of the Growth of the Othman Empire, and the remaining portion, The Decay of ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... desirable propensities of the people of the town have endeared me to them with a spirit as strong as that which makes the ivy cling to the oak, and as we see the ivy fondly clinging to that monarch of trees, whether it sprouts its green leaves in the glorious sunshine or falls to the ground with decay, so will I cling to the people of Ballybraggan. Once again, I thank you, but in conclusion I must say that I will do all in my power to prove worthy of the reliance and confidence placed ...
— Duty, and other Irish Comedies • Seumas O'Brien
... his men into Lepanto, Patras, and pushed on to Athens; but there they had six days' fighting, during which more harm was done to the beautiful old buildings and sculptures than had befallen them in nearly two thousand years of decay. The Turks had shut themselves up in the Acropolis, and made a powder magazine of the Parthenon. A shell from Morosini's batteries fell into it, and blew up the roof, which had remained perfect all these years, and much more damage was done; but the city was won at last, and ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... his eyes were sunk, his jaws lengthened beyond their usual extension; and he seemed twenty years older than he looked when he and our hero parted at Rotterdam. In spite of all these evidences of decay, he accosted him with a meagre affectation of content and good-humour, struggled piteously to appear gay and unconcerned, professed his joy at seeing him in England, excused himself for having delayed so long to come and present his respects; alleging that, since his return, he had been a mere ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... all evil will befall me, is called asravabhavana (meditation of the befalling of evil). By the control of the asrava (inrush of karma) comes the sa@mvara (cessation of the influx of karma) and the destruction of the karmas already accumulated leads to nirjara (decay and destruction of ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... street was at one time the prey of the gas company; at another, of the drainage contractors. They seemed to delight in turning up the fetid soil, cutting deep trenches through various strata of filth, and piling up for days or weeks matter that reeked with vegetable and animal decay. One needs not affirm that Rosemary Street was not so called from its fragrance. If the Ginxes and their neighbors preserved any semblance of health in this place, the most popular guardian on the board must own it a miracle. They, poor people, knew nothing ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... countenance from which hope had fled. I saw it first on the black window-panes, my last night in Durrisdeer; it haunted and returned upon me half the voyage through; and yet it was no effect of lunacy, for I have come to a ripe old age with no decay of my intelligence; nor yet (as I was then tempted to suppose) a heaven-sent warning of the future, for all manner of calamities befell, not that calamity—and I saw many pitiful sights, but ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the garden they kept with care; Left to decay at its own sweet will, Fruit trees and flower beds eaten bare, Cattle and sheep where the roses were, Under the shadow ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... yet, very often, in petto, it is 'My sour friend.' Yet, after all, this is nothing, in fact, but what is perfectly natural; and, in this respect, marriage only follows the eternal law of nature in all earthly existence. Every form of life carries in itself decay and dissolution—a poisonous snake-king[3] gnaws even at the ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... Ireland on his Catholic subjects. But in this scheme he met with opposition from the moderate Catholics in the king's council. Lord Bellasis went even so far as to affirm with an oath, "that that fellow in Ireland was fool and madman enough to ruin ten kingdoms." The decay of trade, from the desertion of the Protestants, was represented; the sinking of the revenue; the alarm communicated to England: and by these considerations the king's resolutions were for some time suspended; though it was ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... age—sixty-eight years. And yet his death was a surprise to us all. He had never been in better health, apparently; his brain was as active as ever; life was dear to him; he seemed much younger than he was. He had no wish to give up his work; no thought of old age; no mental decay. His last novels, his last short stories, showed no falling-off. They were the equals of those written in younger years. Nor had he lost the public interest. He was always sure of an audience, and his work ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... he had become familiar with all the phases of London society, "tasted their pleasures," and, towards the close, "felt their decay." His associates in those years were of two classes—men of the world, and authors. Feted and courted in all quarters, he patronized the theatres, became in 1815 a member of the Drury Lane Committee, "liked the dandies," including Beau Brummell, and was introduced to the ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... semi-civilised dress, expressed his disapproval of the poor wearing quality of his trousers to an old Katingan, the latter exclaimed: "That matters not. Above, all new ones!" In the belief of the Duhoi (Ot-Danums) the liao remains with the body until the funeral-house falls into decay, perhaps for twenty years, when it enters the soil and "is then poor." The idea of the Penihings about life after death is vague, and they do not pretend to know where the ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... poppy peered at me through withering tangles; lilac and locust had already shed foliage too early blighted, but the huge and forbidding maples were all aflame in their blood-red autumn robes. Here the year had already begun to die; in the clear air a faint whiff of decay came from the rotting heaps of leaves—decay, ruin, and the taint of death; and, in the sad autumn stillness, something ominous, something secret and ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... without giving them any others in their place. It does not appear to be the aim of the missionaries to improve the Indians by making citizens of them. Hence, in most cases, anarchy and confusion are the results. Nothing has more effectually contributed to the decay of several tribes than the course pursued by their missionaries. Let us look back to the first of them for proofs. From the days of Elliott, to the year 1834, have they made one citizen? The latter date marks the first instance of such an experiment. Is ...
— Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts - Relative to the Marshpee Tribe: or, The Pretended Riot Explained • William Apes
... youth, her fickle faithless deceiving Youth, of one Opinion to day, and of another to morrow; like Flowers, which never remain in one state or fashion, but bud to day, and blow by insensible degrees, and decay as imperceptibly. The Resolution, we promise, and believe we shall maintain, is not in our power, and nothing is ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... seemed to leap out of the darkness and to vanish again. Decayed drift-wood, trunks of trees, fragments of broken sluicing,—the wash and waste of many a mile,—swept into sight a moment, and were gone. All of decay, wreck, and foulness gathered in the long circuit of mining-camp and settlement, all the dregs and refuse of a crude and wanton civilization, reappeared for an instant, and then were hurried away in the ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Magnetism, Decay of. The gradual loss of magnetism by permanent magnets, due to accidental shocks, changes of temperature, slow spontaneous annealing of the iron ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... character to that temper which will work with honor, if need be, in the tumult, or on the scaffold. Whatever outrages have happened to men may befall a man again; and very easily in a republic, if there appear any signs of a decay of religion. Coarse slander, fire, tar and feathers, and the gibbet, the youth may freely bring home to his mind, and with what sweetness of temper he can, and inquire how fast he can fix his sense of duty, braving such penalties, whenever it ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... indeed make certain structural adaptations, providing tolerable quarters for the local constabulary, with a lockup in the cellarage (which was commodious), but apart from this did little to arrest the general decay of the building. In particular, the disrepair of the old dining-room, where the magistrates now held Session, had become a public scandal. The old wall-paper dropped in tatters, the ceiling showed patches where the plaster had ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... murderers, and promised to levy no taxes on the import or export of goods. The attack of Ismail Ben Ferez, in 1315 (second siege), was frustrated; but in 1333 Vasco Paez de Meira, having allowed the fortifications and garrison to decay, was obliged to capitulate to Mahomet IV. (third siege). Alphonso's attempts to recover possession (fourth siege) were futile, though pertinacious and heroic, and he was obliged to content himself with a tribute for the rock from Abdul Melek of Granada; but after his successful ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 711, August 17, 1889 • Various
... with trusty sword and spur, For fame and honor to wage battle, Thus to be brav'd by foe to cattle? 745 Not all that pride that makes thee swell As big as thou dost blown-up veal; Nor all thy tricks and sleights to cheat, And sell thy carrion for good meat; Not all thy magic to repair 750 Decay'd old age in tough lean ware; Make nat'ral appear thy work, And stop the gangrene in stale pork; Not all that force that makes thee proud, Because by bullock ne'er withstood; 755 Though arm'd with ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... round them too, in this world, and saw that everything in it must die. The tree, though it stood for a thousand years, must decay at last; the very rocks and mountains crumbled to dust at last: and so they thought—truly and wisely enough—Everything which we see near us, perishes at last: why should not everything which we can see, however far off, however great, ...
— The Good News of God • Charles Kingsley
... of his acquaintance was the remorseless Ali Pacha of Yanina. The expressive lineaments of Paganini told a powerful tale of passions which had been fearfully excited, which might be roused again from temporary slumber, or were exhausted by indulgence and premature decay, leaving deep furrows to mark their intensity. Like the generality of his countrymen, he looked much older than he was. With them, the elastic vigor of youth and manhood rapidly subside into an interminable and joyless old age, numbering ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... putrefaction - a stage hastened, it is thought, by a secretion within the bladders; for the plant cannot digest fresh food; it can only absorb, through certain processes within the bladder's walls, the fluid products of decay. The little insectivorous sundew (q.v.), on the contrary, not only digests, but afterward absorbs, animal matter. Tiny aquatic creatures, ever seeking shelter from larger ones ready to devour them, enter the pop-weed bladders by bending inward the free edge of the valve, which, ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... many churches and cemeteries; after having performed every ecclesiastical work throughout Ireland; after having bestowed jewels and food upon the mighty and the needy; after having founded churches and monasteries, for by him was repaired in Ireland every church which had been consigned to decay and neglect, and they had been neglected from times remote;—after leaving every rule and every good moral in the churches of Ireland in general; after having been the second time in the legateship; after having been fourteen ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... been undertaken on the advice of Augustine, who died in 604, we have an approximate date for it, since Augustine only arrived in England in 597. Whether this church was so built by Ethelbert or not, it seems clear there was some church in a state of partial decay standing in 673, because it is recorded that at first Etheldreda designed to restore it and to make it the centre of her religious work; but the present site was judged to be more suitable, and there she began to build. The few remaining inhabitants of Cratendune soon abandoned ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ely • W. D. Sweeting
... of employing servants to cut up your food after their own fancy, and of sitting round a board bereft of all appearance of dinner except the salt-cellars and glasses, to watch flowers and fresh fruit decay and droop in the midst of the various smells of the hot meats, while waiting to receive such portions as your attendant chooses to bestow on you, is so opposed to the social, hospitable, and active habits of an English gentleman that it must soon pass ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... affection may not bloom, Like those green hills, through countless hours, Grant me at least a tardy waning Some pleasure still in age's paining; Though lines and forms must fade away, Still may old Beauty share the empire of Decay! ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... the carpenter examined the pumps, and to our great mortification, found them all in a state of decay, owing, as he said, to the sap's being left in the wood; one of them was so rotten, as, when hoisted up, to drop to pieces, and the rest were little better; so that our chief trust was now in the soundness of our vessel, which happily ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... her face was still inquiring, he added: "Brain trouble. In his case a kind of decay of the tissue; perhaps inherited, certainly hastened by his habits, probably precipitated ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... the one God, who manifested himself to the world, pervaded the universe, and existed throughout creation not alone as the vital spark animates the human organism, but as himself the sum of creation, the world with its perpetual growth, decay, and renewal, obeying the laws he had himself ordained. His spirit, existing in every form of nature, dwelt also in man, and wherever a mortal gazed he could discern the rule of the "One." Nothing could be imagined without him, therefore he was one like ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... was the spot, 'mid the brown mountain heather, Where the pilgrim of nature lay stretched in decay; Like the corpse of an outcast, abandoned to weather, Till the mountain winds wasted the tenantless clay; Nor yet quite deserted, though lonely extended, For, faithful in death, his mute favourite ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... between Austria and Hungary and Hungary and Croatia opened in 1868 a period which ended in 1905—it was a period, on the one hand of the greatest decay and decomposition in the political life of the Jugo-Slavs, and, on the other, of the greatest literary and intellectual unity as shaped by Bishop Strossmayer and Peter II and Nicholas ...
— The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement • Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup Harper,
... golden notes of the warblers which once delighted our ears. The common cells, also, on usurping the place of the nobler cells, are unable to perform the difficult duties of the latter, and the result upon human organism is disorder, decay, disease, etc., contributing to, if not causing, the condition of old age. This is an ingenious but not convincing theory. Our knowledge of histological processes is too incomplete at this stage to permit its acceptance as fact. It assumes too much to be known which is quite ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower
... holiness, so they add to the frailty which they have in common with us, the most grievous sins, because they do not follow their calling, but concern themselves with their honors and emoluments. They neglect the churches and suffer them to miserably decay. They condemn the true doctrine and teach idolatry. In short, in public life they are wise, but in their own sphere they are utterly foolish. This is the most destructive evil in ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... flower I bent, I thought of lives thus lowly clogged and pent, Which yet find room, Through care and cumber, coldness and decay, To lend a sweetness to the ungenial day And make the sad ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... rich, and to appear rich he must dazzle by his expenditure. Act we thus in the public administration. Economy is good for nothing, it warns those who have money, not to lend it to an indebted treasury, and it causes decay among the arts which prodigality vivifies." New works, on a gigantic scale, were undertaken everywhere. "Money abounds in the kingdom," the comptroller-general would remark to the king; "the people never had more openings for work; lavishness rejoices their eyes, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... from any other state of Italy. Subject continually to foreign rulers since the decay of the Greek Empire, governed in succession by the Normans, the Hohenstauffens, and the House of Anjou, it had never enjoyed the real independence or the free institutions of the northern provinces; nor had it ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... greed and ambition of rulers, to the reckless turbulence of the ruled, to the debasing effects of wealth and luxury, and to the devastating wars which have formed a great part of the occupation of mankind, as the causes of the decay of states and the foundering of old civilizations, and thereby point their story with a moral. No doubt immoral motives of all sorts have figured largely among the minor causes of these events. But beneath all this [208] superficial turmoil lay the deep-seated impulse given by unlimited multiplication. ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... while Holloway Gaol was the City Prison, all the inmates had a "blow-out" on Christmas Day, in the shape of beef, vegetables, plum-pudding, and a pint of beer. Some of the old hands, who remembered those happy days, bitterly bewailed the decay of prison hospitality. Their lamentations were worthy of a Conservative orator at a rural meeting. The present was a poor thing compared with the past, and they sighed for "the tender grace of a day that ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... into carbon dioxide to geigercount the radioactivity in the carbon. You see, all living things like the cotton in the rags the paper is made of absorb the radioactive carbon fourteen that is formed in the upper atmosphere by cosmic radiation. Then it begins to decay and we can measure very accurately the amount, which gives us ...
— The House from Nowhere • Arthur G. Stangland
... and eglantine than like what we generally call a garden, with trimly-cut beds and parterres of brilliant roses. There was a beautiful wildness about it and yet it was perfectly in order—there was no sign of withering or decay, no dead leaves lying about, no broken or dried-up branches on the trees, though they were high and massive and covered with foliage—it was all fresh and blooming as if nothing hurtful or troubling had ...
— The Boys and I • Mrs. Molesworth
... from the soul; Life, like the earth, is now a rounded whole, The orb of man's dominion. Live to-day." And every sense in me leapt to obey, Seeing the routed phantoms backward roll; But from their waning throng a whisper stole, And touched the morning splendour with decay. ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... the cultivation, every where tolerable, is nowhere excellent; there are no new farm-houses or farm-steadings; no signs of recent agricultural improvements; and the chateaux, in general, still bear the aspect of desertion and decay. ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... even in a condition to maintain a good system of government. Oppressed by the tyranny of officials, industry and improvement had been neglected, and a state of languor and depression prevailed. The public buildings were even falling into a state of ruin and decay. There was not a Court House in the province, nor a sufficient prison nor house of correction. Nor was there a school house between Tadousac and Niagara. The country upon the Great Lakes was a wilderness. Lymburner did not, however, prevail. The British government desired to put the United Empire ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... of Commons is, perhaps, that it will be reformed too rashly; the danger of the House of Lords certainly is, that it may never be reformed. Nobody asks that it should be so; it is quite safe against rough destruction, but it is not safe against inward decay. It may lose its veto as the Crown has lost its veto. If most of its members neglect their duties, if all its members continue to be of one class, and that not quite the best; if its doors are shut against genius that cannot found ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... source of internal heat. We all know that it is a most combustible body, and that during its inflammation the most intense heat is developed. It is less evident, but not less true, that heat is evolved during its slow oxidation, or decay. ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... sick of a violent fever, which he bore with much constancy and patience, and expressed himself as if he desired nothing more than to be dissolved, and be with Christ, in that case esteeming death as gain, and life only a tedious delaying felicity expected; and finding his vital strength decay, having settled his mind and affairs, as well as the shortness of time, and the violence of his disease would permit, with a constant and christian patience, he resigned his soul into the hands of his most merciful Redeemer, following his ...
— Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners • John Bunyan
... are collected one by one and carried within. Like all harvesters, these Hymenoptera are at the mercy of a shower that may fall during the harvest. They are well aware that in this case their provisions would be damaged, and that they would run the risk of germination or decay in the barns. Therefore, on the first sunny day all the ants, as observed by Lincecum and Buckley, may be seen carrying their grains outside, only bringing them back when they have been thoroughly dried, and always leaving ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... Addressing himself to Edward VI. in 1549, John Bale, afterwards Bishop of Ossory, who had but little love for Popery of any description, writes in this strain: 'Avarice was the other dispatcher which hath made an end both of our libraries and books . . . to the no small decay of the commonwealth. A great number of them who purchased those superstitious mansions [monasteries], reserved of these Library-books, some . . . to scour their candlesticks, and some to rub their boots; some they sold to the grocers and soap-sellers, and some they sent over sea to the ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... reality, and from earth, which is the home of the slaves of reality. The earth is a nursery in which men and women play at being heros and heroines, saints and sinners; but they are dragged down from their fool's paradise by their bodies: hunger and cold and thirst, age and decay and disease, death above all, make them slaves of reality: thrice a day meals must be eaten and digested: thrice a century a new generation must be engendered: ages of faith, of romance, and of science are all driven at last to have but one prayer, "Make me a healthy animal." But here ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... an inquiry into the causes of the decay of eloquence—'cur nostra potissimum aetas deserta et laude eloquentiae orbata vix nomen ipsum oratoris retineat' (Dial. 1). Some critics have supposed that Tacitus meant this work to be an apologia pro vita sua, a justification of his preference for a literary to a rhetorical career, ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... of Pennsylvania for four hundred and forty miles and with fifty-six pound iron west of there. As has been mentioned before, the first section was laid with cottonwood ties of local growth, treated by the burnettizing process, which was erroneously supposed would prevent decay. West of there hard wood ties from the East were used, some of them coming from far away Pennsylvania, and costing the Company two dollars and fifty cents laid down in Omaha. For the mountain section, ties of local growth were largely and satisfactorily used. The basis ...
— The Story of the First Trans-Continental Railroad - Its Projectors, Construction and History • W. F. Bailey
... degeneracy, of doubtful or disrupted succession, have always been the times of loudest poetic insistence on birth-rank and the occasion for the most frenzied utterance of high-sounding titles. This is a disease that has grown with the decay of monarchy. ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... home, close at hand in the vast growing cities of England and Scotland, and in the dwindling and cramped villages of our denuded countryside. It is there you will find the seeds of Imperial ruin and national decay—the unnatural gap between rich and poor, the divorce of the people from the land, the want of proper discipline and training in our youth, the exploitation of boy labour, the physical degeneration which seems to follow so swiftly on civilised poverty, ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... pear-tree, and even in his preoccupation he was struck with the signs of its extraordinary age. Twisted out of all proportion, and knotted with excrescences, it was supported by iron bands and heavy stakes, as if to prop up its senile decay. He tried to interest himself in the various initials and symbols deeply carved in bark, now swollen and half obliterated. As he turned back to the summer-house, he for the first time noticed that the ground rose behind it into a long undulation, on the ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... has certain marks of identity, either in appearance, quality, or condition of growth, which are its own, and never radically varied; none can contain a venomous element at one time, and yet be harmless under other conditions. Like other food, animal or vegetable, however, mushrooms may, by decay or conditions of growth, be unfit for table use; yet in this state no fatality would attend ...
— Mushrooms of America, Edible and Poisonous • Anonymous
... be guarding the gates, or the door of the palace. In fact, the gates hung ajar, and one of them was off its hinges. The grass on the lawn was tall and rank. The gardens, or as little of them as they could see, were full of tall weeds, and everything was going to decay. ...
— The Enchanted Island • Fannie Louise Apjohn
... ground also that of the padrone, to let no profit slip. He had not taken the trouble to make many or recent repairs. The buildings had made a fair start; they promised well. But the promise had not been kept. In their premature decay they were distinctly as bad as the worst. I had the curiosity to seek out the agent, the middleman, and ask him why they were so. He shrugged his shoulders. With such tenants nothing could be done, he said. ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... travelers not only as havens of refuge, but as little heavens in the midst of a sea of despair. The trail across the desert, naturally, ran through as many as possible of these successful efforts of nature to resist decay, and along the trail there were to be found skeletons and ghastly remains of men whose courage had exceeded their ability, and who had succumbed to hunger and thirst ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... flowering, and their leaves begin to decay, they should be taken up and dried, and kept in a dry place, till October, when they are to be replanted, taking off the offsets, and putting them in a bed ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... and the main consideration while they remained. She returned, if not well, at any rate not worse. She had got through the winter, and her lungs were still pronounced to be free from those dreadful signs of decay, the name of which has broken so many mothers' hearts, and sent dismay into the breasts of so many fathers. During her sojourn at Torquay she had grown much, and, as is often the case with those who grow quickly, she had become weak and thin. People at Torquay are always weak ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... general's daughters did. There were three of these bachelor ladies, of nicely graduated ages, who held a neighbouring farm-house in a united and more or less military occupation. The eldest warred against the decay of manners in the village children, and executed frontal attacks upon the village mothers for the conquest of courtesies. It sounds futile, but it was really a war for an idea. The second skirmished and scouted all over the country; and ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... when she came and did what she could to lighten the burden which was pressing her down to the grave. But, poor child, she was never again the same light-hearted girl. She grew pale and thin and in the hectic flush and faltering tread I read the death sign of early decay, and I felt that my misguided young friend was slowly dying of a broken heart. Then there came a day when we were summoned to her dying bed. Her brothers and sisters were present; all their resentment ...
— Trial and Triumph • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... The sea since Wednesday has been very rough, blowing in straight upon the land. Yesterday, the shore was strewn with hundreds of oxen, sheep, and pigs (and with bushels upon bushels of apples), in every state and stage of decay—burst open, rent asunder, lying with their stiff hoofs in the air, or with their great ribs yawning like the wrecks of ships—tumbled and beaten out of shape, and yet with a horrible sort of humanity ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... broad, and arched; the arms and thighs were full, and softly muscular; the feet were elegant, and of the most perfect shape; nowhere, on the whole body, was there a trace either of fat or of leanness and decay. A perfect man lay in great beauty before me; and the rapture which the sight caused made me forget for a moment that the immortal spirit had left such an abode. I laid my hand on his heart—there was a deep silence—and I turned ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... may receive. On the contrary, no care that can be used in the construction of our Government, no division of powers, no distribution of checks in its several departments, will prove effectual to keep us a free people if this spirit is suffered to decay; and decay it will without constant nurture. To the neglect of this duty the best historians agree in attributing the ruin of all the republics with whose existence and fall their writings have made ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... of belief was prevalent among some persons, that the body of a suicide would not decay until the time arrived when, in the ordinary course of nature, he would have died. This was founded upon another belief, that there is a day of death appointed for every man, which no one can pass; but as man is possessed of a free will, he may, by his own wicked determination, shorten ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... of the divine Study of Nature, he has the following reflective truths:—"If we look with wonder upon the great remains of human works, such as the columns of Palmyra, broken in the midst of the desert, the temples of Paestum, beautiful in the decay of twenty centuries, or the mutilated fragments of Greek sculpture in the Acropolis of Athens, or in our own Museum, as proofs of the genius of artists, and power and riches of nations now past ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction—Volume 13 - Index to Vol. 13 • Various
... statement given above is incomplete, inasmuch as it neither hints at the great difficulty of reconciling the civic ideas of Christian and Turkish peoples, nor describes the political problems arising out of the decay of the Ottoman Power and ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... heritage indeed Be lost, be traded quite away For fatted sloth and fevered greed; If, inly rotting, we decay; Suffer we then what doom we must, But silent, as befits the dust Of them whose ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... renascence in matters of the mind and spirit. It was non-sectarian and non-political. Its purpose was purely psychological and educational—it sought the preservation of the Irish language from a fast-threatening decay, it encouraged the study of ancient Irish literature and it promoted the cultivation of a modern literature in the Irish language. Its beginnings were modest, and its founders were practically three unknown young ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... the Norman here rose the Castle of Rougemont, of which a tower, a gateway, and part of the walls, stand to this day. In proportion to the size and strength of that castle, however, the remains are inconsiderable, but it fell into decay very long ago, and as early as 1681 Izacke writes of 'the Fragments of the ancient Buildings ruinated, whereon time ... hath too ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... Aligarh to be such a home of learning as to command the same respect of scholars as Berlin or Oxford, Leipsic or Paris. And we want those branches of learning relative to Islam which are fast falling into decay to be added by Moslem scholars to the stock of the world's knowledge. And, above all, we want to create for our people an intellectual and moral capital—a city which shall be the home of elevated ideas and pure ideals; a centre from which light and guidance shall be ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... Schopper; and as to the said Herdegen Schopper, my dear brother, Margery's book of memorabilia right truly shows forth the manner of his life and mind in the bloom of his youth, and verily it is a sorrowful task for me to set forth the decay and end of so noble ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... under a tree, a saddle and bridle, a few household implements scattered about, indicated the "ranch." Like most pioneer clearings, it was simply a disorganized raid upon nature that had left behind a desolate battlefield strewn with waste and decay. The fallen trees, the crushed thicket, the splintered limbs, the rudely torn-up soil, were made hideous by their grotesque juxtaposition with the wrecked fragments of civilization, in empty cans, broken bottles, battered hats, soleless boots, ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... Josephus[148]) otherwise as to verminose putrefaction in human bodies, we have several instances of it. For this very king's grandfather, Herod, surnamed the Great, is said to have labour'd under this disease a long time, till at length it threw him into a decay, of which he died.[149] Likewise Herodotus relates of Pheretima, the mother of Arcesilaus, king of Cyrene, that she was rotted alive by worms.[150] And it is recorded of the Roman emperor Galerius Maximianus, that this same loathsome disease not only ...
— Medica Sacra - or a Commentary on on the Most Remarkable Diseases Mentioned - in the Holy Scriptures • Richard Mead
... face. The skin, tongue, or the jawbones may become affected, and by a very slow process it may extend downward upon the neck and even into the cavity of the chest. In many cases the teeth have been found in a state of more or less advanced decay and ulceration. In a few cases disease of the lungs was observed without coexisting disease of the bones or soft parts of the head. In such cases the fungus must have been inhaled. The disease of the lungs after a time extends upon the chest wall, where it may corrode the ribs and work its ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... whitish, or bloody; the Sweat, which seldom smelt badly, and which was far from giving Ease to the Sick, that it always weakned them; in certain Cases Hemorrhages, which, however moderate, have been always fatal; a great Decay in the Strength, and above all, an Apprehension so strong of dying, that these poor Creatures, were incapable of any Comfort, and looked on themselves, from the first Moment of their being attacked, as destined to certain Death. But that which deserves to be well observed, and ...
— A Succinct Account of the Plague at Marseilles - Its Symptoms and the Methods and Medicines Used for Curing It • Francois Chicoyneau
... whether of vegetable or animal origin, which have undergone the putrid fermentation, and are consequently decomposed, or nearly so, into their elementary principles. And it is requisite that these vegetable matters should be in a state of decay, or approaching decomposition. The addition of calcareous earth, in the state of chalk or lime, is beneficial to such soils, as it accelerates the dissolution of vegetable bodies. Now, I ask you, what is the utility of supplying the soil ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... from the first been massive and richly sombre, had mellowed into a darker sombreness and richness as it had stood unmoved amid London years and fogs. The grandeur of decoration and furnishing had been too solid to depreciate through decay, and its owner had been of no fickle mind led to waver in taste by whims of fashion. The rooms were huge and lofty, the halls and stairways spacious, the fireplaces furnished with immense grates of glittering steel, which held in winter beds of scarlet glowing coal, kept scarlet glowing by a special ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... mode of worship. The High Commission Court was organized (1583) to try and to to punish heretics—whether Catholics or Puritans. The great number of paupers caused by the destruction of the monasteries under Henry VIII and the gradual decay of relations of feudal service caused the passage of the first Poor Law (1601) (S403), and so brought the Government face to face with a problem which has never yet been satisfactorily settled; namely, what to do ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... Lecturer on Botany at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London, himself a pronounced evolutionist, says the theories of Lamarck and of the "Vestiges of Creation" have given place to that of Mr. Darwin; "and there are not wanting many symptoms of decay in the acceptance even of his. Not only has he considerably modified his views in later editions of the 'Origin of Species,' distinctly expressing the opinion that he attributed too great influence to natural selection, but ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... which they may have been appropriated; while the broken galleries outside, intricate and black and cavernous, like Piranesi's etchings of the 'Carceri,' present the wildest pictures of greatness in decay, fantastic dilapidation. The ruins of the smaller theatre, again, with their picturesquely grouped fragments and their standing columns, might be sketched for a frontispiece to some dilettante work on classical antiquities. For the rest, perhaps the Aliscamps, or ancient Roman burial-ground, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... dispersion, and we have even been obliged to follow them into the midst of the people among whom they have become nationed, to try, if possible, to find the cause of this racial difference in health, resistance to disease, decay, and death. It has been necessary, in following out the research, to give a condensed resume of the religious, political, and social condition of the Jewish commonwealth, which, although in a state of dispersion, still ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... were formed, then it would be easy to read the record of the rocks, but many animals were too soft to become satisfactory fossils, many were eaten or dissolved away, many were destroyed by heat and pressure, so that the rock record is like a library very much damaged by fire and looting and decay. ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... her husband. "And now, stand back, please, everybody. I want to do a little stock-taking." With that, from every pocket he produced French notes of all denominations, in all stages of decay, and heaped them upon the table. "Now, this one," he added, gingerly extracting a filthy and dilapidated rag, "is a particularly interesting specimen. Apparently, upon close inspection, merely a valuable security, worth, to be exact, a ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... place to collect and lay up in store, as against a siege, these other pleasures, as a sort of provision that will not impair and decay; that then, after they have celebrated the venereal festivals of life, they may spend a cleanly after-feast in reading over the historians and poets, or else in problems of music and geometry. For it would never have come into their minds so much as to think of ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... such conjunctures are like to happen. What if some method were thought on towards repairing of churches? for which there is like to be too frequent occasions, those ancient Gothic structures, throughout this kingdom, going every year to decay. That expedient of repairing or rebuilding them by charitable collections, seems in my opinion not very suitable, either to the dignity and usefulness of the work, or to the honour of our country; since it might be so easily done, with very little charge to the public, in a much more decent ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... says Dr. Hunt, "seen but a single suggestion that it could so act, and this a promiscuous guess. One writer (Hammond) thinks it possible that it may 'somehow' enter into combination with the products of decay in tissues, and 'under certain circumstances might yield their nitrogen to the construction of new tissues.' No parallel in organic chemistry, nor any evidence in animal chemistry, can be found to surround this guess with the areola of a ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... them—a gratitude and affection, which no circumstances should subdue, and which few can strengthen; a gratitude, in which even injury from the object, though it may blend regret, should never breed resentment; an affection which can be increased only by the decay of those to whom we owe it, and which is then most fervent when the tremulous voice of age, resistless in its feebleness, inquires for the natural protector of ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... that this condition lasted for hundreds and hundreds of years, the oxygen remaining unable to combine with other elements. During all that time nothing would decay. The trees would stay as they fell. The corpses of people would dry and shrivel, but they would lie where they dropped as perfectly preserved as the best of mummies. The dead fish would float about in ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... they are. Within the limits of those phenomena he may speculate and prove; he may trace the operation of the laws of matter through periods of time; he may penetrate into the past, and anticipate the future; he may recount the changes which they have effected upon matter, and the rise, growth, and decay of phenomena; and so in a certain sense he may write the history of the material world, as far as he can; still he will always advance from phenomena, and conclude upon the internal evidence which they supply. He will not come near the questions, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... Lewes stands the rather mean port of Newhaven. After many years of neglect and decay this Elizabethan sea-gate is once more of great importance in continental traffic. Much money and skill were expended during the latter half of the nineteenth century in improving the harbour and ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... muttering evil spells. All the year round under the green cloud of summer, you might meet Autumn creeping somewhere in the valley, like foul mists that creep from pool to pool; for here all the year was decay to feed upon and dead leaves for her to sleep on. Always the year round in the valley, if you listened close, you would hear something sighing, something dying. To the happiest walking there would come ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... and empty but for the sleeping dogs, where the signs swung and the upper stories leaned together, and where the common life had been transacted since the birth of the town and would continue till its decay. And beyond lay the cool round hills, with their dark dewy slopes, over which he had ridden a year ago, and all England beyond them again, with its human life and affairs and interests; and over all hung the ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... of the Byzantine Empire, showing, with vivid imagination, the possible forces behind the internal decay of the Empire that hastened the ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... advanced toward putrefaction - a stage hastened, it is thought, by a secretion within the bladders; for the plant cannot digest fresh food; it can only absorb, through certain processes within the bladder's walls, the fluid products of decay. The little insectivorous sundew (q.v.), on the contrary, not only digests, but afterward absorbs, animal matter. Tiny aquatic creatures, ever seeking shelter from larger ones ready to devour them, enter the ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... vent, would have fertilized the region through which it poured, now buried the land under a deluge, which blighted every green and living thing. Agriculture, commerce, MANUFACTURES, every branch of national industry and improvement, languished and fell to decay; and the nation, like the Phrygian monarch who turned all that he touched into gold, cursed by the very consummation of its wishes, was poor in the midst of its treasures.' Such was the effect of violating ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... constitution, originally vigorous in the extreme, had been impaired by hardships and exposures in every clime, and silently preyed upon by the sufferings of the mind. His frame, once powerful and commanding, and retaining a semblance of strength and majesty even in its decay, was yet crazed by infirmities and subject to paroxysms of excruciating pain. His intellectual forces alone retained their wonted health and energy, prompting him, at a period of life when most men seek repose, to sally forth with youthful ardor, on the most toilsome ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... affinity between sexes is clearly marked. No love but pure love burns on the altar of any soul, and any one who wishes may stop to kindle the fires or warm himself thereat. There is no bodily contact, no decay, no weakening. This love is enrapturing, uplifting, ever drawing the lover and the ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... the incidents contained in this sketch took place, the peasantry of Ireland, being less encumbered with heavy rents, and more buoyant in spirits than the decay of national prosperity has of late permitted them to be, indulged more frequently, and to a greater stretch, in those rural sports and festivities so suitable to their natural love of humor and amusement. Dances, wakes, and weddings, were then held according to the most extravagant forms of ancient ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... to introduce the reader to the last but one of the half a dozen of our nearest neighbours, selected as typical of the smaller estancieros—a class of landowners and cattle-breeders then in their decay and probably now fast vanishing. This was Don Anastacio Buenavida, who was an original person too in his little way. He was one of our very nearest neighbours, his estancia house being no more than two short miles from us on the south side. Like most of these old establishments, it ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... wasteful fashion of employing servants to cut up your food after their own fancy, and of sitting round a board bereft of all appearance of dinner except the salt-cellars and glasses, to watch flowers and fresh fruit decay and droop in the midst of the various smells of the hot meats, while waiting to receive such portions as your attendant chooses to bestow on you, is so opposed to the social, hospitable, and active habits of an English gentleman that it must soon pass away, and the tempting ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... with three hundred statues, and four hundred pillars of marble, in the space of one year. He also brought into Rome, the aqua Julia, and restored the aqueduct of the aqua Marzia, which had fallen to decay. I have already observed the great number of baths which he opened for the people, and the magnificent thermae, with spacious gardens, which he bequeathed to them as a legacy. But these benefactions, ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... works in exactly similar fashion. Of all the eggs that are produced by the animals at large in nature an overwhelming proportion never develop at all. They dry up, are eaten by their enemies, find no suitable place or time for development and decay, or are overtaken by some other calamity. Of the animals which emerge from the remainder an overwhelming majority come to an untimely end within the first few days of life. Each has countless enemies which prey upon him, and these have scarcely devoured ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... and heavy eyes, thick, projecting eyelids, and a flat nose. His face is of a leaden hue, his skin dirty, flabby, covered with tetters, and his thick tongue hangs down over his moist, livid lips; his mouth, always open and full of saliva, shows teeth going to decay. His chest is narrow, his back curved, his breath asthmatic, his limbs short, misshapen, without power. The knees are thick and inclined inward, the feet flat. The large head droops listlessly on the breast; the abdomen is like a bag." The cretin is generally deaf and dumb, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... the sunshine. Most of the oak-leaves have still the deep verdure of summer; but where a change has taken place, it is into a russet-red, warm, but sober. These colors, infinitely varied by the progress which different trees have made in their decay, constitute almost the whole glory of autumnal woods; but it is impossible to conceive how much is done with such scanty materials. In my whole walk I saw only one man, and he was at a distance, in the obscurity of the trees. He had a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... the Luxembourg. Dr Porhoet walked with stooping shoulders, his hands behind him. He beheld the scene with the eyes of the many painters who have sought by means of the most charming garden in Paris to express their sense of beauty. The grass was scattered with the fallen leaves, but their wan decay little served to give a touch of nature to the artifice of all besides. The trees were neatly surrounded by bushes, and the bushes by trim beds of flowers. But the trees grew without abandonment, as though ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... built one in France or America, after what he thought a better plan? You would say to him: No, sir—my ancestors have lived in this mansion comfortably and honourably for many generations; all its walls are strong, and all its timbers sound: if I should observe a decay in any of its parts, I know how to make the reparation without the assistance of strangers; and I know too that the reparation, when made by myself, may be made without injury either to the strength or beauty of the building. It has been ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... square; the floor or foundation every way shorter than the eve, which is about four feet from the ground. By this construction, the rain that falls on the roof, is carried off from the wall, which otherwise would decay and rot. ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... deference for his genius and integrity remained, and to him no difference for some time appeared, in consequence of the secret decay ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... child found wings for many an airy flight. The town itself bore the name of the English nobleman, well known in Revolutionary days. Not far away his mansion sturdily defied the touch of time and decay, and admonished the men of a degenerate present to remember their glorious past. The house that sheltered me that summer was known in colonial days as the Black-Horse Tavern. Its walls had echoed to the tread of patriot and tory, who gathered here to drink a health to General ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... planet. The Pygmy Planet, Dr. Whiting called it. He said it was the great experiment of the century. You see, he was testing evolution. We began with the planet, young and hot, and watched it until it is now almost as old as Mars. We watched the change and development of life upon it. And the rise and decay of a strange civilization. Until now its people are strange things, with human brains in mechanical bodies, worshiping a ...
— The Pygmy Planet • John Stewart Williamson
... merely a farmer, as certain records proved. Captain Ben may have built the shop, though I think it was older, for when we examined the picturesque little building, with a view to restoration, it proved to be too far gone—too much a structure of decay. So we tore down "the shop," and, incidentally, Old Pop, who did the tearing, found a Revolutionary bayonet in the loft; also a more recent, and particularly hot, hornets' nest which caused him to leap ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... is nothing very offensive in the view of the country. The burnt grass gives rather a sombre aspect to the country, covered with the hard-baked tracks of animals which haunt these plains during the latter part of the rainy season. In the forest numbers of trees lie about in the last stages of decay, and working away with might and main on the prostrate trunks may be seen numberless insects of various species. Impalpably, however, the poison of the dead and decaying vegetation is inhaled into the system with a result sometimes as fatal as that which is said to arise from ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... the road at the point nearest Clarence, and called Kilo. For a while the new station was merely a sidetrack on the level prairie, a convenience for the men of Clarence, but before Clarence knew how it had happened Kilo was a flourishing town, and the older town on the hill had begun to decay. Even while Clarence was still sneering at Kilo as a sidetrack village, Kilo had begun to sneer at Clarence as a played-out crossroads settlement. Clarence, when Mrs. Tarbro-Smith visited it, was no more typical of middle Iowa than a sunfish ...
— Kilo - Being the Love Story of Eliph' Hewlitt Book Agent • Ellis Parker Butler
... is newly and well trimmed, and I feel its light can never die; it may give place to one which is larger, and whose rays can be felt further, but it can never die. I really begin to believe there is no such thing as death. I dislike the word, for it only signifies decay. I call it change, and that seems ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... the air and the sky and sun; therefore, cotton—and not corn, which draws its life from the clay and mud and decay which ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... with over 90% of industry remaining in state hands. Privatization is slated to pick up in 1996, but Bucharest faces other economic problems that could stall recovery, including a growing budget deficit, limited reform of the agricultural and energy sectors, and accumulated decay ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... antiquity, of a time long past, when the Moor still fought around these scenes, and rushed to the fight to the war-cry of Allah Akbar! But now, bathed in the mellow moonlight, this ancient castle showed all its grand proportions, with not a trace of decay or desolation; and its massive walls arose in solemn majesty; its battlements frowned in heavy shadows overhead; its lofty towers and turrets seemed still able to defy the assaults of time for ages ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... trailed after her master with her wet tail between her legs, doing all she could to avoid pricking her nose. It was a dull, overcast morning. Big drops dripped from the bracken and from the trees that were wrapped in a light mist; there was a pungent smell of decay from the dampness of ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... highest I ever saw, and well replenished with ordnance; the rest of the city being ruinous, except the houses of the nobles, which are pleasantly situated on the river. The ancient royal seat was Fatipoor, twelve coss from Agra, but is now fallen into decay. Between these two is the sepulchre of the king's father, to which nothing I ever saw is comparable: yet the church or mosque of Fatipoor comes near it, both being built according to the rules ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... law administered—and I think he will agree with me in saying ably administered—by judges who, I am sorry to say, sit without the traditional wig of England. I have heard since I came here friends of mine gravely lament this as something prophetic of the decay which was sure to follow so serious an innovation. I answered with a little story which I remember having heard from my father. He remembered the last clergyman in New England who still continued to wear the wig. At first it became ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser
... make it ride the sea in gallant trim again. The fair lady who cannot so moderate her pursuit of pleasure that the feast, the midnight hour, the dance, shall not recur too frequently, must relinquish the hope of preserving her charms till the time of nature's own decay. After this moderation in the indulgence of pleasure, the next specific for the preservation of beauty which I shall give, is that of gentle and daily exercise in the open air. Nature teaches us, in the gambols and sportiveness of the lower ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... and died of wounds. For twenty miles round, in Beit Khalifa, Eski Baghdad, and elsewhere, is one confused huddle of ruins. It is hard to believe that such tawdry magnificence as Harun's successors intermittently brought to the town during the precarious times of Abbasid decay is responsible for all these arches and caverns and tumbled bricks. Major Kenneth Mason, already mentioned as having identified Xenophon's Sittake, has collected good reasons for placing Opis, ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson
... notion that organization does not foster individual freedom; that, on the contrary, it means the decay of individuality. In reality, however, the true function of organization is to aid the development and ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... smallest orb, which thou behold'st, But in his motion like an angel sings, Still quiring to the young-ey'd cherubims; Such harmony is in immortal souls; But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in, we ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... there is little good to tell of the White man's treatment of them. Self-government by the stronger people always falls hard on the weaker, and Mission after Mission has been extinguished by the enmity of the surrounding Whites and the corruption and decay of the Indians. A Moravian Mission has been actually persecuted. Every here and there some good man has arisen and done a good work on those immediately around him, and at the present time there are ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... considered certain aspects of the attitude assumed by our Aryan forefathers towards the great processes of Nature in their ordered sequence of Birth, Growth, and Decay. We saw that while on one hand they, by prayer and supplication, threw themselves upon the mercy of the Divinity, who, in their belief, was responsible for the granting, or withholding, of the water, ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... refers to the popular superstition against marrying in the month of May, the children of which marriages are said to "die of decay." ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... constitution of Napoleon sustained considerable change; and it may be presumed that his moral qualities were affected by that change. It is particularly important not to lose sight of the premature decay of his health, which, perhaps, did not permit him always to, possess the vigour of memory otherwise consistent enough with his age. The state of our organisation often modifies our recollections, our feelings, our manner of viewing objects, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... or thought of life is accepted without being brought to the test of Jean-Christophe's own life. What is not true for him does not exist; and, as there are very few of the processes of human growth or decay which are not analysed, there is disclosed to the reader the most comprehensive survey of modern life which has appeared in literature ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... the shrill, Embittered housewifery Of the lean Winter: all such things, And with them all the goodness of the Master Whose right hand blesses with increase and life, Whose left hand honours with decay ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... discovering the qualities in question is to consider groups of individuals, and to compare the qualities that distinguish such groups as flourish or prosper from others of the same kind that decline or decay. This method has the advantage of giving results more free from the possibility of bias than those derived ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... never had been. Whence came this insufficiency of life—this instantaneous turning to decay of everything on ...
— The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert • Various
... very different spirit from an extended history where the object of the historian should be to describe the various aspects of the national life, and to trace through long periods of time the ultimate causes of national progress and decay. The history of religion, of art, of literature, of social and industrial development, of scientific progress, have all their different methods. A writer who treats of some great revolution that has transformed human affairs should deal largely in retrospect, ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... for that day, presiding over its meetings in person, and distributing the poetical premiums with their own hands. During the troubles consequent on the death of Martin, this establishment fell into decay, until it was again revived, on the accession of Ferdinand the First, by the celebrated Henry, marquis of Villena, who transplanted it to ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... of the throne had in secret plighted his faith. There too was she, the beautiful mother of a beautiful race, the St. Cecilia whose delicate features, lighted up by love and music, art has rescued from the common decay. There were the members of that brilliant society which quoted, criticised, and exchanged repartees, under the rich peacock hangings of Mrs. Montague. And there the ladies whose lips, more persuasive than those of Fox himself, had carried the Westminster ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... he afterward visited them in a more sweeping manner by the suppression of its monasteries, chantries, etc., so that, says Milner, "these being dissolved, and the edifices themselves soon after pulled down, or falling to decay, it must have worn the appearance of a city sacked by a hostile army." Through his reign and that of Edward VI., the destruction of the religious houses, and the stripping of the churches, went on to a degree which must have rendered Winchester ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... before, Lyric Hall had been the biggest theater in town. The stage was still there and the boxes, and at the back there were miles—they seemed miles anyway—of ancient, crumbling, dauby scenery stacked up and smelling of age and decay. Booth and Barrett had played there, and Fanny Davenport and Billy Florence. Now, having fallen from its high estate, it served altered purposes—conventions were held at Lyric Hall and cheap ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... alarming scene. The mob fed the fire with whatever they could find fit for the purpose. The flames roared and crackled among the heaps of nourishment piled on the fire, and a terrible shout soon announced that the door had kindled, and was in the act of being destroyed. The fire was suffered to decay, but, long ere it was quite extinguished, the most forward of the rioters rushed, in their impatience, one after another, over its yet smouldering remains. Thick showers of sparkles rose high in the air, as man after man bounded over the glowing embers, and disturbed them in their ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... began to decay mightily: as to linen, I had none a good while, except some chequered shirts which I found in the chests of the other seamen, and which I carefully preserved, because many times I could bear no other clothes on but a shirt; and it was a very great help to me, that I had among all ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... wonderful that such meager traces of human remains are found. Pinart surmises, from the analogies of modern burial customs upon the north coast, that the bones only were deposited in the graves, the flesh having been allowed to decay by a long period of exposure in the open air. This, however, would probably not materially hasten the ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... lounge and there they chatter. Little boys come slyly to pilfer oranges, and are pelted away with other oranges; for a single orange has here no more appreciable value than a single apple in our farmers' orchards; and, indeed, windfall oranges are left to decay, like windfall apples. During this season one sees oranges everywhere, even displayed as a sort of thank-offering on the humble altars of country-churches; the children's lips and cheeks assume a chronic yellowness; and the narrow ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... gentleman fallen to decay, cousin of Mrs. Martha Bethune Baliol, to whom at death, he left the MS. of two novels, one The Highland Widow, and the other The Fair Maid of Perth, called the First and Second Series of the "Chronicles ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... their being there; "when shall I cease to regret you!—when learn to feel a home elsewhere! Oh! happy house, could you know what I suffer in now viewing you from this spot, from whence perhaps I may view you no more! And you, ye well-known trees!—but you will continue the same. No leaf will decay because we are removed, nor any branch become motionless although we can observe you no longer! No; you will continue the same; unconscious of the pleasure or the regret you occasion, and insensible of any ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... hold communion with those around her only partially, and with a mixture of dread pervading the intercourse. Thus some of the deepest, purest wells of spiritual life, are, like those in old castles, choked up by the decay of the outer walls. But what tended more than anything, perhaps, to keep up the painful unrest of her soul (for the beauty of her character was evident in the fact, that the irritation seldom reached her mind), was a circumstance at which, in its present ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... great measure to weaken, y^e same. I have been happy, in my first times, to see, and with much comforte to injoye, the blessed fruits of this sweete communion, but it is now a parte of my miserie in old age, to find and feele y^e decay and wante therof (in a great measure), and with greefe and sorrow of hart to lamente & bewaile y^e same. And for others warning and admonnition, and my owne humiliation, doe I hear note ...
— Bradford's History of 'Plimoth Plantation' • William Bradford
... the trees would be worthless if they were left for a season? Decay and mold or worms would destroy the finest wood. Besides, these logs, or poles, laid side by side in the mud, soon get to be as solid as a rock, for the mud, oozing up between the chinks of the logs, dries out and leaves them baked ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... equal; nor will Caesar's pride A prior rival in his triumphs brook; Which had the right 'twere impious to enquire; Each for his cause can vouch a judge supreme; The victor, heaven: the vanquished, Cato, thee. (7) Nor were they like to like: the one in years Now verging towards decay, in times of peace Had unlearned war; but thirsting for applause Had given the people much, and proud of fame His former glory cared not to renew, But joyed in plaudits of the theatre, (8) His gift to Rome: his triumphs in the past, Himself ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... even in our sunniest hours, Ne'er to this cloudy land one moment stray, Whose brilliant plumes, fleeting and fair as flowers, Come with the flowers, and with the flowers decay.[67] The Indian bird, with hundred eyes, that throws From his blue neck the azure of the skies, And his pale brother of the northern snows, Bearing white plumes, ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... dark hung around me, scarcely showing shadow; and the little light that glimmered seemed to come up from the ground. For the earth was strown with the winter-spread and coil of last year's foliage, the lichened claws of chalky twigs, and the numberless decay which gives a light in its decaying. I, for my part, hastened shyly, ready to draw back and run from hare, or rabbit, or ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... and as the junk and the schooner drew near seemed like a huge black boat floating bottom up. Over it and upon it swarmed and clambered thousands of sea-birds, while all around and below the water was thick with gorging sharks. A dreadful, strangling decay fouled all ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists. Having gone so far back, the historian would find cause for going further still. How could he justify any frontier? Every living organism is said to carry in itself the germ of its own decay, and perhaps a civilisation is no sooner alive than it begins to contrive its end. Gradually the symptoms of disease become apparent to acute physicians who state the effect without perceiving the cause. Be it so; circular fatalism is as cheerful as ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... explicit. He was born on Martha's Vineyard, but, as is customary with the boys of that island, he had left home in his twelfth year, and had now been absent from the place of his birth a little more than half a century. Conscious of the decay which beset him, and fully convinced that his days were few and numbered, the seaman, who called himself Tom Daggett, had felt a desire to close his eyes in the place where they had first been opened to ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... the benefit of my readers, that the little old house where Hanz Toodleburg lived, and about which there clustered so many pleasant memories, still stands by the roadside, and is an object of considerable curiosity. It is much gone to decay now, and a very different person occupies it. There are persons still living in the village who knew Hanz, and never pass the place without recurring to the many happy hours spent under his roof. That was in the good old days, ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... other possibilities. Imprisoned in town life from birth, they contentedly perpetuate the species of a folk with an ebbing future. Yes, ebbing! For if it be not, why is there now so much conscious effort to arrest the decay of town workers' nerves and sinews? Why do we bother to impede a process which is denied? If there be no town-blight on us, why a million indications of uneasiness and a thousand little fights against the march of a degeneration so natural, vast, and methodical, that it brings them all to ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... and no doubt weak, and had been made miserable by the loss of her voice. The doctor had told him that her voice, for all singing purposes, had probably gone for ever. But her beauty remained;—had not so faded, at least, as to have given any token of permanent decay. And that peculiarly bright eye was there; and the wit of the words which had captivated him. The very smallness of her stature, with its perfect symmetry, had also gone far to ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... markets, and that wages must fall, are all half true; but they prove nothing except this, that the industrial greatness of England can be maintained only through the barbarous treatment of the operatives, the destruction of their health, the social, physical, and mental decay of whole generations. Naturally, if the Ten Hours' Bill were a final measure, it must ruin England; but since it must inevitably bring with it other measures which must draw England into a path wholly different from that hitherto followed, it can ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... the same purpose. Among the king's pamphlets in the British Museum is a tract entitled "Harry Hangman's Honour, or Glostershire Hangman's Request to the Smokers and Tobacconists of London," dated June 11th, 1655. The author writes: "The very planting of tobacco hath proved the decay of my trade, for since it hath been planted in Glostershire, especially at Winchcomb, my trade hath proved nothing worth." He adds: "Then 'twas a merry world with me, for indeed before tobacco was there planted, there being no kind of trade ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... to anything it is to Venice as a whole, or possibly the Royal Palace. Yet one ought not to cavil, for it stands so bravely on the spot where its predecessor fell, and this is a very satisfactory proof that the Venetians, for all the decay of their lovely city and the disappearance of their marvellous ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... method of monastic establishments, and, mutatis mutandis, he thought something of the kind might be very useful. He thought it unfair to judge of what these monasteries were in their periods of youth and vigor, from the rottenness of their decay. Modern missionary stations, indeed, with their churches, schools, and hospitals, were like Protestant monasteries, conducted on the more wholesome principle of family life; but they wanted stability; they had not farms like monasteries, and hence they required ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... conditions of humanity, disease, and decay, and death abound on every side, it is surprising that the word "immortality" obtained a place in systems of philosophy, the authors of which must be supposed to have been unacquainted with divine revelation. It is not surprising ...
— An Essay on the Scriptural Doctrine of Immortality • James Challis
... the German free towns, the destruction of the Order of Knighthood, the defeat of the peasants—the local supremacy of the princes which arose therefrom—the decay of German industry and of German commerce, which were based on entirely medieval conditions, at the same time as the modern world market was being opened up and large-scale manufacture was thriving—the depopulation and ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... be unaffected, life and health may be restored to almost all the other parts of the body; but if the heart be chilled, or smitten with any serious disease, it seems matter of necessity that the whole animal fabric should suffer and fall into decay. When the source is corrupted, there is nothing, as Aristotle says, [Footnote: De Part. Animal., iii.] which can be of service either to it or aught that depends on it. And hence, by the way, it may perchance be why grief, and love, and envy, and anxiety, and ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... patriots' struggles, and sages' pious thoughts, affections, noble aspirations, Bethanies, the serenities of virtuous old age, the harmonies of unpolluted homes, the existence of art, of truth, of love; the hopes which last when sun and stars decay? Tell us, ye women, what are realities to you,—your carpets, your plate, your jewels, your luxurious banquets; or your husbands' love, your friends' esteem, your children's reverence? And ye, toiling men of business, what is really your highest joy,—your piles of gold, your marble palaces; ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... vie splendide." Therefore, till the right lady was found, Balzac toiled unceasingly; and when in Madame Hanska the personification of his ideal at last appeared, he redoubled his efforts, till overwork, and his longing for her, caused the decay of his physical powers, and his ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... black. It was caught suspended, head downwards, on a cluster of the fruit of the longan tree (Nephelium longanum). Now this tree is an evergreen, and all the year round some portion of its foliage is undergoing decay, the particular leaves being, in such a stage, partially orange and black. This bat can, therefore, at all seasons suspend from its branches and elude its enemies by its resemblance to the ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... trade in discarded odds and ends a peculiar character of its own. A much larger number of old pictures figure among the hoards of useless "property" than would be the case elsewhere. The constant decay of noble and once wealthy families furnishes to the second-hand market a much more abundant supply of the remains of articles that were once rich and rare in their day—old damask hangings torn from walls that have witnessed the princely revelry of many a generation; rich ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... to Harrow, the Manor was showing unmistakable signs of decay. A new Head Master, recognizing "dry-rot," realizing the necessity of cutting it out, was confronted with that bristling obstacle—Tradition. He possessed enough moral courage to have told Rutford to resign, because in a thousand indescribable ways the ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... these are deeds which should not pass away, And names that must not wither, though the earth Forgets her empires with a just decay, The enslavers and the enslaved, their death and birth; The high, the mountain-majesty of worth Should be, and shall, survivor of its woe, And from its immortality look forth In the sun's face, like yonder Alpine snow, Imperishably pure beyond all ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... the universal interest the Venetian school arouses; for although painting does not deteriorate in a day any more than it grows to maturity in the same brief moment, the story of the decay has none of the fascination of the growth. But several artists remain to be considered who were not of the Venetian school in the strict sense of the term, but who have always been ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... was still the suburban village church of Stepney. But the fields through which the path led have their own church now, with its parish of dull straight streets of monotonous houses already marked with premature decay, and here and there alleys haunted by poverty and disease ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... the Goilaus, and having forced them to share this delightful Country, settled themselves there under the Name of Kranfs. These new Conquerors were for some Time molested by the Manoris, but as Luxury had brought their flourishing Empire to Decay, the Kranfs forced them to desist, and remained in quiet Possession of ...
— The Amours of Zeokinizul, King of the Kofirans - Translated from the Arabic of the famous Traveller Krinelbol • Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crbillon
... basis of biological, sociological, and historical knowledge, we should recognize that the individual self is subject to death and decay, but the sum total of individual achievement, for better or for worse, lives on in the immortality of the Larger Self; that to live for the sake of the species and posterity is religion of the highest kind; and that those religions which seek a future life either in ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... sentence must be resolved into simple ones by placing commas between its members; as, "The decay, the waste, and the dissolution of a plant, may affect our spirits, and suggest a ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... in the open air, she paused. Some emotion—pity, terror, love, but the emotion was strong—seized her, and she was aware of autumn. Summer was ending, and the evening brought her odours of decay, the more pathetic because they were reminiscent of spring. That something or other mattered intellectually? A leaf, violently agitated, danced past her, while other leaves lay motionless. That the earth was hastening ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... whom Rodenbeck tries to name, as he could have done, but curiously without success), i. 179.]—yes, that thin long Gentleman, with high red-heeled shoes, and the daintiest polite attitudes and paces; in superfine coat, laced hat under arm; nose and under-lip ever more like coalescing (owing to decay of teeth), but two eyes shining on you like carbuncles; and in the ringing voice, such touches of speech when you apply for it! Thus they at Sceaux and elsewhere; walking their Life-minuet, making their ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... modes or manifestations; that these beings proceed from that one substance, not by creation, but by emanation; that when they disappear, they are not destroyed, but reaebsorbed; and that thus, through endless cycles of change, of reproduction and decay, it is one and the same eternal being that is continually modified and manifested. This has been called the Pantheistic Hypothesis, and it is exemplified, on a large scale, in the speculations of the Brahmins in India, and, in Europe, in those of ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... of the mansion, and, looking at the corridor, perceived that its roof was broken. Through it the sunshine peeped, and shone upon the slight cover of snow scattered in the crevices. The scene, as we have before said, betrayed everywhere dilapidation and decay. ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... radiations microbes die, decay ceases, the iron in the blood becomes chemically strong; ozone is manufactured from the dirt and dust, which are also destroyed; the perspiration becomes active and carries off waste from the muscles and cleanses the skin; dead ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay
... did not build them, as some pretend." These great artificial highways were broken up and made useless at the time of the Conquest, and the subsequent barbarous rule of the Spaniards allowed them to go to decay. Now only broken remains of them exist to ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... in his eye; the over stimulated and excited intellectual activity, the offspring of disease, mistaken by us for morning instead of sunset splendor, promise of future light and heat instead of prognostication of approaching darkness and decay. It certainly has always struck me as singular that Sterling, who in his life accomplished so little and left so little of the work by which men are generally pronounced to be gifted with exceptional ability, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... they are not considered. We read with as little emotion the violence of Knox and his followers, as the irruptions of Alaric and the Goths. Had the university been destroyed two centuries ago, we should not have regretted it; but to see it pining in decay and struggling for life, fills the mind with mournful ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... no scene in all the world to equal that. The tranquillity of lesser spaces was not here manifest. Sound, movement, life, seemed to have no fitness here. Ruin was there and desolation and decay. The meaning of the ages was flung at him, and a man became nothing. When he had gazed at the San Juan Canyon he had been appalled at the nature of Joe Lake's Herculean task. He had lost hope, faith. The thing was not possible. But when Shefford gazed at that sublime and majestic wilderness, ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... /n./ See {bit rot}. People with a physics background tend to prefer this variant for the analogy with particle decay. See also ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... hyar, and take a bref," remarked Cudjo, grimly, placing Virginia on a log too dank with decay and moss to catch fire easily. ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... vision and ambition were no less demoralizing to humanity and civilization, than those that brought decay and ruin to the potentates of old. He graced them with all the luxury and exuberance that modern civilization, without arousing rebellious complaint among his subjects, would permit. His gatherings appeared to be arranged for the bringing together ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... relatives and friends, whom, now, he had not seen for over sixteen years. The scenes of his boyhood days, he found to be magically changed. New faces met him on all sides. The old log-cabin where his father and mother had resided was deserted and its dilapidated walls were crumbling with decay. The once happy inmates were scattered over the face of the earth while many of their voices were hushed in death. Kit Carson felt himself a stranger in a strange land—the strong man wept. His soul could not brook either the change or the ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... preoccupation of my mind I listened with a certain interest. "There are, then," I said to myself, "people that are neither over-civilized nor steeped in ignorance. There are those that can do something and thus form the intermediate, healthy link between decay and barbarism." It is possible that this social strata mostly exists in bigger towns, where it is continually recruited by the influx of the sons of bankrupt noblemen, who adapt themselves to burgher traditions of work, ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... life-history, like every other vital organization. It is gradually built up, increasing in complexity and strength and may continue to grow indefinitely, or may enter upon a period of decline, and may decay slowly or rapidly, partially ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Gledsmuir just as a stormy autumn twilight was setting in over the bare fields. A wild back-end had followed on the tracks of a marvellous summer. Though it was still October the leaves lay heaped beneath the hedgerows, the bracken had yellowed to a dismal hue of decay, and the heather had turned from the purple of its flower to the grey-blue of its passing. Rain had fallen, and the long road-side pools were fired by the westering sun. Glenavelin looked crooked and fantastic in the falling shadows, and two miles farther ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... however, be too prodigal of our pity upon Pegasus. There is no reason why this animal should be exempt from labour, or illness, or decay, any more than any of the other creatures of God's world. If he gets the whip, Pegasus often deserves it, and I for one am quite ready to protest my friend, George Warrington, against the doctrine which poetical sympathisers are inclined to ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
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