"Foulness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that afternoon. The grave was dug among some cocoanut palms out beyond the fetid swamp which lay in those days a crescent of foulness on three sides of the town. A wall separated the swamp from the houses, and over this wall the sewage used to be cast. Poles, bearing human heads, stuck out here and there. The swamp was crossed by ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... quickly, cleansing with both fire and smoke. When they raked the ashes out with branches, Asaki and Nymani brought in handfuls of leaves which they crumpled and threw on the floor, spreading an aromatic odor which banished most of the foulness. ...
— Voodoo Planet • Andrew North
... greedy of gain, run-aways before peril, readier to pay back injury than kindness. "Worst of all they take middle paths." Upon these, his observations, he proceeds to tell a story of a State and he tells it icily. He lays bare the foulness of man. He doesn't lecture, he does not preach, he never laughs, never scolds, is never surprised. He shows, says Mr. Morley about "as good a heart as can be made out of brains." In my opinion, that sentence is the most terrible indictment in the book. It marks him as ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... say in dactylomancy, the 'psychical' of women are not disposed in their sensitive early days to dwell upon the fortunes of their sex: a thought or two turns them facing away, with the repugnant shiver. They worship at a niche in the wall. They cannot avoid imputing some share of foulness to them that are for scouring the chamber; and the civilized male, keeping his own chamber locked, quite shares their pale taper's view. The full-blooded to the finger-tips, on the other hand, are likely to be drawn to the subject, by noble inducement as often as by base: Nature at flood being ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Jenny's room with its quiet books and flowers, and his heart would ache to think that some day harsh hands must noisily break in upon that sacred silence, and strip it of all its delicate memories. Jenny's room the lair of wild beasts, a nest of foulness and serpents! Sometimes he was thus haunted with the ghosts of those who were to riot up and down these stairs when Jenny's memory had quite died out of these walls like a fragrance of musk ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... fruits of a bad system, bringing disgrace upon his countrymen, corrupting the moral foundation of society, spreading vice around the domestic fireside, and giving to base-minded men power to speculate in the foulness of their ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... the first hours of the death struggle; but the worst horror of that awful night came presently. In the recesses of the chamber, furthest from the windows, a harder evil than the heat was the intolerable foulness of the air. Even where I was standing it had become an excruciating pain to breathe, and my breast felt as though laced about with iron bands. In the interior many had by this time dropped down, not so much suffocated as poisoned by the fetid gas they were compelled to inhale. And ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... all the old smells of a generation would be drawn out by this heat—for there was never any washing of the walls and rafters and pillars, and they were caked with the filth of a lifetime. The men who worked on the killing beds would come to reek with foulness, so that you could smell one of them fifty feet away; there was simply no such thing as keeping decent, the most careful man gave it up in the end, and wallowed in uncleanness. There was not even a ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... replacing the tool beneath the cloak, and again offering him my arm. He leaned upon it heavily. We continued our route in search of the Amontillado. We passed through a range of low arches, descended, passed on, and descending again, arrived at a deep crypt, in which the foulness of the air caused our flambeaux rather ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the world. But the neglected infant has wilted into the premature man, with his old cunning look, blending so fantastically, so mournfully, with the unformed features of youth. Knowing the world on its worst side—knowing its hostility, its knavery, its foulness, its heartless materialism—knowing it as the man does not know it who has only breathed the country air, and looked upon the open face of nature. Is it not very sad, my friends, that the vagrant boy should know so much; ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... navigation, as Canon Isaac Taylor has pointed out, is Scandinavian to this day. Deptford (the deep fiord), Greenwich (the green reach), and Woolwich (the hill reach) all bear good Norse names. So do the Foreness, the Whiteness, Shellness, Sheerness, Shoeburyness, Foulness, Wrabness, and Orfordness. Walton-on-the-Naze near Harwich in like manner still recalls the time when a Danish 'wall'—that is to say, a vallum, or earthwork—ran across the isthmus to defend the Scandinavian peninsula from ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... fact of a course of action which, in other people, we should describe with severe condemnation, being ours, bribes us to indulgence and lenient judgment. Familiarity, too, weakens our sense of the foulness of our own evils. If you have been in the Black Hole all night, you do not know how vitiated the atmosphere is. You have to come out into the fresh air to find out that. We look at the errors of others through a microscope; we look ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... falchion free Has either nerves to feel or eyes to see. Against abstractions evermore you charge You hack no helmet and you need no targe. That wickedness is wrong and sin a vice, That wrong's not right and foulness never nice, Fearless affirm. All consequences dare: Smite the offense and the offender spare. When Ananias and Sapphira lied Falsehood, had you been there, had surely died. When money-changers in the Temple sat, At money-changing ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... Swan vessels to spring a leak or to wear out. The vessels built under my rule will exist unimpaired for many centuries, whilst those built under the former system were broken to pieces on account of their foulness and leakage, chiefly caused by the ravages ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... liberal and just inculcations of Jesus Christ. The nation was sunk to the moral turpitude of Constantinople; and not even a John crying in the wilderness could arouse it to a sense of the exceeding foulness in the midst of which it grovelled, or of the storm gathering on the ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... name is Clara Luxmore. I was never nearer Cuba than Penzance. From first to last I have cheated and played with you. And what I am I dare not even name to you in words. Indeed, until to-day, until the sleepless watches of last night, I never grasped the depth and foulness of my guilt." ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... — N. fetor[obs3]; bad &c. adj. smell, bad odor; stench, stink; foul odor, malodor; empyreuma[obs3]; mustiness &c. adj.; rancidity; foulness &c. (uncleanness) 653. stoat, polecat, skunk; assafoetida[obs3]; fungus, garlic; stinkpot; fitchet[obs3], fitchew[obs3], fourmart[obs3], peccary. acridity &c. 401a. V. have a bad smell &c. n.; smell; stink, stink in the nostrils, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... never had any conception of the passionate longing for vice per se; the thrill, the glow which comes to some men at the splendid caress of sin in her most horrible shape. Do you see what I mean? He couldn't imagine the ecstasy that may lie in mere foulness." ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... near him as to refract and dissipate the rays at their first emanation."[99] Without observing upon the propriety of this metaphor, or asking how mirrors come to have lost their old quality of reflecting, and to have acquired that of refracting, and dissipating rays, and how far their foulness will account for this change; the remark itself is common and true: no less true, and equally surprising from him, is that which immediately precedes it: "It is in vain to endeavor to check the progress of irreligion and licentiousness, by punishing such crimes in one ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... shadow. Three or four centuries ago, in England, no fact was better attested than that swallows passed the winter months in the mud at the bottom of their brooks, clinging together in globular masses. They have apparently been compelled to give up the custom and account of the foulness of the brooks. Sotus Ecobius discovered in Central Asia a whole nation of people who hibernate. By some investigators, the fasting of Lent is supposed to have been originally a modified form of hibernation, to which the Church gave a religious ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... testimony of the hearts of men as to find single hearts, docile and apprehensive hearts; hearts that can, hearts that have learned; wise hearts in one place, and in another in a great degree wise, perfect hearts; straight hearts, no perverseness without; and clean hearts, no foulness within: such hearts I can find in thy word; and if my heart were such a heart, I would give thee my heart. But I find stony hearts too,[154] and I have made mine such: I have found hearts that are snares;[155] and I have conversed with such; ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... was careful to insist that this pecuniary advance was by no means a free gift, but only a loan to be repaid by his more bloodthirsty brother upon demand with interest. With a businesslike caution, in ghastly contrast with the foulness of the contract, he exacted a note of hand from Stoutenburg covering the whole amount of his disbursements. There might come a time, he thought, when his brother's paper would be more negotiable than ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... malignant voice seemed shouting: "Paiper!... Paiper!... Glove Lane Murder!... Suicide and confession of brother of well-known K.C.... Well-known K.C.'s brother.... Murder and suicide.... Paiper!" Was he to let loose that flood of foulness? Was he, who had done nothing, to smirch his own little daughter's life; to smirch his dead brother, their dead mother—himself, his own valuable, important future? And all for a sewer rat! Let him hang, let the fellow hang if he must! And that was not ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... spent five dreadful days in the darkness, dampness, chill and foulness of that tiny cell. I found that influence such as Tanno and Vedia possessed and cash such as they had at their disposal, could do much even for the occupant of such a cell, destined to such a doom. I was visited by Galen, more than once, and he emphasized the still hopeful possibility, ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... golden sands, the head-waters of many a Pactolus flows. And though now nailed amidst all the rustiness of iron bolts and the verdigris of copper spikes, yet, untouchable and immaculate to any foulness, it still preserved its Quito glow. Nor, though placed amongst a ruthless crew and every hour passed by ruthless hands, and through the livelong nights shrouded with thick darkness which might cover ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... paid back in their own coin, but they had never been accustomed to yield to others the privileges they claimed for themselves, and could not understand how "this fellow" dared presume to retort the foulness hurled at him. His paper meanwhile enjoyed a fair circulation, and his enemies periodically saw themselves held up before the people of the Province in a light well calculated to bring down public execration ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... I like them not, except they be of that largeness as they may be turfed, and have living plants and bushes set in them; that the birds may have more scope, and natural nesting, and that no foulness appear in the floor of the aviary. So I have made a platform of a princely garden, partly by precept, partly by drawing, not a model, but some general lines of it; and in this I have spared for no cost. But it is nothing for great princes, that for the most part taking advice with ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... written probably in the autumn of the following year, 1584, requested the Privy Council to dispatch "favorable letters unto the Lord Mayor of London to permit us to exercise within the city," and the Lord Mayor refused, with the significant remark that "if in winter ... the foulness of season do hinder the passage into the fields to play, the remedy is ill conceived to bring them into London."[95] Obviously the Queen's Men were seeking permission to play in the city only during the cold winter months; during the ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... took up my baggage and followed Pete to the room where I was to spend the night. Ugh! it was dreadful. The single window in the room was nailed down, and the air was close and foul. The bunks were damp and dirty beyond belief, grimed with foulness, and reeking with ill odors. This was ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... in the crime of disobedience. He slid down from the top rail and stood among the young pokeberry bushes and ragweed that luxuriated in the foulness of the slaughter-house yard. It was not an especially inviting spot even in broad day, as he knew. Now the moonlight showed him bleached animal bones and grinning animal skulls, while the damp weeds that clung about ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... prowess, save of the god Thor only, to the greatness of whose force nothing human or divine could fitly be compared. The hearts of men ought not to be terrified at phantoms, which were only awful from their ghastly foulness, and whose semblances, marked by counterfeit ghostliness, were wont for a moment to borrow materiality from the fluent air. Swanhwid therefore erred in trying, womanlike, to sap the firm strength of men, and to melt in unmanly panic that might which ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... which really is interesting and which really does good; but normally the books which do good and the books which healthy people find interesting are those which are not in the least of the sugar-candy variety, but which, while portraying foulness and suffering when they must be portrayed, yet have a joyous as well as ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... man flatters himself that, in the splendid situation to which he advances, he will have so many means of commanding the respect and admiration of mankind, and will be enabled to act with such superior propriety and grace, that the luster of his future conduct will entirely cover or efface the foulness of the steps by which he arrived at that elevation. In many governments the candidates for the highest stations are above the law, and if they can attain the object of their ambition, they have no fear of being called to account for the means by which they acquired it. They often ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... from eastern or western quarters. It is expedient, however, to cackle or arm the cables with an iron chain, or with good rounding, for five or six fathoms from the anchor, to secure them from being rubbed by the foulness of the ground.[2] ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... terrible "Ode to a Dead Body," in fifteenth-century Italian; which utters, with extraordinary power, the ascetic thought of the Middle Age, dwelling with a kind of gloomy exultation on the foulness of the human frame ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... clear and transparent, different altogether from the muddy foulness of the lower reaches. And the country around lost the density of matted jungle and undulated in a succession of grassy stretches through which cropped great round hummocks of sandy hills. The stream ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... conscious of feeling soiled, dirty, in the midst of them. As they filed out, she with them, a burning hatred came to her. She hated the woman who was the cause of her feeling dirty. She wanted to use her hands, to tear something away from her body—the dirt, the foulness. For she felt it actually on her body. Her physical purity was desecrated ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... he should be disposed to distinguish, and to say that without the filth one could not get a fair idea of their age, but of themselves, yes. Their beauty and their greatness were personal to them; even their dulness might be so; but their foulness was what had come off on them from living at periods when manners ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... one night there were five drunken fights, one of them between two of the attendants who dropped the corpse they were carrying to the morgue and fought over it. The tenements were plunged back into the foulness of their worst day; the inspectors were answerable, not to the Health Board, but to the district leader, and the landlord who stood well with him thumbed his nose at them and at their orders to clean up. ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... never see such poverty and dirt and squalor as you do in this Catholic one; you never see the lanes and alleys flowing with foulness; you never see such wretched little sties of houses; you never see an inverted tin turnip on top of a church for a dome; and as for a church-bell, why, you never hear a church-bell ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the long staircase hastily, abusing its darkness and foulness, and planning as I went how my mother might most easily and quickly be moved to a better lodging. Gaining the top of the last flight, I saw that mademoiselle's door on the left of the landing was open, and concluding from this that she was up, and ready to start, I entered my mother's ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... sailors could no longer come up the Thames, they came on to the Essex coast, to Harwich and Walton and Clacton, and afterwards to Foulness and Shoebury, to bring off the people. They lay in a huge sickle-shaped curve that vanished into mist at last towards the Naze. Close inshore was a multitude of fishing smacks—English, Scotch, French, Dutch, and ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... there all the stones are like our precious stones, and fairer still (compare Republic). The reason is, that they are pure, and not, like our precious stones, infected or corroded by the corrupt briny elements which coagulate among us, and which breed foulness and disease both in earth and stones, as well as in animals and plants. They are the jewels of the upper earth, which also shines with gold and silver and the like, and they are set in the light of day and are large and abundant and in all places, making the ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... temperature is really the most formidable with which the tunnel engineer has to contend. In the St. Gothard Tunnel, just before the meeting of the two headings in February, 1880, the temperature rose as high as 93 Fahr. This, combined with the foulness of the air, produced an immense diminution in the work done per person and per horse employed, while several men were actually killed by the dynamite gases, and others suffered from a disease which ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 417 • Various
... in the rules that the primary schools of kippers should get off cheap For a two mile reach off Foulness beach when the July tide's at neap; And the lawless lubbers that lust for loot and filch the yearling stock They get smart raps from the coastguard chaps ...
— The Battle of the Bays • Owen Seaman
... How foulness grows fair with the stern lustration of sleets and snows, And rottenness changes back to the breath and the cheek of the rose, And how gentle the wind that seems wild to ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... principal court often branched out a number of smaller alleys or rather narrow passages, than which nothing can be conceived more close and squalid and obscure. Here during the days of business, the sound of the hammer and the file never ceased, amid gutters of abomination and piles of foulness and stagnant pools of filth; reservoirs of leprosy and plague, whose exhalations were sufficient to taint the atmosphere of the whole kingdom and fill the ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... who had commenced farmer, a business of which he was totally ignorant, and in the pursuit of which he sunk a good fortune; yet when he quitted this farm, or rather when his property and stock were seized and sold under an execution, perhaps the county of Hants could not have produced its equal for foulness and bad condition. I had occupied three thousand acres of land in Wiltshire, and I will venture to say, that there was not half the quantity of couch grass upon the whole of it that I now found upon the cleanest ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... IS NEAR; and soon every eye is open, every foot astir, and the busy, waking life of men again begins. The fleecy clouds that hang on the eastern horizon grow ruddy with gold; and the arrowy light shoots its bright rays athwart the clear blue sky. The dust and foulness which the night has hidden stand revealed. But in the forests and hills the pulses of nature beat fresh and full; the leopard and the tiger slink away; the gay flowers open; the birds flit to and fro, and with woodland music welcome the rising ...
— Fruits of Toil in the London Missionary Society • Various
... that her beauty had entered into the foulness of the toad, and the foulness of the toad into her beauty, for there before her stood her own shape and here she crouched ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... time and space and consciousness would be a bubble, a bubble which contained the sun and moon and the high stars, and still was but a bubble in fermenting swill! I must go cleanse my mind of all this foulness. You would have me believe that men, that all men who have ever lived or shall ever live hereafter, that even I am of no importance! Why, there would be no justice in any such ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... be the gods for thy foulness! sluttishness may come hereafter. But be it as it may be, I will marry thee: and to that end I have been with Sir Oliver Martext, the vicar of the next village; who hath promised to meet me in this place of the ...
— As You Like It • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... Frequently the wine does not become wholly clear and needs fining. Various substances are used for this purpose, as fish-glue, charcoal, starch, rice, milk, &c. The best of these substances is charcoal, or the white of eggs and milk. Add by degrees according to the foulness of the wine. An ounce of charcoal to a barrel of wine is an ordinary quantity; or a pint of milk with the white of four eggs—more or less according to the ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... gardens opened in bright populousness and peace; cities built that men might live happily in them, and take delight daily in each other's presence and powers. But our cities, built in black air which, by its accumulated foulness, first renders all ornament invisible in distance, and then chokes its interstices with soot; cities which are mere crowded masses of store, and warehouse, and counter, and are therefore to the rest of the world what the larder and cellar are ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... France. You would not, for instance, had you not come hither, have had an opportunity of observing a member of the noblesse seconding and assisting a tipstaff in the discharge of his duty. And doing it just as a hog wallows in foulness—for ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... feet of him to whom we utterly belong? There is no pride so mean—and all pride is absolutely, essentially mean—as the pride of being holier than our fellow, except the pride of being holy. Such imagined holiness is foulness. Religion itself in the hearts of the unreal, is a dead thing; what seems life in it, is the vermiculate ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... antagonistic forces that constitute one soul, it seemed to him not impossibly strange that one spiritual force should possess divers forms for widely various manifestation. Nor, to him, was it great effort to believe that as pure water washes away all natural foulness, so water, holy by consecration, must needs cleanse God's world from that supernatural evil Thing. Therefore, faster than ever man's foot had covered those leagues, he sped under the dark, still night, over the waste, trackless snow-ridges to the far-away church, ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman
... how inevitable it is that the functions of these millions of secreting and excreting rootlets will be disturbed by the clogging of the system with filth and bacterial poisons as a consequence of chronic constipation, biliousness and general foulness of the alimentary canal. Through such disturbance nutrition is diminished, cell-atrophy progresses, and emaciation becomes more marked. The progressive destruction of these rootlets, involving the pathological change indicated, will be manifest in one of its results, either ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... a literary phenomenon that will in time become historical, that phenomenon being the sudden growth, in all parts of Europe, of a fungus-literature bred of Foulness and Decay; and contemporaneously, the intrusion into all parts of human life of a Calvinistic yet materialistic Morality. This literature of a sunless Decadence has spread widely, by virtue of its own uncleanness, and its leading characteristics are gloom, ugliness, ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... exploded, and deluged me with an odor in comparison with which that of Limberger cheese would be mere geranium. I was betrayed. Tyre had sent over a detachment of spies, and the Sidonites were armed. I briskly dodged several companion eggs whose foulness was permitted to adorn the walls of Jones's Hall behind me, and then undertook to escape. Simultaneously with the explosion of the first shot, a howl had burst from the audience, which boded no good for any prospects of comfort and profit I might entertain. Escaping on my part became ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... brain, but lending his sacrilegious hand, without any malice of his own, to answer the abandoned purposes of the human fiends that have subdued his will. To condemn crimes like these we need not talk of laws or of human rules; their foulness, their deformity does not depend on local constitutions, on human institutes, or religious creeds; they are crimes, and the persons who perpetrate them are monsters, who violate the primitive condition on ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... strain and tribe; she was set a-shudder when made to meet him under conditions which admitted the propriety of marriage between them, should she and he agree. As it stood, Dorothy was alive for flight the moment Storri stepped into her presence; she knew by intuition the foulness of his fiber, and shivered at any ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... man had arisen to tear the veil away from before human life, such as it is in so-called civilised communities, and show society its own self in all its rottenness, foulness, and hypocrisy—so that on more than one occasion, shrinking guiltily from its own image, it has denounced the plain unvarnished truth as libel—there would have been no 'Nana' and no 'Pot Bouille,' no 'Assommoir,' and no 'Germinal.' And no 'La Terre.' 'La Debacle,' and 'Lourdes,' ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... Worldly-Wisdom, its Water was thick, and yet far from dormant or stagnating, for it was in a continual violent Agitation; which kept the Travellers whom I shall mention by and by, from being sensible of the Foulness and Thickness of the Water; which had this Effect, that it intoxicated those who drunk it, and made 'em mistake every Object that lay before them: both Rivulets were parted near their Springs into so many others, as there were strait ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... entrances to the city. Its predecessor had been burnt, in the great fire of 1666, and the new one was at this time less than forty years old, and, though close and badly ventilated, had not yet arrived at the stage of dirt and foulness which afterwards brought about the death of numbers of prisoners confined there, and in 1750 occasioned an outbreak of jail fever, which not only swept away a large proportion of the prisoners, but infected the court ...
— In the Irish Brigade - A Tale of War in Flanders and Spain • G. A. Henty
... greatest On plunder are bent; From the prophet on to the priest Everyone worketh lies. They would heal the breach of my people 11 As though it were trifling, Saying "It is well, it is well!"— And well it is not! Were they shamed of the foulness they wrought? 12 Nay, shamed not at all, Nor knew their dishonour! So shall they fall with the falling, Reel in the time of ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... the thing lay still; and from the wet, sticky foulness of it I rose and stood shuddering. Elza lay on the ground; but she had risen upon one elbow and I saw that she was unharmed save for the shock of terror through which she had passed—a mitigated shock with the knowledge now that I ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... claim control To crush the flower within the soul; Where through each dead roseleaf that clings, Pale as transparent psyche-wings, To the vile text, are traced such things As might make lady's cheek indeed More than a living rose to read; So nought save foolish foulness may Watch with hard eyes the sure decay; And so the lifeblood of this rose, Puddled with shameful knowledge flows Through leaves no chaste hand may unclose; Yet still it keeps such faded show Of when 'twas gathered long ago, That the crushed petals' lovely grain, The sweetness of the sanguine ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... seized me. If they were dead, no one but I would know the hiding place of the treasure. I would kill them; but how? I glanced about. Great pieces of rock were on every hand. Without stopping to consider the foulness of the deed I rolled a huge piece to the mouth of the shaft and pushed it in. There was a cry of terror and I heard a voice call out to know what had happened. I said a piece of rock had broken loose and asked what damage it had done. ...
— The Broncho Rider Boys with Funston at Vera Cruz - Or, Upholding the Honor of the Stars and Stripes • Frank Fowler
... intended volley of foulness was barely out when Sandy, stepping forward, touched the bully on the shoulder. Russell whirled as a bear ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... the scene in shapes which are exquisitely beautiful, in all its purity, its tenderness, its unselfishness. But the claims of its all-ruling and irresistible might are also only too readily verified in the passions of men; in the follies of love, its entanglements, its mischiefs, its foulness. In one shape or another it meets us at every turn; it is never absent; it is the motive and stimulant of the whole activity of the poem. The picture of life held up before us is the literal rendering ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... deceived if thou thinkest it was love to thee which moved them. They could not endure my word, because their own spirits were foul. My word was to them as the shining of a candle into a dark, dirty place, and the sight of their foulness made them mad against me. But in thee I perceive purity of intention; and I will gladly reason with thee of the things of the Spirit, according ...
— Andrew Golding - A Tale of the Great Plague • Anne E. Keeling
... soar aloft and carry that which gravitates downwards into the upper region, which is the habitation of the gods. The divine is beauty, wisdom, goodness, and the like; and by these the wing of the soul is nourished, and grows apace; but when fed upon evil and foulness and the opposite of good, wastes and falls away. Zeus, the mighty lord, holding the reins of a winged chariot, leads the way in heaven, ordering all and taking care of all; and there follows him ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... woman who had endured them with one of two determinations: to take up life again and bring it out into the sunshine until it was sound, and sweet, and clean, and whole once more, or to hide the hurt and brood over it, and cover it with bitterness, and hate until it destroyed by its very foulness. I had Jock, and I chose the sun, thank God! I said then that marriage was a thing tried and abandoned forever, for me. ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... manners, a nuisance to society; which they scandalized and disturbed by their riots, their mad frolics, and even by their quarrels. Their heads and waists were bound with ivy, and in their hands they brandished a thirsus, or kind of lance, garnished with vine-leaves. When by any foulness of weather they were driven into their huts, they passed their time in a kind of noisy merriment, of shoutings and dithirambic catches, accompanied by timpanums, by cymbals, by sistrums, and other instruments, in which noise was more consulted than music, and corresponded to the sort of time ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... where tall chimneys of nitrate plant and smelters belched their foulness against the blue sky. In the forests the loggers were tearing and slashing into all but the remnant of the timber. Down the gloomy gulch cut out of the lava ran a broad, white ribbon of concrete road. Lastly, and primary cause of all this change, where had once been the roaring falls now sprang ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... of the Devils, Lucifer, under the semblance of an appalling monster. The figures seemed to grow to life of themselves under his hand. His success was beyond his fondest hopes; so hideous was the countenance of Lucifer, none could escape the nightmare of its foulness. The face haunted the painter in the streets and even went home ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... or spur of the hay, is confined to the June grass, as far as my observation extends; owing, probably, to its early maturity. Most other kinds of grass are cut before the seeds have matured sufficiently to produce the spur. I was suspicious of the foulness of the feed before I examined any hay, and have found the spur in the hay wherever ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... Around and above his blighted neighbourhood flows the tide of active, prosperous life. Men and women travel past in street cars by the Elevated Railroad and across the bridge, and take no thought of its wretchedness, of the criminals bred there, and of the disease engendered by its foulness. It is a fearful menace to the public health, both moral and physical, yet the multitude is as heedless of danger as the peasant who makes his house and plants green vineyards and olives above Vesuvian fires. We are almost as careless and quite as unknowing as we pass the bridge in the late afternoon. ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... being made as acceptable as possible to well-disposed men of decent behaviour. Such men are assuredly not tempted into the ranks, by the beastly inversion of natural laws, and the compulsion to live in worse than swinish foulness. Accordingly, when any such Circumlocutional embellishments of the soldier's condition have of late been brought to notice, we civilians, seated in outer darkness cheerfully meditating on an Income Tax, have considered the matter as being our business, and have ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... Amos was staggered when he entered the room where sat, in the midst of gloom and filth, the man who had been the cause of so much distress to him and his. The atmosphere was oppressive with the concentrated foulness of numberless evil odours. A bed there was in the darkest corner of the room on the floor. It looked as though composed of the refuse raked from a pig-sty, and thrust into a sack which had been used for the conveyance of dust and bones. Bolster or pillow it had none, but against ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... snayl-codding, mucking, chalking, pidgeons-dung, hens-dung, hogs-dung or by any other means as some by rags, some by coarse wool, by pitch marks, and tarry stuff, any oyly stuff, salt and many things more, yea indeed any thing almost that hath any liquidness, foulness, saltness or good moysture in it, is very naturall inrichment to almost any sort of land.'' Blith speaks of an instrument which ploughed, sowed and harrowed at the same time; and the setting of corn was then ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... you made me what I am." The realisation of what he was, of his foulness and degradation, seemed just to have come to him fully. "You made me what I am, and then you sent me away. You let me come back, and ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... his followers were baptized is thus described by Camden, in his "Description of Great Britain," etc.: "In the Roman times, not far from its bank upon the little river Foulness (where Wighton, a small town, but well-stocked with husbandmen, now stands), there seems to have formerly stood Delgovitia; as it is probable both from the likeness and the signification of the name. For the British word ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... prosperity some exceptions to this knightly and chivalric piggishness and penury, it is none the less true that they outbalanced it by sundry and peculiar vices. And yet, bad as life then was, it is impossible for us to guess at, or realize, all its foulness. We know it mostly from poets, and the poet and historian, like the artist, have in every age lived quite out of the actual, and with all the tact of ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... he would burst into tears and become an exemplary ratepayer, like a villain in the worst parts of Dickens. The moment the danger was withdrawn, the sense of having given himself away, of having betrayed the secret of his infamous freemasonry, would add an indescribable violence and foulness to his reaction of rage. A man in such a case would do exactly as Sludge does. He would declare his own shame, declare the truth of his creed, and then, when he realised what he had done, say ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... have any but crammed poultry or stall-fed butchers' meat. It were sufficient to disgust the stoutest stomach to see the foul, gross, and nasty manner in which, and the fetid, putrid, and unwholesome materials with which they are fed. Perpetual foulness and cramming, gross food and nastiness, we know, will putrefy the juices, and corrupt the muscular substance of human creatures—and sure they can do no less in brute animals—and thus make our food poison. The same may be said ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... the most virtuous of women could enter even her bedroom. Death had purified the air of this abode of splendid foulness, and if more excuse were needed, they had the excuse that they had merely come to a sale, they knew not whose. They had read the placards, they wished to see what the placards had announced, and to make their choice beforehand. What could ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... But from the point of view of a decorous tea-party in a cathedral town, the tone—or the standard of manners, or whatever you would like by way of definition of that vague and comforting word—the tone of the average is deplorably low. The hooligan may be kicked for excessive foulness; but the rider of the high horse is brutally dragged down into the mire. The curious part of it all is that, the gutter element being eliminated altogether, the corporate standard of the remaining majority is lower than ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... which he proceeded to fill. I took advantage of the pause and the momentary rest from the searching eyes on my face to look carefully round the place, now dim and shadowy in the gloaming. There still lay all the heaps of varied reeking foulness; there the terrible blood-stained axe leaning against the wall in the right hand corner, and everywhere, despite the gloom, the baleful glitter of the eyes of the rats. I could see them even through some of the chinks ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... of me, but I didn't intend to let him go, and he stopped at last in front of a miserable house in a miserable street. It was, I verily believe, one of the most wretched quarters I have ever seen,—houses that must have been sordid and hideous enough when new, that had gathered foulness with every year, and now seemed to lean and totter to their fall. 'I live up there,' said Black, pointing to the tiles, 'not in the front,—in the back. I am very quiet there. I won't ask you to come in now, but perhaps ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... ... But doesn't...? Couldn't one perhaps persuade Hoffmann to do something? She ought to be removed from all this foulness. ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... bless thee, child! Bertram has kissed thy child,"—the curtain drops. The third act is short, and short be our account of it. It introduces Lord St. Aldobrand on his road homeward, and next Imogine in the convent, confessing the foulness of her heart to the Prior, who first indulges his old humour with a fit of senseless scolding, then leaves her alone with her ruffian paramour, with whom she makes at once an infamous appointment, and the curtain drops, that it may be ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... and I am prepared to deny utterly that, until the time of the Sensibility and Philosophe novels, it is even a notable characteristic of French fiction. Many hard things have been said of criticism; but, acknowledging the badness of a bird who even admits any foulness in his own nest—far more in one who causes it—I am bound to say that I think the state of the department of literature now under discussion was happier before we meddled with it. Offence must come; it would even be sometimes rather a pity if it didn't come: but perhaps the old saying ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... for this bloodshed, this misery! How long is it to go on? How long are you free men going to allow yourselves to be bloody executioners? How long are you to be slavish followers of that grasping ambition which veils its foulness under ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... makes his appearance on the stage, he takes a pill about the quantity of a hazel nut, confected with the gall of an heifer, and wheat flour baked. After which he drinks privately in his chamber four or five pints of luke-warm water, to take all the foulness and slime from his stomach, and to avoid that loathsome spectacle which otherwise would make thick the water, and offend ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... morning. You do very well to live extremely low, for some time; and I could wish, though I do not expect it, that you would take one gentle vomit; for those giddinesses and swimmings in the head always proceed from some foulness of the stomach. However, upon the whole, I am very glad that your old complaint has not mixed itself with this, which I am fully convinced arises simply from your own ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... century; of the Bretagne nobility; entered the navy, served long and valiantly upon the sea, commanded the "Belle-Poule," and died a vice-admiral. Possessor of a great fortune, by his charity he made amends for the foulness of some of his youthful love affairs (1771 and following), and at Paris, near the Madeleine, towards the beginning of the nineteenth century, with much delicacy, he helped the Baronne Leseigneur de Rouville. A little later, at the age of seventy-two, having for a long time been ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... and it abode upon Him.' The humanity on which the Divine Spirit uninterruptedly abides, ungrieved and unrestrained, must be free from the stains which so often drive that heavenly visitant from our breasts. The white-breasted Dove of God cannot brood over foulness. There has never been but one manhood capable of receiving and retaining the whole fulness of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... from the holy place which you profane," he said, "Is it to the Lord's house that you come to pour forth the foulness of your heart and the inspiration of the devil? Get you down, and remember that the sentence of death is on you—yea, and shall be executed, were it but for this ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of tansy and bitter-sweet from the fields to strive against the unknown fragrance in my room. The melancholy depression of the hour weighed upon me. Beneath the gentle strife of sweet odors, my nostrils seemed to detect a lurking foulness of ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... grosser heats, their foulness mask Under the vizor of a borrow'd name; Let things eschew the light deserving blame: No cause hast thou to blush for thy sweet task. "Marcian Colonna" is a dainty book; And thy "Sicilian Tale" may boldly pass; Thy "Dream" 'bove all, in which, as in ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... work against God's intent. Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to the animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you—alas, it is true of almost every one of us! Love children especially, for they too are sinless like the angels; they live to soften and purify our hearts and as it were to guide us. Woe to him who offends a child! Father Anfim ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... sensible frog, excited to this morbid condition by pressure of contraction. Its cure is simple and easy if the cause is removed. A wash of brine, or chloride of zinc, three grains to the ounce of water, is generally used to correct the foulness. ...
— Rational Horse-Shoeing • John E. Russell
... not know at once quite how to reconcile the present foulness of the New England capital with the fairness of the New England country; and I am still somewhat embarrassed to own that after New York (even under the relaxing rule of Tammany) Boston seemed very dirty when we arrived there. At best I was never more than a naturalized ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... one night he jumped up, and in horror ran to the captain's room; he was sleeping profoundly with the lamp shining upon his face, calm as marble. The boy did not like to disturb him. The next day, two of the slaves were found dead in the hold, suffocated by the foulness of the atmosphere. The captain is informed of this, and orders them in gangs to the forecastle to take the fresh air. The boy runs up on deck to see them; he did not find them so very unwell, but adds, 'that blacks are so much alike that ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... the years that'll spoil the making of your life; and you do it because you think you'll spare somebody. Well, I ask you to spare me. I don't want the man that's going to inherit my name, when my time comes, to bring foulness on it. We've been a rough race, we Calhouns; we've done mad, bad things, perhaps, but none has shamed us before ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... modern joy or ecstasy of ours can lower its height or dim its lustre, but there it lies in the east of literature, as it were the earliest and latest production of the mind. The ruins of Egypt oppress and stifle us with their dust, foulness preserved in cassia and pitch, and swathed in linen; the death of that which never lived. But the rays of Greek poetry struggle down to us, and mingle with the sunbeams of the recent day. The statue of Memnon is cast down, but the shaft of the Iliad ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... after a low-caste carrion-eater. If from the lowest, filthiest, and most poisonous dens in London, you were to take a man, reeking with beer and tobacco, and with his clothes crawling with vermin, and presenting, in short, every appearance of foulness, dirt, and disease; if you were to take that man and place him between two ladies at the administration of the Holy Communion, I do not say that they would there and then refuse the Sacrament on these terms, but I think we may be pretty ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... interfering with the enjoyment of his pipe. As the narrow thoroughfares are not wide enough for carriages, we had to walk through them with a guide. We were not favorably impressed with the odors nor with the sight of the filth in the streets and were glad when the guide turned from the gloom and foulness of the ancient Moorish streets and led us again toward the bright and attractive avenues of the ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... for cellars that are founded in swamps, in salt marshes below the level of the sea, and in old river-beds, where the original iniquity of the standing water is made still more iniquitous by the inevitable foulness of the washing from streets and the unclean refuse from sinks and back doors. But for buildings that have four independent walls, with room enough for a man to ride around his own house in a wheelbarrow without trespassing on his ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... air came gushing down to freshen the foulness within, and as the Ark rode dryly over the seas, I went below and brought up Nais to gain refreshment from the curing rays of our Lord the Sun. Duly the pair of us adored Him, and gave thanks for His great mercy in coming to light another day, and then we laid ourselves down where we were ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... so that by far the greater part of the nose is built on breathing lines. But the smelling part of it, though small, is very important, because it now has to decide, not merely upon the goodness or badness of the food, but also upon the purity or foulness of the air we breathe. The nostrils lie, as you can see, side by side, separated from each other by a thin, straight plate of gristle and bone known as the septum. This should be perfectly straight and flat; but very often when ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... your majesty,— If for I want that glib and oily art To speak and purpose not; since what I well intend, I'll do't before I speak,—that you make known It is no vicious blot, murder, or foulness, No unchaste action or dishonour'd step, That hath depriv'd me of your grace and favour; But even for want of that for which I am richer,— A still-soliciting eye, and such a tongue As I am glad I have not, though not to have it Hath lost me ...
— The Tragedy of King Lear • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... showed him how his soul was growing smaller and meaner every day—how he was just a plague-spot on God's fair earth. He saw himself in a mirror that reflected the inmost recesses of his heart, and he was horrified at sight of the foulness ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... were I have been able to learn nothing. A boat was seen passing towards Bradwell—indeed, it seems that you saw it, and that night a boat was seen sailing southwards down St. Peter's sands towards a ship that had anchored off Foulness Point. But what that ship was, whence she came, and whither she went, none know, though the tidings of this fray have ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... and near a harbour of their ally, and had the benefit of a large number of galleys. The confederates, on the contrary, besides being away from any friendly port, were thinly manned, and had a great deficiency of stores and provisions, while the foulness of their ships was greatly to their prejudice in the day of battle. Notwithstanding this they ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... appliances in agriculture made one engineer the equivalent of thirty labourers. So, inverting the condition of the city clerk in the days when London was scarce inhabitable because of the coaly foulness of its air, the labourers now came hurrying by road or air to the city and its life and delights at night to leave it again in the morning. The city had swallowed up humanity; man had entered upon a new stage in his development. First had come the nomad, the hunter, then ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... tittle tattle of scandal which she can pick up against her neighbour—what do these people do but defile their own souls afresh, after they have been washed clean in the blood of Christ? Foul their souls are, and therefore their thoughts are foul likewise, and the foulness of them is evident to all men by their tongues. Out of their hearts proceed evil thoughts about their neighbours, out of the abundance of their hearts their mouths speak them. Now let such people, if there be any such here, seriously consider the harm which they are doing to their own ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... singular and golden brightness, was that there was in his friend the same fastidious vein, the same dislike of any coarseness of talk or thought which was strong in Hugh. Looking back on his school life, with all the surprising foulness of the talk of even high-principled boys, it was a deep satisfaction to Hugh to reflect that there had never been in the course of this friendship a single hint, so far as he could recollect, in their own intercourse with each other, of the existence ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... nihilist. He does not know that I am aware of all his foulness and villainy. He has been assured that I do not know it! And"—here she leaped to her feet and confronted me like an enraged tigress—"he has the effrontery to pretend that he is in love with me, and to believe that I can ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman |
