"Miasma" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... walk, Mrs. Purblind ran over to see me, and soon afterward, Mrs. Cynic dropped in. I never could bear this latter woman; something malevolent seems to emanate from her; something that is more or less unhealthful to the moral nature of all who come in contact with it, just as the miasma from a swamp is poisonous to ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... Count Keyserling ("Bulletin de la Soc. Geolog.", 2nd Ser., tom. x, page 357), suggested that as new diseases, supposed to have been caused by some miasma have arisen and spread over the world, so at certain periods the germs of existing species may have been chemically affected by circumambient molecules of a particular nature, and thus have ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... upon the yellow pallor of the first inhabitants of the western forests and doubtless correctly attributed this sickly appearance to the effects of malaria and miasma. The psychic influences of the forest wilderness also weighed heavily upon the spirits of the settlers, although, as Baily notes, it was the newcomers who felt the depression to an exaggerated degree. ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... in Rubens' nature had never been developed. He dallied with no "culture-beds," and the thought that any one could ever really equal him had never entered his mind. His conscious sense of power kept his head high above the miasma ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... serpent engendered from the mud of the deluge, and slain by Apollo. In other words, pytho is the miasma or mist from the evaporation of the overflow, dried up by the sun. (Greek, puthesthai, "to rot;" because the serpent was left ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... penetrated the mountain recesses and fell upon the valley, Saint-Prosper arose to shake off a troubled slumber. An unhealthy mist hung over the earth, like a miasma, and the officer shivered as he walked in that depressing and noxious atmosphere. It lay like a deleterious veil before the glades where myrtles mingled with the wild limes. It concealed from view a cross, said to have been ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... my pain and disappointment to God," said he, "but thou hast deceived the Saviour also, for thou hast gone as it were to a quagmire which has poisoned thy soul with its miasma. Thou mightst have offered it to Christ as a costly vessel, and said to Him, 'Fill it with grace, O Lord!' but thou hast preferred to offer it to the servant of the evil one. May God forgive thee and have mercy on thee; for till thou cast out the serpent, ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... were on the street—a street lined with fine wide houses of a bygone time, but which was now a bedlam of throaty voices, a whirling current of alien people, a miasma of stale smells. The taxi soon whirled them out of this section and into another, equally old, but still clinging to its ancient state. The houses were square fronted and solid looking, built of black-headed brick and trimmed with white stone; there were marble carriage ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... there are, properly speaking, no swamps, marshes, nor bayous, as in the United States, and in the neighbourhood of Acapulco and West Mexico. These lakes and bayous drying during summer, and exposing to the rays of the sun millions of dead fish, impregnate the atmosphere with miasma, generating typhus, yellow fever, ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... of Cleveland, as in those of most western towns, the story of sickness and death fills a large part. Fever and ague, brought on by exposure, privations, and by the miasma from swamp, river and uncleared lands, disabled a large number of the early settlers, and hurried some to untimely graves. There were no physicians, and save a few drugs and the simples gathered from the river banks and forest, there ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... too, all the arts and inventions by which any men of any time have separated truth from error. Of one blood are all the people of the earth, and whatsoever is done to the least of these little ones in some degree comes to me. We suffer from the miasma of the Indian jungles; we starve with the savages of the harvestless islands; we grow weak with the abused peasants of the Russian steppes, who leave us the legacy of their grippe. The great volcano which ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... Then through the suffocating miasma thridded another sound—the whine of a loafing tramp slowly pleading along the house fronts—vainly, ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... there is for me at present. I appreciate as never before the value of having lived an open life.... The parlor, the street corner, the newspapers, the very air seem full of social miasma.... Sad, sad revelations! There is nothing more demoralizing than lying. The act itself is scarcely so base as the lie which denies it.... It is almost an impossibility for a man and a woman to have a close, sympathetic friendship without the tendrils ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... ten miles. It was one continuous jungle, except three interjacent glades of narrow limits, which gave us three breathing pauses in the dire task of jungle travelling. The odour emitted from its fell plants was so rank, so pungently acrid, and the miasma from its decayed vegetation so dense, that I expected every moment to see myself and men drop down in paroxysms of acute fever. Happily this evil was not added to that of loading and unloading the frequently falling packs. Seven soldiers to attend seventeen ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... fancy of poets has sanded with gold and embanked with roses, tracks much of its dreary way through rocks and comparative barrenness. The Guadiana creeps through lonely Estremadura, infecting the low plains with miasma. The Guadalquivir eats out its deep banks amid the sunny olive-clad regions of Andalucia, as the Ebro divides the levels of Arragon. Spain abounds with brackish streams, Salados, and with salt-mines, or saline deposits, after the evaporation of the sea-waters. The central ...
— A Supplementary Chapter to the Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... more than ever thankful to be a country parson, and mused on the retribution that the miasma, fostered by the avarice of the grandfather and the neglect of the father, had brought on the family. Dives cannot always scorn Lazarus without suffering ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the river road, the Queen's highway, seizing all the timber he could, destroying all the whisky, turning the white liquor traders off Indian lands, and fighting as only a young, earnest and inspired man can fight. These hours and conditions began to tell on his physique. The marshes breathed their miasma into his blood—the dreaded fever had him in its claws. Lydia was a born nurse. She knew little of thermometers, of charts, of technical terms, but her ability and instincts in the sick-room were unerring; and, when her husband succumbed to a raging fever, love ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... a time of stubborn effort and crushing strain. Some of the men were sick and all had lost their vigor. The fierce sun had not burned but bleached their skin; their blood was poisoned by the miasma the land breeze blew off at night. For all that, Cartwright's promise was they should share his reward and ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... terror and death. But she the great mother of heroes, the shield and the sword of the weak, What lot or what part has her glory in madmen who gibber and shriek? Her eye is as death to assassins, the brood of miasma and gloom, Foul shapes that grow sleek upon slaughter, as worms that are hid in a tomb. In the dawn she has marshalled her armies, the millions go marching as one, With a tramp that is fearless as joy, and a joy that is bright as the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 23, 1890. • Various
... this miasma, came in slowly, like those autumn sea-mists; appearing once a month, twice this week—a ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... the case. They lived under the deadly shadow of the upas tree, and suffered the consequences of its stunting their development in all directions, as the ague-smitten inhabitant of the Roman Campana finds every sense and every muscle clogged by the filtering in of the insidious miasma. They did not compose songs and music, because they did not have the intellectual energy ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... You confound cause with effect. The country is unhealthy because it is uncultivated. The decayed vegetable matter accumulated by centuries ferments under the summer sun. The wind blows over it, and raises up a provision of subtle miasma, imperceptible to the smell, and yet destructive to life. If all these plains were ploughed or dug up three or four times, so as to let the air and light penetrate into the depths of the soil, the ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... have caused a separation, or prevented a re-union, and that the imputations upon him rest on the vaguest conjecture; that whatever real or fancied wrongs Lady Byron may have endured are shrouded in an impenetrable mist of her own creation,—a poisonous miasma in which she enveloped the character of her husband, raised by her breath, and which her breath ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... be that?" "Each day hath a planet that ruleth it: so if the first day in the year fall on First Day (Sunday) that day is the Sun's and this portendeth (though Allah alone is All-knowing!) oppression of kings and sultans and governors and much miasma and lack of rain; and that people will be in great tumult and the grain-crop will be good, except lentils, which will perish, and the vines will rot and flax will be dear and wheat cheap from the beginning of Tbah to the end of Barmaht.[FN423] And, in this year ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... mysteries of common life. In all these cases the tone of the artist's mind is felt throughout his work: what he paints, or sings, or writes, conveys a lesson while it pleases. On the other hand, depravity in an artist or a poet percolates through work which has in it nothing positive of evil, and a very miasma of poisonous influence may rise from the apparently innocuous creations of a tainted soul. Now Correggio is moralised in neither way—neither as a good nor as a bad man, neither as an acute thinker nor as a deliberate voluptuary. He is simply sensuous. On his own ground he is even ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... impossible in the hands of the white man. They tell you, that while the negro endures the labour of the rice field mid-leg deep in water, and with a scorching sun above his head, without danger, and can withstand the miasma-hanging in the night air on the plantations— the white man is attacked with hopeless fever if he exposes himself to these influences. They declare that the unconditional abolition of slavery, in a country abounding in unappropriated lands, ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin |
