"Decay" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... something more to be said, and the life that is thus futile is also, as it seems to me, inexplicable if you believe in God at all. If man, being what he is, is wholly subject to that law of mutation and decay, then not only is he made 'a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death,' but he is also inferior to that persistent, old mother-earth from whose bosom he has come. If all that you have to say of him is, 'Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return,' ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... same sort of continuity and unity in thought The preoccupations of man are the same in all ages—to provide for his material needs, and to speculate what can possibly happen to his spirit, when the body, broken by accident or disease or decay, can no longer contain his soul. The best thought of man has always been centred on trying to devise some sort of future hope which could encourage him to live eagerly, to endure patiently, to act rightly. ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and there was a "'Change," where merchants met every day, as in the Royal Exchange in London. Public dinners were given here also with great magnificence; but from the marshy nature of the ground on which the building had been set up, it fell to decay in 1797, and a new Sessions-house ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... Rome. The extension of the Roman dominion in the south of the peninsula had brought the state into connection with the Greek cities, which at one period were so numerous and powerful as to give to this part of Italy the name of Magna Graecia.[25] Many of these cities had now fallen into decay through internal dissensions and the conquests of the Lucanians and other Sabellian tribes; but Tarentum, originally a Lacedaemonian colony, still maintained her former power and splendor. The Tarentines naturally regarded with extreme jealousy the progress of the Roman arms in the south ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... ploughshare and the yellow grain; And rising ports along the busy shore Protect the vessel from old Ocean's roar— All, all must perish. But, surviving last, The love of letters half preserves the past: True,—some decay, yet not a few survive, Though those shall sink which now appear to thrive, As custom arbitrates, whose shifting sway Our life and language ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... learned may The western abbey give! Like theirs, his ashes must decay, Like theirs, his fame ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... intelligence, would be to do him an injustice. He was not a man of whom it could properly be said that he was ever startled, or shocked; but he certainly had a sense within him, that if his wife should sicken and decay, he would be very sorry, and that he would find a something gone from among his plate and furniture, and other household possessions, which was well worth the having, and could not be lost without sincere regret. Though it would be a cool, business-like, gentlemanly, ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... being no proper place for the public religious and literary exercises of the members of the seminary, the apartment of the old building falling into decay and ruin, he undertook, made arrangements, provided the means, and erected by contract, in five months, a chapel, near the new college edifice. It is fifty feet by thirty-six, of two stories height, arched within and completely finished, and painted without—convenient, ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... I do not pester you with decrepit pages, and insist upon your accepting them as full of the old spirit and vigour. That trouble perhaps still awaits you, after I shall have reached a further stage of decay. Seriously, my mind has, for the time, lost its temper and its fine edge, and I have an instinct that I had better keep quiet. Perhaps I shall have a new spirit of vigour if I wait quietly for it; perhaps not." The winter passed away, but the "new spirit ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... empty but for the sleeping dogs, where the signs swung and the upper stories leaned together, and where the common life had been transacted since the birth of the town and would continue till its decay. And beyond lay the cool round hills, with their dark dewy slopes, over which he had ridden a year ago, and all England beyond them again, with its human life and affairs and interests; and over all hung the serene stars whence God ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... as well as other vegetables, brought to our city markets in this country, is utterly unfit to be eaten. Sometimes it is immature; sometimes it has a hot house maturity; sometimes it has been picked so long that it has begun to decay. Many fruits—berries especially—are in perfection for a very short period only. Mulberries, for example—one kind especially—are not in perfection long enough to carry to the market house, even though the ...
— The Young Mother - Management of Children in Regard to Health • William A. Alcott
... thinking the Almighty put us into this land of rocks and holds, and scalloped coast, cold, hunger, and the chase, just to keep ourselves warm by quarrelling with each other. If we had not the recreation now and then of a bit splore with the sword, we should be lazily rotting to decay. The world's well divided after all, and the happiness as well as the dule of it. It is because I have never had the pleasure of wife nor child I am a little better off to-day than the weeping folks about me, and they manage to make up their share of content with reflections ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... dependable. But, to avoid hairsplitting, what we call "modern" English literature may be said to date from about 1885. A few writers who are decidedly "of the period" are, as a matter of strict chronology, somewhat earlier. But the chief tendencies may be divided into seven periods. They are (1) The decay of Victorianism and the growth of a purely decorative art, (2) The rise and decline of the AEsthetic Philosophy, (3) The muscular influence of Henley, (4) The Celtic revival in Ireland, (5) Rudyard Kipling and the ascendency of mechanism ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... nature's nest of boxes: the heavens contain the earth; the earth, cities; cities, men. And all these are concentric; the common centre to them all is decay, ruin; only that is eccentric which was never made; only that place, or garment rather, which we can imagine but not demonstrate. That light, which is the very emanation of the light of God, in which the saints shall ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... the general of yesterday to act as a corporal to-day, if his services can be useful to his country; holding that to be false pride, which postpones the public good to any private or personal considerations. But I am past service. The hand of age is upon me. The decay of bodily faculties apprizes me that those of the mind cannot be unimpaired, had I not still better proofs. Every year counts by increased debility, and departing faculties keep the score. The last year it was ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... good I cannot denay Yet prayse your selfe so muche ye may For welth oftentimes doth decay 30 And welth is ...
— The Interlude of Wealth and Health • Anonymous
... the close of the Civil War our navy was suffered to fall into neglect and decay. The thirty-seven cruisers, all but four of which were of wood; the fourteen single-turreted monitors built during the war; the muzzle-loading guns, belonged to a past age. By 1881 this was fully realized and the ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... of the sweetest of your boyhood illusions! You seek Fiammetta in the delusive hope of finding her in the person of Mrs. Henry Boggs; there is but one Fiammetta, and she is the memory abiding in your heart. Spare yourself the misery of discovering in the hearty, fleshy Lincolnshire hussif the decay of the promises of years ago; be content to do reverence to the ideal Fiammetta who has built her little shrine in your ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... training as the poor wretches who were lying under its leaves. The features of the surrounding picture were, a church with hoarding and scaffolding about it, which had been under suppositious repair so long that the means of repair looked a hundred years old, and had themselves fallen into decay; a quantity of washed linen, spread to dry in the sun; a number of houses at odds with one another and grotesquely out of the perpendicular, like rotten pre-Adamite cheeses cut into fantastic shapes and full of mites; and a feverish bewilderment of windows, with their lattice-blinds all hanging ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... dangerous hemorrhage last spring. I am almost glad to have seen death so close with all my wits about me, and not in the customary lassitude and disenchantment of disease. Even thus clearly beheld, I find him not so terrible as we suppose. But, indeed, with the passing of years, the decay of strength, the loss of all my old active and pleasant habits, there grows more and more upon me that belief in the kindness of this scheme of things, and the goodness of our veiled God, which is an excellent and pacifying compensation. I trust, if your health continues to trouble you, you may ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... him; and would be profoundly taciturn for days together. The process of this alteration was so easy that almost as soon as it began to be observed it was complete. But Mr Pecksniff saw it first, and having Anthony Chuzzlewit fresh in his recollection, saw in his brother Martin the same process of decay. ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... state of irritation and suspense consequent upon his daughter's relations with her lover must greatly have aggravated his troubles. It was assumed by the prosecution, on the ground of Mr. Blandy losing his teeth through decay, that he had begun to manifest the effects of poison soon after Cranstoun left Henley in November, 1750, but from the evidence given at the trial it seems improbable that anything injurious was administered ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead
... the spot to which Martin pointed, and there saw a human skeleton in the last stage of decay, with a large pearl shell under the skull. Not far-off more ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... reason plain why no organism can permanently outlive its experience of past lives. The death of such a body corporate as the crayfish is due to the social condition becoming more complex than there is memory of past experience to deal with. Hence social disruption, insubordination, and decay. The crayfish dies as a state dies, and all states that we have heard of die sooner or later. There are some savages who have not yet arrived at the conception that death is the necessary end of all living beings, and who consider even the gentlest ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... persisted, "must sometimes have looked into futurity. You must have seen the slow decay of national pride, the nations of the world growing closer and closer together. Can't you bear to strike a blow for the great things? You and I see so well the utter barbarism of warfare, the hideous waste of our mighty armaments, draining the money ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of this lengthy report, I may be permitted to add a few lines concerning the great houses themselves. Their mode and manner of construction and occupation I have already discussed; it is their abandonment and decay to which I wish to refer. This decay is the same in both houses; the path of ruin from S.S.E. to N.N.W. indicates its progress. It shows clearly that, as section after section had been originally added as the tribe increased in number, so cell after cell (or section after ...
— Historical Introduction to Studies Among the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico; Report on the Ruins of the Pueblo of Pecos • Adolphus Bandelier
... that time, speaks of some old folks who spoke Cornish only, and would not understand a word of English; but he tells us at the same time that Sir Francis North, the Lord Chief Justice, afterwards Lord Keeper, when holding the assizes at Lanceston in 1678, expressed his concern at the loss and decay of the Cornish language. The poor people, in fact, could speak, or at least understand, Cornish, but he says, "They were laughed at by the rich, who understood it not, which is their own fault in not endeavoring after it." About the beginning of the last century, Mr. ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... vegetation in the different degrees of its development. We there found lichens cleaving the rock, and collected in crusts more or less thick; little portions of sand nourishing succulent plants; and lastly layers of black mould deposited in the hollows, formed from the decay of roots and leaves, and shaded ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... the poorest and vilest quarter of the great city—among reeking smells, and horrible sounds, and disgusting sights. The house she entered was tottering to decay—a dreadful den by day and by night, thronged with the very scum of the London streets. Up and up a long stair-way she flew, paused at a door on the third landing, opened it, ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... long lived, and some are still living that are known to be hundreds of years old. Certain kinds of wood, too, seem almost incapable of decay ...
— Harper's Young People, June 1, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... a discussion on reform, yet Lord John Russell called the attention of the commons to the unrepresented towns, many of which had risen into great commercial wealth and importance, while certain boroughs which sent representatives to parliament, had fallen into decay. His lordship adduced examples from history, to show that the principle of change had been often acknowledged, and the suffrage withdrawn and conferred on various occasions. He proposed several resolutions in accordance with them, the last being for ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... of fallen timber lying upon the island prompted the curiosity of Flinders. Trunks of trees lay about in all directions "and were nearly of the same size and in the same progress towards decay; from whence it would seem that they had not fallen from age nor yet been thrown down in a gale of wind. Some general conflagration, and there were marks apparently of fire on many of them, is perhaps the ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... volume of "Principles of Biology," it was remarked by the author that the phenomena presented by the organic world as a whole cannot be properly dealt with apart from the phenomena presented by each organism in the course of its growth, development, and decay. The interpretation of either class of phenomena implies interpretation of the other, since the two are in reality parts of one process. Hence the validity of any hypothesis respecting the one ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... faut," he said, "que l'artiste mene une vie splendide." Therefore, till the right lady was found, Balzac toiled unceasingly; and when in Madame Hanska the personification of his ideal at last appeared, he redoubled his efforts, till overwork, and his longing for her, caused the decay of his physical powers, and his ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... which the worn and invalid Earl had witnessed at Sir Thomas Gourlay's were so exhausting to his weak frame that they left very little strength behind them. Yet he complained of no particular illness; all he felt was, an easy but general and certain decay of his physical powers, leaving the mind and intellect strong and clear. On the day following the scene in the baronet's house, we must present him to the reader seated, as usual—for he could not be prevailed ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... remained beautifully fine, and, until near the capital, our ride was very pleasant. During the last part of the journey, however, my cheerfulness was dashed by the universal signs of desolation and decay. The ground lay bare and unfilled, the fat beeves and sturdy oxen had vanished, to be replaced here and there by a lean scraggy beast or two, all skin and bone; the yards were destitute of ricks, the hovels ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... strengthening cordial of life's gall. The lightning's stroke or the fierce tempest blast Which fells the green tree to the earth to-day Is kinder than the calm that lets it last, Unhappy witness of its own decay. May no man ever look on me and say, "She lives, but all her ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... back from the road. To the manager's dismay, however, the door was locked and boards were nailed across the windows. Even the water pail, hospitably placed for man or beast, had been removed from its customary proximity to the wooden pump. Abandoned to decay, the tenantless inn was but another evidence of traffic diverted from the old stage roads by the Erie Canal Company. Cold was the fireplace before which had once rested the sheep-skin slippers for the guests; ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... antiquities and religious institutions; but he afterward visited them in a more sweeping manner by the suppression of its monasteries, chantries, etc., so that, says Milner, "these being dissolved, and the edifices themselves soon after pulled down, or falling to decay, it must have worn the appearance of a city sacked by a hostile army." Through his reign and that of Edward VI., the destruction of the religious houses, and the stripping of the churches, went on to a degree which must have rendered Winchester an object ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... consciences to the safety deposit company of a great political party or religious organization and taking the key in our pocket, let us have individual charge of this useful little instrument and be able finally to answer for its growth or decay. ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... turn, squeezes out of them the sums of which he stands in need, to satisfy his own exigencies and those of the state. In America, from a like cause, the government of the Union has gradually dwindled into a state of decay, approaching nearly to annihilation. Who can doubt, that the happiness of the people in both countries would be promoted by competent authorities in the proper hands, to provide the revenues which the necessities of the public might ...
— The Federalist Papers
... Rocca, with the insurgent Corsicans, carried it by assault. The Genoese then erected the fortress at Bastia, which, with the town growing up under its protection, became the chief seat of their power in the island, and Biguglia fell to decay. ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... the washed-out gulches or sleepy village like harried bees around the ruins of their hive. "We have no industry left now," they told me, "and no men; everybody and everything hereabouts has gone to decay. We are only bummers—out of the game, a thin scatterin' of poor, dilapidated cusses, compared with what we used to be in the grand old gold-days. We were giants then, and you can look around here and see our tracks." But although these lingering pioneers are perhaps ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... then have a curious appearance. The underwood being dead, the forest-trees rise from a mass of dry sticks like thin hop-poles. The roots of these plants very soon decay, and a few weeks of high wind, howling through the forest, levels the whole mass, leaving the trees standing free from underwood. The appearance of the ground can now be imagined-a perfect chaos of dead sticks and poles, ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... same year of decay and decline (1819) belongs a small slip of yellow paper, inscribed with the following lines in a tremulous and feeble handwriting, which is jealously preserved by ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... decay, the rise of the bourgeoisie, the disappointment of the common people,—these are the bold landmarks on which the student must fix his attention, while in the following chapters we sketch the condition of Europe in the eighteenth century, and trace the course of ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... destructive outbreaks, to stresses and disorder culminating in revolution. It is useless to dream of going on now for much longer upon the old lines; our civilisation, if it is not to enter upon a phase of conflict and decay, must begin to adapt itself to the new conditions of which the first and foremost is that the wages-earning labouring class as a distinctive class, consenting to a distinctive treatment and accepting life at a disadvantage is going to disappear. ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... Islam on the west, and the civilization developed in the country by fifteen centuries of intensive and undisturbed Hellenization was completely blotted out. The cities wore isolated from one another till their commerce fell into decay. The elaborately cultivated lands around them were left fallow till they were good for nothing but the pasturage which was all that the nomad required. The only monuments of architecture that have survived in Anatolia above ground are the imposing khans or fortified rest-houses ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... said Trent in a melancholy tone, at the first sound of which the man within turned round with startling swiftness. "From childhood's hour I've seen my fondest hopes decay. I did think I was ahead of Scotland Yard this time, and now here is the largest officer in the entire Metropolitan force already ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... process and made it impossible? Why did the day, which began with a certain amount of separation and decay, end with a closer consolidation than ever, so that they were, for the most part, gathered in the upper room; and forty days after they were all with one accord in one place? Why was it that they who had been like timid deer, before He died, became as lions against the ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... be carefully guarded against, the latter by picking them by the hand from out of the ground, and the former by the use of lime laid round the young plants in a circle. When the summer months prove dry, the beds should be plentifully watered. As soon as the leaves decay in the autumn they should be cleared away, and the beds be covered with light fresh earth and sand to the thickness of an inch; the compost thus used having laid some time in a heap, and been turned several ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... buildings toward Regent's Park. It was long and narrow, a well-lit, well-ventilated, quiet gallery of small tables and sinks, pervaded by a thin smell of methylated spirit and of a mitigated and sterilized organic decay. Along the inner side was a wonderfully arranged series of displayed specimens that Russell himself had prepared. The supreme effect for Ann Veronica was its surpassing relevance; it made every other atmosphere she knew seem discursive and confused. ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... illustrious statesmen and eloquent orators, whose words had vibrated upon the ear of Europe, were transformed into the most revolting aspect of beggared and haggard misery. Their clothes, ruined by the humid filth of their dungeons, moldered to decay. Unwashed, unshorn, in the loss almost of the aspect of humanity, they became repulsive to each other. Unsupported by any of those consolations which religion affords, many hours of the blackest ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... patron, the Bishop of Cambray, gave him a small allowance, and the authorities at Steyn were prevailed upon to consent. His purpose was to obtain a Doctor's degree in Theology; and so he entered the College of Montaigu at Paris, which had been founded in 1388, but had fallen into decay and only recently been revived. In 1483 a certain John Standonck had volunteered to become Principal. By his efforts the college buildings were restored; and by taking in rich pupils he secured means to maintain the Domus Pauperum attached ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... their zeal in the public service, and exhorted them to a discharge of their duties in their several counties. He was, no doubt, extremely pleased with such an issue of a session that had began with a very inauspicious aspect. His health daily declined; but he concealed the decay of his constitution, that his allies might not be discouraged from engaging in a confederacy of which he was deemed the head and chief support. He conferred the command of the ten thousand troops destined for Holland upon the earl of Marlborough, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... maid, had instantly a great desire to let him draw a troublesome tooth of hers which, she took pains to assure us, was not impaired by natural decay, but only accidentally broken in cracking a cherry-stone. "The edge is so rough," said she, "that it hurts my tongue; and since this honest gentleman can extract it painlessly, I have a great mind ...
— Jacques Bonneval • Anne Manning
... Britons understood the manufactory of iron. Perhaps history cannot produce an instance of any place in an improving country, like England, where the coarse manufactory of iron has been carried on, that ever that laborious art went to decay, except the materials failed; and as we know of no place where such materials have failed, there is the utmost reason to believe our fore-fathers, the Britons, were supplied with those necessary implements ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... back to their lair. And, indeed, the Madigan house seemed little more than a lair. It had been rather a fine house once, and had been built for the occupancy of the man who owned the fairgrounds; but he choosing finally to live in the village, had permitted the house to fall into decay, until only a family with no sense of order or self-respect ...
— Painted Windows • Elia W. Peattie
... the miracle of Penicillium Roqueforti a new cheese was made. It is placed historically back around the eighth century when Charlemagne was found picking out the green spots of Persille with the point of his knife, thinking them decay. But the monks of Saint-Gall, who were his hosts, recorded in their annals that when they regaled him with Roquefort (because it was Friday and they had no fish) they also made bold to tell him he was wasting the best part of the cheese. So he tasted again, found the ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... can be put in two ways. You can either say: 'It was just chance that the Tower fell at that particular moment when So-and-so was under it.' Or you can say, with rather more reflection but not any more common sense: 'It fell because of a definite chain of causes, a certain degree of progressive decay in the building, a certain definite pressure, &c. ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... a small dilapidated square. The houses there had a sinister air in the midst of their dirt and decay. Boris looked round, and Tommy drew back into the shelter of a friendly porch. The place was almost deserted. It was a cul-de-sac, and consequently no traffic passed that way. The stealthy way the other had looked round stimulated Tommy's imagination. From the shelter of the doorway ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... decay of nations is "the social evil"—a thing wholly due to the androcentric culture. Another steady endless check is warfare—due to the same cause. Largest of all is poverty; that spreading disease which grows with our social growth and shows most horribly when and where we are most proud, keeping ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... over the surrounding country. The summit of this height was crowned, at the close of the fifteenth century, by a celebrated mansion. Time and the ravages of man have long since thrown this mansion to the ground; but its foundation, overgrown with moss and fast crumbling to decay, still marks the site of the ancient structure, and from the midst of the ruins rises a rough-hewn stone bearing the name Gustavus Vasa. On this spot he was born, May 12, 1496.[1] The estate was then ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... the sins and follies of others and sublimely unconscious of our own until one day—ah, yes—one day we meet Ourselves face to face and see beneath all our pitiful shams and hypocrisies and know ourselves at last for what we really are—behold the decay of faculties, the degeneration of intellect bred of sloth and inanition and know ourselves at last—for exactly ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... said more than one, as with her accustomed grace Rose entered the brilliant drawing-room. And truly Rose was beautiful that night, but like the gorgeous foliage of the fading autumn 'twas the beauty of decay, for death was written on her blue-veined brow, and lurked amid the roses on her cheek. But little thought she of that, as with smiling lip and beaming eye she received the homage of ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... though bound up with inconceivable firmness, from the vigour of innate fixed salts and sulphurs. In seeking to discover the elixir of life, then," continued he, "we seek only to apply some of nature's own specifics against the disease and decay to which our bodies are subjected; and what else does the physician, when he tasks his art, and uses subtle compounds and cunning distillations, to revive our languishing powers, and avert the stroke of ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... is akin to the genetic, but traces the decay or demoralization of mental life instead of its growth. It traces the gradual decline of mental power with advancing age, the losses due to brain disease, and the maladaptations that appear in insanity and other disturbances. ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... different—strangely, utterly different. Then, I knew what it was that made it appear so strange. It was bare: there was not a piece of furniture in the room; not even a solitary fitting of any sort. Gradually, my amazement went, as I remembered, that this was but the inevitable end of that process of decay, which I had witnessed commencing, before my sleep. Thousands of ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... to bind the coils of his grass-made baskets together. He obtained fibre in great abundance from the century-like plant. He found if he broke off the long leaves of this plant and allowed them to decay there remained a long, tough fibrous substance out of which strong cords could be twisted or yarn made for weaving a coarse cloth ...
— An American Robinson Crusoe • Samuel B. Allison
... Eagle, whose head was white with years of wisdom and experience, spoke to the despairing assemblage of creatures. From his lofty perch above the world the Eagle had looked down upon centuries of change and decay. He knew every force of nature and all the strange things of life. The hoary-headed sage said that the Good Hunter could not be restored until his scalp was found. Then all the animals clamored that they might be allowed to go and ...
— The Curious Book of Birds • Abbie Farwell Brown
... hath bent him o'er the dead Ere the first day of death is fled,— The first dark day of nothingness, The last of danger and distress, (Before Decay's effacing fingers Have swept the lines where beauty lingers,)— And marked the mild angelic air, The rapture of repose that's there, The fixed yet tender traits that streak The languor of the placid cheek, And—but for that sad shrouded eye, That fires not, wins not, weeps not ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... not easy to account for the long continuance of this attitude of the Irish mind towards Irish problems, which seems unworthy of the native intelligence of the people. The truth probably is that while we have not allowed our intellectual gifts to decay, they have been of little use to us because we have neglected the second part of the old Scholastic rule of life, and have failed to develop the moral qualities in which we are deficient. Hence we have developed our critical faculties, not, unhappily, along constructive ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... his interests are radically hostile to theirs, whereas it is only his conduct that is so. Accordingly, in proportion to their alertness and self-sufficiency, they clamour for the right to govern themselves, and usually secure it. Democratic government is founded on the decay of representative eminence. It indicates that natural leaders are no longer trusted merely because they are rich, enterprising, learned, or old. Their spontaneous action would go awry. They must not be allowed to act without control. Men of talent may be needed and ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... begin. First come thorns and cusps and lanceolate forms without foliage. Then, not perfect leaves, but buds. In due time the bud opens, at first into the profile coil, and by-and-by into the full-spread leaf. Then comes the flower, and finally the fruit. After that, rottenness and decay. It is curious that this should actually take place through a course of centuries. That it should be reflected in book illumination is simply the usual order of things—the fact has been frequently observed, and as it is curious, we call attention to it. But, as we have said, ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... returned Kiddie. "Look at his thigh bone—the only bone that's left intact. It's longer'n mine, an' I ain't a pigmy. Must have been taller'n I am. Look at the teeth: they're not an old man's teeth. There ain't a speck of decay on 'em, they're not worn down any, an' they're well separate one from another, not crushed together like an old man's. Must sure ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... scoffs at as a 'radical,' an 'abolitionist,' and a 'fanatic,' by education and intuition believes in his very soul that the holding of men in bondage, forcing from them involuntary labor, and the consequences thereof, are pregnant with moral and political ruin and decay. The system, not the men, is offensive to his eyes. Is he to blame for this opinion, provided it be well founded in his mind? Admit it eroneous in logic, still, if he believes it, is he to be condemned for holding the belief, and would he not be contemptible in his own eyes if he feared to express ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the cloud must be far enough removed to show the reflected light, before it will yield any of the stuff of which songs are made. And this light that gathers in song, what is it but hope behind the sorrow—hope so little recognized as such, that it is often called despair? It is reviving and not decay that sings even the ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... bound to morter and decay, Our bodies bound to morter and decay, Our bodies bound to morter and decay, But us souls ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves. - Texas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... minutes they pressed ahead in silence; then some subtle excitement made them break into a run. Thus they rounded the turn. The cabin came in sight. Its door swung wide on complaining hinges. The last of the rickety fence had fallen. The desolation and decay of a deserted house ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... minds be directed to any object more worthy of their liberality and encouragement, than that of laving a foundation in the rising generation for their becoming good and useful men? remembering what was formerly enjoined, 'If thy brethren be waxen poor, and fallen in decay with thee, then thou shalt relieve him; yea, though he be a stranger, or a sojourner; that he may live ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson
... in lexicography as to forget that 'words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.' Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... to be overworked, Jervis," he remarked, as we turned out of the gate after tea, on the day of his arrival, for a stroll on the shore. "Is this a new practice, or an old one in a state of senile decay?" ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... paused as if expecting recognition. Concha threw away his cigarette and raised his hand to his hat. He had not lifted it except to ladies of the highest quality for some years, out of regard to symptoms of senile decay which had manifested themselves at the junction of the brim ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... Jim had alluded as the scene of Sam's punishment by the overseer, was a one-story shanty in the vicinity of the stables. Though fast falling to decay, it had more the appearance of a human habitation than the other huts on the plantation. Its thick plank door was ornamented with a mouldy brass knocker, and its four windows contained sashes, to which here ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... impracticable, for its author had turned away in despair from existing politics. He has no proposals, in that dialogue at least, for making the best of things as they are. The first lesson his philosopher has to learn is to turn away from this world of becoming and decay, and to look upon the unchanging eternal world of ideas. Thus his ideal city is, as he says, a pattern laid up in heaven by which the just man may rule his life, a pattern therefore in the meantime for the individual and not ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... held possession of Pegu, Ava and Arakan. They made their capital at Pegu, and to this dynasty belong the gorgeous [v.04 p.0844] descriptions of some of the travellers of the 16th century. Their wars exhausted the country, and before the end of the century it was in the greatest decay. A new dynasty arose in Ava, which subdued Pegu, and maintained their supremacy throughout the 17th and during the first forty years of the 18th century. The Peguans or Talaings then revolted, and having taken the capital Ava, and made the king prisoner, reduced the whole country to submission. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... and distant ports. The coasting trade has been overlooked in song and story; yet, since the year 1859, its fleets have always been larger and more important than the American deep-water commerce nor have decay and misfortune overtaken them. It is a traffic which flourished from the beginning, ingeniously adapting itself to new conditions, unchecked by war, and surviving with splendid vigor, under steam and sail, ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... house was as dreary as it was within. Poverty had set its mark on all things, like a blight. Decay was visible everywhere—in the wood-work, in the stone-work, in hinges and handles, thresholds and lintels, ceilings and plastered walls. It would have cost a thousand pounds to put the manor house in decent habitable order. To have restored it to its original dignity and comeliness would have cost ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... legpet to those salabawan, "Though you are legpet, you can do nothing if I am not," said the gakot, "because you fall," said the gakot to the legpet who are quarreling. "And what can you all do if I am not, who am grass? you all decay if I am not," said the grass (roof) to those who are quarreling. "Therefore we are all the same use to the house of the Ipogau; we will unite our thoughts and breath, so that in the same manner the thoughts of the Ipogau are united, ...
— Traditions of the Tinguian: A Study in Philippine Folk-Lore • Fay-Cooper Cole
... eyes the woods of Roscarna, the river, and the lake took on a melancholy tinge. Though this aspect of them was new to her, it is hardly strange that she should have seen them thus, for the beauty of Roscarna is really of an elegiac kind, an autumnal beauty of desertion and of decay. As for Slieveannilaun, she ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... which furnished them with "delicious food." They must have been excessively hungry, or blessed with powerful imaginations, for, on cross-examination, these "wild turkeys" proved to be TURKEY BUZZARDS, or carrion vultures, most filthy creatures, which, in many places where the decay of animal matter is common, act faithfully the part of scavengers, and their flesh is strongly tinctured with the ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... came to the throne, she, without loss of time, took measures to restore the navy, which had been allowed to fall into decay during the reign of her wretched sister Mary. Timber was stored up for building, numerous pieces of brass cannon cast, and gunpowder, which had hitherto been brought from abroad, was manufactured ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... been detached until the ligaments had decayed, and if it had been separated after the decay of the soft parts, the bones would have been thrown into disorder. But the egg-patches are all on the palmar surface, showing that the bones were still in their normal relative positions. No, Berkeley, that hand was thrown into the pond separately ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... rectangular, stands on the north bank of the White River. Decay has long been at work upon it, yet it is still weather-proof. It was built long before planks were used in the Bad Lands of Dakota. It was built by hands that aimed only at strength and durability, caring nothing for appearances. Thus it has survived where a lighter ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... before, all claiming a slice of the deceased man's land, and of course all claiming the best. Suppose it was bounded by a "stake and stones" as of old here, minus the stones which are absent; suppose some of the claimants think best to set up a new stake where one has gone to decay, and suppose they are not over exact in placing it; or suppose, as is more than likely, their neighbor thinks the new stake encroaches on him and pulls it up entirely, stamping on the hole and putting it in according to his own ideas, etc., etc., ad infinitum. ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... early Moslem caliphs, who corrupted the name to Haila or Ailat. In the 10th century an Arab geographer described it as the great port of Palestine and the emporium of the Hejaz. In the 12th century the town suffered at the hands of Saladin and thereafter fell into decay. In 1841 the town was recognized by Turkey, together with the Sinai peninsula, as part of Egypt. At that time Egyptian pilgrims frequented Akaba in large numbers. In 1892, on the accession of the khedive Abbas II., Turkey ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... process. Happily there is an essence which neither one nor the other can destroy, which survives triumphant over death; so, lads, when you mourn the loss of a friend, think of him as living in that essence, not in the mortal frame you see torn to pieces or mouldering in decay." A new light seemed to burst on me as the doctor said this. The idea aided me to get over the horror I had felt at seeing the fate of the missionary captain, and enabled me better to bear the first remark which the pirate leader deigned to make ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... otherwise the inheritance would be lost to the paternal gens. The division in gentes, phratries and tribes constituted in Rome for centuries the foundation of the military organization, and also of the exercise of the rights of citizenship. But with the decay of the paternal gentes and the decline of their significance, conditions shaped themselves more favorably for woman. She could not only inherit, but had the right to administer her own fortune. She was, ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... man, at the tender mercies of the weakest creature in the household, that is, his grandchild, Valentine; a dumb and frozen carcass, in fact, living painlessly on, that time may be given for his frame to decompose without his consciousness of its decay." ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... breathe thy poison in my soul, Till all that had been wholesome, pure, and true Shewed its decay, and stained and wasted grew. Though sundered as the distant Northern Pole From his far sister, I should bear thy blight Upon me as I passed into ...
— A Woman's Love Letters • Sophie M. Almon-Hensley
... Blossholme was a peaceful place, a long, grey-gabled house set under the shelter of a hill and surrounded by a high wall. Within this wall lay also the great garden—neglected enough—and the chapel, a building that still was beautiful in its decay. ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... decay but no clergy about him, sir. I fancy I knows a parson when I sees one. Clergymen don't have scars on their ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... the micro-organisms do all that his most imaginative predecessors had suspected, and more. Without them, he proved, there would be no fermentation, no putrefaction—no decay of any tissues, except by the slow process of oxidation. It is the microscopic yeast-plant which, by seizing on certain atoms of the molecule, liberates the remaining atoms in the form of carbonic-acid and alcohol, thus effecting fermentation; it is another ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... the fall of Robespierre; party of the committees; Thermidorian party; their constitution and object—Decay of the democratic party of the committees—Impeachment of Lebon and Carrier—State of Paris —The Jacobins and the Faubourgs declare for the old committees; the jeunesse doree, and the sections for the Thermidorians—Impeachment ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... bliss, And by self-murder seeking higher life; On one foot standing till the other pine, Arms stretched aloft, fingers grown bloodless claws, Or else, impaled on spikes, with festering sores Covered from head to foot, the body wastes With constant anguish and with slow decay.[12] "Can this be wisdom? Can such a life be good That shuns all duties lying in our path— Useless to others, filled with grief and pain? Not so my father's god teaches to live. Rising each morning most exact in time, ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... on it from the heavy trees, were doleful in the last degree; the house was ill-placed, ill-built, ill-planned, and ill-fitted. It was damp, it was not free from dry rot, there was a flavour of rats in it, and it was the gloomy victim of that indescribable decay which settles on all the work of man's hands whenever it's not turned to man's account. The kitchens and offices were too large, and too remote from each other. Above stairs and below, waste tracts of passage intervened between patches of fertility represented ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... alternative remained but to remove the iron bridge entirely, and patch up the old wooden bridge until a new one of wood was built. That bridge, which is the present old bridge, continued to stand, with various repairs and alterations, until the year 1828, when, in consequence of the decay of the piles, and the continual heavy expenses required to uphold it, the Commissioners determined to build a new one of more durable materials. Messrs. Rennie were therefore applied to for designs, and a bill was brought into Parliament to authorize ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 548 - 26 May 1832 • Various
... must be noble and lovable. Nothing that is puny or artificial can ever wear the investiture of that colossal sorrow. McCullough embodied Lear as, from the first, stricken in mind—already the unconscious victim of incipient decay and dissolution; not mad but ready to become so. There is a subtle apprehensiveness all about the presence of the king, in all the earlier scenes. He diffuses disquietude and vaguely presages disaster, and the observer looks on him with solicitude and pain. He is not yet decrepit ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... that pass that way in their periodical migrations. It was melancholy to contemplate the gigantic, yet feeble, efforts of a whole primitive nation, in their anxiety to provide subsistence, forsaken and going to decay." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 388 - Vol. 14, No. 388, Saturday, September 5, 1829. • Various
... The rapid decay of iron through rust—rapid, that is to say, in comparison with other metals—is often found to have taken place when the discovery of old armour has been made; so that gold ornaments, belonging to a sword or other weapon, may be found in excavating, while ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... such as—gaiety, joy, melancholy, truthfulness, fickleness in some things, fickleness in all things, an exalted mind, poetry, domestic peace, hatred, jealousy, morbid sensibility, pardon, receiving again into favour, flowers, decay of health, sickness, returning health, love in a gentle degree, love in a sublime degree, doubting, also trusting love, ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... other. Wherever Time has gnawed one of the stones, you see the mark of his tooth just as plainly in the sunken reflection. Each is so perfect, that the upper vision seems a castle in the air, and the lower one an old stronghold of feudalism, miraculously kept from decay in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... settlement in Canada. Examine the gum "blisters" in the bark of the balsam tree. From this source the "Canada Balsam" gum of commerce is taken. The gum and resin in the wood and bark help to preserve the wood from decay. ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... disintegration which followed the intense life of the Elizabethan age. Shakespeare battles against the ills of society as the Greek dramatists had done, by showing sin and wickedness as destroyers of life, and once this is done, by firing mankind to resistance against the forces of ruin and decay. "To hold the mirror up to nature," that men may see the devastation which evil and vice bring about in the social body. And to do this he does not, like some modern writers, shun moralizing. He warns against ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... caravans of the ants, journeying to and from tiny chinks in the masonry;—the bees gathering honey from the crimson blossoms of the crete-de-coq, whose radicles sought sustenance, perhaps from human dust, in the decay of generations:—all that rich life of graves summoned up fancies of Resurrection, Nature's resurrection-work—wondrous transformations of flesh, marvellous bans migration of souls! ... From some forgotten crevice of that tomb roof, which alone intervened between her and the vast ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... would have agreed with Patmore that "you can see the disc of Divinity quite clearly through the smoked glass of humanity, but no otherwise." He found "harmony in immortal souls, spite of the muddy vesture of decay." ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... earthly mould, degrading them into kindred with the lowest, and even with the very brutes, like whom their visible frames return to dust. In this manner, selecting it as the symbol of his wife's liability to sin, sorrow, decay, and death, Aylmer's sombre imagination was not long in rendering the birthmark a frightful object, causing him more trouble and horror than ever Georgiana's beauty, whether of soul or sense, had given ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... only occasionally and capriciously exercised. It is much easier, however, to indicate the meaning and origin of the jurisdiction confided to the Comitia Calata, than to trace its gradual development or progressive decay. ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... his father had left him, a neat, slim little figure in an Eton suit and straw hat, and the walls were lined by big lads in kilts, knickers, tweed suits, and tailless Highland bonnets in various stages of roughness and decay. ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... of architecture not seen by the Americans elsewhere in Hili-li. The building had an eerie look, and as the party drew near to it Peters observed that but one of its wings was inhabited, the remainder of the mansion being in a state of almost complete decay. They all entered by a side doorway into the inhabited wing. Pym and Peters were motioned to seats in the hallway, the Duke remarking, in hushed tones, 'The home of Masusaelili,' as he and Diregus passed through a broken and decaying doorway ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... still alive, but most of them more or less advanced toward putrefaction - a stage hastened, it is thought, by a secretion within the bladders; for the plant cannot digest fresh food; it can only absorb, through certain processes within the bladder's walls, the fluid products of decay. The little insectivorous sundew (q.v.), on the contrary, not only digests, but afterward absorbs, animal matter. Tiny aquatic creatures, ever seeking shelter from larger ones ready to devour them, enter the pop-weed bladders by bending inward the free edge of ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... the Eighteenth Century. Her Political and Social Aspects. Her Military Condition. France. Her Power and Importance. Signs of Decay. The Court, the Nobles, the Clergy, the People. The King and Pompadour. The Philosophers. Germany. Prussia. Frederic II. Russia. State of Europe. War of the Austrian Succession. American Colonies of France and England. Contrasted Systems and their Results. Canada. Its Strong Military ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... Occident."[36] He discusses at length Indian, Persian, Greek, Roman, and European cultures; in each case, he concludes, the culture is created by the ruling Nordic element and declines through the racial decay of the Nordics resulting from their intermixture with ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... Zeus, O gods who age not nor decay! Let e'en two hundred ages roll away, But at the last these tidings let me learn, Borne o'er the fatal pool whence none return:— "By every tongue thy constancy is sung, Thine and thy favourite's—chiefly by the young." But lo, the future is in heaven's high ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... compassion came over Selwyn. He rebelled against the cruelty of vice that could fasten its claws on anything so fine, when there was so much human decay to feed upon. ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... surprised me much that Mother Alianora lay and hearkened, and said nought. Neither was she asleep, for I glanced at her from time to time, and always saw her awake and listening. Truly, she had little need of nurses, for it was no set malady that ailed her—only a gentle, general decay from old age. Why two of us were set to watch her I could not tell. Had I thought it possible that Mother Gaillarde could do a thing so foreign to her nature, I might have fancied that she sent us two there that night just in order that we might ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... is growing weaker, older, less incisive mentally, as the man approaching old age. There are no other states. Frequently there is a period between the cessation of youthful accretion and the setting in, in the case of the middle-aged man, of the tendency toward decay when the two processes are almost perfectly balanced and there is little doing in either direction. Given time enough, however, the balance becomes a sagging to the grave side. Slowly at first, then with a modest momentum, and at last the graveward process is in the full swing. So it ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... also a matter for surprise that in Paris, among so many sources of carbonic acid, the furnace fires, the respiration of men and animals, and the spontaneous decomposition and decay of organic substances, the quantity of carbonic acid ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... doubt, the father of a family had fanned himself with a palm-leaf fan on Sunday afternoons, watching the surreys go by, and where his daughter listened to mandolins and badinage on starlit evenings; but, although youth still held the veranda, both the youth and the veranda were in decay. The four or five young men who lounged there this afternoon were of a type known to shady pool-parlours. Hats found no favour with them; all of them wore caps; and their tight clothes, apparently from a common source, showed a vivacious fancy for oblique ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... the degree that they strike the balance between the life of the mind and the spirit—all the finer forces and emotions of life—and their outer business organisation and activities. When the latter become excessive, when they grow at the expense of the former, then the inevitable decay sets in, that spells the doom of that nation, and its time is tolled off in exactly the same manner, and under the same law, as has that of all the other nations before it that sought to reverse the ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... enactments;" all that they sought was plenty of rigorous imprisonment, ruinous fining, and diligent espionage.[197] If the reader is revolted by the rashness of Diderot's expectation of the speedy decay of the belief in a God,[198] he may well be equally revolted by the obstinate infatuation of the men who expected to preserve the belief in a God by the spies of the department of police. Much had no doubt been done for the church ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... disablement, acute pain, and listlessness. My fear will be that at last my pieces show indooredness, and being chain'd to a chair—as never before. Only the resolve to keep up, and on, and to add a remnant, and even perhaps obstinately see what failing powers and decay may contribute ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... period, 1813-1816, he had become familiar with all the phases of London society, "tasted their pleasures," and, towards the close, "felt their decay." His associates in those years were of two classes—men of the world, and authors. Feted and courted in all quarters, he patronized the theatres, became in 1815 a member of the Drury Lane Committee, "liked the dandies," including Beau Brummell, and was introduced to the ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... people of Munich had fed upon stenches so long that they could not be satisfied with the ordinary smells of the houses and streets, but must seek the fountain-head of corruption to still their morbid craving for the odors of decay. During the height of the cholera epidemic of the winter of 1873-74 an article appeared in one of the newspapers, written by a citizen who signed himself "A Constant Visitor of the Dead-houses;" and the article was answered by an opponent who signed himself "Another ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... centuries, so when sampling the chapels themselves, after finding half a dozen running which are of inferior merit, we approach the others with a bias against them. Moreover, all of them have suffered more or less severely from decay. Rain and snow, indeed, can hardly get right inside the chapels, or, at any rate, not inside most of them, but they are all open to the air, and, at a height of over two thousand feet, ages of winter damp have dimmed the glory even of the best-preserved. In many cases the hair and beards, with ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... together sat, Conferring thus in solemn chat: "How is the modern taste decay'd! Where's the respect to wisdom paid? Our worth the Grecian sages knew; They gave our sires the honour due: They weigh'd the dignity of fowls, And pry'd into the depth of Owls. Athens, the seat of earned fame, With gen'ral voice revered our ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... sat, worn spare, and yellow like themselves; the rugged font where children had their names, the homely altar where they knelt in after life, the plain black tressels that bore their weight on their last visit to the cool old shady church. Everything told of long use and quiet slow decay; the very bell-rope in the porch was frayed into a fringe, and ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... cavities! But she did. And if she cheated on her perfect diet, bad food could not have amounted to more than two percent of her total caloric intake from birth to age ten. I was a responsible mom and I made sure she ate right! Now my daughter was demanding to know why she had tooth decay. Fortunately, I now know the answer. The answer is rather complex, but I can ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... two phrases lies all the power of revolutionary faith. And how like phrases out of the gospels, those older expressions of the hope and misery of another society in decay. That is the spirit that, for good or evil, is stirring throughout Europe to-day, among the poor and the hungry and the oppressed and the outcast, a new affirmation of the rights and duties of men. ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... and which continues to give off its inward light without change throughout eternity—shall endure through endless cycles of time after the metal of the ring which holds it shall have crumbled in decay: even so shall your spirits, formerly two, now one and indissoluble, progress in ever-ascending evolution throughout eternity after the base material which is your bodies shall have returned to the senseless ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... standing, being neglected by him entirely. Smells of pomace, and the hiss of fermenting cider, which reached him from the back quarters of other tenements, revealed the recent occupation of some of the inhabitants, and joined with the scent of decay ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... scallions, leeks, nor onions in our gardens, by the authority of Thestilis in Virgil,—and of the millers, who are generally thieves,—and of the bakers, who are little better. Is this small saving or frugality? Besides the mischief and damage of the field-mice, the decay of barns, and the destruction usually made by weasels ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... Southwark election Mrs. Piozzi writes (Anec. p. 214):—'A Borough election once showed me Mr. Johnson's toleration of boisterous mirth. A rough fellow, a hatter by trade, seeing his beaver in a state of decay seized it suddenly with one hand, and clapping him on the back with the other. "Ah, Master Johnson," says he, "this is no time to be thinking about hats." "No, no, Sir," replies our doctor in a cheerful tone, "hats are of no use now, as you say, except to throw up in the air and ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... of Time May pluck the blossoms of their prime; Envy may talk of bloom decay'd, How lilies droop and roses fade; But Constancy's unalter'd truth, Regardful of the vows of youth, Affection that recalls the past, And bids the pleasing influence last, Shall still preserve the lover's ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... the ceilings were beautifully decorated, and must have cost a good deal of money in their day, but they were now rapidly falling into decay. ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... beautiful church of Notre Dame, or Ste. Marie, serves now as the stables of the garrison, and all its fine remains are hidden from public view; parts of its exterior still attract the eye, and make one regret that it has fallen into such utter decay. It was once covered with statues of great beauty, some of which remain; but that of Geoffrey Martel, its founder, is destroyed, with a host of others, once its pride; enough, however, is to be seen which is well worthy of attention; but, from its present occupation, we did not do more than ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... be truth in this, there might be depth of reasoning; but Englishmen did not see enough in the argument to induce them to withdraw their confidence from the present arrangements of the government, and Dr Anticant's monthly pamphlet on the decay of the world did not receive so much attention as his earlier works. He did not confine himself to politics in these publications, but roamed at large over all matters of public interest, and found everything bad. According to him nobody was true, and not only nobody, ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... taught to call Him the Father by Christ, to whose instructions it yields a joyful obedience, it revolves around the Supreme Being as its light and security, through its relation to whom it is safe amidst the world's commotions and blessed in life's decay. ...
— The Religion of Politics • Ezra S. Gannett
... traveled swiftly through the forest, and about noon came to the site of the village, but to his disappointment found that the jungle had overgrown the plantain fields and that the thatched huts had fallen in decay. There was no sign of man. He clambered about among the ruins for half an hour, hoping that he might discover some forgotten weapon, but his search was without fruit, and so he took up his quest once more, following up the stream, ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... hence. At Weston she had kept tolerable health, but certainly her constitution was not strong, and the slavery of Walworth Road threatened her with premature decay. Her sisters counselled wisely. Coming to London was a mistake. She would have had better chances at Weston, notwithstanding the extreme discretion with which she was obliged to ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... dead? I dare not think That thus the solemn truth can be; And broken is the only link That chain'd youth's pleasant thoughts to me! Alas! that thou couldst know decay, That, sighing, I should live to say 'The cold grave ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... tell which if any one among these four may be to the others as a sun; for in this special tract of heaven "one star differeth" not "from another star in glory." From each and all of them, even "while this muddy vesture of decay doth grossly close [us] in," we cannot but hear the harmony of ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... upon him, he, thinking the Change of Air would afford him Relief, sold his House, and went again to Basil, to the House of Frobenius; but he had not been there above nine Months before his Gout violently assaulted him, and his strength having gradually decay'd, he was seized with a Dysentery, under which having laboured for a Month, it at last overcame him, and he died at the House of Jerome Frobenius, the son of John the famous Printer, the 12th of July 1536, about Midnight, ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... I recognised clearly that I had committed a crime as bad as murder. My conscience tormented me. To stifle this unbearable feeling, I assured myself that everything was nonsense and vanity, that Kisotchka and I would die and decay, that her grief was nothing in comparison with death, and so on and so on . . . and that if you come to that, there is no such thing as freewill, and that therefore I was not to blame. But all these arguments only irritated me and were extraordinarily ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... deliberately misplaced: energy directed against the course of things, the infinite development, the will of God. Sin is corruption, and desolation, and decay. Death broods over the spirit of man, unless a Redeemer come. The unredeemed ages hang over history like a pall. In them there are monumental oppression, cruelties, and crimes. The breath of myriad millions went out in darkness, ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... hospitable Jove! And every god inspiring social love! And witness every household power that waits, Guard of these fires, and angel of these gates! Ere the next moon increase or this decay, His ancient realms Ulysses shall survey, In blood and dust each proud oppressor mourn, And the lost glories of his ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... in quest of adventures with your trusty friend Thor Helwyse, the yellow-bearded Scandinavian? Do you fancy this fresh, unwrinkled face a mate to your own? and is it but the vision of a restless night,—this long-drawn life of dull routine and gradual disappointment and decay? Open those dim eyes of yours, good sir! stir those thin old legs! inflate that sunken chest!—Ha! is that cough imaginary? those trembling muscles,—are they a delusion is that misty glance only a momentary weakness There is no youth left in you, Mr. MacGentle; ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... there was little. It would appear that the monks had forsaken their home even before the Reformation, for the first Lanison had acquired in the Eighth Henry's reign a property "long fallen into ruinous decay," according to an old parchment. Possibly the writer of this description had not seen the Abbey, trusting, perchance, to the testimony of a man who had not seen it either, for certainly much of ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... symphonic sauces, they say. But again, eating is a useful art; primarily it serves to nourish the body. When man was wholly wild—he is a mere barbarian to-day—his sense of smell guarded him from his foes, from the beasts, from a thousand dangers. Civilization, with its charming odours of decay,—have you ever ventured to savour New York?—cast into abeyance the keenest of all the senses. Little wonder, then, that there was no art of perfume like the arts of vision and sound. I firmly believe the Hindoos, Egyptians, and the ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... was laid away in the grave, where our bodies shall decay. But since Christ was "the Holy One of God," His body could not ...
— An Explanation of Luther's Small Catechism • Joseph Stump
... for fear of Snobs. People pine away lonely under the tyranny of Snobs. Honest kindly hearts dry up and die. Gallant generous lads, blooming with hearty youth, swell into bloated old-bachelorhood, and burst and tumble over. Tender girls wither into shrunken decay, and perish solitary, from whom Snobbishness has cut off the common claim to happiness and affection with which Nature endowed us all. My heart grows sad as I see the blundering tyrant's handiwork. ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... conceived to be a mixture of two elements. In virtue of its higher spiritual nature it participates in the world of ideas, the life of God: and in virtue of its lower or animal impulses, in the corporeal world of decay. These two dissimilar parts are connected by an intermediate element called by Plato thymos or courage, implying the emotions or affections of the heart. Hence a threefold constitution of the soul is conceived—the rational powers, the emotional desires, ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... wretched, as the king alone, and members of the royal family, enjoyed the privilege of having glazed windows, whitened walls, and tiles; the palace, and some of the Buddhist temples, are the only ancient edifices which remain, and even these are crumbling to decay. The chief temple was one built to contain the tooth of Buddha. Not that the original tooth really exists, because that was burned by the Portuguese. The present relic worshipped by all the Buddhists is more like the tooth of a crocodile than that of a man. ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... in the New World. The spirits of the dead crowd me in most solitary places. Here and there, gleam churches or shrines. The little town, much ruined, lies on the slope of a hill, with the houses of the barons gone to decay, and unused churches, over whose arched portals are faded frescoes, with the open belfry, and stone wheel-windows, always so beautiful. Sweet little paths lead away through the fields to convents,—one of Passionists, another of Capuchins; and the draped figures ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... and ambition were no less demoralizing to humanity and civilization, than those that brought decay and ruin to the potentates of old. He graced them with all the luxury and exuberance that modern civilization, without arousing rebellious complaint among his subjects, would permit. His gatherings appeared to be arranged for the bringing together of the ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... turning slowly from right to left as he menaced the crowd with his sinister gaze. Already a close observer might have marked upon his face a heaviness and looseness of feature, the first signs of that physical decay which in a very few years was to stretch him, a helpless wreck, too weak to utter his own name, upon the causeway of the London streets. At present, however, he was still an unbeaten man, the terror of the Ring, and as his ill-omened face ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... morality—and every philosopher hitherto has believed that he has given it a basis; morality itself, however, has been regarded as something "given." How far from their awkward pride was the seemingly insignificant problem—left in dust and decay—of a description of forms of morality, notwithstanding that the finest hands and senses could hardly be fine enough for it! It was precisely owing to moral philosophers' knowing the moral facts imperfectly, in an arbitrary epitome, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples" have but a brief career on earth. It is chiefly the incessant action of water and of air that makes them vanish like the "baseless fabric of a vision." On the moon these causes of disintegration and of decay are all absent, though perhaps the changes of temperature in the transition from lunar day to lunar night would be attended with expansions and contractions that might compensate in some slight degree for the absence of more ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball |
