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Foulness   Listen
noun
Foulness  n.  The quality or condition of being foul.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Foulness" Quotes from Famous Books



... not slept very well; the noise from the guard-room without was too great, and when that was quiet there was still the foulness of the place to keep him awake, for all the floor was strewn with rotten rags and straw and bones, as it were a kennel. His wounds, besides, had not been tended, and he was very sick when he awoke, and for a while scarce knew where ...
— The History of Richard Raynal, Solitary • Robert Hugh Benson

... of special Chinese fever; something bred o' dirt and filth and foulness; a complaint you have to live amongst for weeks, before you'll get it; a kind o' beri-beri or break-bone, which was new to the doctors here. I've been disinfected and fumigated till I couldn't hardly breathe. Races has their special diseases, just the same as they has their special foods: ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace

... sad story which really is interesting and which really does good; but normally the books which do good and the books which healthy people find interesting are those which are not in the least of the sugar-candy variety, but which, while portraying foulness and suffering when they must be portrayed, yet have a joyous as well as a ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt

... crusade against "Frenzied Finance" I expected attack. Reforms are not matured to accompaniments of incense and rose-water, and I had made up my mind to disregard the mud and its slingers. Afterward, if there were any "System" left, I rather looked forward to smothering it beneath the foulness of its own generating. There came a time during the year, however, when I deemed it proper to depart from this resolution and nail some of the lies my enemies were circulating about me. I debated the subject thoroughly, for the rancor of these assaults was evident and I could not help feeling ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson

... great names of the Italian Renaissance, and considered a great moral force—a "preacher painter"—by others he has been denounced as "designer in chief to the devil," and described as a man wallowing in all foulness and horror, a sort of demon of frightful power. Both these extreme judgments are English. The late Blanchard Jerrold, an intimate friend and collaborator of the artist, takes the first view. Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Hamerton have taken the second. Dore's own ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various

... opposite point of view, one perceives that the average country labourer can talk with less restraint because he has really less to conceal than many men who look down upon him. He may use coarse words, but his thoughts are wont to be cleanly, so that there is no suspicion of foulness behind his conversation, rank though it sound. A woman consequently may hear what he says, and not be offended by suggestion of something left unsaid. On these terms the jolly tale is a jolly tale, and ends at that. It does not linger to corrupt the ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt

... it's writ in the rules that the primary schools of kippers should get off cheap For a two mile reach off Foulness beach when the July tide's at neap; And the lawless lubbers that lust for loot and filch the yearling stock They get smart raps from the coastguard chaps with their ...
— The Battle of the Bays • Owen Seaman

... you are hypocrites. You are like carrion birds who soar high up in the ether for a while and then swoop down to revel in filth and rottenness. The stench of death is sweet to you. Putridity is dear to you. As for you who have done this work, you need pity. Your own soul must be reeking with secret foulness to be so basely suspicious. Your own eyes must have cast unholy glances to so soon accuse the eyes of others. As for the thing which you, mine enemy, have intimated here to-night, as pastor of this church I scorn to make defence. But as a man I say, give such words as those breath again, ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... verses refer to a literary phenomenon that will in time become historical, that phenomenon being the sudden growth, in all parts of Europe, of a fungus-literature bred of Foulness and Decay; and contemporaneously, the intrusion into all parts of human life of a Calvinistic yet materialistic Morality. This literature of a sunless Decadence has spread widely, by virtue of its ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... he was foul of favour, for his face was as the face of an ass, his shape that of an ape and his look as the look of a malignant snake: his presence was grievouser than parting from the beloved make; and blacker than night was his blackness and more fetid than the lion was his breath for foulness; more crooked than a bow was his crookedness and grimmer than the leopard was his ugliness, and he was branded with the mark of the Infidels on face.[FN392] After this he came up to King Afridun ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... said the other calmly. But truly Amos was staggered when he entered the room where sat, in the midst of gloom and filth, the man who had been the cause of so much distress to him and his. The atmosphere was oppressive with the concentrated foulness of numberless evil odours. A bed there was in the darkest corner of the room on the floor. It looked as though composed of the refuse raked from a pig-sty, and thrust into a sack which had been used for the conveyance of dust and bones. ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson

... me out—you—you, and you made me what I am." The realisation of what he was, of his foulness and degradation, seemed just to have come to him fully. "You made me what I am, and then you sent me away. You let me come back, and now you ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... gradually forming it for the realities of the world. But the neglected infant has wilted into the premature man, with his old cunning look, blending so fantastically, so mournfully, with the unformed features of youth. Knowing the world on its worst side—knowing its hostility, its knavery, its foulness, its heartless materialism—knowing it as the man does not know it who has only breathed the country air, and looked upon the open face of nature. Is it not very sad, my friends, that the vagrant boy should know so much; and, without one hour of romance, one step of childish innocence ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin

... clear and transparent, different altogether from the muddy foulness of the lower reaches. And the country around lost the density of matted jungle and undulated in a succession of grassy stretches through which cropped great round hummocks of sandy hills. The stream narrowed to ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle

... forgetting that the evil was in the fruits of a bad system, bringing disgrace upon his countrymen, corrupting the moral foundation of society, spreading vice around the domestic fireside, and giving to base-minded men power to speculate in the foulness of their own crimes. ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams

... obligation of positive and moral laws. If he retained any vestige of his native innocence, the sins of Mahomet may be allowed as an evidence of his sincerity. In the support of truth, the arts of fraud and fiction may be deemed less criminal; and he would have started at the foulness of the means, had he not been satisfied of the importance and justice of the end. Even in a conqueror or a priest, I can surprise a word or action of unaffected humanity; and the decree of Mahomet, that, in the sale of captives, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon

... had endured them with one of two determinations: to take up life again and bring it out into the sunshine until it was sound, and sweet, and clean, and whole once more, or to hide the hurt and brood over it, and cover it with bitterness, and hate until it destroyed by its very foulness. I had Jock, and I chose the sun, thank God! I said then that marriage was a thing tried and abandoned forever, for me. ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber

... schemes and sounds or fret under the galling burden of idleness. Here is no bell to affright; nor are we subject to the bidding or liable to the assault of any passer by. Smooth-flowing time knows not mud or any foulness, while its impassive surface, burnished by August sunshine, reflects fair scenes ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... Moreover, of whom these men were I have been able to learn nothing. A boat was seen passing towards Bradwell—indeed, it seems that you saw it, and that night a boat was seen sailing southwards down St. Peter's sands towards a ship that had anchored off Foulness Point. But what that ship was, whence she came, and whither she went, none know, though the tidings of this ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard

... coarse malignant voice seemed shouting: "Paiper!... Paiper!... Glove Lane Murder!... Suicide and confession of brother of well-known K.C.... Well-known K.C.'s brother.... Murder and suicide.... Paiper!" Was he to let loose that flood of foulness? Was he, who had done nothing, to smirch his own little daughter's life; to smirch his dead brother, their dead mother—himself, his own valuable, important future? And all for a sewer rat! Let him hang, let the fellow hang if he must! And that was not certain. Appeal! Petition! He might—he ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... that feast, do flourish and prosper ever after, in an extraordinary manner. But hear me now, and I will tell you what I know. You shall understand that there is not under the heavens so chaste a nation as this of Bensalem, nor so free from all pollution or foulness. It is the virgin of the world; I remember, I have read in one of your European books, of an holy hermit amongst you, that desired to see the spirit of fornication, and there appeared to him a little foul ugly Ethiope; ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various

... would take its station in that shattered fleet for which there was no salvation; and that it would lie among them rotting slowly, as they were rotting, through months or years—until finally, in its turn, it would drop down from amidst those lepers of the ocean, and would sink with all its foulness upon it into the black depths beneath ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier

... second point, the question of temperature is really the most formidable with which the tunnel engineer has to contend. In the St. Gothard Tunnel, just before the meeting of the two headings in February, 1880, the temperature rose as high as 93 deg. Fahr. This, combined with the foulness of the air, produced an immense diminution in the work done per person and per horse employed, while several men were actually killed by the dynamite gases, and others suffered from a disease which was traced to a hitherto unknown species of internal worm. If the Simplon Tunnel should be constructed, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 417 • Various

... for John's soul. She lashed him unmercifully. She showed him how his soul was growing smaller and meaner every day—how he was just a plague-spot on God's fair earth. He saw himself in a mirror that reflected the inmost recesses of his heart, and he was horrified at sight of the foulness so long concealed. ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous

... the whole sea of life's nastiness that he had known and voyaged over and through, and he forgave her for not understanding the story. It was through no fault of hers that she could not understand. He thanked God that she had been born and sheltered to such innocence. But he knew life, its foulness as well as its fairness, its greatness in spite of the slime that infested it, and by God he was going to have his say on it to the world. Saints in heaven—how could they be anything but fair and pure? ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London

... Asia Minor. No modern joy or ecstasy of ours can lower its height or dim its lustre, but there it lies in the east of literature, as it were the earliest and latest production of the mind. The ruins of Egypt oppress and stifle us with their dust, foulness preserved in cassia and pitch, and swathed in linen; the death of that which never lived. But the rays of Greek poetry struggle down to us, and mingle with the sunbeams of the recent day. The statue of Memnon is cast down, but the ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau

... misprinted in the first issue of the Society's Report, where it appeared as "foulness." To prevent misapprehension, the whole staff of printers was ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... many means of commanding the respect and admiration of mankind, and will be enabled to act with such superior propriety and grace, that the luster of his future conduct will entirely cover or efface the foulness of the steps by which he arrived at that elevation. In many governments the candidates for the highest stations are above the law, and if they can attain the object of their ambition, they have no fear of being called to account for the means by which they acquired it. They often endeavor, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various

... I felt no desire to return to mankind. I was only glad to be quit of the foulness of the Beast People. And on the third day I was picked up by a brig from Apia to San Francisco. Neither the captain nor the mate would believe my story, judging that solitude and danger had made me mad; and fearing their opinion might be that of others, I refrained from telling my ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells

... crimes as feigned. It was he who, to avert suspicion from our order (for news had come that the jealousy of the prick-ear'd heretics was aroused, and that they were on sharp look-out for Catholics,) hesitated not to slander the Sister, his own confidential agent, trusting, by the magnitude and foulness of the charges, so to fill the minds of your judges, that other surmises would be thrust out, and thus the ground be ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams

... stirring, and thereby save much trouble. When the pot is coming to a boil, there will always, from the cleanest meat and clearest water, rise a scum to the top of it; proceeding partly from the foulness of the meat, and partly from the water: this must be carefully taken off, as soon as it rises. On this depends the good appearance of ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous

... gloom. But THE DAWN IS NEAR; and soon every eye is open, every foot astir, and the busy, waking life of men again begins. The fleecy clouds that hang on the eastern horizon grow ruddy with gold; and the arrowy light shoots its bright rays athwart the clear blue sky. The dust and foulness which the night has hidden stand revealed. But in the forests and hills the pulses of nature beat fresh and full; the leopard and the tiger slink away; the gay flowers open; the birds flit to and fro, and with woodland ...
— Fruits of Toil in the London Missionary Society • Various

... scene in shapes which are exquisitely beautiful, in all its purity, its tenderness, its unselfishness. But the claims of its all-ruling and irresistible might are also only too readily verified in the passions of men; in the follies of love, its entanglements, its mischiefs, its foulness. In one shape or another it meets us at every turn; it is never absent; it is the motive and stimulant of the whole activity of the poem. The picture of life held up before us is the ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church

... beauty had entered into the foulness of the toad, and the foulness of the toad into her beauty, for there before her stood her own shape and here she crouched a toad ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard

... butt of a pistol—newly purchased. "I go armed, Binet. It is only fair to give you warning. Provoke me as you have suggested, and I'll kill you with no more compunction than I should kill a slug, which after all is the thing you most resemble—a slug, Binet; a fat, slimy body; foulness without soul and without intelligence. When I come to think of it I can't suffer to sit at table with you. ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini

... may grow faint amidst the full fruition of the world, that selfishness may take place of undemanded devotion, compassion be lost in vain-glory, and love in dissimulation,[3] that enervation may succeed to strength, apathy to patience, and the noise of jesting words and foulness of dark thoughts, to the earnest purity of the girded loins and the burning lamp. About the river of human life there is a wintry wind, though a heavenly sunshine; the iris colors its agitation, the frost fixes upon its repose. Let us beware that our rest become ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin

... perhaps, that such a Court should inspire such a stage," returned Fareham, "and that for the heroic drama of Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Massinger, and Ford, we should have a gross caricature of our own follies and our own vices. Nay, so essential is foulness to the modern stage that when the manager ventures a serious play, he takes care to introduce it with some filthy prologue, and to spice the finish ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... that Colonel Rawlings was, some time late in the morning of the 16th of November, attacked by the Hessians, when he fought with great gallantry and effect as they were climbing the heights, until the arms of the riflemen became useless from the foulness they contracted from the frequent repetition ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge

... in the public mouth the public nostril likes to smell a foulness in it. It likes to think that Byron committed incest; that Milton was a brute; that Raffaelle's vices killed him; that Pascal was mad; that Lamartine lived and died a pauper; that Scipio took the treasury moneys; ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... predominant elsewhere, and I am prepared to deny utterly that, until the time of the Sensibility and Philosophe novels, it is even a notable characteristic of French fiction. Many hard things have been said of criticism; but, acknowledging the badness of a bird who even admits any foulness in his own nest—far more in one who causes it—I am bound to say that I think the state of the department of literature now under discussion was happier before we meddled with it. Offence must come; it would even be sometimes rather a pity if it didn't come: but perhaps ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... cried. "Put your lips to the gutter of the streets, if you will, but not to such pitch and foulness as ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe

... before, swishing through the foulness underfoot, and without speaking. Only at times the woman's hold on his hand would tighten, and, meeting with no response, would slacken again, and she would draw him on ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon

... walls; but the women from whose rotten loins they spring were everywhere. They whined insolently, and in maudlin tones begged me for pennies, and worse. They held carouse in every boozing ken, slatternly, unkempt, bleary-eyed, and towsled, leering and gibbering, overspilling with foulness and corruption, and, gone in debauch, sprawling across benches and bars, unspeakably repulsive, fearful ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London

... have been assured by travellers, that there are two hospitals for the leprous alone in Damascus. And there is a fountain at Edessa, in which great numbers of people affected with this cuticular foulness wash daily, as ...
— Medica Sacra - or a Commentary on on the Most Remarkable Diseases Mentioned - in the Holy Scriptures • Richard Mead

... embodying the highest perfection of body and mind. The influence of those types has gone on from century to century, never in the darkest ages wholly forgotten, and serving at all times to redeem human nature from foulness and degradation. All through the history of art they have been acting as a ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... lay still; and from the wet, sticky foulness of it I rose and stood shuddering. Elza lay on the ground; but she had risen upon one elbow and I saw that she was unharmed save for the shock of terror through which she had passed—a mitigated shock with the knowledge now that I was with her, and ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings

... which we have taken in exchange. With the restored king have come over to us vices of every sort, and most the basest and most shameful,—lust without love—servitude without loyalty—foulness of speech—dishonesty of dealing—grinning contempt of all things good and generous. The throne is surrounded by men whom the former Charles would have spurned from his footstool. The altar is served by slaves whose knees are supple to every ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... never in our way; it does not ask notice; we only know it is there by the good it does us. And this exquisitely soft, pure, yielding, unseen being, like a beautiful and beneficent fairy, brings us blessings from all around. It has the skill to wash our blood clean from all foulness. Its weight keeps us from tumbling to pieces. It is a reservoir where the waters lie stored, until they fall and gladden the earth. It is a great-coat that softens to us the heat of the day, and the cold ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson

... removed from my limbs: I was shaved, and polled my locks of hair; the foulness was cast to the desert with the garments of the Nemau-sha. I clothed me in fine linen, and anointed myself with the fine oil of Egypt; I laid me on a bed. I gave up the sand to those who lie on it; the ...
— Egyptian Literature

... woman, from the holy place which you profane," he said, "Is it to the Lord's house that you come to pour forth the foulness of your heart and the inspiration of the devil? Get you down, and remember that the sentence of death is on you—yea, and shall be executed, were it but ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... wall-map, and their relative distances from London. A moment later the Vicar frowned again as Mr Boult launched into a violent—and as it turned out, a lengthy—invective against the German Emperor; with the foulness of whose character and designs he had, it seemed, been intimately acquainted for a number of years. "Who made the War?" "Who had been planning it and spying for the opportunity to gratify his unbridled lust of power?" "Who would stand arraigned for it before the awful tribunal of God?" ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)

... they learn by rote, And never miss one; no, no miser of them, * * * * * Avid of foulness, so they hound me out Away from blessing that they prate about, But never saw, and never dreamed upon, And know not how to long for with desire. ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

... puppetry this world of time and space and consciousness would be a bubble, a bubble which contained the sun and moon and the high stars, and still was but a bubble in fermenting swill! I must go cleanse my mind of all this foulness. You would have me believe that men, that all men who have ever lived or shall ever live hereafter, that even I am of no importance! Why, there would be no justice in any such arrangement, ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell

... inconveniences would have ensued. I never knew one of our Swan vessels to spring a leak or to wear out. The vessels built under my rule will exist unimpaired for many centuries, whilst those built under the former system were broken to pieces on account of their foulness and leakage, chiefly caused ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)

... last race now. Then, I used to keep poets at my expense, and I used to buy pictures and books of the Jews, geese of the best breeds, and pouter-pigeons of pure blood.... I used to go in for everything! Though dogs I never did care for keeping, because it goes with drinking, foulness, and buffoonery! I was a young man of spirit, not to be outdone. That there should be anything of Teliegin's and not first-rate ... why, it was not to be thought of! And I had a splendid stud of horses. And my horses came—from what ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... himself to some Asiatic he saw on the street. And as he stepped out of the coarse debauchery and profanity of the crowded resorts of the metropolis into the room hallowed by the presence of Paul, he saw the foulness of the one life and the beauty of the other, and was persuaded to accept the gospel he had so often heard in his ...
— Weymouth New Testament in Modern Speech, Preface and Introductions - Third Edition 1913 • R F Weymouth

... climbed the long staircase hastily, abusing its darkness and foulness, and planning as I went how my mother might most easily and quickly be moved to a better lodging. Gaining the top of the last flight, I saw that mademoiselle's door on the left of the landing was open, and concluding from this that she was up, and ready ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman

... was foul; he threw it down with an exclamation of disgust. Its foulness was symbolic; everything was out of kilter. He looked at the picture he had been painting for a week—rotten! It was a still life; a broken jar and three books on a rag of Persian embroidery. Picking up his pen-knife ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner

... The foulness of his own soul made him so ignorant that he built into the marvellous structure of his plot a piece ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley

... children, husbands from wives,—which takes place nowhere else in the world, and which causes many tears to flow." He declared that a law should be made against it. Yet it was by his misguided hand that serfage was compacted into its final black mass of foulness. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various

... foulness of his thoughts to frustrate God's purposes of salvation, I believe that when he knew that the Christ had been born, that God had Himself become incarnate, so that He might deliver man—for we ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson

... disgust flitted across Edith's face, and by the necessary law of association poor Arden sank in her estimation through the foulness ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe

... one chance for you," he went on. "The wind is dead on the shore, and Foulness lies ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty

... "And this was the entrance-court to the Temple of the Most High! The court which was a witness that that house should be a House of Prayer for all nations had been degraded into a place which, for foulness, was more like shambles, and for bustling commerce more like a densely-crowded bazaar; while the lowing of oxen, the bleating of sheep, the Babel of many languages, the huckstering and wrangling, and the clinking of money and of balances (perhaps ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage

... Said she, "O thou! say me, could he find none handsomer to send to me?"; whereat loud laughed the Sage and said, "Yea verily, he hath not a Mameluke as ugly as I am; but, O my lady, let not the ill-favour of my face and the foulness of my form deceive thee. Hadst thou profited of me as hath the Prince, verily thou wouldst praise my affair. Indeed, he chose me as his messenger to thee, because of my uncomeliness and loathsomeness in his jealous love of thee; else hath he Mamelukes and negro slaves, pages, eunuchs and attendants ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... get rid of me, but I didn't intend to let him go, and he stopped at last in front of a miserable house in a miserable street. It was, I verily believe, one of the most wretched quarters I have ever seen,—houses that must have been sordid and hideous enough when new, that had gathered foulness with every year, and now seemed to lean and totter to their fall. 'I live up there,' said Black, pointing to the tiles, 'not in the front,—in the back. I am very quiet there. I won't ask you to come in now, but ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various

... up and purifies the immemorial filth of Africa, where that sun enters there is none of the foulness of damp. But into the Mellah of Sefrou it never comes, for the streets form a sort of subterranean rabbit-warren under the upper stories of a solid agglomeration of tall houses—a buried city lit even at midday by oil-lamps ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton

... Taylor has pointed out, is Scandinavian to this day. Deptford (the deep fiord), Greenwich (the green reach), and Woolwich (the hill reach) all bear good Norse names. So do the Foreness, the Whiteness, Shellness, Sheerness, Shoeburyness, Foulness, Wrabness, and Orfordness. Walton-on-the-Naze near Harwich in like manner still recalls the time when a Danish 'wall'—that is to say, a vallum, or earthwork—ran across the isthmus to defend the Scandinavian peninsula from its ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen

... twenty-foot wall of stranded floes. The great blocks were spilled inland among the thrown and standing trees and the slime-coated flowers and grasses like the titanic vomit of some Northland monster. The sun was not idle, and the steaming thaw washed the mud and foulness from the bergs till they blazed like heaped diamonds in the brightness, or shimmered opalescent-blue. Yet they were reared hazardously one on another, and ever and anon flashing towers and rainbow minarets crumbled thunderously into the flood. By ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London

... bundle I bore, and then finding a chance to sit down on the deck beneath. The last of the bunch of prisoners dribbled down the ladder, each in turn noisily greeted by those already huddled below. I began to recognize the increasing foulness of air, and to distinguish words of conversation from the groups about me. There was but little profanity but some rough horse-play, and a marked effort to pretend indifference. I could make out gray-beards ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish

... the history of feudalism, and of the Church for the first fifteen hundred years of its existence, it will seem impossible that such foulness could ever have been part of Christian civilization. That the crimes they have been trained to consider the worst forms of heathendom could have existed in Christian Europe, upheld by both Church and State for more than a thousand five hundred years, will strike most people with incredulity. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... But I think that the really practical task is the most neglected, just because it does not appear so pressing. With the mud at the bottom of society we can practically do nothing; only the vast changes to be wrought by time will cleanse that foulness, by destroying the monstrous wrong which produces it. What I should like to attempt would be the spiritual education of the upper artisan and mechanic class. At present they are all but wholly in the hands of men who can do them nothing but harm—journalists, socialists, vulgar propagators of what ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing

... shall be made known unto them that shall come after thee, when it shall be helpful in the tribulation of the Christians. The river which ye see divideth this island, and even as now it appeareth unto you ripe in fruits, so is it at every time without shadow or foulness. For the light shineth in it without failing." Then holy Brendan saith unto the young man, "Lord father, tell me if this land shall be ever revealed unto men." And he saith, "When the Almighty Creator shall have made all nations subject unto Him, then ...
— Brendan's Fabulous Voyage • John Patrick Crichton Stuart Bute

... Spenser follows closely the description of the witch Alcina in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, vii, 73. Rogero has been fascinated by her false beauty, and her real foulness is exposed by means of a magic ring. The stripping of Duessa symbolizes the proscription of vestments and ritual, and the overthrow of images, etc., at the time of the Reformation. Duessa is only banished to ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser

... and his followers were baptized is thus described by Camden, in his "Description of Great Britain," etc.: "In the Roman times, not far from its bank upon the little river Foulness (where Wighton, a small town, but well-stocked with husbandmen, now stands), there seems to have formerly stood Delgovitia; as it is probable both from the likeness and the signification of the name. For the British word Delgwe ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... of tobacco in a paper and a pipe, which he proceeded to fill. I took advantage of the pause and the momentary rest from the searching eyes on my face to look carefully round the place, now dim and shadowy in the gloaming. There still lay all the heaps of varied reeking foulness; there the terrible blood-stained axe leaning against the wall in the right hand corner, and everywhere, despite the gloom, the baleful glitter of the eyes of the rats. I could see them even through some of the chinks of the boards at the back low down close to the ground. But stay! these ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker

... ground; Eyes too that long have watched how Lancelot draws From homage to the best and purest, might, Name, manhood, and a grace, but scantly thine, Who, sitting in thine own hall, canst endure To mouth so huge a foulness—to thy guest, Me, me of Arthur's Table. Felon talk! Let be! no more!' But not the less by night The scorn of Garlon, poisoning all his rest, Stung him in dreams. At length, and dim through leaves Blinkt the white morn, ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson

... Diamond his own at any cost, if the slightest possible chance of doing so were afforded him. He was dazzled by the magnitude of the temptation; so much so, indeed, that he never seemed to realise in his own mind the foulness of the deed by which alone it could become his property. Had any man hinted that he was a thief, either in act or intention, he would have repudiated the term with scorn—would have repudiated it even in his own mind, for ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various

... most beautiful work is to be found in the profane division, despite the admixture of the above-mentioned epigrams, the dull foulness of which soils the most delightful pages to such an extent that, if it were ever allowable to take liberties with an author's disposition of his own work, it would be allowable and desirable to pick these ugly weeds out ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... strong filed into the station. Stalwart and stolid, tow-haired, with the stamp of acquiescent patience in their homely faces, they came on with the swing, but none of the usual spirit, of drilled men. They asked no questions, but went where they were led, and the foulness of the close-packed steerage seemed to cling about them. For a time the depot rang to the rhythmic tramp of feet, and when, at a sign from the interpreter, it stopped, two bewildered children, frowsy and unwashed, in greasy homespun, sat down and gazed at Miss Torrance with mild blue eyes. ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss

... extensive oyster beds in the Crouch estuary. Burnham lies 6 m. from the North Sea; below it the Crouch is joined on the south side by the Roch, which branches into numerous creeks, and, together with the main estuary, forms Foulness, Wallasea, Potton and other low, flat islands, embanked and protected from incursions of the sea. Burnham is in some repute as a watering-place, and is a favourite yachting station. There is considerable trade in corn and coal, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... Tiber rose thirty-two feet. Now Rome is tunnelled under the streets with drains or sewers that carry all the refuse of a great city into the Tiber. But, naturally, when the Tiber swells high above the crowns of the sewers, they are choked. All the foulness of the great town is held back under the houses and streets, and breeds gases loathsome to the nose and noxious to life. Not only so, but a column of water, some twenty to twenty-five feet in height, is acting like the piston of a pop-gun, and ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould

... which is held in the hand in the current of a running stream, in the waters of which the cloth leaves all its foulness and dirt, is meant to signify this ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci

... greater part of the nose is built on breathing lines. But the smelling part of it, though small, is very important, because it now has to decide, not merely upon the goodness or badness of the food, but also upon the purity or foulness of the air we breathe. The nostrils lie, as you can see, side by side, separated from each other by a thin, straight plate of gristle and bone known as the septum. This should be perfectly straight and flat; but very often when the nose does not grow properly in childhood, it becomes ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson

... and areared, and a blue breast, and a tail full of eyes distinguished and high with wonder fairness, and he hath foulest feet and rivelled. And he wondereth of the fairness of his feathers, and areareth them up as it were a circle about his head, and then he looketh to his feet, and seeth the foulness of his feet, and like as he were ashamed he letteth his feathers fall suddenly, and all the tail downward, as though he took no heed of the fairness of his feathers. And as one saith, he hath the voice of a fiend, head of a serpent, pace of a thief. ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele

... in the crime of disobedience. He slid down from the top rail and stood among the young pokeberry bushes and ragweed that luxuriated in the foulness of the slaughter-house yard. It was not an especially inviting spot even in broad day, as he knew. Now the moonlight showed him bleached animal bones and grinning animal skulls, while the damp weeds that clung about his bare legs ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester

... hate, or grosser heats, their foulness mask Under the vizor of a borrowed name; Let things eschew the light deserving blame: No cause hast thou to blush for thy sweet task. "Marcian Colonna" is a dainty book; And thy "Sicilian Tale" may boldly pass; Thy "Dream" 'bove all, in which, as in a glass, On the great world's antique ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb

... race-feeling, and the broad, liberal and just inculcations of Jesus Christ. The nation was sunk to the moral turpitude of Constantinople; and not even a John crying in the wilderness could arouse it to a sense of the exceeding foulness in the midst of which it grovelled, or of the storm gathering on ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune

... planned, badly managed, and badly built; every thing done there was badly and meanly done. It was white- washed from the topmost point of every chimney down to the lowest edge of the basement. A whited sepulchre. For there was foulness there, in the air, in the surroundings, in every thing. Squalor and dirt reigned. His heart grew sick as those hideous walls ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille

... lead a man too weak to stand in his own strength when appetite, held only in abeyance, springs back upon him to trust in God as his only hope of permanent reformation. First we must help him physically, we must take him out of his debasement, his foulness and his discomfort, and surround him with the influences of a home. Must get him clothed and in his right mind, and make him feel once more that he has sympathy—is regarded as a man full of the noblest possibilities—and so be stimulated to personal effort. But this is only preliminary work, ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur

... they scandalized and disturbed by their riots, their mad frolics, and even by their quarrels. Their heads and waists were bound with ivy, and in their hands they brandished a thirsus, or kind of lance, garnished with vine-leaves. When by any foulness of weather they were driven into their huts, they passed their time in a kind of noisy merriment, of shoutings and dithirambic catches, accompanied by timpanums, by cymbals, by sistrums, and other instruments, in which noise was more consulted than music, and corresponded ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini

... poor people's hospital, became a public scandal. In one night there were five drunken fights, one of them between two of the attendants who dropped the corpse they were carrying to the morgue and fought over it. The tenements were plunged back into the foulness of their worst day; the inspectors were answerable, not to the Health Board, but to the district leader, and the landlord who stood well with him thumbed his nose at them and at their orders to clean up. The neighborhood ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis

... aspersion upon a lady who was very near and dear to me"—the judge paused a moment; he was fighting hard for breath; something within was evidently choking him. Then he went on more excitedly—"an aspersion upon a lady whom I love more than life—an insult that no man could stand—an unspeakable foulness; and I sprang at him, the cur, in the white heat of my anger, not meaning or dreaming to hurt him seriously. I caught him by the throat." The judge held up his hands before the whole court appealingly. "Look at those hands, gentlemen," he cried, turning them about. "How could I ever ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen

... seemed to lie a huge, weltering mass of slime, a very quagmire of foulness and miasma, in the depths and darkness of which he could dimly discern the innumerable coils of a deadly dragon, breathing forth poison and death into the air, which those beloved of God and himself must breathe, and crushing in its pestilential ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton

... own. It was a delightful morning with dazzling sunshine and an eager nip in the air that spoke of the swift, deep river that bathes the city walls. I revelled in the clear, cold atmosphere after the foulness of the drinking-den and the stifling heat of the journey. I exulted in the sense of liberty I experienced at having once more eluded the grim clutches of Clubfoot. Above all, my heart sang within me at the thought ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams

... Charles II, and were noted for biting wit and profligacy. Green, in his Short History of the English People, thus describes them: "Lord Rochester was a fashionable poet, and the titles of some of his poems are such as no pen of our day could copy. Sir Charles Sedley was a fashionable wit, and the foulness of his words made even the porters in the Covent Garden belt him from the balcony when ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley

... all their advantages, they had all ours too. It is with our mental as with our bodily vision,—we see only what is remote; and the image to the mind depends, not only upon seeing, but upon not seeing. In the distant star, all foulness and gloom are lost, and only the pure splendor reaches us. Inspired by Mr. Ruskin's eloquence, the neophyte sets forth with contrition to put his precepts into practice. But the counterstatement which he ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various

... take into their houses those to whom Providence has been less bountiful. You whose daily business takes you to the hovels of the poor, know how wretched and filthy they are, how even the healthy can scarcely bear the foulness of their atmosphere. How great must be the power of such pest-holes to extend the plague when once it finds a foothold there! Let us tear down those hovels. There are enough rich men among you to build new and better houses. You have ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith

... nothing so effectual in extinguishing any fragments that might remain burning in the Bore, and cause accidental explosion in loading, particularly in blank firing. It is a mistake to suppose that this practice increases the foulness of the Bore; on the contrary, it prevents it from hardening and accumulating, as long experience has shown. Sometimes it is convenient for the Spongers to dip the Sponge alongside, and they soon acquire the habit. Superfluous ...
— Ordnance Instructions for the United States Navy. - 1866. Fourth edition. • Bureau of Ordnance, USN

... new, and an excitement. Our friend had exactly fourpence in his pocket. That would take him to anywhere and back before the Bank closed. And also he could put some of that eau-de-Cologne on his face and hands. He had on him still a sense of the foulness of Livermore's Rents and wanted something to counteract it. Eau-de-Cologne ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan

... breaths to humour my nose to the odour. As in the cabin, however, so here I found this noxiousness of air was not caused by putrefaction or any tainting qualities of a vegetable or animal kind, but by the deadness of the pent-up air itself, as the foulness of bilge-water is owing to its being imprisoned from air in the bottom of ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell

... her spirits, and begged she would stay a few moments, when Agnes would probably be calm, whom now she tried to sooth. But the latter seemed to disregard her, while she still fixed her eyes on Emily, and added, 'What are years of prayers and repentance? they cannot wash out the foulness of murder!—Yes, murder! Where is he—where is he?—Look there—look there!—see where he stalks along the room! Why do you come to torment me now?' continued Agnes, while her straining eyes were ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe

... as Turks do, by the event, and most part, as Cyprian notes, in all ages, countries, places, saevitiae magnitudo impunitatem sceleris acquirit; the foulness of the fact vindicates the offender. [330]One is crowned for that which another is tormented: Ille crucem sceleris precium tulit, hic diadema; made a knight, a lord, an earl, a great duke, (as [331]Agrippa ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... discharge from the frog. The matter is secreted by the inner or sensible frog, excited to this morbid condition by pressure of contraction. Its cure is simple and easy if the cause is removed. A wash of brine, or chloride of zinc, three grains to the ounce of water, is generally used to correct the foulness. ...
— Rational Horse-Shoeing • John E. Russell

... be death in the thought that she could be false to herself, and her confession of love for him; but then, it was unthinkable. Let the whole world reek with foulness; his love must still shine above it, white and remote as ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson

... of clubs resembles another. Houses, empty bottles, and garbage, they were forever of the same shapeless pattern. More forlorn they were than stale bones. They seemed to have been strewn there by the wind and to be waiting till the wind should come again and blow them away. Yet serene above their foulness swam a pure and quiet light, such as the East never sees; they might be bathing in the air of creation's first morning. Beneath sun and stars their days and nights ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister

... tables" together, but nothing more. She would coax me with the prettiest gestures, and cajole me with the sweetest endearments; then, when I steadfastly resisted her, she would fly into a fury and flout me with the foulness of the stews. She was beautiful, but born to be bad. No power on heaven or earth could have saved her. Yet in her badness she was frank, natural and untroubled as ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service

... are like our precious stones, and fairer still (compare Republic). The reason is, that they are pure, and not, like our precious stones, infected or corroded by the corrupt briny elements which coagulate among us, and which breed foulness and disease both in earth and stones, as well as in animals and plants. They are the jewels of the upper earth, which also shines with gold and silver and the like, and they are set in the light of day and are large and abundant and in all ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato

... this repulsiveness was due to the coarseness and foulness of the meal, the wretched cooking, and the lack of salt, but there was a still more potent reason than all these. Nature does not intend that man shall live by bread alone, nor by any one kind of food. She indicates this ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy

... 'live to me. So now, when I see you belie Him, an' keep men from Him with yer hundreds o' wranglin' creeds, an' that there's as much honest love of truth outside the Church as in it, I don't put yer bigotry an' foulness on Him. I on'y think there's an awful mistake: just this: that the Church thinks it is Christ's body an' us uns is outsiders, an' we think so too, an' despise Him through you with yer stingy souls an' fights an' squabblins; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... and quite clean; the floors of puddled clay or ants' nests, and very clean. On entering these cool retreats, the flies that had tormented them shirked the cool grot, and buzzed off to the nearest farm to batten on congenial foulness. On the fat, round, glossy babies, not a speck of dirt, whereas the little Boers were cakes thereof. The Kafir would meet them at the door, his clean black face all smiles and welcome. The women and grown girls would fling a spotless ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade

... be linked to the complex and antagonistic forces that constitute one soul, it seemed to him not impossibly strange that one spiritual force should possess divers forms for widely various manifestation. Nor, to him, was it great effort to believe that as pure water washes away all natural foulness, so water, holy by consecration, must needs cleanse God's world from that supernatural evil Thing. Therefore, faster than ever man's foot had covered those leagues, he sped under the dark, still night, over the waste, trackless snow-ridges to the far-away church, where salvation lay ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman

... for cities in cloudless air; for cities in which piazzas and gardens opened in bright populousness and peace; cities built that men might live happily in them, and take delight daily in each other's presence and powers. But our cities, built in black air which, by its accumulated foulness, first renders all ornament invisible in distance, and then chokes its interstices with soot; cities which are mere crowded masses of store, and warehouse, and counter, and are therefore to the rest of the world what the larder and cellar are to a private house; cities in which the ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... of the Oakland Creek channel and the mist suddenly thinned before us. It left the bay and the city fair and wholesome in the gray light, as though the storm had washed the grime and foulness from air and earth and renewed the freshness of life. The clear outline of the hills was scarcely broken by smoke. The ever-changing beauties of the most beautiful of bays took on the faint suggestion of a livelier tint, the herald of the coming sun. We had ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott

... as is the catalogue given by another philosopher of the number of authors he mastered before his twelfth year. Two attacks of the plague, agues, tertian and quotidian, malignant ulcers, hernia, haemorrhoids, varicose veins, palpitation of the heart, gout, indigestion, the itch, and foulness of skin. Relief in the second attack of plague came from a sweat so copious that it soaked the bed and ran in streams down to the floor; and, in a case of continuous fever, from voiding a hundred and twenty ounces of urine. As a boy he was a sleep-walker, and he never ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters

... circling planets. The grace of God is in Christ Jesus our Lord. In Him is life eternal; therefore, if we desire to possess it we must possess Him. In Him is righteousness; therefore, if we desire our own foulness to be changed into the holiness which shall see God, we must go to Jesus Christ. Grace reigns in life, but it is life through righteousness, which is through Jesus ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren

... know what you did—at least, I can guess the great part of it. When you left your brother you were racked with no unrighteous rage, to the extent even that you snatched up a small hammer, half inclined to kill him with his foulness on his mouth. Recoiling, you thrust it under your buttoned coat instead, and rushed into the church. You pray wildly in many places, under the angel window, upon the platform above, and a higher platform still, from which you could see the colonel's ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton

... dangerous and wicked girl. My name is Clara Luxmore. I was never nearer Cuba than Penzance. From first to last I have cheated and played with you. And what I am I dare not even name to you in words. Indeed, until to-day, until the sleepless watches of last night, I never grasped the depth and foulness of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... great measure, from a large heavy sea which comes rolling in, whenever the wind blows from eastern or western quarters. It is expedient, however, to cackle or arm the cables with an iron chain, or with good rounding, for five or six fathoms from the anchor, to secure them from being rubbed by the foulness of the ground.[2] ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr

... and constituted one of the entrances to the city. Its predecessor had been burnt, in the great fire of 1666, and the new one was at this time less than forty years old, and, though close and badly ventilated, had not yet arrived at the stage of dirt and foulness which afterwards brought about the death of numbers of prisoners confined there, and in 1750 occasioned an outbreak of jail fever, which not only swept away a large proportion of the prisoners, but infected the court of the Old Bailey close to ...
— In the Irish Brigade - A Tale of War in Flanders and Spain • G. A. Henty

... town, on low and marshy ground, and the worst of the business was that another convoy having occupied the spot the day before, the field was absolutely invisible under the superincumbent filth; it was no better than a common cesspool, of unimaginable foulness. The sole means the men had of self-protection was to scatter over the ground some large flat stones, of which they were so fortunate as to find a number in the vicinity. By way of compensation they had a somewhat less hard time of it that evening; the strictness of their guardians ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... foulness grows fair with the stern lustration of sleets and snows, And rottenness changes back to the breath and the cheek of the rose, And how gentle the wind that seems wild to each blossom ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne

... custom. Nothing remains but a world-wide pantomime. Worship itself becomes only a more extended place-hunting, and man the walking dummy of society. And then, since man no longer is properly vitalized, disease sets in, consumption, decay, putrefaction, filling all the air with the breath of their foulness. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various

... that afternoon. The grave was dug among some cocoanut palms out beyond the fetid swamp which lay in those days a crescent of foulness on three sides of the town. A wall separated the swamp from the houses, and over this wall the sewage used to be cast. Poles, bearing human heads, stuck out here and there. The swamp was crossed by ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully

... speeches and actions as the sight of a known cut-purse in a throng makes them watchful over their purses and pockets. He is also in this respect profitable physic, that his conversation being once truly tasted and discovered, the hateful foulness of it will make those that are not fully like him to purge all such diseases as are rank in him out of their own lives, as the sight of some citizens on horseback make a judicious man amend his own ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various

... this serial which are most chaotic and unmeaning, and some, indeed, which fall below its own excellent standard of refinement; but we do not remember ever to have met in its pages a double-entendre or a foulness of speech. We must advise its conductor (who, we may say in passing, is a gentleman whose writings have not infrequently appeared in the "Atlantic") never to allow his paper to descend to the level of the ignoble vulgus; and we are glad that in wishing "Vanity Fair" long life and prosperity we ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various

... than tyrant and misdoer. Now he was wont, whenas he heard of a masterful man[FN238] in another land, to send after him and tempt him with money to take service with him; and there was a certain tither, who exceeded all his brethren in oppression of the people and foulness of dealing. So the king sent after him and when he stood before him, he found him a mighty man[FN239] and said to him, 'Thou hast been praised to me, but meseemeth thou overpassest the description. Set out to me somewhat of thy sayings and doings, so I may be dispensed ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne

... A mad idea seized me. If they were dead, no one but I would know the hiding place of the treasure. I would kill them; but how? I glanced about. Great pieces of rock were on every hand. Without stopping to consider the foulness of the deed I rolled a huge piece to the mouth of the shaft and pushed it in. There was a cry of terror and I heard a voice call out to know what had happened. I said a piece of rock had broken loose and asked what ...
— The Broncho Rider Boys with Funston at Vera Cruz - Or, Upholding the Honor of the Stars and Stripes • Frank Fowler

... been called an inverted hypocrite, as one who makes himself out worse than he is. I should rather call him an inverted idealist, for, with high hopes and generous expectations, he entered into the world, and lacerated by rage at the cruelty, foulness, and lunacy he there discovered, he poured out his denunciations upon the crawling forms of life whose filthy minds were well housed in their apelike and corrupting flesh—a bag of loathsome carrion, animated by ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson

... destiny or goddess of parturition who presides a birth, and therefore, when approaching beauty the conceiving power is propitious, and diffuse, and benign, and begets and bears fruit; on the appearance of foulness she frowns and contracts in pain, and is averted and morose, and shrinks up, and not without a pang refrains from conception. And this is the reason why, when the hour of conception arrives, and the teeming nature is full, there is such a flutter and ecstasy about ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various

... understand, what some persons have thought strange, that Ophelia's language should become coarse, like Lear's, in the full tide of bitterness. It is the reaction after the perception of a spiritual beauty. The beauty seems broken; the earth and its foulness remain, and the anguished spirit sees the foulness exaggerated by contrast with its ideal. Lear, who had seen his daughters as paragons, sees them now as centaurs; he, who had adored their filial devotion, compares them now to the most obscene things which can besmirch the sight; nothing is too ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James

... as in a forest. The streets are narrow and crowded with shops, being connected by small bridges spanning the canals at all points. Some of these smaller canals are in anything but a wholesome or odorous condition, receiving, as they do, foulness of all kinds from the houses. They must certainly render the city far from healthy during the summer, when canal malaria and fever are prevalent. Indeed, being almost tideless, they have to be occasionally ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux



Words linked to "Foulness" :   severity, filth, olfactory property, raininess, severeness, smell, odor, wickedness, body odor, aroma, fetidness, stinkiness, iniquity, malodorousness, filthiness, rankness, nastiness, darkness, odour



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