"Blight" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... products of those golden hours, when all that was low is elevated, when all that was dark is illumined, and all that was earthly is transfigured. Books have no touch of personal infirmity—theirs is undying bloom, immortal youth, perennial fragrance. Age cannot wrinkle, disease cannot blight, death cannot pierce them. The personal image of the author is quite as likely to be a hindrance as a help to his book. The actor who played with Shakespeare in his own "Hamlet" probably did but ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... underlay the fundamental views and principles of Puritanism. The early records of our General Court are thickly strown with appointments of Fast-Days that the people might discover the especial occasion of God's anger toward them, manifested in the blight of some expected harvest, or in a scourge upon the cattle in the field. Some among us who claim to hold unreduced or softened the old ancestral faith have been twice in late years convened in our State-House, by especial call, to legislate upon the potato-disease and the pleuro-pneumonia ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... thorn, That not one from partner to porter may bear all I have borne. So Jasper thinks I am sad; how the wintry winds whistle to-night! Heaven grant no poor woman or children are out in this sleety blight. I cannot read this eve; what ails me? "Chronicle," "Tribune" and "Times," Lie looking coaxingly at me, I heed not their prose or rhymes, Is it thinking so much of Arthur, brings Aimee before me here, Aimee, my ...
— Victor Roy, A Masonic Poem • Harriet Annie Wilkins
... you, is it, you wretched blight, you miserable weed!" said Mr. Brewster, having recovered enough breath to be going on with. He glowered at his son-in-law despondently. "I might have, expected it! If I was at the North Pole, I could ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... casting office. "Swell cabaret stuff" was the phrase that brought the applicants to a lively swarm about the little window. Evening clothes, glad wraps, cigarette cases, vanity-boxes—the Victor people doing The Blight of Broadway with Muriel Mercer—Stage Number Four at 8:30 to-morrow morning. There seemed no limit to the people desired. Merton Gill joined the throng about the window. Engagements were rapidly made, both through the window and over the telephone ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... will return, but cold and altered, Like all whose hopes too soon depart; Like all on whom have beat, unsheltered, The bitter blasts that blight the heart. ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... in the neighbourhood of the encampment he ranged with growing thoroughness and care, without finding so much as a mouse with which to satisfy his appetite. Even Koala and Echidna were nowhere to be found. It was as though a blight had descended upon the countryside, and the only living thing Finn saw that morning, besides the crows, was a laughing jackass on the stump of a blasted stringy-bark tree, who jeered at him hoarsely as he passed. ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... 's a foe to the peace o' this bosom, That glows sae devoutly, dear lassie, for thee; Alas! that e'er poortith should blight love's young blossom, When riches nae ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... shudder of the pain she had passed through, of the horror of that terrible discovery. It was all over now, thank Heaven. It had never been any brand or stigma to her; she had never felt any false shame over it; she had never bowed her bright head as though a blight had passed over her. She said to herself it was not her fault, she was not in the least to blame. She had believed herself in all honor to be the wife of Lord Chandos, and she could not feel that the least shadow of blame ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... unfit for England; if false, England was unfit for me. I withdrew; but this was not enough. In other countries—in Switzerland, in the shadow of the Alps, and by the blue depth of the lakes—I was pursued and breathed upon by the same blight. I crossed the mountains, but it was the same; so I went a little farther, and settled myself by the waves of the Adriatic, like the stag at bay, who betakes him to ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... blight, hangs on the briars, And from the clammy ground suspires A sweet frail sick autumnal scent Of stale frost furring weeds long spent; And wafted on, like one who sleeps, A feeble vapour hangs or creeps, Exhaling on the fungus mould A breath ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... this the only cause that operated to disappoint the reasonable hopes and to blight the fair prospects under which the original compact was formed. The effects of discriminating duties upon imports have been referred to in a former chapter—favoring the manufacturing region, which was the North; burdening ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... "Parsifal" and "Salome," but there were humiliating ones, like the prostitution of a great establishment for the performance of "Die Fledermaus" and "Der Zigeunerbaron" to deck out the Herr Direktor's benefits. The blight of commercialism had fallen on the institution. On February 11, 1908, Mr. Conried resigned, and announcement was officially made of a reorganization of his company, and the engagement of Giulio Gatti-Casazza and Andreas Dippel as managers ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... longed to have a future—a future with hope in it. To be shut up entirely to the past and present, is abhorrent to the human mind; it is to the soul—whose life and happiness is unceasing progress—what the prison is to the body; a blight and mildew, a hell of horrors. The dawning of this, another year, awakened me from my temporary slumber, and roused into life my latent, but long cherished aspirations for freedom. I was now not only ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... what I know," said De Valence, "in search of a more enterprising lover than one who is so willing to interpret every air of frost as a killing blight to his hopes; perhaps she seeks the Black Douglas, or some such hero of the Thistle, to reward with her lands, her lordships, and beauty, those virtues of enterprise and courage, of which John de Walton was at one time thought possessed. But, seriously, events are passing ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... This system is a blight of the gravest character upon the local industry of the inhabitants, and it is a suicidal and unstatesmanlike policy that crushes and extinguishes all enterprise. What Englishman would submit to such a prying and humiliating position? ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... Will they suffer this hell-blight to come upon them? Will they wait till violence and suspicion are the only principles retaining power among them? Will they look on while the Repeal movement—the educating, the ennobling, the sacred effort for liberty—is superseded by the buzz of assassination and vengeance? Or will they now ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... seem victorious, War may waste and famine blight, Still from out the conflict glorious, Mind comes forth with ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... Then smiled with grimace of derisive craft, And in a most repugnant manner, laughed, But all the knight discerned with eye and ear, Was his own maudlin laugh and drunken leer. "Breathe thou thy message," shrieked the frantic knight "Discharge thy purpose, though it blast and blight, I charge thee, speak, by all that is most fair. By all most foul, I charge thee to declare; By my bright armor and my trusty sword; I charge thee, speak, by Holy Rood and Word!" He sank exhausted, ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... little bamboo rods supporting a long cord from which long straws hang down, like a fringe, and paper cuttings, which are symbols (gohei) are suspended at regular intervals. This is the shimenawa, sacred emblem of Shinto. Within the consecrated space inclosed by it no blight may enter—no scorching sun wither the young shoots. And where the white arrows glimmer the locust shall not prevail, nor ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... tacking about to catch the erratic breeze, the gay little brig made merry and rapid way over the sparkling Mediterranean, at a rate that promised our arrival at Palermo by the sunset of the following day. As the evening came on the wind freshened, and by the time the moon soared like a large blight bird into the sky, we were scudding along sideways, the edge of our vessel leaning over to kiss the waves that gleamed like silver and gold, flecked here and there with phosphorescent flame. We skimmed almost under the bows of a magnificent yacht—the ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... should ever be without 'em)— And, just conceive the bliss— There is so little of the goose about 'em, One's safe from any hiss! Ah! who can paint that first great awful night, Big with a blessing or a blight, When the poor dramatist, all fume and fret, Fuss, fidget, fancy, fever, funking, fright, Ferment, fault-fearing, faintness—more f's yet: Flushed, frigid, flurried, flinching, fitful, flat, Add famished, ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... majority of her people? This, of course, was only preliminary to the larger question: Shall the National Government, under lead of the Slave Oligarchy, be given power to spread over new territory, at will, the blight and curse of human bondage? Upon this foremost question of the day, Senator Broderick stood side by side with Stephen A. Douglas in opposition to the Buchanan Administration, and its mad attempt to force slavery upon the people of the New West. The attitude of California politicians on ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... go out of her sight, Under the coffin lid—out through the door; Somebody finds only darkness and blight All through the glory of summer-sun light; Somebody's baby will ...
— Poems of Sentiment • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... back, and crouching and groaning for an hour or so in the darkest corner of the travellers' hut, tortured by the demon of sandy blight. It was too hot to travel, and there was no one there except ourselves and Mitchell's cattle pup. We were waiting till after sundown, for I couldn't have travelled in the daylight, anyway. Mitchell had tied a wet towel ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson
... in London, he was stricken with influenza and with subsequent sorrow. The attack was short but sharp—had it lasted Addie would certainly have come to his aid; most of a blight really in its secondary stage. The good ladies his sitters—the ladies with the frizzled hair, with the diamond earrings, with the chins tending to the massive—left for him, at the door of his lodgings, flowers, soup and love, so that with their assistance he pulled through; but his ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... bitter-sweet of wetted weeds, the aromatic flavor that shell-life yields, and the smells also of rotten and decaying fish—all these were inextricably blended in the air, that was of the keenness of a frost-blight for freshness, and yet was warm with the softness ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... hours She has a voice of gladness and a smile And eloquence of beauty, and she glides Into his darker musings with a mild And healing sympathy, that steals away Their sharpness ere he is aware. When thoughts Of the last, bitter hour come like a blight Over thy spirit, and sad images Of the stern agony and shroud and pall And breathless darkness and the narrow house Make thee to shudder and grow sick at heart,— Go forth under the open sky, and list To Nature's teachings, while from all around— Earth and ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... constantly said, is the prevalence of a narrow and mean type of character; the decay of energy; the excessive devotion to a petty ideal of personal comfort; and the systematic attempt to turn our eyes away from the dark side of the world. A smug, placid, contemptible optimism is creeping like a blight over the face of society, and suppressing all the grander aspirations of more energetic times. But in proportion to Fitzjames's general agreement upon the nature of the evil was the vehemence of his dissent from the suggested remedy. ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... measure the coming forces of Freedom. Rosalie Leese, the pioneer white child of California, born in 1838, at Yerba Buena, was the first of countless thousands of free-born American children. In the unpolluted West the breath of slavery shall never blight a single human existence. Old Captain Richardson and Jacob Leese, pioneers of the magic city of San Francisco, gaze upon the beautiful ranks of smiling school-children, in happy troops. They have no regrets, like ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... came the blight Of a little thoughtless fight; Then, alas! each passing day Farther ...
— Ballads of Peace in War • Michael Earls
... one glance of undue reproach upon you. Aye, and my very heart would break within me rather than it should foster one sentiment that was not love for you, and yet, feeling thus, I was driving you to ruin and wreck. Instinct taught you the terrible truth, and you would blight your life rather than not suit the whims of a thoughtless old man. How can I ever look you in the face again? Oh! my dearest child, this indeed is too much—too much—too much" and sobbing violently, the bowed head, with its snow-white locks, fell on ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... hearts and make the whole world bright. 'Tis this that thralls my heart in love's delight, Not thy clear face of beauty glorious; For he who harbours virtue, still will choose To love what neither years nor death can blight. ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... four thousand millions of property specially protected by law. It was for the existing generation of the governing class in the South to vote themselves into bankruptcy and penury. Far beyond this, it was in their judgment to blight their land with ignorance and indolence, to be followed by crime and anarchy. Their point of view was so radically different from that held by a large number of Northern people that it left no common ground for action,—scarcely, ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... unsparing discharge of their duty in searching out and punishing the guilty. "It is come to our ears," says the bull, "that numbers of both sexes do not avoid to have intercourse with the infernal fiends, and that by their sorceries they afflict both man and beast; that they blight the marriage-bed, destroy the births of women, and the increase of cattle; they blast the corn on the ground, the grapes of the vineyard, the fruits of the trees, the grass and herbs of the field." For which reasons ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... the dullness of the prophecy, the evident suffering of his mother, and the equally evident though silent contempt of his father, we need not wonder that Richard grew up in what seemed to him a conviction that religion was worse than a thing of nought, was an evil phantom, with a terrible power to blight; a miasm that had steamed up from the foul marshes of the world, before man was at home in it, or yet acquainted with the beneficent laws of Nature. It was not merely a hopeless task to pray to a power which could ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... air of finality. He was to leave her here, she said. He was to go back to his own country. How badly had his reception fared so far? Why not, then, leave Mexico to ingratitude, and have done? The romantic land of roses was notoriously a blight to hopes. Why should he seek to thrive despite the mysterious curse that seemed to hover over all ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... a woman, who has cursed my life, blasted my prospects, and ruined my youth; a woman who gained my early affection only to blight and wither it; a woman who should be nearer to me and dearer than all else, and yet who is further than the uttermost depths of hell from me in sympathy or feeling; a woman that I should cleave to, but from whom I have been flying, ready to face shame, disgrace, oblivion, even that death which ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... enquire and give such information as his local knowledge enables him to supply. Or again, a foreign country will sometimes make regulations which hinder the importation of English products. English oats may, for instance, be affected with a blight which Italy fears may infect her crops if she allows their importation. It may then become the duty of the British Embassy at Rome to make arrangements with the Italian Government in order that English farmers may not suffer by losing the ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... whole connections and evolution. At first it was merely learned that we had to do with an unstable, adolescent girl who had engaged for apparently no purpose whatever in false self-accusations which would naturally blight her career. ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... where alders, cottonwoods and quaking aspens may not be found. In 1913 either the lack of water, some adverse climatic condition, or some fungus blight caused the aspen leaves to blotch and fall from the trees as early as the beginning of September. As a rule they remain until late in October, changing to autumnal tints of every richness and hue and reminding one of the glorious hues of the ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... destruction had overtaken him. And Berenice had been crushed by the divine vengeance which had so deservedly fallen on him. He groaned in anguish, seeming to see how she had perished through the blight of his passion. Not by fire, O God! Not by fire! How long would it be possible to breathe in this stifling reek, heavy with unspeakable odors? It was his crime that had brought her to this death. He, a man set apart and consecrated to the work of God, had ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... "O thou eternal one; whose presence blight All space doth occupy—all motion guide— Thou from primeval nothingness didst call First chaos, then existence. Lord, on thee Eternity had its foundation: all Sprung forth from thee—of light, joy, harmony, Sole origin: all life, all beauty thine. Thy word created all, and doth create; Thy splendor ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... industries are the ones occupying most attention, the workers in the Department of Agriculture have not been unmindful of other native nut-bearing plants, such as the native black walnuts, the hickories and the chestnut up to the time of the very destructive attack of blight. The chestnut, however, has not passed out of our sphere of activity, because at the present time, (and I think you will see tomorrow at the Bell Station, some interesting possibilities in the future of chestnut culture in this country), the Chinese forms, which are ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... a blight of uncertainty must have pervaded the atmosphere when I was born, and penetrated, not certainly my nature, but my whole earthly destiny, with its influence; from my plans and projects for to-morrow on to those of next year, all is mist and indistinct indecision. I suppose ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... around the unhappy island. The first symptoms of the dread potato disease showed themselves in the autumn of 1845, and even that year there was much suffering, though a trifle to what was to follow. Many remedies were tried, both to stop the blight and save the crops, but all alike proved unavailing. The next year the potatoes seemed to promise unusually well, and the people, with characteristic hopefulness, believed that their trouble was over. The summer, however, was very ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... he knows no guest— No hand will touch him, none! Nor woman mild nor happy child Greets him when day is done; And he walks the night, a poison blight, An outcast ...
— Selected Poems • William Francis Barnard
... at the birthday now, by the light of what happened afterwards, I am half inclined to think that the cursed Diamond must have cast a blight on the whole company. I plied them well with wine; and being a privileged character, followed the unpopular dishes round the table, and whispered to the company confidentially, "Please to change your mind and try it; for I know it will do you good." Nine times out of ten they changed their ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... to blight the fruits of my students. A faith- [1] ful student may even sometimes feel the need of physical help, and occasionally receive it from others; but the less this is required, the better it is for ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... when a sceptical philosophy came down like a blight, and destroyed the bloom of his art and faith, he thus recognized that growing knowledge was an essential condition of growing goodness. Pompilia shone with a glory that mere knowledge could not give (if there were such a ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... thin clumps of birch, poplar, and spruce—all of them (but the spruce especially) ragged and stunted in growth. For the rest this burnt land resembled a neglected pasture, being carpeted for the most part with moss and blueberry. A mysterious blight lay over all, and appeared to extend to the ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... "O King of blight and sorrow, send me not away till I have brought back the light and joy that will make your dark home bright and beautiful again. Let me call back to the desolate gardens the fair forms that are gone, and their soft voices blessing you will bring to your breast ...
— Flower Fables • Louisa May Alcott
... action. It was therefore with no little anxiety that the council of Henry VIII. perceived his male children, on whom their hopes were centred, either born dead, or dying one after another within a few days of their birth, as if his family were under a blight. When the Queen had advanced to an age which precluded hope of further offspring, and the heir presumptive was an infirm girl, the unpromising aspect became yet more alarming. The life of the Princess Mary was precarious, for her health was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... can parents co-operate to check the looseness and rudeness and sinful practice that blight ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... hyperbolical profession of a passion which, however well acted, was not half so deeply grounded as he had led the unsuspecting object of it to believe. That he really loved her was to some extent true. That his love was earnest and pure, such as the blight of coldness and inconstancy would render painful, was not true,—far from it. He had sought her hand, not to lay at her feet the offering of a hallowed affection, but to realize the object we have before mentioned,—to enable him, by the possession of ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... The backwaters, creeks and side channels of both are exceedingly beautiful, and here one can get a glimpse of the fertility that must have belonged to Mesopotamia when it was a network of streams and when the forests abounded within its borders. Centuries of neglect and the blight of the unspeakable Turk have dealt hardly with this country. It is indeed a Paradise Lost and it will be many a long day before it ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... fire; and no matter how quickly or how far removed, no matter how heavy the dews that empearl it, how fresh and cool the wind that sweeps over it, how bright the sun that feeds its pulses,—the curled petals are never smoothed, the hot blasts leaves its ineffaceable blight. To me, the thought of marriage comes no more than to one who knows death sits waiting only for the setting of the sun, to claim his own. That phase of life is as inaccessible and uninviting to me, as Antartic circumpolar lands; and even in thought, I have no temptation to explore it. My future ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... own bitterness," he answered. "Don't pay the least attention to me. You mustn't let moodiness of mine cast a blight upon your high spirits." ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... it seems! Alas, alas! What is this thing, that they call death? Oh, would That I, this day, the mystery could solve, And my defenceless head withdraw from Fate's Relentless hate! I still am young, and still Feel all the blight and misery of age, Which I so dread; and distant far it seems; But, ah, how little different from age, The flower of my years!"—"We both were born," She said, "to weep; unhappy were our lives, And heaven took pleasure in our sufferings." "Oh if my eyes with tears," I added, ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... answered the dark man impressively, "who return to blight the living with the spectacle of our ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Dutch art died before the subject had appeared. It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that the subject really began to make itself felt, and, like the potato blight or phylloxera, it soon became clear that it had come to stay. I think Greuze was the first to conceive a picture after the fashion of a scene in a play—I mean those domestic dramas which he invented, and in which ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... during the earlier half of her life, and that everything which she published during the forty-three years which preceded her death lowered her reputation. Yet we have no reason to think that at the time when her faculties ought to have been in their maturity they were smitten with any blight. In The Wanderer we catch now and then a gleam of her genius. Even in the Memoirs of her father there is no trace of dotage. They are very bad; but they are so, as it seems to us, not from a decay of power, but from ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... passional value of a peacetime year, was here at hand, an ever-ministering angel to them and to their hero; yet they never included him and Flora in one thought together but to banish it, though with tender reverence. Behind a labored disguise of inattention they jealously watched lest the faintest blight or languor should mar, in him, the perfect bloom of that invincible faith to, and faith in, the faithless Anna, which alone could satisfy their worship of him. Care for these watchers brought the two much together, and in every private moment they talked of the third one; Flora still fine in ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... She would hate you! And I will tell her! Ay, I will! You will be respectable, will you? A model husband! Wait till I tell her my story—till I send some of these poor women to tell theirs. You kill my love; I'll blight and ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... creation an inexplicable shadow. If we were made merely to be happy, why this hostility all around us? Why these sharp oppositions of pain and difficulty? Why these writhing nerves, these aching hearts, and over-laden eyes? Why the chill of disappointment, the shudder of remorse, the crush and blight of hope? Why athwart the horizon flicker so many shapes of misery and sin? Why appear these sad spectacles of painful dying chambers, and weary sick-beds?—these countless tomb-stones, too-ghastly witness to death ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... to myself: 'I will ravage and riot in my Kingdoms. I will rage like the Caesars, and be a withering blight where I pass like Sennacherib, and wallow in soft delights like Sardanapalus. I will build me a palace, vast as a city, in which to strut and parade my Monarchy before the Heavens, with stones of pure molten gold, and rough frontispiece of diamond, and cupola of amethyst, and pillars ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... sure. There is still mademoiselle, with her new-formed friends in Paris—may a pestilence blight them all! There are still the lands of La Vauvraye to lose. The only true end to our troubles as they stand at present lies in your marrying this ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... a blight on their labours lay, And ever their quarry would vanish away, Till the sun-dried boys of the Black Tyrone Took a brotherly interest in Boh Da Thone: And, sooth, if pursuit in possession ends, The Boh and his ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... the vendors of beauty, We the purveyors for hell; The carnal bliss of a purchased kiss And the pleasures that blight, we sell. God pity us; God ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... was left, Which Indra's hand in seven had cleft:(213) "No fault, O Lord of Gods, is thine; The blame herein is only mine. But for one grace I fain would pray, As thou hast reft this hope away. This bud, O Indra, which a blight Has withered ere it saw the light— From this may seven fair spirits rise To rule the regions of the skies. Be theirs through heaven's unbounded space On shoulders of the winds to race, My children, drest in heavenly forms, Far-famed as Maruts, Gods of storms. One God to ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... corn I heard it sigh, Hollow and sad, as night crawled sluggishly: Hollow and sadly sighed the corn while I Moved darkly in the midst, a blight ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... conversation had been prospering hitherto, if, at Holy Mass or jovial supper board, Laurence so much as breathed a question concerning the subject next his heart, an instant blight passed over the gaiety of his companions. Fear momently wiped every other expression from their faces, and they answered with lame evasion, or more ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... her where the bait is worth taking. Let us not mince matters, but admit between ourselves that we are sending Frances to court to make a good marriage. No one less than a rich duke or a wealthy earl will satisfy me. If you wish to allow a mere jealous fear in your heart to blight her prospects, she will be the sufferer, and hereafter may thank your folly for ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major
... very wet summer, and everything went wrong in the country round. The hay had hardly been got in, when the haystacks were floated bodily down to the sea by an inundation; the vines were cut to pieces with the hail; the corn was all killed by a black blight; only in the Treasure Valley, as usual, all was safe. As it had rain when there was rain nowhere else, so it had sun when there was sun nowhere else. Everybody came to buy corn at the farm, and went away pouring maledictions on the Black ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... home on branch in morning light, * But shakes my very frame with sorrow's killing might: No lover sigheth for his love or gladdeth heart * To meet his mate, but breeds in me redoubled blight I bear my plaint to one who has no ruth for me, * Ah me, how Love can part man's mortal ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... o'er the spirit of my dream. The wanderer was alone as heretofore, The beings which surrounded him were gone, Or were at war with him; he was a mark For blight and desolation, compassed round With hatred and contention; pain was mixed In all which was served up to him, until, Like to the Pontic monarch of old days, He fed on poisons, and they had no power, But were a kind of nutriment; he lived Through that which had been death to many men, And made ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... looked contented and prosperous. Mingling with them were teamsters, many as neatly dressed as their masters, though some wore blue-jean and saffron-colored shirts; and there were railroad-hands, mechanics, and store-keepers. All of them were cheerful; a few good years, free from harvest frost and blight, had made a marked improvement ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... would have complained about their war-time coffee, made from chicory and acorns, had they once tasted the Java product. Yet I was assured that this was the choicest coffee grown in Java. I might add that, as a result of a blight which all but ruined the industry in the '70s, fifty-two per cent of the total acreage of coffee plantations in the island is now planted with the African species, called Coffea robusta, and thirteen ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... water. Nature herself Makes war on her own loveliness and slays Her children like Medea. Nay but, my Lord, Look closer still. Why in this damask here It is summer always, and no winter's tooth Will ever blight these blossoms. For every ell I paid a piece of gold. Red gold, and good, The ...
— A Florentine Tragedy—A Fragment • Oscar Wilde
... worse, the islands offering a dead-level of mediocrity which I have never seen equalled except in the workingmen's cottages of Ampere, New Jersey, the home of the General Electric Company.] Add to the geographic sameness the universal blight of white civilization with its picture post-cards, professional hula and ooh-la dancers, souvenir and gift shops, automat restaurants, movie-palaces, tourists, artists and explorers, and you have some idea of the boredom which had settled down over ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... bit of woods—and Jims loved the woods, though he scarcely ever saw them. Then, past the pines, were roses just breaking into June bloom—roses in such profusion as Jims hadn't known existed, with dear little paths twisting about among the bushes. It seemed to be a garden where no frost could blight or rough wind blow. When rain fell it must fall very gently. Past the roses one saw a green lawn, sprinkled over now with the white ghosts of dandelions, and dotted with ornamental trees. The trees grew so thickly that they almost hid the house ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... retract what you insinuated had become of it? I'll willingly make it up to you, if it takes every cent I earn; but I'll not have a blight upon my reputation, ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... demented Eunice prove to be a wiser prophet than the hopeful, irrepressible Earl; should the good people of America, North and South, grow busy, confused or irresolute and fail, to the subversion of their ideals, to firmly entrench the Negro in his political rights, the denial of which, and the blight incident thereto, more than all other factors, cause the Ethiopian in America to feel that his ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... something which is not a means to the attainment of happiness, which is happiness itself. It is an inner sympathy of hearts and souls and minds, a perfect union of all that is most worthy in the natures of man and woman; it is a plant so sensitive that a breath of unkindness will hurt it and blight its beauty, and yet it is a tree so strong that neither time nor tempest can overthrow it when it has taken root; and if you would tear it out and destroy it, the place where it grew is as deep and as wide as a grave. ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... Josephus, the mandrake is tamed. {152b} These passages prove that the classical peoples had the same extraordinary superstitions about women as the Bushmen and Red Indians. Indeed Pliny {152c} describes a magical manner of defending the crops from blight, by aid of women, which is actually practised in America by ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... Colonel Preston's recollections cast a suggestive light upon the causes which rendered unhappy the lad's early life and tended to blight his prospective hopes. Although mixing with members of the best families of the province, and naturally endowed with hereditary and native pride,—fostered by the indulgence of wealth and the consciousness of intellectual superiority,—Edgar ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... is shattered, her dream dispelled,—now, it is too late! Gentlemen, my client's answer is—and it is one which will only command your increased respect:—"No. He has broken my heart, undermined my belief in human nature, cast a blight upon my existence. (Miss M. sobs audibly, here, and JAB. is visibly affected.) Much as I should like to recover my old belief in him, much as it would be to my worldly advantage to marry a wealthy Bengali barrister with talents and influence ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... in the air. Beauty—the arts— are to give place to barbarity. In a world of war, how can we taste life delicately? We cannot. Already, my friend, the blight has fallen upon you. Your nerves are harsh and jangled. I think"—she folded her hands and sank back on her green cushions—"I shall make ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... with her weary smile, Just as of old; She looked around a little while, And shivered at the cold. Her passing touch was death to all, Her passing look a blight; She made the white rose-petals fall, And turned the red ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... self to turn to: my natural unenslaved feelings with which to communicate in moments of loneliness. There would be recesses in my mind which would be only mine, to which he never came, and sentiments growing there fresh and sheltered which his austerity could never blight, nor his measured warrior-march trample down: but as his wife—at his side always, and always restrained, and always checked—forced to keep the fire of my nature continually low, to compel it to burn inwardly and never ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... and rather than forgive such a sin, he would blight his own life and break the heart of the wife he adored. Such was the state of mind in which the master of Harcourt Manor had remained since the sad night when his only child had gone off to be married at a neighbouring church to the young ...
— Little Frida - A Tale of the Black Forest • Anonymous
... himself to have all been treated "like dogs," begged me to give him my opinion as to what course he had better pursue; for he must, in the first instance, report the whole circumstances to the king, and could not march at once. This was a blight on our prospects, and appeared very vexatious, in the event of Budja waiting for an answer, which, considering Mtesa had ordered his Wakungu to accompany us all the way to Gani, might stop our ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... (not two) may in a single season produce a billion. And at last when autumn comes, won back from the cold god to his hot mother, they know love and wedlock, and die like all married things. These are the Aphides—sometimes unprettily called plant-lice, and vaguely spoken of by the uninformed as "blight"—and they nourish themselves on vegetable juices, that thin green blood which ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... ministering in the service of song in God's house. Scripturally this seems incontestable; and as to the teaching of experience, we should hardly know how to name any custom which has brought a sorer blight upon the life of the church, or a heavier repression upon its spiritual energy, than the habit, now so general, of introducing unsanctified, unconverted, and even notoriously worldly persons into the choirs of ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right, And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... generations back, a single case of feeble-mindedness, nor of disease that would undermine the nervous organization. Close scrutiny does not reveal a single assignable cause. She came, as an accident, to blight an otherwise ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... just what she wanted. It would help show the listening Abner that the wearing of the social uniform was nothing very formidable after all, and did not necessarily doom one's moral and spiritual fibre to utter blight and ruin. ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... a few strokes in the right direction, I asked her to get me a cigar from an inside pocket of my coat, which was on the seat in front of her. Then came the blight to our bliss. She looked in the wrong pocket and instead of producing a cigar, she extracted ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... Mrs. Channing, her own tears dropping upon the fair young face, as she gathered it to her sheltering bosom. "What have you done that this blight should extend to you?" ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... earth withhold her goodly root, Let mildew blight the rye, Give to the worm the orchard's fruit, The ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... the Deanery of St. Paul's, that frowning and melancholy house in a backwater of London's jarring tide, where the dust collects, and sunlight has a struggle to make two ends meet, and cold penetrates like a dagger, and fog hangs like a pall, and the blight of ages clings to stone and brick, to window and woodwork, with an adhesive mournfulness which suggests the hatchment of Melpomene. Even the hand of Grinling Gibbons at the porch does not prevent one from recalling ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... days of her life;' an accident which, in a fatal hour of weakness, she concealed; an accident which threw her into the power of those who, in hatred, or under the impulse of a guilty passion, sought to blight her peace, and ruin her virtue. That love which you doubt, in the place of a higher principle, saved her from guilt, and only left her a prey to the most protracted agony. Read this letter—it is from the man who vainly sought to gain her love, by wringing ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton |
