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Pestilence   Listen
noun
Pestilence  n.  
1.
Specifically, the disease known as the plague; hence, any contagious or infectious epidemic disease that is virulent and devastating. "The pestilence that walketh in darkness."
2.
Fig.: That which is pestilent, noxious, or pernicious to the moral character of great numbers. "I'll pour this pestilence into his ear."
Pestilence weed (Bot.), the butterbur coltsfoot (Petasites vulgaris), so called because formerly considered a remedy for the plague.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Pestilence" Quotes from Famous Books



... of 1846. The famine and its results were terrible while they lasted; but they left behind them an amended state of things. When man has failed to rule the world rightly, God will step in, and will cause famines, and plagues, and pestilence—even poverty itself—with His own Right Arm. But the cure was effected, and the country was on its road to a fair amount of prosperity, when the tocsin was sounded in America, and Home Rule ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope

... averages 10 years, to captain or Rittmeister 15 years, to major 25 years, to colonel 33 years, and to general 37 years. It would not be altogether inhuman if these gentlemen occasionally drank a toast to war and pestilence! ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier

... the natives that the English had a box in which they kept the plague, and that, if the Indians offended them, they would let the awful scourge loose. Every where the English saw evidences of the ravages of the pestilence to which we have so often referred. There were desolate villages and deserted corn-fields, and but a few hundred Indians wandering here and there where formerly there had been thousands. The kindness ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott

... seen them. To think that the water should be so seldom changed! What filth it is, what a soup of microbes! What a terrible blow for the present-day mania, that rage for antiseptic precautions! How is it that some pestilence does not carry off all these poor people? The opponents of the microbe theory must be ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... triumphant Jacobinism shown its anti-social nature, its capacity for destruction, its impotence to re-construct.—The nation, vanquished and discouraged, no longer resists, but, if it submits it is as to a pestilence, while its transportations, its administrative purifications, its decrees placing towns in a state of siege, its daily violence, only ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... published in such a periodical as the "American Journal of Medical Sciences." Still it had its effect, as I have every reason to believe. I cannot doubt that it has saved the lives of many young mothers by calling attention to the existence and propagation of "Puerperal Fever as a Private Pestilence," and laying down rules for taking the necessary precautions against it. The case has long been decided in favor of the views I advocated, but, at the time when I wrote two of the most celebrated professors of Obstetrics in this country opposed my conclusions ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... Change. See," and she pointed to some sculptures on the rocky wall. "Three times two thousand years have passed since the last of the great race that hewed those pictures fell before the breath of the pestilence which destroyed them, yet are they not dead. E'en now they live; perchance their spirits are drawn towards us at this very hour," and she glanced round. "Of a surety it sometimes seems to me that my eyes ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard

... some genuine Bard, and guide his hand To drive this pestilence from out the land. E'en I—least thinking of a thoughtless throng, Just skilled to know the right and choose the wrong, 690 Freed at that age when Reason's shield is lost, To fight my course through Passion's countless host, [104] ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron

... after his departure from Lisbon, Camoens returned to his native city, bringing nothing save his completed epic, which, owing to the pestilence then raging in Europe, could be published only in 1572. Even then the Lusiad attracted little attention, and won for him only a small royal pension, which, however, the next king rescinded. Thus, poor Camoens, being sixty-two years old, died in an almshouse, having been partly supported since ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber

... 1609 the company wrote to Sir Humphrey Weld,(136) then mayor of London, for assistance in financing the undertaking, urging him at the same time to diminish the risk of pestilence and famine in the city by removing the surplus population to Virginia. For the sake of convenience they purposed to issue no bills of adventure for less than L12 10s., but if his lordship were to make any "ceasement" (assessment) or raise subscriptions from the best disposed and most able of the ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe

... to poor papa straightway. He has been shivering and shuddering through the cold weather; and partaking our influenza in the warmer. I am very sorry that you should have been a sufferer too. It seems to have been a universal pestilence, even down in Devonshire, where dear Bummy and the whole colony have had their share of 'groans.' And one of my doves shook its pretty head and ruffled its feathers and shut its eyes, and became ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon

... battle-fields, the builders of lost civilizations, the masters of that imperial domain stretching from the Red River of the North to the sea-coast of the Carolinas; a people swept backward as by the wrath of the Infinite, scourged by famine, decimated by pestilence, warred against by flame, stricken by storm, torn asunder by vengeful enemies, until a weakened remnant, harassed by the French sword, fled northward in the night to fulfil the fate ordained of God, and finally perished amid the gloomy shadows of the ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish

... discontent among the agricultural classes may be ascribed partly to the results of the great pestilence and partly to the new taxes which were levied in order to prolong the disastrous war with France. Up to this time the majority of those who cultivated the land belonged to some particular manor, paid stated dues to their lord, and performed definite services ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson

... the soldiers of Yndia, who surreptitiously took with them many servants of their own and of other people, so that it was necessary to support these people aboard the vessel. These afterward consumed the food, and then caught and spread a pestilence. Although there were only one hundred and ten soldiers in our galleon, there were about seven hundred persons, mostly negroes and Cafres; of these many were free, although nominally slaves, as Don Gonzalo de Silva, bishop of Malaca, who was aboard the same galleon, testified. He ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVII, 1609-1616 • Various

... assault, and if they were undone it was of their own will and pleasure. But now in this hateful age of ours not one is safe, not though some new labyrinth like that of Crete conceal and surround her; even there the pestilence of gallantry will make its way to them through chinks or on the air by the zeal of its accursed importunity, and, despite of all seclusion, lead them to ruin. In defence of these, as time advanced and wickedness increased, the order of knights-errant ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... child should be called "Ewa," which is death; and first his mother would die and then his father; and he would grow up to be a scourge to his people and a pestilence to his nation, and crops would wither when he walked past them, and the fish in the river would float belly up in stinking death, and until Ewa M'faba himself went out, nothing but ill-fortune ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace

... reign of Marcus Aurelius, or about A.D. 177, the Churches of Lyons and Vienne [294:1] in France endured one of the most horrible persecutions recorded in the annals of Christian martyrdom. A dreadful pestilence, some years before, had desolated the Empire; and the pagans seem to have been impressed with the conviction that the new religion had provoked the visitation. The mob in various cities became, in consequence, exasperated; and demanded, ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen

... majestic Notre Dame, and the graceful Column of July. Paris is truly an earthly Paradise. For centuries it has been the residence of French rulers, and the mecca of her pleasure loving citizens. Fire, famine, foreign invasion, civil war, and pestilence have often swept over this, the fairest of cities, yet from each affliction, Phoenix-like, Paris has risen brighter ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton

... encountered it was necessary to cast a considerable portion of the food overboard, so that the ship might right itself. As it was, the remaining provisions were so damaged by the sea-water that they rotted in a few days and became unfit for food. A pestilence would surely follow the use of such unwholesome stuff, and consequently the entire cargo of bread had to be cast into ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence

... prevented the guards from approaching; the dead bodies were not carried away. The pestilence increased; in pain and exhaustion, the dying fell shuddering on the dead; the hale on the dying; all tearing themselves like dogs with teeth and nails. The tower of Castrovillari became a foul hole of corruption, and the stench was spread abroad for ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas

... the little capital of Fort-de-France was swept by the pestilence as by a wind of death. Then the evil began to spread. It entered St. Pierre in December, about Christmas time. Last week 173 cases were reported; and a serious epidemic is almost certain. There were ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn

... present fee. Their senses, though Alive to love, are yet awake to terror; And these vile damps, too, and yon thick green wave Which floats above the place where we now stand— A cell so far below the water's level, Sending its pestilence through every crevice, Might strike them: this is not their atmosphere, However you—and you—and most of all, 380 As worthiest—you, sir, noble Loredano! ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron

... themselves for hire, Women of weak wills and strong desire. And, like the poison ivy in the woods That winds itself about tall virile trees Until it smothers them, so these Ruined the bodies and the souls of men. More evil were they than Red War itself, Or Pestilence, or Famine. Now in this war - This last most awful carnage of the world - All the old ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... up and asked, a little indignantly: "Am I infected with a pestilence that you so ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe

... most awful cruelties on their prisoners, many of whom having been hunted with bloodhounds, were carried in ships to some distance from the shore, murdered in cold blood, and cast into the sea; their corpses were thrown by the waves back upon the beach, and filled the air with pestilence, by which the French troops perished in large numbers. Leclerc having perished by pestilence, his successor, Rochambeau, when the conquest of the island was beyond possibility, became the cruel perpetrator of these ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various

... property he had was scarcely sufficient to pay his debts, and Madame Fouquet, since the captivity of her husband, is abandoned by everybody. The hand of your majesty strikes like the hand of God. When the Lord sends the curse of leprosy or pestilence into a family, every one flies and shuns the abode of the leprous or the plague-stricken. Sometimes, but very rarely, a generous physician alone ventures to approach the accursed threshold, passes it with courage, and exposes his life to ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas

... for the space of twenty years, will be exempt from all taxes, such as octroi, highway, door and window tax, etc. There are also one or two semi-private companies, which are occupying themselves with the question, and it is to be hoped that the rumors of the pestilence in Egypt ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various

... he advanced to the entrance of the vault, and his eye was struck by a new and very handsome tablet on the wall. It was to the father, mother, and young brother and sisters, whose graves had been hastily made far away in the time of the pestilence, the only Dynevors who did not lie in the tombs of their fathers. For one moment James moved nearer to his uncle. Could he have spoken then, what might not have followed? but it was impossible, and ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge

... awful holiness, his almighty power, and his absolute supremacy over the nations of the earth, not only to the covenant people, but also to the surrounding heathen world. Had the Canaanites perished by famine, pestilence, earthquake, or fire from heaven, it might have remained doubtful to the heathen by whose anger their destruction had been effected, that of the Canaanitish gods, or of the God of Israel. But now that God went forth with his people, dividing the Jordan before them, overthrowing the walls of Jericho, ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows

... result of war, pestilence, or some great misfortune. A nation would not, except in dire necessity, issue its promises to pay money when it is unable to redeem those promises. I know that when the legal tenders were first issued, in February, 1862, we were under a dire necessity. The doubt that prevented several influential ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman

... universall Hot Pestilence beat her mortiferous wings Ore all my Kingdome, am I not bound in soule To empty all our Achademes of Doctors And Aesculapian ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various

... our daily bread, Let us be duly clothed and fed, And keep thou from our homes afar Famine and pestilence and war, That we may live in godly peace, ...
— The Hymns of Martin Luther • Martin Luther

... through perhaps the most fearful tyranny that the western world has known. How did they live, one wonders; how is it that they did not die of very terror, those of them who escaped the scaffold, the famine and the pestilence? ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard

... you show you do. What? do you suppose that the municipal towns, and the colonies, and the prefectures have any other opinion? All men are agreed with one mind; so that every one who wishes the state to be saved must take up every sort of arms against that pestilence. What? does, I should like to know, does the opinion of Decimus Brutus, O Romans, which you can gather from his edict, which has this day reached us, appear to any one deserving of being lightly esteemed? ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero

... cannot but be a most surprising fact. His curiosity will lead him to inquire what kind of system that could have been which was pretending to guide and develop society, but which must be held responsible for this prodigious destruction, excelling, in its insidious result, war, pestilence, and famine combined; insidious, for men were actually believing that it secured their highest temporal interests. How different now! In England, the same geographical surface is sustaining ten times the population of that day, and sending forth its emigrating swarms. Let him, who looks back, with ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper

... destroying all men with a deluge, and preserving Noah and his small family, in order that his individual faith might condemn the whole world. Lastly, a corrupt custom is nothing but an epidemical pestilence, which is equally fatal to its objects, though they fall with a multitude. Besides, they ought to consider a remark, somewhere made by Cyprian,[36] that persons who sin through ignorance, though they cannot be wholly exculpated, may yet ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot

... heap of white ash was all that remained of the man of evil life, whose shade had brought dread to all the citizens of Berwick. But their wise action must, unfortunately, have been taken too late. Very soon afterwards a great pestilence arose, and decimated the town's population. "Never did it so furiously rage elsewhere," says William, Canon of Newburgh, the learned churchman, who has chronicled for us the tale, "though it was at that time general throughout all the borders of England." ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang

... really did not understand how children came about, births were catastrophic. A woman at a certain moment had to disappear into the wilderness; she came back having found a baby under a cabbage leaf. Any contact with her while she was making her discovery might bring pestilence and death ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam

... productive of fever and agues. The centre of the country consists of lofty plateaus and rugged mountains, with deep valleys, lakes, and streams. The higher regions are healthy and fertile, but in the valleys, at certain seasons, pestilence destroys numbers who are subjected to ...
— Our Soldiers - Gallant Deeds of the British Army during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston

... The pestilence that had so ravaged the household of Multnomah was spread widely now; and every band as it departed from the camp left death behind it,—aye, took death with it; for in each company were those whose haggard, sickly faces ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch

... practically all exposed susceptible animals lead to heavy losses. Since the mortality is comparatively low, ranging from only 3 per cent or less in mild forms to 30 or 40 per cent in malignant cases, the havoc caused by the pestilence is sometimes underestimated. But there are other sources of loss which are much more important than the actual mortality. The fever and the difficulty of eating cause a rapid and extreme loss in flesh and a lessening or cessation of the milk secretion. The udders often ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture

... a second-rate religion; they are fatalists, and that keeps them down. Besides, their women are not nearly so charming as ours—or as ours would be if this modern pestilence were eradicated. Think what a confession you make when you say that women are less and less sought in marriage; what a testimony that is to the pernicious effect on their manners, their person, their nature, ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James

... allay a pestilence which raged at Ephesus, he ordered an old beggar to be burned under the stones near the temple of Hercules, as an enemy to the gods. He commanded the people again to remove the stones, that they might see what sort ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian

... plague broke out in Dundee; and all men exclaimed, that the town had drawn down the vengeance of Heaven by banishing the pious preacher, and that the pestilence would never cease, till they bed made him atonement for their offence against him. No sooner did Wishart hear of this change in their disposition, than he returned to them, and made them a new tender ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume

... Nuremberg; and, by this well chosen position, cut off from the city and the camp of Gustavus all supplies from Franconia, Swabia, and Thuringia. Thus he held in siege at once the city and the King, and flattered himself with the hope of slowly, but surely, wearing out by famine and pestilence the courage of his opponent whom he had no wish to ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... who would as readily have walked through a pestilence as in a flower-garden, only smiled at this banter, and replied, after speaking to the sick man, and returning in German the greeting of the woman, who had turned from the tub, "I've no doubt you are disappointed that it isn't contagious!" ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... Assyrian host, according to the Hebrew account, was smitten by "the angel of the Lord," [Footnote: This expression is a Hebraism, meaning often any physical cause of destruction, as a plague or storm. In the present case, the destroying agency was probably a pestilence. ] and the king returned with a shattered army and without glory to his ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers

... of all who loved their fatherland and their race, the sight of a desolate country, with its ancient charters superseded by brute force, its industrious population swarming from the land in droves, as if the pestilence were raging, with gibbets and scaffolds erected in every village, and with a Sickening and universal apprehension of still darker disasters to follow, was a spectacle still more ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... each of these perhaps could number some who loved him dearly; but none in the column won such hearty sympathy as those "trim subalterns, holding their swords daintily," who went forth to their doom gayly and gallantly, as if pestilence were not lying in ambush at fever-stricken Varna, and lines of hungry graves waiting for their prey in the bleak Chersonese. Surely there were sadder faces at home than any that lined the road; and the anxious ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence

... eventually he becomes a recognized power, feared and obeyed by all. Extortion, false swearing, quarrels and murders, and all manner of iniquity, follow in his train. No native but fears him, however complete the training and education of civilization. For the Papuan never thinks of death, plague, pestilence or famine as arising from natural causes. Every little misfortune (much more every great one) is credited to a "pourri-pourri" or magic. The Papuan, when he comes "under the Evil Eye" of the witch-doctor, will wilt away and die, though, apparently, he has nothing ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Australia • Frank Fox

... I think they refer to the march of pestilence or plague. Numbers, colour, race, nothing matters, the plague sweeps all away. Ah, then, I was right," he added. "There is the story in ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... space, and are not astonished. In their childhood they were taught that God made the sun and the stars to give light on the earth; that is enough for them. And so it is with everything. Poverty and suffering; war, pestilence, and the inequalities of fate; madness, life and death, and the spiritual wonders that hedge in our being, are things not to be inquired into but accepted. So they accept them as they do their ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard

... the spring equinox famine and pestilence together fell upon the inhabitants of the city. There was still, it is true, some grain for the soldiers, though no other kind of provisions, but the grain-supply of the rest of the Romans had been exhausted, and actual famine as well as pestilence was pressing ...
— Procopius - History of the Wars, Books V. and VI. • Procopius

... notwithstanding he lived in Athens during that great Plague, which has made so much Noise through all Ages, and has been celebrated at different Times by such eminent Hands; I say, notwithstanding that he lived in the time of this devouring Pestilence, he never caught the least Infection, which those Writers unanimously ascribe to that uninterrupted Temperance ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... struggle against the snows of winter and the pestilence of the summer wilderness, he had fought Nature with the dogged determination of the soldier. Snow meant winter quarters, the spring marching and fighting. The hills were breastworks. The night brought dreams of strategy and surprise. The grass and flowers were ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon

... hateful monster base ingratitude, Soul's mortal poison, deadly killing-wound, Deceitful serpent seeking to delude, Black loathsome ditch, where all desert is drown'd; Vile pestilence, which all things dost confound. At first created to no other end, But to grieve those, whom ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 358 - Vol. XIII, No. 358., Saturday, February 28, 1829 • Various

... free, any more than the rest of the Protestant world, from this direful superstition, which ran over Europe like a pestilence in the sixteenth century. In Sweden especially, the witches and their midnight ridings to Blokulla, the black hill, gave occasion to processes as absurd and abominable as the trial of Dr. Fian and the witch-findings of Hopkins. ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent

... how one was slain by the sword, another was drowned, another falling from on high broke his neck, another died at the table, another whilst at play! One died by fire, another by the sword, another by the pestilence, another by the robber. Thus cometh death to all, and the life of men swiftly passeth ...
— The Imitation of Christ • Thomas a Kempis

... PEOPLE,—A week in Paris reduced me to the limpness and lack of appetite peculiar to a kid glove, and gave Fanny a jumping sore throat. It's my belief there is death in the kettle there; a pestilence or the like. We came out here, pitched on the Star and Garter (they call it Somebody's pavilion), found the place a bed of lilacs and nightingales (first time I ever heard one), and also of a bird called the piasseur, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... country. We left the trenches and climbed out upon the earth—along a great incline which hid the enemy horizon from us and protected us against him. The blackening dampness turned the cold into a thing, and laid frozen shudders on us. A pestilence surrounded us, wide and vague; and sometimes lines of pale crosses alongside our march spelled out death ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse

... adventists was held, who besides other blasphemies of the living God and his Christ teach also, that man dies as a beast, but that when Christ comes on the clouds, he will awaken the righteous from death, but the wicked will be eternally annihilated. As all other pestilence which is spread in the Papal and in the Protestant sects is supported by the use and abuse of the Bible, likewise also these "annihilators" made their discoveries of the annihilation of the wicked by the means of the Bible. They are spread through the country and especially through the ...
— Secret Enemies of True Republicanism • Andrew B. Smolnikar

... the conquest of Jerusalem that Count Robert of Paris returned to Constantinople, and with his wife, and such proportion of his followers as the sword and pestilence had left after that bloody warfare, resumed his course to his native kingdom. Upon reaching Italy, the first care of the noble Count and Countess was to celebrate in princely style the marriage of Hereward and his faithful Bertha, who had added to their other claims ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott

... squalor, famine, loathsome disease, and dull despair, such as the worst slums of London, Paris, or Liverpool know nothing of. When we hear of the mortality among the townsmen during the periodical outbreaks of pestilence or famine, horror suggests that we should dismiss as incredible such stories as the imagination shrinks from dwelling on. What greatly added to the dreary wretchedness of the lower order in the towns was ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp

... is broken to pieces and lost in the sea. Vainamoinen saves enough to secure the prosperity of Kalevala, but Louhi only carries home a small and almost useless fragment. Vainamoinen then makes a new kantele of birchwood. Louhi brings pestilence on Kalevala, then sends a bear against the country, and lastly, steals away the sun and moon, hiding them in the stone mountain of Pohjola. Vainamoinen drives away the plagues, kills the bear, and renews fire from a conflagration caused by a spark sent down from heaven by the god ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous

... and, with their usual turpitude, they repudiated their oath, and refused to liberate their oppressed countrymen. For this violation of their covenant with the Lord, they were given over to all the horrors of the sword, pestilence, and famine—Jeremiah, xxxiv. 15-17. ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... Rome, 3,160 are bastards, and for every 750 people in the city of Rome, there is a murder committed during the year; thus you will see that this herd of Catholic teachers are not only teachers of immorality and degradation, but are also responsible for murder, as such a pestilence of immorality will ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg

... foot within my territories. And truly I wonder that your king should suffer them in their sermons to publish such scandalous doctrine in his dominions; for they deserve to be chastised with greater severity than those who, by magical art, or any other device, have brought the pestilence into a country. The pest killeth but the bodies, but such abominable imposters empoison our very souls. As he spake these words, in came the monk very resolute, and asked them, Whence are you, you poor wretches? Of Saint ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... away or disobeying in any way, but always close to her side, ready to creep under her wing, or bring her a plump bug when the poor biddy's appetite failed her. They were very happy together till Thanksgiving drew near, when a dreadful pestilence seemed to sweep through the farm-yard; for turkeys, hens, ducks, and geese fell a prey to it, and were seen by their surviving relatives featherless, pale, and stiff, borne away to some unknown place whence no fowl returned. Blot was waked one night by a great cackling and fluttering in the ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott

... Scepter, Vnlesse he doe prophane, steale, or vsurpe. And though you thinke, that all, as you haue done, Haue torne their Soules, by turning them from vs, And we are barren, and bereft of Friends: Yet know, my Master, God Omnipotent, Is mustring in his Clouds, on our behalfe, Armies of Pestilence, and they shall strike Your Children yet vnborne, and vnbegot, That lift your Vassall Hands against my Head, And threat the Glory of my precious Crowne. Tell Bullingbrooke, for yond me thinkes he is, That euery ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... best means to arrest the progress of the pestilence in the people's food have occupied the attention of scientific men. The commission appointed by government, consisting of three of the most celebrated practical chemists, has published a preliminary report, in which several suggestions, rather ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell

... schools and public buildings turned into barracks, her stores filled with gaping empty shelves, her railroad yards clogged with munitions, and ever the mourners going about the street and man to his long home. How would Emporia act with the pestilence that stalketh in darkness for ever near her; with her women and children slaughtered, merely to break the morale of the people and cause them to plead for peace; with cripples from the war hidden away in a hundred sad homes, with fatherless children and children ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White

... dead bodies threatens the health of the whole region. Now that the waters are fast shrinking back from the horrid work of their own doing and are uncovering thousands of putrid and ill-smelling corpses the fearful danger of pestilence is espied, stalking in the ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker

... unwholesome came upon the ocean. "As the lights touched the water a purple glow that was to it like the ashen hue that beclouds the face of the dying. A filmy green spread over the land and there seemed to arise a miasmatic vapor like the breath of a brooding pestilence, which clung clammily to the earth and dulled all life." Every one felt the presence of trouble impending; one grave question breathed forth from the haunting music and, unspoken, trembled on every ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand

... pestilence.—These constant wars not only brought wounds and death and sorrow to many homes, they also kept all the people poor and increased the deadliness of the other great historic curses of humanity, such as famine. The money and labor ...
— Hebrew Life and Times • Harold B. Hunting

... August,[10] which are the most deadly throughout the basin of the Mediterranean. Pestilences were common at Rome in her early history, and have left their mark in the calendar of her religious festivals; for example, the Apolline games were instituted during the Hannibalic war as the result of a pestilence, and fixed for the unhealthy month of July. Foreigners from the north of Europe have always been liable to fever at Rome; invaders from the north have never been able to withstand the climate for long; in the Middle Ages one German army after another melted away ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler

... wars that formed and displayed his virtue. Some of its best provinces were torn from his kingdom, which was shrunk to the ancient bounds of Wessex; and what remained was weakened by dissension, by a long war, by a raging pestilence, and surrounded by enemies whose numbers seemed inexhaustible, and whose fury was equally increased by victories or defeats. All these difficulties served only to increase the vigor of his mind. He took the field without delay; but ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... especially the care of the revenues of the chapter. All his duties were detailed therein with the greatest precision and minuteness. An article was afterwards added, which made it the duty of the people's priest not to leave the city during seasons of pestilence. ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger

... entirely unprepared for any farming operations, having neither agricultural tools nor seed. Neither if they had them could they wait for the slow advent of the harvest. Famine commenced its reign, and with famine, its invariable attendant, pestilence. In less than six months, of all the glittering hosts, which with music and banners had landed upon the isthmus, expecting soon to return to Europe with their ships freighted with gold, but a few hundred were found alive, and they were haggard ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott

... alone seems to grasp the full significance of the satire. "We acknowledge gladly," says the reviewer, "that the author has with accuracy noted and defined the rise, development, ever-increasing contagion and plague-like prevalence of this moral pestilence; ... that the author has penetrated deep into the knowledge of this disease and its causes." He wishes for an engraving of the Sterne hobby-horse cavalcade described in the first chapter, and begs for a second and third volume, ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer

... look back for a moment to the triumphs of the pagan emperors, well may we bless God for the change which the religion of Christ has wrought in this city. After they had let loose war, and famine, and pestilence, to prey upon hapless nations, they ascended the Capitol to offer incense with polluted hands to their profane gods; and meantime the groans of the dying and unpitied princes, whom they had reserved to decorate their triumph, ascended from the scala Gemonia to call down the vengeance ...
— The Ceremonies of the Holy-Week at Rome • Charles Michael Baggs

... writes one of them, "Mother India, though reduced to a mere skeleton by the oppression of alien rulers during hundreds of years, still preserves her vitality, it is because the Brahmans have never relaxed in their devotion to her. She has witnessed political and social revolutions. Famines and pestilence have shorn her of her splendour. But the Brahmans have stood by her through all the vicissitudes of fortune. It is they who raised her to the highest pinnacle of glory, and it is they whose ministrations still keep up the drooping ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol

... probably a dissimilar disease, writers having applied the terms pestilential and pestilent in a generic sense to diseases specifically different. It must also be remembered that, in some cases, death must have been due to famine, want, and privation, which are so frequently coexistent with pestilence. Following the idea of Hecker, the dancing manias have been included ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... provision for its purification. Even the wind is sent to the sea to be cleansed. The sea washes every shore, purifies every cove, bay, and river twice every twenty-four hours. All putrescible matter liable to breed a pestilence is carried far from shore and sunk under fathoms of the never-stagnant sea. The distant moon lends its mighty power to carry the burdens of commerce. She takes all the loads that can be floated on her flowing tides, and cheerfully carries them in opposite ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren

... with her, he felt her hand steal into his as the vicar read the Litany; and the pressure of her hand waxed closer as the vicar's voice sounded through the church: "From lightning and tempest; from plague, pestilence, and famine; from battle and murder, and from sudden death." Then rose the fervent response from the congregation, "Good Lord, deliver us." And none prayed it more fervently than the widow as she knelt by the side ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting

... morasses filled the dreary prospect. Under the ardent rays of the tropical sun, noisome vapors exhaled from the rank soil and sluggish waters, poisoning the breezes from the southern seas, and corrupting them into the breath of pestilence. Masses of floating trees, whose large branches were scathed by months of alternate immersion and exposure, during hundreds of leagues of travel, choked up many of the numerous outlets of the river, and, cemented together by the alluvial deposits of the muddy stream, gradually became ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton

... through the dust and cannon-smoke; for a glimpse of whose shining face they had kept the long night vigils and charged upon the guns in the morning; for a touch of whose shimmering robe they had wasted in prison pens, where famine and loathsome pestilence and raving madness stalked about ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair

... centuries. Those terrible laws of natural selection, which issue in "the survival of the fittest," cleared off the less fit, in every generation, principally by infantile disease, often by wholesale famine and pestilence; and left, on the whole, only those of the strongest constitutions to perpetuate a hardy, valiant, and ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley

... black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes! O thou Who chariotest to their ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy

... the problems in their grasp. I do not believe for an instant that war has falsified our vision of peace. We must cling to it more than ever, we must emphasize it, we must dwell in it. I regard war as I regard an outbreak of pestilence; the best way to resist it is not to brood over it, but to practise joy and health. The ancient plagues which devastated Europe have not been overcome by philosophy, but by the upspringing desire ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson

... threadbare giant, showing bruises, they sink on their inherent desire for a dance with the handsome man. And the really handsome man is the most extraordinary of the rarities. No wonder that when he appears he slays them, walks over them like a pestilence! ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... intervention of a miracle in proof of the faith, they all perished. (185) A fresh sedition then arose among the whole people, who believed that their champions had not been put to death by the judgment of God, but by the device of Moses. (186) After a great slaughter, or pestilence, the rising subsided from inanition, but in such a manner that all preferred death ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part IV] • Benedict de Spinoza

... then a double ear of corn in the fields—a phenomenon which will be duly recorded in the Peking Gazette. But should there be anything like laxness or incapacity, or still worse, degradation and vice, then a comet may perhaps appear, a pestilence may rage, or a famine, to warn the erring ruler to give up ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles

... same rumors had come up from the south, and the Red Terror had followed. The horror of it still remained with the forest people; for a thousand unmarked graves, shunned like a pestilence, and scattered from the lower waters of James Bay to the lake country of the Athabasca, gave evidence of the toll ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood

... the Lieutenant, after a tactical meditation. "This must have been abandoned by its inhabitants. Pestilence, or starvation, ...
— Overland • John William De Forest

... Thousands thus driven into crime, are detected, lose their reputation, and abandon themselves to intemperance. Their evil example has a pernicious influence on the morals of those children and youth, who may, by various circumstances, be placed in their society, and thus the pestilence, in all its frightful horrors, gathers ...
— Twenty-Four Short Sermons On The Doctrine Of Universal Salvation • John Bovee Dods

... that the Toltecs were dispersed by reason of a great famine due to drought, followed by pestilence, only a few people surviving. Banished from the scene of their civilisation by these disasters, the few remaining inhabitants made their way to Yucatan and Central America; and their names and traditions seem to be stamped there. Beyond this little is known of the Toltecs. ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock

... origin. We see it in both the teaching and practice of the early Christian Church. That great father of the Church, Origen, says: "It is demons which produce famine, unfruitfulness, corruption of the air, and pestilence." St. Augustine said that "All diseases of Christians are to be ascribed to demons." The Church of England still retains in its Articles an authorisation for the expulsion of demons; and a number of charms yet in wide use amongst civilised nations show how persistent is this ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen

... old house. Here, Mr. Henley, am I, a suicide, justly deserving the punishment I receive; but there is my child, as innocent as the air of heaven, forced to suffer with me, and it is no small part of my chastisement to realize this fact. People fly from us as they would from pestilence, both in this world and the other, although many of the dwellers in the higher state, from their greater knowledge and loftier development, simply avoid us. And we can not criticise their action in either world, for we are not adapted to ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale

... the daylight. Should his wiles and entreaties take effect, however, the man-demon would remain only a little while above ground. He would gratify his fiendish malignity by perpetrating signal mischief on his benefactor, and perhaps bringing some old pestilence or other forgotten and long-buried evil on society; or, possibly, teaching the modern world some decayed and dusty kind of crime, which the antique Romans knew,—and then would hasten back to the catacomb, which, ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... The second is the great advantages which we enjoy from the temperature of the air, the fertility of the earth, and the abundance of various benefits of other kinds. The third cause is deduced from the terror with which the mind is affected by thunder, tempests, storms, snow, hail, devastation, pestilence, earthquakes often attended with hideous noises, showers of stones, and rain like drops of blood; by rocks and sudden openings of the earth; by monstrous births of men and beasts; by meteors in the air, and blazing stars, by the Greeks called ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... There, 'mid the throng of hurrying desires That trample on the dead to seize their spoil, Lurks vengeance, footless, irresistible As exhalations laden with slow death, And o'er the fairest troop of captured joys Breathes pallid pestilence. ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... this feeling back a few thousand years, and we reach the time when our forbears looked upon all the forces in nature as in league against them. The anger of the gods as shown in storms and winds and pestilence and defeat is a phase of the same feeling. A wild animal caught in a steel trap vents its wrath upon the bushes and sticks and trees and rocks within its reach. Something is to blame, something baffles it and gives it pain, and its teeth and ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs

... sent Ambassador by King Henry the Eighth to Charles the Fifth Emperor, then residing in Spain, died of the Pestilence in the West Country, before he could take ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley

... to all the evils which can afflict a nation. Pestilence was added to the ravages of war and the woes of transplantation, and it raged alike among the conquerors and the conquered. Friar Morrisson's "Threnodia" reads to-day like an exaggerated lament, the burden of which was drawn from a vivid ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud

... Rezu also was a sun-god whom from his throne in the fires of the Lord of Day, gave life to men, or slew them if he willed with his thunderbolts of drought and pestilence and storm. He was no gentle king of heaven, but one who demanded blood-sacrifice from his worshippers, yes, even that of maids and children. So it came about that the people of Kor, who saw their virgins slain and eaten by the priests of Rezu, and their infants burned to ashes in the ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard

... curst breath that withers flowers and burns them like fire; that pain at once physical and mental, which invades both soul and body, penetrates to the depths of thought, and paralyzes mind as well as blood! Cold—the sinister demon who grazes the universe with his damp wing, and breathes pestilence on bewildered nations! Cold, tarnishing everything, unrolling its gray and nebulous veil over the sky's rich tints, the waters' reflections, the hearts of flowers, and the cheeks of maidens! Cold, that casts its white winding-sheet over fields and woods and ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various

... The same yeare deceassed the duchesse of Glocester, thorough sorrow (as was thought) which she conceiued for the losse of hir sonne and heire the lord Humfrie, who being sent for foorth of Ireland (as before ye haue heard) was taken with the pestilence, and died ...
— Chronicles (3 of 6): Historie of England (1 of 9) - Henrie IV • Raphael Holinshed

... secretary's desk and added: "We must win this strike. The directors meet to-day and those English share-holders are getting nervous. They can't understand that this fight is necessary—that we are fighting for peace hereafter; weeding out a pestilence that threatens, not only the future of railway corporations, but the sacred rights of American citizens—the right to engage in whatever business or calling one cares to follow, and to employ whom he will at whatever wages the ...
— Snow on the Headlight - A Story of the Great Burlington Strike • Cy Warman

... sisters and erring brothers, nor the grace, love and fellowship of the Trinity, but simply for enough money. And the evil to be attacked is not sin, suffering, greed, priestcraft, kingcraft, demagogy, monopoly, ignorance, drink, war, pestilence, nor any other of the scapegoats which reformers sacrifice, but ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw

... next day. The family walked over after tea from the inn at which they had been staying, resolving to rough it for a single night in their new home in preference to passing another night amid countless swarms of "the pestilence that walketh in darkness." Two beds were hastily made up on the floor of the drawing-room, one for the occupation of Mr. and Mrs. Horsfall, and the other for the two young women. A third bed was hastily extemporized ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent

... heedlessly, a great evil becomes the consequence. Unrighteousness increases causing a confusion of castes. Cold sets in during the summer months, and disappears when its proper season comes. Drought and flood and pestilence afflict the people. Ominous stars arise and awful comets appear on such occasions. Diverse other portents, indicating destruction of the kingdom, make their appearance. If the king does not take measures for his own safety ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... speech on the sugar duties came off in due course. In this speech he took the sound point that the new arrangement must act as an encouragement to the slave trade, 'that monster which, while war, pestilence, and famine were slaying their thousands, slew from year to year with unceasing operation its tens of thousands.' As he went on, he fell upon Macaulay for being member of a cabinet that was thus deserting ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... erected in Rome in 467 B.C. in honour of Apollo, the reputed father of AEsculapius, and in 460 B.C. in honour of AEsculapius of Epidaurus. Ten years later a pestilence raged in the city, and a temple was built in honour of the Goddess Salus. By order of the Sibylline books, in 399 B.C., the first lectisternium was held in Rome to combat a pestilence. This was a festival of Greek origin. It was a time of prayer and sacrifice; the images ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott

... funds could bear; they advised, therefore, that he should be killed—shot in the hands and face with poisoned arrows. Others, however, argued that if this were done it would be a very difficult thing to get rid of so large a dead body, which might cause a pestilence to break out if it lay long ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various

... proceeded to set forth the reasons for such a message, as he had conceived them within his shrewd mind. First, it seemed that the pestilence had visited Gorumna in the absence of its mistress, and that the Dark Master had caught a score of the O'Malleys who had been wrecked in Bertraghboy Bay, promptly hanging them all. Between the plague and the hanging Nuala had ...
— Nuala O'Malley • H. Bedford-Jones

... ever in the soul of a People! Ah, that rage for Justice!—that divine fury and fever which with strong sweating and delirium shakes the body politic and cleanses it from accumulated sickly humours and pestilence! What would the nations be without its periodical and merciful visitations! Tearing down old hypocrisies,—rooting up weedy abuses,—rending asunder rotten conventions,—what wonder if thrones and sceptres, and even the heads of kings get sometimes mixed into the general swift clearance of ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... connection with that devastatingly popular ballad, "Mother's Knee," was one to which he always looked back later with a certain pride. "Mother's Knee," it will be remembered, went through the world like a pestilence. Scots elders hummed it on their way to kirk; cannibals crooned it to their offspring in the jungles of Borneo; it was a best-seller among the Bolshevists. In the United States alone three million copies were ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse

... cramped for us. I have talked with the fiance of the wet-nurse, a modest-looking person. He spoke of her with love, and declared in reply to my question that he certainly is willing to marry her. What he wrote about the "white pestilence" is nonsense; no such sickness exists, least of all in Berlin. The cholera is fast disappearing. I have not heard a word more about it since I came here; one sees it only in newspaper reports. Isn't our mammy jealous because, according to the paper, I have been in company with "strikingly ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... Julius Casar, comets have always been looked upon as the forerunners of pestilence and war, but wars are sometimes blessings, and Donati's discovery proved a harbinger of good to Italy, —but to the Hawthornes, a prediction of evil. Continually in Hawthorne's Italian journal we meet with references to the Roman malaria, as if it were a subject ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns

... discreet, and make a very good choice; and this is concerning flatterers; whereof all writings are full: and that because men please themselves so much in their own things, and therein cozen themselves, that very hardly can they escape this pestilence; and desiring to escape it, there is danger of falling into contempt; for there is no other way to be secure from flattery, but to let men know, that they displease thee not in telling thee truth: but when every one hath this leave, thou losest thy reverence. Therefore ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli

... our house, had been in the olden time a Potter's Field, where all the victims of the yellow fever pestilence had been interred. Now it had become a beautiful little park, but there were legends of a myriad of white confused forms seen flitting over it in the night, for it was a mysterious haunted place to many still, and I can remember my mother gently ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland

... but few public men who would have the courage to oppose it. Experience proves that the man who obstructs a war in which his nation is engaged, no matter whether right or wrong, occupies no enviable place in life or history. Better for him, individually, to advocate "war, pestilence, and famine," than to act as obstructionist to a war already begun. The history of the defeated rebel will be honorable hereafter, compared with that of the Northern man who aided him by conspiring against his government while protected by it. The most favorable posthumous history the ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... and disease, but there are very few doctors and nurses to help people to get well. So the life of an Egyptian peasant is a hard one—a great deal of work and very little time to rest, or play, or learn. But everyone has something to make him happy, and, unless there is famine or pestilence, these people have their wives and children and home, just as people have in England and other countries. The only person who need be unhappy is the one who ...
— People of Africa • Edith A. How

... the beasts of the mountain his children devour, And the pestilence seize him with death-dealing power; May his warriors all perish and he in his gloom, Like the hosts of the red men, be swept ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various

... at the dance hall after we left, and the four villainous looking men we had seen had "done a bit of shootin,'" but no one was hurt much, and they had left to-day for no one knows where. He says this class of desperadoes are like a pestilence; whenever they descend trouble of sorts brews, and the chief of them is a man called Curly Grainger—the "lowest yellow dog ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn

... exertions, are left to perish of starvation, or driven to vice or crime to procure the means of support. In a third class, men, their wives, and children, are driven from their homes to perish in the road, or to endure the slavery of dependence on public charity until pestilence shall Send them to their graves, and thus clear the way for a fresh supply of others like themselves. In a fourth, we see men driven to selling themselves for long periods at hard labour in distant countries, deprived of the society of parents, relatives, or friends. In ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey

... full of ships and boats. Woe to those who allow themselves to be tempted on board by the magnificence of its decorations! How great is their chance of infection, how easily they will carry it from ship to ship, and from the ships on to the shore, till the pestilence has spread from the harbor to the city! Let us then be thankful to those who destroy the gorgeous vessel, who drive it from amongst us, or sink or burn it. May our Father in Heaven give courage to their hearts, strength ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... things bewitched; an army without fear They had broken through the rushes their upward way to take; And each one followed steadily a voice no man could hear— While poisoned wind and pestilence came swiftly ...
— The Miracle and Other Poems • Virna Sheard

... Francisco; Larrikins in Melbourne. This last phrase is an Irish constable's broad pronunciation of 'larking' applied to the nightly street performances of these young scamps, here as elsewhere, a real social pestilence." ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris

... hoarse, with satin badges pinned on their coats, and their hats (the wrong kind) stuck far back on their heads; music students to whom Michigan Avenue means the Fine Arts Building. There you have the west side. But just across the street the walk is as deserted as though a pestilence lurked there. Here the Art Institute rears its smoke-blackened face, and Grant Park's greenery struggles bravely against the poisonous breath of ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber

... in the hotel de ville, Jean Guiton, the mayor of the city, brought down his dagger with an oath, when in 1628 the vessels and regiments of Richelieu closed about it on sea and land. This terrible functionary was the soul of the resistance; he held out from February to October, in the midst of pestilence and famine. The whole episode has a brilliant place among the sieges of history; it has been related a hundred times, and I may only glance at it and pass. I limit my ambition, in these light pages, to speaking of ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James

... the case with the Club Indians of the Colorado of the West, with the Crows, the Flat-heads, the Umbiquas, and the Black-feet. These last suffered a great deal more than any people in the world ever suffered from any plague or pestilence. To be sure, the Mandans had been entirely swept from the surface of the earth; but they were few, while the Black-feet were undoubtedly the most numerous and powerful tribe in the neighbourhood of the mountains. Their war-parties ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat

... painful consumption, "A broken spirit drieth up the bones," it will eat up the marrow of the spirit and body, Prov. xvii. 22. What infirmity is there which a man cannot bear? Poverty, famine, war, pestilence, sickness, name what you will, but a wounded spirit who can bear? Prov. xviii. 14. And there is reason for it, for there is none to bear it, a sound and whole spirit can sustain infirmities, but when that is wounded, which should ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... paradise reigned below. We do not know how long this condition lasted, but in some way sin entered and all was changed. Sorrow and death came, and a thousand ills to vex us. Another period passed, and the race had become so wicked that it could not be allowed to exist. A pestilence swept over the world, and all but one tribe perished. Through this remnant the world was repeopled, but sin and woe remained, to be driven out at last only by a struggle too great for ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan

... the little white maiden, as she stood on the hearth-rug, with the hot blast of the stove striking through her like a pestilence. Once, she threw a glance wistfully toward the windows, and caught a glimpse, through its red curtains, of the snow-covered roofs, and the stars glimmering frostily, and all the delicious intensity of the cold night. The bleak wind rattled the window-panes, as ...
— The Snow-Image - A Childish Miracle • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... obtain anything he asked. If you find a stone bearing the figure of a hare, it will be a defence against the devil; if you find a dog and a lion on the same stone, it will be a preservative against dropsy or pestilence. The figure of Orion was believed to give victory in war. If you find a stone, in which is Perseus holding in his right hand a sword, and in his left the Gorgon's head, it is a preservative against lightning and tempest and against the assaults of devils. ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt



Words linked to "Pestilence" :   glandular plague, pneumonic plague, bubonic plague, pestis, influence, pestilent, pestilential, pestis bubonica, plague pneumonia, pest, plague, pulmonic plague, canker



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