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Canker   Listen
verb
Canker  v. t.  (past & past part. cankered; pres. part. cankering)  
1.
To affect as a canker; to eat away; to corrode; to consume. "No lapse of moons can canker Love."
2.
To infect or pollute; to corrupt. "A tithe purloined cankers the whole estate."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Canker" Quotes from Famous Books



... definitely; it evokes in him the humanising sense of grace and melody, not merely by enticing him to study good models, but by the very act of composition. It gives him a vent for sorrows, doubts, and aspirations, which might otherwise fret and canker within, breeding, as they too often do in the utterly dumb English peasant, self-devouring meditation, dogged melancholy, and fierce fanaticism. And if the effect of verse-writing had stopped there, all had been well; but bad models have had their ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... canker of the mind, The discord that disorders sweet heart's tune, The abortive bastard of a coward mind, The lightfoot lackey that runs post by death, Bearing the letters which contain our end; The busy advocate that sells his ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 486 - Vol. 17, No. 486., Saturday, April 23, 1831 • Various

... know that I shall ask that sacrifice of you. A part of your brain is asleep now, but it is a very active and insistent part when awake. In time you might revert—and resentment is a fatal canker; but let's leave it open. It is generally a mistake to settle things off-hand. Let them ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... no means all the insect pests which the fruit grower has to combat, but they are usually the most important. Canker worm and tent caterpillars often do great damage in unsprayed orchards, but they are easily controlled by an application of a poison as soon as they appear. The same is true of other caterpillars and leaf eating worms. Apple tree borers are frequently ...
— Apple Growing • M. C. Burritt

... above it, that it should make the earth tremble. No, monsieur, you are searching for excuses for your annoyance with me. You are annoyed all the time. I vex you by my silence, still more by my speech. We are to be some time together, and I do not want to be a constant canker. Is it not possible for you to forget me, to ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith

... worms, like Herod, was the town, Because, like Herod, it had ruthlessly Slaughtered the Innocents. From the trees spun down The canker-worms upon the passers-by, Upon each woman's bonnet, shawl, and gown, Who shook them off with just a little cry; They were the terror of each favorite walk, The endless theme ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... magnificent, with a fitness Tartarean and diabolic. But under a glaring sun, amid green fields and blue skies, all its wickedness is revealed without its beauty. You see its works, and little more. The flame is hardly noticed. All that is seen is a canker eating up God's works, cracking the bones of its prey,—for that horrible cracking is uglier than all stage-scene glares,—cruelly and shamelessly under the very eye of the ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley

... or undefeated, the writer who always is trying to master something more difficult than the work he used to do preserves his self-respect and the respect of his worth-while neighbors. The fellow with the canker at his heart is not the battler but the envious shirker who is too "proud" ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing

... sorrow, to my humiliation, that it is not in my power to bear the canker of constant solitude. I had calculated that when shut out from every enjoyment, from every stimulus but what could be desired from intellectual exertion, my mind would rouse itself perforce. It is not so. Even intellect, even imagination will not dispense with the ray ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson

... childhood; to God submitting the rest: Not seeing the desolate years, the dungeon of Carisbrook drear; Eyes dry-glazed with fever, and none to lend even a tear! Now, all her heart to the little one goes; for, day upon day, As a rosebud in canker, she pales and pines, and the cough has its way. And the gardens of Richmond on Thames, the fine blythe air of the vale Stay not the waning pulse, and the masters of science fail. Then the little footsteps ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave

... as though he found them sweet: If, with a thousand wine-casks—call the hoard A million rather—in his cellars stored, He drinks sharp vinegar: nay, if, when nigh A century old, on straw he yet will lie, While in his chest rich coverlets, the prey Of moth and canker, moulder and decay, Few men can see much madness in his whim, Because the mass of ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace

... us more than those which are remote; interests which affect ourselves, more than those which affect our descendants. Citizens of the Southern States, to save a petty individual interest, are nursing in the bosom of society a malignant canker, which, if let alone, must one day, in the inevitable course of destiny, eat into its vitals. Heroic treatment will alone meet the demands of the case. It must be a surgical operation that will penetrate to the very roots of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... because for weeks past my life has been a living lie. At each service, I have mounted the steps of this pulpit, and have preached to you of sin and its atonement, and all the while my heart was sore, and my conscience eating into it like a canker. ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley

... grounds. Hurd, who had fleshed his polished weapon on poor Jortin, and had been received into the arms of the hero under whom he now fought, adventured to cast his javelin at Leland: it was dipped in the cold poison of contempt and petulance. It struck, but did not canker, leaves that were immortal.[169] Leland, with the native warmth of his soil, could not resist the gratification of a reply; but the nobler part of the triumph was, the assistance he lent to the circulation of Hurd's letter, by reprinting it with his own reply, to accompany ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... all be alike! There's all sorts of Christians: some stands fer sunshine, some fer shade; some fer beauty, some fer use; some up high, some down low. There's jes one thing all the flowers has to unite in fightin' ag'inst—that's the canker-worm, Hate. If it once gits in a plant, no matter how good an' strong that plant may be, it eats ...
— Lovey Mary • Alice Hegan Rice

... and there, is heard the voice of some solitary zealot, some isolated missionary for love, and truth, and philanthropic good, some dauntless apostle in the cause of Heart, denouncing selfish wealth as the canker of society: and, hark! that voice is not alone; there is a murmur on the breeze as the sound of many waters; it comes, it comes! and the young have caught it up; and manhood hears the thrilling strain that sinks ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... when I saw distinctly that the novel with which I was to revolutionize society and my own fortunes, and with the purpose of writing which in an unvexed seclusion I had buried myself in this expedient hamlet on the South Coast, was withered in the bud beyond redemption. To this lamentable canker of a seedling hope the eternal harmony of the sea was a principal contributor; but Miss Whiffle confirmed the blight. I had fled from the jangle of a city, and the worries incidental to a life of threepenny ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes

... into the full spirit of the fun. Not a murmur of anxiety from her father and mother in London reached her. Mrs. Lorrimer, in writing to Molly, had assumed as cheerful a tone as possible; she had alluded to no possible care, had hinted at no canker root of possible trouble. She had said, it is true, that it was rather unlikely that she and the Squire would return in time for the ball; but if this could not be managed, she hoped the children would enjoy themselves to the full ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade

... cannot serve two masters," Abel Ah Yo told her. "Hell is full of those who have tried. Single of heart and pure of heart must you make your peace with God. Not until you tell your soul to God right out in meeting will you be ready for redemption. In the meantime you will suffer the canker of the sin you ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London

... broken heart. You wrote to me to follow you here. I did so; first because I loved you; but you soon cured me of that; whatever gentle feeling, whatever pity, whatever humanity, was in my heart you withered up and destroyed, as the canker worm eats the corn, and the plague kills the child. You bade me cast out love from my breast as a vile thing, you turned my hand to iron, and my heart to stone; you told me to live for freedom and for revenge. I have done so; but you, ...
— Vera - or, The Nihilists • Oscar Wilde

... The work of creation, of transformation to desirable result, is the purest joy the human mind can experience. Fourteen hours a day is not too much for this kind of task. The difficulty is to gain skill of hand and eye, or training of mind, to this end. A fallacy, a canker at the heart of our social fabric today, is that the daily task is something to ...
— Euthenics, the science of controllable environment • Ellen H. Richards

... warns a man that he is working against his highest good, his art will lose its savour and its most skilful products will grow hateful, even to his immediate apprehension, infected as they will be by the canker ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... the canker of human differences. Your kindred souls discover that, though they think alike on the one point which drew you together, they differ strongly on others. There are other opinions, religious and political, than those which come within the ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby

... our friends in heaven: If that be true, I shall see my boy again; For, since the birth of Cain, the first male child, To him that did but yesterday suspire, There was not such a gracious creature born. But now will canker sorrow eat my bud, And chase the native beauty from his cheek; And he will look as hollow as a ghost, As dim and meagre as an ague's fit; And so he'll die; and, rising so again, When I shall meet him in the court of heaven I ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... with art or science. If her first vocation was business, she is bored to death by domesticity. But if she marries poverty, she looks on herself as a drudge, and though loyalty and pride may keep her from voicing her regrets, they eat like a canker worm in the bud,—and we have the neurosis of this type of housewife. Or else her experience in business makes her size up her husband more keenly, and we find her rebelling against his failure, criticizing him either openly to ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson

... over the castle, hard to endure by every one who dwelt within its walls. Disease lurked in the family like canker in a flower. Since the dark hour when the dying son had been carried into his father's presence, the baron had never left his room. His small measure of remaining strength had been broken; grief consumed mind and body. He would sit silently brooding throughout ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag

... then. You know that a snake is a queer proposition in a menagerie. They get sore mouths—canker the fakirs call it—and won't eat, and then, if you've got any investment in 'em you want to get it out mighty quick, for they are no orchids. I was pretty well on my uppers, after a bad season on ...
— Side Show Studies • Francis Metcalfe

... month; he will be too intent on subduing some rival chieftain or circumventing some favourite at court, on gaining some heathy hill and lake or adding to his bands some new troop of caterans, to inquire what she does, or how she amuses herself. And then will canker sorrow eat her bud, And chase the native beauty from her cheek; And she will look as hollow as a ghost, And dim and meagre as an ague fit, And so she'll die. And such a catastrophe of the most gentle creature on earth might have been prevented if Mr. Edward ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... well-disposed, and patient, and sweet-tempered. Years of neglect, oppression, and misrule, have been at work, to change their nature and reduce their spirit; miserable jealousies, fomented by petty Princes to whom union was destruction, and division strength, have been a canker at their root of nationality, and have barbarized their language; but the good that was in them ever, is in them yet, and a noble people may be, one day, raised up from these ashes. Let us entertain that hope! And let us not remember Italy the less regardfully, because, in every fragment of her ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens

... churches and palaces, and never remember the earthquake that would whelm them if once the pent volcano burst, if once the black mass covered below took flame and broke to the surface! Statesmen multiply their prisons, and strengthen their laws against the crime that is done—and they never take the canker out of the bud, they never save the young child from pollution. Their political economy never studies prevention; it never cleanses the sewers, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... and five shillings—a large sum for him—found its way from his kind hand to hers. Now the common ending might have come; now starvation, the slow, unwilling, recourse to more shame and deeper vice; then the forced hilarity, the unreal smile, which in so many of these poor creatures hides a canker at the heart; the gradual degradation—lower still and lower—oblivion for a moment sought in the bottle—a life of sin and death ended in a hospital. The will of Providence turned the frolic of three voluptuaries to good account; the prince gave ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton

... Canker— of foot, description, causes, symptoms, and treatment, 418 or grease (inflammation of heels with sebaceous secretion), description, causes, symptoms, and ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture

... perhaps at most no loser, as by the resumption of the Campanian domains, to which Aenaria was now added,(33) and above all by the abolition of the largesses of grain, which since the time of Gaius Gracchus had eaten like a canker into the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... seedlings valuable from their roots running near the surface. One of these seedlings was remarkable from its extremely dwarfed size, "forming itself into a bush only a few inches in height." Many varieties are particularly liable to canker in certain soils. But perhaps the strangest constitutional peculiarity is that the Winter Majetin is not attacked by the mealy bug or coccus; Lindley (10/93. 'Transact. Hort. Soc.' volume 4 page 68. For Knight's case see volume 6 page 547. When the coccus first appeared ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin

... Cultivators should know them. They destroy vast quantities of plant lice. The ground beetles are mostly cannibals, and should not be destroyed. The large black beetle, with coppery dots, makes short work with the Colorado potato beetles; and a bright green beetle will climb trees to get a meal of canker worms. Ichneumon flies are among our most useful insects. The much-abused dragon flies are perfectly harmless to us, but destroy many mosquitoes ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various

... their faith: "The trail of flame is ashen, And pleasure's lees are gray, And gray the fruit of passion Whose ripeness is decay; The stress of life is rancor, A madness born to slay; They only miss its canker Who live with God ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove

... you!" "God forbid," he cried, "that my 'gold and silver' should ever become 'cankered!' It would be a terrible thing for their 'rust' to 'witness against me,' and eat my 'flesh as it were fire'; and it would be yet more dreadful for the money which has such power for good to be itself given up to canker and rust!" Then he would meditate on the uncompromising declarations of Christ—"How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the Kingdom of God!" "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth

... amount. Prosperity is a more severe ordeal than adversity, especially sudden prosperity. "Easy come, easy go," is an old and true proverb. A spirit of pride and vanity, when permitted to have full sway, is the undying canker-worm which gnaws the very vitals of a man's worldly possessions, let them be small or great, hundreds, or millions. Many persons, as they begin to prosper, immediately expand their ideas and commence expending for ...
— The Art of Money Getting - or, Golden Rules for Making Money • P. T. Barnum

... are in a higher class than the cook, the waitress, the maid, but that we are all laborers alike, sisters by virtue of the service we are rendering society. That is, labor should be the last to recognize the canker of caste.[4] ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell

... saw that they were capable of two readings. Of course, it could not be otherwise. The plausible rascal must have conned them over until this essential was secured. Grant even went so far as to give them a grudging professional tribute. They held a canker of doubt, too, which it was difficult to dissect. Their veiled threats were perplexing. While their effect, as apart from literal significance, was fresh in his mind, he made a few notes ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy

... self-contempt and haunted, always, by the thought of his father. She longed to speak to him about his father's death, but as yet she did not dare. If once she could persuade him that that had not been his fault, she could, she thought, really help him. That was the secret canker at his heart and she could ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole

... refuge. But to-day his step lagged. The divine discontent of youth, the rebellion aginst the brute force of circumstance, seethed in him headily. Here he was, in the lusty April of his days, and yet life was bitter to his palate, and there was canker at the heart of the rose of ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler

... not his fault if such was the case. He undoubtedly, whether he actually invented it or not, established, communicated, spread the error of Naturalism. But he lived long enough and wrote hard enough to "work it out" in a singular fashion—to illustrate the rottenness of the tree by the canker of the fruit to such an extent, and in such variety of application and example, that nobody for a long time has had any excuse for grafting the one or eating the other. Personally—in those points of personality which touch literature really, and out of the range of mere gossip—he ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... Assembly considering how the errours of Independency and Separation (have in our Neighbour Kingdome of England) spread as a Gangraen, and do daily eat as a Canker; In so much that exceeding many Errours. Heresies, Schismes, and Blaspemies, have issued therefrom, and sheltered thereby; And how possible it is, for the same evils to invade, and overspread this Kirk and Kingdome, (lying within the same Island) by the spreading of their erronious ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland

... makes a slimy tea, which is excellent for the canker. Leaves and blossoms are both good. Those who have families should take some ...
— The American Frugal Housewife • Lydia M. Child

... most of my readers will be able to testify how perfectly harmless must be borax, it being one of the drugs so constantly used with honey, and recommended by the faculty as an excellent remedy for canker in the mouth. I am, as I have previously stated, the daughter of a medical man, and am perfectly acquainted with the danger attending the absorption of mineral colours into the system: under these circumstances, it is not likely that I should myself use that which would be injurious. Ladies, ...
— The Royal Guide to Wax Flower Modelling • Emma Peachey

... That we shall see and know our friends in heaven: If that be true, I shall see my boy again; For, since the birth of Cain, the first male child, To him that did but yesterday suspire, There was not such a gracious creature born. But now will canker sorrow eat my bud And chase the native beauty from his cheek, And he will look as hollow as a ghost, As dim and meagre as an ague's fit; And so he'll die; and, rising so again, When I shall meet him in the court of heaven I shall not know him: therefore never, never Must I behold ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... is disappearing. The chance guest is no longer welcome to the family table; we are ashamed of our daily routine, or we have an idea that our fare is not worthy of being shared. Whatever it is, unconscious as it often is, it is a canker in the family life of to-day. It leads to selfishness, to a laxness in home manners very demoralizing. It is doubtless one of the great factors in the distinct deterioration ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards

... protest at his folly, "What do I care who has the first place? It's well I do not, for she would not permit such a reprobate as I, with evil in my heart like that cursed worm in the chestnut, to have any place worth naming—unless I can introduce a little canker of evil in her heart also. I wish I could. That would bring us nearer together and upon the same level." Annie saw the landscapes. She looked away from the man by her side and for a few moments forgot him. The scenes upon which she was gazing were associated with another, and she ardently ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe

... The canker of civilisation had got to him even in Bogota, and he could not find it in himself to go down and assassinate a blind man. Of course, if he did that, he might then dictate terms on the threat of assassinating them all. But—Sooner or later ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... them. The path to honour and distinction, even to fame itself, had lain plainly open before him—and now everything was so different. The sun which he had thought was only rising was already setting. He knew now that the fruit which looked so sweet and luscious had the canker-worm feeding on the core; that the flesh which seemed so healthy was really tainted and leprous; and that, worse than all, the brightest and sweetest promise of his life, a promise infinitely sweeter ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith

... son of Robert E. Lee. He was not a soldier by education, but by instinct. A graduate of Harvard College and the stroke oar of his class, he was well prepared for military life, and the third of his line to bear arms for the United States. But no war ensued; the canker of a long peace was ...
— Memorial Addresses on the Life and Character of William H. F. Lee (A Representative from Virginia) • Various

... relation to life, or quarrelling about languages no one ever uses, blunts their sensibilities. At all events, they have none of that loyalty distinguishing members of other learned professions. The canker of jealousy ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross

... days are in the yellow leaf; The flowers and fruits of Love are gone; The worm, the canker, and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron

... the humblest preserves something of courtesy and ease, which tells of breed. I remember those clear evenings when, after the peaceful navigation of the day, I used to stop and draw up my dahabiya to the bank of the river. (I speak now of out-of-the-way places—free as yet from the canker of the tourist element—such as I habitually chose.) It was in the twilight at the hour when the stars began to shine out from the golden-green sky. As soon as I put foot upon the shore, and my arrival was signalled by the barking of the watchdogs, the ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti

... before? There it lies, all that is left of it—the naked bones of the most splendid, the most beautiful, the most powerful city in the world, murdered by power, done to death by popes and emperors, by prefects and barons, sapped of life by the evil canker of empire, and left there like a dead dog in the Campagna, to be a prey to carrion beasts and a horror to ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford

... in the Sleeping Giant Plantation are the spring canker worms, the mites (Paratetranychus bicolor), Japanese ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various

... Elzevir and the pain that it must be to him to quit, the Why Not?: nor yet was it the grief of leaving Moonfleet that so troubled me, although that was the only place I ever had known, and seemed to me then—as now—the only spot on earth fit to be lived in; but the real care and canker was that I was going away from Grace Maskew. For since she had left school I had grown fonder of her; and now that it was difficult to see her, I took the more pains to accomplish it, and met her sometimes in Manor Woods, ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner

... striking; it has for its subject the lawless pathologic love of Phaedra for her step-son. She is "seized with wild desire;" she "pines away in silence, moaning beneath love's cruel scourge;" she "wastes away on a bed of sickness;" denies herself all food, eager to reach death's cheerless bourn; a canker wastes her fading charms; she is "stricken by some demon's curse;" from her eyes the tear-drops stream, and for very shame she turns them away; on her soul "there rests a stain;" she knows that to yield ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... locust and the canker-worm Are not more ruinous than he. "I'll take this Eden—for a term!" He cries, and ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 8, 1892 • Various

... along By mischief-plotting boys, the rage increased, Grew to a mighty mass, until it reached The palace of Duke Vladislaw. He heard With righteous wrath his injured subjects' charge Against presumptuous aliens: how these blocked His avenues, his bridges; bared to the sun The canker-taint of Prague's obscurest coigne; Paraded past the churches of the Lord One who denied Him, one by them hailed Christ. Enough! This cloud, no bigger than one's hand, Gains overweening bulk. Prague harbored, first, Out of contemptuous ruth, a wretched band Of ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus

... seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour, if seen as experience. Details are melancholy; the plan is seemly and noble. In the actual world—the painful kingdom of time and place—dwell care, and canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy. Round it all the Muses sing. But grief cleaves to names, and persons, and the partial interests of to-day ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... calculated to fill my mind with dreary forebodings. The future was no longer a scene of security and pleasure. It would be hard for those to partake of our fears who did not partake of our experience. The existence of Wiatte was the canker that had blasted the felicity of my patroness. In his reappearance on the stage there was something portentous. It seemed to include in it consequences of the utmost moment, without my being able to discover what ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown

... Jellicoe, his partner's father, where he succeeded in obtaining considerable Government orders for iron made after his patents. To all ordinary eyes the inventor now appeared to be on the high road to fortune; but there was a fatal canker at the root of this seeming prosperity, and in a few years the fabric which he had so laboriously raised crumbled into ruins. On the death of Adam Jellicoe, the father of Cort's partner, in August, 1789,[8] ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles

... braes Were our temple o' joy and glee, Some dour auld body would shake his head, And tell us our gladness away would flee, And our hearts beat as heavy as lead. Stupid auld body—silly auld body— His mother spained him wi' a canker-worm. In our auld, auld days, the gowany braes Are memory's rainbows owre ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various

... cell; Till time and circumstance, and sun and shower, Expand the embryo blossom—and it bursts Its narrow cerements, lifts its blushing head, Rejoicing in the light and dew of heaven. But if the canker-worm lies coil'd around The heart o' the bud, the summer sun and dew Visit in vain the ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie

... had rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in his grace; and it better fits my blood to be disdain'd of all than to fashion a carriage to rob love from any: in this, though I cannot be said to be a flattering honest ...
— Much Ado About Nothing • William Shakespeare [Knight edition]

... future by dwelling too long upon what we are surely still young enough to bury if not forget? I acknowledge that I would have behaved in a more ideal fashion, if, after I had been forsaken by you, I had turned my face from society, and let the canker-worm of despair slowly destroy whatever life and bloom I had left. But I was young, and society had its charms, so did the prospect of wealth and position, however hollow they may have proved; you who are the master of both this day, because ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green

... heart, a grief which was wearing out the elasticity of her spirits, withering her glorious beauty, and making her aged before her time. Perchance she mourned the absence of one she loved, and was wearied with anxiety for his return; perhaps the canker-worm of remorse was at work within her, for a fault committed and irretrievable; perhaps she was the victim of lawless outrage, a captive against her will; perhaps she had been severed from all she ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston

... enable even a clever gardener to grow good fruit in a bad site. Where the land is low and swampy, exposed therefore to frosts more than ground at a higher altitude, the effort would be useless. Stagnant water moreover produces canker, and soon ruins trees. Pears love a deep moist soil, but not water that lies for any length of time about the roots. On a hillside, where the slope is more than gradual, so that in a dry season the upper part suffers from drought, they would be a failure. Trees planted near ...
— The Book of Pears and Plums • Edward Bartrum

... niggardness of the next; and feverish anxieties lest you should not succeed in getting this gem, and irritating regrets that you too soon bought that, will divide your tortured soul. And when you finally leave Rome, as you must some day, you will always harbor a small canker-worm of immitigable grief, that you did not purchase one stone you saw and thought too high-priced; and will pass thenceforward no curiosity-shop without looking in the windows a moment, in the hope of finding some gem strayed away into parts where no man knows its value. If you feel ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various

... husband who was cried up as one of the ablest men of the royalist party, and, as a friend of the King, certain to be made Minister, she belonged to the aristocracy, and shared its magnificence. In the midst of this triumph she was attacked by a moral canker. There are feelings which women guess in spite of the care men take to bury them. On the first return of the King, Comte Ferraud had begun to regret his marriage. Colonel Chabert's widow had not been the means of allying him to anybody; he ...
— Colonel Chabert • Honore de Balzac

... sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose, Doth spot the beauty of thy budding ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various

... makes most effective and touching prayers, remembering, at least once on a Sunday, the United States. 'Grant, O God,' he said recently, 'that the right may conquer, and that if the fearful canker of slavery must be cut out by the sword, it be wholly eradicated from the body politic of which it is the curse.' He is seldom, however, as pointed as this; and, like other clergymen of England, prays for the return of peace. ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson

... suffer a great deal of pain in the ear in common canker. He will be almost incessantly scratching it, crying piteously while thus employed. The ear is, oftener than any other part, bitten by the rabid dog, and, when a wound in the ear, inflicted by a rabid dog, begins to become painful, the agony appears to be of the intensest kind. ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt

... mainland by a low and narrow strip of land, and along the main shore ran a dense forest belonging to the castle and plentifully stocked with game. All these pleasures were at the free disposal of the captive. But there was a canker ever gnawing at his heart. No matter which way he turned, he heard only rumors of fresh preparations to conquer Sweden. When guests visited the castle, they talked from morn till night of the splendid armaments of Christiern. On one occasion he heard them declare ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson

... their greeting, he suddenly looked up at his visitor with a certain fixed attention: the mere glance had shown him that he looked ill, and he now saw that something in the man's heart was eating at it like a canker. Therewith at once arose in his brain the question: could he be the father of the little one crowing in the next room? But he shut it into the darkest closet of his mind, shrinking from the secret of another soul, as from the veil of the Holy of Holies! The next moment, however, came the thought: ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald

... between us. I, for my part, had learned from the manner in which she bore this attack, that she was a firm, patient woman (patient under physical pain, though sometimes perhaps excitable under long mental canker); and she, from the good-will with which I succoured her, discovered that she could influence my sympathies (such as they were). She sent for me the next day; for five or six successive days she claimed my company. Closer acquaintance, ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte

... to live in the tiny room with the canary bird and the engraving of the "Rock of Ages." This was putting lime to the canker, but, somehow, she felt that she could go to no other place. She told the landlady that her young man had not done so well in business as they had expected, and had sought work in another city. He would come back, ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington

... As for Hunter, his was the French attitude toward the Young Person; she had heard him say he preferred his flowers in full bloom and his fruit ripe—one then knows what one is getting; one isn't deceived by canker in the closed bud and worm in the green fruit. No, Howard wasn't the sort ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler

... inspiration to accomplish a similar and co-operative work among people of wealth and leisure, who, ignorant of the true object and purpose of life, were unwittingly wasting precious years in leading indolent and aimless lives, by lending themselves body and soul to the care and canker of the fashionable game of killing time. One year's experience had taught her that the task was a difficult one, to accomplish which required time, patience and perseverance, reinforced by ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson

... Few give themselves the trouble to study his beginnings, and few, therefore, give weight enough to the fact that he made a false start. He, the ground of whose nature was an acrid common-sense, whose eye magnified the canker till it effaced the rose, began as what would now be called a romantic poet. With no mastery of verse, for even the English heroic (a balancing-pole which has enabled so many feebler men to walk the ticklish rope of momentary success) was uneasy to him, he essayed ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell

... was first introduced into the United States at Brooklyn, New York, in the years 1851 and '52. The trees in our parks were at that time infested with a canker-worm, which wrought them great injury, and to rid the trees of these worms was the mission of the ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [December, 1897], Vol 2. No 6. • Various

... defects, has been noted in history for its martial virility, require to be differentiated. Was the collapse of the Turkish army due merely to incapacity and mismanagement on the part of the commanders, aided by the corruption which has eaten like a canker into the whole Ottoman system of government and administration? Or must the causes be sought deeper, and, if so, was it the palsy of an unbridled and malevolent despotism which in itself produced the result, or did the sudden downfall ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring

... when she woke that morning, having had his fling, slunk away, leaving the old bewildered misery. She had stabbed her lover with words and looks, felt pleasure in stabbing, and now was bitterly sad. What use—what satisfaction? How by vengeful prickings cure the deep wound, disperse the canker in her life? How heal herself by hurting him whom she loved so? If he came up again now and made but a sign, she would throw herself into his arms. But hours passed, and he did not come, and she did not go ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... sacred mysteries of each other's hearts, that needed not to be dragged to open day for inspection. In a pure friendship, faith is the highest element: with that there is supreme content; without it, distrust gnaws like a canker-worm. ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas

... my brightest visions are for ever dispelled—that my peace is shattered and my power of enjoyment destroyed—that my heart is no longer in the right place—and that I no more walk erect before my fellow man. The canker is in the flower. The cup is bitter to the brim. The worm is at his work, and will soon dispose of his victim. The sooner the better. But I will not digress. 'Placed in a mental position of peculiar painfulness, ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens

... a tour through the orchard and garden, regaling himself upon the canker-worms. At this time he is one of the tamest of birds, and will allow you to approach within a few yards of him. I have even come within a few feet of one without seeming to excite his fear or suspicion. He is quite unsophisticated, or else ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs

... side he would be taught to apprehend something far more formidable: a fawning treachery against which no prudence can guard, no courage can defend. The insidious smile upon the cheek would warn him of the canker ...
— English Satires • Various

... Cardington returned, "they are still grappling with the realities of life. Ancestor worship has not yet set in as a canker in the fruit; that will come with the dead ripeness. Here you see the New Englander as he is to-day, not as he was in a glorified past; not landing at Plymouth Rock, not hanging witches, or beating Quakers, or persecuting Episcopalians, not throwing ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... the villages, and warriors, and youth? The sachems and the tribes? The hunters and their families? They have perished. They are consumed. The wasting pestilence has not alone done the mighty work. No,—nor famine, nor war. There has been a mightier power, a moral canker, which hath eaten into their heart-cores,—a plague which the touch of the white man communicated,—a poison, which betrayed them into a lingering ruin. The winds of the Atlantic fan not a single region which ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... eats and sleeps, and hath such senses As we have, such. This gallant which thou see'st Was in the wreck; and, but he's something stain'd With grief, that's beauty's canker,[390-105] thou mightst call him A goodly person: he hath lost his fellows, And strays about to ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester

... of the North, its canker and its moth! These modern Esaus, bartering rights for broth! Taxing our justice, with their double claim, As fools for pity, and as knaves for blame; Who, urged by party, sect, or trade, within The fell embrace of Slavery's sphere of sin, Part at the outset with their moral ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... longed for at least a decent equipment and some pocket money. As yet the curse of pillage was not synonymous with conquest, as yet the free and generous ardor of youth and military tradition exerted its force, as yet self-sacrifice to the extreme of endurance was a virtue, as yet the canker of lust and debauchery had not ruined the life of the camp. Emancipated from the bonds of formality and mere contractual relation to superiors, manhood asserted itself in troublesome questionings as to the motives and plans of officers, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane

... the year 1850—that new material was discovered in a black-coated dog recently introduced into England from Labrador. He was a natural water-dog, with a constitution impervious to chills, and entirely free from the liability to ear canker, which had always been a drawback to the use of the Spaniel as a retriever of waterfowl. Moreover, he was himself reputed to be a born retriever of game, and remarkably sagacious. His importers called him a ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton

... bishops and over thirty doctors of divinity in the Anglican Church, some of their utterances being very violent and all of them running their roots down into texts of Scripture. Typical among these is a sermon of Bishop Sands, in which he declares, regarding the taking of interest: "This canker hath corrupted all England; we shall doe God and our country true service by taking away this evill; represse it by law, else the heavy hand of God hangeth over ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... the apple are the codlin-moth, tent-caterpillar, canker-worm and borer. The codlin-moth lays its eggs on the fruit about the time of the falling of the blossoms, and the larvae when hatched eat into the young fruit and cause the ordinary wormy apples and pears. Owing to these facts, it is too late to reach the trouble by spraying after the ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell

... put on no airs from having been for a time the wife of a reputed wealthy man. "Mustn't put on airs!" muttered Hagar, as she left the room. "Just as if airs wasn't for anybody but high bloods!" And with the canker-worm of envy at her heart she wrote to Hester, who came immediately; and Hagar—when she heard her tell the story of her wrongs, how her husband's sister, indignant at his marriage with a sewing-girl, had removed from him the ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes

... that period, and the French nation had proclaimed him Emperor in 1804. He placed his brother Joseph on the throne of Naples in February 1806; Joseph ruled with marked moderation and distinction, sweeping away much of the foul canker of corruption and introducing many beneficent reforms during his two years of kingship. He then, much against his own wishes, became King of Spain, and was succeeded by his brother-in-law, Prince Joachim Murat, the dashing cavalry officer, whose decorative exterior awed friend and foe, ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman

... night through the streets on her return from work, would she look with a shudder into the faces of those poor wretches who flaunted by fearing yet hoping to see her lost child. But the name of Nora never passed her lips. No one who knew Mrs. Flanagan imagined of this canker at her heart; that page of her life was folded down, and closed to prying eyes; it was only when alone with God that on bended knees she prayed Him to bring the ...
— Little Pollie - A Bunch of Violets • Gertrude P. Dyer

... felt was meant in part for him. It was on the danger and unwisdom of brooding continually on what is over; and it was preached upon the text, "I will restore to you the years which the locust hath eaten, the canker-worm, the caterpillar, and the palmerworm, my ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar

... to revive in the heart of Boris; but as months passed and no decision came, those hopes faded again, and the canker of the past gnawed at his vitals and sapped his strength. And then there was ever present to his mind the nightmare riddle of the pretender's identity. At last, one evening in April, he sent for Smirnoy Otrepiev to question him again concerning that nephew of his. Otrepiev ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini

... time forward, the mother never had a well day. After ten years of ill health and suffering, she died from too much calomel and from slow starvation, being able to take but little food on account of canker in her mouth and throat. Carleton, her pet, was very much with her during his child-life, so that his recollections of his mother were ever very clear, very tender, and profoundly influential ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis

... withdrew himself, seeking sanctuary in the lee of Mittie May. He squatted upon the capsized keeler, automatically balancing himself as it wabbled under him on its one projecting handle, and, with his eyes fixed on nothing, gave himself over unreservedly to a consuming canker. For all that unhappiness calked his ears as with pledgets of cotton wool, there presently percolated to his aloof understanding the consciousness that somebody was speaking on the other side of the high board fence which marked the dividing line between Judge Priest's place and the ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb



Words linked to "Canker" :   come down, influence, stem canker, sicken, plant disease, infect, canker brake, blight canker, pestilence, chestnut canker, canker sore, apple canker, ulcer, cankerous



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