"Blight" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... were sentenced to death by default for conspiring against M. Venizelos. But all that could be done from a distance to embitter their lot was done. Whilst at home the blackest calumnies were thrown upon them: in exile they were pursued by the same blight. Special attention was directed to the "arch-traitor." He had been dethroned and expatriated; but this was not enough. His pension was cut off. He and all the members of his family, with the exception of Prince ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... that frowning and melancholy house in a backwater of London's jarring tide, where the dust collects, and sunlight has a struggle to make two ends meet, and cold penetrates like a dagger, and fog hangs like a pall, and the blight of ages clings to stone and brick, to window and woodwork, with an adhesive mournfulness which suggests the hatchment of Melpomene. Even the hand of Grinling Gibbons at the porch does not prevent one from ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... blight on their labours lay, And ever their quarry would vanish away, Till the sun-dried boys of the Black Tyrone Took a brotherly interest in Boh Da Thone: And, sooth, if pursuit in possession ends, The Boh and his trackers were best ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... Steynlin captured him and began to talk music. He repeated that remark, too good to be lost, about the spinet; it led to Scarlatti, Mozart, Handel. He said Handel was the saviour of English music. She said Handel was its blight and damnation. Each being furnished with copious arguments, the discussion ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... to achieve a few strokes in the right direction, I asked her to get me a cigar from an inside pocket of my coat, which was on the seat in front of her. Then came the blight to our bliss. She looked in the wrong pocket and instead of producing a cigar, she extracted two letters with ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... has raved with delight, The true, good, and beautiful seeking; Hiddigeigei often felt grief's deadly blight, And with ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... met to-day for what, the SAGE OF QUEEN ANNE'S GATE tells me, must needs be last Session of present Parliament. Appropriately funereal air over scene and proceedings. Usually Members return to work in highest spirits. Remember, in years gone by, before the blight of neglect in high places fell upon him, how dear old PETER RYLANDS enjoyed himself on these occasions. What long strides he used to take, bustling to and fro! What thunderous slaps of friendly welcome he bestowed on shrinking shoulders! ...
— Punch, Or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, Feb. 13, 1892 • Various
... says Alvin, "the original tragedy of man. See how its blight rests on these around us! Simply over-stimulation of the ego; our souls in the strait-jacket of self; no freedom of thought or word or deed to our fellows. Ego, the tyrant, rules us. Only we of the Free Brotherhood are seeking to tame ours. Do I put ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... fate of all the dainty things That dance in wind and water. Nature herself Makes war on her own loveliness and slays Her children like Medea. Nay but, my Lord, Look closer still. Why in this damask here It is summer always, and no winter's tooth Will ever blight these blossoms. For every ell I paid a piece of gold. Red gold, and good, The ...
— A Florentine Tragedy—A Fragment • Oscar Wilde
... veil'd in deepest night This beauty-breathing world of thine, And taught the serpent's deadly blight Amid its sweetest flowers to twine, Thou, thou alone hast dared repine, And turn'd aside from duty's call, Thou who hast broken nature's shrine, And wilder'd hope and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XII, No. 347, Saturday, December 20, 1828. • Various
... a gruesome place. Everything in it and for yards around it, was covered with a yellow blight, as if the slight beard of some pestilential fungous were sprouting ... the only people the company could induce to work there were foreigners who knew little of America.... Swedes mostly ... attentive churchgoers on Sunday,—who on week-days, ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... choice words and fancies In orange tubs and beds of pansies; One's sighs and passionate declarations In odorous rhetoric of carnations; Seeing how far one's stocks will reach; Taking due care one's flowers of speech To guard from blight as well as bathos, And ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... roses just breaking into June bloom—roses in such profusion as Jims hadn't known existed, with dear little paths twisting about among the bushes. It seemed to be a garden where no frost could blight or rough wind blow. When rain fell it must fall very gently. Past the roses one saw a green lawn, sprinkled over now with the white ghosts of dandelions, and dotted with ornamental trees. The trees ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... those who live in northern cold, and their glances were as chill as the weather. But that was better than if they had taken too much interest in a strange face in a familiar uniform; and it would have needed more than a freezing stare to blight the spring in my heart, for ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... can plot things out my own way, and do them without hurting my back. I'm going to clear all the old rose-bushes out of the shady border. The trees are so big now, it's so shady that the roses never come to anything but blight, and I mean to make a fernery there instead. Bob says there's a little wood belonging to Lord Beckwith that the trustees have cut down completely, and it's going to be ploughed up. They're stubbing up the stumps now, and we can have ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... land was of greater value than the increased yield of the first crop; for now clover will grow where none would grow before; another advantage arising from guano is, the wheat ripens so much earlier (15th of June) it escapes the rust, so apt to blight that which is late coming to maturity. He now sows wheat in the fore part of September, three pecks to the acre, after having previously plowed in 200 lbs. of Peruvian guano to the acre, and after the first ...
— Guano - A Treatise of Practical Information for Farmers • Solon Robinson
... from a mysterious "disease" for the last few years, and the most careful study has failed to find any fungus blight or insect at the bottom of this. We have had summer after summer of severe and long continued drought. It is now believed that this has weakened the trees so that they could not withstand the winter cold and have been "winter killed." With the drought we had several winters of infrequent ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... evolution of the Italian genius. Michael Angelo was essentially an artist, living in the prime of the Renaissance. Campanella was a philosopher, born when the Counter-Reformation was doing all it could to blight the free thought of the sixteenth century; and when the modern spirit of exact enquiry, in a few philosophical martyrs, was opening a new stage for European science. The one devoted all his mental energies to the realisation of beauty: the other strove to ascertain truth. The one clung ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... thought the good woman, "but it may wither even without the blight of fashion; so I will try to secure for it ...
— Be Courteous • Mrs. M. H. Maxwell
... can always be settled out of court in France if the missing amount is returned. The losers by the crime are usually well-to-do, and have no wish to blight an imprudent man's character. But du Croisier had no mind to slacken his hold until he knew what he was about. He meditated until he fell asleep on the magnificent manner in which his hopes would be fulfilled by the way of the Assize Court or by marriage. The murmur of ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... wet summer, and everything went wrong in the country round. The hay had hardly been got in, when the haystacks were floated bodily down to the sea by an inundation; the vines were cut to pieces with the hail; the corn was all killed by a black blight; only in the Treasure Valley, as usual, all was safe. As it had rain when there was rain nowhere else, so it had sun when there was sun nowhere else. Everybody came to buy corn at the farm, and went away pouring maledictions on the Black Brothers. They asked what they liked, ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... you how the grand old hills, forest crowned, stretched off into the dim distance—and how sweet the music of childhood's ringing laugh, heard from the far-off shore—or how Aunty thought 'twas such a pity that sin, and tears, and sorrow, should ever blight ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... led, "Her heart is sad—her love is far away!" Elate that lover waits the promised day When he shall clasp his blooming bride again— Shine on, sweet visions! dreams of rapture, play! Soon the cold corse of her he loved in vain Shall blight his withered heart and fire his ...
— The Culprit Fay - and Other Poems • Joseph Rodman Drake
... halls, monarchs of all they survey, succeeding in every effort made to muzzle ministers, bribe lawmakers, control officers and business men of our country, and place the nation in great peril. The traffic is an intolerable burden to the state, a burden on every back, a blight on every industry, sapping the heartblood out of all concerned. Think of $900,000,000 as a direct annual drink bill, and an equal sum to cover the sad consequence. Two-thirds of this amount is expended by laboring men at the ...
— Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading • Various
... showed, and had recently been residing in that country, as was learned from Paolo. Now everybody knows that the evil eye is not rarely met with in Italy. Everybody who has ever read Mr. Story's "Roba di Roma" knows what a terrible power it is which the owner of the evil eye exercises. It can blight and destroy whatever it falls upon. No person's life or limb is safe if the jettatura, the withering glance of the deadly organ, falls upon him. It must be observed that this malign effect may follow a look from the holiest personages, that is, if we may assume that a monk ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the loftiest hopes man nurses, Never deem them idly born; Never think that deathly curses Blight them on ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... whom the Spaniards found in Cuba and St. Domingo had withered before them as if struck by a blight. Many died under the lash of the Spanish overseers; many, perhaps the most, from the mysterious causes which have made the presence of civilisation so fatal to the Red Indian, the Australian, and the Maori. It is with men as it is with animals. The races which ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... with pity then, you will surely pity me the more now; yet not too much, Reuben, for my pride as a woman is as strong as ever. The world was made for me, as much as it was made for others; and if I bear its blight, I will find some flowers yet to cherish. I do not count it altogether so grim and odious a world,—even under the broken light which shines upon it for me,—as in your last visits you seemed disposed to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... where mothers, freed from the necessity for long hours of toil beyond their own doors, may preside as befits the hearthstone of American citizenship. We want the cradle of American childhood rocked under conditions so wholesome and so hopeful that no blight may touch it in its development, and we want to provide that no selfish interest, no material necessity, no lack of opportunity shall prevent the gaining of that education ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... fleeting and superficial charm—a bright eye, a blooming cheek, a soft voice, or a voluptuous form—I would warn you to beware; I would tell you that beauty is but a passing gleam of the morning, a perishable flower; that accident may becloud and blight it, and that at best it must soon pass away. But were you in love with such a one as I could describe; young in years, but still younger in feelings; lovely in person, but as a type of the mind's beauty; soft in voice, ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... her suffer any great pain; but his manners were too often cold, his conduct wilful or thoughtless. He did not love her—perhaps no child can love his parents—with all the abandon and intensity wherewith she loved him. The fact is, a blight lay upon Kenrick whenever he was at home—the Fuzby blight he called it. He hated the place so much, he hated the people in it so much, he felt the annoyances of their situation with so keen and fretful a sensibility, that at Fuzby, even though with his mother, he was never happy. Even ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... think this pride a weakness, but it is too deeply rooted in my nature ever to be eradicated. When I look about the world and see girls disgracing themselves by improper marriages, elopements, often social crimes, which must blight their lives and those of all connected with them, I think what I ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... I myself mislead By blind desire wherewith my heart is torn, E'en while I speak away the moments speed, To me and pity which alike were sworn. What shade so cruel as to blight the seed Whence the wish'd fruitage should so soon be born? What beast within my fold has leap'd to feed? What wall is built between the hand and corn? Alas! I know not, but, if right I guess, Love to such joyful hope has only led To plunge my weary life in worse distress; ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... giants of the frost, And the stalwarts of the sun,— Britons, Britons, Britons are they! Britons, every one! It shall be their life-long boast, That they counted not the cost, But, at the Mother-Country's call, they came. They came a wrong to right, They came to end the blight Of a vast ungodly might; And by their gallant coming overcame. Britons, Britons, Britons ...
— 'All's Well!' • John Oxenham
... relinquishment, but through days of deadly languor, through weeks of agony, that was not less agony because silently borne, with clear sight and calm courage, he looked into his open grave. What blight and ruin met his anguished eyes, whose lips may tell—what brilliant, broken plans, what baffled, high ambitions, what sundering of strong, warm, manhood's friendships, what bitter rending of sweet household ties! Behind him a proud, expectant nation, a great host of sustaining friends, ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... cheap pamphlets nor cheap magazines written for their amusement or instruction; but this is less owing to want of attention to their interests on the part of many good and enlightened men, than to the unsettled state of the country; for the blight of civil war prevents ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... them all by their pretty names, assisted them to become chrysalises, and watched over them in that unprotected state as if I had been their mother. Ah, how dear were my little charges to me then! But now I class them with mosquitoes and blight and harvesters, the pests of the countryside. Why, I would let them crawl up my arm in those happy days of old, and now I cannot even endure to have them dropping gently into my hair. And I should not know what ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... their friendship came the blight Of a little thoughtless fight; Then, alas! each passing day Farther bore ...
— Ballads of Peace in War • Michael Earls
... "'The Blight of Respectability,' by Geoffrey Mortimer, is well worth reading, and by more of us, perhaps, than imagine it. The shoddy god has votaries in England, where one would least expect ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... really skilful and judicious steer clear of it from a fear of compromising their credit for commonsense; and while the caution necessarily attendant upon habitual scientific studies, dissuades the best men from meddling with that which may blight their hardly-earned laurels, the public is left to be swayed to and fro by an under-current of fallacious half-truths, far more seductive and dangerous than absolute falsehoods. We cannot undertake to say, thus far is true, and thus far false;—to mark out the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... if I infringe the Divine order, I can turn the sacramental cup into a vehicle of moral poison and spiritual blight. "They must be holy who bear the ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... been carried on to any great extent, was not entirely unknown in the neighborhood. Several planters thereabouts had attempted it on a commercial scale, in former years, with greater or less success; but like most Southern industries, it had felt the blight of war ...
— The Conjure Woman • Charles W. Chesnutt
... her, and she was very unhappy at home; you did not know this, but I did, and if luck hadn't been against me—Ah! but what's the use in talking of luck; luck was against me, or she would have been my wife now. And what a little thing suffices to blight a man's happiness in life; what a little, oh, what a little!' he said, speaking in a voice full of bitterness; and he buried his face in ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... naturally became comparatively more friendly with her than with his other cousins; and this friendliness led to greater intimacy and this intimacy once established, rendered unavoidable the occurrence of the blight of ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... the days of his prosperity he has acquired a taste for. The Oil Rivers, which send out the greatest quantity of trade on the West Coast possessions, subsist entirely on palm oil for it. Were anything to happen to the oil palms in the way of blight, or were a cheap substitute to be found for palm oil at home, the population of the Oil Rivers, even at its present density, would starve. The development of trade is a necessary condition for the ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... year was done, which would serve as a warning for them in time to come. There might, however, be a difficulty in beginning such a system. I can remember, and others present will remember it too, two or three years of bad fishing, followed by a year of blight, when the man who wrought most anxiously and was honest-hearted could not meet the demands upon him. At such times, if there was no qualification or mitigation of the ready-money system, perhaps the men might ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... free alike endured under slave laws. Since reaching her majority, in looking back, the following sentences from her own pen express the loneliness of her childhood days. "Have I yearned for a mother's love? The grave was my robber. Before three years had scattered their blight around my path, death had won my mother from me. Would the strong arm of a brother have been welcome? I was my mother's only child." Thus she fell into the hands of an aunt, who watched over her during these early helpless years. Rev. William Watkins, ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... have in mind? I transcribe the paragraph which deals with divorce: "The Vice Commission, after exhaustive consideration of the vice question, records itself of the opinion that divorce to a large extent is a contributory factor to sexual vice. No study of this blight upon the social and moral life of the country would be comprehensive without consideration of the causes which lead to the application for divorce. These are too numerous to mention at length in such a report as this, but the Commission ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... and still has, to contend against such numerous and formidable obstacles. Confidence, especially mercantile confidence, is a delicate flower, of slow growth, and very difficult to rear. A breath may blight it. It will bloom only in a tranquil and temperate air. If ever there was a man entitled to speak, however, with authority upon this subject, it was Mr Baring, the late candidate, and unquestionably the future member, for the city of London—a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... to which they have reduced him, they will discharge a volley of abuse at his grave and trouble themselves about him no more. However, if, not content with refusing his valuable assistance in the chase, the ghost should actually blight the crops or send wild boars into the fields to trample them down, the patience of the long-suffering people is quite exhausted: the vials of their wrath overflow; and snatching up their cudgels in a fury they belabour his grave ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... transform straight and noxious outlines into undulating and propitious curves, rescue whole districts from the devastations of flood or pestilence, and "scatter plenty o'er a smiling land" which might otherwise have known the blight of poverty and the pangs of want. To perform such miracles it is merely necessary to build pagodas at certain spots and of the proper height, to pile up a heap of stones, or round off the peak of some hill to which nature's ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... and so greatly did he damage the morale of the troops that an investigation had to be made, and as a result the man was sent to jail for a year. People have been a long time learning that thoughts are things to heal, upbuild, strengthen; or to wound, impair, or blight. After all we cannot do very much for many people, no matter how hard we try, but we can contribute to their usefulness and happiness by holding for them a ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... taboo is, so to say, a powerful explosive which the smallest touch may detonate, it is necessary in the interest of the general safety to keep it within narrow bounds, lest breaking out it should blast, blight, and destroy whatever it comes into ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... is entirely covered during a great part of the year seems to have cast a blight upon it. The very few palms have a drooping and tragic air. The ground has a gangrened appearance, and much of it shows a crawling mass of unwholesome-looking plants, which seem crouching down as if ashamed of their brutal exposure by the receded river, and of harsh and ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... possession and make the ballot something more than a mere symbol of a thing that is dead, we have no choice but to resort to the one process by which the resources of the country can be returned to its people, and the blight of poverty and pauperism that is settling down on the country and is becoming permanent can be ...
— Confiscation, An Outline • William Greenwood
... He had withered like Trescorre, but under the harsher blight of physical privations; and his tongue had an added bitterness. He replied evasively to all enquiries as to what had become of him during his absence from Pianura; but on Odo's asking for news of Momola and the child he said coldly: "They are ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... within the compass of its five acts she runs the wild and weary gamut from crowned love to crowned despair. It is a new interpretation, and a remarkable one—an interpretation that is tinged with the blight of our inquisitive and mournful age: self-consciousness, that terrible tormentor in her soul, sits for ever in judgment upon every impulse of the heart of Adrienne, and makes of pain a stinging poison, and of pleasure but a poor potentiality. Her death-scene is singular and awful—awful ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... noticed for the first time how the relative position of these two women had shifted. Laura Bowman wasn't red-headed for nothing; out from under the blight of Bowman and that hateful marriage, she had already thrown off some of her physical frailness; the nervous tension showed itself now in energy. She was moving swiftly about putting to rights after my meal while she listened. But Barbara ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... weave; Trust not too deeply—they may deceive! Hope with her Dead Sea fruits is there, Sin is spreading her gilded snare, Disease with a ruthless hand would smite, And Care spread o'er thee her withering blight. Hate and Envy, with visage black, And the serpent Slander, are on thy track; Falsehood and Guilt, Remorse and Pride, Doubt and Despair, in thy pathway glide; Haggard Want, in her demon joy, Waits to ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... that if the state assumed control of industry the blight of business could be removed. But in the transfer we would not necessarily gain opportunity to enjoy the adventure which industry holds out. Industry as a creative experience, it is safe to predict, would be as rare a personal experience and as foreign an ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... blight fell upon the belle of the afternoon. When Sissy went, go she must, too; this was the sole rule of conduct Francis Madigan had devised for the guidance of his most ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... it with his mother, at ony rate. She entered the room like a woman demented, and the first words she spoke were, Elspeth Cheyne, did you ever pull a new-budded flower?' I answered, as ye may believe, that I often had. Then,' said she, ye will ken the better how to blight the spurious and heretical blossom that has sprung forth this night to disgrace my father's noble houseSee here;'(and she gave me a golden bodkin)nothing but gold must shed the blood of Glenallan. This child ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... on the prospect of the corn crop: they said the number of hogs in Kansas will double. Congratulated them. From Idaho, on the blight on the root crop: they say there will soon not be a hog left in Idaho. Expressed my sorrow. From Michigan, beet sugar growers urging a higher percentage of sugar in beets. Took firm stand: said I stand where I stood and I stood where I stand. ...
— Further Foolishness • Stephen Leacock
... particularly, are afraid of the evil eye from the superstitious fear inculcated in their minds in the nursery. Parents in the East feel no delight when strangers look at their children in admiration of their loveliness; they consider that you merely look at them in order to blight them. The attendants on the children of the great are enjoined never to permit strangers to fix their glance upon them. I was once in the shop of an Armenian at Constantinople, waiting to see a procession which was expected to pass ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... his father he should look on never more. You cry out shame on my honour? But yet remember again That a man in my boy was growing; must my passing pride and pain Undo the manhood within him and his days and their doings blight? So I thrust my pride away, and I did what I deemed was right, And left him down in our country. And well may you think indeed How my sad heart swelled at departing from the peace of river and mead, But I held all sternly aback and again to ...
— The Pilgrims of Hope • William Morris
... flies; the pests kept eating into our eyes, which were already bad enough. This seemed to be the only object for which these wretches were invented and lived, and they also seemed to be quite ready and willing to die, rather than desist a moment from their occupation. Everybody had an attack of the blight, as ophthalmia is called in Australia, which with the flies were enough to set any one deranged. Every little sore or wound on the hands or face was covered by them in swarms; they scorned to use their wings, they preferred walking to flying; one might kill them in millions, ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... and walk and breathe in peace from earth and air. He went on, not walking fast, for the depression that was on him was not like a definite grief that urges the body to fierce exertion, and as he went it was as though he had neglected the charm too long and it was going to fail him. A blight seemed to hang upon everything, and a dread that had no form but that pressed on him grew as ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... as water; that the light Might ebb, drawn backward from their eyes, and night Hide for one hour the imperishable faces. That they might rise up sad in heaven, and know Sorrow and sleep, one paler than young snow, One cold as blight of dew and ruinous rain, Rise up and rest and suffer a little, and be Awhile as all things born with us and we, And grieve as men, and ...
— Atalanta in Calydon • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... what could your father be thinking of? Here had we got three of the ugliest Philistines in Coombeland in our hand, and we've let 'em go to blight and freeze and blast everything. What could Sir Godfrey be ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... Nebraska bill would open all the unorganized territory of the Union to the ingress of slavery; the other arraigned the bill as "a gross violation of a sacred pledge; as a criminal betrayal of precious rights." In ominous words, fellow citizens were besought to observe how the blight of slavery would settle upon all this land, if this bill should become a law. Christians and Christian ministers were implored to interpose. "Let all protest, earnestly and emphatically, by correspondence, ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... it a pleasant magic if you could flush your flowers into brighter bloom by a kind look upon them: nay, more, if your look had the power, not only to cheer, but to guard;—if you could bid the black blight turn away, and the knotted caterpillar spare—if you could bid the dew fall upon them in the drought, and say to the south wind, in frost—"Come, thou south, and breathe upon my garden, that the spices of it may flow out." This you would think a great thing? And do you ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... proved a complete blend of the parent species, the nuts being double the size of the wild parent and of sweet, rich quality. The trees were very shapely and bid fair to become extremely productive but a year or two later were all attacked by the dreaded blight or bark disease, then spreading from its original starting point in Long Island. The work of destruction was very rapid and by the third year all were hopelessly crippled, but a few individuals continued to send up suckers as late ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... all, covered only with their Christmas dress of snow and icicles—these trees were clothed with the loveliest foliage, fresh and green and feathery, which no winter's storms or nipping frosts had ever come near to blight. And in the little space between the door where Hugh stood and these wonderful trees was drawn up, as if awaiting him, the prettiest, queerest, most delicious little carriage that ever was seen. It was open; the cushions with which it was lined were of rose-coloured ...
— The Tapestry Room - A Child's Romance • Mrs. Molesworth
... amount of priests would be able to make the festive Eskimo bask in the sun and sing in chorus when there wasn't any sun and it was altogether too cold to open their mouths wide in the open air. In fact the priests are not the cause of the blight where it exists, just as they are not the cause of the jolliness, when there is any. But Orthodoxy is Chesterton's sincerest book. It is perhaps the only one of the whole lot in the course of which he would not be justified in repeating a remark which ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... also might reveal joys now hidden and unknown, if she would only be patient. Every rustling leaf that fluttered in the gale, but did not fall, called to her with its tiny voice: "Cling to your place, as we do, till the frost of age or the blight of disease brings the end in God's own time and way." A partridge with her brood rustled by along the edge of the forest, and the poor girl imagined she saw in the parent bird, as she led forward her plump little bevy, the pride and complacency of a happy motherhood, which ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... witches—the evil thoughts of men; they rejoice in the battle, in the wounds and pain and death of men; they shriek and scream and laugh around the head of the hero when he goes forth, like Cuchulain, to an unwearied slaughter of men. They make the blight, the deadly mist, the cruel tempest. To deceive is their pleasure; to discourage, to baffle, to ruin the hero is their happiness. Some of them are monsters of terrific aspect who abide in lakes or in desolate rocks, as the terrible tri-formed horse whom ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... though he was dignified by the king, he had shorn himself of all his honours in the sight of the people. The influence which the Earl of Bute was supposed to have had over him tended still more to blight his fair fame. He was taunted with being a willing agent of men whom he did not esteem, and his acceptance of a peerage was a never-failing source of invective. Moreover, in his negociations with his brother-in-law, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... alone; she held, within, A second principle of Life, which might Have dawned a fair and sinless child of sin;[dz] But closed its little being without light, And went down to the grave unborn, wherein Blossom and bough lie withered with one blight; In vain the dews of Heaven descend above The bleeding flower and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... land into broad estates; but it had been tacitly understood that this sprinkling of water established a claim for a return, and this both father and son had solemnly promised. Its magic turned everything they touched to gold, but it brought a blight on the peace of the household. One branch, which had grown up in the traditions of the old Macedonian stock, had separated from the other; and her husband's great lie lay between them and the family still living ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... glimpses of banana-orchards, which look like dishevelled patches of gigantic cornstalks. The fields of Easter lilies do not quite live up to their photographs; they are presently suffering from a mysterious blight, and their flowers are not frequent enough to lend them that sculpturesque effect near to, which they wear as far off as New York. The potato-fields, on the other hand, are of a tender delicacy of coloring which compensates ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... unyielding might, Enduring still through day and night Rude tempest-shock and withering blight, That I may keep at bay The changeful April sky of chance And the strong tide of circumstance,— Give ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... rolling in shadow and sunshine, Bright with luxuriant clusters of roses and purple amorphas. Over them wandered the buffalo herds, and the elk and the roebuck; Over them wandered the wolves, and herds of riderless horses; Fires that blast and blight, and winds that are weary with travel; Over them wander the scattered tribes of Ishmael's children, Staining the desert with blood; and above their terrible war-trails Circles and sails aloft, on pinions ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... for exterminating from a field, blight, tares, foxtail, and all parasitic growths which destroy the wheat. He defended a rabbit warren against rats, simply by the odor of a guinea-pig which ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... voiceless stone In deathless song shall tell, When many a vanished age hath flown, The story how ye fell: Nor wreck, nor change, nor winter's blight, Nor Time's remorseless gloom, Shall dim one ray of glory's light That ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... happened, to ask any of my friends to receive her. Naturally, she shrinks from speaking of that terrible time, but I understand that she spent no less than three nights alone in the mountains with him. And that fact in itself would be more than sufficient to blight any girl's career from a social standpoint. I often think that the rules of our modern etiquette are very rigid, though I know well that we cannot afford to disregard them." Again came that soft, regretful sigh; and then in an apologetic tone, ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... is born in blight, Victim of perpetual slight When thou lookest in his face Thy heart saith, 'Brother, go thy ways None shall ask thee what thou doest, Or care a rush for what thou knowest, Or listen when thou repliest, Or remember where thou ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... shall not a dear friend, a loyal subject, 165 Throw off all fear? I tell ye, the fair trophies Valiantly wrested from a valiant foe, Love's natural offerings to a rightful king, Will hang as ill on this usurping traitor, This brother-blight, this Emerick, as robes 170 Of gold plucked from the images of gods Upon a sacrilegious robber's back. [Enter ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... not "go to smash." To the intense chagrin of the wiseacres he prospered despite an unprecedented disregard for the teachings of his father and his grandfather before him. The wolf stayed a long way off from his door, the prophetic mortgage failed to lay its blight upon his lands, his crops were bountiful, his acreage spread as the years went by,—and so his uncles, his cousins and his aunts were never so happy as when wishing for the good old days when his father was alive and running the farm as it should be run! If David had married some good, sensible, ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... distinct species of the fruit flourished within a radius of a dozen miles of the town, all wholesome and palatable. The attention of planters is being diverted from spice culture to that of fruit raising, the latter requiring so much less attention, and not being liable to blight ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... who enter here profess in jubilation Our gospel of elation, then suffer dolts to curse! Here refuge shall ye find, and sure circumvallation Against the protestation of those whose delectation Brings false abomination to blight ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... so much difficulty and privation by themselves, when I have a strong arm to help them! No! no!—I have done my duty to those who ever did their duty to me, and I trust that my own conscience will prove my reward, and check that repining which we are too apt to feel when it pleases Heaven to blight what appears to be our fairest prospects ... I say, my good fellow," said Alfred, after a while, to a man in a boat, "what is the ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... exerted all the powers at his command to bring about a good understanding between the kings of France and Spain. He pictured to Henry, in darkest colours, the blight that would come over religion and civilization if the progress of the rebellious Netherlands could not be arrested. The United Provinces were becoming dangerous, if they remained free, not only to the French kingdom, but to the very existence of monarchy ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the bread and drank the milk, their Father and Mother talked about the Tinkers. "Sure, they are as a frost in spring, and a blight in harvest," said Mrs McQueen. "I wonder wherever they got the badness in them the ...
— The Irish Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... all the collegiate honors—but without exciting jealousy or envy. He was so really the best, that his companions were anxious he should have the sign of his superiority. He studied hard, he thought much, and wrote well. There was no evidence of any blight upon his ambition or career, but after living quietly in the country for some time, he went to Europe and traveled. When he returned, he resolved to study law, but presently relinquished it. Then he collected materials for a history, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... profit by it. It holds its position by love. No publisher may say to it: "Buy my books, not those of my rival"; no scientist may forbid it to give his opponent a hearing; no religious body may dictate to it; no commercial influence may throw a blight over it. ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... itself. Never was such a mistake. Mental consciousness is a purely individual affair. Some men are born to be highly and delicately conscious. But for the vast majority, much mental consciousness is simply a catastrophe, a blight. ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... master of the owls. I talk to the wild cat in the hush. I call Tikoloshe (a water spirit) out of the river in the night-time and ask him questions. I make sickness do my bidding on men and cattle. I drive it away when I like. I can bring blight to the crops, and stop the milk of cows. I can, by my magic medicines, find out the wicked ones who do these things. I alone can look upon Icanti (a fabulous serpent) and not die. I know the mountain where Impandulu (the Lightning Bird) builds its nest. I can make men invulnerable in battle with ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... down on the table among the countless objects Mrs. Jeffrey always had about her. The noise seemed to startle her mistress, who had walked to the window after opening the door, for she wheeled impetuously about and Loretta saw her face. It was as if a blight had passed over it. Once gay and animated beyond the power of any one to describe, it had become in twenty-four hours a ghost's face, with the glare of some awful resolve on it. Or so it would appear from the way Loretta described it. But such ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... Paradise, Round fane impervious to the skies; On whose green roof two nights of rain May fiercely beat and beat in vain! I know thy leaves are ever scathless; The hardened steel as soon will blight; When every grove and hill are pathless With frosts of winter's lengthened night, No goat from Hafren's {141} banks I ween, From thee a scanty meal may glean! Though Spring's bleak wind with clamour launches His wrath ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... Jean Merle," he answered with a melancholy smile, "Jean Merle, and no one else. I come back with no claims, and they must never know me. Why should I cross their path and blight it? I cannot atone for the past in any way, except by keeping away forever from them. I shall injure no one by continuing ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... a very long walk with my father through some of the most beautiful ways hereabouts; the day was cold with an iron, windy sky, and only glorified now and then with autumn sunlight. For it is fully autumn with us, with a blight already over the greens, and a keen wind in the morning that makes one rather timid of one's tub when ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... so, dear father," she answered, gently, "it has been because I knew your secret must be a painful one. I have lain awake night after night, wondering what was the cause of the blight that has been upon you and all you have done. But why should I ask you questions that you could not answer without pain? I have heard people say cruel things of you; but they have never said them twice in my hearing." Her eyes flashed through ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... shall we find any thing to repay us for the swelling extacy of our young hearts, as those who have cradled and loved us grow proud in our successes? For myself, a life that has failed in every prestige of those that prophesied favourably—years that have followed on each other only to blight the promise that kind and well-wishing friends foretold—leave but little to dwell upon, that can be reckoned as success. And yet, some moments I have had, which half seemed to realize my early dream of ambition, and rouse my spirit within me; but what were they ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... and love grow cold, And friends prove false, and best hopes blight, Yet the sun will wade in waves of gold, And the stars in glory will ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the blight of the twenty-five-foot lot were really wiped out with the double-decker. And no one is hurt. The speculative builder weeps—for the poor, he says. He will build no more, he avers, and rents will go up, so they ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... felt the chilling blight Their shadows cast on me, My thought by day—my dream by night— Was of my own country. But independent souls will brave All hardships to be free; No more I weep to cross the wave, My native ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... is a blight of the gravest character upon the local industry of the inhabitants, and it is a suicidal and unstatesmanlike policy that crushes and extinguishes all enterprise. What Englishman would submit to such a prying and humiliating position? And still it is expected that ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... of newspaperdom is that nothing which happens to a reporter in the line of his work is or can be "big news." The mere fact that he is a reporter is enough to blight the story. ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... foxes that spoil the grapes of perfect diction, but they are very little foxes; it is the false elegance of stupid pretentiousness that is an annihilating blight which destroys ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... beginning to glow in the leaden eyes the light that she alone knew how to kindle.... It pleased her.... It pleased her also to blight it at her will. She laughed. She knew as well how to blight as how to kindle. She knew also how to twist a soul in torment; and how to swirl it to the false heaven of unreal joys. For she, of the Unknown, knew much— more, perhaps, than of the ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... it; and she let it remain, looking quickly round her with an air of misgiving. She did not look absolutely behind her, and therefore did not see Jude, who sank into the hedge like one struck with a blight. There he remained hidden till they had reached Sue's cottage and she had passed in, Phillotson going on to the school ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... New England, adapting itself to a great variety of situations, but preferring a soil that is constantly moist. Nursery or good collected plants are easily transplanted. A disease, similar in its effect to the pear blight, so often disfigures it that it is not desirable for use ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... Hannah was sanguine in this expectation; and for a moment her hopes were contagiously exciting to mine. But the hideous despondency which in my mind had settled upon the whole affair from the very first, the superstitious presentiment I had of a total blight brooding over the entire harvest of my life and its promises (tracing itself originally, I am almost ashamed to own, up to that prediction of the Hungarian woman)—denied me steady light, anything—all in short ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... a passion now equal to his own. "You have fallen into the hands of a Delilah, and she has shorn you of your manhood. Infatuated with a nameless Northern girl, you would blight your life and mine. When you come to your senses you will thank me on your knees that I interposed an oath that cannot be broken between you and suicidal folly;" and she was ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... happiness between Ethel and myself—have you no heart that you can refuse to repair a little of the harm that you have done? You are a cruel woman—I could almost say a wicked woman: hard, false, and cowardly; and I wish my words could blight your life as ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... no concealing what had happened, and, to Phoebe's surprise, she was encouraging. From an external point of view, she could judge better than those more nearly concerned, and her elder years made her more conscious what time could do. She would not let the adventure be regarded as a lasting blight on Bertha's life. Had the girl been a few years older, she could never have held up her head again; but as it was, Honor foretold that, by the time she was twenty, the adventure would appear incredible. It was not to be lightly passed over, but she must not be allowed to lose her self-respect, ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... threshold of the door to keep out the Evil One. Sometimes they are tied round the necks of camels, and even placed on trees, especially at the time when bearing fruit, for the purpose of preserving the camel from mange, or the tree from blight. These talismans usually have a diagram of this and other shapes, with certain Arabic signs, letters, words, and ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... who long to realize the ideal in this world. Had he discovered the warning signs of the misfortunes which were to come upon his family? Had he come to see that the necessities of life were to sully and blight his dream? Had he seen in the check of his missions in Syria and Morocco a providential indication that he had to change his method? We do not know. But about this time he felt the need of turning to St. Clara and Brother Silvestro for counsel on the subject ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... creed, has proved the fruitful parent of hypocrisy and superstition; which has soured the sweet charities of human life, [154] and, settling like a foul mist on the goodly promise of the land, closed up the fair buds of science and civilization ere they were fully opened. Alas, that such a blight should have fallen on so gallant and generous a people! That it should have been brought on it too by one of such unblemished patriotism and purity of motive, as Isabella! How must her virtuous spirit, if it be permitted the departed ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... stands a marble statue of the good Doctor, very well executed, and representing him with a face of fussy activity and benevolence: just the kind of man, if luck favored him, to build up the fortunes of those about him, or, quite as probably, to blight his whole neighborhood by some ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... A blight, a gloom, I know not what, has crept upon my gladness— Some vague, remote ancestral touch of sorrow, or of madness; A fear that is not fear, a pain that has not pain's insistence; A sense of longing, or of loss, in some foregone existence; A ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... to subdue this bevy of giggling maidens and cast a blight upon their levity, stood behind his counter like a soldier making a last stand in a third line trench, while Pepsy, captivated by ...
— Pee-wee Harris • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... right:— night brands and chokes as if destruction broke over furze and stone and crop of myrtle-shoot and field-wort, destroyed with flakes of iron, the bracken-stems, where tender roots were sown, blight, chaff and waste of darkness to ...
— Hymen • Hilda Doolittle
... grows, lest there should be no Unseen Power, as his fathers believed, and his mother taught him, filling all things and meaning all things,—no Power with whom, in his last extremity, awaits him a final refuge. With the quickening doubt falls a tenfold blight on the world of poetry, both that in Nature and that in books. Far worse than that early chill which the assertions of science concerning what it knows, cast upon his inexperienced soul, is now the shivering death which its pretended denials concerning ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... In his virtue, nowhere but in his virtue, is garnered up the incomparable treasure. What care we for brother or friend, compared with what we care for his honor, his fidelity, his reputation, his kindness? How venerable is the rectitude of a parent! How sacred his reputation! No blight that can fall upon a child, is like a parent's dishonor. Heathen or Christian, every parent would have his child do well; and pours out upon him all the fullness of parental love, in the one desire that he may do well; ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... day in public, that in consequence of the impiety of the Omaguas, he should retire to a neighboring tribe, of more religious turn of mind; and taking with him the precious instrument, leave their palms to blight, and themselves to ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... I, "what ruefu' chance Has twin'd ye o' your stately trees? Has laid your rocky bosom bare— Has stripped the cleeding o' your braes? Was it the bitter eastern blast, That scatters blight in early spring? Or was't the wil'fire scorch'd their boughs, Or canker-worm wi' ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... doing what he was made and meant to do; and however incomplete may be its attainments, the lowest form of a God-fearing, God-obeying life is higher and more nearly 'perfect' than the fairest career or character against which, as a blight on all its beauty, the damning accusation may be brought, 'The God in whose hand thy breath is, and whose are all thy ways, thou hast ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... top. "Of course I've got to admit," he continued, "that my hair is gradually evaporating; but for all that, I'm 'still in the ring,' don't you know; as young in society, for the matter of that, as yourself! And this is just the reason why I don't want you to blight every prospect in your life by marrying at your age—especially a woman—I mean the kind of woman you'd be sure to ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... with beauty. The reproach Of barrenness is past. The fruitful field Laughs with abundance; and the land, once lean, Or fertile only in its own disgrace, Exults to see its thistly curse repeal'd. The various seasons woven into one, And that one season an eternal spring, The garden fears no blight, and needs no fence; For there is none to covet: all are full. The lion, and the libbard, and the bear, Graze with the fearless flocks; all bask at noon Together, or all gambol in the shade Of the same grove, and drink one common stream. Antipathies are ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... discouraging land speculation; and when the Government wanted land owned by private parties who were citizens of the Republic (for no foreigner was permitted by law to own land directly or indirectly, so that the curse of Absentee Landlordism which was the ruin of Ireland, should never blight the happiness of the people of Eurasia), they added up the assessments for the previous five years and divided them by five and added twenty per cent. to it in payment for the land, together with fair compensation for any buildings there might be on it; so that if the ...
— Eurasia • Christopher Evans
... columbine, the graceful gilia, coreopsis gleaming golden, anemones, pale and soft. How they kept their loveliness when life was past! They were only flower memories, but how fair they were, and how lasting! No frost to blight them, no winds to tear their silken petals any more! Well might they outlast ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... down and grind Fleshly lusts that blight us; So heaven's bliss 'Mid saints that kiss ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... flowers were all blighted by its scorching breath, and with its forked tongue it fed upon the pride of the forest, drying up the life of great trees, and without waiting to consume them, hurrying onward to blight other groves, leaving a blackened track of ruin ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... speed of the work of Rationalism are concerned we shall find that it ranks with the most rapid and destructive errors that have ever risen in conflict with the church. Instead of striving to build up a land that had so long been cursed with the blight of Papacy, and had not yet been redeemed a full century, this evil brought its quota of poison into the university, the pulpit, and the household circle. Nor did it cease, as we shall see, until it corrupted nearly all the land for several generations. To-day the ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... of a "cursing roundel," a form once employed by Callimachus, who may have inherited it from the East. It calls down heaven's wrath upon the confiscated lands in language as bitter as ever Mt. Ebal heard: fire and flood over the crops, blight upon the fruit, and pestilence upon the heartless barbarians who drive ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... up a sacrifice. Evan Lamotte had flung away his last rag of respectability for his sister's sake. Henceforth he would appear in the eyes of the people doubly blackened, doubly degraded, the destroyer of his sister's happiness, the blight upon her life, and yet, he was innocent of this; he was a martyr; he ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... black death, the famines, the hundred years' war, the free companies, the abasement of the church, the great schism—these things were misfortunes to which our modern time can find no parallel. They came suddenly upon Western Europe and defiled it like a blight.... They have made the mediaeval idea odious to every half-instructed man and have stamped even its beauty ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... order to prepare the country for their nomadic life; they pulled down cities to put up tents. Though they long ago ceased to be nomads, they have to this day never learned to comprehend civilized life, and they have been simply a blight upon every part of the earth's surface which they have touched. At the beginning of the eleventh century, Asia Minor was one of the most prosperous and highly civilized parts of the world;[320] and the tale of its devastation by the terrible ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... patches on my tattered uniform, for steering me clear of the camp followers; but more than all for the cheery words of solace for those 'gone West,' for the blessed face of a woman from the homeland in the midst of withering blight and desolation—for these I am indebted ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... or ten villages and three or four Tokedars under a Zillahdar. The Zillahdar looks out for good lands to change for bad ones, where this is necessary, and where no objection is made by the farmer; sees that the Tokedars do their work properly; reports rain, blight, locusts, and other visitations that might injure the crop; watches all that goes on in his zillah, and makes his report to the planter whenever anything of importance happens in his particular part of the cultivation. Over all again comes the JEMADAR—the ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... There is still mademoiselle, with her new-formed friends in Paris—may a pestilence blight them all! There are still the lands of La Vauvraye to lose. The only true end to our troubles as they stand at present lies in your marrying ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... large and ample grounds had been laid out with all the artistic care a landscape gardener could bestow upon them. Rare plants, shrubs, and trees from all over the world had been transplanted here in great variety. They were now feeling the bitter blight of war. Army wagons and artillery had made sad havoc of the beautiful grounds, and such of the rare trees and shrubbery as interfered with a good vision of the operations of the rebels in and around Fredericksburg ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... dying; slowly dying, under the blight of Sir Walter. I have read the first volume of Rob Roy, & as far as Chapter XIX of Guy Mannering, & I can no longer hold my head up or take my nourishment. Lord, it's all so juvenile! so artificial, so shoddy; & such wax ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... will I miss thine own dear voice In Summer's soft, bright eve; A blight will rest on tree and flower— The hue of things that grieve; And when the wintry hour hath come, And 'round the blazing hearth Shall cluster faces we have ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... remote, when thou Shalt feel far more than thou inflictest now,— Feel for thy vile self-loving self in vain, And turn thee howling in unpitied pain. May the strong curse of crushed affections light Back on thy bosom with reflected blight, And make thee, in thy leprosy of mind, As loathsome to thyself as to mankind, Till all thy self-thoughts curdle into hate Black as thy will for others would create: Till thy hard heart be calcined into dust, And thy soul ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... while I sit, with flowerets crowned, To regulate the goblets round. Let but the nymph, our banquet's pride, Be seated smiling by my side, And earth has not a gift or power That I would envy, in that hour. Envy!—oh never let its blight Touch the gay hearts met here tonight. Far hence be slander's sidelong wounds, Nor harsh dispute, nor discord's sounds Disturb a scene, where all should be ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... he had stood shoulder to shoulder with them all in the fight for the establishment of the new order of things and his generosity with himself and his wealth had been superb. The delight with which he made a gift of himself to any cause whatsoever, rather tended to blight the prospects of what might have been a brilliant career at law. With his backing Hobson Capers had opened the cotton mills on a margin of no capital and much grit. Then Tom Cantrell had begun stock manipulations on a few blocks of gas and water, which his mother and Andrew had ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... procuring the money necessary for their daily wants, each suffering keenly; she, desperate at the thought of the tortures that awaited him; he unable to accustom himself to the idea of seeing her wanting bread. Was their happiness forever ended, then? Was poverty going to blight their spring ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... kindred had hearts in their breasts. Would they doom you to the life upon which you are entering? Can you not see that you are passing deeper and deeper into the shadow of the past? What good can it do them? Could they speak would they say, 'We wish our sorrows to blight your life'? You are not happy, you cannot be happy. It is contrary to the law of God, it is impossible to human nature, that happiness and bitter, unrelenting enmity should exist in the same heart. You are not only unhappy, but you are in deep trouble of some kind. I saw that ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... cover a case so cruel as this? He hardly hears the colonel's words. He is thinking—thinking with a bursting heart and whirling brain. For a time all sense of the loss of his only son seems deadened in face of this undreamed-of, this almost incredible shadow that has come to blight the sweet and innocent life that is so infinitely dear to him. What can he say to Bessie when he meets those beautiful, pleading, trusting, anxious eyes? She has borne up so bravely, silently, patiently. Their journey has been trying ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King |
