"Decay" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... company, that he is the Prince of Wales, and that he is the Almighty. Moral perversion is a common symptom, and the patient is often guilty of criminal assaults, indecent exposures, bigamous marriages, and the like. It is accompanied with progressive bodily and mental decay. Women are comparatively rarely affected by it, and it generally commences in men about middle age, and its duration is from a few months to three years. It is commonly parasyphilitic in origin. Paralytic symptoms first appear in the tongue, lips, and face; the speech becomes thick and hesitating. ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... their connections, nor success.' Horace Walpole's Letters, vi. 134. Of one Southwark election Mrs. Piozzi writes (Anec. p. 214):—'A Borough election once showed me Mr. Johnson's toleration of boisterous mirth. A rough fellow, a hatter by trade, seeing his beaver in a state of decay seized it suddenly with one hand, and clapping him on the back with the other. "Ah, Master Johnson," says he, "this is no time to be thinking about hats." "No, no, Sir," replies our doctor in a cheerful tone, "hats are of no use now, as you say, except to throw up in the air and ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... galleries or the airing-courts, nursing their morbid irritability, while others lounged on the benches or crept into corners, and so drifted downwards through the dreary stages of physical and mental decay. It does not require much consideration to show that it would tend to improve all such patients, both in their bodily and mental health, if they were engaged in some regular occupation during a reasonable ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... for that century we must consider as the decay of old ways of believing, the preparation afar off for new, better, and wider ways an inevitable thing. We will not blame men for it; we will lament their hard fate. We will understand that destruction of old forms is not destruction of everlasting ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... exist without the presence of this all-important insect. She is just as necessary to its welfare, as the soul is to the body, for a colony without a queen must as certainly perish, as a body without the spirit hasten to inevitable decay. ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... air and the sky and sun; therefore, cotton—and not corn, which draws its life from the clay and mud and decay which ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... George More, whose patience God hath been pleased to exercise with many temporal crosses; I have maintained my own mother, whom it hath pleased God, after a plentiful fortune in her younger days, to bring to great decay in her very old age. I have quieted the consciences of many, that have groaned under the burden of a wounded spirit, whose prayers I hope are available for me. I cannot plead innocency of life, especially of my youth; but I am to be judged by a merciful God, who ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... however noblie donne, And thoughts do as themselves decay; But wise words, taught in numbers for to runne Recorded by the Muses, live for ay; Ne may with storming showers be washt away, Ne bitter breathing windes with harmful blast, Nor age, nor envie, shall them ever ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... the boys used to declaim, their Yankee hearts throbbing under their roundabouts? 'Happy, proud America!' Somehow in that way. 'Cursed, abased America!' better if they had said. Look at her, in the warm vigor of her youth, most vigorous in decay! Look at the dregs of nations, creeds, religions, fermenting together! As for the theory of self-government, it will muddle down here, as in the three great archetypes of the experiment, into ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... name," she murmured, "though the sound of it is beautiful. Rouille! It signifies, for the moment, the decay of hopes, a mould of rust obscuring ambition. But in a little while the steel of your courage will shine bright once more. I am Madame Gilbert; my husband was of the Territorial Army—a Captain also." She had thought to have made him a Colonel on General Castelnau's ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... when the monument on Grand Island had fallen into decay, Hushiel saw the cornerstone of the dream city, Ararat, displayed in one of the rooms of the Buffalo Historical Society. He was no longer a sensitive boy, yet the tears sprang to his eyes as he re-read the old inscription which you may still ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... velvet and satin, and hunting suits of scarlet—all faded and falling to pieces—stood the picture of Tyrrel Rawdon, with its face turned to the wall. The Squire made a motion to his descendant, and the young American tenderly turned it to the light. There was no decay on those painted lineaments. The almost boyish face, with its loving eyes and laughing mouth, was still twenty-four years old; and with a look of pride and affection the Squire lifted the picture and placed it in the hands of the Tyrrel ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... lighted in the tripod-pan, to keep the Banqueting-Hall as warm as circumstances would admit. As soon as the old gentleman's anxieties were set at rest the rooms were shut up again, and "Freeze-your-Bones" was once more abandoned for weeks and weeks together to damp, desolation, and decay. The last of these temporary migrations had taken place only a few days since; the admiral had satisfied himself that the rooms in the east wing were none the worse for the absence of their master, and he might now be safely reckoned ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... no new phase in human experience. It characterised all the civilisations of ancient times, at the height of their prosperity, and was really the beginning of their decay. ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... Derbend better than a coffin to me? Does not my heart feel its decay, without power to escape it? Here is only my corpse: my ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... ought to be kept slightly tempered with warmth, both night and day, a condition very favorable to the introduction and change of atmospheric currents. The invigorating tendencies of a dry, pure atmosphere are remarkably beneficial, while air charged with moisture and decay is exceedingly baneful, introducing diseases under ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... forcibly struck me. I felt that I was on the lands of a rich, intelligent, and beneficent proprietor. Entering the park, and passing before the manor-house, the contrast between the neglect and the decay of the absentee's stately Hall and the smiling homes of his villagers ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... upon the Territories of the Goilaus, and having forced them to share this delightful Country, settled themselves there under the Name of Kranfs. These new Conquerors were for some Time molested by the Manoris, but as Luxury had brought their flourishing Empire to Decay, the Kranfs forced them to desist, and remained in quiet Possession of ...
— The Amours of Zeokinizul, King of the Kofirans - Translated from the Arabic of the famous Traveller Krinelbol • Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crbillon
... earth and was so hot that not a single one of the now existing plants and living beings could then exist, the life in that ocean and on its bottom was so infinitely grand in its proportions that men can now form no adequate conception of the same. The force of growth as well as of decay was immense, and all that was grown or made by its decay only increased ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... another and distant quarter of the globe. This, politically and commercially speaking, was a great error; but it has been committed, and it would be a greater error to leave those people, now free British subjects, and the large British capital there vested, to decay, misery, and general deterioration. They must be supported, and it is fortunate that they can be supported, through their present difficulties, without inflicting a grievous wrong on Africa, by taking her children from her by wholesale to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... asunder. Plato and Carlyle are both possessed with the idea that they are living in a degenerate age, and they attribute its degeneracy to the same causes:—Laissez faire; the growth of luxury; the effeminate preference of Lydian to Dorian airs in music, education, and life; the decay of the Spartan and growth of the Corinthian spirit; the habit of lawlessness culminating in the excesses of Democracy, which they describe in language as nearly identical as the difference of the ages and circumstances admit. They propose ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... my bosom grieves, To view thy sadly drooping leaves: For, while their tender tints decay, The rose of Fancy fades away! As pilgrims, who, with zealous care, Some little treasur'd relic bear, To re-assure the doubtful mind, When pausing memory looks behind; I, from a more enlighten'd shrine, Had made this sweet memento mine: But, lo! its fainting head reclines; It folds ...
— Poems • Matilda Betham
... disregard for private interests, and for the moral welfare and improvement of the people, both Greece and Rome destroyed the vital elements on which the prosperity of nations rests, and perished by the decay of families and the depopulation of the country. They survive not in their institutions, but in their ideas, and by their ideas, especially on the art ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... would fright my ear With the destruction and decay Of things familiar and dear, And vaunt of a swift-running day That sweeps the fair old Past away; Whatever else be strange and new, All other things may go or stay, So that there ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... with some difficulty that he found the way to his own house, which he approached with silent awe, expecting every moment to hear the shrill voice of Dame Van Winkle. He found the house gone to decay—the roof fallen in, the windows shattered, and the doors off the hinges. A half-starved dog that looked like Wolf was skulking about it. Rip called him by name, but the cur snarled, showed his teeth, and passed on. This was an unkind cut indeed. ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... little good to tell of the White man's treatment of them. Self-government by the stronger people always falls hard on the weaker, and Mission after Mission has been extinguished by the enmity of the surrounding Whites and the corruption and decay of the Indians. A Moravian Mission has been actually persecuted. Every here and there some good man has arisen and done a good work on those immediately around him, and at the present time there are some Indians living upon the reserves ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... to think that even in decay there's life," the painter murmured. "The falling apart of rotten wood breeds sentiency, there's force and motion in the falling of a dying leaf, in the breaking up and crumbling of everything indeed. ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... unlovely in the worldliness that ingulfed her and bore her onward. I do not know that there is anything singular in her history. But the pain of it to us was in the certainty—and it seemed so near—that in the decay of her higher life, in the hardening process of a material existence, in the transfer of all her interest to the trivial and sensuous gratifications—time, mind, heart, ambition, all fixed on them—we should never regain our Margaret. What I saw in a vision of her future was a ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... little. Another said this must be the very place where Lot's wife was turned into a pillar of salt, and the pillar been broken up and spread around the country. He said if a man was to die he would never decay on account of the salt. Thus the talk went on, and it seemed as if there were not bad words enough in the language to properly express their contempt and bad opinion of such a country as this. They treated me to some of their meat, a little better ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... He thought there was a pleasing contrast between Adelaide and myself, referred to Diana, mentioned that my hair was remarkably thick, and proceeded with a dissertation on the growth and decay of the hair, when she returned with ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... a "find" of more than 200 Jersey Gaulish coins, which are in the possession of R. R. Lempriere, Esq. They were turned up by the plough on his manor of Rozel; and whatever covering had enclosed them had either gone to decay, or become broken up, as they were quite loose. He had cleaned a few of them. Even to the eye the metallic composition varied greatly—some being of the colour of silver, and some lowering to that ...
— The Coinages of the Channel Islands • B. Lowsley
... all, this is nothing, in fact, but what is perfectly natural; and, in this respect, marriage only follows the eternal law of nature in all earthly existence. Every form of life carries in itself decay and dissolution—a poisonous snake-king[3] gnaws even at the root ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... spirit live and act and have a body. Let our enemies prevail over our armies; let them destroy; yet shall all that is good in our institution be preserved even by our enemies; for a true idea is imperishable and nothing can decay but ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... exercised with a view to individual immortality. That seemed to me to mean so much that I've built up quite a little creed on it. It's the principle, isn't it, upon which the whole scheme of the world hinges? A million leaves fall and decay to enrich the soil wherefrom two million more may spring. An infinity of little shell-fish die, and the ages grind their shells to powder to make the sands and the chalk cliffs. Countless raindrops sacrifice their identity ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... it; yea, will itself be a spring of life, in the very heart of him that drinks it. Ah! it will be such a preservative also to spiritual health, as that by its virtue the soul shall for ever be kept, I say, the soul that drinks it, from total and final decay; it shall be in them a well of living water, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... which had been among the family possessions for about a quarter of a century. It had once been a fine equipage, and had been drawn by a spirited team in the days before Felipe Delcasar lost all his money, but now it had a look of decay, and the team consisted of a couple of rough coated, low-headed brutes, one of which was noticeably smaller than the other. The coachman was a ragged native who did odd jobs ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen in decay with thee, then thou shalt relieve him, yea, though he be a stranger or a sojourner, that he may live with thee: Take thou no interest of him, or increase; but fear thy God that thy brother may live with thee. Thou shalt not give him any ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... might not have been the case. At any rate there was the body of a man in a wonderful state of preservation, kept from decay by the action of the peat; and, judging from the clothing, the body must have been in its position there for many ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... still shown as the shop which Peter occupied while he was there. It is a small wooden building, leaning and bent with age and decrepitude and darkened by exposure and time. Within the last half century, however, in order to save so curious a relic from farther decay, the proprietors of the place have constructed around and over it an outer building of brick, which incloses the hut itself like a case. The sides of the outer building are formed of large, open arches, which allow the hut within to be seen. The ground on which the hut stands has also been ...
— Peter the Great • Jacob Abbott
... of poisoning by poisons so slow in their operation as to make the victim appear, to ordinary observers, as if dying from a gradual decay of nature, has been practised in all ages. Those who are curious in the matter may refer to Beckmann on secret poisons, in his History of Inventions, in which he has collected several instances of it from the Greek and Roman writers. Early in the sixteenth century the crime seems to ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... rough stone floor laid, on which the bundled or folded remains were placed and at least partially covered with earth and gravel. Other flat rocks were then laid over them, either directly on the earth or more probably supported by poles placed across, whose decay had allowed them to fall into the confusion ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... many minutes, when a break in the wood gave me a view of the old mansion, and at once dispelled the illusion that was momentarily gaining upon me. "They could not be the Callonbys." The house was old; and though it had once been a fine and handsome structure, exhibited now abundant traces of decay; the rich cornices which supported the roof had fallen in many places, and lay in fragments upon the terrace beneath; the portico of the door was half tumbling; and the architraves of the windows were broken and dismantled; the tall and once ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... was annexed to the ancient bounds of the empire." In accordance with this statement, the same historian entitles the first part of his history up to the victory over the Poles in 1672 the History of the Growth of the Othman Empire, and the remaining portion, The Decay of ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... indeed, trampled down by the living; the place thereof shall know them no more, for that place is not in the hearts of the survivors, for whose interest they have made way. But adversity and ruin point to the sepulchre, and it is not trodden on; to the chronicle, and it does not decay. Who would substitute the rush of a new nation, the struggle of an awakening power, for the dreamy sleep of Italy's desolation, for the sweet silence of melancholy thought, her twilight time of ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... to understand here that there were two courses of action still open to the disappointed capitalist confronted by the new peril of this real or alleged decay. First, he might have reversed his machine, so to speak, and started unwinding the long rope of dependence by which he had originally dragged the proletarian to his feet. In other words, he might have seen that the workmen had more ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... desolate—when their worldly comforts fail and their hopes decay, they are directed to return to God and put their trust in him; and also to bring with them, those for whom they feel interested—their helpless dear ones, and he hath promised them protection. "Leave thy fatherless children, and I will preserve them alive, ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... his own request was ordered to join Beauregard. S. D. Lee was absent from his corps by reason of a wound he had received at Nashville, and Hill was assigned to its temporary command. [Footnote: Id., pp. 1002, 1003, 1272, 1317.] The growing decay of discipline and organization was shown by the irregularity of reports, and for the few weeks the war still went on, Johnston had to content himself with abbreviated returns, which contained only the numbers ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... Ah, memory, make it clear— (It was not long ago, but yesterday,) So little and so helpless and so dear Let not the song be lost, the flower decay! His voice, his waking eyes, his gentle sleeping: The smallest things are safest in thy keeping. Sweet memory, keep our child with ...
— Music and Other Poems • Henry van Dyke
... the head of the social life of Worcester as a matter of course. I remember one night, when a party was breaking up, I said to the person next to me, in some jesting fashion: "I am sorry to see the decay of the old aristocracy." The Governor, who was getting his coat at the other end of the room, overheard the remark, and called out: "Who is lamenting ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... to Parliament—who knows? It is something of a risk, perhaps, to leave all this pretty coin here, but then it's a greater risk to carry it in the schooner"—he argued both ways—"and then, again, damp does not decay pure metal. But," thought Captain Brand, "suppose somebody should discover this little casket in the rock. Ah! that's not probable, for no soul besides myself knows of it, and even the very man who made the door did not ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... are rapidly diminishing. The 'Coligans,' once a numerous and powerful people, inhabiting the fertile region of Lake 'Colac,' are now reduced, all ages and sexes, under forty, and these are still on the decay. The Jarcoorts, inhabiting the country to the west of the great lake 'Carangermite,' once a very numerous and powerful people, are now reduced to under sixty. But time would fail, and I fear it would ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... nuisance. It is going through so much for so little. It is as bad as the campaign before a parliamentary election. It offends one's sense of proportion. In a well-regulated universe there would be no tedious process of decay, either before or after death. You would go about your daily avocation unconcerned and unwarned, and then at the moment appointed by an inscrutable Providence for your dissolution—phew!—and your clothes would remain standing ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... are, in Carolina, at least, four sorts. The Pitch-Pine, growing to a great Bigness, most commonly has but a short Leaf. Its Wood (being replete with abundance of Bitumen) is so durable, that it seems to suffer no Decay, tho' exposed to all Weathers, for many Ages; and is used in several Domestick and Plantation Uses. This Tree affords the four great Necessaries, Pitch, Tar, Rozin, and Turpentine; which two last are extracted by tapping, and the Heat of ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... became apparent that all orders and all parts of Germany were in a state of ferment. The next manifestation of the revolutionary spirit was the rebellion of the knights. This class, now in a state of moral and economic decay, had long survived any usefulness it had ever had. The rise of the cities, the aggrandizement of the princes, and the change to a commercial from a feudal society all worked to the disadvantage of the smaller nobility and gentry. ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Yet something more protects her; a certain common sense, which now and then very nearly achieves wit. For an instance—But yesterday a certain pompous lady lamented to her in my hearing (and with intention, as it seemed to me, who am grown suspicious), the rapid moral decay of Boston society. "Alas!" sighs my heroine; "but what a comfort, ma'am, to think that neither of us belongs to it!" Add to this that she has learning enough to equip ten precieuses—and hides it: has read Plato and can quote her Virgil by the page—but ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... designed for the nation over which it was to extend, to be able to connect himself with the future progress of an agile and ambitious people, was certainly a rare and happy fortune, and must be considered, when we claim superiority for him over those who were placed in the midst of apathy and decay. His influence upon us may be seen in the material, but still more distinctly in the social and moral action of the country. With those laws which here restrain turbulent forces and stimulate beneficent ones,—with the bright visions of peace and freedom which the unhappy of every ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... whose home and patrimony it had been; and her husband, a retired Austrian officer, and two grown-up daughters did not lighten her task. Every year the fortunes sank lower; the upper storey of the house was already falling into decay, and the fine old furniture passing into the brokers' or private buyers' hands. It still, however, afforded sufficiently comfortable, and, by reason of its very drawbacks, desirable quarters to Mr. Browning. ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... of the constitution—went all to pieces. First, decay appeared in the brace buttons; then the straps got out of order. They did say it was owing to the heels of the French-polished boots going down on one side, but the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... is clearly marked. No love but pure love burns on the altar of any soul, and any one who wishes may stop to kindle the fires or warm himself thereat. There is no bodily contact, no decay, no weakening. This love is enrapturing, uplifting, ever drawing the lover and the loved nearer to ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... which make tearless Lima, the strangest, saddest city thou can'st see. For Lima has taken the white veil; and there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro, this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new; admits not the cheerful greenness of complete decay; spreads over her broken ramparts the rigid pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its own distortions. I know that, to the common apprehension, this phenomenon of whiteness is not confessed to be the prime agent in exaggerating the terror of objects otherwise terrible; nor to the ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... ideal was performed in former times by these great men and more especially by those great men whom legend, myth and superstition converted into gods. But with the decay of the old faiths the only possible fruitful ideal left is the ideal upheld by Socialism, the ideal of the Co-operative Commonwealth in which the economic conditions will give birth to the highest, purest, most altruistic ethics the ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... few French chairs of tarnished gilt, a rifle in the corner, a presentation sword in a mahogany case, a few classical prints on the walls, and one or two iron deed-boxes marked "El Dorado Bank," were the principal objects. A mild flavor of dry decay and methylated spirits pervaded the apartment. Yet it was scrupulously clean and well kept, and a few clothes neatly brushed and folded on a chair bore witness to the servant's care. As Paul, however, glanced behind the sofa, he was concerned to see a coat, which had evidently ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... The windows, doors, mantle-pieces, bannisters, and every portable thing had been removed from the house by the blacks, who had squatted in the neighbourhood; even the chimneys had been taken down for the bricks. The swallows were the sole tenants; the barn had fallen a prey to decay and storms, and the roof lay comparatively uninjured at some distance on the ground. A pair of glistening eyes, peeping through a broken board at the end, showed me that the foxes had appropriated it to their own use. The horse-stable, coach-house, ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... they wont to put up with their plainness, hence the fancy trimmings. The development of the American pie is a curious analogy in this respect. We see in this the intricate working of human culture, its eternal strife for perfection. And perfection is synonymous with decay. The fare of the Carthusian monks, professed, stern vegetarians, underwent the same ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... and a wan but beautiful form, clasping an urn to her breast, appeared stretched on a litter, and was borne toward the spot. It was Helen, brought from the adjoining nunnery, where since her return to these once dear shores, now made a desert to her, she had languished in the gradual decay of the fragile bonds which alone fettered her mourning ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... happen that these roots sent down into the cavity of a decaying trunk may, after a time, become completely concealed within it, by the gradual formation and extension of new wood over the orifice of the cavity formed by the death and decay of the old wood. Such is presumed to be the explanation of a specimen of this kind in the possession of the writer, and taken from a cavity in an apparently solid block of rosewood; externally there were no marks to indicate the existence of a central ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... between the several savage tribes, leaving, occasionally, no vestige of once powerful nations and villages. Have we not seen in our day a once warlike and princely race—the Hurons— dwindle down, through successive decay, to what now ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... Mausolus, King of Caria, who made that noble sepulchre at Halicarnassus; while she lived, she lived in grief, and died of it, being worn out by it, for that opinion was always recent with her: but you cannot call that recent which has already begun to decay through time. Now the duty of a comforter is, to remove grief entirely, to quiet it, or draw it off as much as you can, or else to keep it under, and prevent its spreading any further, and to divert one's attention to other matters. There are some who think, with ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... I garnered autumn's gain, Out of her time my field was white with grain, The year gave up her secrets, to my woe. Forced and deflowered each sick season lay In mystery of increase and decay; I saw the sunset ere men see the day, Who am too wise in all I should ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... families of the same kind. There is thus a striking analogy, which has not escaped the philosophical biologist, between the ant colony and the cell colony which constitutes the body of a Metazoan animal; and many of the laws that control the cellular origin, development, growth, reproduction, and decay of the individual Metazoan, are seen to hold good also of the ant society regarded as an individual of a higher order. As in the case of the individual animal, no further purpose of the colony can be detected than that of maintaining itself in the face of a constantly changing environment ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... head was white with years of wisdom and experience, spoke to the despairing assemblage of creatures. From his lofty perch above the world the Eagle had looked down upon centuries of change and decay. He knew every force of nature and all the strange things of life. The hoary-headed sage said that the Good Hunter could not be restored until his scalp was found. Then all the animals clamored that they ...
— The Curious Book of Birds • Abbie Farwell Brown
... never expected to act at all. No one counted on your awakening. No one dreamt you would ever awake. The Council had surrounded you with antiseptic conditions. As a matter of fact, we thought that you were dead—a mere arrest of decay. And—but it is too complex. We dare not suddenly—-while you are still ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... year 1786, as will be remembered, being then poor and in debt, he declined another election to the governorship, and set himself to the task of repairing his private fortunes, so sadly fallen to decay under the noble neglect imposed by his long service of the public. One of his kinsmen has left on record a pleasant anecdote to the effect that the orator happened to mention at that time to a friend how anxious he was under the great burden of his debts. "Go back ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... vessels, and thereafter it was not worth while to take the blubber to Spitzbergen to be boiled; and the different nations, having carried home their coppers, left the apparatus of those fishing stations to decay. ...
— Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage • Richard Hakluyt
... followed, have produced? Have they never visited that neighbouring country, which still presents to the eye, even of a passing stranger, the signs of a great dissolution and renovation of society? Have they never walked by those stately mansions, now sinking into decay, and portioned out into lodging rooms, which line the silent streets of the Faubourg St Germain? Have they never seen the ruins of those castles whose terraces and gardens overhang the Loire? Have they never heard that from those ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... lighten the burden which was pressing her down to the grave. But, poor child, she was never again the same light-hearted girl. She grew pale and thin and in the hectic flush and faltering tread I read the death sign of early decay, and I felt that my misguided young friend was slowly dying of a broken heart. Then there came a day when we were summoned to her dying bed. Her brothers and sisters were present; all their resentment against her had vanished in the presence of death. She was their dear sister about ...
— Trial and Triumph • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... materialist, looking outward, sees that the world is made up of force-driven matter, of gas, carbon and mineral; and he says, "Even so am I made up." He studies an object, sees that it has its appointed cycle of growth and decay, and concludes, "Even so do I appear and vanish." To him the world is the only reality, and the world perishes, and man is but a part ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... remarking upon the great number that were in ruins, the officer replied that it was considered so much more meritorious an action to build a pagoda than to repair one that, after the death of the founder, they were generally suffered to fall into decay. ...
— On the Irrawaddy - A Story of the First Burmese War • G. A. Henty
... disgraced by the characteristics of a slavish populace, a mean selfishness, a mad frivolity, and fawning adulation on the ruler who dispenses panem et circenses. Such has been the course of many a political reaction, from the time of degenerate Athens and imperial Rome down to the decay of Medicean Florence and the orgies of ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... the late invasion, the persons who are objects of the grant of public money now before you had so diverted the supply of the pious funds of culture and population, that everywhere the reservoirs were fallen into a miserable decay.[39] But after those domestic enemies had provoked the entry of a cruel foreign foe into the country, he did not leave it, until his revenge had completed the destruction begun by their avarice. Few, very few indeed, of these magazines of water that are not either totally destroyed, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... in the impotence of rottenness, they lie outstretched over knoll and hollow, like moldering reptiles of the primeval world, while around, and on and through them, springs the young growth that fattens on their decay—the forest devouring its own dead. Or, to turn from its funereal shade to the light and life of the open woodland, the sheen of sparkling lakes, and mountains basking in the glory of the summer noon, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... produced, according to Theophrastus, by heat acting upon moisture. For this reason the hottest and driest regions of the earth produce the most aromatic perfumes, because the sun dries up that moisture which causes most substances to decay. ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... my mouth. And I have no device to aid me. But it were easier, when I long for a meal, to escape my own thoughts than them, so swiftly do they fly through the air. But if haply they do leave me a morsel of food it reeks of decay and the stench is unendurable, nor could any mortal bear to draw near even for a moment, no, not if his heart were wrought of adamant. But necessity, bitter and insatiate, compels me to abide and abiding to put food in my cursed ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... well appeareth this day, To fetch to thy fold thy first sheep going astray. Most mighty Maker, thou castest not yet away Thy sinful servant, which hath done most offence. It is not thy mind for ever I should decay, But thou reservest me, of thy benevolence, And hast provided for me a recompence, By thy appointment, like as I have received In thy strong promise here openly pronounced. This goodness, dear Lord, is of me undeserved, I so declining ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... faced the sea, and I alighted to watch the steaming horses being replaced by a trio of fresh ones. The place was Dadendal, I was informed, and the proprietor of the place, when I entered and tossed off a liqueur-glass of cognac, pointed out to me a row of granite buildings fallen much to decay as the ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... first went into the past to look for treasure. It is a treasure buried in Arden Castle by the sea, which is their home. They want the treasure to restore the splendor of the old Castle, which in your time is fallen into ruin and decay, and to mend the houses of the tenants, and to do good to the poor and needy. But you know that now they have used their magic to get back their father, and can no longer use it to look for treasure. But your magic will hold. And if you lay out ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... boys used to declaim, their Yankee hearts throbbing under their round-aborts? 'Happy, proud America!' Somehow in that way. 'Cursed, abased America!' better if they had said. Look at her, in the warm vigour of her youth, most vigorous in decay! Look at the germs and dregs of nations, creeds, religions, fermenting together! As for the theory of self-government, it will muddle down here, as in the three great archetypes of the experiment, into a paling, ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... it said that too much brushing will injure the teeth, but don't you believe it! The sooner you become accustomed to a moderately stiff brush, that will do its work well and thoroughly, the better. All foreign matter must be constantly removed, else decay will come as sure as fate. A perfect state of cleanliness cannot be unless the teeth have proper and constant attention. By this I do not mean that you must cease all other occupations and take up that of eternal scrubbing. Simply keep your teeth clean. Toothpicks must not be used ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... house of Virginia's Parliament, in session at Williamsburg, became exercised about the tobacco trade and "Resolved, That an humble address of this house be presented to His Majesty, and a Petition to the Parliament of Great Britain; representing the distressed state and decay of our Tobacco Trade, occasioned by the Restraint on our Export; which must, if not speedily remedied, destroy our Staple; and there being no other expedient left for Preservation of this Valuable Branch of the British Commerce, to beseech His Majesty and His Parliament, ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore
... and Pessimism, 33. How reconcile with life one bent on suicide? 38. Religious melancholy and its cure, 39. Decay of Natural Theology, 43. Instinctive antidotes to pessimism, 46. Religion involves belief in an unseen extension of the world, 51. Scientific positivism, 52. Doubt actuates conduct as much as belief does, 54. To deny ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... been a roadhouse with its roulette wheels, its bar, its dining tables and its champagne, but which now, barely furnished in only a few of its rooms, inhabited by mountain rats and fluttering bats and general decay for the most part, formed the uncomfortable ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... house, and a barouche-and-pair was waiting for us in the sunny road outside. We drove along a road that crossed the moor, until we came to a little village of scattered houses, with a fine old church—at one end of which an ancient sacristy seemed mouldering slowly to decay. We drove past the gates of two or three rather important houses, lying half-hidden in their gardens, and then turned sharply off into a road that went up a hill, nearly at the top of which we came to a pair of noble old carved iron gates, surmounted with a ...
— Milly Darrell and Other Tales • M. E. Braddon
... that never tires When human strength gives way— There is a love that never fails When earthly loves decay." ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... merrier multitude; White-armed Nuala, Aengus of the birds, Feacra of the hurtling foam, and him Who is the ruler of the Western Host, Finvarra, and their Land of Heart's Desire, Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, Time an endless song. I kiss you and the world ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... vast labours our horizon has broadened beyond the backstairs of the Palace and the benches of the Senate House in Rome to the wide lands north and east and south of the Mediterranean, and we have begun to realize the true achievements of the Empire. The old theory of an age of despotism and decay has been overthrown, and the believer in human nature can now feel confident that, whatever their limitations, the men of the Empire wrought for the betterment and the ...
— The Romanization of Roman Britain • F. Haverfield
... inlaid with patines of bright gold. There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st But in his motion like an angel sings, Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims. Such harmony is in immortal souls; But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in, we cannot ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... tree. I will wear you for my crown; I will decorate with you my harp and my quiver; and when the great Roman conquerors lead up the triumphal pomp to the Capitol, you shall be woven into wreaths for their brows. And, as eternal youth is mine, you also shall be always green, and your leaf know no decay." The nymph, now changed into a Laurel tree, bowed its head in ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... off, say'st thou? Decay of time, believe me Mark; for wit Is wine, and wine is poured into a cup Of sparkling gold, and not into a crack'd Old jug, and thou, illustrious cousin, art Become a broken ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... the midst of the ages. It is very composed of them. I can't think why they do it. Nor why I have written a real letter. If you write a real letter back, damme, I'll try to correspond with you. A thing unknown in this age. It is a consequence of the decay of faith; we cannot believe that the fellow will be at ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... you doing in London? Are you ripening as fast for the grave as I am? How should we lay out every moment for God? For some days I have had the symptoms of an inward consumptive decay—spitting of blood, etc. Thank God! I look at our ...
— Fletcher of Madeley • Brigadier Margaret Allen
... vain—the all-composing hour Resistless falls: the Muse obeys the power. She comes! she comes! the sable throne behold Of Night primeval and of Chaos old! Before her, Fancy's gilded clouds decay, And all its varying rainbows die away. Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires, The meteor drops, and in a flash expires. As one by one, at dread Medea's strain, The sickening stars fade off th' ethereal plain; As Argus' eyes, by ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... October night in the high wolds beyond Wiltshire, with a north wind chaunting of winter, with the old leaves letting go their hold one by one from branches and dropping down to decay, with a mournful sound of owls, and in fearsome loneliness, there trudged in broken boots and in wet and windy rags an old man, stooping low under a sack of emeralds. It were easy to see had you been travelling late on that inauspicious night, ...
— Tales of Three Hemispheres • Lord Dunsany
... sorrow came in the death of Elisabeth, the wise, gentle, and quiet invalid sister who had been always part of Mr. Keble's life, and seemed, above all, to diffuse about her an atmosphere of peace and holiness. After a gradual, almost imperceptible decay, she sank to sleep on the 7th of August 1860. Mrs. Keble's always frail health began to fail more and more, so that winters in a warmer climate became necessary. Dawlish, Penzance, and Torquay were resorted to in successive winters, ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... under the heading of "The Prison of Cervantes," calls attention to the alarming state of decay of the house in Argamasilla del Alba, in the cellar of which, as an extemporized dungeon, tradition asserts that Cervantes was imprisoned, and where he penned at least a portion of his work. It was ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... 'tis the Fashion now-a-days, if a Citizen get but a little Money, one goes to building Houses, and brick Walls; another must buy an Office for his Son, a third hoists up his Daughter's Topsail, and flaunts it away, much above her breeding; and these things make so many break, and cause the decay of Trading: but I am for the honest Dutch way of breeding their Children, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... Aurungzeb each erected scores of buildings that have survived the ravages of time and the more destructive work of greedy mercenaries in time of war. In and around Delhi are scores of these tombs in various stages of decay. Those which have been cared for are splendid specimens of the best architecture of ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... green fish, hewing them out of the frozen mass with the axe. The young man had fished here the previous summer, had cached the fish caught too late to dry in the sun, and they had remained where he left them for four or five months. Most of them had begun to decay before they froze, but that did not impair their value as dog food, though it rendered the cooking of them a disagreeable proceeding to white nostrils. This caching of food is a common thing amongst both natives and whites, and it is ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... anything, for it was so dingy, so battered, so broken, that its raison d'etre had come to be a matter of speculation. Into this seat I now inducted our visitor. He was as shabby as the funeral coach itself, but had kept up more gentility in his decay. I had not seen him for four years, and the lack of any change in his appearance surprised me. There he was, as well shaven, as threadbare, as jaunty and well-mannered, as in the old days when we used to play the siege of Troy, using an old packing-case for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... Fate had not spared her. The beautiful face—beautiful even in age and decay—changed suddenly as she looked at them—the mouth became distorted, the eyes fixed: and then the heavy head fell back upon the pillow—the paralysed form, wholly paralysed now, lay like a thing of stone. ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... grows and increases in size. Generation and regeneration take place through this layer. I have called it the girdle of perpetual youth. It never grows old. It is annually renewed. The heart of the old apple-tree may decay and disappear, indeed the tree may be reduced to a mere shell and many of its branches may die and fall, but the few apples which it still bears attest the fact that its cambium layer, at least over a part of its surface, ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... during the late war had produced such large emissions of paper money, that a considerable depreciation took place, and specie disappeared. The consequent rise of exchange, instead of being attributed to its true cause, was ascribed to the decay of trade. ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... natural world when things reach the highest point of development, they begin to decay or deteriorate; but this is not true in the spiritual world. Never in this life and possibly never in that life which is to come shall we reach the fulness of the type, or, in other words, the highest point of development. As the acorn or the little chick bears in its nature ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr
... into the considerably different position of parents and child we have known, which doubtless attained its climax nearly a century ago. Feudal conditions, with the large households so well adapted to act as seminaries for youth, began to decay, and as education in such seminaries must have led to frequent mischances both for youths and maidens who enjoyed the opportunities of education there, the regret for their disappearance may often have been tempered for parents. Schools, colleges, and universities began to spring up and develop ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... doubt, original differences in teeth, as in other parts of the human system, some being more liable to decay than others; but the simple means we have pointed out, if adopted in season and perseveringly applied, will preserve almost any teeth, in all their usefulness and reality, till old age. If yours have been neglected, and some of ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... count. By the miracle of Penicillium Roqueforti a new cheese was made. It is placed historically back around the eighth century when Charlemagne was found picking out the green spots of Persille with the point of his knife, thinking them decay. But the monks of Saint-Gall, who were his hosts, recorded in their annals that when they regaled him with Roquefort (because it was Friday and they had no fish) they also made bold to tell him he was wasting the best part ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... soldiers, and other representative classes. The method adopted for discovering the qualities in question is to consider groups of individuals, and to compare the qualities that distinguish such groups as flourish or prosper from others of the same kind that decline or decay. This method has the advantage of giving results more free from the possibility of bias than those derived from ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... foreign with our domestic policy, we shall experience after the close of the war the darkest and most difficult days of our existence. The crisis through which we are passing is the gravest we have yet encountered. Let us make it a crisis of growth, not a symptom of irreparable senile decay. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... social polity. And of course we must be fair in our comparisons, and not set a Chinese coolie in the concrete against an English statesman, nor any concrete example of another kind of culture in its decay with the highest bloom to which we believe our own type to be able ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... wretched, as the king alone, and members of the royal family, enjoyed the privilege of having glazed windows, whitened walls, and tiles; the palace, and some of the Buddhist temples, are the only ancient edifices which remain, and even these are crumbling to decay. The chief temple was one built to contain the tooth of Buddha. Not that the original tooth really exists, because that was burned by the Portuguese. The present relic worshipped by all the Buddhists is more like the tooth of a crocodile than that of a man. It is preserved in an inner chamber, without ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... two nymphs, now almost classic with decay. One of them, toppling helplessly, quenched her bronze torch in weeds. Her sister stood erect in grief like a daughter of Niobe wept ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... aspect of terrific struggle. In Maine, for example, it gives a pleasant impression of comfortable prosperity. Wherever the trees have room to grow, they are full and stocky, and even where they are crowded together their slender upspringing trunks look alert and energetic. The signs of death and decay, indeed, appear everywhere in fallen trunks, dead branches, and decayed masses of wood, but moss and lichens, twinflowers and bunchberries so quickly mantle the prostrate trees that they do not seem like tokens of weakness. Then, too, ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... promptly as possible; for the pleasure of climbing into this queerest of cities on foot is not the least part of the entertainment of going there. Then you appreciate its extraordinary position, its picturesque- ness, its steepness, its desolation and decay. It hangs - that is, what remains of it - to the slanting summit of the mountain. Nothing would be more natural than for the whole place to roll down into the valley. A part of it has done so - for it is not unjust to suppose that in the process of decay the crumbled particles have sought the ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... result Jefferson and Gallatin deliberately neglected to make ordinary preparations against attack; fortifications were abandoned, skilled officers dismissed, ships allowed to decay at the wharves or on the stocks, and the accumulation of military material ceased. The only offset to this neglect was the creation of a military school at West Point in 1802, and the training gained by the naval wars against the ...
— Formation of the Union • Albert Bushnell Hart
... frown. His heart, devoted to indolence, seems to have thought that there is wealth enough in happiness, but seldom happiness in mere wealth. The cheerfulness, indeed, with which he brightens his old age is interesting and endearing; like his own rose, he is fragrant even in decay. But the most peculiar feature of his mind is that love of simplicity, which be attributes to himself so feelingly, and which breathes characteristically throughout all that he has sung. In truth, if we omit ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... behind. I believe that historians have not yet reckoned sufficiently with the disastrous influence which this worship of insanity,—for it is often nothing less—has exercised on the fortunes of peoples and on the development or decay of their institutions. ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... just completed, of which the new Council Chamber was the nucleus, was now habitually known in Venice as the "Palazzo Nuovo;" and the old Byzantine edifice, now ruinous, and more manifest in its decay by its contrast with the goodly stones of the building which had been raised at its side, was of course known as the "Palazzo Vecchio." That fabric, however, still occupied the principal position in Venice. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... fourteen feet one inch; a gain so slight that the rings of annual growth must be difficult to trace—an evidence of waning vital force. The grand subdivisions of the trunk are all sadly crippled; unsightly bandages of zinc mask the progress of decay; the symptoms of approaching dissolution are painfully evident, especially in the winter season. In summer, the remaining vitality expends itself in a host of branchlets which feather the limbs, and give rise to a false ...
— Bay State Monthly, Volume I, No. 2, February, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... following manuscript. It was placed in my hands by this kindly stranger, who in so doing explained that it had been written by the last occupant of the old inn I was so nearly on the point of investigating. She had been its former landlady, and had clung to the ancient house long after decay had settled upon its doorstep and desolation breathed from its gaping windows. She died in its north room, and from under her pillow the discolored leaves were taken, the words of which I now place ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... that nations, like the individuals composing them, have fixed periods of growth, manhood, decay, decrepitude, and death—more or less rapid, according to the stock and situation. Those who accept that dogma argue that all that is necessary in order to predict the fate of a nation is a correct calculation ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... gardeners' tidy souls could not abide the gold and green and russet pattern on the grass. The gravel paths must lie unstained, ordered, methodical, without knowledge of the realities of life, nor of that slow and beautiful decay which flings crowns underfoot to star the earth with fallen glories, whence, as the cycle rolls, will leap again ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... "We are the lords of the kingdom of mind! We are the stem which can never decay!" —Students' Song, ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... soon may I follow When friendships decay, And from love's shining circle The gems drop away. When true hearts lie withered, And fond ones are flown, Oh! who would inhabit ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... soil. The vines were laden with dark purple grapes, and the slender twigs of the maple, then tasseled with their clusters of small red flowers, now hung out a gorgeous display of leaves stained by the frost with burning crimson. On every side we saw the tokens of maturity and decay where all had before been fresh and beautiful. We entered the forest, and ourselves and our horses were checkered, as we passed along, by the bright spots of sunlight that fell between the opening boughs. On either side the dark rich masses of foliage almost ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... with flowers around their fingers. Memory was not even troubled by the decay of the dead, for there remained of them only a handful of ashes. The soul, mingled with the boundless ether, ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... this gradual decay, an action was witnessed exhibiting something of antique energy. Two marines of the guard were cut off from their column by a band of Cossacks, who seemed determined to take them. One became discouraged, and wished to surrender; ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... evidence of a general fire over the Rockies about the time that the Indian's tradition places it, but in this forest there were no indications that there had ever been a fire. Trees were in all stages of growth and decay. Humus was deep. Here I found a stump of a Douglas spruce that was eleven feet high and about nine feet in diameter. It was so decayed that I could not decipher the rings of growth. This tree probably required at least a thousand years to reach maturity, and many years must ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... thought in England is against any association of a schoolmaster with matrimonial irregularity. And also Mr. Benham remarried. It would certainly have been better for him if he could have produced a sister. His school declined and his efforts to resuscitate it only hastened its decay. Conceiving that he could now only appeal to the broader-minded, more progressive type of parent, he became an educational reformer, and wrote upon modernizing the curriculum with increasing frequency to the TIMES. He expended a considerable fraction of his dwindling capital upon a science ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... clenched his fists, and looked with a vindictive scowl at the strangers. A second glance induced him to unclench his fists and reel round the corner on his way to a neighbouring grog-shop. Whatever other shops may decay in that region, the grog-shops, like noxious ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... dying, and he lay In all the weakness of decay. A numerous progeny, with groans, Attended ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay |
