"Mephitical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of recent date, There comes a strange mephitic blast. Here lies—Ha! Backbite, you at last— 'Tis he indeed: and sure as fate, They buried him in overhaste— Into the earth he has been cast, And in this grave, Before the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... apology being, that so many carriages had been "smashed" lately that the enterprising managers of the road had been obliged to buy an old excursion-train from another company. Meantime, what became of the unfortunate women who had no kind companion to purvey for them blankets and pillows from the mephitic sleeping-car, and cups of hot tea from unknown sources, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... many houses in the city had been found smeared with some foul substance, in broad streaks of white and yellow, which was believed to be a poisonous compost carrying contagion to every creature who touched or went within the influence of its mephitic odour; how this thing had happened not once, but many times; until the Milanese believed that Satan himself was the prime mover in this horror, and that there were a company of wretches who had sold themselves to the devil, and were his ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... political atmosphere of Europe was mephitic with falsehood, and certainly the gales which blew from the English court at the accession of James were not fragrant, but De Rosny had himself come over from France under false pretences. He had been charged by his master ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... in my throat," proceeded the artist, to whom most of the guests were listening. "I can still see nothing but lurid patches of gaslight on a background of solid mephitic fume. There are fine effects to be caught, there's no denying it; but not every man has the requisite physique for such studies. As I came along here from the railway-station, it occurred to me that the Dante story might have been repeated in ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... pallet bed, with two dirty curtains half drawn round it. On the table were an inkstand, a big copybook scribbled all over, a jug of lemonade, a glass, and a morsel of bread. The heat in this wretched hole was stifling, and one breathed a mephitic air which would have given cholera, if cholera had then been invented!" Balzac was in bed, with a cotton cap of problematic colour on his head. "You see," he said, "the abode I have not left except once for ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... personally investigating a highly nauseous kind of mephitic vapor drew me and Jones suddenly hither without time to say farewell or make explanations. I made the journey in—10' by electric telegraph, and am delighted that I came, for anything more unpleasant never met my nostrils, and I am almost sure ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... of the earth. The lake Avernus is supposed to fill the crater of an extinct volcano. It is circular, half a mile wide, and very deep, surrounded by high banks, which in Virgil's time were covered with a gloomy forest. Mephitic vapors rise from its waters, so that no life is found on its banks, and no birds fly over it. Here, according to the poet, was the cave which afforded access to the infernal regions, and here Aeneas offered sacrifices to the infernal deities, ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... light behind waxed fiercer still, and a low rumbling as of distant thunder began to mutter round us. The air became difficult to breathe. It was no longer air, but a mephitic stench that choked us with disgusting fumes. Then a great shock shook the land, and right in front of us a seam opened that must have been fully fifteen feet in width. Natalie was the first to see it. She observed ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... Honore Riquetti, Comte de Mirabeau. These two saw one another; twice, for half an hour each time. The last of the old Gods and the first of the modern Titans;—before Pelion leapt on Ossa; and the foul Earth taking fire at last, its vile mephitic elements went up in volcanic thunder. This also is one of the peculiarities of Friedrich, that he is hitherto the last of the Kings; that he ushers in the French Revolution, and closes an Epoch of World-History. Finishing off forever the trade of King, think many; ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... oxygen, if one had a preacher who understood the subject, might do more to repress sin than the most orthodox discourse to show when and how and why sin came. A minister gets up in a crowded lecture-room, where the mephitic air almost makes the candles burn blue, and bewails the deadness of the church,—the church the while, drugged by the poisoned air, growing sleepier and sleepier, though they feel dreadfully wicked for ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Your promise. The air of Benchers' Inn is not particularly good; but it's better than this mephitic odour of stuffiness and gas. Why, Mal, old lad, I can smell the methylated spirits in which you preserve ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... curious instances of radiation in brick ornament above arches, but I think these also without any very luminous intention. The imitations of fire in the torches of Cupids and genii, and burning in tops of urns, which attest and represent the mephitic inspirations of the seventeenth century in most London churches, and in monuments all over civilised Europe, together with the gilded rays of Romanist altars, may be left to such mercy as the reader is inclined to ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... of will, emotion, understanding; the division is good in logic, but its convenient lines are lost to us as we watch a being with soul all blurred, body all shaken, unstrung, poisoned, by erotic mania, rising in slow clouds of mephitic steam from suddenly heated stagnancies of the blood, and turning the reality of conduct and duty into distant unmeaning shadows. If such a disease were the furious mood of the brute in spring-time, it would be less dreadful, ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... found myself in that place chill and gloomy as the tomb; when I felt choked by the mephitic gases that arose from this seat of infection; when I found myself in the presence of a heap of corpses mutilated by the scalpel, disfigured by putrefaction and partially devoured by rats and worms; when, beneath tables laden with these horrible remains, I ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... wolf-hounds; and they caused an interruption in one afternoon service by chasing into the meeting-house one of those pungently offensive, though harmless, animals that abounded even in the earliest colonial days, and whose mephitic odor, in this case, had power to scatter the congregation as effectively as would have a score of armed Indian braves. Officially appointed "Dogg-whippers" and the never idle tithingman expelled the intruding and unwelcome canine attendants from the meeting-house ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... intoxicated with it, and it has rendered them fearless of the danger which may from thence arise to others or to themselves. These philosophers consider men in their experiments no more than they do mice in an air-pump or in a recipient of mephitic gas. Whatever his Grace may think of himself, they look upon him, and everything that belongs to him, with no more regard than they do upon the whiskers of that little long-tailed animal that has been long the game of the grave, demure, insidious, spring-nailed, velvet-pawed, green-eyed ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... a long pole and probed the cavity, and found that it must be of considerable size. My boys wished to have the opening enlarged and to enter immediately, but this I strictly forbade; for, as I leaned forward to examine it through the opening, a rush of mephitic air gave me a sort of vertigo. "Come away, children," cried I, in terror; "the air you would breathe there is certain death." I explained to them that, under certain circumstances, carbonic acid gas was frequently accumulated in caves or grottoes, ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... of his aspects is a figure so typically Hellenic, the ever-young and beautiful god of music and the arts, was also the Power of prophetic inspiration, of ecstasy or passing out of oneself. The priestess who delivered his oracle at Delphi was possessed and mastered by the god. Maddened by mephitic vapours streaming from a cleft in the rock, convulsed in every feature and every limb, she delivered in semi- articulate cries the burden of the divine message. Her own personality, for the time being, was annihilated; ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... beautiful," La Belle Riveriere of the New Orleans French; and a few days took us, I trust for ever, out of that murky stream which is as emphatically called "the deadly;" and well does it seem to merit the title; the air of its shores is mephitic, and it is said that nothing that ever sunk beneath its muddy surface was known to rise again. As truly does "La Belle Riviere" deserve its name; the Ohio is bright and clear; its banks are continually ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... of so many treasures of a perishable nature in so small an area, appear to have been the following: first, a river flowing into a lake; secondly, storms of wind, by which leaves and sometimes the boughs of trees were torn off and floated by the stream into the lake; thirdly, mephitic gases rising from the lake, by which insects flying over its surface were occasionally killed: and fourthly, a constant supply of carbonate of lime in solution from mineral springs, the calcareous matter when precipitated ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... the contrary, it is the chief force that unmakes the home. "So long as egotism waters it with the tears of sentiment and shields it from the cold blasts of scientific inquiry, so long will it thrive. But the time will come when it will be burned in the Garden of Love as a noxious weed. Its mephitic influence in society is too palpable to be overlooked. It turns homes that might be sanctuaries of love into hells of discord and hate; it causes suicides, and it drives thousands to drink, reckless excesses, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... farmer in the country but what has had some amusing or serious experience with the skunk, and almost every trapper has, at one time or another, served as a target for his shooting propensities. Natural histories are replete with anecdotes of which this animal is the mephitic hero, and volumes might be filled to the ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... Lord, that there may be no unpreparedness or delay in flinging open the gates. But then the tension is taken off and the loins ungirded, for there is no need for painful effort, and the lamps that burn dimly and require tending in the mephitic air are laid aside, and 'they need no candle, for the Lord is the light thereof'; and there is no more intense listening for the first foot-fall of One who is coming, for He has come, and expectation is turned into fellowship and fruition. The strained ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... and rioting the transformed idealist passed through many stages of the journey down a certain dark and mephitic valley not of amelioration. With the bitter industrial conflict to feed it, a slow fire within him ate its way into all the foundations, and as the fair superstructure of character settled, the moral perpendiculars and planes of projection became more and more ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... would have sympathised with human nature, seemed to have been dried up for ever. I found myself incapable of any kindly feeling, and my whole being was wrapped in that dismal and isolated gloom which, like the mephitic vapour, tended to paralyze the exertions and blight the fair prospects of life. Alas! I was mistaken; for, to my misfortune, I eventually discovered that I was a man, subject to the weakness of human nature, that the depths of my heart, which I had judged impenetrable to the influence of the ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... and jagged with mountain masses. Vast crater rings overspread its surface, and in some of these I imagined I could perceive a lurid illumination coming out of their deepest cavities, and the curling of mephitic vapors around ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... it will be because a larger public has discovered that the music which has been consorted with the old pictures, actions, and words has added to them an element either of charm or expressive potentiality hitherto felt to be lacking. Is that true? Has a rock of offense been removed? Has a mephitic odor been changed to a sweet savor by the subtle alchemy of the musical composer? Has a drama abhorrent, bestial, repellent, and loathsome been changed into a thing of delectability by the potent agency ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel |
