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More "Blight" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... into which the duchess had sunk, and gazed dreamily over the screen which she held in her hand. Some of the ladies gathered in little groups, others turned to the books and albums, one or two yawned almost openly. A kind of blight seemed falling upon them. Nell, who was unused to the phenomena of dinner parties, looked round, aghast. Were they all going to sleep? Suddenly she realized that it was at just such a moment as this that she was supposed to come in. ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... best more than empty delusions? He had yearned so toward her; she had been "his life, his fate." His fate, truly, but was she not rather his death? What kind of creature was it that words like those could not move? She cast a blight upon the noblest things, made him doubt and disbelieve where before he had walked with firm feet. And she was his fate; he was bound to her by his own hand. She sat there now by his table, and there she would sit and sit. The picture made his house seem a prison. He must go back ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... to my sitter I found that the blight which had always settled upon them when they were together was disappearing quickly. They were talking quite amiably, and although I should have been glad to have said something to show that I noticed ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... the notion that man, if left free, would wantonly heap ruin, vice, or shivery, or curse his species with the withering blight of war; ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... along the waters of the Cumberland; the lair of moonshiner and feudsman. The knight is a moonshiner's son, and the heroine a beautiful girl perversely christened "The Blight." Two impetuous young Southerners' fall under the spell of "The Blight's" charms and she learns what a large part jealousy and pistols have in the ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... half shouting, half weeping. "Never, s'help me God! She's my sister from this hour—no more, no less. And may the red blight fall on my arm and my heart, if I or any man takes her from you—any man!" he cried, his temples flushing and his eye glittering; "sooner than a hundred men should take her from you while I am here I'd die at their ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... knot of spiry trees for ages grew From out the tomb of him for whom she died; And ever, when such stature they had gained That Ilium's walls were subject to their view, The trees' tall summits withered at the sight; A constant interchange of growth and blight! ...
— The Story of Troy • Michael Clarke
... been, and with this advantage, that his bitter experience of a heartless world had completely cured him of all tendency to extravagance. And now he would have enjoyed as much happiness as is the usual lot of man, were it not that the shadow of death fell upon his house, and cast its cold blight upon his children. Ere three years had elapsed he saw his eldest daughter fade out of life, and in less than two more his eldest son was laid beside her in the same grave. Decline, the poetry of death, in its deadly beauty came upon them, and whilst it sang its song ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... indignation shall rise against the profligate wretch as warmly as the Catos of the pit could desire; because in a modern play I am to judge of the right and the wrong. The standard of police is the measure of political justice. The atmosphere will blight it, it cannot live here. It has got into a moral world, where it has no business, from which it must needs fall headlong; as dizzy, and incapable of making a stand, as a Swedenborgian bad spirit that has wandered unawares into ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... by Mr. Brown Agricultural progress —— statistics Aphides, to kill, by Mr. Creed Asparagus, French Berberry blight Birds, instinct of, by the Rev. F. F. Statham Books noticed Bouyardias, scarlet British Association Calendar, horticultural —— agricultural Camellia culture Charlock Corn averages and rents, by ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 207, October 15, 1853 • Various
... What crimes have I committed in a previous existence—Karma, again!—that I must perforce study the writings of impious men? Yet I submitted myself as a candidate for the task, to save my brethren in Christ from soiling their hearts. Heaven preserve me from the blight of spiritual pride, but I believe that I am now a scapegoat for the offences of my fellow-monks, and, thus, may redeem my own wretched ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... upon any of his other fellow-prisoners. O'Brien was born, near Ballymacoda, County Cork, the birthplace of the ill-fated and heroic Peter Crowley. His father rented a large farm in the same parish, but the blight of the bad laws which are the curse of Ireland fell upon him, and in the year 1856, the O'Briens were flung upon the world dispossessed of lands and home, though they owed no man a penny at the time. Michael O'Brien was apprenticed to a draper in ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... the maid my spirit seeks, Through cold reproof and slander's blight? Has she Love's roses on her cheeks? Is hers an eye of this world's light? No: wan and sunk with midnight prayer Are the pale looks of her I love; Or if, at times, a light be there, Its beam ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... more than was apparent on the surface. But, as the danger was of an entirely unprecedented character, it is not to be wondered at that I should be completely at a loss to divine what its meaning was. It was a blight some people said; and many were of opinion that it was caused by clouds of animalculae coming, as is described in ancient writings, to destroy the crops, and even to affect the health of the population. The doctors scoffed at this; but they talked about malaria, which, as far as I could ...
— A Beleaguered City • Mrs. Oliphant
... bread and drank the milk, their Father and Mother talked about the Tinkers. "Sure, they are as a frost in spring, and a blight in harvest," said Mrs McQueen. "I wonder wherever they got the badness in them the way ...
— The Irish Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... cried after him. "I would not have thee blight my chances with the full blaze of ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... the movements of her hands, round the vegetable plot in front of the cottage. Mrs. Pascoe was his aunt. Both women surveyed a bush. Mrs. Durrant stooped and picked a sprig from it. Next she pointed (her movements were peremptory; she held herself very upright) at the potatoes. They had the blight. All potatoes that year had the blight. Mrs. Durrant showed Mrs. Pascoe how bad the blight was on her potatoes. Mrs. Durrant talked energetically; Mrs. Pascoe listened submissively. The boy Curnow knew that Mrs. Durrant was saying that it is perfectly ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... often say to me: "But has God made all things so beautiful, and is it not right that we should enjoy them? Are not His gifts all good?" I answer, yes, but remember what it says; they are good, if sanctified by the Word of God and prayer. The curse of sin is on them; the blight of sin is on everything most beautiful, and it takes much of God's Word, and much of prayer to sanctify them. It is very hard to give up a thing to the death, and it is hardest of all to give up my life to the death, ...
— The Master's Indwelling • Andrew Murray
... 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 ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... sought that palace on its haughty height, And came to know its starry joys, Its sudden blackness, and the withering blight Of all its ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... those days, the bearded Russ and red-haired Dane, the Norwayer, and the Hollander, laden with merchandise, furled their sails in that deserted harbor, where now scarcely a fisherboat is seen; for on Crail, as on all its sister towns along the coast, fell surely and heavily the terrible blight of 1707, and now it is hastening ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... behind him, which I recognised as his wife's, "because you're bringing a blight on us, and our houses—because we want our children's faces ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... rugged patience, and the noisy, dusty crowd of shameless and indifferent tourists, that circulated among the green valleys, like a poisonous fluid in the veins of the wholesome mountains. They brought a kind of blight upon the place; and yet they were harmless, inquisitive people, tempted thither, most of them by fashion, a few perhaps by a feeble love of beauty, and only desirous to bring their own standard of comforts with ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... blast, upon her height, Yet shows of what she was, when shell and ball Rebounding idly on her strength, did light; A tower of victory! from whence the flight Of baffled foes was watched along the plain: But peace destroyed what war could never blight, And laid those proud roofs bare to summer's rain, On which the iron shower for ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... display the cloud, which hangs small at first, a mere speck, but which is to grow to a gloomy tempest that is to swallow up the loveliness of the sky, and blacken with gloom and sorrow the fairest aspects of the earth. I am to show the worm in the bud which is to bring blight—the serpent in the garden which is to spoil the Eden. Wo, beyond all other woes, that this serpent should be engendered in one's own heart, producing its blindness, and finally working its bane! Yet, so it is! The story is a painful one to tell; the task is one of self-humiliation. But the ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... 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 ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... ventured to bear or send a message of condolence. It was as if the house of the once acknowledged leader had been marked for the pestilence—and no pestilence was more to be shunned than the deadly blight of broken power. Even the slaves shifted about in embarrassed silence, offered little service, and obeyed as if conscious that obedience was something of an indiscretion, and was liable at any moment to become a crime. Some had slipped away to ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... publications, is the fostering patron to which he owes his difficulties. Thus does America nip her young genius in the bud; and when it perchance comes to flower and fruit, she is not behind-hand with a blight. The unknown production of the American author is brought into a depressing competition with works which have been tried in England, and found certain of success in America. The popular British author, whom the public have long demanded, is furnished at the lowest ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... doted on apples and used to beg slips and seeds of any new variety until he had one hundred and eighty-two trees in his big orchard. I have counted them and longed for them, early, mid, and late harvest—he fit off the bug and the blight and the worm like a wizard. If there was any one thing save his orchard he doted upon it was a daughter o' his'n, her name being Rose, and all that you can cram of lush and bright-red and rosy-posy nicety into that name. An' yet he hankered much ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... bud 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 ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... around us are the valleys of death, filled with bones—very many and very dry. Love lies there, dead. Hope is dead. Faith is dead. Honour is dead. Truth is dead. Purity is dead. Liberty is dead. Humility is dead. Fidelity is dead. Decency is dead. It is the blight of humanity. Death— moral and spiritual death in all her hideous and ghastly power—reigns around us. Men are indeed dead—"dead in trespasses and sins." What do we need? What is the secret longing of our hearts? What is the crying agony of our prayers? ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... pot-bound, and this applies especially to the double varieties. They will, if treated generously, do ample justice to the 8-or even the 10-inch size. The growth should not be hurried at any stage, and if the foliage has a dark, healthy, green colour, free from blight, there will be magnificent flowers four or five inches across. The final shift should be into a sound compost, consisting, if possible, of good loam and leaf-mould in equal parts, with sufficient sand added to insure drainage. About a fortnight later commence ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... be eaten, not to be drank, To be husked in a barn, not soaked in a tank; I come as a blessing when put in a mill, As a blight and a curse when run through a still. Make me up into loaves, and your children are fed; But made into drink, I will starve them instead. In bread I'm a servant the eater shall rule, In drink I'm a master, the drinker a fool. Then remember my warning; ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... took Peter some time to explain his uncle to Mrs. Hemingway. At the best, she thought, he had been insane. Not even the fact that Peter was co-heir to the Champneys fortune consoled her for what she considered a block to his happiness, a blight upon his life. The more she thought about that marriage, the more she disliked it; and as the time approached for Peter literally to sacrifice himself upon the altar, Mrs. Hemingway grew more and more perturbed, though she wasn't so troubled about it as Emma Campbell was. Emma's ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... cannot do much with beauty in perfect repair; the splendor that belongs to somebody else, unless it belongs also to everybody else, wounds one's vulgar pride and inspires envious doubts of the owner's rightful possession. But when the blight of ruin has fallen upon it, when dilapidation and disintegration have begun their work of atonement and exculpation, then our hearts melt in compassion of the waning magnificence and in a soft pity for the expropriated possessor, to whom we attribute every fine and endearing quality. It ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... seen their opportunity, and it was the English power that was really acting, not the Church. The Church was being used as a blind, a disguise; and for a forcible reason: the Church was not only able to take the life of Joan of Arc, but to blight her influence and the valor-breeding inspiration of her name, whereas the English power could but kill her body; that would not diminish or destroy the influence of her name; it would magnify it and make it permanent. Joan of Arc was the only ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... 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 per cent with ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... should find this out, and begin the demonstration thereof. Life and goodness are immortal. Let us then shape our views of existence into 246:30 loveliness, freshness, and continuity, rather than into age and blight. ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... continued, "that my hair is gradually evaporating; but for all that, I'm 'still in the ring,' don't you know; as young in society, for the matter of that, as yourself! And this is just the reason why I don't want you to blight every prospect in your life by marrying at your age—especially a woman—I mean the kind of woman you'd be sure ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... beauty, to perpetuate the malediction. When his son is a man, you will be a woman, with all a woman's subtle power and more than a woman's beauty, and you will be his curse, and his bane, and his blight, as his father has been ours! Will you ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... time. At last came a 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 ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... northern cold, and their glances were as chill as the weather. But that was better than if they had taken too much interest in a strange face in a familiar uniform; and it would have needed more than a freezing stare to blight the spring in my heart, for I ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... with the exorbitant growth of London that many an ill has spread over the land? London is the antithesis of the domestic ideal; a social reformer would not even glance in that direction, but would turn all his zeal upon small towns and country districts, where blight may perhaps be arrested, and whence, some day, a reconstituted national life may act upon the great centre of corruption. I had far rather see England covered with schools of cookery than with schools of the ordinary kind; the ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... eyes all the 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 her heart—read this ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... fear, One cheerful comfort still is cherish'd here. No dread internal, haunts my hours of rest, No dreams of injured innocence infest; Of hope, of peace, of almost all bereft, Conscience, my last but welcome guest, is left. Slander's empoison'd breath, may blast my name, Envy delights to blight the buds of fame: Deceit may chill the current of my blood, And freeze affection's warm impassion'd flood; Presaging horror, darken every sense, Even here will conscience be my best defence; My bosom feeds no "worm which ne'er can die:" Not crimes I mourn, but happiness gone by. Thus crawling on ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... pastime, so that after each storm of snow or sleet a serious bit of engineering must be undergone before the sashes can be lifted and the plants saved from dampness; or if the daffodils and tulips lie well bedded all the winter through, if, when the sun has called them forth, the winds of March blight their sap-tender foliage? Yet the lands that send the north winds also send us the means to deter them—the cold-loving evergreens, low growing, high growing, medium, woven dense in warp and woof, to be windbreaks, also the shrubs of tough, twisted fibre and stubborn thorns lying close to the ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... day in public, that in consequence of the impiety of the Omaguas, he should retire to a neighboring tribe, of more religious turn of mind; and taking with him the precious instrument, leave their palms to blight, and themselves ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... days in the society of flies and lizards, with only, as a very occasional treat, the smallest glimpse of anything resembling a Front. And all this is in a country so desolated by centuries of war that in spite of obvious natural fertility it is a sullen treeless desert—a desert of blight and thistles, as profitless to our men as their periodically deferred anticipations of a grand advance. A book that sets out to record vacuity can hardly be crammed with thrilling literature, and I am not going to pretend ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various
... small shops; but the only stock in trade appeared to be heaps of children, who, even at that time of night, were crawling in and out at the doors, or screaming from the inside. The sole places that seemed to prosper amid the general blight of the place, were the public-houses; and in them, the lowest orders of Irish were wrangling with might and main. Covered ways and yards, which here and there diverged from the main street, disclosed ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... serious and formal subject was 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 ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... that your speech is monotonous may mean very little to you, so let us look at the nature—and the curse—of monotony in other spheres of life, then we shall appreciate more fully how it will blight ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... and tighter 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 ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... and it's vital, Wally," she answered. "It's all part and parcel of some singular kind of change that's been coming over you, lately, like a blight. You haven't been yourself, at all, these few days past. Something or other, I don't know what, has been coming between us. You've got something else on your mind, beside me—something bigger and more important ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... flowerets crowned, To regulate the goblets round. Let but the nymph, our banquet's pride, Be seated smiling by my side, And earth has not a gift or power That I would envy, in that hour. Envy!—oh never let its blight Touch the gay hearts met here tonight. Far hence be slander's sidelong wounds, Nor harsh dispute, nor discord's sounds Disturb a scene, where all should be Attuned to ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... sacrilege, and cannot be altered by the power of Fate itself. Carlos, as the poet represents him, calls forth our tenderest sympathies. His soul seems once to have been rich and glorious, like the garden of Eden; but the desert-wind has passed over it, and smitten it with perpetual blight. Despair has overshadowed all the fair visions of his youth; or if he hopes, it is but the gleam of delirium, which something sterner than even duty extinguishes in the cold darkness of death. His energy survives but to vent itself in wild gusts of reckless passion, or aimless indignation. ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... thou spearhead in my side, Thy father's first-born, and his shame; Unstable as the rolling tide, A blight has fall'n upon thy name. Decay shall follow thee and thine. Go, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... conscience," replied Hard. "My conscience is as elastic and pleasantly disposed as an Irishman's. Bunker Hill casts no blight ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... make them do anything; and what was more, in some of the very worst cases, the evil was past remedy now, and better left alone. For the drought went on pitiless. A copper sun, a sea of glass, a brown easterly blight, day after day, while Thurnall looked grimly aloft ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... at his losses, A man doesn't whimper and fret, Or rail at the weight of his crosses And ask life to rear him a pet. A man doesn't grudgingly labor Or look upon toil as a blight; A man doesn't sneer at his neighbor Or sneak from a cause that ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest
... would, and yet I could not speak it," Elbridge replied. "When, with a blight upon my name I left those halls," pointing to the old homestead standing in shadow of the autumn trees, "I vowed to know them no more, that my step should never cross their threshold, that my voice should never be heard again in those ancient chambers, that no being of all that household ...
— Chanticleer - A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family • Cornelius Mathews
... tomb. Good God!' he cried, suddenly starting up in anger, 'are you telling me untruths? Why should you play with me like this? I'll have the right of it. Elfride, we shall never be happy! There's a blight upon us, or me, or you, and it must be cleared off before we marry.' Knight moved away impetuously as if to ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... the determining principle of their 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the time, and, amongst others, by Gray. He specially praises a passage which has often been quoted as representing Pope's highest achievement in his art. At the conclusion the goddess Dulness yawns, and a blight falls upon art, science, and philosophy. I quote the lines, which Pope himself could not repeat without emotion, and which have received the highest eulogies ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... Casting a look over the past, he saw that Dr Graham had been right in his reference to the Ring of Polycrates, for although he was outwardly still prosperous and high-placed, shame had come upon him, and evil was about to befall. From the moment of Jentham's secret visit a blight had fallen on his fortunes, a curse had come upon his house, and in a thousand hidden ways he had been tortured, although for no fault of his own. There was his secret which he did not dare even to think of; there was the enforced ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... sword. Surrounded by a gang of children, some grown to maturity, men and women, and others only infants, the poor patriarch sat pale and sickly at the family board; and the melancholy shade that kept flitting over his countenance, though he smiled and rose to greet us, told of some blight that had fallen on his hopes; for he resumed his seat apart, and crossing his thin hands on his lap, gave no other notice of his presence than an occasional sigh, uttered deeply and involuntarily. Except the old man, they all eat fast and greedily of a kind of white mixture, or porridge, collected ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... 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 count ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... arrival in this country, stuffed like Christmas turkeys with abstracts and notes, the pemmican of school-boy learnings, are more or less a weariness and a bore; but the youth who comes out from the admiring circle of sisters and aunts with the airs of a man of the world and the blight of a premature ennui is peculiarly insufferable. Of course he has never known at home any grown-up people beyond the chrysalis stage of undergraduatism, except to receive from them patronising hospitalities ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... sloops, ranged below each other in order of size, and showing a forest of masts, occupied the wharfs. These and a thousand other objects, seen as they were under a brilliant sun, presented a picture of surpassing splendour; but the curse and blight ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... But there is another form of repose; or is it not rest to sit near an open window and look out on dumb nature? The moon had not yet risen; only the stars of heaven shone down on the smooth ice. Their reflection was like rubies spread on a blight steel plate, or the lights which ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... 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 ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... in this world when a healthy boy is happy. When he is put into knickerbockers, for instance, and 'comes a man to-day,' as my little Jim used to say. When they're cooking something at home that he likes. When the 'sandy-blight' or measles breaks out amongst the children, or the teacher or his wife falls dangerously ill—or dies, it doesn't matter which—'and there ain't no school.' When a boy is naked and in his natural state for ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... sake, don't be too hasty! Give me opportunity for explanation. I admit that I did wrong, but there are extenuating circumstances. Let me explain, I entreat you, before you thus blight ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... a dissipated father, or a reckless son may blight a home and destroy its happiness, so may a thoughtful, virtuous, and kind man in the home change its very atmosphere and help to make it a heaven. As a home-maker man has the ruggeder part. It is his to provide. The man who falls ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... circumstances as those now in question, the ordinary social rules were not ordinarily broken—whether a countess should not call on a clergyman's wife first, although the countess might be the stranger; but she did not dare to do as she would have done, had no blight attached itself to her name. She gave, therefore, no hint; she said no word of Mrs. Sturm, though her heart was longing for a kind word from some woman's mouth. But she allowed herself to feel no anger against the husband, and went through her parish ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... creed, has proved the fruitful parent of hypocrisy and superstition; which has soured the sweet charities of human life, [154] and, settling like a foul mist on the goodly promise of the land, closed up the fair buds of science and civilization ere they were fully opened. Alas, that such a blight should have fallen on so gallant and generous a people! That it should have been brought on it too by one of such unblemished patriotism and purity of motive, as Isabella! How must her virtuous spirit, if it be permitted the departed good to look down on the scene ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... Margaret, for the wrong I did you. I should never have spoken love to you at all, or if I did, I should have told you of the blight upon it; but the sky and the trees and the hill were clothed that night in the beauty that wrapt my soul and I thought that God had forgotten and had shrived me in the same sacred light. But He does not forget. That light itself cannot ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... had been the more remarkable in so young a man, with the world opening on him so brightly. As to the promise lost, that, indeed, Mr. Ross owned, and pleased Charles by saying how he had hoped to watch its fulfilment; but he spoke of its having been, in truth, no blight, only that those fair blossoms were removed where nothing could check their full development or mar their beauty. 'The hope in earthly furrows sown, would ripen in the sky;' Charles groaned, saying it was hard not ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was under the same roof with Tai-yue in dowager lady Chia's suite of rooms, he naturally became comparatively more friendly with her than with his other cousins; and this friendliness led to greater intimacy and this intimacy once established, rendered unavoidable the occurrence of the blight of harmony ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... no sooner touched the flower than the whole plant suffered a blight, its leaves turning coal-black as if by the agency ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... Edith! may no untimely blight fall on thy garland of love, no thorns be found with its glowing blossoms, no canker-worm of jealousy ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... Administration will propose authority to contract for 35 thousand additional public housing units in each of the next 2 fiscal years for communities which will participate in an integrated attack on slums and blight. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... replied Godwin; "and worthy of you, who are the most honest of men. Yet, Wulf, I am troubled. See you, my brother, have ever brethren loved each other as we do? And now must the shadow of a woman fall upon and blight that love which ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... For the hour of hope will soon take flight And on your form and features leave a blight; Since Time, who heals full many an open wound, More oft than not ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... liberal nature and a niggard doom, A difficult journey to a splendid tomb. New writ, nor lightly weighed, that story old In gentle Goldsmith's life I here unfold; Thro' other than lone wild or desert gloom, In its mere joy and pain, its blight and bloom, Adventurous. Come with me and behold, O friend with heart as gentle for distress, As resolute with fine wise thoughts to bind The happiest to the unhappiest of our kind, That there is fiercer crowded misery In garret toil ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... change, nor winter's blight, Nor Time's remorseless doom, Can dim our ray of holy light That gilds this ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... assured in his own presence. But if the greater part of the officer corps were ever to become absorbed in the business of taking men apart to see what makes them tick, thereby superinducing self-consciousness all down the line, an irremediable blight would come upon the services. There is no need to look that deeply. What matters mainly is that an officer will know how men are won to accept authority, how they can be made to unify their own strength, how they can be helped to find satisfaction and success in their employment, how the ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... woman's love can blight as terribly as a man's—almost. Well, I like you none the worse for this curious spice of loyalty. It is so rare in ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... season. The ground about Toongabbie was pronounced to be worn out, the produce of the last harvest not averaging more than six or seven bushels an acre, though at first it was computed at seventeen. The Northern farms had also failed through a blight. ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... It is well that we should be thoroughly impressed with the fact that so long as slavery in any form is tolerated, the internal—we may say infernal—miseries and horrors which we have attempted to depict will continue to blight the land and brutalise its people. Besides this, justice demands that the same constraint which we lay on the Sultan of Zanzibar should be applied to the King of Portugal. We ought to insist that his "domestic slavery" shall cease at once. Still further, as Sir Bartle ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... of what may be called dry-rot or local blight on the civilised world's culture the decline appears to be due not to a positive infection of a malignant sort, so much as to a failure of the active cultural ferment, which has fallen below the critical point of efficacy; ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... cases of asexual multiplication, and there are other instances, and still more extraordinary ones, in which this process takes place naturally, in a more hidden, a more recondite kind of way. You are all of you familiar with those little green insects, the 'Aphis' or blight, as it is called. These little animals, during a very considerable part of their existence, multiply themselves by means of a kind of internal budding, the buds being developed into essentially asexual animals, which are neither male nor female; ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... the schoolmaster will reply that something of everything means nothing thorough. I know the objection and what it commonly stands for. It is the cloak and pretext for that accursed pedantry and cant which turns every sort of teaching to a blight. Thoroughness is the excuse for giving boys grammar and accidence in the name of Greek: diagrams, formulae and numerical examples in the name of science. Stripped of disguise this love of thoroughness is nothing but an indolent resolve to make things easy for the teacher, ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... corruption, just as surely as the liar and adulterer. No matter how "polite" and "refined" and "respectable" the seed may be, no matter how closely it resembles the good seed, its true nature will out, the blight of corruption will be ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Dwight Moody
... and Trouble, turn about, Through hopeless desolation, Through flood and fever, fire and drought, And slavery and starvation; Through childbirth, sickness, hurt, and blight, And nervousness an' scarin', Through bein' left alone at night, I've got to be past carin'. Past botherin' or carin', Past feelin' and past carin'; Through city cheats and neighbours' spite, I've come to be ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... it, though! If her life is spared, and her constitution remains free from blight, (both of which felicities we trust will be hers,) that subject ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 26, September 24, 1870 • Various
... remorse—not so Martino di Porto. He had been struck with the beauty of the prey thus suddenly snatched from him; he had been accustomed to long outrage and to long impunity; the very sight, the very voice of a Colonna, was a blight to his eye and a discord to his ear: what, then, when a Colonna interfered with his lusts, and ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... should be ruled by a heedful while unobtrusive respect and self-respect. Do not think a strong word of caution in this matter out of place and out of scale. Carelessness of even appearances here may wreck a life; it may certainly blight an influence. ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... drawn them. Dead horse or mule or bullock, decomposing in the sun, seemed to have nothing of offence for Republican noses. The yellow smear of lyddite was everywhere, and, looking over the rock-rampart upon the works below, you saw it like a blight, or yolk of egg ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... through the clearness of it; and it is a law of this universe, that the best things shall be seldomest seen in their best form. The wild grass grows well and strongly, one year with another; but the wheat is, according to the greater nobleness of its nature, liable to the bitterer blight. And therefore, while in all things that we see, or do, we are to desire perfection, and strive for it, we are nevertheless not to set the meaner thing, in its narrow accomplishment, above the nobler thing, in its mighty ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... beautiful territories the tourist can find, and still fertile,—though the hills have forgotten their fruit and the plain its river,—and capable of sustaining a much larger population than it now supports, if the Mohammedan blight were off it. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... "'The Blight of Respectability,' by Geoffrey Mortimer, is well worth reading, and by more of us, perhaps, than imagine it. The shoddy god has votaries in England, where one would least expect to ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... your hand. And then ask me what middle-age and the clerical profession have to do with all this! Why, nothing, just precisely nothing, nothing in the whole world. That's the point of my argument. They'd ruin the sentiment, blight the romance, hopelessly ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... greatest peacemaker in families, save death; and for her sake they made a show of tolerating her husband, after they had given him some bad hours behind her back. But the whole affair was like a blight on Redford, which was never the same place again. Mr Pennycuick had a slight "stroke" on hearing all the bad news at once. It was light enough to be passed over and hushed up, but his vigour and faculties declined from that hour with a rapidity that could be ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... walked by Witham stream There fell no chilling shade To blight the drifting naiad's dream Or ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... superstitions of newspaperdom is that nothing which happens to a reporter in the line of his work is or can be "big news." The mere fact that he is a reporter is enough to blight ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... lies in the affections of those who use and profit by it. It holds its position by love. No publisher may say to it: "Buy my books, not those of my rival"; no scientist may forbid it to give his opponent a hearing; no religious body may dictate to it; no commercial influence may throw a blight over it. It ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... they shall find him. On the highways at each turn, (Since you did not choose to counsel or to warn,) They shall tempt him, then shall bind him; they shall blight, and they shall burn, Down to offspring ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... and cries and beat of wings, Grown eager now and venturesome, The swallows hold their twitterings, To see the blight of winter come. ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... 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 ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... wouldn't be there at all. Things is gettin' pretty tight on farms now. It means about sixteen hours hard graft a-day to make not half what a railwayman makes in eight hours. If you happen to have grapes or oranges, if they manage to escape the frost, an' hail, an' caterpillar, then the blight ketches 'em, or there's a drewth, and there ain't none; an' if there's any, there's so much that there ain't no sale for 'em; and the farmer's life I reckon ought to be stopped as gamblin', for a gambler's life ain't one bit ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... tinted clouds? Shall I tell you how the grand old hills, forest crowned, stretched off into the dim distance—and how sweet the music of childhood's ringing laugh, heard from the far-off shore—or how Aunty thought 'twas such a pity that sin, and tears, and sorrow, should ever blight so fair a world? ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... bind it down or confine it. You might load the witch with irons, you might bury her in the lowest cell of a feudal prison, and still it was believed that she could send forth her imps or her spectre to ravage the fields, and blight the meadows, and throw the elements into confusion, and torture the bodies, and craze the minds, of any who might be the objects ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... ladies and gentlemen, you all are familiar with the fact that the chestnut blight is loose in Europe. It was reported in Italy in 1938, and it spread rather rapidly in Italy. It had been there many years before they found it. In spite of our numerous warnings to get them to watch for it, they let it get ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... The grass grew rare, A blight lurked in the darkening air, The very moss grew hueless and spare, The last daisy stood all astunt; Behind his back the soil lay ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... the thoughtless Madame Steynlin captured him and began to talk music. He repeated that remark, too good to be lost, about the spinet; it led to Scarlatti, Mozart, Handel. He said Handel was the saviour of English music. She said Handel was its blight and damnation. Each being furnished with copious arguments, the discussion ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... noonday's burning sun All thy body's strength doth blight, When the midnight stars and moon Dazzle with their brilliant light, Then His hand of mighty pow'r, Shades thee ...
— Paul Gerhardt's Spiritual Songs - Translated by John Kelly • Paul Gerhardt
... BERTRAND). The game's up: we must save the swag. (To DUMONT.) Sir, since your key, on which I invoke the blight of Egypt, has once more defaulted, my feelings are unequal to a repetition of yesterday's distress, and I shall simply pad the hoof. From Turin you shall receive the address of my banker, and may prosperity attend ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XV • Robert Louis Stevenson
... blight known as Bolshevism any such redeeming traits to its credit account? The consensus of opinion down to the present moment gives an emphatic, if summary, answer in the negative. Every region over which ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... speak the dreadful word? How shall ye live when ye have heard? Madness hath seized our lord by night And blasted him with hopeless blight. Such horrid victims mightst thou see Huddled beneath yon canopy, Torn by red hands and dyed in blood, Dread offerings to ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... crossed the railroad at a switch east of Grinnell. I was naturally expecting some word from Don Lovell, and it was my intention to send one of the boys into that station to inquire for mail. There was a hostelry at Grinnell, several stores and a livery stable, all dying an easy death from the blight of the arid plain, the town profiting little or nothing from the cattle trade. But when within a half-day's drive of the railway, on overtaking the herd after dinner, there was old man Don talking to the boys on herd. The ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... with some reason in view of Laura's romantic nature—that only a career of gloomy grandeur and high renown would impress the maiden whom yesterday he proposed to make happy forever, but to-day to blight with regret like a "worm i' the bud." He already had a vague presentiment that such a role would often mortify his tastes and inclinations most dismally; and yet, what had he henceforth to do with pleasure? But if, after he had practiced the austerity of an anchorite, ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... A blight, a gloom, I know not what, has crept upon my gladness— Some vague, remote ancestral touch of sorrow, or of madness; A fear that is not fear, a pain that has not pain's insistence; A sense of longing, or of loss, in some ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... 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, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... churches, nations. Men are not merely aggregated together like a pile of cannon balls, but are knit together like the myriad lives in a coral rock. Put a drop of poison anywhere, and it runs by a thousand branching veins through the mass, and tints and taints it all. No man can tell how far the blight of his secret sins may reach, nor how wide the blessing of his modest goodness may extend. We should seek to cultivate the sense of being members of a great whole, and to ponder our individual responsibility for the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... low-grade imbecile. There is not in the whole family, for 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 normal family. ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... the little restless things, The base and barren things, the things that spite The day, and trail processions through the night Of sad remembrances and questionings; The poverties, stupidities and stings, The silted misery, the hovering blight; The things that block the paths of sound and sight; The things that snare our thought and ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... A rheum, like 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 of age, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... we have said the word adieu! A blight has fallen on my soul! And bliss, that angels never knew, Is torn from me, by fate's control! And yet the tear I shed at parting, Was "all ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... can corrupt nor blight can wither. The poet Keats had not this sort of protection for his person—he lay bare to weather—the serpent stung him, and the poison-tree dropped upon this little western flower: when the mercenary ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... shall blight our vines, Nor Sirius blaze above us, But you and I shall drink our wines And sing to the loved ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... dive me tandy, Dive me only white,— 'Tause there's poison in the tolored, Which my health will blight; But you better dive me sudar, Let the tandy be,— 'Tause I shall not want so much, And ...
— Mother Truth's Melodies - Common Sense For Children • Mrs. E. P. Miller
... eternal One! whose presence bright All space doth occupy, all motion guide, Unchanged through time's all-devastating blight! Thou only God, there is no god beside! Being above all things, mighty One, Whom none can comprehend and none explore; Who fill'st existence with thyself alone,— Embracing all, supporting, ruling o'er,— Being whom we call ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... Autumn's interlude Elysian The old grim Shadow strikes across the land. May Heaven arrest its course, avert its terror, And keep the Statesman who this foe must fight From careless blindness and from blundering error, Such as of old lent aid to the Black Blight. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 30, 1890. • Various
... were trying ones at Prospect. The blight that ruined the potato crop in 1846, and the loss of the wheat crop a few years later by the weavil, were felt more keenly because of the loss of the controlling mind. To give an idea of the financial loss, I may mention the fact that in 1843 two ...
— The Chignecto Isthmus And Its First Settlers • Howard Trueman
... all! Not at all!" said Allan heartily. "I am glad that I could put that matter straight for you. It would blight like black frost to have Stonewall Jackson's hand and mind set against you—and Richard Cleave is not the ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... to several diseases, which affect the flour made from it, and render it unfit for good bread. The principal of these are the blight, mildew, and smut, which are occasioned by microscopic fungi, which sow themselves and grow upon the stems and ears, destroying the nutritive principles, and introducing matter of a deleterious kind. The farmer is at the ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... or none worth having, seeing they had never invented the like for them. The chief, Mankambira, likewise treated us with kindness; but wherever the slave-trade is carried on, the people are dishonest and uncivil; that invariably leaves a blight and a curse in its path. The first question put to us at the lake crossing- places, was, "Have you come to buy slaves?" On hearing that we were English, and never purchased slaves, the questioners put on a supercilious air, and sometimes ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... who were in the beginning born of Terra shall always have a common heritage. There are and will be other lost colonies among the stars. We could not have been the only outlaws who broke forth during the rule of Pax, and before the blight of that dictatorship, there were at least two expeditions that went forth ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... will inevitably entail most serious consequences not only upon the guilty parties, but upon the community as a whole, and even menace the existence of a whole people. Thebes, for example, suffered blight and pestilence owing to the incest of Oedipus. I found it widely believed in Serbia that before marrying Alexander, Draga had been his father's mistress and was told emphatically that the marriage must ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... is birdie. A little bird and a little blight and a little balance to a best button. A little ...
— Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein - With Two Shorter Stories • Gertrude Stein
... 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 ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... the sky of life. Big with the rain, the snow, the hail—the lightning of passion. A spark, a touch, a strong wind an' they explode, they fall from grace, so to speak. But what have they done that we ain't never heard of? All we've noticed is the explosion, the fall, the blight. They have stirred the sky, whilst the little white pale-livered untempted clouds floated on the zephyrs—they've brought rain that made the earth glad, they've cleared the air in the very fall of their lightnin'. The lightnin' came—the fall—but give 'em credit ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... ruthlessly reducing one of her most highly developed provinces to the dead level of autocratic rule. In her Baltic provinces she is trying to destroy, root and branch, whatever there is left of German culture. Wherever the Russian Church holds dominion intellectual blight ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... resurrection; and from out That sullen hell which girt their shades about The nether soul that lurks and lowers within Man, made of dust and fire and shame and sin, Breathed: all the cloud that felt it breathe and blight Was blue as plague or black as thunderous night. Elect of hell, the children of his hate Thronged, as to storm sweet heaven's triumphal gate. The terror of his giving rose and shone Imminent: life had put its ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... midnight's wilds by savage bandits led, "Her heart is sad—her love is far away!" Elate that lover waits the promised day When he shall clasp his blooming bride again— Shine on, sweet visions! dreams of rapture, play! Soon the cold corse of her he loved in vain Shall blight his withered heart and ...
— The Culprit Fay - and Other Poems • Joseph Rodman Drake
... sin Leading them astray, No false heart within That would them bewray, Nought to tempt them in An evil way; And if canker come and blight, Nought will ever ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... on and fill pages with corroborative facts and figures, drawn from the most reliable sources. But these are amply sufficient to show the extent and magnitude of the curse which the liquor traffic has laid upon our people. Its blight is everywhere—on our industries, on our social life; on our politics, and even ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... for the old and hardened, and education for the young and tender. I would tell the schoolboys and schoolgirls that alcohol will destroy the framework of their beautiful bodies, and that cruelty to any of God's living creatures will blight and destroy ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... seventeen when the Plague swept over Kennons. That mysterious blight, rising in the orient, traveling darkly and surely unto the remotest West, laid its blackened hand upon the fair ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... tall lilies glistening, the evening shadows slanting out, the night murmuring of waters. There is no other genuine dream; without it to sweeten all, life is harsh and shrill and east-wind dry, and evil overruns her more quickly than blight be-gums the rose-tree or frost blackens fern of a cold June night. We elders are past re-making England, but our children, even these crippled children here, may ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... prized, But plucked not. She, poor wench, from moon to moon Waxed pale and paler: of no known disease, The village-leech averred, with lips pursed out And cane at chin; some inward fire, he thought, Consumed. A dark inexplicable blight Had touched her, thinned her, till of that sweet earth Scarce more was left than would have served to grow A lily. Later, at a fresh-turned grave, From out the maiden strewments, as it were, A whisper rose, of most pathetic breath, Of how one maid had been by two men loved— No names, ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... incurring observation and provoking suspicion. His enemies had triumphed, his Queen was cold and unjust, and now his dearly-loved friend, his adviser and confidant, the sharer of his sorrows, his consoler and encourager, was no more. A blight had fallen ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... the first suspected the visit, with which he was honoured, to have been preconcerted by his wife and the duke; and he now began to think her majesty was likewise connected with a plot destined to rob him of his peace and blight his honour. However, he was obliged to obey the queen's summons and depart. Nor had he been many minutes absent when Lord Arran entered the presence-chamber where the audience was being held, unaccompanied by the duke, at which Lord Chesterfield's jealous fears ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... girl, "he could be so much to me and I to him! His touch, even in thought, would never be coarse and unfeeling; and I have seen again and again that I can inspire him, move him, and make him happy. Why must a wretched blunder thwart and blight two lives?" ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... house we have lost possession of, and if we would regain possession and make the ballot something more than a mere symbol of a thing that is dead, we have no choice but to resort to the one process by which the resources of the country can be returned to its people, and the blight of poverty and pauperism that is settling down on the country and is becoming permanent can be removed - ...
— Confiscation, An Outline • William Greenwood
... mounted lens in a leather loop alongside, which has often to be used. The compass {22} itself is so placed that you can see it well while either sitting or standing up, or when lying at full length on the deck, with the back against a pillow propped by the mizen mast, the blight sun or moon overhead, and a turn or two of the mainsheet cast about your body to keep the sleepy steersman from rolling over into the water, ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... rejoice in the battle, in the wounds and pain and death of men; they shriek and scream and laugh around the head of the hero when he goes forth, like Cuchulain, to an unwearied slaughter of men. They make the blight, the deadly mist, the cruel tempest. To deceive is their pleasure; to discourage, to baffle, to ruin the hero is their happiness. Some of them are monsters of terrific aspect who abide in lakes or in desolate rocks, as the terrible tri-formed horse whom Fergus mac ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... is one of the reasons, and one of the principal reasons, why I believe a blight seemed to have fallen over our fortunes. I think at the same time that there is another cause that has exercised an injurious effect upon the position, until recently, of this institution. I think that a limited view of its real character has been taken even ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... along the south wall—ugh, ugh," persisted Simon, without seeming to hear her; "and your new g'raniums a'most covered wi' blight. I wur a tacklin' one of 'em ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... 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
... pounds, and it would have done for us to live on a little while, till I could carry out some plan." She paused an instant and then added more impetuously, "Everything has gone against me. People have come near me only to blight me." ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... well, she's gone, And I have tamed my sorrow. Pain and grief Are transitory things, no less than joy; And though they leave us not the men we were, Yet they do leave us. You behold me here, A man bereaved, with something of a blight Upon the early blossoms of his life, And its first verdure,—having not the less A living root, and drawing from the earth Its vital juices, from the air its powers: And surely as man's heart and strength are whole, His appetites regerminate, his heart Re-opens, and his ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... her powers, this favour'd spot to prove A dwelling fit for innocence and joy, Or temple worthy of the god of love. All objects round to mirth and joy invite, Nor aught appears among that could the pleasure blight. ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... laid along the waters of the Cumberland, the lair of moonshiner and feudsman. The knight is a moonshiner's son, and the heroine a beautiful girl perversely christened "The Blight." Two impetuous young Southerners fall under the spell of "The Blight's" charms and she learns what a large part jealousy and pistols have in the love making ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... what has been said, you have been led more fully to appreciate the advantage of seeing all of the branches of intellectual culture led out of the ruts of routine, away from plagiarism and from disorder and anarchy, one word upon the most distasteful and effectual blight to which art is subject—the loss of naturalness, viz., affectation. Can anything be more irritating than an affected actor or singer, caterers ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... said. We are packing our bags to leave for Brussels tomorrow. When I went to the Convent this morning, I found all the soldiers in bed and looking so wretched. Merciful Heaven! What blight could have fallen on our children over night? But it was a farce. They had heard that the officers of the regiment, here, were coming to inspect the wounded with the idea of sending those who are well enough on to Germany as, of course, they are prisoners. So ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... spy passing through hostile lines. None other of the friends of the afflicted father had ventured to bear or send a message of condolence. It was as if the house of the once acknowledged leader had been marked for the pestilence—and no pestilence was more to be shunned than the deadly blight of broken power. Even the slaves shifted about in embarrassed silence, offered little service, and obeyed as if conscious that obedience was something of an indiscretion, and was liable at any moment to become a crime. ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... the face, will prevent flies from settling on the person. Likewise turnips, cabbages, fruit trees, or corn, if whipped with the branches and green leaves of Elder, will gain an immunity from all depredations of blight; but moths are fond of ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... child during which she shall not be allowed to suffer because her power to earn a wage is temporarily gone. These things cannot fail in the long run to strengthen the people. They strengthen chiefly the present generation. The blight of the fact that acquired characters cannot be transmitted, meets us here. This improved environment can only slowly, if at all, improve the race, and every effort made in this direction must be ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... secret might be safe. I have been his tool and his scapegoat. I, an old man, on my way to the grave, have earned—and rightly earned—the names of usurer and thief. All this I have done and suffered that he should never blight my child's happiness by his presence. He has broken the contract. He came down here that night you went to Richmond, and, with his fiendish ways and threats, nearly killed her. Well, now his power has gone. Thanks to your generosity, your forgiveness, Lucy is free, and I am free. Now ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... glanced at Allen, who stood behind him, or bent his gaxe upon any of his other fellow-prisoners. O'Brien was born, near Ballymacoda, County Cork, the birthplace of the ill-fated and heroic Peter Crowley. His father rented a large farm in the same parish, but the blight of the bad laws which are the curse of Ireland fell upon him, and in the year 1856, the O'Briens were flung upon the world dispossessed of lands and home, though they owed no man a penny at the time. ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... the smith, looking up from the horse's foot; "'tis the trade of yonder philosophers to gainsay whatever honest folk believed before them. They'll deny next that hens lay eggs, or blight rots wheat. My good wife speaks but plain truth, and we have seen it ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... our young hearts, as those who have cradled and loved us grow proud in our successes? For myself, a life that has failed in every prestige of those that prophesied favourably—years that have followed on each other only to blight the promise that kind and well-wishing friends foretold—leave but little to dwell upon, that can be reckoned as success. And yet, some moments I have had, which half seemed to realize my early dream of ambition, and rouse my spirit ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... them-grey morning-glories!—opening expectant and shining to the Sun which always shines on enchanted seventeen. And, like other morning-glories, Missy's eyes are the shyest of flowers, ready to droop sensitively at the first blight of misunderstanding. That is the chiefest trouble of seventeen: so few are there, especially among old people, who seem to "understand." And that is why one must often retire to the summerhouse or other solitary places where one can without risk of ridicule let one's ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... or falling by and for itself, every step in the advance of the arts and sciences was gained only at the cost of an amount of loss and ruin to particular portions of the community such as would be wrought by a blight or pestilence. The march of invention was white with the bleaching bones of innumerable hecatombs of victims. The spinning jenny replaced the spinning wheel, and famine stalked through English villages. The railroad supplanted the stagecoach, ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... myself—have you no heart that you can refuse to repair a little of the harm that you have done? You are a cruel woman—I could almost say a wicked woman: hard, false, and cowardly; and I wish my words could blight your life as your ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... capacities. There were sensational features, like the production of "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 ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... lips moist-warm, as thou hadst lately stayed 'Mong rosebuds, wooing to the cheeks of these Loth blushes faint and maidenly:—rich breeze, Still doth thy honeyed blowing bring a shade Of sad foreboding. In thy hand is laid The power to build or blight the fruit of trees, The deep, cool grass, ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... that we shud go beggin' through the lines in the broad daylight for the broken word of a man? Double portion of my shame be on you, Terence Mulvaney, that think yourself so strong! By Mary and the saints, by blood and water an' by ivry sorrow that came into the world since the beginnin', the black blight fall on you and yours, so that you may niver be free from pain for another when ut's not your own! May your heart bleed in your breast drop by drop wid all your friends laughin' at the bleedin'! Strong you think yourself? May your strength ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... not left deserted in my age? The child Britta,—sole daughter of my sole daughter,—is she not stolen, and kept from me? Has not her heart been utterly turned away from mine? All through that vile witch,—accursed of God and man! She it is who casts the blight on our land; she it is who makes the hands and hearts of our men heavy and careless, so that even luck has left the fishing; and yet you hesitate,—you delay, you will not fulfill your promise! ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... It was highly admired at the time, and, amongst others, by Gray. He specially praises a passage which has often been quoted as representing Pope's highest achievement in his art. At the conclusion the goddess Dulness yawns, and a blight falls upon art, science, and philosophy. I quote the lines, which Pope himself could not repeat without emotion, and which have received the highest eulogies from ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... 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 ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... his flocks, and bringing forth rich harvests from the earth. For him the bees wrought their sweetest honey; for him the sheep gave their softest wool; for him the cornfields waved with their fullest grain. No blight touched the grapes which his hand had tended; no sickness vexed the herds which fed in his pastures. And they who dwelt in the land said, "Strife and war bring no such gifts as these to the sons of men; therefore ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... Heaven, sorrow and a blight follow him not into this place.' The rector murmured to himself, and sighed, still following ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... Spaniards found in Cuba and St. Domingo had withered before them as if struck by a blight. Many died under the lash of the Spanish overseers; many, perhaps the most, from the mysterious causes which have made the presence of civilisation so fatal to the Red Indian, the Australian, and the Maori. ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... beseeching Diti sighed. When but a blighted bud 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 Brahma's ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... cause. Neither of them can 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 knights of slavery, to see their places in ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... some weeks beforehand as many worn-out brooms as they can lay their hands on. These, after dipping in tar, they light—running with them from one bonfire to another—and when burnt out they are placed in the fields as charms against blight.[13] The large ragwort—known in Ireland as the "fairies' horse"—has long been sought for by witches when taking their midnight journeys. Burns, in his "Address to the Deil," makes his witches "skim the muirs and dizzy crags" on "rag-bred nags" with "wicked speed." The same ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... that is, all except the storekeepers, the plumbers, the milkman, and so on. My money seems to be good enough for them. But as for the others—well, you know how we've been frozen out. As though we had something catching, or would blight the landscape. Now what's the big idea? What are some of ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford
... bud," thought the good woman, "but it may wither even without the blight of fashion; so I will try to secure ...
— Be Courteous • Mrs. M. H. Maxwell
... not for you. You must—you must be happy! The shy and tender Dawn creeps up in fear That Night has laid some blight upon the world, But finding all is well, steps forth, and lo! Out of her courage the great sun is born. So doth the heart look outward after grief To find the world all dark, but nay, the light Is more of ...
— Semiramis and Other Plays - Semiramis, Carlotta And The Poet • Olive Tilford Dargan
... have the place overrun with slugs and snails, and all kinds of injurious blight, sir, if you use that gun. No, sir, you'll put nets over the fruit when it's beginning to ripen. That ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... witch," the mob screamed out, for she had now come to the place of her conflict. "We'll pay you off for blight and pestilence! Where's our bread, where's the maize and barley, where are the grapes?" And they uttered fierce yells of execration, and seemed disposed to break through the line of apparitors, and to tear her to pieces. Yet, after all, ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... dome of which stands a marble statue of the good Doctor, very well executed, and representing him with a face of fussy activity and benevolence: just the kind of man, if luck favored him, to build up the fortunes of those about him, or, quite as probably, to blight his whole neighborhood ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Father Benedict, those who were to carry the banner of that father into the isle lost to Christ. In that island he appointed the primate of Canterbury, and designed the primate of York. Through St. Leander and St. Isidore, and the martyr St. Hermenegild, he recovered Spain from the Arian blight; through the queen Theodelinda he made some impression upon Lombard cruelty and misbelief; through the Frankish monarchy he won back France from dissolution and heresy. As he saw the palaces around him deserted, and the broken ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... takes the form of a "cursing roundel," a form once employed by Callimachus, who may have inherited it from the East. It calls down heaven's wrath upon the confiscated lands in language as bitter as ever Mt. Ebal heard: fire and flood over the crops, blight upon the fruit, and pestilence upon the heartless barbarians who ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... or prejudices, there can be but one answer to that question. Oriental superstition cast its blight upon the fair field of science, whatever compensation it may or may not have brought in other fields. But we must be on our guard lest we overestimate or incorrectly estimate this influence. Posterity, in glancing backward, is ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... you friend, I wish you this— No gentle destiny throughout the years; No soft content, or ease, or unearned bliss Bereft of heart-ache where no sorrow nears, But rather rugged trouble for a mate To mold your soul against the coming blight, To train you for the ruthless whip of fate And build your heart up ...
— Bobby of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... 9: This remark applies to the side of the tree that faces the south-east only. The north-west side is perfectly healthy-looking and green, when its opposite is the very picture of blight ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson
... and during two following seasons, New South Wales suffered a serious drought, which increased in severity. Rivers were exhausted, and their beds left dry. Not only the want of rain was felt, but a withering blight, travelling in a defined current over the cultivated districts, cut off their harvests. In two years the cultivation of wheat in Van Diemen's Land increased from twenty to thirty thousand acres, and the average price of wheat at Hobart Town ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... was a gruesome place. Everything in it and for yards around it, was covered with a yellow blight, as if the slight beard of some pestilential fungous were sprouting ... the only people the company could induce to work there were foreigners who knew little of America.... Swedes mostly ... attentive churchgoers on Sunday,—who on week-days, and overtime ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... like an angel-piteous, To heal all hearts and make the whole world bright, 'Tis this that thralls my soul 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. So fares it ever with things high and rare Wrought in the sweat of nature; heaven above Showers on their birth the blessings of her prime: Nor hath God deigned to show Himself elsewhere More clearly than ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... price, especially early in the season, but jam fruit sells at an average of 2-1/2d. per lb., at which price it pays fair wages, but is not a bonanza. As a rule the plants are very healthy, and any fungus pests to which they are subject, such as leaf blight, are easily kept in check by spraying, a knapsack pump being used for this purpose. The ground is kept well worked and free from weeds, whilst the plants are fruiting, and occasionally the ground is mulched, as is the case in the ...
— Fruits of Queensland • Albert Benson
... Swampscott fishermen still relate How a strange sea-monster stole their bait; How their nets were tangled in loops and knots, And they found dead crabs in their lobster-pots. Poor Danvers grieved for her blasted crops, And Wilmington mourned over mildewed hops. A blight played havoc with Beverly beans,— It was all the work of those hateful queans! A dreadful panic began at "Pride's," Where the witches stopped in their midnight rides, And there rose strange rumors and vague alarms 'Mid the peaceful dwellers ...
— The One Hoss Shay - With its Companion Poems How the Old Horse Won the Bet & - The Broomstick Train • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... calls forth. Oh! as we hope Forgiveness of our earthly trespasses,— Of all our erring deeds and wayward thoughts,— When Time's dread reckoning comes,—oh! as we hope Mercy, who need it much, let us, away From kindness never turning, mould our hearts To sympathy, and from all withering blight Preserve them, and all deadening influences:— So 'twill be best for us. The All-seeing Eye, Which numbers each particular hair, and notes From heaven the sparrow's fall, shall pass not o'er Without approval deeds unmarked by man— Deeds, which the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... Dandy Dale's outfit, except when we're on the trail.... And, say, if you knew what I had to pay for this stuff you'd think there was a bigger robber in Alder Creek than Jack Kells.... And, come to think of it, my name's now Blight. You're my daughter, if any one asks." Joan was so grateful to him for the goods and the permission to get out of Dandy Dale's suit as soon as possible, that she could only smile her thanks. Kells stared at her, then turned abruptly ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... his hand here and there in the load on the donkey's back and finally drew out a goatskin bag. Hillyard, like other Englishmen, had been brought up in a creed which included the inefficiency of all Postmasters-general. A blight fell upon such persons, withering their qualities and shrivelling them into the meanest caricatures of bureaucrats. It could not be that the postal service was now to reveal resource and become the servant of romance. Yet the ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... the struggle, in an epoch of wild literary competition, to obtain novelty of material. The varieties of aspect and color in healthy fruit, be it sweet or sour, may be within certain limits described exhaustively. Not so the blotches of its conceivable blight: and while the symmetries of integral human character can only be traced by harmonious and tender skill, like the branches of a living tree, the faults and gaps of one gnawed away by corroding accident can be shuffled ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... I have lectured, but never after dinner. We do it when we have promised it, and when those who are present expect it. After dinner, I agree with you, it is the most doleful blight that can ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... odious in the eye of the constitution. He undertook to tear in tatters the various modern precedents advanced by the government for their purpose; scouted the alleged visitorial power of the crown; insisted that it would blight future munificence; argued that defective instruction with freedom and self-government would, in the choice of evils, be better than the most perfect mechanism secured by parliamentary interference; admitted that what the universities had done for learning was perhaps less ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... because of too much cold water in the soil. It would seem, by the remarks of those who till the earth, as if there were never a season just right—as if Providence had bidden us labor for bread, and yet sent down the rains of heaven so plentifully as always to blight our harvests. It is rare that we do not have a most remarkable season, with respect to moisture, especially. Our potatoes are rotted by the Summer showers, or cut off by a Summer drought; and when, as in the season of 1856, in New England, they are neither ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... further blessing,—the contrast between their meek and rugged patience, and the noisy, dusty crowd of shameless and indifferent tourists, that circulated among the green valleys, like a poisonous fluid in the veins of the wholesome mountains. They brought a kind of blight upon the place; and yet they were harmless, inquisitive people, tempted thither, most of them by fashion, a few perhaps by a feeble love of beauty, and only desirous to bring their own standard of comforts with them. The world seemed out of joint; the radical ugliness and baseness ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... proudly take their place as men, knowing that by their own conduct and talents they may work their way to fortune, or, at least, "rough hew" it, without dread that the might of custom's icy breath can blight their fate for lack of birth or fortune. This gives a noble feeling to the heart and a higher tone to the character, although a sense of the ridiculous is often attached to this by a native of the old countries, when ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... A sudden blight fell upon the belle of the afternoon. When Sissy went, go she must, too; this was the sole rule of conduct Francis Madigan had devised for the guidance ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... ever need to return fertilizers, but it was only a few years until they yearned for the fertility they had extravagantly wasted. Buildings inevitably decay and they may be destroyed by fire or storm. Orchards may be overturned by a cyclone or be destroyed by blight or by the thousand enemies of the various varieties of fruit trees. The land may be injured by washing that may require years to repair. A single storm has destroyed fields in this way that never can be restored. Noxious weeds ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... no wild goat in a week. Though Feathers of the Sun compels the traders to buy copra at the old price, the people sell not, for they will have none of the paper money. Only to-day have I sent messengers to twenty houses. There are no eggs. Has Feathers of the Sun put a blight upon the hens? I do not know. All I know is that there are no eggs. Well it is that those who drink much eat little, else would there be a palace famine. Tell your soldiers to receive their pay. Let it be in his ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... blemish, but we do not see it. We know the weakness that to-morrow perhaps will blight our joy, but we do not feel it. We hear the word that ought to deal our hopes a mortal blow; and it does not even touch them!... And our reason, which knows, sees, hears and foresees, remains dumb, as though it delighted in ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... Ray until I know," she had told herself over and over in great distress, "for I love him too well ever to bring any blight upon his life." ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... instead of with things. The loss of vision is never compensated for by the gain of sight; to see a thing one must use his mind quite as much as his eye. It too often happens, as the result of our educational methods, that in training the observer we blight the poet; and the poet is, after all, the most important person in society. He keeps the soul of his fellows alive. Without him the modern world would become one vast, dreary, soul-destroying Coketown, ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... done so, dear father," she answered, gently, "it has been because I knew your secret must be a painful one. I have lain awake night after night, wondering what was the cause of the blight that has been upon you and all you have done. But why should I ask you questions that you could not answer without pain? I have heard people say cruel things of you; but they have never said them twice in my hearing." Her ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... been residing in that country, as was learned from Paolo. Now everybody knows that the evil eye is not rarely met with in Italy. Everybody who has ever read Mr. Story's "Roba di Roma" knows what a terrible power it is which the owner of the evil eye exercises. It can blight and destroy whatever it falls upon. No person's life or limb is safe if the jettatura, the withering glance of the deadly organ, falls upon him. It must be observed that this malign effect may follow a look from the holiest ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... off into the dim distance—and how sweet the music of childhood's ringing laugh, heard from the far-off shore—or how Aunty thought 'twas such a pity that sin, and tears, and sorrow, should ever blight so fair ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... confiscations. The great enfranchisement of foreign slaves, also, degraded the people, and made them indifferent to the masters who should rule over them. All races were mingled with Roman citizens. The spoliation of estates in the civil wars cast a blight on agriculture, and the population had declined from ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... ate the bread and drank the milk, their Father and Mother talked about the Tinkers. "Sure, they are as a frost in spring, and a blight in harvest," said Mrs McQueen. "I wonder wherever they got the badness in ...
— The Irish Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... the whispering breast, But in thy world no place Was for my nest, Fragrant for perilous brooding pause. Thou went'st thy pace; My gathered straws And grasses cast to dust To make thy lust A wayside couch. Deep from the nation's root, The bower-tree where homes are nesting fruit, Thy blight creeps up unseen On bitten way to the green, Till no hope-banneret Makes Spring in windy fret Of flagellant boughs that whip my fingers bare, Too chill at last to build, ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... I think 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 it is the trial that ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... a kind of peculiar stillness and languor. Fenitchka gave no sign of her existence; she sat in her little room like a mouse in its hole. Nikolai Petrovitch had a careworn air. He had just heard that blight had begun to appear in his wheat, upon which he had in particular rested his hopes. Pavel Petrovitch overwhelmed every one, even Prokofitch, with his icy courtesy. Bazarov began a letter to his father, but tore it up, and threw it under ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... the red colour was made from the dead body of an insect too. There is a sort of blight which gives this red colour after it ...
— Dick and His Cat and Other Tales • Various
... present she remained with William, her daughters, and her two aged unmarried sisters in the plain old house in Albany Street. But Dante Gabriel moved to Cheyne Walk, and began that craze for collecting blue china that has swept like a blight over the civilized world. His collection was sold for three thousand five hundred dollars some years after—to pay his debts—less than one-half of what it had cost him. Yet when he had money he generously divided it with the folks up in Albany Street. But by and by ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... Sandy-blight, n. a kind of ophthalmia common in Australia, in which the eye feels as if full of sand. Called also ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... that vast monument in which King Cheops vainly sought eternal privacy. What would he say, we wondered, could he see the crowds of tourists tearing out to pay him a call, on their way to the Sphinx? Would he blight them with a curse, or would he remember pearly nights of old, when his subjects assembled in multitudes for the feast of the Goddess Neith when the moon was full, and all the white, brightly painted houses along the Nile reflected their flowerlike illuminations in the water? Anyhow (as Sir John Biddell ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... Convict Settlement by the Government of France, and showing every extreme of reckless, worldly pleasure, and of cruel, slavish toil. When I saw it again, three-and-twenty years thereafter, it showed no signs of progress for the better. It there be a God of justice and of love, His blight cannot but rest on a nation whose pathway is stained with corruption and steeped in blood, as is undeniably the case with ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... sense of justice, his benevolence, and the desire of perfection. Toil is the school for these high principles; and we have here a strong presumption that, in other respects, it does not necessarily blight the soul. Next, we have seen that the most fruitful sources of truth and wisdom are not books, precious as they are, but experience and observation; and these belong to all conditions. It is another important consideration, that almost all labour demands intellectual activity, and is ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... south;—a little kingdom well defined, one of the most perfectly beautiful territories the tourist can find, and still fertile,—though the hills have forgotten their fruit and the plain its river,—and capable of sustaining a much larger population than it now supports, if the Mohammedan blight were ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... his desires was yonder, where those colors warred, and she was mantled in red and gold and purple for his coming. The thought aroused him; the sense of his unworthiness vanished, the blight fell from him; he felt only a throbbing eagerness to see her and to take her in his arms once more before ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... clear and cold: not a cloud floated across the sky, nor did there rise above the horizon one of those clouds (portentous forerunners of evil!) to which novelists refer as being "no larger than a man's hand". Heaven knew right well that the blight of evil was approaching fast enough, but there was no visible indication on her face that glorious November morning. Doubtless you are familiar with history and have read all about what great personages did just before calamity swooped down on them. The Trojans ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... all filled with family delight. Full of hope and joyous feelings, never dreaming of a blight To prospects of enjoyment that awaited their return, Where the smiles of wives and children make ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... favorite food of caterpillars and are subject to a blight which turns them brown prematurely. The trunk is often attacked by a disease which causes the flow of ...
— Studies of Trees • Jacob Joshua Levison
... year there came a blight; the woods died away, the springs ran dry; and the scene, which had once been the joy of every traveler, was in autumn standing waste, naked, and bald, scarcely showing here and there, in the sea of sand, a spot or two where grass, with a dingy greenness, still grew ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... chestnut was quite plentiful in different sections of the southern hardwood belt. It was valued quite highly for the nuts. It has been killed out by the chestnut blight and it is very rarely that ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... is a holy, blest companionship In the sweet intercourse thus held with those Whose tear and smile are guileless; from whose lip The simple dictate of the heart yet flows;— Though even in the yet unfolded rose The worm may lurk, and sin blight blooming youth, The light born with us long so brightly glows, That childhood's first deceits seem almost truth, To life's cold after lie, selfish, and ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... 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 ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... Summer's bloom and Autumn's blight, For bending wheat and blasted maize, For health and sickness, Lord of light, And Lord of darkness, hear ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... events, you are in a moody state of mind, my friend." My answer is, I have described myself as a public character with a blight upon him—which fully accounts for the curdling of the milk ...
— Somebody's Luggage • Charles Dickens
... give. Mythology comes nearer to it than anything. How much more fertile a Nature, at least, has Grecian mythology its root in than English literature! Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted, before the fancy and imagination were affected with blight; and which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigor is unabated. All other literatures endure only as the elms which overshadow our houses; but this is like the great dragon-tree of the Western Isles, as old as mankind, and, whether that does or not, will endure as long; for the decay of other ...
— Walking • Henry David Thoreau
... course, till his blanched cheeks and cadaverous aspect, from close study and want of proper exercise, proclaim the loss of health, and the probable establishment of some pulmonary affection that may, before he scarcely reaches maturity, blight the ambitious hopes of his father, and consign 38 the son "to that bourne from ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now" (Rom. viii:19-22). Sin has brought a curse upon creation. The thorns and thistles are the result of the fall of man as well as the blight and misery which rests upon a creation, which was pronounced good by the Creator. But this condition into which creation has been plunged will not continue forever. A better day is coming. Groaning creation is to be delivered. The curse will be removed. This cannot be the work of man. Scientists ...
— The Work Of Christ - Past, Present and Future • A. C. Gaebelein
... the power of unbelievers to say that the Bible is for me only what the Koran is for the deaf Turk, and the Vedas for the feeble and acquiescent Hindoo. No; I will retire UP INTO THE MOUNTAIN, and hold secret commune with my Bible above the contagious blastments of prejudice, and the fog-blight of selfish superstition. FOR FEAR HATH TORMENT. And what though MY reason be to the power and splendour of the Scriptures but as the reflected and secondary shine of the moon compared with the solar radiance; yet the sun endures the occasional co-presence ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... wonder, Devoid of blight or flaw, The peerless blooms of Eden Our primal mother saw In redolent beauty before her placed So tempted fair ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... 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 ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... You may think this pride a weakness, but it is too deeply rooted in my nature ever to be eradicated. When I look about the world and see girls disgracing themselves by improper marriages, elopements, often social crimes, which must blight their lives and those of all connected with them, I think what I should do ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... instances, and still more extraordinary ones, in which this process takes place naturally, in a more hidden, a more recondite kind of way. You are all of you familiar with that little green insect, the Aphis or blight, as it is called. These little animals, during a very considerable part of their existence, multiply themselves by means of a kind of internal budding, the buds being developed into essentially non-sexual animals, ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... especially early in the season, but jam fruit sells at an average of 2-1/2d. per lb., at which price it pays fair wages, but is not a bonanza. As a rule the plants are very healthy, and any fungus pests to which they are subject, such as leaf blight, are easily kept in check by spraying, a knapsack pump being used for this purpose. The ground is kept well worked and free from weeds, whilst the plants are fruiting, and occasionally the ground is mulched, as is the case in the plot ...
— Fruits of Queensland • Albert Benson
... self-esteem determined the quality of Margaret's influence, which was singularly penetrating, and most beneficent where most deeply and continuously felt. Chance acquaintance with her, like a breath from the tropics, might have prematurely burst the buds of feeling in sensitive hearts, leaving after blight and barrenness. Natures, small in compass and of fragile substance, might have been distorted and shattered by attempts to mould themselves on her grand model. And in her seeming unchartered impulses,—whose latent law was honorable integrity,—eccentric spirits might have found ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... homes, illumined with hope and happiness, where mothers, freed from the necessity for long hours of toil beyond their own doors, may preside as befits the hearthstone of American citizenship. We want the cradle of American childhood rocked under conditions so wholesome and so hopeful that no blight may touch it in its development, and we want to provide that no selfish interest, no material necessity, no lack of opportunity shall prevent the gaining of that education so essential ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... lord, beware!" he cried, "'tis nigh the midnight hour and she a noted witch—heed her not lest she blight thy ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... the port of Alexandria with a pretence of returning in triumph from a naval victory. Laurel wreaths hung on spars and bulwarks, flags flew, trumpets sounded, and she received the enthusiastic greetings of Greeks and Egyptians as she landed. But the truth could not be long concealed, and under the blight of defeat, linked with stories of leaders deserting comrades and allies, Antony and Cleopatra failed to rally any determined support to their side when the conqueror of Actium came to threaten Egypt itself. Both ended their lives with their ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... because of natural disasters, fluctuations in global oil prices, and government policies designed to curb inflation. Banana exports, second only to oil, have suffered as a result of EC import quotas and banana blight. The new President Sixto DURAN-BALLEN, has a much more favorable attitude toward foreign investment than did his predecessor. Ecuador has implemented trade agreements with Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and Venezuela and has applied ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... entering manhood. Her thoughts were always with them, and her prayers followed them in all that they did. So much was at stake. Three lives to be made or marred. Three men to bless the world or to curse it. And they had the blight upon them which their father was bringing. Every woman who is a real mother knows that Elizabeth Hill's face was often wet with tears as she contemplated what the future might bring. And happy are the sons who are blessed with such a ...
— The Hero of Hill House • Mable Hale
... must, but never hate: Man is but grass and hate is blight, The sun will scorch you soon or late, Die wholesome then, ...
— Country Sentiment • Robert Graves
... Love and Friendship their charmed spells weave; Trust not too deeply—they may deceive! Hope with her Dead Sea fruits is there, Sin is spreading her gilded snare, Disease with a ruthless hand would smite, And Care spread o'er thee her withering blight. Hate and Envy, with visage black, And the serpent Slander, are on thy track; Falsehood and Guilt, Remorse and Pride, Doubt and Despair, in thy pathway glide; Haggard Want, in her demon joy, Waits to degrade thee and then ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... said the smith, looking up from the horse's foot; "'tis the trade of yonder philosophers to gainsay whatever honest folk believed before them. They'll deny next that hens lay eggs, or blight rots wheat. My good wife speaks but plain truth, and we have seen ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with a mob who think that life is a sort of St. Vitus's dance, and imagine that they're having a good time because they're making enough noise for six and drinking too much for ten. I loathe New York, Bertie. I wouldn't come near the place if I hadn't got to see editors occasionally. There's a blight on it. It's got moral delirium tremens. It's the limit. The very thought of staying more than a day in it makes me sick. And you call this ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... ruefu' chance Has twin'd ye o' your stately trees? Has laid your rocky bosom bare— Has stripped the cleeding o' your braes? Was it the bitter eastern blast, That scatters blight in early spring? Or was't the wil'fire scorch'd their boughs, Or canker-worm wi' ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... front rose the tower-topped hill of Monte Giove, marking the site of Corioli; and just as they turned towards Nemi the Appian Way ran across their path. Overhead, a marvellous sky with scudding veils of white cloud. The blur and blight of the scirocco had vanished without rain, under a change of wind. An all-blessing, all-penetrating sun poured upon the stirring earth. Everywhere fragments and ruins—ghosts of the great past—yet engulfed, as it were, and engarlanded by ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... he answered. "Do not blight my hopes and your own happiness a second time. Your father is about to shut up his house for a twelvemonth, if the plague lasts so long. This done, we shall meet no more, for access to you will be impossible. Do not hesitate, or you will ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... came 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 ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... thy mother grieve, nor let Thy father with too solemn thinking fret His head, but thou must kiss them, daughter mine, And all with that entrancing laugh of thine! Now on the house has fallen a dumb blight: Thou wilt not come with archness and delight, But every corner lodges lurking grief And all in vain the heart ...
— Laments • Jan Kochanowski
... 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 the inquisitors were armed with the apostolic power, ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... from the North by elements of inherent hostility, we speak only of the governing faction, and not of the millions of nominally free men who are scarcely less its thralls than the black slaves themselves. This unhappy class of our countrymen are the first to feel the blight which Slavery spreads around it, because they are the nearest to its noxious power. The subjects of no European despotism are under a closer espionage, or a more organized system of terrorism, than are they. The slaveholders, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... came upon me I will tell you as we go,— The blight of the shadow hunter Who walks ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... The executive session will be held after the meeting, as many are here to hear the paper on the chestnut blight, so we will proceed at once to the order of business and listen to the first paper ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... liable to several diseases, which affect the flour made from it, and render it unfit for good bread. The principal of these are the blight, mildew, and smut, which are occasioned by microscopic fungi, which sow themselves and grow upon the stems and ears, destroying the nutritive principles, and introducing matter of a deleterious kind. The farmer is at the utmost pains to keep ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... some demand of life which would make her ideals appear the dreams of bygone halcyon days, useless and worse amid the threats of gathering tempest. An essentially human apprehension, be it understood. The vulgarities of hysterical pietism Emily had never known; she did not fear the invasion of such blight as that; the thought of it was noisome to her. Do you recall a kind of trouble that came upon her, during that talk in the hollow, when Wilfrid suggested the case of her being called upon to make some great sacrifice in her father's behalf? It was an instance of ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... religion of the Roman Catholic Church in China was quite incompatible with the supposed celestial origin of the emperor, who was alleged to receive his authority direct from Heaven. It is not surprising that Yung Ching, at the earliest possible moment, decided to blight these hopes, and to assert the natural and inherited prerogative of a Chinese emperor. There is no room to doubt that the Catholic priests had drawn a too hasty and too favorable deduction from the favor of Kanghi. They confounded their practical utility with the intrinsic ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... earth, quite as eclipses occur, but that are not referable to any known eclipsing body. Of course there is no suggestion here that these darknesses may have been eclipses. My own acceptance is that if in the nineteenth century anyone had uttered such a thought as that, he'd have felt the blight of a Dominant; that Materialistic Science was a jealous god, excluding, as works of the devil, all utterances against the seemingly uniform, regular, periodic; that to defy him would have brought on—withering by ridicule—shrinking away by publishers—contempt ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... shown that this destructive Blight, of which the Turnleaf is the victim, is caused by a deadly ...
— Cupid's Almanac and Guide to Hearticulture for This Year and Next • John Cecil Clay
... at last, but it was not until the brightness of May was on the fields outside, and the deadly blight of famine on all within, that a haggard, wasted-looking deputation came down from the upper city to treat ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fair," replied Godwin; "and worthy of you, who are the most honest of men. Yet, Wulf, I am troubled. See you, my brother, have ever brethren loved each other as we do? And now must the shadow of a woman fall upon and blight that love which ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... while glad songs handed down by their fathers. No amount of priests would be able to make the festive Eskimo bask in the sun and sing in chorus when there wasn't any sun and it was altogether too cold to open their mouths wide in the open air. In fact the priests are not the cause of the blight where it exists, just as they are not the cause of the jolliness, when there is any. But Orthodoxy is Chesterton's sincerest book. It is perhaps the only one of the whole lot in the course of which he would not be justified in repeating a remark which begins one of the Tremendous ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... upon this household," the woman cried. The monkey whimpered again, and she took it by the scruff and tossed it to the floor. "Peace, ape, or I will have you strangled. Bestir yourself, father, and call Anton. There is a blight of deafness ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... days of our doom and our dread Ye were cruel and callous. Grim Death with our fighters ye fed Through the jaws of your gallows. But a blasting and blight was the fee For which ye had bartered them. And we smite with the sword that from ye We had ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... process is a version of a moral sentence. The moral law lies at the centre of Nature and radiates to the circumference. What is a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun—it is a sacred emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow of winter overtakes in the fields. Who can guess how much firmness the sea-beaten rock has taught the fisherman? How much tranquillity has been reflected to man ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... disguise; there was a continual warfare being waged between the Deity and the devil for the possession of every soul, the latter generally being considered victorious. The flood, the tornado, the volcano, were all evidences of the displeasure of heaven and the sinfulness of man. The blight that withered, the frost that blackened, the earthquake that devoured, were ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... blows from hill to hill And every valley rings—O Daffodil! What promise for the season newly born? Shall wave on wave of flow'rs, full tide of corn, O'erflow the world, then fruited Autumn fill Hedgerow and garth? Shall tempest, blight, or chill Turn all felicity ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the shoemaker. "It was the most miserable place within the ring of Ireland. It lay under the blight of a good landlord, no better. That was its misfortune, and especially my misfortune. If the Gobstown landlord was not such a good landlord it's driving on the box of an empire I would be to-day instead of whacking tips on the heels of ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... Aleck in an outhouse pointed out to him by his friend the gardener, and thence to dress for a dinner that he looked forward to with dread, and Philip to make his way home. As he passed up through the little flower-garden at the Abbey House, he came across his daughter, picking the blight from ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... torture they are! Think of the needy man who has spent his all, beggared himself and pinched his friends to enter the profession, which will never yield him a morsel of bread. The waiting—the hope—the disappointment—the fear—the misery—the poverty—the blight on his hopes and end to his career—the suicide, perhaps, or the shabby, slipshod drunkard. Am I not right about them?" And the old man rubbed his hands, and leered as if in delight at having found another point of view in which to ...
— The Law and Lawyers of Pickwick - A Lecture • Frank Lockwood
... flower garden; "out of Weathersfield" Wethersfield (the modern spelling), Connecticut, was famous for its onions (there is still a red onion called "Red Weathersfield"), until struck by a blight about 1840; "old Egyptians" ancient Egypt was proverbial ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... worth of bubble advertisements, yielding a profit of say 25 pounds on this single issue. In this one are nearer 100 pounds worth of such advertisements. Now is it in nature that a newspaper, which is a trade speculation, should say the word that would blight its own harvest? This is the oblique road by which the English press is bribed. These leaders are mere echoes of to-day's advertisement sheet, ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... sorrow, alone remained. It was never removed, in all the changes of seasons, fortunes, and years, which, in the vicissitudes of a suffering, female, savage life, she was subsequently doomed to endure. As in the case of a premature blight, let the plant quicken and revive as it may, the effects of that withering ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... to be avoided is monotony in colour. Who can not recall barren rooms, without a spark of attraction despite priceless treasures, dispersed in a meaningless way? That sort of setting puts a blight on any gathering. "Well," you will ask, "given the task of converting such a sterile stretch of monotony into a blooming joy, how should one begin?" It is quite simple. Picture to yourself how the room would look if you ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... Burke; and the Earl of Chatham soon found that though he was dignified by the king, he had shorn himself of all his honours in the sight of the people. The influence which the Earl of Bute was supposed to have had over him tended still more to blight his fair fame. He was taunted with being a willing agent of men whom he did not esteem, and his acceptance of a peerage was a never-failing source of invective. Moreover, in his negociations with his brother-in-law, Lord Temple, he had ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... original bearer of the name she knew nothing. Waiting on table at the Golden Nugget and later bearing children and helping on the ranch had not left her time for historical study. When her son, waking to the blight she had so innocently put upon him, asked her where she had found the name, she had answered, "In a book," but beyond that could give no data. When, unable to bear his shame, he had abbreviated it to "Mark D.L." she ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... not." Your standing, your influence, your usefulness—all depend upon your faithfulness; and if you are faithful, you will be faithful to your promises. Think seriously over these things. If you are at fault, set about to amend. Such a fault will be a blight upon your life and upon your character until it is corrected. When the Psalmist pictures a righteous man, he says that he "sweareth [promiseth] to his own hurt, and changeth not." Are you that sort of ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... 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 a ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... solitude and desolation; but my life, with its wasted energies and flagging purpose, rises up before me, darkly and reproachfully reminding me of what I might have done, have been! O Heaven! what bitter years of suffering and crushing disappointment, years on which the tracks of time have left their blight and mildew, have passed since first I listened to the bird-like warbling of its simple strains. Then was the blissful May-time of my existence, when I was governed by youth's generous impulses, led captive by its sweet delusions, when I fondly dreamed ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the wild cat in the hush. I call Tikoloshe (a water spirit) out of the river in the night-time and ask him questions. I make sickness do my bidding on men and cattle. I drive it away when I like. I can bring blight to the crops, and stop the milk of cows. I can, by my magic medicines, find out the wicked ones who do these things. I alone can look upon Icanti (a fabulous serpent) and not die. I know the mountain where Impandulu (the Lightning Bird) builds its nest. ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... consideration. From that utterance, however, Lady Harman would no doubt have gone on to the slow, tentative but finally conclusive statement of the new difficulty that had arisen out of her husband's jealousy and to the discussion of the more fundamental decisions it forced upon her, if a peculiar blight had not fallen upon their conversation and robbed it at last of even an ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... o'er the bleak and dreary prospect steals.— Spring claims our tender, grateful, gay delight; Winter our sympathy and sacred fear; And sure the Hearts that pay not Pity's rite O'er wide calamity; that careless hear Creation's wail, neglect, amid her blight, THE SOLEMN LESSON OF THE ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... long-backed sons and daughters. They were but a speck on the land yet, as Chadron had told the smoky stranger when he had engaged him to try his hand at throwing the "holy scare." But they spread far over the upland plain, having sought the most favored spots, and they were a blight and a pest in ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... lately stayed 'Mong rosebuds, wooing to the cheeks of these Loth blushes faint and maidenly—rich Breeze, Still doth thy honeyed blowing bring a shade Of sad foreboding. In thy hand is laid The power to build or blight rich fruit of trees, The deep, cool grass, ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... you so! How could I! Oh, that some blight may come upon this unhappy tongue! I, who have had nothing but good from you! I to insult you, who are the author of all my happiness! Oh, sire, forgive me, forgive me! ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... cogs' loud roll,— That makes stout joist and rafter groan and sway,— The harmless gossip of the passing day: Good country talk, that says how so-and-so Lived, died, or wedded: how curculio And codling-moth play havoc with the fruit, Smut ruins the corn and blight the grapes to boot: Or what is news from town: next county fair: How well the crops are looking everywhere:— Now this, now that, on which their interests fix, Prospects for rain or frost, and politics. ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... blend of the parent species, the nuts being double the size of the wild parent and of sweet, rich quality. The trees were very shapely and bid fair to become extremely productive but a year or two later were all attacked by the dreaded blight or bark disease, then spreading from its original starting point in Long Island. The work of destruction was very rapid and by the third year all were hopelessly crippled, but a few individuals continued to send up suckers as ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... over the whole world, always moving forward and travelling at times favourable to it. For it seemed to move by fixed arrangement, and to tarry for a specified time in each country, casting its blight slightingly upon none, but spreading in either direction right out to the ends of the world, as if fearing lest some corner of the earth might escape it. For it left neither island nor cave nor mountain ridge ...
— History of the Wars, Books I and II (of 8) - The Persian War • Procopius
... can catch glimpses of banana-orchards, which look like dishevelled patches of gigantic cornstalks. The fields of Easter lilies do not quite live up to their photographs; they are presently suffering from a mysterious blight, and their flowers are not frequent enough to lend them that sculpturesque effect near to, which they wear as far off as New York. The potato-fields, on the other hand, are of a tender delicacy of coloring which compensates for the lilies' lack, and the palms give ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... competition, to obtain novelty of material. The varieties of aspect and color in healthy fruit, be it sweet or sour, may be within certain limits described exhaustively. Not so the blotches of its conceivable blight: and while the symmetries of integral human character can only be traced by harmonious and tender skill, like the branches of a living tree, the faults and gaps of one gnawed away by corroding accident can be shuffled into senseless change like ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... he repeated. "A blight! That's more a phrase to apply to the potato than to a blooming ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... city's biggest shame, its most ancient and rotten surviving canker, its pollution and disgrace, its blight and perversion, its forever infamy and guilt, fostered, unreproved and cherished, handed down from a long-ago century of the basest barbarity—the Hue and Cry. Nowhere but in the big cities does it survive, and here most of ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... makes stout joist and rafter groan and sway,— The harmless gossip of the passing day: Good country talk, that tells how so-and-so Has died or married; how curculio And codling-moth have ruined half the fruit, And blight plays mischief with the grapes to boot; Or what the news from town; next county fair; How well the crops are looking everywhere: Now this, now that, on which their interests fix, Prospects for rain or frost, and politics. While, all around, the sweet smell ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... more request. To keep the meeting of last night, and all that passed between us there, for ever a secret. Were it to become known, it would utterly blight the happiness of a trusting and generous man, whom I love still, and ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... is practically free from blight; the coddling moth is under perfect control. There is nothing, Mr. Pederstone, and you know it too, nothing in the world to prevent the Valley's production of fruit from increasing year by year as the younger orchards come to bearing age and fresh ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... warranted. The Cardinal's face—a composite portrait of various types of middle-class dog-life—made pretense useless and early in his puppy career he seemed to realize it and to abandon himself to a philosophy of irresponsible pleasure. But Ritchy's eye had taken on a saddened cast since the blight had fallen on his master. He no longer frisked and devised, out of his comedian's soul, mirth-provoking antics. It was as though he understood and his ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... pulling themselves together, and if order and some sort of law could be established, they were confident that they could rebuild their life again. We talked to them and encouraged them to continue their struggle against the blight that had defiled their homes and their country. Their hopes seemed to revive from our assurance of English working-class sympathy. I am pleased they did not know that we had some people mad enough to wish to inflict similar wounds upon ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... whine at his losses, A man doesn't whimper and fret, Or rail at the weight of his crosses And ask life to rear him a pet. A man doesn't grudgingly labor Or look upon toil as a blight; A man doesn't sneer at his neighbor Or sneak from a cause ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest
... reason he failed to understand that the withdrawal of the royalists from the neighborhood of the coast was merely a strategic retreat that made the occupation of the capital a more or less empty performance. This blunder and a variety of other mishaps proved destined to blight his military career. Unfortunate in the choice of his subordinates and unable to retain their confidence; accused of irresolution and even of cowardice; abandoned by Cochrane, who sailed off to Chile and left the army stranded; ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... cultivator. The "rot" is a very severe trial to human patience. The vines look thrifty, the grapes are large and abundant, and all goes well, until the time when the grapes, being fully grown, are about to change color. Then a sudden blight occurs, and two thirds of the whole crop of grapes, the result of the year's labor, wither and spoil. The cause, probably, is the exhaustion of some elements in the soil needful to the supreme effort ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... the writer fulfilled her promise is testified by those packets of letters, dim with the dust and blight of a vanished century, but in which her reward is likewise attested. "I do not believe," she affirms proudly, "that there is a man at either of the Universities who writes so often to his mother as you do, and let me beg you will continue to do so, for the hearing from ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... he explained, "on my departure to-night. The cause hangs upon it. A blight on my evil luck!" he cried. "Were Colonel Myddelton at home, I should not be fleeing from my own country empty-handed. I shall be writing to him most of this day, but a spoken word is worth a volume of ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas
... truck-garden planted. We're glad of a good fire in the shack-stove after sun-down. I've rented thirty acres from the Land Association that owns the half-section next to mine and am going to get them into oats. If they don't ripen up before the autumn frosts come and blight them, I can still use the stuff for green feed. And I've bargained for the hay-rights from the upper end of the section, but heaven only knows how I'll ever ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... Piache announced one day in public, that in consequence of the impiety of the Omaguas, he should retire to a neighboring tribe, of more religious turn of mind; and taking with him the precious instrument, leave their palms to blight, and themselves to ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... we appropriate one hundred dollars to put with the Butterfly's money for Mr. Munroe," said William Blight, and Charles had lost the honor of ...
— All Aboard; or, Life on the Lake - A Sequel to "The Boat Club" • Oliver Optic
... so. The presence of Pauline would have been no obstacle. The presence of her father would have been no obstacle. The presence of her father would have been rather an incentive. But at the supreme moment, the shadow of Batoche fell upon the lighted door, like a blight of fate, the current of all their thoughts were turned elsewhere, and the exquisite opportunity ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... through the waiting room and the 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 ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... hoped to have travelled the weary road of life. Friends approved—fortune smiled—one little month, and we should have been one; but it pleased Him, to whom in my present frame of mind I dare not look up, to blight my beautiful flower, to canker my rose—bud, to change the fair countenance of my Elizabeth, and send her away. She drooped and died, even like that pale flower under the scorching sun; and I was driven forth to worship Mammon, in these sweltering climes; ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... fall like a dreadful blight upon a myriad of God's children, and the Heavenly Father gives neither guidance nor consolation. Only man helps man. Only man pities; only man ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... underwear neatly over a chair, was struck by the enormity of the task she had undertaken. A great blight of utter discouragement swept over her—she never could do it! Her mother—all her kin—seemed to take shadowy shape to menace this little haven she had found. Chester—suppose he should find her! Suppose Mark should! Sooner or later some one must ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... winds, ye are dead, with your voices attuned, That thrilled the green life in the sweet-scented sheaves, When I touched a warm hand which has faded, and swooned To a trance of the darkness, and blight ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... fetched from the lumber-rooms and distributed among their owners, when a letter arrived from Mother saying that the two little boys had sandy blight, and that Laura would not be able to come home under two or three weeks, for fear of infection. These weeks she was to spend, in company with Pin, at a watering-place down the Bay, where one of her aunts ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... as a London summer dies, in days of feverish sunlight and breathless languor. Everywhere there was the same torpor, the same wornout, desiccated life in death. It was in the streets with their sultry pallor, in the parks and squares where the dust lay like a grey blight on every green thing. Everywhere the glare accentuated this toneless melancholy. It was the symbol of the decadence following the brilliant efflorescence of the season, the exhaustion after that supreme effort of Society ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... years," she said, "this awful blight of sin continued; then Jesus, the provision that God had promised, came into the world to live a life of perfect obedience to God. And God sent to all the world by his Son the message that any and all who would follow Christ's example and ...
— The Poorhouse Waif and His Divine Teacher • Isabel C. Byrum
... his race was Kano Indara; the last of a mighty line of artists. Even in this material age his fame spread as the mists of his own land, and his name was known in barbarian countries far across the sea. Tokyo might fall under the blight of progress, but Kano would hold to the traditions of his race. To live as a true artist,—to die as one,—this was his care. He might have claimed high position in the great Art Museum recently inaugurated by the new government, and housed in an ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... confession, but allowing love to cherish its fairest hopes without fear or torment! How pure a memory for life! What a free blossoming of all the flowers that spring from the soul, which a mere trifle can blight, but which, at that ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... judges should have sometimes shifted places. I was unable to divine why he fevered me so much. Must I say it?—He had ceased to entertain me. Instead of a comic I found him a tragic spectacle; and his exuberant anticipations, his bursting hopes that fed their forcing-bed with the blight and decay of their predecessors, his transient fits of despair after a touch at my pulses, and exclamation of 'Oh, Richie, Richie, if only I had my boy up and well!'—assuming that nothing but my tardy recovery stood in the way of our contentment—were examples of downright ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... fallen gladiator, spent and prostrate on the Alban hills, still awaits the issue of the conflict between the forces of life and death within. Dead, where the blight of pagan and mediaeval superstition has eaten into the quivering tissues; it lives where the pulsing current of modernism expands its shrunken arteries and bears the nourishing truth. Though eternal in tradition and colossal in material achievement, the glory of ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... the dainty things That dance in wind and 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 fruit ...
— A Florentine Tragedy—A Fragment • Oscar Wilde
... een. But he had left some of it with his mother, at ony rate. She entered the room like a woman demented, and the first words she spoke were, Elspeth Cheyne, did you ever pull a new-budded flower?' I answered, as ye may believe, that I often had. Then,' said she, ye will ken the better how to blight the spurious and heretical blossom that has sprung forth this night to disgrace my father's noble houseSee here;'(and she gave me a golden bodkin)nothing but gold must shed the blood of Glenallan. This child is already as one of the dead, and since thou and Teresa alone ken that ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... though thy bloom shall pass away, By winter overtaken, Thoughts of the past will charms display, And many joys awaken. When time shall every sweet remove, And blight thee on my bosom, Let beauty fade!—to me, my love, Thou'lt ne'er be ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... military fidelity, a voluntary oath; (3) then the exacted oath of allegiance; (4) any oath whatever; (5) in early Christian use any sacred or solemn act, and especially any mystery where more was meant than met the ear or eye" (Blight's "Select Sermons of St. Leo on the ...
— The Church: Her Books and Her Sacraments • E. E. Holmes
... Idealism, and no spiritual possession is more easily lost. The spiritual depression of a reactionary period, the routine of work, the immersion in the stream of events, the decline of moral energy, conspire to blight this noble use of the imagination, and to chill the faith which makes creative living and working possible. The familiar companionship of the great Idealists is one of the greatest resources against the paralysis of this faith and ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... As with a blight upon a rose-tree, the little green creatures lurk on the underside of the leaves, and in all the folds of the buds, and because unseen, they increase with alarming rapidity. The very fact that we have faults in our characters, which everybody ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... feelings were not less deep because they were inactive, remembered this man and his associates, in after times. The historian of the sect affirms that, by the wrath of Heaven, a blight fell upon the land in the vicinity of the "bloody town" of Boston, so that no wheat would grow there; and he takes his stand, as it were, among the graves of the ancient persecutors, and triumphantly recounts the judgments that overtook them, in old age ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... cries and beat of wings, Grown eager now and venturesome, The swallows hold their twitterings, To see the blight of winter come. ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... ruled by a heedful while unobtrusive respect and self-respect. Do not think a strong word of caution in this matter out of place and out of scale. Carelessness of even appearances here may wreck a life; it may certainly blight an influence. ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... that has been assigned is The Development and Propagation of Blight Resistant Chestnut in West Virginia. Now, being a forester, I am perhaps interested in blight resistant chestnut from a little different standpoint than the majority of this group. As representing ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... with change, A cloud in one and billow of battle, a surge High reared as heaven with monstrous surf of spears That shake on us their shadow, till men's heads 490 Bend, and their hearts even with its forward wind Wither, so blasts all seed in them of hope Its breath and blight of presage; yea, even now The winter of this wind out of the deeps Makes cold our trust in comfort of the Gods And blind our eye toward outlook; yet not here, Here never shall the Thracian plant on high For ours his father's symbol, nor ...
— Erechtheus - A Tragedy (New Edition) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... not. We wanted your advice, and nothing more. Even now I am afraid I am saying too much. There is a withering blight over yonder house that is beyond mere words. And twice gallant gentlemen have come forward to our assistance. Both of them are dead. And if we had dragged you, a total stranger, into the arena, we ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... Dante's Italy.[890] But after the decay of the Greenland colonies converted Iceland from a focal into a remote terminal point, and after the progress of the world became based upon complex and far-reaching commercial relations, the blight of extreme isolation settled upon the island; peace ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... voice behind him, which I recognised as his wife's, "because you're bringing a blight on us, and our houses—because we want our children's faces left as God ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... Cromwell, and Vane passionately inveighed against Prelacy and the "Man of Blood," as I had just heard the Radicals of the Victorian era overwhelm with diatribe the obstructors of the popular will. Then, during the subsoiling which the land, growing arid and worthless through mediaeval blight, underwent in 1832 and after, when the Reform Bill and its successors, like deeply penetrating plows, threw to the surface much that was unsightly, yet full of potentialities for good, the spot was the same. The ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... strokes of the midnight bell As they thrilled the quiet air, And saw the soft, white curtains wave In the lamp's uncertain glare; And felt the breath of the July night, Laden with fragrance and warmth and blight. ...
— Indian Legends and Other Poems • Mary Gardiner Horsford
... world has not either heard or read of this poisonous tree, supposed to carry death to every living thing for a wide distance around it, not even sparing shrubs or plants—things of its own kind—but inflicting blight and destruction wherever its envenomed breath may be ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... duration, and it never recurred, which, considering all the sorrows and all the irregularities of his life, seems remarkable. He had not been long in a condition to be responsible when the tragedy took place which cast its blight upon his life. In September of the year 1796 Mary Lamb, "worn down to a state of extreme nervous misery by attention to needle-work all day and by watching with her mother at night, broke into uncontrollable insanity, and seizing a knife from the table ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... hardening and demoralising than to call forth the tenderest feelings of a woman's heart and cherish them yourself as long as you need them, as long as your children require a nurse to love them, and then to blight and thwart and destroy them, whenever your own use for them is at an end? This may be Utopian; but it is always a little thing if one mother or two mothers can be brought to feel more tenderly to those who share their toil and have no part ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to tobacco. After doing this, if time and energy remained, they might try some of Sir Edwin Sandys' ideas—maybe set out a few grapevines or mulberries, as they had been instructed to do. There was good reason for the growing fear among the leading adventurers in London that tobacco might put a blight on ...
— The Virginia Company Of London, 1606-1624 • Wesley Frank Craven
... was to begin. She thought with a 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
... innuendoes, ending only the day before in a positive demand for money. It was too certain that there was a chain of events there leading direct to the horrible encounter in the laboratory. His money had cast a blight where he had ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... coupled with the world-hardness which marred her, there lingered something of tenderness in her love. Then, too, she was a consummate actress, and a being gifted with the womanly genius for charming, and therein lies sympathy. It is when this sympathetic spark is killed by the terrible blight of over-prosperity, that the deterioration of a woman takes place. Not all in a day, but gradually, the poison works: the first stage signalised by a cruel hardness to those they love; then an entire incapacity for ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... 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; ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... triumphantly fanned their lights along the base of that vast monument in which King Cheops vainly sought eternal privacy. What would he say, we wondered, could he see the crowds of tourists tearing out to pay him a call, on their way to the Sphinx? Would he blight them with a curse, or would he remember pearly nights of old, when his subjects assembled in multitudes for the feast of the Goddess Neith when the moon was full, and all the white, brightly painted houses along the Nile reflected their flowerlike ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... New England, adapting itself to a great variety of situations, but preferring a soil that is constantly moist. Nursery or good collected plants are easily transplanted. A disease, similar in its effect to the pear blight, so often disfigures it that it is not desirable ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... one's mouth; find one a false prophet. not realize one's hope, not realize one's expectation. [cause to be disappointed] disappoint; frustrate, discomfit, crush, defeat (failure) 732; crush one's hope, dash one's hope, balk one's hope, disappoint one's hope, blight one's hope, falsify one's hope, defeat one's hope, discourage; balk, jilt, bilk; play one false, play a trick; dash the cup from the lips, tantalize; dumfound, dumbfound, dumbfounder, dumfounder (astonish) 870. Adj. disappointed &c v.; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... no; not in retrospect. I remain their ideal, and all that, of course. They cherish the thought of me. They see the world in terms of me. But I am an inspiration, not an obsession; a glow, not a blight." ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... 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 Darkening ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... barrel." The Hartford Wits had fought out the war against King George; they now took up the pen against King Mob, and placed themselves in rank with the friends of order, good government, and union. Hence the "Anarchiad." An ancient epic on "the Restoration of Chaos and Substantial Blight" was dug up in the ruins of an old Indian fort, where Madoc, the mythical Welsh Columbus, or some of his descendants, had buried it. Colonel Humphreys, who had read the "Rolliad" in England, suggested the plan; Barlow, Hopkins, and Trumbull joined with him in carrying it out. Extracts from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... powers at his command to bring about a good understanding between the kings of France and Spain. He pictured to Henry, in darkest colours, the blight that would come over religion and civilization if the progress of the rebellious Netherlands could not be arrested. The United Provinces were becoming dangerous, if they remained free, not only to the French kingdom, but to the very ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... I were as frisky as they, We laugh'd at their biting, and kiss'd all the time, For the spring of her beauty was just in its prime! But now for their frolics I never can sleep, So I crack 'em by dozens, as o'er me they creep: Curse blight you! I cry, while I'm all over smart, For I'm bit by the arse, while I'm ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... The pear blight has destroyed whole orchards of pear trees in the Western states. The citrus canker is now threatening the orange orchards of ...
— Conservation Reader • Harold W. Fairbanks
... therefore remember that, if I infringe the Divine order, I can turn the sacramental cup into a vehicle of moral poison and spiritual blight. "They must be holy who bear the ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... ills which summer knew, Pest and blight for life and fruit Winter's hosts have put to rout. In peace she shall awake again Purified by winds and snows, Peace shall greet her ...
— The Bridal March; One Day • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... left deserted in my age? The child Britta,—sole daughter of my sole daughter,—is she not stolen, and kept from me? Has not her heart been utterly turned away from mine? All through that vile witch,—accursed of God and man! She it is who casts the blight on our land; she it is who makes the hands and hearts of our men heavy and careless, so that even luck has left the fishing; and yet you hesitate,—you delay, you will not fulfill your promise! I tell you, there are those in Bosekop who, at my bidding, would cast her naked ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... a Blight, for there was a dreadful east wind over at our farm that destroyed all the little young crops just out of the ground, and the farmers called it the Blight. And I would rather be hail, sleet, frost, or snow than a Blight, which is mean and secret, and which is the reason I threw ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... under the same roof with Tai-y in dowager lady Chia's suite of rooms, he naturally became comparatively more friendly with her than with his other cousins; and this friendliness led to greater intimacy and this intimacy once established, rendered unavoidable the occurrence of the blight of harmony ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... Anson was quite gentlemanly in his action at the last. He had some sense of the fitness of things. He could not find a place in the world without making other people uncomfortable, and causing trouble. If he had lived, he would always have added to the blight on his wife's career, and have been an arrow—not a thorn—in her side. Very likely he would have created a scandal for the good young girl who nursed him. He made the false step, and compelled society to reject him. It did not want ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... vales, which each held a thousand or several thousand when the blight of the white man came, the abandoned paepaes are solemn and shrouded witnesses of the death of a race. The jungle runs over them, and only remnants remain of the houses that sat upon them. Their owners have died, leaving no posterity to inhabit their homes; neighbors have removed their few chattels, ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... in the same way as, according to 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
... loved a tree or flower; But, if I had, I beg to say The blight, the wind, the sun, or shower Would soon have withered it away. I've dearly loved my Uncle John, From childhood to the present hour, And yet he will go living on— I would he ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... he flipped a rosebud covered with blight, kicked off a snail which was crawling on the path; then, halfway down the path, he suddenly raised his head and gave ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... and far from thy border, By the grace of my godhead benignant I order The blight which may blacken the bloom of the trees. Far from thy border, and far from thy dwelling, Be the hot blast which shrivels the bud in its swelling, The seed-rotting taint, and the creeping disease. Thy flocks ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... 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 ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... gruesome place. Everything in it and for yards around it, was covered with a yellow blight, as if the slight beard of some pestilential fungous were sprouting ... the only people the company could induce to work there were foreigners who knew little of America.... Swedes mostly ... attentive churchgoers on Sunday,—who on week-days, and overtime at nights, ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... grasp all the elements of prosperity. We are free from the thousand time-honoured evils and abuses that afflict and retard the nations of the Old World. Not even our neighbours of the United States occupy an equal position of advantage, for we have not the canker-worm of domestic slavery to blight our tree of liberty. And greater than these, we are but commencing our career as a people, our institutions have yet to be established. We are free to look abroad over the earth and study the lessons of wisdom taught by the history of older countries, and choose those systems and those laws ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... murmured 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 ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... I know you would like that to be true; you would think it a pleasant magic if you could flush your flowers into brighter bloom by a kind look upon them; nay, more, if your look had the power, not only to cheer but to guard them:—if you could bid the black blight turn away and the knotted caterpillar spare—if you could bid the dew fall upon them in the drought, and say to the south wind, in frost—"Come, thou south, and breathe upon my garden, that the spices of it may flow out." This you would think a great thing? And ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... any rate) such living monuments of human history are made sacred and treated with greater care than are our ancient monuments in stone. Smaller creatures, birds like the dodo and the great auk and a whole troop of others less familiar, have disappeared and are disappearing under the human blight. Even some beautiful insects—the great copper butterfly and the swallow-tail butterfly—have been exterminated in England by human "progress" in the shape of the drainage of ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... his ever-winning smile responded less readily than before; sharp lines began to reveal themselves, flanking his nostrils. His heart was bitter. The weeks had brought him to a fuller realization of the horrid blight upon his fair name; he had come to see the wreck in all its cold, brutal aspects. The realization that he was a hunted, branded thing, with a price on his head, sank deeper and deeper into his soul. Hunted! Chased as a criminal! He, a ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... never invented the like for them. The chief, Mankambira, likewise treated us with kindness; but wherever the slave-trade is carried on, the people are dishonest and uncivil; that invariably leaves a blight and a curse in its path. The first question put to us at the lake crossing- places, was, "Have you come to buy slaves?" On hearing that we were English, and never purchased slaves, the questioners put on a supercilious air, and sometimes refused to sell us food. This want of respect ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... with which it is entirely covered during a great part of the year seems to have cast a blight upon it. The very few palms have a drooping and tragic air. The ground has a gangrened appearance, and much of it shows a crawling mass of unwholesome-looking plants, which seem crouching down as if ashamed of their brutal exposure by the receded river, and of harsh and yellow-green grass, ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... that Thou gavest Me I have kept." Oh, the wonders of redeeming love! the rapture of that hour when the infinite Father, looking upon the ransomed, shall behold His image, sin's discord banished, its blight removed, and the human once more in ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... available it is difficult to understand how people can continue to pour forth nonsense about the ruin of our national industries. During the very decade in which the blight of German competition was supposed to have destroyed the profits of our manufacturers, it is clear from the above infallible test that the incomes of our commercial, professional, and property-owning classes have ...
— Are we Ruined by the Germans? • Harold Cox
... the blight of sorrow's smart, Her woman's heart oft faileth, She moaneth not but with fond wiles Her pain in smiles she veileth; So sings she through the live-long night, Till hope's bright light appeareth, Which glittering like a radiant eye, ...
— Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century • Edmund O. Jones
... tranquillity quite inconsistent with the rules of romance, I cannot say that the under-plots are equally propitious. The "opening bud of love" between the general and Lady Lillycraft seems to have experienced some blight in the course of this genial season. I do not think the general has ever been able to retrieve the ground he lost, when he fell asleep during the captain's story. Indeed, Master Simon thinks his case is completely desperate, her ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... growing much more warm and strong in its support." "Once," he said, "the most eminent men, and nearly all the conspicuous politicians of the South, held the same sentiments,—that slavery was an evil, a blight, a scourge, and a curse"; but now it is "a cherished institution in that quarter; no evil, no scourge, but a great religious, social, and moral blessing." He then asked how this change of opinion had been brought about, and thus answered the question: "I suppose, sir, this ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... intimacy greater than he and she had yet known, would seem to be enforced by this winter of isolation and leisure, she did not, for a time, see as much of him as before. A constraint, almost like a blight upon their friendship, seemed to have fallen between them ever since the night that she had danced. Seagreave did not come down to Gallito's cabin quite so frequently in the evenings, and, according to Jose, spent much time by his own fireside absorbed ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... in happier times, had been a watering place, less fashionable than some on the French coast, but the pleasant resort of many in search of health and pleasure. And like Folkestone it had suffered the blight of war. The war had laid its heavy hand upon the port. It ruled everything; it was omnipresent. From the moment when we came into full view of the harbor it was impossible to think ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... BLIGHT'S DISEASE, a disease in the kidneys, due to several diseased conditions of the organ, so called from Dr. Richard Bright, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... was Kano Indara; the last of a mighty line of artists. Even in this material age his fame spread as the mists of his own land, and his name was known in barbarian countries far across the sea. Tokyo might fall under the blight of progress, but Kano would hold to the traditions of his race. To live as a true artist,—to die as one,—this was his care. He might have claimed high position in the great Art Museum recently inaugurated by the new government, and housed in an abomination of pink stucco with ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... some of the kroomen on board Mr Beecroft's Victoria let go her anchor, and there she lay exposed entirely to the fire of the blacks. On seeing this, Captain Lyster pulled back to her to learn what was the matter. "What has occurred now?" he asked of Mr Blight, the boatswain. "The kroomen let go the anchor without orders," he replied. "Then slip your cable, and get out of this," exclaimed Captain Lyster. "It's a chain cable, clenched to the bottom, and we can't unshackle ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... gypsies came the oldest of them all, who was the King's great-grandmother, and she looked from the angry parents to the unhappy lovers and said, "You can blight the tree and make the lantern dark; nevertheless you cannot extinguish the flower and the light of love. And till these things lift the curse and are seen again united among you, there will be no Lords in Gay Street nor ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... course the season for romance. Its buoyant spirit must soar till weighed down by earthly care. It is in youth that the feelings are warm and the fancy fresh, and that there has been no blight to chill the one or to wither the other. And it is in youth that hope lends its cheering ray, and love its genial influence; that our friends smile upon us, our companions do not cross us, and our parents are still at hand ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady
... separation, with a grave earnestness and a saddened 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 things ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... exorbitant growth of London that many an ill has spread over the land? London is the antithesis of the domestic ideal; a social reformer would not even glance in that direction, but would turn all his zeal upon small towns and country districts, where blight may perhaps be arrested, and whence, some day, a reconstituted national life may act upon the great centre of corruption. I had far rather see England covered with schools of cookery than with ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... man's form may 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
... across the land. May Heaven arrest its course, avert its terror, And keep the Statesman who this foe must fight From careless blindness and from blundering error, Such as of old lent aid to the Black Blight. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 30, 1890. • Various
... little foxes that spoil the grapes of perfect diction, but they are very little foxes; it is the false elegance of stupid pretentiousness that is an annihilating blight which destroys root ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... all the collegiate honors—but without exciting jealousy or envy. He was so really the best, that his companions were anxious he should have the sign of his superiority. He studied hard, he thought much, and wrote well. There was no evidence of any blight upon his ambition or career, but after living quietly in the country for some time, he went to Europe and travelled. When he returned, he resolved to study law, but presently relinquished it. Then he collected materials for a history, but suffered ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... people said that they had no Bazimo, or none worth having, seeing they had never invented the like for them. The chief, Mankambira, likewise treated us with kindness; but wherever the slave-trade is carried on, the people are dishonest and uncivil; that invariably leaves a blight and a curse in its path. The first question put to us at the lake crossing- places, was, "Have you come to buy slaves?" On hearing that we were English, and never purchased slaves, the questioners put on a supercilious ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... made some sacrifice sweeps over him and came out as a great sob.[73] The sight of their sin brought sorest pain to his spirit. Paul tells us there was a continual cutting of a knife at his heart because of his racial kinsfolk, their sin, their stubbornness in sin, the awful blight upon their lives.[74] There was sore, lone, unspeakable pain of spirit because he felt so keenly the sin of others. This is the Gethsemane experience. Have you felt something like this as you have come in touch with the sin, ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... Hayyim of Volozhin inveigh against the followers of Mendelssohn, because of the latitudinarian habits of the Maskilim, who "despise the counsel of their betters, and go after the dictates of their hearts."[35] Both saw in Haskalah a deadly foe to their dearest ideals, a blight upon their most cherished hopes, and, like Elizabeta Petrovna, they would not derive even a benefit from the enemies of ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... system, the system of leaning on the government, is spreading like a blight over England and America, and everywhere we suffer from it. Government, that in theory represents a union of effort and a saving of force, sprawls like an octopus over the land. It has become like a dead weight upon us. Wherever it touches industry it cripples it. It runs railways and makes a heavy ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... so affected by the malattia or blight, that the yield being small, the fruit to an extent was not pressed in the vineyards, and the juice only brought up to the town in goat-skins as usual; but the fruit itself was carried up, by those having the proper places, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... between the daytime and a night where there is sleep for ever, and isn't it a better thing to be following on to a near death, than to be bending the head down, and dragging with the feet, and seeing one day a blight showing upon love where it is sweet and tender. NAISI — his voice broken with distraction. — If a near death is coming what will be my trouble losing the earth and the stars over it, and you, Deirdre, are their flame and bright crown? Come away into the safety of the woods. DEIRDRE ...
— Deirdre of the Sorrows • J. M. Synge
... knows they are bad enough, but they are by no means so bad as you thought. And I'm your wife, Stephen. That thing you did was brutal; those men will talk. I was guilty, no doubt, in my thoughts, but I'm young, and you have no right to blight my life and my reputation—yes, and yours—by a thing like that. We will have to meet those men. What are you ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... had taught her, from the dawn of her intelligence, with your utmost energy and might, that there was such a thing as daylight, but that it was made to be her enemy and destroyer, and she must always turn against it, for it had blighted you and would else blight her;—if you had done this, and then, for a purpose, had wanted her to take naturally to the daylight and she could not do it, you would have been ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... of his former rule had been discontented and troublesome, now settled down submissively to their yoke; the Spaniards began to work in earnest on their farms; and there descended upon island affairs a brief St. Martin's Summer of peace before the final winter of blight and death set in. The Admiral, however, was obviously in precarious health; his ophthalmia became worse, and the stability of his mind suffered. He had dreams and visions of divine help and comfort, much needed by him, poor soul, in all his tribulations and adversities. Even yet the cup ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... visage obdurate as stone, 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, in such pallid fright The snowy sheets looked dark ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... 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 is indeed ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... the sandals. In the pause that followed a door opened, and, as at the feast of Balthazar, God manifested himself. He seemed to command recognition now in the person of an old, white-haired servant with unsteady gait and drawn brows; he entered with gloomy mien and his look seemed to blight the garlands, the ruby cups, the pyramids of fruits, the brightness of the feast, the glow of the astonished faces and the colors of the cushions dented by the white arms of the women; then he cast a pall over this folly by saying, in a hollow voice, the solemn ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... not doubt the fact, the statue still remains, and stands in the temple of Venus at Salamis, in the exact form of the lady. Now think of these things, my dear, and lay aside your scorn and your delays, and accept a lover. So may neither the vernal frosts blight your young fruits, nor furious ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... the loftiest hopes man nurses, Never deem them idly born; Never think that deathly curses Blight them ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... as a warning for them in time to come. There might, however, be a difficulty in beginning such a system. I can remember, and others present will remember it too, two or three years of bad fishing, followed by a year of blight, when the man who wrought most anxiously and was honest-hearted could not meet the demands upon him. At such times, if there was no qualification or mitigation of the ready-money system, perhaps the men might ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... country are feeling this very deeply. The pastor who ministers to a whole community, boasts of it. He realizes he is serving a true social unit. This is the joy of many country churches which might be named, and the lack of it is the blight of many other country communities. It must be clearly born in mind, however, that the church can not organize a unity that is apart from the life of men. Religion is the expression of social realities. There can be no ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson
... house—bare and leafless, or if covered at all, covered only with their Christmas dress of snow and icicles—these trees were clothed with the loveliest foliage, fresh and green and feathery, which no winter's storms or nipping frosts had ever come near to blight. And in the little space between the door where Hugh stood and these wonderful trees was drawn up, as if awaiting him, the prettiest, queerest, most delicious little carriage that ever was seen. It was open; the cushions with which it was lined were of rose-coloured plush—not velvet, I think; ...
— The Tapestry Room - A Child's Romance • Mrs. Molesworth
... given himself up to a dull hope that the little girl who had become so dear was really his brother's child, and joint heir with Donald to his and his brother's estates; and how Eben Slade actually had come to claim her and take her away, threatening to blight the poor child by proving that she was his niece, Delia Robertson, and not Dorothy ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... I answer; mark a soothfast word, Not the true parent is the woman's womb That bears the child; she doth but nurse the seed New-sown: the male is parent; she for him, As stranger for a stranger, hoards the germ Of life; unless the god its promise blight. And proof hereof before you will I set. Birth may from fathers, without mothers, be: See at your side a witness of the same, Athena, daughter of Olympian Zeus, Never within the darkness of the womb Fostered nor fashioned, but a bud more bright Than ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... of trash, and taxing him to support such publications, is the fostering patron to which he owes his difficulties. Thus does America nip her young genius in the bud; and when it perchance comes to flower and fruit, she is not behind-hand with a blight. The unknown production of the American author is brought into a depressing competition with works which have been tried in England, and found certain of success in America. The popular British author, whom the public ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... clear again, as happens a thousand times during every year in the East, that what is not nipped in the bud grows with such malignant swiftness as finally to blight all honest intentions. Had steps been taken on or about the 23rd May to detain forcibly in Peking the ringleader of the recalcitrant Military Governors, one General Ni Shih-chung of Anhui, history would have been very different and China spared much national and international humiliation. Six years ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... Dale's outfit, except when we're on the trail.... And, say, if you knew what I had to pay for this stuff you'd think there was a bigger robber in Alder Creek than Jack Kells.... And, come to think of it, my name's now Blight. You're my daughter, if any one asks." Joan was so grateful to him for the goods and the permission to get out of Dandy Dale's suit as soon as possible, that she could only smile her thanks. Kells stared at her, then turned abruptly away. Those ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... the cogs' loud roll,— That makes stout joist and rafter groan and sway,— The harmless gossip of the passing day: Good country talk, that says how so-and-so Lived, died, or wedded: how curculio And codling-moth play havoc with the fruit, Smut ruins the corn and blight the grapes to boot: Or what is news from town: next county fair: How well the crops are looking everywhere:— Now this, now that, on which their interests fix, Prospects for rain or frost, and politics. While, all around, the sweet ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... 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
... with only, as a very occasional treat, the smallest glimpse of anything resembling a Front. And all this is in a country so desolated by centuries of war that in spite of obvious natural fertility it is a sullen treeless desert—a desert of blight and thistles, as profitless to our men as their periodically deferred anticipations of a grand advance. A book that sets out to record vacuity can hardly be crammed with thrilling literature, and I am not going to pretend that Mr. LAKE has achieved ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various
... and relegates the mother to the position of an underling nurse. It will be remembered, however, that Athena, although, as Apollo said, "having a father only," makes the mothers still invaluable as guardians of the family altar and as those who can bless or blight both the fruitage of the earth and of the ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... pack-donkeys without bridles to Abydos, six miles through the most beautiful crops ever seen. The absence of weeds and blight is wonderful, and the green of Egypt, where it is green, would make English green look black. Beautiful cattle, sheep and camels were eating the delicious clover, while their owners camped there in reed huts during the time the crops are growing. Such ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... merely obeyed mechanically. Then came the impulse to say boldly that this kind of thing might answer at the store, but not here, and he nearly carried it out; but soon followed the sober second thought, that such action would bring a blight over all his prospects, and involve the loss of his position at the store. Such giving way to passion would injure only himself. They would laugh, and merely suffer a momentary annoyance; to him and his the result would be most disastrous. ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... yet; yon must hear the whole, and help me to save Bella. We knew nothing of the blight that hung over us till father told Augustine upon his death-bed. August, urged by mother, kept it to himself, and went away to bear it as he could. He should have spoken out and saved me in time. But not till ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... their early ambition. But now, their pleasure is in memory, and their ambition is in heaven. They can be kind to you, but you nevermore can be kind to them. You may be fed with the fruit and fulness of their old age, but you were as the nipping blight to them in their blossoming, and your praise is only as the warm winds of autumn to the ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... fire and under-foot tangle with Peter fighting behind him. Half an hour later he stood where the Missioner's cabin had been and he found only a ruin of ash and logs burned down to the earth. Where the trail had run there was no longer a trail. A blight, grim and sickening, lay upon the ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... is liable to several diseases, which affect the flour made from it, and render it unfit for good bread. The principal of these are the blight, mildew, and smut, which are occasioned by microscopic fungi, which sow themselves and grow upon the stems and ears, destroying the nutritive principles, and introducing matter of a deleterious kind. ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... it. Emissaries of the Pope and the devil, as the strangers were considered—the smell of sulphur hardly yet shaken out of their canonicals—what islander would venture to jeopardize his soul, and call down a blight on his breadfruit, by holding any intercourse with them! That morning the priests actually picknicked in grove of cocoa-nut trees; but, before night, Christian hospitality—in exchange for a commercial equivalent of hard dollars—was given them ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... personalities as they are themselves, suggesting, if you are willing to waste your time listening to their twaddle, that there is something radically wrong in any innovation, that both "Church and State" will be imperilled if things are altered. No blight, no mildew is more fatal to a plant than the "complacent" are to the world. They resent any progress and are offended if you mention before them any new standards or points of view. "What has been good enough for us and our parents should certainly be satisfactory to the younger generations." ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... diverge, and listless stray Into some thought, feeling, or dream unright, O Watcher, my backsliding soul affray; Let me not perish of the ghastly blight. Be thou, O Life eternal, in me light; Then merest approach of selfish or impure Shall start ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... varieties. They will, if treated generously, do ample justice to the 8-or even the 10-inch size. The growth should not be hurried at any stage, and if the foliage has a dark, healthy, green colour, free from blight, there will be magnificent flowers four or five inches across. The final shift should be into a sound compost, consisting, if possible, of good loam and leaf-mould in equal parts, with sufficient sand ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... in a fight; He died without pardon or grace. Wanted, to train for his burden and blight, Somebody's boy ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... which it is entirely covered during a great part of the year seems to have cast a blight upon it. The very few palms have a drooping and tragic air. The ground has a gangrened appearance, and much of it shows a crawling mass of unwholesome-looking plants, which seem crouching down as if ashamed ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... 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 the ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... resigned themselves to the affront, for they would not quarrel with Spain. To have done so would have been to throw themselves into the arms of the Protestant party, adopt the principle of toleration, and save France from the disgrace and blight of her later years. France was not so fortunate. The enterprise of Florida was a national enterprise, undertaken at the national charge, with the royal commission, and under the royal standard; and it had been crushed in time of peace by ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... dove moans from 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 ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... yield of the first crop; for now clover will grow where none would grow before; another advantage arising from guano is, the wheat ripens so much earlier (15th of June) it escapes the rust, so apt to blight that which is late coming to maturity. He now sows wheat in the fore part of September, three pecks to the acre, after having previously plowed in 200 lbs. of Peruvian guano to the acre, and after the first harrowing sows the clover seed. The land is a yellow clay ...
— Guano - A Treatise of Practical Information for Farmers • Solon Robinson
... help but think of the chestnut blight that has worked havoc throughout our state and some other states. It has occasioned a big material loss. Yet I think too of another side of the loss and that is the spiritual side because our "chestnut ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... discredited 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 Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... written for their amusement or instruction; but this is less owing to want of attention to their interests on the part of many good and enlightened men, than to the unsettled state of the country; for the blight of civil war prevents the best ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... Things is gettin' pretty tight on farms now. It means about sixteen hours hard graft a-day to make not half what a railwayman makes in eight hours. If you happen to have grapes or oranges, if they manage to escape the frost, an' hail, an' caterpillar, then the blight ketches 'em, or there's a drewth, and there ain't none; an' if there's any, there's so much that there ain't no sale for 'em; and the farmer's life I reckon ought to be stopped as gamblin', for a gambler's life ain't one bit ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... moment at the old familiar structure, wiped the tears from her eyes, that in spite or all she could do, would come to testify that her heart was not so callous as she fain would make it appear; and then she walked rapidly away—but not to her work. No! she sought the home of him who had come like a blight on their domestic peace. She carried with her no feeling of resentment—her heart was full of love and compassion. She had undergone a dreadful struggle. The climax had arrived. She must choose between her parents and her lover. It was a hard, hard task, but it was over. ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... soft reddish-brown ripe blood-hue that made her cheeks sweet to contemplate. She looked worn, small, wretched: her very walk indicated self-contempt. Wilfrid was keen to see the change for which others might have accused a temporary headache. Now that she appeared under this blight, it seemed easier to give her up; and his magnanimity being thus encouraged (I am not hard on him—remember the constitution of love, in which a heart un-aroused is pure selfishness, and a heart aroused heroic generosity; they being one heart to outer life)—his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Bertie Mayo, 'oo's allus a turr'ble far-seeing sort of chap, 'e says, "Reckon the trolley 'ull be along fust thing i' the marnin' from the brewery, Missus?" An' when Mrs. Izod 'er says as 'er didn't know, but 'twas to be 'oped as 'twud, a sort of a blight settled down on the lot on us, which I reckon is a pretty fair way o' puttin' it, for a blight allus goes 'and-in-'and wi' ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, August 1, 1917. • Various
... by with a heavy bundle of maize upon her head, followed by a couple of red-haired children, their perfectly-shaped little legs browned by the sun and powdered with dust. How beautiful are the limbs of these peasant children, however disfigured by toil and the inherited physical blight of hardship their mother's form may be! With each fresh generation, Nature seems to make an effort to go back to her ideal type; but destiny is strong. Old and new causes working together are often more than a match for that most marvellous ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... you must, but never hate: Man is but grass and hate is blight, The sun will scorch you soon or late, Die wholesome then, since you ...
— Country Sentiment • Robert Graves
... more hardening and demoralising than to call forth the tenderest feelings of a woman's heart and cherish them yourself as long as you need them, as long as your children require a nurse to love them, and then to blight and thwart and destroy them, whenever your own use for them is at ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... chilly blast Shall never strip the bowers, Or icy Winter cast A blight upon the flowers; But Spring, in all her bloom, For ever flourish there, And the children of the tomb Forget this ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... respect, and dislike by the warmest, most grateful affection. I had scorned her poverty, and hated her turbulence. The first I now knew to be no poverty of soil, of natural resources, of mind, talent, or energy, but the effect of a blight, permitted to rest alike on the land and people, through the selfishness of an unjust, crooked policy, that made their welfare of no account in its calculations, nor would stretch forth a hand to deliver them from the dark dominion of Popery. Their turbulence was the natural ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... of man will sicken In that pure and holy light, When he feels the hopes I've stricken With an everlasting blight! For, so wildly in my madness Have I poured abroad my wrath, I've been changing joy to sadness; And with ruins strewed ...
— The Youth's Coronal • Hannah Flagg Gould
... acute, in all severely felt. And what is very remarkable, and may be considered, as a distinctive sign of the times, specially worthy of universal attention, the suffering has now spread to those classes which are furthest removed from the blight of nature, and fastened upon those interests which, according to the generally received opinion, should have been benefited rather than injured by the calamity which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... to rights by Clem would be found at least endurable. It had not the solid grace nor the columned front of the houses I had somewhat hurriedly admired in the Southland some years before, but its lower rooms were wide, its windows abundant, and outwardly it had escaped the blight ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... round the chamber. Everything was in its old place. Her bed looked as if she had risen from it but that morning. The sight of these familiar objects, marking the dear remembrance in which she had been held, and the blight she had brought upon herself, was more than the woman's better nature that had carried her there could bear. She wept ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... the theatre of the present day is the horrible mantle of respectability which has settled on the profession. Respectability in Art is a blight which undermines, and the moment any worker or profession of workers is accepted on equal terms by the non-workers of the community, misery invariably ensues. It is impossible for a non-worker to comprehend the life of a worker, or to make any margin for the work, which, if we judge ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... garden; "out of Weathersfield" Wethersfield (the modern spelling), Connecticut, was famous for its onions (there is still a red onion called "Red Weathersfield"), until struck by a blight about 1840; "old Egyptians" ancient Egypt was proverbial for worshiping ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... almost as much like heaven as heaven itself could be, if it were not for the unspeakable Turk, but his blight rests on everything. I could have kept awake that morning without Fred's irreverent music, simply for sake of the scenery, if its freshness had been untainted. But there hung a sickly, faint pall of smoke that robbed the green landscape of all liveliness. ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... Evan's letter came gave way before the anxiety with which they all saw the change in him. His wife was a quiet, gentle woman, saying little at any time, perhaps feeling less than her stern husband. They all sorrowed, but it was on the father that the blight fell heaviest. ...
— Shenac's Work at Home • Margaret Murray Robertson
... will send boys with you from one village to the next; but only in the early hours, or in the late hours of day. See that you do not persuade them otherwise. The full-day heat is called 'blight' because it robs men ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... Consumption's ruthless eye had mark'd me for her prey: They bade me seek in foreign climes her wasting hand to stay; They told me of an altered form, an eye grown ghastly bright, And called the crimson on my cheek the spoiler's hectic blight. ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... lips, I live in his life, his passions are my own; and it is impossible for me to know noble and pure emotions excepting in the heart of this being unsoiled by crime. You have your fancies, here I show you mine. In exchange for the blight which society has brought upon me, I give it a man of honor, and enter upon a struggle with destiny; do you wish to be of my party? ...
— Vautrin • Honore de Balzac
... you know as much about certain features of this chestnut disease as I do myself; for I have only worked over certain sides of the whole question. I also presume that you are all acquainted with the fact that this disease, which is known as chestnut blight or the chestnut bark disease, is without doubt the most serious disease of any forest tree which we have had in this country at any time, that is, so far as its inroads at present appear ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Second Annual Meeting - Ithaca, New York, December 14 and 15, 1911 • Northern Nut Growers Association
... amusement's thread, With myrtle blooming and music ringing ... But solemn I on the threshold tread:— The dance is checked And the clang is wailing, The wreath is wrecked And the bride is paling: The end of splendor and joy and might Is only sorrow and tears and blight. ...
— The Angel of Death • Johan Olof Wallin
... lady, while he's waiting for his answer from another, and keeps his head close shut to each about it. Or a man who backs out of his vows by trading off the sloppiest kind of flap-doodle about not wishing to blight the hopes of his dearest friend. Or a man who has been trying his hardest to get into the good graces again of the young lady he went back on first, so he can cut out that same dearest friend of his, and leave the girl he's haff engaged ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 23, 1892 • Various
... house. I ask you to make the sacrifice, if it is a sacrifice to forgive the husband you love so small a fault. I ask you—for the sake of my gray hairs, and of the love you owe your mother. You do not want to blight my later years with bitterness ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... beauty, We the purveyors for hell; The carnal bliss of a purchased kiss And the pleasures that blight, we sell. God pity ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... following seasons, New South Wales suffered a serious drought, which increased in severity. Rivers were exhausted, and their beds left dry. Not only the want of rain was felt, but a withering blight, travelling in a defined current over the cultivated districts, cut off their harvests. In two years the cultivation of wheat in Van Diemen's Land increased from twenty to thirty thousand acres, and the average ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... new star. She has as yet appeared but in one role, that of Adrienne in Scribe's play, but within the compass of its five acts she runs the wild and weary gamut from crowned love to crowned despair. It is a new interpretation, and a remarkable one—an interpretation that is tinged with the blight of our inquisitive and mournful age: self-consciousness, that terrible tormentor in her soul, sits for ever in judgment upon every impulse of the heart of Adrienne, and makes of pain a stinging poison, and of pleasure ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... 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 ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... and the shiny hazes over the sea. In front rose the tower-topped hill of Monte Giove, marking the site of Corioli; and just as they turned towards Nemi the Appian Way ran across their path. Overhead, a marvellous sky with scudding veils of white cloud. The blur and blight of the scirocco had vanished without rain, under a change of wind. An all-blessing, all-penetrating sun poured upon the stirring earth. Everywhere fragments and ruins—ghosts of the great past—yet engulfed, as it were, and engarlanded by the active ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... hard enough, in our sad offspring, but they shoot at the expense of life itself. Never was such a mistake. Mental consciousness is a purely individual affair. Some men are born to be highly and delicately conscious. But for the vast majority, much mental consciousness is simply a catastrophe, a blight. It just ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... to the fullest measure of detestable injustice and cruelty, was now fast crumbling into ruin, inevitably doomed to be overwhelmed because it was all so wicked and abominable, inevitably doomed to sink under the blight and curse of senseless and unprofitable selfishness out of existence for ever, its memory universally ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... multiplication, and there are other instances, and still more extraordinary ones, in which this process takes place naturally, in a more hidden, a more recondite kind of way. You are all of you familiar with that little green insect, the Aphis or blight, as it is called. These little animals, during a very considerable part of their existence, multiply themselves by means of a kind of internal budding, the buds being developed into essentially non-sexual animals, which are neither male nor female; ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... evils and abuses that afflict and retard the nations of the Old World. Not even our neighbours of the United States occupy an equal position of advantage, for we have not the canker-worm of domestic slavery to blight our tree of liberty. And greater than these, we are but commencing our career as a people, our institutions have yet to be established. We are free to look abroad over the earth and study the lessons of wisdom taught ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... 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 ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... arms to her. As if the blight of her spirit fell upon him, the light died out of his face and he dropped his arms ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... one who grows English walnuts on their own roots need expect to be able to compete with those who grow them on the native black walnut roots, for when grown on these roots the trees will uniformly be larger and longer lived, will hardly be affected by blight and other diseases, and will bear from two to four times as many nuts, which will be of larger size and of much better quality. These are facts, not theories, and walnuts ...
— Walnut Growing in Oregon • Various
... the Ohio side, in improvements of every sort. Thus far, we have not ourselves noticed differences of that degree. Doubtless before the late civil war,—all the ante-bellum travelers agree in this,—when the blight of slavery was resting on Virginia and Kentucky, the south shore of the Ohio was as another country; but to-day, so far as we can ascertain from a surface view, the little villages on either side are equally ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... North growing much more warm and strong against slavery, and the South growing much more warm and strong in its support." "Once," he said, "the most eminent men, and nearly all the conspicuous politicians of the South, held the same sentiments,—that slavery was an evil, a blight, a scourge, and a curse"; but now it is "a cherished institution in that quarter; no evil, no scourge, but a great religious, social, and moral blessing." He then asked how this change of opinion had been brought about, and thus answered the question: "I suppose, sir, this is owing to the rapid ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... in the hush. I call Tikoloshe (a water spirit) out of the river in the night-time and ask him questions. I make sickness do my bidding on men and cattle. I drive it away when I like. I can bring blight to the crops, and stop the milk of cows. I can, by my magic medicines, find out the wicked ones who do these things. I alone can look upon Icanti (a fabulous serpent) and not die. I know the mountain where Impandulu (the Lightning Bird) builds its nest. I can make ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... and, again, above the sun's brightness. Naturally, with this comes a renewed fertility of the earth's soil, and the removal of the curse upon vegetation. Before the healing light and heat the poisonous growth, the blight of drought and of untempered heat disappear. There is to be a new earth and above it a ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... foaming in hasty current, and in others seeming to slumber in deep and circular eddies. The temptations which this dangerous scene must have offered an excited and desperate spirit, came on Mowbray like the blight of the Simoom, and he stood a moment to gather breath and overcome these horrible anticipations, ere he was able to proceed. His attendants felt the same apprehension. "Puir thing—puir thing!—O, God send she may not have been left to hersell!—God send she may have been upholden!" ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... her hand, and all the ghosts of my ancestors howling curses over me at night for my desolated and ruined home—I am to be conscience-stricken in her presence, as if I were a felon, while she, the really guilty one—the blight and bitter destruction of my life—she is to appear before me now as injured, and must make her appearance here, standing by the side of that sweet child-angel, and warning me away. Confound it all, man! Do you mean to say that such a thing is to ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... imagine that they're having a good time because they're making enough noise for six and drinking too much for ten. I loathe New York, Bertie. I wouldn't come near the place if I hadn't got to see editors occasionally. There's a blight on it. It's got moral delirium tremens. It's the limit. The very thought of staying more than a day in it makes me sick. And you call this ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... 'Mong rosebuds, wooing to the cheeks of these Loth blushes faint and maidenly:—rich breeze, Still doth thy honeyed blowing bring a shade Of sad foreboding. In thy hand is laid The power to build or blight the fruit of trees, The deep, cool grass, and field ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... she remained with William, her daughters, and her two aged unmarried sisters in the plain old house in Albany Street. But Dante Gabriel moved to Cheyne Walk, and began that craze for collecting blue china that has swept like a blight over the civilized world. His collection was sold for three thousand five hundred dollars some years after—to pay his debts—less than one-half of what it had cost him. Yet when he had money he generously divided it with ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... slew alike the virtuous and the guilty, and governed all by terror. Thus did that state, oppressed by slavery, rue bitterly its insane mirth. Within our memory, when victorious Sylla commanded Damasippus and his crew, who had grown up a blight to the republic, to be put to the sword's edge, who did not praise the deed? Who did not exclaim earnestly that men, factious and infamous, who had torn the republic by their tumults, were slain justly? And yet that deed was the ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... the rain that spoiled the grapes, they said at Montreux, and wherever we complained; and indeed the vines were a dismal show of sterility and blight, even to the spectator who did not venture near enough to subject himself to a fine of six francs. The foreigners had protected themselves in large numbers by not coming, and the natives who prosper upon them suffered. The stout lady who kept a small shop of ivory carvings at Montreux continually ...
— A Little Swiss Sojourn • W. D. Howells
... had once been very beautiful; that when she was in her fresh and lovely youth, some strange misfortune had fallen upon her, and that she had worn since then—most innocently—the mark of a direful tragedy. One lady, old, nearly, as Aunt Hannah, but upon whom there had never fallen any blight of poverty or wrong, loved the poor creature well, and she only, of all the inhabitants of the village, frequently entered the cottage where the 'Black Witch' dwelt. This lady, it was said, had known her when both were young, and carried forever locked ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... tentative but finally conclusive statement of the new difficulty that had arisen out of her husband's jealousy and to the discussion of the more fundamental decisions it forced upon her, if a peculiar blight had not fallen upon their conversation and robbed it at last of even an ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... friend of ours, a young Southern poet of distinct promise, who had just died. Like many Southern verse-writers of his generation, he had lived and written under the inspiration of Poe. Asbury surprised me by the almost bitter remark that Poe's influence had been a blight upon the younger Southern poets, inasmuch as it had tended to over-subjectivity, to morbid sensibility, and to a pre-occupation with purely personal emotions. He argued, as he has since done so courageously in his Texas Nativist, [Footnote: Published by the ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... the lad's face when he saw that he was to receive no answer; withering blight dried up its joy. But ...
— A Cathedral Singer • James Lane Allen
... a plant, scathed by frost, that has made a strong and successful effort to live, and still in its struggling existence bears the mark of the early blight on ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... the Sirdar named Shere Ali at Candahar seemed to blight his authority over the tribesmen in that quarter. All hope of maintaining his rule vanished when tidings arrived that Ayub Khan, a younger brother of the deported Yakub, was marching from the side of Herat to claim ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... many small shops; but the only stock in trade appeared to be heaps of children, who, even at that time of night, were crawling in and out at the doors, or screaming from the inside. The sole places that seemed to prosper amid the general blight of the place, were the public-houses; and in them, the lowest orders of Irish were wrangling with might and main. Covered ways and yards, which here and there diverged from the main street, disclosed little knots of houses, where drunken men and women ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... dash instead of an ignominious crawl, triumphantly fanned their lights along the base of that vast monument in which King Cheops vainly sought eternal privacy. What would he say, we wondered, could he see the crowds of tourists tearing out to pay him a call, on their way to the Sphinx? Would he blight them with a curse, or would he remember pearly nights of old, when his subjects assembled in multitudes for the feast of the Goddess Neith when the moon was full, and all the white, brightly painted houses along the Nile reflected their flowerlike illuminations in the water? ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... growth of this tree; because in rich soils and sheltered situations, the wood, though it thrives fast, is full of sap, and of little value; and is, likewise, very subject to ravage from the attacks of insects, and from blight. Accordingly, in Scotland, where planting is much better understood, and carried on upon an incomparably larger scale than among us, good soil and sheltered situations are appropriated to the oak, the ash, and other deciduous ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... seemed neither surprised at their coming nor curious. They gathered that in former days wagons had wound through these forest ways gathering the handiwork of the people, but that they came no more. To Tom it seemed a pathetic thing that Kaiser Bill should reach out his bloody hand and blight the peaceful occupation of this quaint little old man of the forest. Perhaps he would die, far away there in his tree-embowered cottage, before the wagons ever came again, and the overflowing basket would rot away and the windmills blow ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... delayed. At last, it fell—it fell. All who had wronged me met their dreadful doom. Ambition was changed to madness. Avarice was tortured with bankruptcy. Falsehood sought refuge in self destruction; and all—all—all—even the meanest of those who had contributed to blight my life—perished miserably at my will! And did the guilty suffer alone? Alas! impious, remorseless, horrible revenge! The innocent and the criminal suffered alike. A might approaching omnipotence was vouchsafed me, but no power of omniscience to direct my hand or stay its effects. ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... A various language; for his gayer 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, e're 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 ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... thought of them wimmen who had received their dead raised to life agin, he thought of the yearly sacrifice to Intemperance, the thousands and thousands of husbands, sons, brothers who are struck by the death blight now, makin' ready to fall into those oncounted graves. And he wanted to roust 'em up and save their souls and bodies alive and give them back to these wimmen agin, raised ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... some reason in view of Laura's romantic nature—that only a career of gloomy grandeur and high renown would impress the maiden whom yesterday he proposed to make happy forever, but to-day to blight with regret like a "worm i' the bud." He already had a vague presentiment that such a role would often mortify his tastes and inclinations most dismally; and yet, what had he henceforth to do with pleasure? But if, after he had practiced the austerity of an anchorite, ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... faints in the heat of the toilsome day. Look up! the lengthening shadows are falling like dew upon you! tired hearts, look up! purple-red hangs the clustering fruit of your life-long work; the vintage has come, the freest from blight that can ever come—the vintage of a ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Leslie's stamp are perhaps the most evil-tongued of all. They rise from obscurity, and finding wealth at their command, imagine that they can command obeisance and popularity. Woe betide other women who arouse their jealousy, for they will scandalise and blight the reputation of the purest of their sex in the suburban belief that the invention of scandal ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux
... 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 ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... also be detected, it is said, by the dark appearance of the bark, where the grub is at work: cut in and pull out the young grub. It is the best time of the year to catch and kill this pest. Cylindrical bark borers, which are little round, black, weevil-like beetles, often causing "fire-blight" in pears, etc., are now flying about fruit trees to lay their eggs; and many other weevils and boring beetles, especially the Pea weevil (Bruchus pisi, Fig. 215), the Pine weevil (Pissodes strobi, ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... random shot told? The secretary's eye did not falter, nor his figure lose an inch of its height, yet the impression made by his look and attitude were not the same; the fire had gone out of them; a blight had struck his soul—the flush of his ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... for fresh consumption, fetch a fair price, especially early in the season, but jam fruit sells at an average of 2-1/2d. per lb., at which price it pays fair wages, but is not a bonanza. As a rule the plants are very healthy, and any fungus pests to which they are subject, such as leaf blight, are easily kept in check by spraying, a knapsack pump being used for this purpose. The ground is kept well worked and free from weeds, whilst the plants are fruiting, and occasionally the ground is mulched, ...
— Fruits of Queensland • Albert Benson
... London, some blight had fallen on the inhabitants, death seemed everywhere, not seen but hinted at. Stray recollections of weird stories by H. G. Wells passed through the mind of Jones. He recalled the city of London when ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... hideous concomitants which he mentions are, after all, relatively minor and restricted dangers to man's civilization and moral soundness. They can [229] neither operate freely nor expand easily. The paralysis of horrified popular sentiment obstructs their propagation, and the blight of the death-penalty which hangs over the heads of their votaries is an additional guarantee of their being kept within bounds that minimize their perniciousness. But there are more fatal and further-reaching ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... forget what heroes once you charm'd, Whom at her feet fair Omphale disarm'd? Whose purple sail before Augustus flew, Who lost the world for Egypt's queen and you? To these proud trophies Henry's name unite, 100 Beneath your myrtle all his laurels blight: You serve yourself, when you my throne maintain, For Lore and Discord must together reign". So spoke the monster, and the vault around Trembling, threw back on Earth ...
— The Fourth Book of Virgil's Aeneid and the Ninth Book of Voltaire's Henriad • Virgil and Voltaire
... that lurks unseen in the shadows and hovers over the little lives of men for the working of harm, swooped down upon the camp and in a series of untoward happenings impaired its efficiency and impregnated the atmosphere with the blight ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... Tip answered, his eyes very blight; in his heart he sang "Glory!" And the angels in heaven sang for joy; for that night there had been laid aside a white robe and a crown ...
— Tip Lewis and His Lamp • Pansy (aka Isabella Alden)
... harsh rebuff, whereupon it subsided through hysterical levity into frigid and brittle sarcasm and gay defiance. For a while, accordingly, the feelings of the observer were deeply moved. Yet this did not make the character of Stephanie less detestable. The blight remains upon it—and always must remain—that it repels the interest of the heart. The added blight likewise rests upon it (though this is of less consequence to a spectator), that it is burdened with moral sophistry. Vicious conduct in a woman, according to Stephanie's logic, is not more culpable ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... for the swelling extacy of our young hearts, as those who have cradled and loved us grow proud in our successes? For myself, a life that has failed in every prestige of those that prophesied favourably—years that have followed on each other only to blight the promise that kind and well-wishing friends foretold—leave but little to dwell upon, that can be reckoned as success. And yet, some moments I have had, which half seemed to realize my early dream of ambition, and ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... part. It was highly admired at the time, and, amongst others, by Gray. He specially praises a passage which has often been quoted as representing Pope's highest achievement in his art. At the conclusion the goddess Dulness yawns, and a blight falls upon art, science, and philosophy. I quote the lines, which Pope himself could not repeat without emotion, and which have received the highest eulogies from ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... are so united That their love can never wane, Then I ween no man should blight it, Death ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... The 'apple-blight' of the Calvados must obviously have extended into the neighbouring department of the Eure, or at least into the great and busy arrondissement of Bernay, which gave the Monarchist candidate in September 1889 the tremendous majority of 5,550 votes in a ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... he laid his head upon a tomb, Not knowing it was Arthur's, at which sight One of her maidens told her, 'He is come,' And she went forth to meet him; yet a blight ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris
... marry Ray until I know," she had told herself over and over in great distress, "for I love him too well ever to bring any blight upon ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... At last came a 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 Brothers. They asked what they liked, and got it, ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... people seemed to have been of a serious cast of mind, which led to speculation, criticism, and the cultivation of the exact sciences. From Ferrara came Savonarola, the fanatical prophet who appeared during the moral blight which characterized the age of the Borgias, and Lucretia must frequently have recalled this man in whom her father, by the executioner's hand, sought to stifle the protestations of the faithful and upright against the immorality of ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... eight or ten villages and three or four Tokedars under a Zillahdar. The Zillahdar looks out for good lands to change for bad ones, where this is necessary, and where no objection is made by the farmer; sees that the Tokedars do their work properly; reports rain, blight, locusts, and other visitations that might injure the crop; watches all that goes on in his zillah, and makes his report to the planter whenever anything of importance happens in his particular part of the cultivation. Over all again comes ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... people who pass their days as do those who now live in the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf." They are free from invidious jealousies and the blight of avarice toward each other, free from doubt of the rectitude of their daughters and relieved from solicitude that the future of their sons, if they remain in the valley, will be influenced by dissipation ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... hillside, pleased, I must own, by the warm blight sunlight, the colour of the sea, and the smell of the aromatic herbs,—pleased, and half forgetful of the horrid heathenism that surrounded me, I heard a low wail as of an infant. I searched about, in surprise, and came on a beautiful baby, in rich swaddling bands, with a gold ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... patted the sleek head of the sad-eyed seal. Elsewhere she showed the father-hawk a leveret crouching in his form; she took young rabbits to the new spring grass; the fox to the fowl, the fly to the spider, the blight to the bud. Her weakly nestlings fell from tree and cliff to die, but she beheld unmoved; her weasel sucked the gray-bird's egg, yet no hand was raised against the thief, no voice comforted the screaming agony of the mother. ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... herein lay his own real danger. Yes, to bolt again, as he had done that time before, would be an easy way out. But its selfishness was too obvious. He could not do it. To do so would be to drag them in his train of disaster, to blight their lives and leave them under the grinding ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... usual blight to all such enterprises: a spy or a traitor revealed everything to Wirz. One day a guard came in, seized Baker and took him out. What was done with him I know not; we never heard of him after he ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... powerful and unerring movements would slow down simultaneously, as if they had been the functions of a living organism, stricken suddenly by the blight of languor; and Mr. Rout's eyes would blaze darker in his long sallow face. He was fighting this fight in a pair of carpet slippers. A short shiny jacket barely covered his loins, and his white ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... 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 a total perversion ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in view of Laura's romantic nature—that only a career of gloomy grandeur and high renown would impress the maiden whom yesterday he proposed to make happy forever, but to-day to blight with regret like a "worm i' the bud." He already had a vague presentiment that such a role would often mortify his tastes and inclinations most dismally; and yet, what had he henceforth to do with pleasure? But if, after he had practiced the austerity of an anchorite, she should ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... herself, contemplating the beautiful slumbering queen, "oh, that grief might pass away from her like a dark cloud—that no thunderbolt burst forth from it and strike that beloved head! But I am afraid the lightning will at last blight all the blossoms of her heart. O God, give her strength, nerve her in her sufferings, as Thou hast blessed her in her happiness! She is sleeping; let her slumber be peaceful and refreshing, so that it may invigorate her mind!" Madame von Berg leaned cautiously, in order not to disturb the ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... during two following seasons, New South Wales suffered a serious drought, which increased in severity. Rivers were exhausted, and their beds left dry. Not only the want of rain was felt, but a withering blight, travelling in a defined current over the cultivated districts, cut off their harvests. In two years the cultivation of wheat in Van Diemen's Land increased from twenty to thirty thousand acres, and the average price of ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... sugar in slave countries, and a greater impetus to slavery and the slave-trade." From the same report, we also learn that the prosperity of the Mauritius, no less than that of the West India Islands, had suffered a fearful blight, in consequence of the ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... know, is blind: defects that blight The loved one's charms escape the lover's sight, Nay, pass for beauties, as Balbinus glows With admiration of his Hagna's nose. Ah, if in friendship we e'en did the same, And virtue cloaked the error with ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... 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 knights of slavery, to see ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... been sharpened to a canine pointedness by the missile which had so narrowly grazed his life. Ellis had been goaded to a pitch of high exasperation by the solicitude and attentions of his fellows. It was his emphatically expressed opinion that the whole gathering lay under a blight of superlative youthfulness. In his mind he exempted Hal, over whose silence and distraction he was secretly worried. The cause was explained when the chairman rose to close ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... One plants what one considers the best seeds, and when the little green shoots come up, it's terribly hard to make them live at all. It is only by constant care that they are made to thrive and all sorts of storms are likely to rise out of a clear sky and blight them. Some of the seeds one thought would surely grow the fastest are total disappointments, while others that one just planted to fill in, fairly astonish one by their growth, but if at the end of the freshman year the garden looks green and well cared for, it's ...
— Grace Harlowe's First Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... to the Teazer, some of the kroomen on board Mr Beecroft's Victoria let go her anchor, and there she lay exposed entirely to the fire of the blacks. On seeing this, Captain Lyster pulled back to her to learn what was the matter. "What has occurred now?" he asked of Mr Blight, the boatswain. "The kroomen let go the anchor without orders," he replied. "Then slip your cable, and get out of this," exclaimed Captain Lyster. "It's a chain cable, clenched to the bottom, and we can't unshackle ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... whispered him to condense into small compass, and drop into her tender bosom a germ of evil that would be sure to blossom darkly soon, and bear black fruit betimes. Such was his sense of power over this virgin soul, trusting him as she did, that the minister felt potent to blight all the field of innocence with but one wicked look, and develop all its opposite with but a word. So—with a mightier struggle than he had yet sustained—he held his Geneva cloak before his face, and hurried onward, making no sign of recognition, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... enabled him to carry on a propaganda of hellenization. The disappearance for three centuries of the national consciousness in Servia and Bulgaria was not the sole work of the Moslem invader; a more fatal blight to the national languages and culture were the Greek bishops and clergy who conducted their churches and schools. And if Kinglake knew nothing of Bulgaria as late as 1834 it was because every educated person in that country called himself a Greek. ...
— The Balkan Wars: 1912-1913 - Third Edition • Jacob Gould Schurman
... man be too weak to put them down, Christ is not. Though man neglect to put them down, Christ will not. If man dare not fight on the Lord's side against sin and evil, the Lord's earth will fight for Him. Storm and tempest, blight and famine, earthquakes and burning mountains, will do His work, if nothing else will. As He said Himself, if man stops praising Him, the very stones will cry out, and own Him as their King. Not that the blessed Lord ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... they should ever need to return fertilizers, but it was only a few years until they yearned for the fertility they had extravagantly wasted. Buildings inevitably decay and they may be destroyed by fire or storm. Orchards may be overturned by a cyclone or be destroyed by blight or by the thousand enemies of the various varieties of fruit trees. The land may be injured by washing that may require years to repair. A single storm has destroyed fields in this way that never can be restored. Noxious weeds take possession of land that can only be eradicated by infinite pains. ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... 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
... speedy growth of this tree; because in rich soils and sheltered situations, the wood, though it thrives fast, is full of sap, and of little value; and is, likewise, very subject to ravage from the attacks of insects, and from blight. Accordingly, in Scotland, where planting is much better understood, and carried on upon an incomparably larger scale than among us, good soil and sheltered situations are appropriated to the oak, the ash, and other deciduous trees; and the larch is now generally ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... the first time how the relative position of these two women had shifted. Laura Bowman wasn't red-headed for nothing; out from under the blight of Bowman and that hateful marriage, she had already thrown off some of her physical frailness; the nervous tension showed itself now in energy. She was moving swiftly about putting to rights after my meal while she listened. But Barbara sat looking straight ahead of her; ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... a soothfast word, Not the true parent is the woman's womb That bears the child; she doth but nurse the seed New-sown: the male is parent; she for him, As stranger for a stranger, hoards the germ Of life; unless the god its promise blight. And proof hereof before you will I set. Birth may from fathers, without mothers, be: See at your side a witness of the same, Athena, daughter of Olympian Zeus, Never within the darkness of the womb Fostered nor fashioned, but a bud more bright Than any ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... of promise grew The chilling blight of separation knew. Scarce had he told his heart's unquiet case, And JANE to shun him ceas'd to mend her pace, And learnt to listen trembling as he spoke, And fondly judge his words beyond a joke; When, ...
— Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs • Robert Bloomfield
... by it. It holds its position by love. No publisher may say to it: "Buy my books, not those of my rival"; no scientist may forbid it to give his opponent a hearing; no religious body may dictate to it; no commercial influence may throw a blight over it. It ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... prodoocers wouldn't be there at all. Things is gettin' pretty tight on farms now. It means about sixteen hours hard graft a-day to make not half what a railwayman makes in eight hours. If you happen to have grapes or oranges, if they manage to escape the frost, an' hail, an' caterpillar, then the blight ketches 'em, or there's a drewth, and there ain't none; an' if there's any, there's so much that there ain't no sale for 'em; and the farmer's life I reckon ought to be stopped as gamblin', for a gambler's life ain't one bit ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... is judgment; But He strikes with the hands of men, And His blight would wither our manhood If we smote not ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... handsome incomes until about twenty years ago, when the blight, more devastating than the cotton boll weevil, came with destruction as swift as that which befell Sennacherib. I heard the story of an old plantation near Lipa, whose high-bred Castilian owner once lived in splendor, his imported horses gay in harness made of ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... richer and fuller life, a softer beauty. But although an intimacy greater than he and she had yet known, would seem to be enforced by this winter of isolation and leisure, she did not, for a time, see as much of him as before. A constraint, almost like a blight upon their friendship, seemed to have fallen between them ever since the night that she had danced. Seagreave did not come down to Gallito's cabin quite so frequently in the evenings, and, according to Jose, spent much time by his own fireside ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... alone; she held, within, A second principle of Life, which might Have dawned a fair and sinless child of sin;[dz] But closed its little being without light, And went down to the grave unborn, wherein Blossom and bough lie withered with one blight; In vain the dews of Heaven descend above The bleeding flower and blasted fruit ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... his essay on "The Training of the Negro" in Century Magazine of October, 1906, said that in the large cities the Negro is being forced by competition into the most degraded and least remunerative occupations; that such occupations make them helpless to combat the blight of squalor and disease which are inevitable in these cities, and therefore many of them are being destroyed ...
— Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt • William James Edwards
... and tears. The days are gone! no more, no more, The cruel fates allow; And, though I'm hardly twenty-four, I'm not a lover now. Lady, the mist is on my sight, The chill is on my brow; My day is night, my bloom is blight— I'm not a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 288, Supplementary Number • Various
... the first-line troops, the army in battle array. Instead he saw the base camps, the non-combatant followers of the army, a great deal that was confused and sordid, very little that was glorious or fine. It might conceivably have been possible for him to curse the whole army and cast a blight upon its enterprise, when his eyes rested only on the camp-followers, the baggage trains, the mobs of cattle, the maimed and unfit men; when the fine show of the fighters was out of sight. Plainly ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... with the boatman. They were now, he knew, between the two Niles, which joined their waters at Khartoum. The country here had evidently been rich and prosperous before the host of the Mahdi passed like a blight over it. They halted a few miles from the river, near a ruined and deserted village. Edgar was told to watch the camels while they plucked heads of corn from the deserted fields, while the Arabs lit a fire and baked some cakes. None of these were offered to Edgar, who had to content ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... that Drake was stepping hastily aside, so that not even his coat sleeve might be brushed by the advancing figure of the elderly, retired judge. And before Judge Marshall had time to speak, Dundee saw that a blight had touched, at last, the solid friendship of the women; that they did not look at each other with that air of standing together whatever happened, but that their eyes, not meeting at all, became secret, ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... this, too. Perhaps even these hardened men and the more than hardened woman whose presence was in itself a blight, recognised heroism when they saw it; for when the lawyer, with a certain obvious reluctance, laid his hand on the bolts of the door with the remark, "This is not my work, you know; I am but following out instructions very minutely given me," the smothered growls and grunts ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... Alas! alas! Like a vapor the golden vision Shall fade and pass, And thou wilt find in thy heart again Only the blight of pain, And bitter, bitter, ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... withdrawal of the royalists from the neighborhood of the coast was merely a strategic retreat that made the occupation of the capital a more or less empty performance. This blunder and a variety of other mishaps proved destined to blight his military career. Unfortunate in the choice of his subordinates and unable to retain their confidence; accused of irresolution and even of cowardice; abandoned by Cochrane, who sailed off to Chile and left the army stranded; incapable of ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... it to the course once chosen, was also no indictable offence. Nor could the North on its part be taxed with crime for its "higher law fanaticism," which was simply the spirit of the age; or for seeing early what all believe now, that slavery was a blight upon the land. Much as was "nominated in the bond" of the Constitution, neither law nor equity forbade free States to increase the more rapidly in numbers, wealth, and other elements of prosperity; and northern congressmen must have been other than human, if, seeing this increase and being in the ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... gratefully for the destitute and the dying. It was expected, and justly too, that the land of apostolic revivals would be the first to imitate the apostles in the work of saving the heathen. A failure to do this may bring a blight upon the churches, if it has not ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble
... others; for since the virtue of holiness or taboo is, so to say, a powerful explosive which the smallest touch may detonate, it is necessary in the interest of the general safety to keep it within narrow bounds, lest breaking out it should blast, blight, and destroy whatever it comes into ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... and the master of the owls. I talk to the wild cat in the hush. I call Tikoloshe (a water spirit) out of the river in the night-time and ask him questions. I make sickness do my bidding on men and cattle. I drive it away when I like. I can bring blight to the crops, and stop the milk of cows. I can, by my magic medicines, find out the wicked ones who do these things. I alone can look upon Icanti (a fabulous serpent) and not die. I know the mountain where Impandulu ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... his head gravely: "Not weeks, but years, of a different life are needed. You must give up the laboratory altogether if you want to live. Remember your mother's fate and your father's early death—think of the deadly blight that fell so soon upon the rare beauty of your sister. Some day you will realize your danger: realize it now, in time. Close your laboratory, lock up your library, say adieu to Paris, and lead the life of a traveler, an Arab, a Tartar. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... comp. Arc. 48-53, Ham. iii. 4. 64, "Here is your husband; Like a mildew'd ear Blasting his wholesome brother." A mildew blast is one giving rise to that kind of blight called mildew (A.S. meledeaw, honey-dew), it being supposed that the prevalence of dry east winds was ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... knowledge exert an acidulating influence upon female temper, or produce an ossifying effect on female hearts? Is ignorance an inevitable concomitant of refinement and delicacy? Does the knowledge of Greek and Latin cast a blight over the flower-garden, or a mildew in the pantry and linen closet; or do the classics possess the power of curdling all the milk of human-kindness, all the streams of tender sympathy in a woman's nature, as rennet coagulates ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... vitiated as the breath of a toad! The very saints could not be revivified from such a poison, much less our poor selves, sir, who strive a lifetime constructing character for those damned polluters to blight with their graveyard whisperings! I detest it, sir! The stench of it is repulsive to honest men and gentle women! But come," he added more genially, "before we ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... three rooms were devoted exclusively to "books printed in the Fifteenth Century: of which they possessed about fifteen hundred." This intelligence recruited my spirits; and I began to look around with eagerness. But alas! although the crop was plentiful, a deadly blight had prevailed. In other words, there was number without choice: quantity rather than quality. Yet I will not be ill-natured; for, on reaching the third of these rooms, and the last in the suite, Monsieur Thiebaut placed before me the ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... of our doom and our dread Ye were cruel and callous. Grim Death with our fighters ye fed Through the jaws of your gallows. But a blasting and blight was the fee For which ye had bartered them. And we smite with the sword that from ye We had gained when ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... yourselves, oh! men of the Sagalie Tyee, or I shall blight you with my evil eye. Care for yourselves and do not follow me." On and on she danced through the thickest of the wilderness, on and on they followed until they reached the very heart of the seagirt neck of land we ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... East, Over a continent of blight, Like a maleficent Influence released From the most squalid cellarage of hell, The Wind-Fiend, the abominable - The Hangman Wind that tortures temper and light - Comes slouching, sullen and obscene, Hard on the skirts of the embittered night; And in a cloud unclean Of excremental ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... Has the withering blight known as Bolshevism any such redeeming traits to its credit account? The consensus of opinion down to the present moment gives an emphatic, if summary, answer in the negative. Every region over which it swept is blocked with heaps of unsightly ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... She had up till that moment, with the instinctive aversion which mourners only know, and which we have formerly alluded to in the case of Martha, been shrinking from facing the gladsome light of heaven, caring not to look abroad on the blight of an altered world. But the few words her sister uttered, and which the other auditors manifestly had not comprehended, all at once rouse her from her seat of pensive sadness, and her shadow is seen hurrying by the darkened ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... roof with Tai-yue in dowager lady Chia's suite of rooms, he naturally became comparatively more friendly with her than with his other cousins; and this friendliness led to greater intimacy and this intimacy once established, rendered unavoidable the occurrence of the blight of ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... sometimes fostering, sometimes crushing each other. Out of the remains of the dead arises a new generation, with an increase of vital impulse. It seems as though the ice-crowned Andes looked down with envy on the luxuriant vegetation of the forests, and sought to blight it by sending down cold, nightly winds. The low temperature of the night counteracts that extreme development which the humidity of the soil and the great heat of the day promote. But what the vegetation loses in upward growth it gains in superficial extension, and thereby ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... sort, together with new power sources to replace the fossil fuels on which factory, home, and vehicle now depend, might also all but eliminate the growing smog and air-pollution blight. ...
— The Practical Values of Space Exploration • Committee on Science and Astronautics
... what can there have been, worth speaking of, to break? Ours was everything a relation could be, filled to the brim with the wine of consciousness; and if it was to have no meaning, no better meaning than that such a creature as you could breathe upon it, at your hour, for blight, why was I myself dealt with all for deception? why condemned after a couple of short years to find the golden flame—oh, the golden flame!—a mere handful of black ashes?" Our young woman so yielded, at moments, to what was ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... perceive the same sad evidences of neglect, public grounds unattended, roads uncared for, mills and other public works crumbling into ruin. These palpable signs of decay most strongly impress him. A blight seems to have come over this lately fair and prosperous town. Rapidly it is becoming a 'deserted village,' a 'city ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... the failure of fair promise, because I took it to my heart as token of what would come to me in the budding of my years and hope. And even then, being much possessed, and full of a foolish melancholy, I felt a sad delight at being doomed to blight and loneliness; not but that I managed still (when mother was urgent upon me) to eat my share of victuals, and cuff a man for laziness, and see that a ploughshare made no leaps, and sleep of a night without dreaming. And my mother half-believing, in her fondness and affection, that what ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... couldn't get over was the fact that this particular blight seemed, in a tradition of self-respect, so undeserved and so arbitrary. No doubt people had a right to take the line they liked; but why should his people have liked the line of pushing and toadying and lying and cheating? What had their forefathers—all ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... of Soil. Planting of Seeds. Budding, Grafting, and Transplanting. Training the Limbs. Attention to the Soil. Manuring. Filberts. Figs. Currants. Gooseberries. Raspberries. Strawberries. Grapes. To Preserve Fruit; Modes of Preserving Fruit-Trees. Fire Blight. Worms, 347 ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... not the first, the fairest of the year: For thee the Graces lead the dancing hours, And Nature's ready pencil paints the flowers: When thy short reign is past, the feverish sun The sultry tropic fears, and moves more slowly on. So may thy tender blossoms fear no blight, Nor goats with venom'd teeth thy tendrils bite, 60 As thou shalt guide my wandering feet to find The fragrant greens I seek, my ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... way he flipped a rosebud covered with blight, kicked off a snail which was crawling on the path; then, halfway down the path, he suddenly raised his head and gave a look at ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... mountain land in some sections of Italy is said to be completely covered with chestnut trees. In my state, the weevil is the scourge of chestnuts; I had hoped that after the chestnut blight destroyed our native chestnuts, the Chinese and Japanese chestnuts would be free from that pest. Where it came from I do not know, unless it came from the chinkapin. West Virginia has chinkapins and these, being blight resistant, apparently have kept up the supply ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... accomplished the evil they had set out to do, made shift to sail away. And then, just after the palms of the island had sunk from sight below the water's edge, the unspeakable had happened. The Death that was not Death had arisen from out the sea and stood before the ship, and over it, and the blight of the thing lay along the decks like mould, and the ship sweated in the terror of that which ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... gentleman became excessively gallant, entreated his fair visitor to remain where she was for a tiny instant until he could descend and admit her, implored her with expansive gestures not on any account to go away and blight his life. As the sweep of the arm and the shrug of the shoulders betrayed only too plainly the fact that the hospitable gentleman was very much in a state of nature, except for the lather on his face, Esther took fright and bolted out of the gate, inwardly execrating the Gallic race and their ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... than strange; it was impressive, interesting, pathetic. Not guessing the cause, there was nothing to remind him that experience is as to intensity, and not as to duration. Tess's passing corporeal blight had been ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... scarcely seventeen when the Plague swept over Kennons. That mysterious blight, rising in the orient, traveling darkly and surely unto the remotest West, laid its blackened hand upon ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... little detour in silence, the corners of her mouth wilting, he would have declared, had he the words, like a field flower in the hands of a picnicker. Marylin could droop that way, so suddenly and so whitely that almost a second could blight her. ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... the small boulders of difficulty trip them up, for they are hopelessly unpractical; they have neither strength of purpose nor fortitude, and their best-laid schemes are always frustrated at the critical moment, by either the incurable blight of vacillation, or by the determination to amplify their scheme ere it has proved successful, sacrificing probable ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... us leave the din, the dust, the spite, The gloom and glare of towns, the plague, the blight; Amid the forest leaves and fountain spray There is the mystic home of our delight, And through the dim wood ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... Lady Harman would no doubt have gone on to the slow, tentative but finally conclusive statement of the new difficulty that had arisen out of her husband's jealousy and to the discussion of the more fundamental decisions it forced upon her, if a peculiar blight had not fallen upon their conversation and robbed it at last of even an appearance ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... the waters of the Cumberland, the lair of moonshiner and feudsman. The knight is a moonshiner's son, and the heroine a beautiful girl perversely christened "The Blight." Two impetuous young Southerners fall under the spell of "The Blight's" charms and she learns what a large part jealousy and pistols have in the love making ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... present and the past, troubled me, and I 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 ashamed ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... held a thousand or several thousand when the blight of the white man came, the abandoned paepaes are solemn and shrouded witnesses of the death of a race. The jungle runs over them, and only remnants remain of the houses that sat upon them. Their owners have died, leaving no posterity to inhabit their homes; neighbors ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... by ten years Debussy's junior, and were he less positive an individuality, less original a temperament, less fully the genius, he could never have realized himself. There would have descended upon him the blight that has fallen upon so many of the younger Parisian composers less determinate than he and like himself made of one stuff with Debussy. He, too, would have permitted the art of the older and well-established ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... with their Christmas dress of snow and icicles—these trees were clothed with the loveliest foliage, fresh and green and feathery, which no winter's storms or nipping frosts had ever come near to blight. And in the little space between the door where Hugh stood and these wonderful trees was drawn up, as if awaiting him, the prettiest, queerest, most delicious little carriage that ever was seen. It was open; the cushions with which it was lined ...
— The Tapestry Room - A Child's Romance • Mrs. Molesworth
... "Make yourself some clothes. You can shake Dandy Dale's outfit, except when we're on the trail.... And, say, if you knew what I had to pay for this stuff you'd think there was a bigger robber in Alder Creek than Jack Kells.... And, come to think of it, my name's now Blight. You're my daughter, if any one asks." Joan was so grateful to him for the goods and the permission to get out of Dandy Dale's suit as soon as possible, that she could only smile her thanks. Kells stared at her, then turned abruptly away. Those little unconscious acts of hers seemed to affect ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... a blemish, but we do not see it. We know the weakness that to-morrow perhaps will blight our joy, but we do not feel it. We hear the word that ought to deal our hopes a mortal blow; and it does not even touch them!... And our reason, which knows, sees, hears and foresees, remains dumb, as though ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... 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 ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... as she gives you. The man doesn't live who is clean enough in heart and in life to be worthy of such a treasure. But I do expect you to be, Felix, and I must assure myself that you are, clean enough and honorable enough not to blight all the rest of her life. What is past is past, but from now on there must be nothing that will not bear the light ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... fear of complications, be careful about descending from the lofty heights of logic to the common level of impulse and affection. Many years before, Warwick, when a lad of eighteen, had shaken the dust of the town from his feet, and with it, he fondly thought, the blight of his inheritance, and had achieved elsewhere a worthy career. But during all these years of absence he had cherished a tender feeling for his mother, and now again found himself in her house, amid the familiar surroundings of his childhood. His visit had brought joy to his mother's heart, ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... Peter was not addicted to habits of intemperance, not even to looking on dandelion wine when it was pale yellow, we did not exactly see why Felicity should have selected such a device. But Peter was perfectly satisfied, so nobody cast any blight on his happiness by carping criticism. Later on Felicity told me she had worked the bookmark for him because his father used to drink before ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... days of his prosperity he has acquired a taste for. The Oil Rivers, which send out the greatest quantity of trade on the West Coast possessions, subsist entirely on palm oil for it. Were anything to happen to the oil palms in the way of blight, or were a cheap substitute to be found for palm oil at home, the population of the Oil Rivers, even at its present density, would starve. The development of trade is a necessary condition for the existence of the natives, and the discovery ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... committed by a civilized nation, and it is irrevocable, as its results are to be fatal and lasting. But upon the good reality of unity, the deadly dream of military greatness descended as a killing blight, and the evil vision of political power has blasted the common sense of a whole people. It is one thing to be one, as a united family, each working for the good of each and all; it is another thing, and a worse thing, to be one as a vast and idle army, sitting down to besiege its own storehouses, ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... time regretfully, and said decidedly that "A.E." could not be his Messiah, as he abhorred the Absolute above everything else. He was infected with Pater's Relative, said Mr. Russell, "which has fallen like a blight on all English literature." So the boy—he was not yet twenty-one—went out into the night with, I suppose, another of ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... back to my sitter I found that the blight which had always settled upon them when they were together was disappearing quickly. They were talking quite amiably, and although I should have been glad to have said something to show that I noticed the change, ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... be bettered by reforms of detail, there was more danger to society than in the crass indifference of the selfish and the unreflecting. When the natural leaders of society avow that they despair of the future, fatalism spreads like a contagious blight among the rank and file, until even discontent is numbed into silence. Nor does the evil end here. The idealists pay for their contempt of the real, not merely with their fortunes and their lives, but, worse still, with their intellectual patrimony. Just as a government ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... of sorrow, wreck, and blight; Think rather of those moments bright When to the consciousness of right His course was true, When Wisdom prospered in ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... other things, but nothing in which is an assurance of perpetuity, and little that is truly wisdom. Our vaunted elixir vito is the art of printing with moveable types. What good will those do when posterity, struck by the inevitable intellectual blight, shall have ceased to read what is printed? Our libraries will become its stables, our ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... it became clear again, as happens a thousand times during every year in the East, that what is not nipped in the bud grows with such malignant swiftness as finally to blight all honest intentions. Had steps been taken on or about the 23rd May to detain forcibly in Peking the ringleader of the recalcitrant Military Governors, one General Ni Shih-chung of Anhui, history would have been ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... Morny was king of the Bourse and Mexico was to make every Frenchman rich; after the commune and the siege, when the Hotel de Ville was in ruins, the palace of the Tuileries still aflame, the column gone from the Place Vendome, and everything a blight and waste; and I have marked it rise from its ashes, grandly, proudly, and like a queen come to her own again, resume its primacy as the only complete metropolis in ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... find him, as the case might be, but in either event to eat his heart in jealousy and impatience. When he found him he burned to insult him by asking him what tailor he advertised, or by addressing him as the Housemaid's Terror or the Nursegirl's Blight. He ground tegmenta of 'Maud' between his teeth as he looked at him. 'His essences turn the live air sick,' and 'that oiled and curled Assyrian bull, smelling of musk and of insolence.' And it happened one night that Captain MacMadden, arriving ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... 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? ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... him day after day, With heads on one side and eyes so bright, Surveying the monster, began to say, "Why should this fellow our prospects blight? ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... urge that patronage is the curse and blight of all such endeavours, and to impress upon the working men that they must originate and manage for themselves. And to ask them the question, can they possibly show their detestation of drunkenness better, ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... la Morte,' and at every turn there is something to remind us of the deadly blight which fell upon the city when its trade was lost. The faded colours, the timeworn brickwork, the indescribable look of decay which, even on the brightest morning, throws a shade of melancholy over the whole ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond
... fertile must be reinforced with friendship. It is the sap that preserves from blight and withering; it is the sunshine that beckons on the blossoming and fruitage; it is the starlight dew that perfumes life with sweetness and besprinkles it with splendor; it is the music-tide that sweeps the soul, scattering ...
— For Auld Lang Syne • Ray Woodward
... The game's up: we must save the swag. (TO DUMONT.) Sir, since your key, on which I invoke the blight of Egypt, has once more defaulted, my feelings are unequal to a repetition of yesterday's distress, and I shall simply pad the hoof. From Turin you shall receive the address of my banker, and may ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson
... fights and falls, his fame no blight shall know, As long as through heaven's free expanse the breezes freely blow, As long as in the forest wild the green leaves flutter free, As long as rivers, mountain-born, roll freely to the sea, As long as free the eagle's wing exulting cleaves the skies, As long as from a freeman's ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... befell that, 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 convalescence ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... that when she was in her fresh and lovely youth, some strange misfortune had fallen upon her, and that she had worn since then—most innocently—the mark of a direful tragedy. One lady, old, nearly, as Aunt Hannah, but upon whom there had never fallen any blight of poverty or wrong, loved the poor creature well, and she only, of all the inhabitants of the village, frequently entered the cottage where the 'Black Witch' dwelt. This lady, it was said, had known her when both were young, and carried forever locked in ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... me, Life's little day—full, rich, and blessed, for all that storm and wreck and blight have, once and again, befallen me, as was God's will, and therefore, for my eternal good—when, for me, Life's little day darkens to its outgoing, may the lights of the Home that changes not, save from glory to glory, shine out for me through night and chill with such loving welcome as ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... families. The Administration will propose authority to contract for 35 thousand additional public housing units in each of the next 2 fiscal years for communities which will participate in an integrated attack on slums and blight. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Dwight D. Eisenhower • Dwight D. Eisenhower
... threatened almost as much by disgrace to name and family as by the disgrace of self. Keith's instinct was always to deal actively with danger. But this blow, whether it fell on him by discovery or by confession, could not be countered. As blight falls on a rose from who knows where, the scandalous murk would light on him. No repulse possible! Not even a wriggling from under! Brother of a murderer hung or sent to penal servitude! His daughter niece to a murderer! His dead mother-a murderer's mother! And to wait day after day, week after ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... 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 Crabbe's ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... it not with the exorbitant growth of London that many an ill has spread over the land? London is the antithesis of the domestic ideal; a social reformer would not even glance in that direction, but would turn all his zeal upon small towns and country districts, where blight may perhaps be arrested, and whence, some day, a reconstituted national life may act upon the great centre of corruption. I had far rather see England covered with schools of cookery than with schools of the ordinary kind; the issue would be infinitely more hopeful. Little girls ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... The straining cord has broken, and my heart Riots in free delirium! O, Heaven! I struggled with it, but it mastered me! I fought against it, but it beat me down! I prayed, I wept, but Heaven was deaf to me; And every tear rolled backward on my heart, To blight and poison! ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... to this prison-house Descended, like an angel piteous, To heal all 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
... indefensible causes, however, which too frequently drive the independent farmer out of the country. In too many cases it happens that the rapacity and dishonesty of the agent, countenanced or stimulated by the necessities and reckless extravagance of the landlord, fall, like some unwholesome blight, upon that enterprise and industry which would ultimately, if properly encouraged, make the country prosperous and her landed proprietors independent men. We allude to the nefarious and monstrous custom of ejecting ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... exported from the port of Manilla. Indigo, coffee, sugar, cotton, and tobacco, are grown in abundance; indeed, were the resources of the islands fully developed, they would prove some of the richest in the world. But it may truly be said, that where Spaniards rule there a blight is sure ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... of this month, until the end of May, is the best season for sowing wheat in the districts of Richmond Hill, Phillip, Nelson, and Evan, as it is not so subject to the caterpillar, smut, rust, and blight. Oats may also be sown now for a general crop. Asparagus haulm should also be cut and carried off the ground, and ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann
... there is a small mounted lens in a leather loop alongside, which has often to be used. The compass {22} itself is so placed that you can see it well while either sitting or standing up, or when lying at full length on the deck, with the back against a pillow propped by the mizen mast, the blight sun or moon overhead, and a turn or two of the mainsheet cast about your body to keep the sleepy steersman from rolling over into the water, as shown ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... return to me, Drear, drear must be life's night! And, mother, I can almost see Even now the gathering blight—my soul Faints, ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... never has been so sudden and so terrible a fall from such a height of any man in this nation—not excepting that of Aaron Burr. John C. Calhoun, in talent, learning, and statesmanship, was greatly superior to Jackson, and unsurpassed by any man of the age. But the breath of Jackson was the blight which withered his laurels, and crushed his prospects, and destroyed his usefulness forever, in ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... crowd, saw the crowd looking up to these trainers and employers of pickpockets, hailing them "captains of industry"! They reaped only where and what others had sown; they touched industry only to plunder and to blight it; they organized it only that its profits might go to those who did not toil and who despised those who did. "Have I gone mad in the midst of sane men?" I asked myself. "Or have I been mad, and have I suddenly become sane ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... discontented and troublesome, now settled down submissively to their yoke; the Spaniards began to work in earnest on their farms; and there descended upon island affairs a brief St. Martin's Summer of peace before the final winter of blight and death set in. The Admiral, however, was obviously in precarious health; his ophthalmia became worse, and the stability of his mind suffered. He had dreams and visions of divine help and comfort, much needed by him, poor soul, in all his ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... have a great deal to war with in the habits of thought acquired by their mothers from their own early life. Everywhere the fatal spirit of imitation, of reference to European standards, penetrates, and threatens to blight whatever of original ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... with delight, The true, good, and beautiful seeking; Hiddigeigei often felt grief's deadly blight, And with ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... and die. Such is the fate of all the dainty things That dance in wind and 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 fruit of ...
— A Florentine Tragedy—A Fragment • Oscar Wilde
... the opinion that rust is but an earlier stage of mildew or blight, the one form of parasite being capable of development into the other, and the fructification characteristic of the two supposed genera having been evolved on one and the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883 • Various
... oath; (3) then the exacted oath of allegiance; (4) any oath whatever; (5) in early Christian use any sacred or solemn act, and especially any mystery where more was meant than met the ear or eye" (Blight's "Select Sermons of St. Leo ...
— The Church: Her Books and Her Sacraments • E. E. Holmes
... hopes man nurses, Never deem them idly born; Never think that deathly curses Blight them ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... Charles Barclay was on his way to Canada, vigorously intent on the new life before him. Agnes drew strength and comfort from the steadfast look of her brother's eyes, as he whispered to her, "Don't fear. Trust God, and be patient." The blight fell away from her, after that. If she was never a light-hearted girl again, she became something even sweeter and nobler. They never talked together about him, for the father had forbidden it; and, indeed, they needed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... of humiliation, and, far from rebelling at or despising the small establishment, comparatively speaking, provided for her by Mr. Carlyle, she felt thankful to him for it. But to be told continuously that this was more than he could afford, that she was in fact a blight upon his prospects, was enough to turn her heart to bitterness. Oh, that she had had the courage to speak out openly to her husband, that he might, by a single word of earnest love and assurance, have taken the weight from ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... these, the black death, the famines, the hundred years' war, the free companies, the abasement of the church, the great schism—these things were misfortunes to which our modern time can find no parallel. They came suddenly upon Western Europe and defiled it like a blight.... They have made the mediaeval idea odious to every half-instructed man and have stamped even its beauty with associations ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
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