"Stench" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... patient. Stables stunk him out. Let it to a man; I forget his name. Stables stunk HIM out. He said, 'I shall go.' 'You can't,' said my friend; 'you have taken a lease.' 'Lease be d—d,' said the other; 'I never took YOUR house; here's quite a large stench not specified in your description of the property—IT CAN'T BE THE SAME PLACE;' flung the lease at his head, and cut like the wind to foreign parts less odoriferous. I'd have got you the hole for ninety; but you are like your wife—you must go to an agent. What! ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... with the terrible stench of the other's foul breath and his filthy body. He teetered on his gnarled legs and side-stepped a vicious kick and then stepped in to gouge with straightened thumb at the other's eye. The thumb went true and ...
— Hellhounds of the Cosmos • Clifford Donald Simak
... the river, and similar sparse supplies. They died by hundreds. Disease aided starvation in carrying them off. The living were too few and too weak to bury the dead. Bodies were left unburied, and a deadly and revolting stench filled the air. That there was secret discontent and plottings for surrender may well be believed. But no such feeling dared display itself openly. Stubborn resolution and vigorous defiance continued the public tone. "No surrender" ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... the clamoring barrier of salkars and headed for the fairing. A neck snapped about; a head was lowered in his direction. He smelled the rank stench of reptile combined with burned flesh. The nearest of the brutes must have scented the Terran in turn, as it was now trying vainly to edge around to cut across Ross's path. But it was completely outclassed on land, and the ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... of the sailor, with its coarseness and drudgery, its inadequate pay, its evil-smelling food, its maggoty bread, its beer drawn from casks that once had held oil or fish, its stinking salt-meat barrels, the hideous stench of the bilge-water—all this could in one sense be no worse than his sufferings in jail. In spite of self-control, jail had been to him the degradation of his hopes, the humiliation of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... housed at the Vigne d'Or," he said. "It will take Maitre Bernard a week to rid his house of the stench of leather. They are part of a stray company that is on its way to fight the Spaniards," he informed me. "But methinks they will be forced to spend two or three days at Blois; their horses are sadly jaded and will need that rest before they can take the road again, thanks ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... night the store was gutted, and the bodies cast in a pit and covered with leaves. Three days later the schooner had come in; and things appearing quieter, Mr. Stewart and the captain landed in Taahauku to compute the damage and to view the grave, which was already indicated by the stench. While they were so employed, a party of Moipu's young men, decked with red flannel to indicate martial sentiments, came over the hills from Atuona, dug up the bodies, washed them in the river, and carried them away on sticks. That night ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... from the top. I think some other word would be better than "stench." You have used that ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... that city, where I left a dozen louis, without either my health or understanding being the better for it, except from a short course of anatomy begun under M. Fitz-Morris, which I was soon obliged to abandon, from the horrid stench of the bodies he dissected, which I ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... gathering rags from the city to their dens, when the cholera was raging outside the Ghetto's gates, and rags were cheap, yet never sickening of the plague themselves; a people never idle, sleeping little, eating sparingly, labouring for small gain amid dirt and stench and dampness, till Friday night came at last, and the old crier's melancholy voice ran through the darkening alleys—'The ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... mighty sorcerer, the inhabitant of this rocky den, deluding us onwards to destruction. The laughter, screams, and hallooing, which accompanied our efforts to maintain a hold upon the cable, our only hope of safety, united to the smoke and stench of the flambeaux, rendered the whole scene no unapt representation of Pandemonium. The Greeks shouted forth oaths, warnings, entreaties, and directions, in their native tongue: with these were intermingled, ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... cutlets smelling of grease, in the centre of the common room, to which an open window admitted the pestilential odour of a dung heap, while the place was so full of flies that they positively blackened the tables. The heat of the burning afternoon came in with the stench, and Claude and Sandoz did not even feel the courage to order any coffee; ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... the dark months you held the sector at Mametz,— The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets? Do you remember the rats; and the stench Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench,— And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain? Do you ever stop and ask, "Is it all going ...
— The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon • Siegfried Sassoon
... of the poor girl, whose mother finishes pants for the postal uniforms at nine and one-half cents a pair, slaving eighteen hours for fifty-seven cents; and she, the daughter, toils all day long, in the midst of the physical and moral stench of a Jewish sweater's shop, for sixteen and two-thirds cents. But she is better off than the orphan girl that works beside her, whose condition ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... snow, where they would be allowed to shiver for a time; thence they would be precipitated into a loathsome pool of boiling brimstone, to wallow there in conflagration, smoke and the suffocation of horrible stench; from the pool they would be driven to the marsh of Hell, that they might embrace and be embraced by the reptiles, many times worse than serpents and vipers; after allowing them half an hour's dalliance with these creatures the devils would ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... them to secure their riches. They agreed therefore to cut Cassim's body into four quarters, to hang two on one side and two on the other, within the door of the cave, to terrify any person who should attempt the same thing, determining not to return to the cave till the stench of the body was completely exhaled. They had no sooner taken this resolution than they put it in execution, and when they had nothing more to detain them, left the place of their hoards well closed. They mounted their horses, went to beat the roads again, and to ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... police "of public safety." Who kept the public safe from the police I am unable to say. Fighting was going on perpetually in the neighbourhood; the dead and dying lay scattered in all directions; the stench bred epidemics more murderous than all Napoleon's cannon. Friedrich must have found his hands full day and night. Richard was baptized on August 16; the following day Napoleon won a victory which cost him dear; the 18th, being Sunday, was observed as such by a soldiery in need ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... the stench of the corpse of the Empress Isabella opened the eyes of Francis Borgia to the folly of a worldly life. He renounced the world and entered the Society of Jesus, where he sanctified himself, thinking often of the eternal ...
— Vocations Explained - Matrimony, Virginity, The Religious State and The Priesthood • Anonymous
... from the sea the skins of four sea-calves, which she had newly flayed, for she was minded to lay a snare for her father. She scooped hiding-places for us in the sand, and made us lie down therein, and cast the skin of a sea-calf over each of us. It would have been a grievous ambush, for the stench of the skins had distressed us sore,—who, indeed, would lay him down by a beast of the sea?—but she wrought a deliverance for us. She took ambrosia [Footnote: ambrosia, the food of the gods.], very sweet, and put it under each man's nostrils, ...
— The Story Of The Odyssey • The Rev. Alfred J. Church
... consisted of only one meal a day. "One can hardly conceive," say they in their journal, "what we endured: we had no rest neither night nor day; when we lay down to sleep and gat warm, we were almost devoured with vermin; when we sat up during the day, we were almost suffocated with stench and smoke." ...
— The Moravians in Labrador • Anonymous
... this very fact that Joe and his friends now rested their hopes. For just so soon as in the camps the first burst of enthusiasm had begun to die away, as the millions in the armies began to grow sick of the sight of blood, the groans and the shrieks of the wounded and dying, the stench of the dead—and themselves weary of fighting, worn by privation and disease, began to think of their distant homes, their wives and children starving there—then these socialists in their midst, one at every bivouack fire, ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... days afterward died our father, the Counselor Balam, one of the ancients, O my children. The ancients and the fathers died alike, and the stench was such that men died of it alone. Then perished our fathers and ancestors. Half the people threw themselves into the ravines, and the dogs and foxes lived on the bodies of the men. The fear of death destroyed the old people, ...
— The Annals of the Cakchiquels • Daniel G. Brinton
... June came a number of strangers to the mountain. They always came in the warm season, but they quartered themselves over in the town, beyond the stockade, and the stench, and ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... drawing nearer and with still more frenzy; "Glencoe has songs on it already. The stench from Invcrlochy's in the air; it's a mock in Benderloch and Ardgour, it's a nightmare in Glenurchy, and the women are keening on the slopes of Cladich. Cowards, cowards, little men, cowards! all the curses of Conan on you and the black rocks; ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... spent, PRIVILEGE OF PARLIAMENT, Now a new misfortune feels, Dreading to be laid by th' heels. Never durst a Muse before Enter that infernal door; Clio, stifled with the smell, Into spleen and vapours fell, By the Stygian steams that flew From the dire infectious crew. Not the stench of Lake Avernus Could have more offended her nose; Had she flown but o'er the top, She had felt her pinions drop. And by exhalations dire, Though a goddess, must expire. In a fright she crept away, Bravely I resolved to stay. When I saw the ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... pleasure in the wild, open-air perfumes, especially in the spring—the delicate breath of the blooming elms and maples and willows, the breath of the woods, of the pastures, of the shore. This keen, healthy sense of smell has made me abhor tobacco and flee from close rooms, and put the stench of cities behind me. I fancy that this whole world of wild, natural perfumes is lost to the tobacco-user and to the city- dweller. Senses trained in the open air are in tune with open-air objects; they are quick, ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... repeated endeavours that stones, slung from the military engines, at last killed it. The serpent then exhibited a sight that was more terrible to the Roman cohorts and legions than even Carthage itself. The streams of the river were dyed with its blood, and the stench of its putrified carcass infected the adjacent country, so that the Roman army was forced to decamp. Its skin, one hundred and twenty feet long, was sent to Rome: and, if Pliny may be credited, was to ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... faith I like the audience that frequenteth there With much applause: a man shall not be chokt With the stench of garlick, nor be pasted firm To the barmy jacket of a beer-brewer. Bra. 'Tis a good gentle audience, and I hope The boys will come one ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... more pungent sharpness of freshly burned gun-powder, and the man standing near the door gazed downward, with a dazed stare, at the floor by his feet, where lay the pistol which gave forth that acrid stench. ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... is a dirty and offensive occupation. The husk of the cocoa-nut is thrown into tanks of water, until the woody or pithy matter is loosened by fermentation from the coir fibre. The stench of putrid vegetable matter arising from these heaps must be highly deleterious. Subsequently the husks are beaten and the fibre is separated and dried. Coir rope is useful on account of its durability and power of resisting ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... ravine, and discovered three white bears' lairs fresh, saw several carcasses of buffaloes lying round, more or less eaten and decayed, and smelt quite a stench from them. One particularly was fresh killed, and partly eaten by the bears. He passed on across a brook, and after looking farther returned to the lairs. On returning to the brook he found several sticks in the ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... instrumental in bringing to an end this cruel war which is now deluging the pages of history with the heart's blood of the people, whose voices may now be drowned in the roar of the 42-centimeter guns, but whose spirits will unite in the black stench clouds which rise from the festered fields of Flanders to descend upon the heads of those who by Divine Right have murdered them,—I would rather be instrumental in bringing about this result, than be President of ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... studded with thousands of little cusps, each being brown without and milk-white within, and each destined to remain there until the heat had dried the nut meats to the proper brownish tone, there rose and spread upon the air a stench so thick and so heavy as to be almost visible; a rancid, hot, rottenish stench. Then, when the wind blew off the seas it frequently brought with it the taint of rotted fish. Sniffing this smell Ethan Pratt would pray for ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... with which Home begins his Iliads, as says the Greek epigram, but six hundred; as being ever hunger-starved and slovens in their schools—schools, did I say? Nay, rather cloisters, bridewells, or slaughterhouses—grown old among a company of boys, deaf with their noise, and pined away with stench and nastiness. And yet by my courtesy it is that they think themselves the most excellent of all men, so greatly do they please themselves in frighting a company of fearful boys with a thundering voice and big looks, tormenting them with ferules, ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... cinders, swelling the hideous uproar into which entered sounds of every kind: shrieks, groans, the rattle of musketry, the crash of falling walls. Men could scarce see one another; great livid clouds drifted athwart the sun and obscured his light, bearing with them an intolerable stench of soot and blood, heavy with the abominations of the slaughter. In every quarter the work of death and destruction still went on: the human brute unchained, the imbecile wrath, the mad fury, of man ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... from his dreams by the stench of his burnt cottage; he looked up, and everything he saw became abominable to him. The frozen river, into which his child would never gaze again; the empty, hideous homestead; he longed to escape from it all and go far away and forget Stasiek and ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... illustration of the sentiment, than this town of mud and money, contrasted with its beautiful environs. The distant view of Lyons is imposing from most points; but the interior presents but few objects to repay the traveller for its closeness, stench, and bustle (not even good silk stockings). Its two noble rivers have had no apparent effect in purifying it, nor the easterly winds from the Alps, which stand in full sight, in ventilating its narrow smoky streets: and though usually considered the second city of the empire in wealth and ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... gamblers, every low-down grogshop, every smoking-car, every public resort and waiting-room departments for men, every rendezvous of rogues, loafers, villains, and tramps is thoroughly saturated with the vile stench of the cuspidor and the poisonous odors of the pipe and cigar. "Rev. Dr. Cox abandoned tobacco after a drunken loafer asked him for a light." Not until then had he seen and felt the disreputable fraternity that existed between ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... terrible snakes, striking fear into every creature, began to fall into it. And the fat and the marrow of the snakes thus falling into the fire began to flow in rivers. And the atmosphere was filled with an insufferable stench owing to the incessant burning of the snakes. And incessant also were the cries of the snakes fallen into the fire and those in the air ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... was a low, black, miserable place; Its roof was rotting; and above it hung A cloud of murky vapor, sending down Intolerable stench on all around. The place was silent, save the creaking noise, The steady motion of a dozen pumps, That labored all the day, nor ceased at night. Methought in it I heard a hundred groans; Dropping of widows' tears, and cries of orphans; Shrieks of some victim to the fiendish lust Of men for gold; ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... does not appear to have been worked till much later. The salt which was obtained by a rude process from brine pits was held in no high estimation. The pans in which the manufacture was carried on exhaled a sulphurous stench; and, when the evaporation was complete, the substance which was left was scarcely fit to be used with food. Physicians attributed the scorbutic and pulmonary complaints which were common among the English to this unwholesome condiment. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... see her and hearken. This is she. Stop the ways fast against the stench that nips Your nostril as it nears her. Lo, the lips That between prayer and prayer find time to be Poisonous, the hands holding a cup and key, Key of deep hell, cup whence blood reeks and drips; The loose ...
— Two Nations • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... had been recently the more disposed to purity through the death of my mother. At Woolwich I remained extraordinarily innocent and uncurious, letting the poisonous stream flow continually by me, shrinking from its stench, and finding more and more relief in my own company. I must have been a very unpleasant ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... So broad, so bountiful is his character that he never turned a tramp empty-handed from his door, but always gave him a letter of introduction to me. Pure, honest, incorruptible, that is Joe Hawley. Such a man in politics is like a bottle of perfumery in a glue factory—it may modify the stench, but it doesn't destroy it. I haven't said any more of him than I would say of myself. Ladies and gentlemen, this ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... this occasion, were estimated at three hundred thousand pounds sterling. Near the harbour the streets are narrow and irregular: in the other parts of the town they are tolerably wide. None of them, however, are paved, and all are filthy. During the hot months of summer, the stench that proceeds from some of them ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... Esquimaux flesh, rotten fish and infectious wearing apparel, which constitute a Greenland hovel; no window to revive the unbreathable air, only a hole at the top of the hut, which gives free passage to the smoke, but does not allow the stench to ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... lot where I may meet my wife hereafter, should I never see her here.'" He had then been allotted to a corsair, and had thenceforth been chained to the bench of rowers, between the two decks, where, in stifling heat and stench, in storm or calm, healthy or diseased, the wretched oarsmen were compelled to play the part of machinery in propelling the vessel, in order to capture Christian ships—making exertions to which only the perpetual lash of the galley-master could ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain. Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from all dead. Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... to Portici. Those which stood with their gardens toward the bay would have been tolerable, no doubt, if they could have kept their windows shut to the vile street before their doors; but the houses opposite could have had no escape from its stench and noisomeness. It was absolutely the filthiest street I have seen anywhere outside of New York, excepting only that little street which, in Herculaneum, leads from the theatre ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... and improvements in furniture were suggested; and a man of moderate fortune saw his house vie with, nay, superior to, the old palaces of his governors. When he paced his streets, he felt the genial western breeze pass him, rich with the perfumes of the country, instead of the stench described by Erasmus; and looking upward, he beheld the beautiful blue of the air, variegated with fleecy clouds, in place of projecting black beams and plaster, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 271, Saturday, September 1, 1827. • Various
... themselves on the dead roots. Even stone walls were down, and under them, sometimes, were men. Mills were in ruins; for no one had remained to keep bars in their staples. Tanks of last year's rum and treacle had been flung through the walls, and their odours mingled with the stench of decomposing men and cattle. The horrid rattle of the land-crab was almost the only sound in that desolate land. "The Garden of the Antilles" looked like a putrid swamp, and she had not a ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... ceased to glow on their foliage; then taking the nearest path, I suffered myself, though not without regret, to be conducted out of this fresh sylvan scene to the dusty, pompous parterres of the Greffier Fagel. Every flower that wealth can purchase diffuses its perfume on one side; whilst every stench a canal can exhale, poisons the air on the other. These sluggish puddles defy all the power of the United Provinces, and retain the freedom of stinking in spite of their endeavours: but perhaps I am too ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... camp, to pick him out, if we could, among the dead; but it was not possible to recognize him, the bodies being all far gone in corruption, and their faces changed. We saw more than half a league round us the earth all covered with the dead; and hardly stopped there, because of the stench of the dead men and their horses; and so many blue and green flies rose from them, bred of the moisture of the bodies and the heat of the sun, that when they were up in the air they hid the sun. It was wonderful to hear them buzzing; and where they settled, there they infected the air, and ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... is generally believed, that putrefaction and stench are the causes of pestilential distempers, the removal of this grievance may be pressed from motives of far greater weight than those of delicacy and pleasure; and I might solicit the timely care of this assembly for the preservation ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... and the banks of the canals are planted with rows of trees, that make a very pleasing appearance; but the trees concur with the canals to make the situation unwholesome.[131] The stagnant canals in the dry season exhale an intolerable stench, and the trees impede the course of the air, by which, in some degree, the putrid effluvia would be dissipated. In the wet season the inconvenience is equal, for then these reservoirs of corrupted water overflow their banks in ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... that javelin from the ghost, and—-the cat on his hindlegs, screaming like a stricken devil, clawing at the ghost, now revealed as a very big, long-legged bird which flapped. It flapped huge wings and danced a grotesque dance, and it smelt abominably, with the stench of ten fish-markets on a ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... they wants, an' then they aint got nothin' more to live for. They gits into motor-cars an' scours the country, but they never sees it. They never 'ears the birds singin', an' they misses all the flowers. They never smells the vi'lets nor the mayblossom—they on'y gits their own petrol stench wi' the flavour o' the dust mixed in. Larst May I was a-walkin' in the lanes o' Devon, an' down the 'ill comes a motor-car tearin' an' scorchin' for all it was worth, an' bang went somethin' at the bottom ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... insolent and bold, Pursued the bison while he sought for gold. And on the hungry red man's own domains He left the rotting and unused remains To foul with sickening stench each passing wind And rouse the demon in the savage mind, Save in the heart where virtues dominate Injustice always breeds ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... diminutive shocking semi-occasionally, provided the act comes about as a natural course of events. There were many things about the college and clinic rooms that were, to me, gruesome and repulsive. The dissecting-room, with its stench and debris from dead bodies, was the crucial test for me. I wonder now that I stayed with it as long as ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... the place, I spied what seemed to me a little cupboard, over the mantel-shelf, and I told John to see if I was right. The lad mounted upon a chair, and pulled open a small door, but almost fell to the ground with the dreadful stench which seemed to rush ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... that if he could not produce the body when the relief came, he might be deemed a murderer. He therefore let it lie until it became so overpoweringly offensive that the whole building, from foundation to cupola, was filled with the horrible stench. The feelings of the solitary man can neither be conceived nor described. Well was it for John that he had the Word of God in his hand, and the grace of God in his heart during that ...
— The Story of the Rock • R.M. Ballantyne
... water. On the second morning, he found the bread gone, but the water untouched. When he had been in the press four days and five night, the slave informed his master that the water had not been used for four mornings, and that horrible stench came from the gin house. The overseer was sent to examine into it. When the press was unscrewed, the dead body was found partly eaten by rats and vermin. Perhaps the rats that devoured his bread had gnawed him before life was extinct. Poor Charity! Grandmother ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... below, which, however, vary much in development, and the flesh tooth is most marked in those in which the tuberculate is least developed, and vice versa. The great and small intestines differ little in calibre, and many of them (i.e. the family) can diffuse at will a disgusting stench." This last peculiarity is a specialty of the American members of the family, notably the skunk, of the power of which almost incredible stories are told. I remember reading not long ago an account of a train passing over a skunk, and for a time the majority of the passengers suffered ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... the cant of humanitarianism. Self, and after self a friend; the rest may go to the devil; and be sure that when any man is more stupidly vain and outrageously egotistic than his fellows, he will hide his hideousness in humanitarianism. Victor Hugo was the innermost stench of the humanitarianism, and Mr Swinburne holds his nose with one hand while he waves the censer with the other. Men of inferior genius, Victor Hugo and Mr Gladstone, take refuge in humanitarianism. Humanitarianism is a pigsty, where ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... Bluebottle and the Flesh-fly perch on the trellis-work, make a short investigation and then decamp. Throughout the summer season, for three whole months, the apparatus remains where it is, without result: never a worm. What is the reason? Does the stench of the meat not spread, coming from that depth? Certainly it spreads: it is unmistakable to my dulled nostrils and still more so to the nostrils of my children, whom I call to bear witness. Then why does the Flesh-fly, who but now was dropping ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... breath made the poisonous miasma of the marshes more deadly as he padded over the shivering reeds and trembling rushes, across the bleak moorland and the high cliffs where the fresh tang of the grey sea was defiled by the hideous stench of a foul beast of prey. There was fresh food for him to-night, he knew, some blood more potent than any that for twelve years had come his bestial way. And he hastened on with greedy eagerness, nightmare incarnate. He found the great door of the banqueting-hall bolted and barred, but one angry ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... created the first blot of uncleanly, uncouth habitation upon the view. Add to these a proportionate number of ragged tents and teepees, a crowd of unwashed, and, for the most part, undressed children, a hundred fierce and half-starved dogs of the "husky" type. Imagine a stench of dung fire cooking, and the gathering of millions of mosquitoes about a few choyeuses and fat cattle grazing near by, and the picture as it first presents ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... doth burn in love: Love the strong and weak doth yoke, And makes the ivy climb the oak, Under whose shadows lions wild, Soften'd by love, grow tame and mild: Love no med'cine can appease, He burns the fishes in the seas: Not all the skill his wounds can stench, Not all the sea his fire can quench. Love did make the bloody spear Once a leavy coat to wear, While in his leaves there shrouded lay Sweet birds, for love that sing and play And of all love's joyful flame I the bud and blossom am. Only bend thy knee ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... I defy all counsel, all redress, But that which ends all counsel, true redress, Death, death:—O amiable lovely death! Thou odoriferous stench! sound rottenness! Arise forth from the couch of lasting night, Thou hate and terror to prosperity, And I will kiss thy detestable bones; And put my eyeballs in thy vaulty brows; And ring these fingers with thy household worms; And stop this gap of breath with fulsome dust, And be a carrion ...
— King John • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... that beast with the sharp teeth and the terrible eyes that flashed lambent fire like those of Cynna,[330] surrounded by a hundred lewd flatterers, who spittle-licked him to his heart's content; it had a voice like a roaring torrent, the stench of a seal, a foul Lamia's testicles and the rump ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... bladder with a service-tree peg, brought them to Wilno and sold them to the Franciscan priests, who gave him twenty skojcow[7] he did this to destroy the enemies of Christ's name. I have seen that bladder with my own eyes; a dreadful stench came from it, because in that way those dirty spirits manifested their ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... the drawbridge swung to slowly, the steam-tug blackened the dull air and roiled the turbid water as it dragged its schooner on towards the lumber-yards of the South Branch, and a long line of waiting vehicles took up their interrupted course through the smoke and the stench as they filed across the stream into the thick of business beyond: first a yellow street-car; then a robust truck laden with rattling sheet-iron, or piled high with fresh wooden pails and willow baskets; then a junk-cart bearing a pair of dwarfed and bearded Poles, who bumped in unison with the ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... people for more than six hundred years were not, indeed, without medicine, but they were without physicians." They used traditional family recipes, and had numerous gods and goddesses of disease and healing. Febris was the god of fever, Mephitis the god of stench; Fessonia aided the weary, and "Sweet Cloacina" presided over the drains. The plague-stricken appealed to the goddess Angeronia, women to Fluonia and Uterina. Ossipaga took care of the bones of children, and Carna was the deity presiding over the ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... unto the way of life, By which sweet path thou mayst attain the goal That shall conduct thee to celestial rest! Break heart, drop blood, and mingle it with tears, Tears falling from repentant heaviness Of thy most vile[155] and loathsome filthiness, The stench whereof corrupts the inward soul With such flagitious crimes of heinous sin[156] As no commiseration may expel, But mercy, Faustus, of thy Saviour sweet, Whose blood alone ...
— The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe
... great fear and terror. At daybreak they went to open the grave where the wicked body of Luther had been placed. When the grave was opened, you could clearly see that there was no body, neither flesh nor bone, nor any clothes. But such a sulphuric stench rose from the grave that all who were standing around the grave turned sick. On account of this miracle many have reformed their lives by returning to the holy Christian faith, to the honor, praise, and glory of Jesus Christ, and to the strengthening ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... helpless in the nightmareridden days, dreaming through twitching nights of an escape geographically nonexistent. Dismembered corpses in the streets, arenas packed with dead bodies, fallow fields newly fertilized with human blood added their stench to that of an unwashed, disease riddled continent. A rumor was circulated that there were still Jews alive and those who but yesterday had sought each other in mortal combat now happily united to hunt down a common prey. And sure enough, in miserable caverns ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... been rendered impossible; and the horrible brutalities of the passenger-ship are day after day repeated,—but on a larger scale. And yet this is a fair specimen. And for such hideous and necessarily demoralizing habitations,—for two rooms, stench, indecency, and gloom, the poor family pays—and the rich builder receives—"thirty-five per cent, annually on ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... rose, by reason of the great stench that they smelt, and went up to the fire, where the gentleman drew out of his bosom a handkerchief all dyed with the melted sugar, and on opening his robe, lined with fox-skin, found it ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. V. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... the wretched inhabitants had been compelled to live on mussels and limpets till they had no strength left to gather them, and that numbers dying from starvation, the survivors had been driven by the horrible stench of the corpses in the houses to seek for pure air and provisions along the shore. Here they had been killed by the savages, in whose possession a variety ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... followers; not cringers and crawlers. If there is in heaven an infinite being, he never will be satisfied with the worship of cowards and hypocrites. Honest unbelief will be a perfume in heaven when hypocrisy, no matter however religious it may be outwardly, will be a stench. That is my doctrine. That is all there is to it; give every other human being all the chance you claim for yourself. To keep your mind open to the voices of nature, to new ideas, to new thoughts, and to improve upon your ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... passage in the rocks, where the brutes upreared hindlegged and stretched their forelegs upward like cats to clear the wall, the way was piled with carcasses where they had toppled back. And here he stood, in the stench of hell, with a cheery word and a hand on the rump at the right time, till the string passed by. And when one bogged he blocked the trail till it was clear again; nor did the man live who crowded ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... at once if we would reach Ravellos (our Spanish town) before night. So I to Dawson's chamber, and he to Moll's, and in a little while we all shivering down to the great kitchen, where is never a muleteer left, but only a great stench of garlic, to eat a mess of soup, very hot and comforting. And after that out into the dark (there being as yet but a faint flush of green and primrose colour over towards the east), where four fresh mules (which Don Sanchez overnight had bargained to exchange against our ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... under thine her tender thigh; Not a silk gown shall once melt one of them, Nor the delights of a transparent gemme. A scurvy story kills thee, which doth tell, That in thine armpits a fierce goat doth dwell. Him they all fear full of an ugly stench: Nor 's 't fit he should lye with a handsome wench; Wherefore this noses cursed plague first crush, Or cease to wonder, ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... from the east, that day; it whistled through the open, double-decked cars packed with gray, woolly bodies, whose voices were ever raised in strident complaint; and the stench of them smote the unaccustomed nostrils of the Happy Family and put them to disgusted flight up the track and across it to where the air ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... he. "Beggin' fer fish-heads. They up-eend the way when they're hungry. Breath on him like the doleful tombs, hain't he?" A horrible stench of decayed fish filled the air as the pillar of white sank, and the water bubbled oilily. "Hain't ye never seen a grampus up-eend before? You'll see 'em by hundreds 'fore ye're through. Say, it's good to hev a boy ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... but shook his head pessimistically. He was not a politician—so much the better, we don't want a politician; he was a plain business man exactly what is needed; a conservative, level-headed business man wholly lacking in those sensational qualities which are a stench in the nostrils of good citizens. Mr. Giles Henderson admitted that the time had come when a man of these qualities was needed—but he was not the man. Mr. Tredway was the man—so he told Mr. Tredway; Mr. Gates of Brampton was the man—so he assured Mr. Gates. Mr. Henderson ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... pitchy clouds, Vast showers of ashes hovering in the smoke; Now belches molten stones and ruddy flame, Incensed, or tears up mountains by the roots, Or slings a broken rock aloft in air. The bottom works with smothered fire involved In pestilential vapours, stench, and smoke. 10 'Tis said, that thunder-struck Enceladus Groveling beneath the incumbent mountain's weight, Lies stretched supine, eternal prey of flames; And, when he heaves against the burning load, Reluctant, to invert his broiling limbs, A sudden earthquake shoots through all ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... the impression is universal[768]; yet it is strange. As to the sailor, when you look down from the quarter deck to the space below, you see the utmost extremity of human misery; such crouding, such filth, such stench[769]!' BOSWELL. 'Yet sailors are happy.' JOHNSON. 'They are happy as brutes are happy, with a piece of fresh meat,—with the grossest sensuality. But, Sir, the profession of soldiers and sailors has the dignity ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... how he had fallen in with a sperm whale, dead of disease, floating as high as a frigate; how, with a very light breeze, the skipper had crept down toward her; how, at half a mile distance the stench of her was severe, but, as they neared her, awful; then so intolerable that the skipper gave the crew leave to go below and close the lee ports. So there were but two men left on the brig's deck, and a ship's company that a hurricane would not have driven from their duty skulked ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... have been accorded, for St. Renny had its reputation as the great naturalists' school to keep up. Half the glamour surrounding the savage pet would have vanished, however, and the secret was jealously guarded, the badger himself, by his unconquerable stench, being the only person likely to give it away. Luckily the hutch was not directly over the dormitory, but right at the angle of the roof, where a low window, kept always open by Killigrew, allowed the worst of the smell to be wafted away. The ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... of a garden, varied according to the fragrance of flowers and fruits; the general enjoyment in hell is sensed as the odor of stagnant water, into which filth of various sorts has been thrown, the odor varied according to the stench of the things decaying and reeking in it. While I have been given to know how the enjoyment of a particular affection of good is sensed in heaven, and the enjoyment of some lust of evil in hell, it would take too long ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... possible condition. Stanton is in the Department, got his secretary, but the secretary of the Senate, who have taken upon themselves his sins, and who place him there under a large salary to annoy and obstruct the operations of the Executive. This the people well enough understand, and he is a stench in the nostrils of their ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... those hours when darkness or when pain Recals its force, and guilt recedes again; When passion, vice, and fancy quit their sway, When lawless pleasure trembling shrinks away, While black conviction's rushing whirlwinds quench Her smoky torch, and leave a sickening stench; And thro' the soul's chill gloom, fierce conscience pours His fiery arrows in resistless showers. But, as accumulated guilt oppress'd With stronger obstacles his hardening breast, Faint and more faint the dread awakenings grew, And their subsiding terrors soon withdrew. Like traces ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... sun blazed down upon the town, not a drop of rain fell, not the faintest breeze stirred. From corpses that lay rotting in the houses and from corpses that were only half-buried in the earth, there was engendered a suffocating stench which mingled with the stagnant air of the streets and attracted swarms and clouds of ravens and crows until the walls and roofs were black with them. And round about the wall encircling the town sat strange, large, outlandish birds from far away with beaks ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... out the exact measure of ground over which it rested. It hung low, and had the appearance of a light powdering of snow. In passing, it fell down on his small farm, and he smelt it very unpleasant, exactly like, he says, the bilge water of a ship—a sulphurous sort of stench. After the wind rose and cleared off those clouds or lumps of fog, there remained on the grass over which they had hung, as well as on the potato shaws, [stalks,] an appearance of grey dew or hoar frost. The next morning he noticed the leaves of his potatoes ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... the evil spirits in the air, since "wise clerks know well that dragons hate nothing more than the stink of burning bones, and therefore the country folk gather as many as they might find, and burned them; and so with the stench thereof they drove away the dragons, and so they were brought out ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... prince, and having travelled a considerable distance, Kurugsar suddenly exclaimed: "I now begin to smell the stench of the dragon." Hearing this, Isfendiyar dismounted, ascended the machine, and shutting the door fast, took his seat and drove off. Bashutan and all the warriors upon witnessing this extraordinary ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... grown men, then those things would have ceased to be, and even their very memory would have perished, most likely, while the smoke of the accursed engines would have sullied the pure blue sky, and the stench of their foul vapours would have poisoned the ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... not thrown off the scent by the powerful odour of naphthaline, which I thought would mask the extra-subtle emanations of the female, which were imperceptible to human olfactory organs. I repeated the experiment with the Oak Eggar. This time I used all the resources of scent and stench that my knowledge ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... rolled on, with all its fume and fuss, and roar of steam, and stench of oil and burning coal. It had to go quietly and slowly on account of the snow which was falling, and ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... turning to regard me, every hair upon his sunburned face seeming to bristle, "think o' the most sinful stench ever offended you, the most loathly corruption you ever saw and there's his soul; think o' the devil wi' eyes like dim glass, flesh like dough and a sweet, soft voice, and you have Alexo Valdez inside ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... mockeries of the idea of Christianity. Now I say to you, you are hypocrites. You are like carrion birds who soar high up in the ether for a while and then swoop down to revel in filth and rottenness. The stench of death is sweet to you. Putridity is dear to you. As for you who have done this work, you need pity. Your own soul must be reeking with secret foulness to be so basely suspicious. Your own eyes must have cast unholy glances to so soon accuse the eyes of others. As for ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... ambition warms the mind in pursuit of fame, through the paths of honor; while too large a portion tends to unfavorable directions, kindles to a flame, consumes the finer sensations of rectitude, and leaves a stench behind. ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... true, that, when the coarse and worthless dross Is purg'd away, there will be mighty loss: E'en Congreve, Southern, manly Wycherley, When thus refin'd, will grievous sufferers be; Into the melting-pot when Dryden comes, What horrid stench will rise, what noisome fumes! How will he shrink, when all his lewd allay, And wicked mixture, shall ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... smaller yet, and blacker and bluer, and more slippery and slimy, is an uncovered cesspool, from which a sickening stench exales continually. All about it are chambers—very small ones,—state-rooms let me call them, opening upon narrow galleries that run in various directions, sometimes bridging one another in a marvelous and exceedingly ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... weariness of his camel to fall behind the caravan, and who left no remnants behind him but his spear and shield. Major Harris well describes this spot as one which, from its desolate position, might be believed to be the last stage of the habitable world. "A close mephitic stench, impeding respiration, arose from the saline exhalations of the stagnant lake. A frightful glare from the white salt and limestone hillocks threatened extinction to the vision, and a sickening heaviness ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... certain day, when the carcase of an ox came drifting down the current and stuck upon the forepoint of that island. They tried in vain to lift it up or push it off; it was too heavy to be moved an inch by all their efforts. They named it in their speech the Heavy One. Its stench infected the whole island, and kept on increasing until the hapless ducks were ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... notwithstanding the disgust which their uncleanliness inspired. Their custom of painting their cheeks with ochre and oil, was alone sufficient to deter the more sensible from such intimate connections with them; and if we add to this a certain stench which announced them even at a distance, and the abundance of vermin which not only infested their hair, but also crawled on their clothes, and which they occasionally cracked between their teeth, it is astonishing that persons should be found, who could gratify ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... mighty, and Karma is a fool to us; we are the children of MODERN CIVILIZATION; what have Nature and its laws to do with us? Our inventions and discoveries have certainly put them out of commission.—And sure enough, the mere foulness of the battlefield, the stench of decay, bred no pest; our Science had circumvented the old methods through which Natural Law (which is only another way of saying Karma) worked; we had cut the physical links, and blocked the material channels through which wrong-doing flowed into its own punishment.—Whereupon Nature, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... at the expense of his official dignity." Another critic, alleging that "the dressing-rooms of the new company of comedians were under the orchestra," complained that "in the first row of the pit the stench was so abominable, one might as well have sitten in a stable." Still the "equestrian drama" delighted the town. "Blue Beard" was followed by Monk Lewis's "Timour the Tartar," in which more horses appeared. Some hissing was heard at the ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook |
