"Blear" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and when he looked at it he turned very pale and sat down quickly as though his knees had failed him. Apparently the house had not been painted since his childhood, and certainly it had not been repaired. Broken, dangling shutters gave it a blear-eyed look which it made him sick to see, and swarms of untidily pin-feathered chickens wandered about over the hard-beaten earth of the yard, which was without a spear of grass, littered with old boxes ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... street and entered the saloon where Manley was still drinking heavily, his face crimson and blear-eyed and brutalized, his speech thickened disgustingly. He was sprawled in an armchair, waving an empty glass in an erratic attempt to mark the time of a college ditty six or seven years out of date, which he was trying to sing. ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... the maddening brine, And seas and clouds in battling conflict join, O'erturn the vast gulph glade with rending sweep, And crash the crust that bridged the boiling deep; Till forced aloft, bright bounding thro the air, Moves the blear ice, and sheds a dazzling glare; The torn foundations on the surface ride, And wrecks of winter ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... whole indebtedness. A smart rain-storm drives me into an uninviting mehana near the Roumelian frontier, for two unhappy hours, at noon - a mehana where the edible accommodations would wring an "Ugh" from an American Indian - and the sole occupants are a blear-eyed Bulgarian, in twenty-year-old sheep-skin clothes, whose appearance plainly indicates an over-fondness for mastic, and an unhappy- looking black kitten. Fearful lest something, perchance, might occur to compel me to spend the night here, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... Black Country, from a little window, Before I slept, across the haggard wastes Of dust and ashes, I saw Titanic shafts Like shadowy columns of wan-hope arise To waste, on the blear sky, their slow sad wreaths Of smoke, their infinitely sad slow prayers. Then, as night deepened, the blast-furnaces, Red smears upon the sulphurous blackness, turned All that sad region to a City of Dis, Where naked, sweating giants all night long Bowed their strong ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... crowded hovels scarce good enough for pigstyes. 'One day man see his dinner, and one other day none at all,' as Omar observes; and the children are shocking from bad food, dirt and overwork, but the little pot-bellied, blear-eyed wretches grow up into noble young men and women under all their difficulties. The faces are all sad and rather what the Scotch call 'dour,' not mechant at all, but harsh, like their voices. All the melody is in walk and gesture; ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... of uneven footsteps made the poor widow start to her feet, and Sally to cry out. The next moment the door was rudely shaken, and then Jim staggered into the room, haggard, blear-eyed, muttering to himself savagely. The sight of his mother and sister seemed partially to sober him, for the spirit within him bowed instinctively before the beauty of holiness, which neither poverty nor terror could obliterate from the face of those ...
— Nearly Lost but Dearly Won • Theodore P. Wilson
... sight recalled me to my senses—say, rather, it reawoke in me the spirit of manhood. I seized him by the arm, tore him down upon the pavement, and held him, in spite of his frantic struggles. It was Jemmy Downes! Gaunt, ragged, sodden, blear-eyed, drivelling, the worn-out gin-drinker stood, his momentary paroxysm of strength ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... shrieks and howls from her air-whistle. But it was too rough for any little choo-choo boat to be battling around. It was 9.30 that night before they could safely be taken off. They were a moderately good-natured lot; but that was the blear-eyed trouble with making sub trial trips with bad weather coming on—a man never knew about his ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly
... and went through all the rooms, until in the last he found the King's daughter. But how shocked he was when he saw her. She had an ashen-gray face full of wrinkles, blear eyes, and red hair. "Are you the King's daughter, whose beauty the whole world praises?" cried he. "Ah," she answered, "this is not my form; human eyes can only see me in this state of ugliness, but that thou mayst know what I am like, look in the mirror it ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... stood up and had its revenge on me. It taunted me for the half-expressed thought, for the fled insight, for the swelling note that midmost broke. Praise the artist, and he feels himself betrayer. Blear-eyed, the poet recalls the poem's sunrise, straightens himself with the old pride, is held again by the splendour which forecasts the about-to-be-steadier glory of day, and even with the recalling he shrinks together before what he knows was a false dawn. There ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... little she had won over all who had cause to love the dead woman,—all human creatures, that is to say: a dog was more faithful and had resisted her. Alison's dog was a terrier, old, shaggy and blear-eyed: he had been young with his dead mistress, and had seemed to grow old when she died. He had fretted incessantly during that year of her husband's widowhood, whimpering and moaning about the house like a distraught creature, ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... buy leather for cobbling, and there his devil, for no apparent reason at all, leaped upon him and flung him. For a week he saw or knew nothing but a whirling vision of the world seen through rum-crazy eyes; then at last he awoke to find himself hatless, coatless, filthy, unshaved, blear-eyed, palsied. Not a cent of money was left, and so that day and night, in spite of the deadly nausea that beset him and the trembling weakness that hung like a leaden weight upon every limb, he walked all the thirty-eight miles home again to East Haven. ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... The ragged trousers, the spotted "reefer" buttoned high around the neck, the dirty cap pulled over the eyes, and the wholly disreputable broken shoes Burke had brought with him completed the transformation of an immaculate young gentleman into a blear-eyed ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... to their commands, but made straight onward. Then one blear-eyed and scab-faced cripple scrambled up and struck off his cap with a crutch. He picked it up again without a look or a word, and strode away. But next morning, at early prayers, there was a place empty at the ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... ever wan morass, the dune, the blear Sandweed, and tepid pool, and putrid smell, Emaciate purpose to a fractious fear, Beckon the body to its last low cell— A chink no chart ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... hastened to offer to his English friend to share with him the disputed possession. But Wakefield's pride was severely hurt, and he answered disdainfully, "Take it all, man—take it all; never make two bites of a cherry. Thou canst talk over the gentry, and blear a plain man's eye. Out upon you, man. I would not kiss any man's dirty latchets for leave to bake ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... person of singularly equable temperament. But to have an offer which he had made only with self-sacrificing effort thus cavalierly received by a red-nosed, blear-eyed, impudent little chittermouse (thus, I must reluctantly admit, did he mentally characterize his new acquaintance), was just a ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the left into the new road. Alice emitted a sigh of relief. There was a sense of luxury—of exclusiveness—in passing over its smooth surface. Morrison and his common hotel, with its blear-eyed windows, were now well out of sight. Presently the camp lay ahead of them—an orderly settlement of trim buildings. Margaret was too excited to do more than gaze ahead ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... hail, but promised the blear-eyed sentinels in the bows of the ship a lively five minutes when the watch was relieved. Slowly the Andromeda swung to the west. Even more slowly, or so it appeared to the anxious man on the bridge, a ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... soldier knelt against the bank, Staring across the morning blear with fog; He wondered when the Allemands would get busy; And then, of course, they started with five-nines Traversing, sure as fate, and never a dud. Mute in the clamour of shells he watched them burst Spouting dark earth and wire ...
— The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon • Siegfried Sassoon
... it was suspected—whether justly or not will be presently shown—that Henry III. "was seeking to blear the eyes of the world, as his brother Charles did before the Massacre of St. Bartholomew." As the letters received from the Dutch envoys in France became less and less encouraging, and as the Queen was informed by her ambassador in Paris ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... blear, and hoar, Their breasts in anguish beat - They've seen him seventy times before, How ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... mocked her sometimes, and she looked at them in wonder. Why should she be mocked or punished? She felt no repentance; neither the Alcalde nor her husband had convinced her of her sin's enormity; she felt only bitter resentment that it should have been so brief. Her husband, a blear-eyed crippled old man, loathsome to all the youth and imagination in her, had beaten her and made her work. A man, young, strong, and good to look upon, had come and kissed her with passionate tenderness. Love had meant to her the glorification of a wretched ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... come to zee the show, sir?" the old man coughed out, peering with dim, blear eyes up into the ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... son to the right Vincentio; That have by marriage made thy daughter mine, While counterfeit supposes blear'd thine eyne. ...
— The Taming of the Shrew • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... you take me for a blear-eyed mole, that never seed the light of a man's eyes?" inquired Blundell, closely approaching the beset tradesman, and taking him leisurely by the neck. "Do you want to take a summerset through that window, old fellow, that you try to stuff us with such tough stories? If ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... into Salmasius's Responsio. There he will see the first scholar of his age not thinking it unbecoming to taunt Milton with his blindness, in such language as this: "a puppy, once my pretty little man, now blear-eyed, or rather a blindling; having never had any mental vision, he has now lost his bodily sight; a silly coxcomb, fancying himself a beauty; an unclean beast, with nothing more human about him than his guttering eyelids; the fittest doom for him would be to hang him on the highest ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... of that peculiar mental calibre which warrants Yorkshire peasants in describing a man as 'half-rocked,' or 'not plumb.' His wife, on the other hand, was one of those neat, gentle, sensible women, of whom one wonders how they ever came to marry such thick-lipped and blear-eyed men. Between them they informed me that if I did not object to share a room, I could be taken in; otherwise—maire or no maire—not. I asked whether they meant half a bed; but they said no, ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... of a landlady accustomed to dominate her company. There was a chorus of adhesion from the more courageous; but Mr. Limp, after taking a draught, placed his flat hands together and pressed them hard between his knees, looking down at them with blear-eyed contemplation, as if the scorching power of Mrs. Dollop's speech had quite dried up and nullified his wits until they could be brought round ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... sequi.[121] You that be wise, and ever mean to thrive, O, study not these toys we sluggards use, But follow arms, and wait on barbarous wars. Young men, young boys, beware of schoolmasters; They will infect you, mar you, blear your eyes: They seek to lay the curse of God on you, Namely, confusion of languages, Wherewith those that the Tower of Babel built Accursed were in the world's infancy. Latin, it was the speech of infidels; Logic hath nought to say in ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... that the priest, old and blear-eyed as he was, saw him first: the others had heard nothing. With Jehane's hand in his own, the priest stopped and blinked. Who was this prowler, afoot when all else were on their knees? His jaw dropped; you saw that he was ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... frowsy blowsy brats o' babes, The scum o' the Kennel, cream o' the filth-heap—Faugh! Aie, aie, aie, aie! [Greek: otototototoi], ('Stead which we blurt out, Hoighty toighty now)— And the baker and candlestick maker, and Jack and Gill. Blear'd Goody this and queasy Gaffer that, Ask the Schoolmaster, Take Schoolmaster first. He saw a gentleman purchase of a lad A stone, and pay for it rite on the square, And carry it off per saltum, jauntily Propria quae maribus, gentleman's property now (Agreeable to the law explained above). ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... tarriance all that night, Until the world was blear with coming light, Forth fared the princely fugitive, nor stayed His wearied feet till morn returning made Some village all a-hum with wakeful stir; And from that place the royal wayfarer Went ever faster on and yet more fast, Till, ere the noontide sultriness was past, Upon ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... the year, with their strings and pin-hooks, around the shallow ponds where dace and redfins hide; the same irresistible charm that fixes a row of city gamins, like ragged and disreputable fish-crows, on the end of a pier where blear-eyed flounders sometimes lurk in the muddy water. Let the philosopher explain it as he will. Let the moralist reprehend it as he chooses. There is nothing that attracts human nature more powerfully than the sport of tempting the unknown ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... awful pretty in the face o' rocks, an' clay an' alkali. Oh, Lord, what a life it is anyway! They eat dirt, they sleep in dirt, they breathe dirt 'til their backs are bent, their hands twisted an' warped. They're all wind-swept an' blear-eyed I tell you, an' some o' them jest lie down in their sweat beside the sluices, an' they don't never rise up again. I've seen 'em there!" She paused reminiscently; then, pointing to the keg, she went on haltingly: "I got some money there of Ol' Brownie's. ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... hear, how it blooms in the blear dayfall, That flower of passionate wistful song! How it blows like a rose by the iron wall Of the city loud and strong. How it cries "Nay, nay" to the worldling's way, To the heart's clear dream how it whispers, "Yea; Time comes, ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... was telling the truth. He was blear-eyed with misery. Brett looked at Hume, and the latter rang a bell. He asked the waiter ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... then, in such a case, Lord Rufford could hardly have taxed the costs. It was really suicide for an attorney to throw away business so excellent as this. And now it had gone to Bearside whom Nickem remembered as a junior to himself when they were both young hobbledehoys at Norrington,—a dirty, blear-eyed, pimply-faced boy who was suspected of purloining halfpence out of coat-pockets. The thing was very trying to Nat Nickem. But suddenly, before that Wednesday was over, another idea had occurred to him, and he was almost content. He knew Goarly, and he ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... drove up the inn-yard of some large coachmaster; but few words were said, and I was consigned to the coachman of one of the country stages, with as little remorse and as little ceremony as if I had been an ugly blear-eyed pug, forwarded in a basket, labelled "this side uppermost," to an old maiden aunt, ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... so blear us that we cannot distinguish the usage of things.... Certes, chastity is an excellent virtue, the commodity whereof is very well known; but to use it, and according to nature to prevail with it, is as hard as it is easy to endear it and to prevail with it ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... these woods! Now to my charms, 150 And to my wily trains: I shall ere long Be well stocked with as fair a herd as grazed About my mother Circe. Thus I hurl My dazzling spells into the spongy air, Of power to cheat the eye with blear illusion, And give it false presentments, lest the place And my quaint habits breed astonishment, And put the damsel to suspicious flight; Which must not be, for that's against my course. I, under fair pretence of friendly ends, 160 And well-placed words of ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... whose ennobled name Is woven with his country's fame, Triumphant over all, I found weak, palsied, bloated, blear; His province seemed to be, to leer ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... think contrary clean: 550 What Member 'tis of whom they talk, When they cry, Rope, and walk, knave, walk. He'd extract numbers out of matter, And keep them in a glass, like water; Of sov'reign pow'r to make men wise; 555 For drop'd in blear thick-sighted eyes, They'd make them see in darkest night Like owls, tho' purblind in the light. By help of these (as he profess'd) He had First Matter seen undress'd: 560 He took her naked all alone, Before ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... turn us out, sir,' said old Milsom, wistfully looking up at Elsmere with blear eyes, 'there'll be nothing left but the House for us old 'uns. Why, lor' bless you, sir, it's not so bad but we can ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... depend largely on the numbers you received, and it might not be safe to trust to your discretion in limiting the number. Your sympathies would be so wrought on, Oaklands would soon swarm with blear-eyed specimens of humanity, and Mrs. Flaxman and I would be compelled to ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... of observing what may be called the charitable side of politics. For a whole month, or more, the burden of existence had been lifted from the shoulders of the homeless. No church or organization, looked out for these frowsy, blear-eyed and ragged wanderers who had failed to find a place in the scale of efficiency. For a whole month, I say, Mr. Judd Jason and his lieutenants made them their especial care; supported them in lodging-houses, induced the night clerks to give them ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Maimon, his blear eyes twinkling with complacency. 'Your guest, Rabbi Zimri, must read the treatise of the learned Shimei, of Damascus, on ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... She was blear-eyed, and her skin, which seemed drawn tight over her forehead and cheek-bones, was of the colour of parchment. I asked her ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... their new desks, each smoking a fine brand of cigar, but busy poring over a profusion of maps and blue-prints, in a belated endeavour to get some notion—however indistinct—of how the land lay according to numbers. They knew where Kickwillie Loop was; they could go blindfold to Blear-eyed Monoghan's Ranch, or Mudflats, or Sunset Avenue, but when it came to driving out to, say, lot 21 sub-division 16, district lot 218—well, that was quite another matter and called ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... came from out the court-house door, Stretched his hands above the passing poor. Booth saw not, but led his queer ones there Round and round the mighty court-house square. Yet in an instant all that blear review Marched on spotless, clad in raiment new. The lame were straightened, withered limbs uncurled And blind eyes opened ...
— General William Booth enters into Heaven and other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... me to die?" he asked, coming up close to my stool, and regarding me with a shrewd though blear-eyed gaze; ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... Ku, look forth! Huh! Ku is blear-eyed! Aye, weave now the wreath— A wreath for the dog Pua-lena; 5 A hala plume for Kahili, Choice garlands from Niho-ku. [Page 226] There was a scurry of clouds, earth, groaned; The sound of your baying reached Hawaii the verdant, the pet of the gods; 10 A portent was seen in the heavens. ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... a ragged, blear-eyed vagabond—older, more serious, the laugh gone out of his eyes, the cheeks pale as if from long confinement. Dressed in dark clothes, his face cleanshaven; linen neat, a plain black tie—the hat worn straight, not slouched over his eyes with ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... half-asleep, when I felt a heavy weight stealthily creeping over me, from head to heel, so that I could not move a finger—my tongue only was unbound. I perceived, methought, a man upon my chest, and above him, a woman. After eyeing him carefully I recognised by his strong odours, dewy locks and blear eyes, that the man was no other than my good Master Sleep. "I pray you, sir," cried I, squeaking, "what have I done to you that you bring that witch here to torment me?" "Hush," said he, "it is only my sister Nightmare; we twain are going to pay our brother Death {43b} a visit, and ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... reader! may you never behold such a sight as that which presented itself: eighty-three men and women in ball-dresses; the former with their lank powdered locks streaming over their faces; the latter with faded flowers, uncurled wigs, smudged rouge, blear eyes, draggling feathers, rumpled satins—each more desperately melancholy and hideous than the other—each, except my beloved Belinda Bulcher, whose raven ringlets never having been in curl, could of course never go OUT of curl; whose cheek, pale as the lily, could, ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... you know, is seldom made but among equals. And yet if it should so happen that there were a mutual good will between them, it is in no wise firm nor very long lived; that is to say, among such as are morose and more circumspect than needs, as being eagle-sighted into his friends' faults, but so blear-eyed to their own that they take not the least notice of the wallet that hangs behind their own shoulders. Since then the nature of man is such that there is scarce anyone to be found that is not subject to many errors, add to this the great diversity of minds and studies, ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... consisted of grotesque dancing, beating of drums, and blowing upon a shrill fife before a rude altar, upon which incense was burning. There was also marching, by these musicians, around the altar, led by a dirty, blear-eyed priest. The scene was strongly suggestive of a powwow as performed by the Digger Indians of California. So great was the din, we were quite willing to take for granted the presence, in another part of the temple, of the tooth of Buddha, ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... eyes Ralph caught the vague hum of a lingo of switch pidgin, smut-faced, blear-eyed men near by, himself stretched at full length on sleeping car cushions on the floor of the doghouse. He sat up promptly. There was a momentary blur to his sight, ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... fearful old crone; hunchbacked, toothless, blear-eyed, bearded, halt, with huge gouty feet swathed in flannel. As she cast in the ingredients one by one, she ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... seen him, and perhaps this (that she considered a grievance) was a kindness vouchsafed to her by Providence. Had she seen the pretty boy of twenty years ago as he now is she would not have recognized him. The change from the merry, blue-eyed, daring lad of the past to the bloated, blear-eyed, reckless-looking man of to-day would have been a shock too cruel for her to bear. But this she was not allowed to realize, and so remained true to her belief in him, ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... the lives of the Virgin and saints; here are short fat burghers, with enormous blotchy, bloated faces and little eyes set in fat, their huge stomachs protruding from under their jackets; here are blear-eyed ladies, tall, thin, wrinkled though not old, with figures like hungry harpies, stalking about in high headgears and stiff gowns, or sitting by the side of lean and stunted pages, singing (with dolorous voice) to lutes; or promenading under trees with long-shanked, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... the hotel. It took Mahony the best part of the day to rouse him; to make him understand he was not to be horsewhipped; to purchase a fresh suit of clothing for him: to get him, in short, halfway ready to travel the following day—a blear-eyed, weak-witted craven, who fell into a cold sweat at every bump of the coach. Not till they reached the end of the awful journey—even a Chinaman rose to impudence about Johnny's nerves, his foul breath, ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... also to listen to the accusers, if they prove that the defendants have committed many crimes against you, and their ancestors did much harm. 25. For this man, when a youth, at the house of Archedemus the blear-eyed, who had stolen much of your money, while many eyes were upon him, drank, lying at full length under the same rug, and caroused at midday, having a mistress while a mere boy, imitating his ancestors, and thinking ...
— The Orations of Lysias • Lysias
... Having saluted us all round, he perceived our uncomfortable situation, and conducting us into another apartment, which had fire in the chimney, called for chocolate — Then, withdrawing, he returned with a compliment from his wife, and, in the mean time, presented his son Harry, a shambling, blear-eyed boy, in the habit of a hussar; very rude, forward, and impertinent. His father would have sent him to a boarding-school, but his mamma and aunt would not hear of his lying out of the house; so that there was a clergyman engaged as his tutor in ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... Brat, comfortingly, "he will never find out that we are there: do you suppose that his blear old eyes will see all across that big room, economically lit up by one ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... income? To her alone he brought his degraded mass of humanity day after day; and though never personally unkind to her, or to the little boy that died, she was enabled by the might of her tearless agony beside that tiny bier, to cut the last tie that bound her to the blear-eyed creature sobbing on the other side. The last tie? Ah, woe was she! The coming time brought into her desolate life the frail link she must now take up; and in the first bitter realization of her wronged womanhood, the mother-love ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... length arrived; but the destinies, who had hitherto spun the thread of the two lovers' fate as smooth and even as a whale-line yarn, now began to fill it full of kinks. Well did the ancients represent them as three haggard, blear-eyed, wrinkled, spiteful, old maids, who would not allow any poor mortal to live or die comfortably, and who took a malicious pleasure in disturbing "the course of true love." The inexorable Atropos brandished her scissors, and at one snip severed ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... with purchases, I set out to find their shepherd. And there he was on the edge of Mallington Moor standing motionless, gazing stupidly at his sheep; his hands trembled continually and his eyes had a blear look, but he was quite sober, wherein all ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... the miserable wretch entered who, appearing opportunely in Gavin's Hotel, had cured Dennis of his desire to drink, when weary and despondent, for the sake of the effects. For a moment they looked at the blear-eyed, trembling wreck of a man, and then Dennis asked, "Had God any hand in making ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... Laertius writes of him, he saw more than all Greece besides. . . . AEsop was crooked, Socrates purblind, Democritus withered, Seneca lean and harsh, ugly to behold; yet show me so many flourishing wits, such divine spirits. Horace, a little, blear-eyed, contemptible fellow, yet who so sententious and wise? Marcilius Ficinus, Faber Stapulensis, a couple of dwarfs; Melanchthon, a short, hard-favored man, yet of incomparable parts of all three; Galba the emperor was crook-backed; Epictetus, lame; the ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth
... once were mine, and, till I forget, Ye are mine forever and aye, Mine, wherever your wild wings go, While shrill winds whistle across the snow And the skies are blear and grey. ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... when the performance is ended. The story itself is interesting, though I had heard it many times before; but never, perhaps, under circumstances more effective. Stretched beneath tall, somber pines; a great camp fire; by the fire, men, old, wrinkled, and ugly; deformed, blear-eyed, wry-faced women; lithe, stately young men; pretty but simpering maidens, naked children, all intently listening, or laughing and talking by turns, their strange faces and dusky forms lit up with the glare of the pine-knot fire. All the circumstances conspired to ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... a place where a refined young lady would care to find herself alone, even in the cheery daylight. If she came at all, she would be attended by a trusty escort. She would not get too close to people on the doorsteps, and she would shrink away in disgust and fear from a blear-eyed creature careering down the sidewalk on many-jointed legs. The delicate damsel would hasten home to wash and purify and perfume herself till the foul contact of Wheeler Street was utterly eradicated, and her wonted purity restored. And I do not blame her. I only wish ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... life escapes the blight. Timoleus, the gay satirist of the first two acts, who scoffed at the pious hypocrisies and money-grubbing ways of the great Roman lords, is grown old and fat and blear-eyed and racked with disease in the third, has lost his stately purities, and watered the acid of his wit. His life has suffered defeat. Unthinkingly he swears by Zeus—from ancient habit—and then quakes with fright; for a fellow-communicant ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... oneness of purpose made itself felt in the House of Commons from his first entrance. All parliamentary bodies are swayed by a few persons—the working members are the exception. The horse-racing and cockfighting contingent in the House of Commons is well represented; the blear eyes, the poddy pudge, the bulbous beak—all these are in evidence. If one man out of ten knows what is going on, it is well; and this is equally true of Washington, for our representatives do not ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... or moist place, because it will prove unhealthfull. You shall judge of the good air by the people; for some part of that coast where the lands are low, have their people blear eyed, and with swollen bellies and legs: but if the naturals be strong and clean made, it is a ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes
... the night I awoke; what woke me I suppose I shall never know. But when I awoke I sat up suddenly as if I had never been asleep. I was face to face with the worst-looking creature I had ever seen in my life, black and blear-eyed and ugly, on his hands and knees in the tunnel beyond the lantern drawing my gun toward him by the stock. Then Kaiser sprang up like any wild beast; but I held him back by ...
— Track's End • Hayden Carruth
... white man right through all the inmost fibres of my being: too white, I often fear; for I find my love of race, and pride of blood and ancestry, often encroach too far upon the proper regions of my humanity, and threaten to blear my eyesight to the fair claims ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... are all but universal. Such examples as the Russian Chudo-Yudo (a dragon), the Chinese ping-pang "rattling of rain on the roof,"[46] the Tibetan kyang-kyong "lazy," and the Manchu porpon parpan "blear-eyed" are curiously reminiscent, both in form and in psychology, of words nearer home. But it can hardly be said that the duplicative process is of a distinctively grammatical significance in English. ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... vehicle upon straw, which made a cheap substitute for buffalo-robes. Perched, as we were, upon the crown of the height, we looked completely down into the sleigh, and during the whole course of my life I never saw three uglier mortals collected into such a narrow space. The man was blear-eyed, with a hare-lip, through which protruded two dreadful yellow teeth that resembled the tusks of a boar. The woman was long-faced, high cheek-boned, red-haired, and freckled all over like a toad. ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... shall forget their GOD, and see no trace, Save dimly, of their Great Original. 320 Rude caves shall be their dwellings: till, with noise Of multitudes, imperial cities rise. But the Arch Fiend, the foe of GOD and man, Shall fling his spells; and, 'mid illusions drear, Blear Superstition shall arise, the earth Eclipsing.—Deep in caves,[158] vault within vault Far winding; or in night of thickest woods, Where no bird sings; or 'mid huge circles gray Of uncouth stone, her aspect wild, and pale As the terrific ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... my Narcissus, Had Echo but been private with thy thoughts, She would have dropt away herself in tears, Till she had all turn'd water; that in her, As in a truer glass, thou might'st have gazed And seen thy beauties by more kind reflection, But self-love never yet could look on truth But with blear'd beams; slick flattery and she Are twin-born sisters, and so mix their eyes, As if you sever one, the other dies. Why did the gods give thee a heavenly form, And earthly thoughts to make thee proud of it? Why do I ask? 'Tis now the known disease That beauty hath, to bear too deep a sense ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... S. Gregory says[413]: "By Lia, who was blear-eyed but fruitful, is signified the active life which sees less clearly, since occupied with works; but when, now by word, now by example, it arouses its neighbour to imitation, it brings forth many children in good ...
— On Prayer and The Contemplative Life • St. Thomas Aquinas
... audacious forehead of falsehood or pollution. But ridicule in the hands either of cold-blooded or infuriated Malice, is harmless as a birch-rod in the palsied fingers of a superannuated beldam, who in her blear-eyed dotage has lost her school. The Bird of Paradise might float in the sunshine unharmed all its beautiful life long, although all the sportsmen of Cockaigne were to keep firing at the star-like plumage during the Christmas holydays of a ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... there goes the blear old dame Who nurs'd me; you have heard her name, No doubt, at Compton, Sarah Salways; There are twelve groats at once, beside The frying-pan in which she fried Her pancakes. Madam, I am always, etc., Sir ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... condition in matter of the outward state and complexion of her body, the ragged and tattered equipage of her person in the point of accoutrement, and beggarly poor provision of fare for her diet and entertainment; for she was ill apparelled, worse nourished, toothless, blear-eyed, crook-shouldered, snotty, her nose still dropping, and herself still drooping, faint, and pithless; whilst in this woefully wretched case she was making ready for her dinner porridge of wrinkled green coleworts, with a bit skin of yellow bacon, mixed with a twice-before-cooked ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... majesty. Where, if such glory flashes from his name, Which is his shade, who can abide his flame! Princes, and such like public lights as these, Must not be look'd on but at distances: For, if we gaze on these brave lamps too near, Our eyes they'll blind, or if not blind, they'll blear. ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... returned from the Cowgate with a motley assortment of pallbearers. There was a good-tempered Irish laborer from a near-by brewery; a decayed gentleman, unsteady of gait and blear-eyed, in greasy frock-coat and broken hat; a flashily dressed bartender who found the task distasteful; a stout, bent-backed fagot-carrier; a drunken fisherman from New Haven, suddenly sobered by this uncanny duty, and a furtive, gaol-bleached thief who feared ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... to be handy, and I happened to be touched. That's all there is to it. I was concerned as to the way he would go out. It would have hurt me if, for instance, he had taken to drink. The earth is so small that I was afraid of, some day, being waylaid by a blear-eyed, swollen-faced, besmirched loafer, with no soles to his canvas shoes, and with a flutter of rags about the elbows, who, on the strength of old acquaintance, would ask for a loan of five dollars. You know the awful jaunty bearing of these scarecrows coming to ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... my jo, John, I wonder what ye mean, To rise sae early in the morn, And sit sae late at e'en; Ye 'll blear out a' your een, John, And why should you do so? Gang sooner to your bed at e'en, John ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... worms was gather'd there. Then looking farther onwards I beheld A throng upon the shore of a great stream: Whereat I thus: "Sir! grant me now to know Whom here we view, and whence impell'd they seem So eager to pass o'er, as I discern Through the blear light?" He thus to me in few: "This shalt thou know, soon as our steps arrive Beside the woeful tide of Acheron." Then with eyes downward cast and fill'd with shame, Fearing my words offensive to his ear, Till we had reach'd the river, I from speech Abstain'd. And lo! toward ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... on the witch!" cried a merry girl, As they rounded the point where Goody Cole Sat by her door with her wheel atwirl, A bent and blear-eyed poor old soul. "Oho!" she muttered, "ye're brave to-day! But I hear the little waves laugh and say, 'The broth will be cold that waits at home; For it's one to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... obey. Yes; she loves the luxury with which she will be surrounded, the glitter of diamonds, the equipages, the great house, all the paraphanalia of wealth, but she hates the trembling, tottering, blear-eyed ...
— Wise or Otherwise • Lydia Leavitt
... glutinous brightness of cheap upholstery. On the largest table, in the middle of the room, stood a smart Bible, placed exactly in the centre on a red and yellow woollen mat and at the side of the table nearest to the window, with a little knitting-basket on her lap, and a wheezing, blear-eyed old spaniel crouched at her feet, there sat an elderly woman, wearing a black net cap and a black silk gown, and having slate-coloured mittens on her hands. Her iron-grey hair hung in heavy bands on either side of her face—her dark eyes looked straight forward, with a hard, ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... he was a very decent chap, though rather low-spirited. Hugh thought that if Mr. George Loftus had been alive he might have consulted him. In an amicable silence, broken occasionally by whistling for Crack, who hurried blear-eyed and asthmatic out of rabbit-holes, the pair reached Beaumere; and, after following the path through the wood, came suddenly upon the little lake locked in the heart of the steeply ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... little blear-eyed chimney-sweeper, mounted the poor animal, and belaboured him most unmercifully, without producing any other effect than kicking up behind, and most effectually placing poor ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... no denial some dotards and striplings were routed out and the patriarch of the clan was thrust forward. He looked senile from his slippered feet to the shine on his bald-pate, he was blear-eyed and hard of hearing, but he understood plain Latin when he heard it, he knew of old the signs he read in the flash of her eyes, the set of her jaw and every feature as she stood or moved. Also no dog ever had a keener scent for game than he ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... something, though some hid it better than others; and he had added that Dan Meldrum had the murderer's dread lest vengeance overtake him unexpectedly. Roy knew now that his partner had spoken the true word. At that last stinging sentence, alarm had jumped to the blear eyes ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... fear[13] me, While thy pomp did blear me; Fa la la! But now I do perceive Thy art is to deceive; And every simple lover All thy falsehood can discover. Then weep, Love! and be sorry, For thou hast lost thy glory. Fa la ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... asked suddenly, spying the empty trencher on the floor. "There is a pasty and a cake in the buttery, and thou shalt have some of it if thou wilt not cry any more. Come, I cannot bear to see thee cry—it makes me weep myself; and that will blear mine eyes, and father ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... globe dean craze creed tribe drone bean shape steep brine stone bead state sleek spire probe beam crape fleet bride shore lean fume smite blame clear mope spume spite flame drear mold fluke quite slate blear tore flume whine spade spear robe dure spine ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... the inventor's and proprietor's name. In the time of Galen, these quack oculists were very numerous, and Galen inveighs against them. Martial satirized them: "Now you are a gladiator who once were an ophthalmist; you did as a doctor what you do as a gladiator." "The blear-eyed Hylas would have paid you sixpence, O Quintus; one eye is gone, he will still pay threepence; make haste and take it, brief is your chance; when he is blind, he will pay you nothing." The oculists of Alexandria were very proficient, and some of their ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... twa fauld as he dow, Wi' his teethless gab and his auld beld pow, And the rain rains down frae his red blear'd e'e; That auld man shall never daunton me. To ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... for you to wrestle with, Asa Thor," said the King. Thor looked round and saw an old woman hobbling toward him. She was blear-eyed and toothless. "This is Ellie, my ancient nurse," said the Giant King. "She is the one we would have you ...
— The Children of Odin - The Book of Northern Myths • Padraic Colum
... Sergeant. You never know what you may have to say to your men.—For pity's sake, try to stand up without leanin' against each other, you blear-eyed, herrin'-gutted gutter-snipes. It's no pleasure to me to comb you out. That ought to have been done before you came ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... vices. Griskinissa's face and her mind grew ugly together; her good humor changed to bilious, bitter discontent; her pretty, fond epithets, to foul abuse and swearing; her tender blue eyes grew watery and blear, and the peach-color on her cheeks fled from its old habitation, and crowded up into her nose, where, with a number of pimples, it stuck fast. Add to this a dirty, draggle-tailed chintz; long, matted hair, wandering into her eyes, and over her lean ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... in the village, seventy-seven years old, who had lost her teeth, had blear eyes, a great mouth and large nose; in short, was a very hideous figure. They were going to take her to prison, but I interceded for her. When she came to thank me I asked her what fancy it was that had induced her to go about playing ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... into the house for a few minutes, could have brought themselves to believe that it was such a very broad part of the road leading to destruction: but the landlord had some hazy notion on that point. He sat there day and night, and saw the destruction going on. He saw the blear-eyed, fuddled men that came to drown conscience in his stalls, and the slatternly women who came and went. Nevertheless he was a rosy, jocund fellow who appeared to have a good deal of the milk of human kindness about him, ...
— Sunk at Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... says (Hom. xiv in Ezech.) that Lia who was blear-eyed but fruitful signifies the active life: which "being occupied with work, sees less, and yet since it urges one's neighbor both by word and example to its imitation it begets a numerous offspring of good deeds." Now this would seem to belong ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... manners true of every clime, And composition's art sublime. In academick lore profound, I boldly took that lofty ground, Which, as it rais'd me near the sky, Was thence for vulgar eyes too high; Or, if beheld, to them appear'd By clouds of gloomy darkness blear'd. Yet still that misty height I chose, For well I knew the world had those, Whose sight, by learning clear'd of rheum, Could pierce with ease the thickest gloom. Thus, perch'd sublime, 'mid clouds I wrought, Nor heeded what the vulgar thought. What, though ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... well-made man, with a curling, grizzled head, and a well-featured face. It is possible that in his youth the word 'dapper' may have applied to him; a forgotten fact which perhaps accounted for his nickname. He gazed with an open mouth and puzzled, blear eyes at the ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... will may be discovered in their peculiar characteristics. The repulsive features, moroseness, avarice, malice, garrulity of his hags are said to be appropriate instruments. Scot informs us, 'One sort of such as are said to be witches are women which be commonly old, lame, blear-eyed, pale, foul, and full of wrinkles, poor, sullen, superstitious, and papists, or such as know no religion, in whose drowsy minds the devil hath got a fine seat. They are lean and deformed, showing melancholy in their ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... face, too, with its infinity of anxious yet meaningless lines, and its dim spectacled eyes, so plainly overtaxed by the effort to discern anything clearly, might have belonged to any old village priest grown childish and blear-eyed in the solitude of stupid books. Even the blotches of tell-tale colour on his long nose were not altogether unclerical in their suggestion. A poor old man he seemed, as he stood blinking in the electric light of the strange, ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... case the passengers will have to sit, entertained by howling blasts, till a fresh engine comes up from Blair Atholl. Such an experience was once mine, and I always think of it when I read the ninth ode of Horace's first book. Outside were the great snow-sheeted mountains, and the moon was gazing in blear-eyed compassion through a screen of haze. From end to end of the train resounded the rhythmic beat of cold-footed passengers striving to bring some warmth of blood ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... dance? Not if you have only heard it ground to your ears' affliction beneath your windows in the square. To hear it aright you must stand in the darkness of such a by-street as this, and for the moment be at one with those who dwell around, in the blear-eyed houses, in the dim burrows of poverty, in the unmapped haunts of the semi-human. Then you will know the significance of that vulgar clanging of melody; a pathos of which you did not dream will touch you, and therein the secret of hidden ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... intelligence, has that selfishness ever had more valuable allies and tools than the mental torpor that cannot think and the conscientious stupidity that will not? Moral laws, indeed, are intellectual facts, to be investigated as well as obeyed; and it is not a blind or blear-eyed conscience, but a conscience blended with intelligence and consolidated with character, that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... old man, bent and blear-eyed, was swept along the gangway like a chip on the tide. In pure lightness of heart a sailor, posted at the head of the plank, expedited him with a kick. "That'll do for good-bye to ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... snuffling by, With her three frowsy blowsy brats o' babes, The scum o' the kennel, cream o' the filth-heap—Faugh! Aie, aie, aie, aie! ot?t?t?t?toi, ('Stead which we blurt out Hoighty toighty now) - And the baker and candlestickmaker, and Jack and Gill, Blear'd Goody this and queasy Gaffer that. Ask the ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... dame you never saw, Where reigned by custom old a Salic law; Here coatless lolled he on his throne of oak, And every tongue paused midway if he spoke. Due mirth he loved, yet was his sway severe; No blear-eyed driveller got his stagger here; 390 "Measure was happiness; who wanted more, Must buy his ruin at the Deacon's store;" None but his lodgers after ten could stay, Nor after nine on eves of Sabbath-day. He had his favorites and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... stick or stone, and thence by an easy transition to the chin, which, consequently, is soon adorned with a rich growth of beard. The ancient Greeks thought that to eat the flesh of the wakeful nightingale would prevent a man from sleeping; that to smear the eyes of a blear-sighted person with the gall of an eagle would give him the eagle's vision; and that a raven's eggs would restore the blackness of the raven to silvery hair. Only the person who adopted this last mode of concealing the ravages of time had to be most careful ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... at all that night, but showed up next morning at the diggings, looking blear-eyed and sleepy. He told us he had slept with a friend, and replied rather curtly that he was a "little behind the game." I believe myself that he was cleaned out; but that was none of our business. Every night we divided the dust into five parts. Don Gaspar ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... curious things to me!— Laughs to the lip—tears to the eye, In looking on the gifts that lie Like broken playthings scattered o'er Imagination's nursery floor! Did these old hands once click the key That let "Jack's" box-lid upward fly, And that blear-eyed, fur-whiskered elf Leap, as though frightened at himself, And quiveringly lean and stare At ...
— Riley Songs of Home • James Whitcomb Riley
... blown, sir, Hard for your worship; thrown by many a coal, When 'twas not beech; weigh'd those I put in, just, To keep your heat still even; these blear'd eyes Have wak'd to read your several colours, sir, Of the pale citron, the green lion, the crow, The ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... way. So he began to question abruptly, in very bad Portuguese, as to the state of her larder, the elder woman, who, ugly and blear-eyed, with ragged, scanty dress, and bare feet, yet wore a necklace of beads and earrings of gold. She answered tartly, that it being a fast-day, there was no flesh in the house. They had bacalhao and sardinhas, and garlic, and pepper, and onions, ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... was a small fire built upon the earth floor in the center of the building and around the warming blaze the figures of six men. Some reclined at length upon old straw; others squatted, Turk fashion. All were smoking either disreputable pipes or rolled cigarets. Blear-eyed and foxy-eyed, bearded and stubbled cheeked, young and old, were the men the youth looked upon. All were more or less dishevelled and filthy; but they were human. They were not dogs, or bulls, ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the deeps of {286} one's own spirit—"real knowledge comes when the Day Star rises in the heart."[63] We pass from "notions" and "words" to an inward power and a bubbling joy. He calls the period of law and letter a "baby-stage," "when we see truth as blear-eyed beholders." Legal religion compared with the religion of the Spirit is "like a spark struck from flint at midnight" compared with the sun; it is like "drawing the waters of Grace, a bucketful at a time," when we might have "the Spirit gushing as a living and perpetual ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... procured from its hiding place under the flooring, banished the make-up stain from his face, his neck, his wrists, and hands as if by magic. It was a strange metamorphosis that had taken place—the coarse, brutal-featured, blear-eyed, leering countenance of Larry the Bat was gone, and in its place, clean-cut, square-jawed, clear-eyed, was the face of Jimmie Dale. And where before had slouched a slope-shouldered, misshapen, flabby creature, a broad-shouldered form well over six feet in height ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... young women there too, who play first, to see if they can win, and when by the fall of the little ball their gold piece is doubled, they try again and again, until the habit is fixed, and their faces are as well known in the saloons as those of the old men with the blear eyes, which find time between the plays to scan these young girls ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... course or paying her off till she catches it full. He is likely to have mourners at home if a married man, and "cussing" owners if the craft is not his own. As my old sea-dog afterward wisely observed: "When you smell a land 'twister,' act first and think atterwards, or your widow 'ill get blear-eyed watching ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... might work our bane! For, I remember, once a sickly slave Ill shepherded my flock: I spake him plain; 'When next, through fault of thine, the midnight wolf Worries my sheep, on yonder tree you hang:' The blear-eyed idiot looked into my face, And smiled his disbelief. On that day week Two lambs lay dead. I hanged him on a tree. What tree? this tree! Why, this is passing strange! For, three nights since, I saw him ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... excited thoughts, and have a brief hour of solitary meditation, previous to the committal of that act which he knew must be his immediate passport to the jail and the gibbet. On entering his squalid and miserable home, the woman of the house, a blear-eyed and filthy hag, who was holding to her withered breast an infant, which, even in sucking the stream that nourished its tainted existence, betrayed upon its haggard countenance the polluted nature of the mother's ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in mine arms A duke or else an earl.' But when she looked him upon, He was a blear-eyed ...
— Ballads of Scottish Tradition and Romance - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Third Series • Various
... Slippery mud covers the floor. Mr. Krone sits on an empty whiskey-barrel, his stunted features betraying the hardened avarice of his character. He smokes his black pipe, folds his arms deliberately, discoursing of the affairs of the nation to two stupefied negroes and one blear-eyed son of the Emerald Isle. Three uncouth females, with hair hanging matted over their faces, and their features hidden in distortion, stand cooling their bared limbs at a running faucet just inside the door, to the left. A group of half-naked negroes lie ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... skill. Here Geth, who to the Slaves cried "Onward go," And Mundiaque and Ottocar—Plato And Ladislaeus Kunne; and Welf who bore These words upon his shield his foes before; "Nothing there is I fear." Otho blear-eyed, Zultan and Nazamustus, and beside The later Spignus, e'en to Spartibor Of triple vision, and yet more and more As if a pause at every age were made, And Antaeus' fearful ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... lane between two fences, which led us directly to the Fayetooca, or burying-place, we had left before. Here we found Captains Cook and Furneaux and Mr Hodges, with a great number of natives, seated on the fine lawn. They were in conversation with an old blear-eyed man," &c. "From this place we returned to the sea shore, where a brisk trade for vegetables, fowls, and hogs was carried on," &c. "It was near sun-set when we returned on board with our collection, and found the vessels still ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... stir amongst the Men of the Fleece of the Shepherds, and their ranks opened, and there came forth an ill-favoured lean old man, long-nebbed, blear-eyed, and bent, girt with a rusty old sword, but not otherwise armed. And all men knew Penny-thumb, who had been ransacked last autumn. As he came forth, it seemed as if his neighbours had been trying to hold him back; ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... "The blear-eyed sorcerers of the north Their vile enchantments sung and wove, And in the night they sallied forth, A ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... where ye tint the end— Sae ye maun foremost gae the miss to mend. 'Tis nae to mird wi' unco folk, ye see, Nor is the blear drawn easy o'er their ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... than anything that he had ever said or written. They published paragraphs in the newspapers, articles in the magazines, sixpenny pamphlets, five-shilling books. One scribbler abused Johnson for being blear-eyed; another for being a pensioner; a third informed the world that one of the Doctor's uncles had been convicted of felony in Scotland, and had found that there was in that country one tree capable of supporting the weight of an Englishman. Macpherson, whose Fingal had been ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... but the misery at intermediate places like Gafsa (and there are hundreds of them) is too great, too irremediable to be otherwise than an eyesore. They have not solved the problem of the simple life, these shivering, blear-eyed folk. Their daily routine is the height of discomfort; they are always ailing in health, often from that disease of which they plaintively declare that "whoever has not had it, cannot enter the kingdom of ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... expression of keenness without cunning. And after these canine noblemen of the old regime, whither has vanished the countless rabble of mongrels, curs, and pariah dogs; and last of all—being more degenerate—the corpulent, blear-eyed, wheezy pet dogs of a hundred breeds? They are all dead, no doubt: they have been dead so long that I daresay nature extracted all the valuable salts that were contained in their flesh and bones thousands of years ago, and used it for better things—raindrops, ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... blasted, blear-eyed, blundering, thundering, brainless, Godforsaken, doddering, damned fool!" he said without taking breath. "You great silly, ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... country than England,' said an ugly, blear-eyed lad, about a head and shoulders taller than myself, the leader of a gang of varlets who surrounded me in the playground, on the first day, as soon as the morning lesson was over. 'Scotland is a far better country than ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... though he generously says he will not insist on his refunding those cows which do not resemble the original heifers, and are not, as they were, dun and red and white. This sounded magnanimous, and met with grunts of approval until the blear-eyed defendant remarked, hopelessly, "They are all of those colors," which changed the sympathies of the audience once more. Tevula saw this at a glance, and hastened to improve his position by narrating an anecdote. No words of mine could reproduce the dramatic ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... blear-eyed and ill, Her battered bonnet nodding on her head, From a dark arch she clutched my sleeve and said: 'I've sold no bunch to-day, nor touched a bite ... Son, buy six-pennorth; and ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... couched in whispers. The men around him were blear-eyed and haggard-faced, their skins dry and bluish, and not a one was clad in more than undershirt and trousers. Alive and breathing, they were—but breathing grotesquely, horribly. They made awful noises at it; they panted, in quick, shallow sucks. Some lay on the deck at his ...
— Under Arctic Ice • H.G. Winter
... splenetic and melancholy passions, hurt the eyes, cause a bad temperature, and ill disposition of the whole body, with bad colour." This Jobertus stiffly maintains, Paradox, lib. 1. part. 5, that it causeth blear eyes, bad colour, and many loathsome diseases to such as use it: this which they say, stands with good reason; for as geographers relate, the water of Astracan breeds worms in such as drink it. [1390] Axius, or as now ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... repeated twice or thrice at the room-door, brought into the apartment a short, thin, weasen, blear-eyed old woman, palsy-stricken and hideously ugly, who, wiping her shrivelled face upon her dirty apron, inquired, in that subdued tone in which deaf ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... begin by disguising you so that no human being shall know you; I will cover your body with wrinkles; you shall lose all your yellow hair; I will clothe you in a garment that shall fill all who see it with loathing; I will blear your fine eyes for you, and make you an unseemly object in the sight of the suitors, of your wife, and of the son whom you left behind you. Then go at once to the swineherd who is in charge of your pigs; he has been always well affected ...
— The Odyssey • Homer
... prohibition, Scarce dare I, without his permission. Months, on his mighty work intent, Hath he, in strict seclusion spent. Most dainty 'mong your men of books, Like charcoal-burner now he looks, With face begrimed from ear to nose; His eyes are blear'd while fire he blows; Thus for the crisis still he longs; His music is ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... ten only of the best of the city who appeared to him most capable and eloquent. These were Bushy-haired Zeza, Bandy-legged Cecca, Wen-necked Meneca, Long-nosed Tolla, Humph-backed Popa, Bearded Antonella, Dumpy Ciulla, Blear-eyed Paola, Bald-headed Civonmetella, and Square-shouldered Jacova. Their names he wrote down on a sheet of paper; and then, dismissing the others, he arose with the Slave from under the canopy, and they went gently to the garden of the palace, ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... head and heels for us in his usual diverting manner. If I have cares in my mind, I come to the Zoo, and fancy they don't pass the gate. I recognize my friends, my enemies, in countless cages. I entertained the eagle, the vulture, the old billy-goat, and the black-pated, crimson-necked, blear-eyed, baggy, hook-beaked old marabou stork yesterday at dinner; and when Bob's aunt came to tea in the evening, and asked him what he had seen, he stepped up ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... an acquaintance with the dealers of both sorts, is somewhat like Laban's usage of Jacob, namely, keeping back the beloved Rachel, whom he served his seven years' time for, and putting him off with a blear-eyed Leah in her stead; it is, indeed, a kind of robbing him, taking from him the advantage which he served his time for, and sending him into the world like a man out of a ship set on shore among savages, who, instead ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... All the Laplanders are blear-eyed, owing to the sharp wind, the glare on the snow, fogs, and smoke. Yet I never met any people who lead such easy, happy lives as the Laplanders. In summer they have two meals of milk a day, and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... nose, one shut his eyes, one turned away, And all among themselves began to say: "Detested creature! he pollutes the earth and air!" "His eyes are blear!" "His ears are foul!" "His ribs are bare!" "In his torn hide there's not a decent shoestring left, No doubt the execrable cur was hung for theft." Then Jesus spake, and dropped on him the saving wreath: "Even pearls are dark before the whiteness of ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... flowers sweet; From weary tendrils, and bow'd branches green, She plucks the fruit unseen, she bathes unseen: And by my power is her beauty veil'd To keep it unaffronted, unassail'd By the love-glances of unlovely eyes, Of Satyrs, Fauns, and blear'd Silenus' sighs. Pale grew her immortality, for woe Of all these lovers, and she grieved so I took compassion on her, bade her steep Her hair in weird syrops, that would keep Her loveliness invisible, yet free To wander as ...
— Lamia • John Keats
... consolations of delusion remain to us, as we stand face to face with the Power which holds our destinies in its hand. None of these blear illusions can cheat our eyes with any such false presentments. No antiquity hallows, no public services consecrate, no gifts of lofty culture adorn, no graces of noble breeding embellish the coarse and sordid oligarchy that gives law ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... of mental evolution, whereas their own attitude in the matter affords painful proof that it is one of the latest. They will understand some day that a steatopygous "Hottentot Venus" is no more beautiful because an African finds her attractive, than an ugly, bloated, blear-eyed harlot is beautiful because she pleases a ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... the contemplation of the mountain peaks which glowed rich orange in the last lingering sun-rays, but really watching which way the sheep on the moor were taking, stood the innkeeper, a brawny, sodden-visaged, blear-eyed six feet of brutishness, holding up his hose with one hand, for want of points, and clawing with the other his elf-locks, on which a fair sprinkling of feathers might denote: first, that he was just out of bed, having been out sheep-stealing all the night before; and secondly, ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... say "O God" for the matter: Thou art the cause; thou bad'st her to my house, Only to blear the eyes of Goursey, did'st not? But I will send him word, I warrant thee, And ere I sleep too, trust upon it, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... leisure; he had been so used to blowing a furnace and decocting medicines that he could not give up the occupation and consequently she could not roast so much as a pigeon without having his grim and blear-eyed visage peering ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... caught by a giant pup, which was not like the pups of our harbour but a lean, long-limbed, short-haired dog, with heavy jaws and sagging, blood-red eyelids. At a round table, whereon there lay a short dog-whip, his master sat at cards with a stout little man in a pea-jacket—a loose-lipped, blear-eyed, flabby little fellow, but, withal, hearty in his own way—and himself cut a curious figure, being grotesquely ill-featured and ill-fashioned, so that one rebelled against the ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... no blear-eyed spinster mooning over the trumpery of a heyday that is gone, but a Miss Mischief offering her dainty fingers to you before the kiss of your grandfather's lips is yet dry on them. The damask petticoat, ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... is said, has a tendency to injure some one or other of the bodily organs of the artisan. Grinders of cutlery die of consumption; weavers are stunted in their growth; smiths become blear-eyed. In the same manner almost every intellectual employment has a tendency to produce some intellectual malady. Biographers, translators, editors, all, in short, who employ themselves in illustrating the lives or the writings of others, are peculiarly exposed to the Lues Boswelliana, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... a keen sight for many reasons. To begin with, its eyes are set too prominently on the skull, and the eyelids are clipped and blear, (41) and afford no protection to the pupils. (42) Naturally the sight is indistinct and purblind. (43) Along with which, although asleep, for the most part it does not enjoy visual repose. (44) Again, its very fleetness of foot contributes ...
— The Sportsman - On Hunting, A Sportsman's Manual, Commonly Called Cynegeticus • Xenophon
... besides the housekeeper, of a tall, raw-boned, sandy-haired personage, with a low brow, a blear eye and a sneaking look, the Overseer of the plantation; and of a well-mannered, intelligent lad,—with the peculiarly erect carriage and uncommon blending of good-natured ease and dignity which distinguished my host,—who was introduced to me as ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... diminishing end of the last car dwindled to a dark square, a spot, a dot, and was ingulfed in a flurry of dust. As he turned away and passed along the platform to the dog-cart, there came a roar, a shriek of a locomotive, a rush, and a train swept by towards the east, leaving a blear of scarlet in his eyes, and his ears ringing with the soldiers' cheers: "Vive la France! Vive l'Empereur! A Berlin! A Berlin! A Berlin!" A furtive-eyed young peasant beside him shrugged ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers |
