"Blot" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... about and dropped the sheet of pigs upon the desk, but at that unfortunate moment, the paint-brush slipped from her grasp and spilled a great, scarlet blot on the teacher's fresh white waist. Dismayed, Peace could only stare at the ruin she had wrought, having forgotten all about her drawing in wondering what punishment would follow this second calamity; and Miss Peyton had ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... could not be called a very well written one; there were several mistakes in the spelling, and here and there, a great blot could tell that a good deal of his heart had gone into it; but whatever it was, it was a loving ...
— Left at Home - or, The Heart's Resting Place • Mary L. Code
... sin in this particular point of cleanliness than in any other. I know young men, and young women, too, who dress very well and seem to take considerable pride in their personal appearance, yet neglect their teeth. They do not realize that there could hardly be a worse blot on one's appearance than dirty or decaying teeth, or the absence of one or two in front. Nothing can be more offensive in man or woman than a foul breath, and no one can have neglected teeth without reaping this consequence. We all know how disagreeable it is to be anywhere near a person ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... broke into a cheer, for advancing toward the other dark object at a rapid rate was another blot on the white expanse, which a moment's scrutiny through the glasses showed them was the motor-sledge packed with men on whose rifles the setting sun glinted brightly. The Golden Eagle ten minutes later swooped to ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... truth of a sister's feeling, they would barter everything, yet who were in an unending danger! Think of them, with this skeleton behind the door of their hearts, fearful at every moment! Does it seem good in the scheme of existence, or a blot there, that those who are themselves innocent, but who are yet the real sufferers, whether punishment to the culprit fall or fail, should be made thus poignantly ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... presuming upon a promise which my heart perhaps has never ratified; on the other I see an admirable friend whose sublime devotion is ready to brave all prejudices; who—believing that I bear the smirch of an indelible shame—is none the less prepared to cover the blot with his protection." ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... questions most emphatically come in the category of those which affect in the most far-reaching way the home life of the Nation. The horrors incident to the employment of young children in factories or at work anywhere are a blot on our civilization. It is true that each. State must ultimately settle the question in its own way; but a thorough official investigation of the matter, with the results published broadcast, would greatly help toward ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... not if thine eye Be on them; who, in love and truth, Where no misgiving is, rely Upon the genial sense of youth: Glad hearts! without reproach or blot; Who do thy work, and know it not: O, if through confidence misplaced They fail, thy saving arms, dread Power! around ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... decided. "I'll buy things for that chapel Sister Angela is planning, and polish my manners. And," here Doris grew grave, "I'll think of David Martin! I wish I could love Davey enough to marry him as I feel he wants me to—and let him blot out this ache for Merry." But that was ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... the heavy rains and dusted as carefully in summer. There were grape-vine arbors and wild rose hedges, and the wide verandas were embowered. In summer there were many rowboats on the lake, and they lingered more often in the deep shade of the weeping willows fringing the banks. The only blot on the aristocratic landscape was a low brown restaurant kept by a Frenchman, known as "Old Blazes." It was a resort for gay parties that were quite respectable and for others that were not. Behind the public rooms was ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... mixture of gruffness and politeness had bred legends among the women of the neighbourhood. He was a German baron, who had forfeited his title and estates through killing a man in a duel; and never a milder pair of eyes looked timidly through spectacles. He was a famous musician, who had chosen to blot himself out of the world for love of a high-born lady; and, in his opinion, women were useful to cook ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... man, one that hath grace, a generous spirit, tender of his reputation, will be deeply wounded, and so grievously affected with it, that he had rather give myriads of crowns, lose his life, than suffer the least defamation of honour, or blot in his good name. And if so be that he cannot avoid it, as a nightingale, Que cantando victa moritur, (saith [1687]Mizaldus,) dies for shame if another bird sing better, he languisheth and pineth away in ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... then. Here's the contract," said the American, "you have only to sign it." And a receipt duly prepared was handed to Mother Etienne, who in a trembling hand appended her signature and a flourish. I don't know that she did not even embellish it with a huge blot ...
— The Curly-Haired Hen • Auguste Vimar
... honest man, Mr. Steele. I commend the nicety of your scruples and am quite ready to trust myself to them. I own to no blot, in my past or present life, calling for public arraignment. If my statement of the fact is not enough, I here swear on the ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... days, and on the other hand the wisdom, courage, and mild self-assertion with which she fought her battle and conquered. There is not a man living who took part in that disgraceful row who would not gladly blot out that page in his personal history. But the few noble men—lawyers, statesmen, clergymen, philanthropists, poets, orators, philosophers—who have remained steadfast and loyal to woman through all her struggles for freedom—have been brave and generous enough to redeem their sex from the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... pass—fame, joy and love, The sting of grief, the blot of shame; The only thing that really counts Is how we ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... private;—and who will care When I may pass away,— Or how, or why I perish, or where I mix with the common clay? They will fill my empty place again, With another as bold and brave; And they'll blot me out, ere the Autumn rain ...
— Beechenbrook - A Rhyme of the War • Margaret J. Preston
... glance on the battle-field was like inspiration, saw the blot and charged upon them in person with his whole battalia of cavalry. The veteran Biron followed hard upon the snow-white plume. The scene was changed, victory succeeded to impending defeat, and the enemy was routed. The riders ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... another disabled witness: Peggy Black. That naive personage was nursing her deceased sister's children—in an affidavit: and they had scarlatina—surgeon's certificate to that effect. Compton opposed, and pointed out the blot. "You don't want the children in the witness-box," said he: "and we are not to be robbed of our trial because one of your witnesses prefer nursing other people's children ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... glance had been but a momentary one, but in it he had marked a huge figure, in a squarish hat and ill-fitting clothes. Gustav Linke! In his hand, clutched like a weapon, he still carried his atrocious umbrella. A grotesque outlandish figure, an ink-blot on the velvet night! What was he doing here near the house of the lighted windows? Renwick sprang from his place of concealment, whispering Linke's name; but when he reached the corner of the alley the man was twenty paces away, and so bent upon his mission that he heard nothing. ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... and thoughtful charity. Why do we let human malignity embitter us? why should ingratitude, jealousy—perfidy even—enrage us? There is no end to recriminations, complaints, or reprisals. The simplest plan is to blot everything out. Anger, rancor, bitterness, trouble the soul. Every man is a dispenser of justice; but there is one wrong that he is not bound to punish—that of which he himself is the victim. Such a wrong is to be healed, not avenged. ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... for the time, but how would it be afterwards, when they had settled down to the routine of every-day life? It would be a tremendous experiment, but she could not let him enter on that close union in ignorance of the blot on her scutcheon, and then the door would be closed on the earlier half of her life, which had been so bitter-sweet. How little peace she had known since her mother's death! how heavenly sweet her life ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... blot out the smaller shadow of the guard. Then both figures disappeared. A moment later a silhouette cut across the lines of the grille. Unoiled hinges screeched; the bars lifted. A rope uncoiled from above ...
— Rastignac the Devil • Philip Jose Farmer
... maintained that gaiety was the best that life had to give; that the butterfly being the type of the human soul, the nearer man could come to his prototype, the better for him and for all. Sorrow and suffering, he cried, were a blot on the scheme, a mistake, a concession to the devil; if all would but spread their wings and fly away from it, houp! it would ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... root downward or bear fruit upward, the sun, the air, the rain soliciting in vain its sapless and rotten boughs—such a monarchy, even were it not a monarchy of priests, and tenfold more because it is one, stands out a foul blot upon the face of creation, an offence to Christendom and to mankind.'[255] As we shall soon see, he was just as wrathful, just as impassioned and as eloquent, when, in a memorable case in his own country, the temporal power bethought ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... The long and totally uninteresting campaign against Claudas, during the greater part of which Lancelot (who is most of all concerned) is absent, and in which he takes no part or interest when present, is another great blot. Some of these things, but not ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... an instant. It was too late. The water circled us about and was running toward the coast at tremendous speed. No, it did not run, it glided, crept, spread like an immense, limitless blot. The water was barely a few centimeters deep, but the rising flood had gone so far that we no longer saw the vanishing line of ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... Tulkinghorn does not go on to the Fields at present. He goes a short way, turns back, comes again to the shop of Mr. Krook, and enters it straight. It is dim enough, with a blot-headed candle or so in the windows, and an old man and a cat sitting in the back part by a fire. The old man rises and comes forward, with another blot-headed candle in ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... conscience, as to anything that came within the range of his vocation, would trouble such a man very much in the same way, though to a far greater degree, that an error in the balance of an account or an ink-blot on the fair page of a book of record. Here, in a word,—and it is a rare instance in my life,—I had met with a person thoroughly adapted to ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the scene of Tufetu's violent end. A great splotch of red gleamed as a blot of blood on the ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... not to abandon them or surrender the power which has alone done something to raise them out of the slough of despond? Mr. Gandhi, however, who would be a great social reformer had he not preferred to plunge into a dangerous political agitation, is not himself blind to such an awful blot as "untouchability" has made on Hindu civilisation, and some of his followers, prompted perhaps less than he is himself by a generous reforming spirit, have not been slow to see what abundant materials lie ready ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... with the current, his voyage was ease itself. But when he strove to cut across and so reach the mouth of the hidden swamp-stream, he narrowly escaped upsetting. As it was, he fended off some dark blot bobbing through the water, his palm meeting it with a force that jarred ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... army, and in a way it was successful. Mr. Greeley was hammering at me to take action for peace and said that unless I met these men every drop of blood that was shed and every dollar that was spent I would be responsible for, that it would be a blot upon my conscience and soul. I wrote a letter to Mr. Greeley and said to him that those two ex-United States senators were Whigs and old friends of his, personally and politically, and that I desired him to go to Niagara Falls and find out confidentially what their credentials were and let ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... That they wouldn't own a prison-bird; (Though they're gettin' over that, I guess, For all of 'em owe me more or less;) But I've learned one thing; an' it cheers a man In always a-doin' the best he can; That whether on the big book, a blot Gets over a fellow's name or not, Whenever he does a deed that's white, It's credited to him fair and right. An' when you hear the great bugle's notes, An' the Lord divides his sheep and goats, However they may settle my case, Wherever they may fix my place, My good old Christian ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... you will see in every window three clerks and a head clerk; and the old head clerk is the worst of all, for he can't understand anything." But she only said this to frighten Jack the Dullard: and the clerks gave a great crow of delight, and each one spurted a blot out of his pen on ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... long in coming. Such a delay always aggravated the slow fire within him. He had nothing of Ladd's patience. He wanted action. The gray shadow below thinned out, and the patch of mesquite made a blot upon the pale ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... to mitigate the terrors of the law by finding that the stolen property, however valuable it might be, was of less value than five shillings. May the recording angel "drop a tear over this record of perjury and blot it ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... doomed. They are torn down, dug out, washed to pieces, and then washed over side hills. Where the process of hydraulic mining has been, or is being carried on, the country presents an appearance of devastation and ruin that is scarcely imaginable; forming a frightful blot upon the face ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... of slander, you must prove yourself innocent. What I want from you is an informal and strictly confidential declaration, for the case against you is a serious one, and of such a kind as to require all your efforts to wipe off this blot upon your honour. Your enemies will not respect your delicacy of feeling. They will press you so hard that you will either be obliged to submit to a shameful sentence, or to wound your feelings of honour in proving your ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... constantly. He was not buried in that outer circle of oblivion from which the thoughts unconsciously shy—as we bury our dead, their going so shrouded in pain that we long to blot out the memory of them. John Derringham was always with her. She prayed for his welfare with the fervor and purity of her sweet soul. He was her spirit lover still. He could never really belong ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... Memory's scroll there came a blot, A space of time remembered not; When sense awoke, clouds late aglow With sunset ...
— Daisy Dare, and Baby Power - Poems • Rosa Vertner Jeffrey
... rear'd for you amid the waste! Yes I will see you when ye first behold Those turrets tipp'd by hope with morning gold, And watch, while on your brows the cross ye make, Round your pale eyes a wintry lustre wake. 675 —Without one hope her written griefs to blot, Save in the land where all things are forgot, My heart, alive to transports long unknown, Half wishes your ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... nestled beneath the scarred face of a crag, and, because mining operations had lately been suspended and work was scarce just then, pale-faced men in moleskin lounged about the slate-slab doorsteps. Above the village, and beyond the summit of the crag, the mouth of a tunnel formed a black blot on the sunlit slopes of sheep-cropped grass stretching up to the heather, which gave place in turn to rock out-crop on the shoulders of the fell. The loungers glanced at the tunnel regretfully, for that mine had furnished most of ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... and the Lapiths were always an unadventurous, respectable crew," said Priscilla, with a note of scorn in her voice. "If I were to write my family history now! Why, it would be one long continuous blot from beginning to end." She laughed jovially, and helped herself to another glass ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... his fondness for wearing jewelled studs, buttons, scarf-pins. In his town and country houses the main scheme, leading features and every smallest detail were the result of Clyde Fitch's personal taste and effort, and he, more than most men and women, appreciated what a blot an inartistic human being can be on a room which of itself is ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... was the most indolent of mortals and of poets. But he was also one of the best both of mortals and of poets. Dr. Johnson makes it his praise that he wrote "no line which dying he would wish to blot." Perhaps a better proof of his honest simplicity, and inoffensive goodness of disposition, would be that he wrote no line which any other person living would wish that he should blot. Indeed, he himself wished, on ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... remembered, wondering, the days when she had darned the tattered tapestry in her chamber, and changed the ribbands and fashions of her gowns. Being now attired fittingly, though soberly as became her, she was not in these days—at least, as far as outward seeming went—an awkward blot upon the scene when she appeared among her sister's company; but at heart she was as timid and shrinking as ever, and never mingled with the guests in the great rooms when she could avoid so doing. Once or twice she went forth with Clorinda in her coach and six, and saw the glittering world, ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the rapturous passion with the force of gravitation which holds planets and systems in order. 'Blot it out from the mechanism of nature and the All bursts asunder in fragments; your worlds thunder into chaos; weep, Newtons, for their giant ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... and] no mention of Christ nor faith; but men hoped by their own works to overcome and blot out sins before God. And with this intention we became priests and monks, that we ...
— The Smalcald Articles • Martin Luther
... heaven you could get the right kind of evidence against the Montmartre gang," he sighed. "It is a gang, too—a high-class gang. In fact—well, it must be done. That place is a blot on the city. The police never have really tried to get anything on it. Miss Kendall never could, could you? I admit I never have. It seems to be understood that it is practically impossible to prove anything against ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... known, it would be only to remember that the man he most dreaded, he who was his most implacable enemy, was dwelling in it. And when would he cease to think of his own birth-place and the birth-place of his children, the home where Felicita had lived? It would be impossible to blot the vivid memory of it ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... state— 'Twas a gibberish that Cupid alone could translate;— But "there," said he, (pointing where, small and remote, The dear Hermitage rose), "there his JULIE he wrote,— "Upon paper gilt-edged, without blot or erasure; "Then sauded it over with silver and azure, "And—oh, what will genius and fancy not do!— "Tied the leaves up together with nonpareille blue!" What a trait of Rousseau! what a crowd of emotions From sand ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... into the big ravine. Lipa and Praskovya, who had been walking barefooted, sat down on the grass to put on their boots; Elizar sat down with them. If they looked down from above Ukleevo looked beautiful and peaceful with its willow-trees, its white church, and its little river, and the only blot on the picture was the roof of the factories, painted for the sake of cheapness a gloomy ashen grey. On the slope on the further side they could see the rye—some in stacks and sheaves here and there as though strewn about by the storm, and some freshly cut lying in swathes; the oats, ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... which they before had for you. Women are the only refiners of the merit of men; it is true, they cannot add weight, but they polish and give lustre to it. 'A propos', I am assured, that Madame de Blot, although she has no great regularity of features, is, notwithstanding, excessively pretty; and that, for all that, she has as yet been scrupulously constant to her husband, though she has now been married above a year. ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... side of it had melted into the darkness beyond the moon. I bent over the bed. Sami was there—Sami, rolled shapelessly in the concealing bedclothes, his round face hidden in the pillow, his black hair just a blot of darkness on the white.... It might have been Desire ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... never been able to suppress them completely, because the soldiers are abandoned by their officers, and because of lack of example on the part of the latter; they do not understand that it is a great blot when they commit these abuses, since when they discover the goods or house of a Spaniard they believe they have a right to ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... King Haakon's reign was to have himself crowned king, and thus to rid himself of the blot on his claim to the throne. After some negotiations with the Pope, a cardinal was sent from Rome, the ceremony being performed with much pomp and ceremony, and followed with the most magnificent feasts and festivities Norway ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... was making the barren mountains a wonderland of deep purple and black and silvery gray and brown, a coyote yapped a falsetto message and was answered by one nearer at hand—his mate, it might be. In a bush under the bank that made of it a black blot in the unearthly whiteness of the sand, a little bird fluttered uneasily and sent a small, inquiring chirp into the stillness. From somewhere farther up the arroyo drifted a faint, ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... evening we had banked our fires and were ready to be hoisted up. Dooley Rileyvich went first, and I watched him blot out the bit of blue for a while. Then, slowly, down came the ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... sacred name. But, I believe that untouchability is no part of Hinduism. It is rather its excrescence to be removed by every effort. And there is quite an army of Hindu reformers who have set their heart upon ridding Hinduism of this blot. Conversion, therefore, I hold, is ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... sunny dreams, building her little castles to the clink of enameled tin cups, weaving her romances to the clatter of cutlery, smiling upon the mentally conjured faces of her boys amidst the steaming odors of greasy, lukewarm water. The one blot upon her existence is perhaps the Chinese cook, with whom she has perforce to associate. She dislikes him for no other reason than that he is a "yaller-faced doper that ought to been set to herd with a menagerie of measly skunks." But even ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... the slums of our cities, bent over, uncouth, rough, slovenly, has possibilities slumbering within the rags, which would have developed him into a magnificent man, an ornament to the human race instead of a foul blot and scar, had he only been fortunate enough early in life to have come under ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... they would not attempt with his successor. The members of the present House who in the preceding Congress had voted to impeach the President, and the great mass of the senators who voted to convict him, now voted to blot out the identical clause of the Act under which they held the President to be deserving of removal for even venturing to act upon his own fair construction of its meaning. With all the plausible defenses that can be made for this ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... dust and glare of the noon of life we cast regretful glances back to the dewy morn, and as eve creeps on the shadows reach further back until they link the cradle and the grave and all is dark. I would not blot from heaven the star of hope, nor mock one earnest effort of mankind; but I would warn this world that its ideals are all wrong, that it's going forward backwards, is chasing foolish rainbows that lead to barbarism. Palaces and gold, fame and power—these by thy gods, O! Israel—mere ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... loomed before me like a blot of something yet blacker than darkness, then her spars and hull began to take shape, and the next moment, as it seemed (for, the further I went, the brisker grew the current of the ebb), I was alongside of her hawser, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... [here a large blot, Scatchy being addicted to blots]: I am honestly frightened when I think what we are doing. But, oh, my dear, if you could know how pleased we are with ourselves you'd not deny us this pleasure. Harry, you have it—the real thing, you know, whatever it is—and I haven't. None of the rest of us had. ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... feeling would the announcement be received? Certainly not with a desire to redeem this ruffian from his bonds and place him in the honoured seat of his dead father. Such intelligence would be regarded as a calamity, an unhappy blot upon a fair reputation, a disgrace to an honoured and unsullied name. Let him succeed, let him return again to the mother who had by this time become reconciled, in a measure, to his loss; he would, at the best, be to her a ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... that this picture was not an evil dream. His gaze sought the quiet figures, lingered hopefully on the captives, menacingly on the sleeping savages, and glowered over the gaudily arrayed form. His glance sought the upright guard, as he stood a dark blot against the gray stone. He saw the Indian's plume, a single feather waving silver-white. Then it became riveted on the bubbling, refulgent spring. The pool was round, perhaps five feet across, and shone like a burnished shield. It mirrored the moon, the twinkling ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... the desire of domination should in time usurp the place of those laborious, enthusiastic, and pious missionaries who, so happily for the natives, had managed to revolutionize their minds, and so spared their country those scenes of blood which blot with a fearful stain the history of Spanish power in America. But the influence of churchmen, as usual, in the Philippines, was not always to be well directed; for the merciless Inquisition having established itself at Manilla, commenced its terrible ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... return of the Druses," a "Blot in the 'Scutcheon," and "Colombo's Birthday," all have the same originality of conception, delicate penetration into the mysteries of human feeling, atmospheric individuality, and skill in picturesque detail. ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Agonistes, Faust, Pippa Passes, Peer Gynt, and the early dream-dramas of Maurice Maeterlinck, are something else than plays. They are not devised to be presented by actors on a stage before an audience. As a work of literature, A Blot in the 'Scutcheon is immeasurably greater than The Two Orphans; but as a play, it is immeasurably less. For even though, in this particular piece, Browning did try to write for the theatre (at the suggestion of Macready), he employed the same intricately intellectual method of character analysis ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... the woes of earth, Like unchained bird, seeking my native air. Men seldom see their fellow-creatures' worth, But blot sweet nature's page, however fair. Away, my soul, and seek thy nobler state, Where loving angels breathe their softest prayer, Where sweetest seraphs for thy coming wait, And ne'er suspicion's breath can ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... said Dorothea. "This funeral seems to me the most dismal thing I ever saw. It is a blot on the morning I cannot bear to think that any one should die ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... festival was celebrated to his honor, by merchants, traders, &c. in which they sacrificed a sow, sprinkled themselves, and the goods they intended for sale, with water from his fountain, and prayed that he would both blot out all the frauds and perjuries they had already committed, and enable them to impose again ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... accurate as his to be honest and regular in the administration of affairs. A stain on his conscience, as to anything that came within the range of his vocation, would trouble such a man very much in the same way, though to a far greater degree, than an error in the balance of an account, or an ink-blot on the fair page of a book of record. Here, in a word—and it is a rare instance in my life—I had met with a person thoroughly adapted to ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... on the pages of the MS. They look more like the rough draft than the fair copy. There are numerous slips of the pen, corrections in phrasing and sentence structure, dashes instead of other marks of punctuation, a large blot of ink on f. 57, one major deletion (see ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... within them all the brotherhood of man. But it is not too much to say, that the mass of our populations have not at all advanced beyond the savage code of morals, and have in many cases sunk below it. A deficient morality is the great blot of modern civilization, and the greatest hindrance to ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... he paused, wondering which would be the wisest plan to pursue, there was a wave ready to rise up and completely blot out the faint daylight which streamed through ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... your majesty! 'T would blot our honor To send him from us thus! We shall be plunged Anew in wars, for Husak will avenge it! I am thy most unhappy subject, and Thou'lt hear ...
— Semiramis and Other Plays - Semiramis, Carlotta And The Poet • Olive Tilford Dargan
... used for pencilling the eyes and beautifying them. There are two preparations for darkening the eyes—surma and kâjal. Kâjal is fine lamp-black, but the difference between its use and that of surma is that the former is used for making a blot to avoid the evil eye (na*ar) and the latter merely as ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel
... she did not even think of it that moment. It was simply because she couldn't watch any longer—not even for a minute or two—that her eyes finally fluttered that way. But when she did turn there was a bigger, darker blot there against the leaning picket fence—a big-shouldered figure that had moved slowly forward until it stood full in front of the ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... shown to lie along the path of largeness. There are, therefore, in self-sacrifice both negative and positive elements. But why select its name from the subordinate part? Why turn to the front its incidental negations? This is topsy-turvy nomenclature. Better blot the word self-sacrifice from our dictionaries. Devotion, service, love, dedication to a cause, —these words mark its real nature and are the only descriptions of it which its practicers will recognize. That damage to the abstract self which chiefly impresses the outsider is something of which the ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... object to gaze upon, that they should let their minds be dissipated all over the trivialities of Time, and not gather them together and project them, as I may say, with all their force towards the sovereign realities of Eternity. A sixpence held close to your eye will blot out the sun, and the trifles of earth close to us will prevent us from realising the things which neither sight, nor experience, nor testimony reveal to us, unless with clenched teeth, so to speak, we make a dogged effort to keep them ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... hearkened unto," but his power was to assert itself in deeds rather than in words. He appeared at the head of a troop of his own raising at Edgehill; but with the eye of a born soldier he at once saw the blot in the army of Essex. "A set of poor tapsters and town apprentices," he warned Hampden, "would never fight against men of honour"; and he pointed to religious enthusiasm as the one weapon which could meet and turn the chivalry of the Cavalier. ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... thee well, O Moon, thou cavern'd realm, Sad satellite, thou giant ash of death, Blot on God's firmament, pale home of crime, Scarr'd prison house of sin, where damned souls Feed upon punishment: Oh, thought sublime, That amid night's black deeds, when evil prowls Through the broad world, thou, watching sinners well, Glarest o'er all, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... that he never wrote any of his works that were printed, twice over. Dr. Burney's wonder at seeing several pages of his Lives of the Poets, in Manuscript, with scarce a blot or erasure, drew this observation from him. MALONE. 'He wrote forty-eight of the printed octavo pages of the Life of Savage at a sitting' (post, Feb. 1744), and a hundred lines of the Vanity of Human Wishes in a day (post, under Feb. 15, 1766). ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... one. Two of its perpetrators at least were worthless boys, and the other was away from Grandcourt, and might possibly never come back. Was it worth risking so much for so small a scruple? Did not his duty to Grandcourt demand sacrifices of him, and could he not that very night remove a dark blot from its scutcheon! ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... who had these things on his black heretic conscience should continue to haunt the scene of his crimes and lord it over those whom his misdeeds had sullied, was to the common mind unthinkable—nay, incredible: a blot on God's good day. To every potato-setter who, out of the corner of his eye, watched his passage, to every beggar by the road whose whine masked heart-felt curses, to the very children who fell back from the cabin door to escape his evil ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... mischance Begored with blood and pierced with a lance On high the Helm, I bear it well in mind, The wreath was silver, powdered all with shot, About the which, goutte du sang, did twine A roll of sable black, and foul be blot The crest two hands which may not be forgot, For in the right a trenchant blade did stand, And in the left a ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 475 - Vol. XVII, No. 475. Saturday, February 5, 1831 • Various
... most unmistakable puncture! the distinct, though slight, pang of a miniature wound. A crimson bead of blood rose on Otto's finger, swelled to its due proportion, and became a trickling blot. ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... so than those which greet my eye even now from my study window. No, there is no fault to be found with external nature; it is man only who spoils it all. I see nothing in sun, moon, or stars, in mountain, forest, or stream, that needs to be altered; we are the blot on this fair world, "O man," I am sometimes ready to exclaim, "what a—"; but I check myself, for as Correggio whispered to himself exultingly, "I also am a painter," so I, though with very different feelings, say, "I also am a man." Johnson said, ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... have come my way, I think I never achieved one which gave me such acute physical satisfaction as I underwent last night at my sister Bee's success as a premiere danseuse. Shall I ever forget it? Shall danger, or sickness, or poverty, or disaster ever blot from my mind that scene? Jimmie, never again can she scorn us for our sawdust-ring proclivities, for do you know, I shouldn't be surprised to see her end her days on ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... detriment since the direction taken was usually wrong. Porter acted on impulses, and they seemed destined forever to be senseless. A swift inspiration came to him, he made a slash with his heavily inked pen, there was a blot, a figure with heavy lines drawn crookedly through it, an exclamation of despair—and then the blank look. The vacant expression seemed to be behind all his woes, and an empty mind was undoubtedly ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... cross with these words over it, "Unless ye forgive men their trespasses, how can your Heavenly Father forgive you?" And coming up to me, put forth her hand and beckoned me to follow her. Then the old gentleman spoke and said, "Your blood will blot out your disgrace;" and turning the leaf, he pointed to the "Deaths," and I read, "On the 28th of September, 1862, Harry Clay Mason, aged 21;" and then I woke up. This is the 20th; I think I shall live until that ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... now and then, I met people in Portland, and especially in Boston, who had known me in former years, and who knew something of my past life; but these were generally my friends who sympathized with my sufferings, or who, at least, were willing to blot out the past in my better behavior of the present. One day in Boston a young man came up ...
— Seven Wives and Seven Prisons • L.A. Abbott
... prisoner passionately. "I would have endured imprisonment, ay, even execution, rather than have left my miserable secret as a family blot to my children. ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... kindness of manner, "I see I pain you; and though I am what my very pleasant guests will call a parvenu, I comprehend your natural feelings as a gentleman of ancient birth. Parvenu! Ah! is it not strange, Leslie, that no wealth, no fashion, no fame can wipe out that blot? They call me a parvenu, and borrow my money. They call our friend, the wit, a parvenu, and submit to all his insolence—if they condescend to regard his birth at all—provided they can but get him to dinner. They call the best debater ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... an Englishman should feel acutely sensitive to this blot in the law of England and desire the speedy disappearance of a system so open to scathing sarcasm. It is natural that every humane person should grow impatient of the spectacle of so many blighted lives, of so much misery inflicted on innocent persons—and ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... few politicians declaimed on the necessity of ending a ruinous war by recognising the independence of the United States, and others advised a cessation of arms and conciliation, the vast majority of the nation soon burned with ardour to blot out the recollection of Burgoyne's disgrace, by deeds of arms, and by reducing the colonies to their original subjection to the mother country. Not only did public meetings of corporate bodies, towns, and counties, display their ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... attention,—the figure of the young King in his raised chair, and the forms of the Dane and the Angle who fronted each other before his footstool. Shielded from the heat by his palm, Canute's face was in the shadow, and the giant shape of the son of Lodbrok was a blot against the flames, but the glare lay strong on Sebert of Ivarsdale, revealing a picture that caused one spectator to catch her breath in a sob. Equally aloof from English thane and Danish noble, the Etheling in the palace of his native ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... famine; his men deserted in numbers and became renegades; and his captains were in almost open mutiny. It was at this time that he ordered the execution of one of his soldiers, a young Portuguese fidalgo named Ruy Dias, which is treated by the poet Camoens as the chief blot upon the great commander's fame. It was reported to Albuquerque that Ruy Dias had been in the habit of visiting the Muhammadan women whom he had brought with him as hostages from Goa. There is no doubt that through these women information was conveyed to the enemy of the state of affairs in ...
— Rulers of India: Albuquerque • Henry Morse Stephens
... hoops of casks, and the cast-off rags of blankets and clothing. The whole claim in its unsavory, unpicturesque details, and its vulgar story of sordid, reckless, and selfish occupancy and abandonment, was a foul blot on the landscape, which the first rosy dawn only made the more offending. Surely the last spot in the world that men should quarrel ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... suppose you have no personal acquaintance in this parish, it would be presumption in me to expect that you will visit my cottage, but I will attend you in any part of the Forest if you will send me word. I am far from supposing that a person of your discernment,—d-n it, I'll blot out that, 'tis so like flattery. I say I don't think you would despise a shepherd's "humble cot an' hamely fare," as Burns hath it, yet though I would be extremely proud of a visit, yet hang me if I would know what to do wi' ye. I am surprised to find that the ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... and composure, 'is one of the blessings, Edward, with which your free country has accommodated poor old Scotland; her own jurisprudence, as I have heard, was much milder. But I suppose one day or other—when there are no longer any wild Highlanders to benefit by its tender mercies—they will blot it from their records as levelling them with a nation of cannibals. The mummery, too, of exposing the senseless head—they have not the wit to grace mine with a paper coronet; there would be some satire in that, Edward. I hope they will set it on the Scotch gate though, ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... generation before them, then will they in turn have no reverence for their fathers. Let them be taught that the sins of their ancestors involve their own honour so little that they need not take any trouble to clear the blot off the scutcheon, but may safely sit down and laugh over it, saying, 'Very likely it is true. If so, it is very amusing; and if not—what matter?'—Then those young people are being bred up in a habit of mind which contains in itself all the capabilities of degradation and slavery, in self-conceit, ...
— Froude's History of England • Charles Kingsley
... Austin or a Houston, followed the bent of their dispositions, and were guilty of acts of barbarism and cruelty which, had they, at the time, been properly represented to the civilised people of Europe, would have caused them to blot the name of Texas out of the list ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... and he took a menacing step toward me. Then suddenly he stopped, a queer tragic expression coming over his face. He put his hand to his eyes as if to blot out some ...
— The Homicidal Diary • Earl Peirce
... but the verse was two, and not six, as my scribe had it. It was just the same with the other three—the number of the Psalm was right but the verse wrong. So here was a discovery, for all was painfully written smooth and clean without a blot, and yet in every verse an error. But if the second number did not stand for the verse, what else should it mean? I had scarce formed the question to myself before I had the answer, and knew that it must be the number of the word chosen in each text to make a secret meaning. I was in as great ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... Presently the bright blot of light that fell from the pantry window on the little willow trees vanished silently, and they could hear Belle's ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... at Borne is now less than it was.' And again, speaking of Roman insolence: 'They push on blindly ahead—there is no listening or reasoning. Well, I have seen; more water-bubbles than even theirs, and once such an outrageous smoke that it managed to blot out the sun, but the smoke never lasted, and the sun still shines. I shall continue to keep the truth bright and expose it, and am as far from fearing my ungracious masters as they are ready ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... 'tis pity moves me; but a blot The martial honor of our house will stain, If, when I might have bled, my lord ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... beneath the pale hands, and the voice, awful in its solemn and mysterious depth, sighed, "The Lord have mercy on the people!" Then all was gone, the place was clear again, the gray sky was obstructed by no deathly blot; she looked about her, shook her shoulders decidedly, and, pulling on her hood, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... died out as black clouds once more rose to blot out the pleasant picture she had formed in her mind; and as the mists gathered the tears fell once more, hot, briny tears which seemed to scald her eyes as she sank upon her knees by the bedside and buried her face ...
— A Life's Eclipse • George Manville Fenn
... you may find it advantageous to make preliminary outlines of what you wish to say. But above all, you must be willing to blot, to revise, to take infinite pains. You should remember the old admonition that easy ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... Captain Swope, and Lynch and the tradesmen. Lynch carried the lighted hurricane lamp that hung handy in a sheltered nook during the night. Forward, a respectful distance, the stiffs of the watch made a vague blot in the gloom. As, we came down the poop ladder a voice I recognized as Boston's called to us from this last group, "He tried to get you, Big 'Un!" So I knew that the lightning flash had revealed to the watch what it ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... looked upon as a blot which dishonours a family, and every one has a right to wash away the stain with the blood of the delinquent. "Father Breboeuf," says Charlevoix, (vol. ii. p. 28) "one day saw a young Huron who was killing a woman with a club; he ran ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... contrast with the revolting scheme proposed in relation to them by the most refined philosopher of antiquity. Well might the matrons of Antioch refuse to gratify Julian by a sacrifice to gods whose votaries had steeped their sex in impurity and degradation. The death of Hypatia is indeed a blot in Christian annals, but she fell the victim of an infuriated multitude; and how often had the Proconsul and the Emperor beheld, unmoved, the arena wet with the blood of Christian virgins, and the earth blackened with their ashes! Indeed, the deference paid to weakness is the grand maxim, the practical ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... back with calm thankfulness on that long period of trial and exertion—with thankfulness that the dark clouds that hung over us, threatening to blot us from existence, when they did burst upon us, were full of blessings. When our situation appeared perfectly desperate, then were we on the threshold of a new state of things, which was born out of ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... one of her comrades scornfully, and tells her how of course the home-folk have been careful to blot out all memories of one who has come to the town to lead the life she leads. She may be sure the old people have rubbed out the mark showing how tall she was ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... "I have never greatly cared for the praises of the world. God is my witness that I am innocent of my brother's sins; in politics I have never meddled much, but have performed the duties of my office and ploughed my patch of ground. But I am a gentleman by birth, and should be glad to wipe out the blot on my escutcheon; I am a Pole, and should be glad to do some service for my country—even to lay down my life. With the sabre I was never over skilled, and yet some men have received slashes even from me. The world knows that at the time of the last Polish district assemblies I challenged and wounded ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... priest came to the Latin words, Introibo ad altare Dei, a sudden divine inspiration flashed upon him; he looked at the three kneeling figures, the representatives of Christian France, and said instead, as though to blot out the poverty of the garret, "We are about to enter the ...
— An Episode Under the Terror • Honore de Balzac
... I could reason about it in my mind, but I could not call up the memory of what the feeling of it was like. The blackness grew and grew. I hated life fiercely. I hated the very possibility of a God who had created me a blot, a blackness. With that I felt blackness begin to go out from me, as the light had gone before—not that I remembered the light; I had forgotten all about it, and remembered it only after I awoke. Then came the words of the Lord ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... She felt the old sense of gladness in her youth and strength and health, and in her freedom, and she bounded along over the hard, glittering snow, full of a mere irresponsible animal pleasure, such as moves the young chamois in his bounds from rock to rock. Darkness had come like a blot upon the earth before she had done half the distance, but now she had the twinkling lights and the reddish haze of Dawson before her. Her own eyes brightened as she caught sight of them, and she hastened ...
— A Girl of the Klondike • Victoria Cross
... resumed; "and those days were the last that I ever spent free from care and anxiety. I sometimes look back to them and live them over again in thought, till I long to blot out from my life and my memory all that has intervened between that time and this. But the one is not more impossible than the other," he added with a sigh, and for a moment leant his face on his hand, and remained silent. "Well," he resumed after a pause, "I left Elmsley, ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... struggling bird that fluttered out of his hands when they were ready to close over her. So it had been to-night. He might have kept her, prevented her from taking the car. Yet he had let her go! There came again, utterly to blot this out, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... soothing influence was completed by a contemplation of the serene heavens, wherein were seen the starry host, with the thin bright crescent of the new moon in the midst of them, diffusing a pearly light around her. One blot alone appeared in the otherwise smiling sky, and this was a great, ugly, black cloud lowering over ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... disc, and she pointed to the narrow slit, and her tears came dropping down on it. "Oh, what must Jesus feel!" she said. "Oh, what must Jesus feel!" She is only a common village girl, she has been a Christian only a year; but it touched her to the quick to see that great black blot. ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... For the first time he turns his head and regards her with a steady gaze. "I particularly object to your doing anything of the kind. It would be a disgrace, a blot upon our name forever. None of our family has ever been forced to work for daily bread. And I would have you ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... authors than upon me, in the judgment of every honourable and Christian mind in Upper Canada, of whatever persuasion or party. I am happy to believe that this poor imitation of the system of the "Index Expurgatorius" cannot blot from the memories of an older generation in the Church recollections of labours and struggles of which the expurgators know nothing but the fruits—among which are the civil and religious privileges ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... be instructive to show that the religion of Greece, as embraced by the people, did not prevent or even condemn those social evils that are the greatest blot on enlightened civilization. It did not discourage slavery, the direst evil which ever afflicted humanity; it did not elevate woman to her true position at home or in public; it ridiculed those passive virtues that are declared and commended in the Sermon on the Mount; it did not ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... I have no plotters lurking here. Search and welcome;—but if thou findest aught in this house that smells of treason, the Queen may blot out my escutcheon. I'll dismount the pheon. The arrow-head shall return to its quiver. 'Twas honestly won, and, by our lady's grace, it shall be ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... Winter creeps With iron dews their little lives to blight. Since recordless immensities of Time I stand whose ne'er-sealed eyes the birth behold Of worlds dream-born,—their fiery infant clime, Their teeming life, their epochs gray and cold, Peace kiss and blot their tarnished light and close Their leaden urns with gentleness. I shed The ashes of my silence on their snows,— Then waft them to my kingdoms ...
— The Masque of the Elements • Herman Scheffauer
... and piercing,—"fixed in their everlasting seat,"—ever presenting the same aspect, the same order and disposition, through all the changes of this changing and mutable world. The scene was peculiarly inviting—so calm, so placid, the whole wide and visible hemisphere was without a blot. Nature, like a deceitful mistress, looked so hypocritically serene, that her face might never have been darkened with a cloud or furrowed by a frown. So winning was she withal, that, though the veriest shrew, and all untamed and ungovernable in her habits and conditions, this night she became ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... blot which a thousand ages cannot eradicate from the name of Britian. * * * While on board almost every thought was occupied to invent some plan of escape. The time now came when I must be delivered from the ship or die. I was seized with yellow fever, and should certainly take the small-pox with ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... intentional, untruth.'—Whether traceable to descent, or to the evil influence of Buckingham and the intriguing atmosphere of the Spanish marriage-negotiations, this defect in political honesty is, unquestionably, the one serious blot on the character of Charles I.—Yet, whilst noting it, candid students will regretfully confess that the career of Elizabeth and her counsellors is defaced by shades of bad faith, darker ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... a single man on a point, it is called a "blot." When a blot is left, the man there may be taken up (technically the blot may be "hit") by the adversary if he throws a number which will enable him to place a man on that point. The man hit is placed on the bar, and has to begin again by entering ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... which had compelled Lucretia to send her son away, on whom, as we have shown, she always lavished her maternal care, the unfortunate child's experience will always be a blot on ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... that was grounde of well sayinge, In all his lyfe hyndred no makyng, My maister Chaucer yt founde ful many spot Hym list not pynche nor grutche at every blot.... Sufferynge goodly of his gentilnesse, Full many thynge embraced with rudenesse, And if I shall shortly hym discrive, Was never none to thys daye alive, To reken all bothe of yonge and olde, That worthy was his ynkehorne for ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... his image, thou must nobly dare The thorny crown of sovereignty to share. With eye uplifted, it is thine to view, From thine own centre, Heaven's o'erarching blue; So round thy heart a beaming circle lies No fiend can blot, no hypocrite disguise; From all its orbs one cheering voice is heard, Full to thine ear it bears the Father's word, Now, as in Eden where his first-born trod "Seek thine own welfare, true to man and God!" Think ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... romantic affection which fills circulating libraries. Do not read the trash: it will make you expect too much; it will make real life seem insignificant; it will cause you to be more and more susceptible in the presence of young men; it will blot leaves in your book of life which ought to be all white; it will make truth fictitious; it will lead to temptation,—to death. Says Miss Yonge, "If every modest woman or girl would abstain from such books as poison, and never order or ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... against the whole Word of God, yea, against the very nature of God himself (Deut 29:18,19). Wherefore he adds, 'Then the anger of the Lord, and his jealousy, shall smoke against that man, and all the curses that are written in God's book shall lie upon him, and the Lord shall blot out his name from ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... gasped Judy. The strong colors of the red and green made almost a blot upon Hilda's fairness. Her father, who was accompanying her ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... in the formal alleys, lurked in the formal waters, haunted the formal gardens, overshadowed all the leafy pleasant places. There is no getting very far from history at Versailles no matter how hard one may try to. But we had no intention to let the dead past blot out the new life rekindling—to give its chill to the young spring day and its sadness to the foolish young people out for a holiday—to wither the fresh beauty that makes it good just to be alive, just to have eyes to see and ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... slow to find tenants, for ghosts almost always come with revengeful intent; indeed, the owners of such houses will almost pay men to live in them, such is the dread which they inspire, and the anxiety to blot out ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... had, so far as the union of its members was blessed by the Church, expired, and no legitimate offspring were left. Gilbert's spouse, accordingly, must, if a genuine Oliverres, have come into the world with a considerable blot on her 'scutcheon. ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... space confound them, and blow back Their wild cries down their cavernthroats, and slake With points of blastborne hail their heated eyne! So their wan limbs no more might come between The moon and the moon's reflex in the night; Nor blot with floating shades ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... bound that she shall never go into the Palmer family, if I can prevent it," she said, with a frowning brow. "If I am to be mistress of Mr. Palmer's home, I have no intention of allowing Mona Forester's child to be a blot ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... his words, the black eyes of great photographic cameras awaited his beginning, beyond metal rods and coils glittered dimly, and something whirled about with a droning hum. He walked into the centre of the light, and his shadow drew together black and sharp to a little blot at ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells |
