"Blight" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... race was Kano Indara; the last of a mighty line of artists. Even in this material age his fame spread as the mists of his own land, and his name was known in barbarian countries far across the sea. Tokyo might fall under the blight of progress, but Kano would hold to the traditions of his race. To live as a true artist,—to die as one,—this was his care. He might have claimed high position in the great Art Museum recently inaugurated by the new government, and housed in an ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... gained heaven if they were possessed of Madeleine's wealth, her jewels, her carriages, her dresses; but were the veils that shroud the hypocrisy of human joy raised for the warning of the uninitiated, many a noble heart like Madeleine's would show the blight of disappointment, with the thorns thick and sharp under the flowers that are strewn on their path. The sympathy of manhood, ever flung over the couch of suffering beauty, must hover in sighs of regret over ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... fairest of the year: For thee the Graces lead the dancing hours, And Nature's ready pencil paints the flowers: When thy short reign is past, the feverish sun The sultry tropic fears, and moves more slowly on. So may thy tender blossoms fear no blight, Nor goats with venomed teeth thy tendrils bite, As thou shalt guide my wandering feet to find The fragrant greens I seek, my brows to bind." His vows addressed, within the grove he strayed, Till Fate or Fortune near the place ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... oath—to die, if need be, but never cross the fatal line. The struggle was manfully maintained, but at last the chief priest fell, pierced to the heart with a spear, and the unlucky omen fell like a blight upon the brave souls at his back; with a triumphant shout the invaders pressed forward—the line was crossed—the offended gods deserted the despairing army, and, accepting the doom their perjury had brought upon them, they broke and fled over the plain where Honolulu stands now—up the beautiful ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... nobles were come to ninepence." Now, they were challenged to establish a society of their own principles; now, they were recommended to the mercy of the Attorney-General, and again commended to the hatred of the people. Meantime a blight had fallen on the earth, and a whole people's food, in one night, perished. To the new Government, the famine that ensued was an assurance of subsistence and success. Hunger would waste the bodies of the people, as the dearth of truth had wasted their ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... man doesn't whine at his losses, A man doesn't whimper and fret, Or rail at the weight of his crosses And ask life to rear him a pet. A man doesn't grudgingly labor Or look upon toil as a blight; A man doesn't sneer at his neighbor Or sneak from a cause that ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest
... October or November. Figs we have till late into the winter, and they begin again early; we are very fond of them. Oranges, lemons, and shaddocks grow fairly well, and are fruiting all the year round. Apples do badly, being subject to blight, though the young trees grow rapidly, and, if freely pruned, will yield enormous crops. To obviate the blight we keep a constant succession of young trees to replace those that are killed. Pears are not subject to the blight, and do well. ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... have launched us upon the current of the months from the snowy banks of January. I love better to count time from spring to spring; it seems to me far more cheerful to reckon the year by blossoms than by blight. ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... white queen on a ruined throne, A lily bowed with blight; In her eyes the darkness about was blown By flashes of liquid light; Her skin with very whiteness shone; Back from her forehead loosely thrown Her hair was ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... that the light Might ebb, drawn backward from their eyes, and night Hide for one hour the imperishable faces. That they might rise up sad in heaven, and know Sorrow and sleep, one paler than young snow, One cold as blight of dew and ruinous rain, Rise up and rest and suffer a little, and be Awhile as all things born with us and we, And grieve as men, and like slain ...
— Atalanta in Calydon • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... many small shops; but the only stock in trade appeared to be heaps of children, who, even at that time of night, were crawling in and out at the doors, or screaming from the inside. The sole places that seemed to prosper amid the general blight of the place, were the public-houses; and in them, the lowest orders of Irish were wrangling with might and main. Covered ways and yards, which here and there diverged from the main street, disclosed little knots of houses, where drunken men and women were positively ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... year there came a blight; the woods died away, the springs ran dry; and the scene, which had once been the joy of every traveler, was in autumn standing waste, naked, and bald, scarcely showing here and there, in the sea of sand, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... oh! men of the Sagalie Tyee, or I shall blight you with my evil eye. Care for yourselves and do not follow me." On and on she danced through the thickest of the wilderness, on and on they followed until they reached the very heart of the seagirt neck of land ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... very long walk with my father through some of the most beautiful ways hereabouts; the day was cold with an iron, windy sky, and only glorified now and then with autumn sunlight. For it is fully autumn with us, with a blight already over the greens, and a keen wind in the morning that makes one rather timid of one's tub when it ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... veins would kill me. You may think this pride a weakness, but it is too deeply rooted in my nature ever to be eradicated. When I look about the world and see girls disgracing themselves by improper marriages, elopements, often social crimes, which must blight their lives and those of all connected with them, I think what I should do under ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... baffled again and again, until at last he had given himself up to a dull hope that the little girl who had become so dear was really his brother's child, and joint heir with Donald to his and his brother's estates; and how Eben Slade actually had come to claim her and take her away, threatening to blight the poor child by proving that she was his niece, Delia Robertson, and not Dorothy ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... over the threshold of the door to keep out the Evil One. Sometimes they are tied round the necks of camels, and even placed on trees, especially at the time when bearing fruit, for the purpose of preserving the camel from mange, or the tree from blight. These talismans usually have a diagram of this and other shapes, with certain Arabic signs, letters, words, and ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... temperance are not contented with taking the property of their fellow-men as they often do in different ways, they are not even satisfied with inflicting bodily injury and suffering upon those who oppose their ways, but they would blight their reputation, and this, too, is no small injury, for ...
— The Story of a Dark Plot - or Tyranny on the Frontier • A.L.O. C. and W.W. Smith
... out along the south wall—ugh, ugh," persisted Simon, without seeming to hear her; "and your new g'raniums a'most covered wi' blight. I wur a tacklin' one of 'em ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... Of course, people have different ways of showing blight. Mr. Redgrave, it is rumoured, hides his head in a hermitage, somewhere in the north of Italy, by one of the lakes. No doubt he lives on olives and macaroni, and broods over what might have been. Did you ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... been residing in that country, as was learned from Paolo. Now everybody knows that the evil eye is not rarely met with in Italy. Everybody who has ever read Mr. Story's "Roba di Roma" knows what a terrible power it is which the owner of the evil eye exercises. It can blight and destroy whatever it falls upon. No person's life or limb is safe if the jettatura, the withering glance of the deadly organ, falls upon him. It must be observed that this malign effect may follow a look from the holiest personages, that is, if we may ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... eat, thou hast bread; Drink, drink, thou hast water; On that day, dust possesses the earth, On that day, a blight is on the face of the earth, On that day, a cloud rises, On that day, a mountain rises, On that day, a strong man seizes the land, On that day, things fall to ruin, On that day, the tender leaf is destroyed, On that day, the dying eyes are ...
— The Maya Chronicles - Brinton's Library Of Aboriginal American Literature, Number 1 • Various
... by love. No publisher may say to it: "Buy my books, not those of my rival"; no scientist may forbid it to give his opponent a hearing; no religious body may dictate to it; no commercial influence may throw a blight over it. It ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... seems so fair and sweet, Yet tyranny is stalking here, And hate and lust and foul deceit Hang heavy on the atmosphere. Injustice seeks to throttle right, And laughter's stifled to a sigh. If death can take so great a blight From human ...
— Over Here • Edgar A. Guest
... middle of this month, until the end of May, is the best season for sowing wheat in the districts of Richmond Hill, Phillip, Nelson, and Evan, as it is not so subject to the caterpillar, smut, rust, and blight. Oats may also be sown now for a general crop. Asparagus haulm should also be cut and carried off the ground, and the ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann
... efficacious in dealing with the butcher and even the bishop, to say nothing of the effect it always had upon the commonplace nobodies who go to the butcher and the bishop for the luxuries of both the present and the future life, and it had seldom failed to wither and blight the most hardy of masculine opponents. It was not always so effective in crushing the members of her own sex, for there were women in New York society who could look straight through Mrs. Tresslyn without even appearing to suspect that she was in the range of ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... The game's up: we must save the swag. (To DUMONT.) Sir, since your key, on which I invoke the blight of Egypt, has once more defaulted, my feelings are unequal to a repetition of yesterday's distress, and I shall simply pad the hoof. From Turin you shall receive the address of my banker, and may prosperity attend your ventures. (To BERTRAND.) Now, boy! (To DUMONT.) Embrace my fatherless ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XV • Robert Louis Stevenson
... men forgive force in the woman? and when do women ever forgive the woman's greatness? and when does every cur fail to snarl at the life that is higher than its fellows? It is by the very genius in her that you have had such power to wound, such power to blight and to destroy. By so long as her name shall be spoken, so long will the wrong you have done her cling round it, to make it meet for reproach. A mere woman dies, and her woe and her shame die with her, and the earth covers ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... feelings bind them to every heart capable of generous emotions; those in whom we see life most beautified, most glad. Oh, it is so sad to see them weep; to feel that even on them sorrow hath cast its blight, and paled the cheek, and dimmed the laughing eye, the speaking smile, and the first grief in such as these is agony indeed: it is the breaking asunder of every former joy. They shrink from retrospection, for they cannot bear to feel they are not now as then, and the future shares ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume II. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes • Grace Aguilar
... the colonel. He had never seen the man, and yet his influence was everywhere. He seemed to brood over the country round about like a great vampire bat, sucking the life-blood of the people. His touch meant blight. As soon as a Fetters mortgage rested on a place, the property began to run down; for why should the nominal owner keep up a place which was destined in the end to go to Fetters? The colonel had heard grewsome tales of Fetters's convict labour ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... go to nothing. To prevent this I determined to take my measures with such thought and fore-thought, such cautions and precautions, that all the malignant planets in the hemisphere should be unable to blight my designs .... Heaven and Earth! must I remember? my damned star wheeled about to the zenith, by whose baleful rays Fortune took the alarm.[15a] ... In short, Pharaoh at the Red Sea, Darius at Arbela, Pompey at Pharsalia, ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... a blight on their labours lay, And ever their quarry would vanish away, Till the sun-dried boys of the Black Tyrone Took a brotherly interest in Boh Da Thone: And, sooth, if pursuit in possession ends, The Boh and his trackers were ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right, And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... men of the world. The profession of singing in public, then, presupposed that the singer was no longer the more or less imaginary young girl, the hothouse flower of the social garden, whose perfect bloom the merest breath of worldly knowledge must blight for ever. Margaret might smile at the myth, but she could not ignore the fact that she was already as much detached from it in men's eyes as if she had entered the married state. The mere fact of realising that the hothouse blossom was part of the social legend ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... laugh on the wrong side of one's mouth; find one a false prophet. not realize one's hope, not realize one's expectation. [cause to be disappointed] disappoint; frustrate, discomfit, crush, defeat (failure) 732; crush one's hope, dash one's hope, balk one's hope, disappoint one's hope, blight one's hope, falsify one's hope, defeat one's hope, discourage; balk, jilt, bilk; play one false, play a trick; dash the cup from the lips, tantalize; dumfound, dumbfound, dumbfounder, dumfounder (astonish) 870. Adj. disappointed &c. v.; disconcerted, aghast; disgruntled; out of one's reckoning. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... ruthless eye had mark'd me for her prey: They bade me seek in foreign climes her wasting hand to stay; They told me of an altered form, an eye grown ghastly bright, And called the crimson on my cheek the spoiler's hectic blight. ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... had an idea of starting a dairy. First, the cows' eyes got bad, and he sought the advice of a German cocky, and acted upon it; he blew powdered alum through paper tubes into the bad eyes, and got some of it snorted and butted back into his own. He cured the cows' eyes and got the sandy blight in his own, and for a week or so be couldn't tell one end of a cow from the other, but sat in a dark corner of the hut and groaned, and soaked his glued eyelashes in warm water. Germany stuck to him and nursed ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... but not alone; she held, within, A second principle of Life, which might Have dawned a fair and sinless child of sin;[dz] But closed its little being without light, And went down to the grave unborn, wherein Blossom and bough lie withered with one blight; In vain the dews of Heaven descend above The bleeding flower and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... shall pass away, By winter overtaken, Thoughts of the past will charms display, And many joys awaken. When time shall every sweet remove, And blight thee on my bosom, Let beauty fade!—to me, my love, Thou'lt ne'er be out ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... She is marked with the gallows. Ill-luck attaches to her. There has been a blight on her from the beginning. I mind when her father chucked her down all among the fly-poison. Now she has got the Broom-Squire, she may count herself lucky, and ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... that we know of nowadays. But then, nobody knew what to do for her, poor lady. To be 'crossed in love,' as it was called, was a thing that admitted of no cure, unless the patient were willing to be cured. People spoke of Phoebe Montfort under their breath, and called her 'a blight,' meaning a person whose life has been blighted. The world has gone on a good deal in the two generations since then, ...
— Three Margarets • Laura E. Richards
... vainest of all vain things, the most unseemly and revolting of all forms of pride, is the pride of disbelief in God and immortality. And the maddest if not the wickedest of all occupations, is to labor to destroy the faith and blight the hopes of others. What good, humane, or merciful motive can a man have to impel him to such ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... of with things. The loss of vision is never compensated for by the gain of sight; to see a thing one must use his mind quite as much as his eye. It too often happens, as the result of our educational methods, that in training the observer we blight the poet; and the poet is, after all, the most important person in society. He keeps the soul of his fellows alive. Without him the modern world would become one vast, dreary, soul-destroying Coketown, and man would sink to the ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... the dawn of her intelligence, with your utmost energy and might, that there was such a thing as daylight, but that it was made to be her enemy and destroyer, and she must always turn against it, for it had blighted you and would else blight her;—if you had done this, and then, for a purpose, had wanted her to take naturally to the daylight and she could not do it, you would have ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... Observed in Shagbark Hickory, Carya ovata (Mill.) K. Koch. in Central New York—David H. Caldwell 29 The Control of the Hickory Weevil (Curculio caryae) 39 Round Table Discussion—What's Your Problem 43 The International Chestnut Commission and the Chestnut Blight Problem in Europe, 1953—G. Flippo Gravatt 52 Rooting Chestnuts from Softwood Cuttings—Roger W. Pease 56 Evaluating Chestnuts Grown under Forest Conditions—Jesse D. Diller 59 Panel Discussion—Chestnuts 62 Development of the Nut Industry in the Middle West—J. F. Wilkinson 70 Some Aspects ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... I answer; mark a soothfast word, Not the true parent is the woman's womb That bears the child; she doth but nurse the seed New-sown: the male is parent; she for him, As stranger for a stranger, hoards the germ Of life; unless the god its promise blight. And proof hereof before you will I set. Birth may from fathers, without mothers, be: See at your side a witness of the same, Athena, daughter of Olympian Zeus, Never within the darkness of the womb Fostered nor fashioned, but a bud more bright Than ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... neither promise nor confession, but allowing love to cherish its fairest hopes without fear or torment! How pure a memory for life! What a free blossoming of all the flowers that spring from the soul, which a mere trifle can blight, but which, at that moment, everything warmed ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... bird's song, wind in the ash-trees and the corn, tall lilies glistening, the evening shadows slanting out, the night murmuring of waters. There is no other genuine dream; without it to sweeten all, life is harsh and shrill and east-wind dry, and evil overruns her more quickly than blight be-gums the rose-tree or frost blackens fern of a cold June night. We elders are past re-making England, but our children, even these crippled children here, may ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... fetched from the lumber-rooms and distributed among their owners, when a letter arrived from Mother saying that the two little boys had sandy blight, and that Laura would not be able to come home under two or three weeks, for fear of infection. These weeks she was to spend, in company with Pin, at a watering-place down the Bay, where one of her aunts ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... ornamental flower garden; "out of Weathersfield" Wethersfield (the modern spelling), Connecticut, was famous for its onions (there is still a red onion called "Red Weathersfield"), until struck by a blight about 1840; "old Egyptians" ancient Egypt was proverbial for worshiping ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... the uniform was unauthorized and the insignia an invention of Sticky Smith, aiming to counteract any social stigma that might blight his sojourn in France. ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... treated with greater care than are our ancient monuments in stone. Smaller creatures, birds like the dodo and the great auk and a whole troop of others less familiar, have disappeared and are disappearing under the human blight. Even some beautiful insects—the great copper butterfly and the swallow-tail butterfly—have been exterminated in England by human "progress" in the shape of the drainage ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... together with new power sources to replace the fossil fuels on which factory, home, and vehicle now depend, might also all but eliminate the growing smog and air-pollution blight. ...
— The Practical Values of Space Exploration • Committee on Science and Astronautics
... was constituted to remember, and to remember with all his soul. Every day of his life he had missed her; never was there a night that she was not in his thoughts before he dropped to sleep. What would have been his career had fate brought them together before the blight fell upon her? What intimacies, what enjoyment, what ideals nurtured and made real. And the companionship, the instant sympathy, the sureness of an echo in her heart, no matter how low and soft his whisper! These thoughts were never ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith
... morning had dawned. The daylight seemed to pry into the secrets of the past night. I would fain shun it—the garish light disturbed me. The morning sun, which had ever been my delight, seemed now a mocking imp of curiosity; the house and grounds looked bare and desolate; a blight had ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... tending his flocks, and bringing forth rich harvests from the earth. For him the bees wrought their sweetest honey; for him the sheep gave their softest wool; for him the cornfields waved with their fullest grain. No blight touched the grapes which his hand had tended; no sickness vexed the herds which fed in his pastures. And they who dwelt in the land said, "Strife and war bring no such gifts as these to the sons of men; therefore let ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... spells weave; Trust not too deeply—they may deceive! Hope with her Dead Sea fruits is there, Sin is spreading her gilded snare, Disease with a ruthless hand would smite, And Care spread o'er thee her withering blight. Hate and Envy, with visage black, And the serpent Slander, are on thy track; Falsehood and Guilt, Remorse and Pride, Doubt and Despair, in thy pathway glide; Haggard Want, in her demon joy, Waits to degrade thee and then destroy; And Death, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... will retract what you insinuated had become of it? I'll willingly make it up to you, if it takes every cent I earn; but I'll not have a blight upon my reputation, even ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... and still more extraordinary ones, in which this process takes place naturally, in a more hidden, a more recondite kind of way. You are all of you familiar with those little green insects, the 'Aphis' or blight, as it is called. These little animals, during a very considerable part of their existence, multiply themselves by means of a kind of internal budding, the buds being developed into essentially asexual animals, which are neither male nor female; ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... paired these Cinaedes sans shame Mamurra and Caesar, both of pathic fame. No wonder! Both are fouled with foulest blight, One urban being, Formian t'other wight, And deeply printed with indelible stain: 5 Morbose is either, and the twin-like twain Share single Couchlet; peers in shallow lore, Nor this nor that for lechery hungers more, As rival wenchers who the maidens claim Right ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... ago, about a friend of ours, a young Southern poet of distinct promise, who had just died. Like many Southern verse-writers of his generation, he had lived and written under the inspiration of Poe. Asbury surprised me by the almost bitter remark that Poe's influence had been a blight upon the younger Southern poets, inasmuch as it had tended to over-subjectivity, to morbid sensibility, and to a pre-occupation with purely personal emotions. He argued, as he has since done so courageously in his Texas Nativist, [Footnote: ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... have dared to venture, after what has happened, to ask any of my friends to receive her. Naturally, she shrinks from speaking of that terrible time, but I understand that she spent no less than three nights alone in the mountains with him. And that fact in itself would be more than sufficient to blight any girl's career from a social standpoint. I often think that the rules of our modern etiquette are very rigid, though I know well that we cannot afford to disregard them." Again came that soft, regretful sigh; and then ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... highest of the White Mountains, stood up round and bare, rimmed bright gold in the last glow of the setting sun. Then, as the fire dropped behind the domed peak, a change, a cold and darkening blight, passed down the black spear-pointed slopes over all that ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... as often as he glanced at Allen, who stood behind him, or bent his gaxe upon any of his other fellow-prisoners. O'Brien was born, near Ballymacoda, County Cork, the birthplace of the ill-fated and heroic Peter Crowley. His father rented a large farm in the same parish, but the blight of the bad laws which are the curse of Ireland fell upon him, and in the year 1856, the O'Briens were flung upon the world dispossessed of lands and home, though they owed no man a penny at the time. Michael O'Brien was apprenticed to a draper in Youghal, ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... relations with America, was hamstringing the British fleet, was rendering almost impotent its control of the sea, and was thus throwing away the greatest advantage which Great Britain possessed in its life and death struggle. "Some blight has been at work in our Foreign Office for years," said the Quarterly Review, "steadily undermining our mastery ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... air; but when we are in good health they are absolutely innocuous, our nature offers no hold or resting place for them. The grouse disease only makes headway when there has been a wet season, and the young birds are too weakened by the damp to resist its attack. The potato blight is always lying in wait, till the potato plants are deteriorated by a long spell of rain and damp; it is only then that it can effect its fell purpose. The microbes of consumption and cancer are probably never far away from us, but are powerless to hurt us, till our system has become ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... would make her ideals appear the dreams of bygone halcyon days, useless and worse amid the threats of gathering tempest. An essentially human apprehension, be it understood. The vulgarities of hysterical pietism Emily had never known; she did not fear the invasion of such blight as that; the thought of it was noisome to her. Do you recall a kind of trouble that came upon her, during that talk in the hollow, when Wilfrid suggested the case of her being called upon to make some great ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... neatly dressed as their masters, though some wore blue-jean and saffron-colored shirts; and there were railroad-hands, mechanics, and store-keepers. All of them were cheerful; a few good years, free from harvest frost and blight, had made a marked ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... Take care! The great white witch rides out to-night. Trust not your prowess nor your strength, Your only safety lies in flight; For in her glance there is a snare, And in her smile there is a blight. ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... people—who are so kind to one another, and to tramps and beggars, that they seem to live by the rule of an old woman in a Galway sweet-shop: 'Refuse not any, for one may be the Christ'—speak of a visit of the tinkers as of frost in spring or blight in harvest. I asked why they were shunned as other wayfarers are not, and I was told of their strange customs and ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... those days, the bearded Russ and red-haired Dane, the Norwayer, and the Hollander, laden with merchandise, furled their sails in that deserted harbor, where now scarcely a fisherboat is seen; for on Crail, as on all its sister towns along the coast, fell surely and heavily the terrible blight of 1707, and now it is hastening rapidly to ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... will rob the tender joys That bless the little lintwhite's nest; And frost will blight the fairest flowers, And love ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... side of a bed on which his son Sammy lay sprawling in the helpless attitude in which he had fallen down the night before, after a season of drunken riot. He was in a heavy sleep, with his still innocent-looking features tinged with the first blight of dissipation. ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... condition of Godfrey Cass in this six-and-twentieth year of his life. A movement of compunction, helped by those small indefinable influences which every personal relation exerts on a pliant nature, had urged him into a secret marriage, which was a blight on his life. It was an ugly story of low passion, delusion, and waking from delusion, which needs not to be dragged from the privacy of Godfrey's bitter memory. He had long known that the delusion was partly due to ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... good time for once in my life—for once in my life!' It was in the dark, in a carriage, coming back from a hunt ball. Eleven miles we had to drive! And then suddenly the bitterness of the endless poverty, of the endless acting—it fell on me like a blight, it spoilt everything. Yes, I had to realize that I had been spoilt even for the good time when it came. And I burst out crying and I cried and I cried for the whole eleven miles. Just imagine me crying! And just imagine me making a fool of the poor dear chap like that. It certainly ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... eclipses occur, but that are not referable to any known eclipsing body. Of course there is no suggestion here that these darknesses may have been eclipses. My own acceptance is that if in the nineteenth century anyone had uttered such a thought as that, he'd have felt the blight of a Dominant; that Materialistic Science was a jealous god, excluding, as works of the devil, all utterances against the seemingly uniform, regular, periodic; that to defy him would have brought on—withering by ridicule—shrinking away by publishers—contempt of friends and family—justifiable ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... did so much to devastate the East, and which, by the emigration of some {162} 50,000 Christians, cleric and lay, to Calabria, exercised so important an influence on the history of Southern Italy, might have cast a fatal blight on the Church in Constantinople had it not been for the stand made by the Monks of the Studium. [Sidenote: The Monks of the Studium and the Iconoclastic Controversy.] The age of the Iconoclasts was the golden age of the Studite monks. Persecuted, ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... omit tradesman-like references! What Lord Hawcastle wished me to impress on you is not only that you will ruin yourself, but put a blight upon the life of the young lady whom you are pleased to consider your ward. We make this suggestion because we conceive that you have a preposterous sentimental ...
— The Man from Home • Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson
... is that I owe my station to the esteem I profess for the cultivation of hair, and to my persecution of the clippers of it. And in this kingdom is no one that beareth such a crop as I, saving one, a clothier, an accursed one!—and may a blight fall upon him for his vanity and his affectation of solemn priestliness, and his lolling in his shop-front to be admired and marvelled at by the people. So this fellow I would disgrace and bring to scorn,—this Shagpat! for ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... reborn. For this end had Ireland been kept faithful and pure for centuries, just that she might be at last the witness to the spiritual in a materialized world. For this end had the Church in Ireland gone through the storm of persecution, suffered the blight of the world's contempt, that she might emerge in the end entirely fitted ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... over the land? London is the antithesis of the domestic ideal; a social reformer would not even glance in that direction, but would turn all his zeal upon small towns and country districts, where blight may perhaps be arrested, and whence, some day, a reconstituted national life may act upon the great centre of corruption. I had far rather see England covered with schools of cookery than with schools of the ordinary kind; the issue would be infinitely ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... revival is needed for an intellectual renaissance. All students must be baptized with a passion for social service, before studies that enrich the mind and enlarge the character will be pursued with eager devotion. The blight of irresponsibility is almost universal upon the students in the higher educational institutions of ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... led more fully to appreciate the advantage of seeing all of the branches of intellectual culture led out of the ruts of routine, away from plagiarism and from disorder and anarchy, one word upon the most distasteful and effectual blight to which art is subject—the loss of naturalness, viz., affectation. Can anything be more irritating than an affected actor or ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... remnant of their self respect. One need not be a prophet to foresee that out of all this injustice and inequality God's avenging angel will come some day with sword, double-edged and deadly with disease and crime, to smite and to blight this land where white people having eyes refuse to see whither all their race injustice is leading, and ears but who are deaf to the prayer of Christ's little ones crying for a man's chance to get with others into the sun and to grow the free and beautiful life which God ...
— The Ultimate Criminal - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 17 • Archibald H. Grimke
... Tip answered, his eyes very blight; in his heart he sang "Glory!" And the angels in heaven sang for joy; for that night there had been laid aside a white robe and a crown ...
— Tip Lewis and His Lamp • Pansy (aka Isabella Alden)
... example to all the youth of the land, and the churches will ring with his praises. But what has been the effect of his life on the moral, social capital of the community? Is the world better or worse for his life? He has all his life been disseminating the germs of a soul-blight more infectious and deadly ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... strong arm to help them! No! no!—I have done my duty to those who ever did their duty to me, and I trust that my own conscience will prove my reward, and check that repining which we are too apt to feel when it pleases Heaven to blight what appears to be our fairest prospects ... I say, my good fellow," said Alfred, after a while, to a man in a boat, "what is the name of that ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... have trod— Flowers in the desert bloom; and fields, for God, Are white to harvest. Skeptics may ignore; Yet on the conquering Word, from shore to shore, Like flaming chariot, rolls. Ask ocean isles, And plains of Ind, where ceaseless summer smiles; Speak to far frozen wastes, where winter's blight Remains;—they tell the love, attest the might Of Him whose messengers across the wave To them ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... thou spearhead in my side, Thy father's first-born, and his shame; Unstable as the rolling tide, A blight has fall'n upon thy name. Decay shall follow thee and thine. Go, outcast of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... returned, Charles Barclay was on his way to Canada, vigorously intent on the new life before him. Agnes drew strength and comfort from the steadfast look of her brother's eyes, as he whispered to her, "Don't fear. Trust God, and be patient." The blight fell away from her, after that. If she was never a light-hearted girl again, she became something even sweeter and nobler. They never talked together about him, for the father had forbidden it; and, indeed, they needed not. Openly, and before them all, Everett would say when he heard from his friend. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... attic contents were to furnish forth the Cape Cod cottage with no unnecessary additions. Here were eight cane-seated chairs of the late Empire years. Four had been painted a dirty brown to simulate black walnut; four represented the white enamel blight which, in turn, had chipped enough to display the "grained" painting of the golden oak years beneath. A scraper applied to a leg revealed the mellow tone of honey-colored maple. Patience and paint ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... parts of the world it is not so. In Blantyre, for example, according to MacDonald, "to be called a liar is rather a compliment." Once more: English sentiment is such that the mere suspicion of incontinence on the part of a woman is enough to blight her life; but there are peoples whose sentiments entail no such effect, and, in some cases, a reverse effect is produced: "Unchastity is, with the Wetyaks, a virtue." It seems, then, that in respect of all the leading divisions of human conduct, different races of men, and the same races at different ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... and we gather the whole of creation into our own pained being—"the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now." The world you complain of as impure and wrong is not God's world, but your world; the blight, the dullness, the blank, are all your own. The light which is in you has become darkness, and therefore ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... fortiori all argumentative works on history or on administrative policy of any kind. The old Tartar blood and Tartar sympathies of the First August Emperor must surely re-appear in a policy so incompatible with all orthodox teaching? In one sense the blight upon Chinese civilization was akin to the blight cast upon that of Eastern Europe 500 years ago by the "unspeakable Turk." The new ruler boldly said: "The world begins afresh, with me. No posthumous condemnatory titles for me! My successor will be 'August Emperor Number Two,' ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... other people happy. I breathe through his lips, I live in his life, his passions are my own; and it is impossible for me to know noble and pure emotions excepting in the heart of this being unsoiled by crime. You have your fancies, here I show you mine. In exchange for the blight which society has brought upon me, I give it a man of honor, and enter upon a struggle with destiny; do you wish to be of ...
— Vautrin • Honore de Balzac
... hospitality, gave him a large popularity; but his alliance with President Johnson was fatal to his political fortunes. He had placed himself in a position from which he could not with grace retreat, and to go forward in which was still further to blight his hopes of promotion in his party. It was an extremely mortifying fact to Mr. Raymond that with the power of the Administration behind him he could on a test question secure the support of only one Republican member, and he a colleague who was bound to him by ties ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... management. They form a long covered walk, with a row of plantains on the W. side, to diminish the effects of the hot winds, but even with this screen, the fruit on that side are inferior to that on the opposite trellis. Easterly winds, again, being moist, blight these and other plants, by favouring the abundant increase of insects, and causing the leaves to curl and fall off; and against this evil there is no remedy. With a clear sky the mischief is not great; under a cloudy one the prevalence of such winds is fatal ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... blind loyalty. He felt that herein lay his own real danger. Yes, to bolt again, as he had done that time before, would be an easy way out. But its selfishness was too obvious. He could not do it. To do so would be to drag them in his train of disaster, to blight their lives and leave them under the ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... his eye Grew kindled with a fierce and flaming blight, Red-lowering like the sky, When, heralding the tempest in his might, The muttering clouds march forth and form on high. With sable banners and grim majesty. Beneath his frowning brow a shaft of fire, That told the lurking ire, Shot ever forth, outflashing ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... moans from home on branch in morning light, * But shakes my very frame with sorrow's killing might: No lover sigheth for his love or gladdeth heart * To meet his mate, but breeds in me redoubled blight I bear my plaint to one who has no ruth for me, * Ah me, how Love can part man's mortal ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... blight of sorrow's smart, Her woman's heart oft faileth, She moaneth not but with fond wiles Her pain in smiles she veileth; So sings she through the live-long night, Till hope's bright light appeareth, Which glittering like a radiant eye, Through dawn's ...
— Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century • Edmund O. Jones
... Felicia agreed. "But I'd much better go after I get through telling her what I'm going to pretend she is! She's exactly like the Black Blight—that horrid black thing that makes the green leaves droop and the gay little flowers shrivel up—there's only one thing to do to keep it from killing the whole garden—that's to burn ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... the blight of hell rest upon you both!" said the Countess, rushing to the door. But she returned. "Mr. Thwaite," she said, "I will trouble you at once to leave the house, and never more ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... the subject; I've felt the influence of this nocturnal blight upon our city, but I never thought to analyse it before. I can see now that your 'Man About Town' should have been classified long ago. In his wake spring up wine agents and cloak models; and the orchestra plays 'Let's ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... written in no spirit of vindictiveness, for all who give the subject consideration must concede that far too serious is the condition of that civilized government in which the spirit of unrestrained outlawry constantly increases in violence, and casts its blight over a continually growing area of territory. We plead not for the colored people alone, but for all victims of the terrible injustice which puts men and women to death without form of law. During the year 1894, there were 132 persons executed ...
— The Red Record - Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... about the stage-door, to find his enemy or not to find him, as the case might be, but in either event to eat his heart in jealousy and impatience. When he found him he burned to insult him by asking him what tailor he advertised, or by addressing him as the Housemaid's Terror or the Nursegirl's Blight. He ground tegmenta of 'Maud' between his teeth as he looked at him. 'His essences turn the live air sick,' and 'that oiled and curled Assyrian bull, smelling of musk and of insolence.' And it happened one night ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... struggle, in an epoch of wild literary competition, to obtain novelty of material. The varieties of aspect and color in healthy fruit, be it sweet or sour, may be within certain limits described exhaustively. Not so the blotches of its conceivable blight: and while the symmetries of integral human character can only be traced by harmonious and tender skill, like the branches of a living tree, the faults and gaps of one gnawed away by corroding accident can be shuffled ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... may seem victorious, War may waste and famine blight, Still from out the conflict glorious, Mind ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... of which I had not thought it capable. 'That is so to an extent of which you do not dream. No man likes to have his hand forced, especially by one whom he regards—may I say it?—as a possible rival. But I will tell you this much. If the blight which has fallen on my life is likely to continue, I would not wish,— God forbid that I should wish to join her fate with mine,—not for all that the world could ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... from time to time supplied labour to these islands, so that the besetting trouble of the latter is nonexistent there." He adds: "I am decidedly of opinion that some such scheme as this is the only cure for the blight that has fallen on the island of Principe." It would require greater local knowledge than any to which the writer of the present article can pretend to discuss the merits of this proposal, but at first sight it would certainly ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... all!" said Allan heartily. "I am glad that I could put that matter straight for you. It would blight like black frost to have Stonewall Jackson's hand and mind set against you—and Richard Cleave is not the least ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... "'The Blight of Respectability,' by Geoffrey Mortimer, is well worth reading, and by more of us, perhaps, than imagine it. The shoddy god has votaries in England, where one would least expect ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... fruit so that spores of fungi have difficulty in finding foothold. But if water brings fogs, dews and humidity, as does the Pacific, grapes must be planted inland; otherwise leaf, bloom and fruit are born in the blight of fungi. The benign influences of water are felt in the eastern grape regions at distances of one to four miles, seldom farther. These narrow belts about the eastern waters are bounded on the landward side by high bluffs over which many showers fail to ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... are laid along the waters of the Cumberland, the lair of moonshiner and feudsman. The knight is a moonshiner's son, and the heroine a beautiful girl perversely christened "The Blight." Two impetuous young Southerners fall under the spell of "The Blight's" charms and she learns what a large part jealousy and pistols have in the love making of ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... accomplished the evil they had set out to do, made shift to sail away. And then, just after the palms of the island had sunk from sight below the water's edge, the unspeakable had happened. The Death that was not Death had arisen from out the sea and stood before the ship, and over it, and the blight of the thing lay along the decks like mould, and the ship sweated in the terror of that which ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... prejudices, there can be but one answer to that question. Oriental superstition cast its blight upon the fair field of science, whatever compensation it may or may not have brought in other fields. But we must be on our guard lest we overestimate or incorrectly estimate this influence. Posterity, in glancing ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Boulogne, in happier times, had been a watering place, less fashionable than some on the French coast, but the pleasant resort of many in search of health and pleasure. And like Folkestone it had suffered the blight of war. The war had laid its heavy hand upon the port. It ruled everything; it was omnipresent. From the moment when we came into full view of the harbor it was impossible to think ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... Leading them astray, No false heart within That would them bewray, Nought to tempt them in An evil way; And if canker come and blight, Nought will ever ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... event:—Angela Bradley's marriage with Errington and Katherine's with Lord de Burgh,—might come off on the same day, even in the same church: that would be a culmination of excitement! Now some mysterious blight had fallen on all her schemes. What had happened? What could they have quarrelled about? Then when Katherine emerged from her refuge she was hopelessly mysterious; there was no penetrating the reserve ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... heard the strokes of the midnight bell As they thrilled the quiet air, And saw the soft, white curtains wave In the lamp's uncertain glare; And felt the breath of the July night, Laden with fragrance and warmth and blight. ...
— Indian Legends and Other Poems • Mary Gardiner Horsford
... about their war-time coffee, made from chicory and acorns, had they once tasted the Java product. Yet I was assured that this was the choicest coffee grown in Java. I might add that, as a result of a blight which all but ruined the industry in the '70s, fifty-two per cent of the total acreage of coffee plantations in the island is now planted with the African species, called Coffea robusta, and thirteen per cent with another African species, Coffea liberia, ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... economic effects of Commercial Selection in soils and sites, and by Malthus of a competition for subsistence which he attributed to pressure of population on available subsistence, had already brought political science into that unbreathable atmosphere of fatalism which is the characteristic blight of Darwinism. Long before Darwin published a line, the Ricardo-Malthusian economists were preaching the fatalistic Wages Fund doctrine, and assuring the workers that Trade Unionism is a vain defiance of the inexorable laws of political economy, just as the Neo-Darwinians ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... knows they are bad enough, but they are by no means so bad as you thought. And I'm your wife, Stephen. That thing you did was brutal; those men will talk. I was guilty, no doubt, in my thoughts, but I'm young, and you have no right to blight my life and my reputation—yes, and yours—by a thing like that. We will have to meet those men. What are you going ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... session will be held after the meeting, as many are here to hear the paper on the chestnut blight, so we will proceed at once to the order of business and listen to the ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... sometimes the tangle descends on us like a net of blight on a rose-bush. There is then an instant choice for us between courage to cut loose, and desperation if we do not. But not many men are trained to courage; young women are trained to cowardice. For them to front ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sake, don't be too hasty! Give me opportunity for explanation. I admit that I did wrong, but there are extenuating circumstances. Let me explain, I entreat you, before you thus blight my ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... you must, but never hate: Man is but grass and hate is blight, The sun will scorch you soon or late, Die wholesome then, ...
— Country Sentiment • Robert Graves
... Then came the usual blight to all such enterprises: a spy or a traitor revealed everything to Wirz. One day a guard came in, seized Baker and took him out. What was done with him I know not; we never heard of him after he ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... slowly and silently they rode home, - Rohtraut, Beauty Rohtraut! The boy was lost in his delight: 'And, wert thou Empress this very night, I would not heed or feel the blight; Ye thousand leaves of the wild wood wist How Beauty Rohtraut's mouth I ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... do they serve Him?" inquired the child. "If He is the great God Father Jamay teaches He can do everything, have everything. It is all His. Then why does He not keep people well, so they can work, and not blight the crops with fierce storms. Sometimes great fields of maize are swept down. And the little children die; the Indians kill each other, and at times the white ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... Mendelssohn, because of the latitudinarian habits of the Maskilim, who "despise the counsel of their betters, and go after the dictates of their hearts."[35] Both saw in Haskalah a deadly foe to their dearest ideals, a blight upon their most cherished hopes, and, like Elizabeta Petrovna, they would not derive even a benefit from the enemies ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... And yet I must choose This time to vex thee. O, I am the curse And blight of the existence, which to bless Is all my thought! Alarcos, dear Alarcos, I pray thee pardon me. I am so wretched: This fell suspense is like a frightful dream Wherein we fall from heights, yet never reach The bottomless abyss. It wastes my spirit, Wears down my life, ...
— Count Alarcos - A Tragedy • Benjamin Disraeli
... if the state assumed control of industry the blight of business could be removed. But in the transfer we would not necessarily gain opportunity to enjoy the adventure which industry holds out. Industry as a creative experience, it is safe to predict, would be as rare a personal experience ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... imagination from height to height, but the small boulders of difficulty trip them up, for they are hopelessly unpractical; they have neither strength of purpose nor fortitude, and their best-laid schemes are always frustrated at the critical moment, by either the incurable blight of vacillation, or by the determination to amplify their scheme ere it has proved successful, sacrificing probable results for ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... in especial, Rudolph. That would be precisely the theme of my story of the real Lichfield if I were ever bold enough to write it. There seems to be a sort of blight upon Lichfield. Oh, yes! it would be unfair, perhaps, to contrast it with the bigger Southern cities, like Richmond and Atlanta and New Orleans; but even the inhabitants of smaller Southern towns are beginning to buy excursion ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... Johannesburg, little white landmarks like milestones made their appearance, and these, we were told, were new claims pegged out. The thought suggested itself that this part of South Africa is in some respects a wicked country, with, it would almost seem, a blight resting on it: sickness, to both man and beast, is always stalking round; drought is a constant scourge to agriculture; the locust plagues ruin those crops and fruit that hailstones and scarcity of water ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... fair," replied Godwin; "and worthy of you, who are the most honest of men. Yet, Wulf, I am troubled. See you, my brother, have ever brethren loved each other as we do? And now must the shadow of a woman fall upon and blight that love which is so ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... that frowning and melancholy house in a backwater of London's jarring tide, where the dust collects, and sunlight has a struggle to make two ends meet, and cold penetrates like a dagger, and fog hangs like a pall, and the blight of ages clings to stone and brick, to window and woodwork, with an adhesive mournfulness which suggests the hatchment of Melpomene. Even the hand of Grinling Gibbons at the porch does not prevent one from recalling Crabbe's ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... think that much good may be done by its investigation. The really skilful and judicious steer clear of it from a fear of compromising their credit for commonsense; and while the caution necessarily attendant upon habitual scientific studies, dissuades the best men from meddling with that which may blight their hardly-earned laurels, the public is left to be swayed to and fro by an under-current of fallacious half-truths, far more seductive and dangerous than absolute falsehoods. We cannot undertake to say, thus ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... longer saw the first-line troops, the army in battle array. Instead he saw the base camps, the non-combatant followers of the army, a great deal that was confused and sordid, very little that was glorious or fine. It might conceivably have been possible for him to curse the whole army and cast a blight upon its enterprise, when his eyes rested only on the camp-followers, the baggage trains, the mobs of cattle, the maimed and unfit men; when the fine show of the fighters was out of sight. Plainly if a curse of any ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... by the goblins of the abyss. Others believed that she concealed herself in the top of the highest mountain that was near them, and by a commerce with invisible, malignant beings, still exercised the same gloomy temper in more potent, and therefore more inauspicious harm. The blight that overspread the meadows, the destructive contagion that diffused itself among the flocks, the raging tempest that rooted up the oak, when the thunder roared among the hills, and the lightning flashed from ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... love as she gives you. The man doesn't live who is clean enough in heart and in life to be worthy of such a treasure. But I do expect you to be, Felix, and I must assure myself that you are, clean enough and honorable enough not to blight all the rest of her life. What is past is past, but from now on there must be nothing that will not bear the ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly |
