"Blear" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... boy?" she 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 ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... to compose the fever of his 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 milk, from which it drew at once the support of life and the seeds ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... god 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 ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... were really frightened this time. No sophomore could disguise herself like this. These were undoubtedly genuine ruffians of the worst type, hungry, blear-eyed and ragged. ...
— Grace Harlowe's Plebe Year at High School - The Merry Doings of the Oakdale Freshmen Girls • Jessie Graham Flower
... 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 Anderson, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... 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 ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... 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, ...
— The Sportsman - On Hunting, A Sportsman's Manual, Commonly Called Cynegeticus • Xenophon
... 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 ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... been attended to, the travellers entered the house, where they found Pierre, the proprietor, dozing on his bar; a bloated, blear-eyed creature, who evidently would have much preferred making them drunk with his vile whisky to preparing them any pretence for a dinner. But they firmly declined his liquor, so muttering unintelligibly to himself ...
— The Young Woodsman - Life in the Forests of Canada • J. McDonald Oxley
... a low 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 true sign of ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes
... blood, or ample 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 ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... 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 seek some ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... 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, and would have looked on you with great ...
— Sunk at Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... there he got down, and threading the well- known locality, through Bedford Place and across Theobald's Road, soon found himself at the door of his generous patron. Oh! how he hated the house; how he hated the blear-eyed, cross-grained, dirty, impudent fish-fag of an old woman who opened the door for him; how he hated Mr. Jabesh M'Ruen, to whom he now came a supplicant for assistance, and how, above all, he hated himself ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... 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 ...
— Track's End • Hayden Carruth
... 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 ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... cherish ever the image I first loved as Edith Hastings. You, on the contrary, will watch the work of death go on in me, will see my hair turn gray, my form begin to stoop, my hand to tremble, my eyes grow blear and watery, and when all has come to pass, won't you sicken of the shaky old man and sigh for a younger, more ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... 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 ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly
... of my extremities, being giddy, and doubtful what to do, at least it was put into my labouring thoughts, to make happy use of this paper; and to blear their unlettered eyes, I told them there was a Device for a Mask drawn int', and that (but for their interception,) I was going to a Gentleman to receive my reward for't: they, greedy at this word, and hoping ...
— The Puritain Widow • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... the Cause of Virtue, and to expose some of the most glaring Evils, as well public as private, which at present infest this Country". The statement seems somewhat needless when prefacing pages which enshrine Amelia; and where also are displayed Blear Eyed Moll in the prison yard of Newgate, as Newgate was twenty years before the prison reforms of Howard were heard of; Justice Thrasher and his iniquities; the 'diabolisms' of My Lord and of his tool Trent; the ruinous miseries of excessive gambling; and the abuses of duelling. Indeed ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... 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
... of astonishing talents, sagacity, acuteness, and clearness of head. What part he had in the brilliant effusions of Mirabeau, and in the French Revolution, may be seen by his posthumous work, just published at Paris, entitled Souvenirs de Mirabeau. He was a short, thick man, of coarse features, blear eyed, and slovenly in his dress; but of mild manners, hospitable, an excellent story-teller, and much beloved. I think he had been at one time librarian to old Lord Lansdowne. He died at Milan, in 1829, aged about 70. The French cannot contain their rage at the exposure that he was the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 554, Saturday, June 30, 1832 • Various
... which was of the most painful description. Oh, my 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, as it may naturally be supposed, ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... her. The commonplace life still supplies her with weapons, which today are old-fashioned and crude. Her mode of attack, in exterior life, is as it always has been, as it was in Oedipus' days. She shoots like a blear-eyed bow-man, aiming straight ahead of her; but if the target be raised somewhat higher than usual, her arrows fall harmless ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... learning were not destined for me. I found, at length, that the glass coach 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, or ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... civilians several noted personages were influenced in the right direction. Chief among these was sodden, blear-eyed, disreputable Sloper, whose trembling hand scrawled a hieroglyphic, supposed to represent his name, which began indeed with an S, but ended in a mysterious prolongation, and was further rendered indecipherable ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... tutor—Cirindey of Corpus—whom we recommended to him, and with whom the young gentleman did not fatigue his brains very much; but his great forte decidedly lay in drawing. He sketched the horses, he sketched the dogs; all the servants from the blear-eyed boot-boy to the rosy-cheeked lass, Mrs. Kean's niece, whom that virtuous housekeeper was always calling to come downstairs. He drew his father in all postures—asleep, on foot, on horseback; and jolly little Mr. Binnie, with his plump legs on a chair, or jumping ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... up and blinked at them. He shaded his eyes with one hand. The other he laid flat upon the papers before him. He was old, blear-eyed, unkempt. ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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 sort of waterish, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... 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; ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... sudden sound 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 ...
— Nearly Lost but Dearly Won • Theodore P. Wilson
... father, that is to say, of all 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, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... or paddock, where a milch-cow with two or three horses were kept. The manservant, whose name was Nepomucino, presided over orchard and paddock, also to some extent over the entire establishment. Nepomucino was a pure negro, a little old round-headed, blear-eyed man, about five feet four in height, the short lumpy wool on his head quite grey; slow in speech and movements, his old black or chocolate-coloured fingers all crooked, stiff-jointed, and pointing spontaneously in different directions. I have never seen ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... 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, though ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... 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 of the tergiversations in Paris, she became ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... it makes the sight of eyes both sharp and clear; With help of Rue, oh! blear-eyed man I thou shalt see far ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... opened his 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, but ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... aft, and mounted the small poop, and looked towards the aforesaid moon, a glorious resplendent tropical moon, and not the paper lantern affair hanging in an atmosphere of fog and smoke, about which your blear—eyed poets haven't so much. By the by, these gentry are fond of singing of the blessed sun—were they sailors they would bless the moon also, and be—to them, in place of writing much wearisome poetry ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... more, and he would have leapt into the stream. The 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 gone, ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... 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 me, ...
— Riley Songs of Home • James Whitcomb Riley
... 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 ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... have 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
... thy ancient friend, Whose dearest blood doth rest at thy command: Hath sorrow lately blear'd thy wat'ry eyes, That thou forgett'st the lasting league of love, Long since was vowed betwixt thyself and me? Look on me, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... That horrible hole!—it seems to say, 'I'm a grave that gapes for a living prey!'" And my heart grew sick, and my brow grew sad— And I thought of that wink at the Gardener-lad. Ah me! ah me!—'tis sad to think That maiden's eye, which was made to wink, Should here be compelled to grow blear and blink, Or be closed for aye In this kind of way, Shut out forever from wholesome day, Wall'd up in a hole with never a chink, No light,—no air,—no victuals,—no drink!— And that maiden's lip, Which was made to sip, Should here grow wither'd and dry as a chip! —That wandering ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... one 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
... THE LORD.—A blear-eyed man, but he were all blind of wit, might see the solution of this reason; and though he were blind he might grope the solution, but if his feeling him failed. For if this reason were aught worth, by such manner arguing men might prove that the three score and ten interpreters, and Aquila, ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... noble actions of their ancestors, you ought 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 he could not be an illustrious man, unless ...
— The Orations of Lysias • Lysias
... 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 ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... 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 ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... loudly 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 ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... the old man on the beach—a short patriarch, with his baldness covered by a kind of bloated woolen sock—a blear-eyed sage, and a bare-legged. He waded through the surf toward the boat, and when we asked him whether the Grotto was to be seen, he paused knee-deep in the water, (at a secret signal from Antonino, as I shall always believe,) put on a face of tender solemnity, threw back his head ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... children, they had never seemed so small, so pitiful. It struck him that Nature is cruel not to fit us for love and marriage as soon as we are born—cruel to make us wait twenty or thirty years before she lets us really begin to live. He looked with eyes more full of pity than usual at blear-eyed, delicate little Jennie, as to whom he could never tell whether it was the multiplication-table that made her deathly sick, or sickness that kept her from multiplying. His eye lit upon a wee, chubby-cheeked urchin on the ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... Tyro is a 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 ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... 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
... that daily miracle, a dinner and a drink, or perhaps slumbering in the daylight that they may the better follow out their catlike rambles through the dark. Here are women with young figures, but old, wrinkled, yellow faces, tanned and blear-eyed with the smoke which they cannot spare from their scanty fires,—it being too precious for its warmth to be swallowed by the chimney. Some of them sit on the door-steps, nursing their unwashed babies ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... 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. ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... 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
... his 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 Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... 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
... (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
... Heidelberg students are attended, wherever they go, by a companion who is apt to produce fear and dislike in those who are not accustomed to him. This is a small, blear-eyed, bullet-headed, bloodthirsty-looking bull-dog, with red eyes and snarling mouth. You see such dogs everywhere with the students, running close to their heels, and ready, at an instant's notice, to defend ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... him, for long miles, Alive with bright green lizards, And the springing bustard-fowl, The track, a straight black line, 175 Furrows the rich soil; here and there Clusters of lonely mounds Topp'd with rough-hewn, Grey, rain-blear'd statues, overpeer ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... "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 ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... will find them joyous indeed, sometimes loud in song or conversation, and taking generally a sort of pride in a dash of rudeness, calling it independence, but you will never find them sottish; nowhere cumbering the footway with their prostrate carcases; nowhere reeling zigzag, blear-eyed and stupid, ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... arches his back and hunched wingshoulders, peers at the moth out of blear bulged eyes, points a horning claw and cries) Who's moth moth? Who's dear Gerald? Dear Ger, that you? O dear, he is Gerald. O, I much fear he shall be most badly burned. Will some pleashe pershon not now impediment ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... Wanton is my name: I can many a quaint game. Lo, my top I drive in same, See, it turneth round! I can with my scourge-stick My fellow upon the head hit, And lightly[196] from him make a skip, And blear on him my tongue. If brother or sister do me chide, I will scratch and also bite: I can cry, and also kick, And mock them all berew.[197] If father or mother will me smite, I will ring with my lip, And lightly from him make a skip, And call my dame shrew. Aha, a new game have ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... Jove keep thy five wits; Thy sight is growing blear; Rue, myrrh and cummin for the Sphinx, Her muddy eyes to clear!" The old Sphinx bit her thick lip,— Said, "Who taught thee me to name? I am thy spirit, yoke-fellow; Of thine ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... thought 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 ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... representative 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
... have coolly informed me, many girls of respectable parentage, belonging to the middle class, are not much better. The men, of course, are much worse than the women, and even in Paris one sees fewer physical signs of excessive debauchery. Here, the number of broken-down young men, and blear-eyed, hoary sinners, is astonishing. I have never been in any place where licentiousness was so open and avowed—and yet, where the slang of a sham morality was so prevalent. There are no houses of prostitution in Stockholm, and the city would be scandalised ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... Cure for each Disease; How great its Vertues are, we hence may think, The Worlds third Part makes it their common Drink: In Breif, all you who Healths Rich Treasures Prize, And Court not Ruby Noses, or blear'd Eyes, But own Sobriety to be your Drift. And Love at once good Company and Thrift; To Wine no more make Wit and Coyn a Trophy, But come each Night and Frollique ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... crushed in its cotyledon by the physician who might be short-sighted himself, or even blind. But the law must be enforced for the sake of the clear-sighted citizens of the Republic. We will have nothing to do with these poor blear-eyed foreigners. ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... of their laws—are we not provided with a mirror that reflects every lineament with the true disposition of light and shade? If it is a stern, it is yet a truthful, mirror. It flatters neither those who made it nor those blear-eyed maskers, who, forgetful of their own distorted visages, look in askance, and are able to see nothing to admire in the sober, bright-eyed faces of their fathers who gaze down upon them from the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... came, this 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 ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... to be nothing more." "Oh, perhaps I might prefer that also!" There is a common note in these three illustrations of the modern idyll; and it must be owned the god goes among us with a limping gait and blear eyes. You wonder whether it was so always; whether desire was always equally dull and spiritless, and possession equally cold. I cannot help fancying most people make, ere they marry, some such table of recommendations as Hannah Godwin ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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
... been scrapping with third- and fourth-rate heavies, and sparring with real, live ones for nothing. The mate's fist whistled through empty air; the blear-eyed hunk of clay that had seemed such easy prey to him was metamorphosed on the instant into an alert, catlike bundle of steel sinews, and Billy Byrne swung that awful right with the pile-driver weight, that even The Big Smoke himself had acknowledged respect ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... red-nosed, blear-eyed tramp, of low-toned, rowdy style, Give an interductory hiccup, an' then swaggered up the aisle. Then thro' that holy atmosphere there crep' a sense er sin, An' thro' thet air of sanctity the ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... alone with his blear-eyed wife, but a glance sufficed to tell Mackenzie that the news was already told. So he plunged at once into the business, shifting the beaded sheath prominently to the fore ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... of themselves cultivate the taste and the sentiments, let him look 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 ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... my masters, is 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, the powdered wig, and the coquettish little patch by her dimpled little mouth ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... the false modesty left his face, his tall form straightened itself, and he stared round with his blear, evil-looking eyes. ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... 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; ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... none, after all. Leffler's was no longer a stable. It was condemned to demolition, and in the respite between sentence and execution it had become a vague place of storage, a hospital for broken-down carriages and carts, presided over by a blear-eyed old woman who knew nothing of Flood's garage across the way—did not even remember what had stood there before the new ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... air 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
... but a few lines, just to tell me how that good, sagacious man your father is,—that kind, dainty body your mother,— that strapping chiel your brother Douglas-and my friend Rachel, who is as far before Rachel of old, as she was before her blear-eyed sister Leah. ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... Jesus 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 on a new, ...
— General William Booth enters into Heaven and other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... from the Devil's Tavern, and we were invited to visit the establishment. On our way we passed by the Blackfriars, Curtain, In Yard, Paris and Devil theatres, interspersed with hurdy-gurdy concert hall, sailor and soldier, gin and sack vaults, where blear-eyed belles and battered beaux vied with ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... 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 England, in ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... 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, ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... come on, A' the house are sleeping, I think on my bonnie lad, An' I blear my een wi' greetin'! ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... with blear eyes, "it's a queer thing how ye favour your mother, miss. She had just they beautiful shoulders and arms, as firm an' as white; but you're taller, I think, and may be so, to speak, a stouter make altogether. Eh, dear, you were always a fine child ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... not return 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 ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... will tear it up, and its soil shall be divided after the victory between the wives of the sergents de ville!' They are beginning to understand all the insanity of their plan. Why, it is Paris that will take Versailles, that will take all those blear-eyed old men who, because they cannot look steadily at Monsieur Thiers' face, fancy that it ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... here, Lucile!" cried Gannette, his apoplectic face becoming more deeply purple, and his blear eyes leering angrily upon the calm woman. "I ain't a-goin' to stand this! What have I done? I'm as sober as any one here, an'—" William took the heavy man gently by the arm and persuaded him to his feet. ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... stood 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! [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 ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... see sometimes a man and a woman—a teamster out of work or with his wages for the day, and with him a creature—a blear-eyed, slatternly looking woman, in a filthy calico gown. The man clutches her arm, as they sing and stagger up past the cafes. The woman holds in her claw-like hand a half-empty bottle of cheap red wine. Now and then they stop and share it; the ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... their nicety*, *simplicity And thought, "All this is done but for a wile. They weenen* that no man may them beguile, *think But by my thrift yet shall I blear their eye, For all the sleight in their philosophy. The more *quainte knackes* that they make, *odd little tricks* The more will I steal when that I take. Instead of flour yet will I give them bren*. *bran The greatest clerks are not the wisest men, As whilom to the wolf thus spake ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... ugly slanting contrivance used to be put under his pillow in the days when his breath came hard; there is his old chair with both arms gone, symbol of the desolate time when he had nothing earthly left to lean on; there is the large wooden reel which the blear-eyed old deacon sent the minister's lady, who thanked him graciously, and twirled it smilingly, and in fitting season bowed it out decently to the limbo of troublesome conveniences. And there are old leather portmanteaus, like stranded ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... "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 works." But all this seems rather to come ...
— On Prayer and The Contemplative Life • St. Thomas Aquinas
... hung limp under his bagging waistcoat. When he used to treat the boys in old days at a coffee-house, he would shout and laugh louder than anybody there, and have all the waiters skipping round him; it was quite painful to see how humble and civil he was to John of the Tapioca, a blear-eyed old attendant in dingy stockings and cracked pumps, whose business it was to serve glasses of wafers, and bumpers of ink in pewter, and slices of paper to the frequenters of this dreary house of entertainment, where nothing else seemed ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 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, ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... listening to the news and answering questions. "We are looked upon as beings who have come from another world. This afternoon I had a shave after soaking my face in a hot sponge, and then a bath. Lashly had already cut my hair. Bill looks very thin and we are all very blear-eyed from want of sleep. I have not much appetite, my mouth is very dry and throat sore with a troublesome hacking cough which I have had all the journey. My taste is gone. We are getting badly spoiled, but our beds are the height of ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... before a clergyman and promises to love, honour and 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 object ...
— Wise or Otherwise • Lydia Leavitt
... low rookeries, the unshaven, blear-eyed men sitting on the thresholds of the saloons, the slattern squaws wandering abroad like bedraggled hens, made the girl stare with wonder and dismay. She had remembered the town street as a highway filled with splendid cavaliers, ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... 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]
... The blear eyed 'scapes the pits * Wherein the lynx eyed fall: A word the wise man slays * And saves the natural: The Moslem fails of food * The Kafir feasts in hall: What art or act is man's? * ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... is sad enough: deserted palaces, and 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; they are as graceful as cats, and the women have exactly ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... single file, for it was quite impossible to keep the tail up with the leaders. I shall try to give my reader some slight idea of them, if description is sufficiently palpable to do so. The real leader was an old black mare, blear-eyed from fly-wounds, for ever dropping tears of salt rheum, fat, large, strong, having carried her 180 pounds at starting, and now desperately thirsty and determined, knowing to an inch where the water was; on she went, reaching ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... bull-dogs. Mount guard for an hour, till I call you down the hill. You can pull down a score of Volunteers apiece, if they dare to come after me. I have an hour to spare, and I know how to employ it. Jerry, old Jerry Bowles, stir your crooked shanks. What are you rubbing your blear eyes at?" ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... us who sit in the railway train, we do not look at him much. We are all either reading papers or talking. Two old men, bearded and greasy-coated, tramps of a bygone era, sit opposite one another and neither read nor talk. One of them is blear-eyed and coughs, and has an unclean moustache. All his friend ever says to him is: "Clean your nose," making an impatient gesture. A young man in a bowler hat and spectacles, who smokes a pipe in inward-drawn lips, discusses the Labour ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... 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 ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... Horrid with bloody jaws. Scaled reptiles crawl From slum and sewer, slimy, coil on coil— Danton, dark beast, that builded for himself A monument of quicksand limed with blood; Horse-leech Marat, blear-eyed, vile vulture born; Fair Charlotte's dagger robbed the guillotine! Black-biled, green-visaged, traitorous Robespierre, That buzzard-beaked, hawk-taloned octopus Who played with pale poltroonery of men, And drank the cup of flattery till ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... slackened her pace and made him halt with her at the kerb, where they were necessarily jostled by the press of squalid people, lurching with drink or merely with rough manners, that streamed up and down this street of topless houses whose visible lower storeys were blear-eyed with windows broken or ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West |
