"Decay" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fairy-land—so far removed from daylight reality; and yet the sound of sleigh-bells, the occasional shouts of coasters, and the laughter of girls added a familiar human quality to it all, and added an ache to the mysterious shuddering delight of it all. It was so evanescent; it would decay so quickly. The wind, the morning ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... sacred Phoebus, endles thankes to thee That doest vouchsafe so much to pittie mee; And, aged father, for your kindnesse showne Imagine not your friendship ill bestowne: The earth shall sooner vanish and decay Than I will ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... government were on every branch of industry. Perverse regulations, uncertain and ruinous taxes, monopolies, encouragements, prohibitions, restrictions, cramped the national energy. Mistress of the Indies, Spain swarmed with beggars. Yet, verging to decay, she had an ominous and appalling strength. Her condition was that of an athletic man penetrated with disease, which had not yet unstrung the thews and sinews formed in his days of vigor. Philip the Second could command the service of warriors ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... which stand on the encomiendas belonging to your royal crown, two-thirds of the cost—one-third as encomendero, and another as king and lord. In those possessed by private citizens you pay one-third as king. As woods in this country decay very easily, they rot within five or six years, and it is necessary to build the said churches over again. Besides, it often happens that when they are finished they are soon burned down. It would be well for the said churches henceforth to be built of stone ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume XI, 1599-1602 • Various
... a magnificent old town Venice is—it is clearly the finest in Italy, although in decay; it stands upon islands in the sea, and in many places is intersected with canals. The Grand Canal is four miles long, lined with palaces on either side. I, however, shall be glad to leave it, for there is no place to me like Oulton, where live two of my dear ones. ...
— Letters to his wife Mary Borrow • George Borrow
... unfavourable criticism side by side. His own head was unbent for his thoughts wandered abroad and whether he looked around the little class of students or out of the window across the desolate gardens of the green an odour assailed him of cheerless cellar-damp and decay. Another head than his, right before him in the first benches, was poised squarely above its bending fellows like the head of a priest appealing without humility to the tabernacle for the humble worshippers about him. Why was it that when ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... surrounded by gardens fragrant with champa and orange-blossom, and gay with many other flowers. One can see that formerly the gardens must have been much more lovely and luxuriant than they now are. The decay and ruin were caused by the great siege in the days of Aurangzib. Extensive repairs have been carried out by Sir Salar Jung. He has restored the gardens, and saved the Tombs from the destruction which had gradually ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... part appropriated benefices in the queen's majesty's possession, are let by leases to farmers with allowance or reservation of very small stipends or entertainments for the vicars or curates, besides the decay of the chancels, and also of the churches universally in ruins, and some wholly down. And out of their said dioceses, the remote parts of Munster, Connaught, and other Irish countries and borders thereof order cannot yet so well be taken with the residue till the countries ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... Peninsula, and at the same time consolidated themselves further in Asia Minor. By the beginning of the seventeenth century their expansion reached its utmost geographical limits, but already the Empire held within it the seeds of its own decay, and by a curious irony the force that should still keep it together was derived not from its own strength, but from the jealousies of the European Powers among themselves, who would willingly have dismembered it, but feared the quarrels that would surely result from the apportionment ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... to say simply how things are, without occupying ourselves with the thousand aspects in which the ignorant see them! To explain the laws under which societies prosper or decay, is virtually to destroy all sophistry at once. When La Place had described all that can, as yet, be known of the movements of the heavenly bodies, he had dispersed, without even naming them, all the astrological dreams of the Egyptians, Greeks, and Hindoos, much more surely than ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... that early man also turned to account the trees he saw growing around him, using them as coffins for his dead. But the rapid decay of this fragile case led to its total disappearance. A few exceptions must, however, be mentioned. In 1840 some dredgers took from the bed of the Saone, at Apremont, from beneath a bed of gravel five feet thick, the trunk of a tree which still contained the bones that ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... ten of these watercourses are dry, and the masonry required in the sudden angles of ravines, has, in most cases, fallen to decay. Even those water-courses still in existence are of the second class; small streams have been conducted from their original course, and these serve for the ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... threshold of history, down through the six or seven centuries during which she was engaged in conquering the nations; through the five hundred years of her undisputed reign as proud mistress of the world; in her sad decay and fall; and to-day in her resurrection, she is only herself—unlike ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... from nothingness to splendour and power: both held the gorgeous East in fee; and both fell lamentably from their high estate. The chief point of difference in this comparison of their careers is obvious; Amalfi collapsed suddenly and utterly, whilst the Queen of the Adriatic has sunk gradually to decay until she has become the interesting monument of a vanished magnificence which we ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... nothing. This, which when writ large maddens and kills, writ small is our meat and drink; it attends each minutest and most impalpable detail of the ceaseless fusion and diffusion in which change appears to us as consisting, and which we recognise as growth and decay, or as life ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... these decay: but not for that decays The yearning, high, rebellious spirit of man That never rested yet since life began From striving with red Nature and ...
— Spirits in Bondage • (AKA Clive Hamilton) C. S. Lewis
... maintained the rule of Junkerthum. On the race theory an exclusive aristocratic government recruited and maintained by artificial selection is the only logical and sensible government, and democracy is bound to be considered as a principle of decay. The Kings of Prussia select their rulers on the same principle on which King Frederick William selected his regiment of six-foot grenadiers from ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... to decline in the sixteenth century, in spite of royal proclamations and occasional revivals. Henry VIII. forbade the use of the cross-bow, lest it should interfere with the practice of the more ancient weapon, and many old writers lament over the decay of this famous pastime of old England, which, as Bishop Latimer stated in one of his sermons, "is a goodly art, a wholesome kind of exercise, ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... and permanently established government. Nor does it seem possible, even in the event of Bombay taking the ascendance as the capital of British India, that the proud City of Palaces shall upon that account dwindle and sink into decay. Stranger things, and even more melancholy destinies, have befallen the mighty Babylons of the earth; but with all its faults of situation and of climate, I should at least, for one, regret the fate that would render the glories of a city so distinct ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... the conceit with which the Dantons and the Marats have filled it, will seize the reins by force. Chaos must follow, and a despotism of brutes and apes, a government of the whole by its lowest parts. It cannot endure, because unless a nation is ruled by its best elements it must wither and decay." ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... Texas. I'm none bound by Yorkshire, though I do think it's the best bit o' land on t' face o' t' world. And I like to stand up for t' weakest side—that's Yorkshire! If I hed known nowt o' t' quarrel, I'd hev gone wi' t' seven hundred instead o' t' two thousand; ay, would I!" Decay had not touched his mind or his heart; his eyes flashed, and he spoke out with all the fervor of his youth: "If I'd nobbut been a young man when a' this happened, I'm varry sure I'd hev pitch'd in and helped 'em. It's natural for Englishmen to hate t' Spaniards and Papists. Why, thou knows, we've ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... with the palm-fruit. Our dates shall we slight, When their juice brings a cure for all sorrow? or care for the plight Of the palm's self whose slow growth produced them? Not so! stem and branch Shall decay, nor be known in their place, while the palm-wine shall stanch Every wound of man's spirit in winter. I pour thee such 160 wine. Leave the flesh to the fate it was fit for! the spirit be thine! By the ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... in America and France; and what are we to say of these? President Cleveland's letter may serve as a picture of the one; a glance at almost any paper will convince us of the weakness of the other. Decay appears to have seized on the organ of popular government in every land; and this just at the moment when we begin to bring to it, as to an oracle of justice, the whole skein of our private affairs to be unravelled, and ask it, like ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and discreet gentleman, 'The Governor and Assistants, London, of the new Plantation of Ulster'—for their interest in the renewable leases? Not less than 100,000 l., or about 40 years' purchase. In the year 1765, when the city of Derry was fast hastening to decay under this London government, the society was induced by an increase of 37 per cent. on the rent, to grant those renewable leases. 'And but for the granting of those leases,' said Mr. Hazlett, 'we should ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... narrow ditch of mud. It has gone the way of the aqueducts, and bridges, and post-houses, the gardens and the llama-flocks of that strange empire. In the mad search for gold, every art of civilization has fallen to decay, save architecture alone; and that survives only in the splendid cathedrals which have risen upon the ruins of the temples ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... friendship of, and trying to understand, whatever lives and suffers as they do. You will find it never fail that where a passionate regard for the animals about us, or even a great tenderness for them, is to be found there is also to be found decay in ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... from which he had hitherto abstained. It was not a discourse to which print could do justice; it flickered from issue to issue. He touched upon Georgina, upon the stiffness of Mrs. Sawbridge's manner, upon the neurotic weakness of Georgina's unmarried state, upon the general decay of feminine virtue in the community, upon the laxity of modern literature, upon the dependent state of Lady Harman, upon the unfairness of their relations which gave her every luxury while he spent his days in arduous toil, upon the shame and annoyance in the eyes of his servants that her unexplained ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... learn to feel a home elsewhere! Oh! happy house, could you know what I suffer in now viewing you from this spot, from whence perhaps I may view you no more! And you, ye well-known trees!—but you will continue the same. No leaf will decay because we are removed, nor any branch become motionless although we can observe you no longer! No; you will continue the same; unconscious of the pleasure or the regret you occasion, and insensible of any change in those who walk under your shade! But ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... universal revolution, and, after previously assuring the Convention the King is guilty, recommends that they may instantly proceed to his trial. But, after all this tremendous eloquence, perhaps Mr. Paine had no malice in his heart: he may only be solicitous to preserve his reputation from decay, and to indulge his self-importance by assisting at the trial of a Monarch whom he may not wish to suffer.—I think, therefore, I am not wrong in asserting, that Vanity ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... of the arts over barbaric greatness; as the timbers employed in the construction consisted chiefly of the masts of the Persian vessels. Notwithstanding the repairs bestowed on that ancient edifice by a king of Cappadocia, it was again fallen to decay. Herod restored its ancient beauty and magnificence. Nor was the liberality of that illustrious citizen confined to the walls of Athens. The most splendid ornaments bestowed on the temple of Neptune ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... Frederick Walker, a genius cut off before his meridian, and resting now amid his kindred in a lowly grave, over which the Thames waters surge every spring, leaving the grave all the rest of the year the sadder for its cold soddenness and for the humid mildew and decay eating already into the headstone, as yet but twelve years old. In the church itself is Thorneycroft's mural tablet to the dead artist, a portrait head of him who was born almost within the old church's shadow, and whose pencil dealt always so lovingly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... at its best, their system of government had in it—like all human invention—original sin; an unnatural and unrighteous element, which was certain, sooner or later, to produce decay and ruin. The old Nobility of Europe was not a mere aristocracy. It was a caste: a race not intermarrying with the races below it. It was not a mere aristocracy. For that, for the supremacy of the best men, all societies strive, or profess ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... reign of Silence and of Death.... The temples enshrine a most pure and salutary principle of art, that which connects grandeur of effect with simplicity of detail; and, retaining their beauty and their dignity in their decay, they represent the great man when fallen, as types of that almost highest of human qualities—silent yet ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... visiting. In the eleventh century it was the center of the Eden of India, broad, fertile plains, magnificent forests of sweet-scented trees, abounding in population and prosperity. It has passed through two long periods of greatness, two of decay and one of revival. Under the rule of Sidh Rajah, "the Magnificent," one of the noblest and greatest of the Moguls, it reached the height of its wealth and power at the beginning of the fifteenth century. He erected ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... some of the ancient churches of Rome; it has been revived in many Protestant places of worship. It symbolized principally an official distinction; but with the theocratizing of the empire in the East and its decay in the West the accentuation of the mystic powers of the clergy led to a more complete separation from the laity, a tendency which left its mark on the arrangements of the churches. In the East the cancelli, under the influence possibly of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... of interest. A larger number of interments exhibit the fact that the bodies were placed there before the decay of the flesh, and in many instances collections of bones are buried. Sometimes these bones are placed in some order about the crania, and sometimes in irregular piles, as if the collection of bones had been emptied from a sack. With men, pipes, stone hammers, ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... palace of the great religious headman of Yorubaland, he says: "The edifice rests upon foundations not of sun dried, but of fine burnt brick." Taken as a whole, the present-day structure conveys "the impression of grandeur in decay." "Such," he says, "is a sketch of the city whose effect is heightened by the noble ruins of the palace of this Holiness and the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... was to transfer our booty to the shore, where we spread them out on a large tarpaulin on the sand to die. The method pursued by the regular pearl-fishers, I believe, is to allow the fish to remain until they are in an advanced stage of decay, when the pearls are sought for amongst the putrid mass. I felt no inclination, however, for such a task, and, moreover, did not care to expend so much time as this process involved. I conjectured that, the fish once dead, they might be opened with comparatively little difficulty; and I thought ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... had been a conglomerate mass, bark-roofed, slab-sided, falling to decay; added to as each successive owner had thought fit, with a final mixture of old and new that was neither convenient nor beautiful. Mr. Linton had apologised to his horses during his first week of occupancy and, in the ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... of Saul and David did not long remain at its height. Decay set in even at the separation, and when once the Assyrians were heard at the door, it advanced with steps not to be arrested. But the memory of the period of glory and power was all the greener, and the hope arose of its return. ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... of all other created beings; and it is supposed they are, to a great extent, exempted from the diseases to which the flesh of other animals is heir. In place of suffering from the rigidity of age, which is the cause of the natural decay of those that "live and move and have their being" on the land, their bodies continue to grow with each succeeding supply of food, and the conduits of life to perform their functions unimpaired. The age of fishes has not been properly ascertained, although ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... vegetable mud above referred to; but the greater part are argillo-arenaceous in composition, with little vegetable matter, and bleached by the drainage from them of water containing the products of vegetable decay. They are, in short, loamy or clay soils, and must have been sufficiently above water to admit of drainage. The absence of sulphurets, and the occurrence of carbonate of iron in connection with them, prove that, when they existed as soils, rain-water, ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... and subsidies for the war against England, a state of vassalage which was made harder by Napoleon. The results are well known. After being forced by him to cede Trinidad to us at the Peace of Amiens, she sacrificed her navy at Trafalgar, saw her colonies and commerce decay and her finances shrivel for lack of the golden streams formerly poured in ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... France." For this fellow, who knows nothing of disordered liver or high-strung nerves, goes regularly to a great nerve specialist with the periodical belief that his nervous system is beginning to decay. ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... things change and glide, Corrupt and crumble, suffer wreck and decay, But, obstinate dark Integrities, you abide, And obey but them who obey. All things else are dyed In the colours of man's desire: But you no bribe nor prayer Avails to soften or sway. Nothing of me you share, Yet I cannot think you away. And if I ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... escaped as often as we could, and rode and drove and made secret visits to the city and saw the plays at matinees. There's nothing old about Mother. I suppose that's why she married again. But now that I'm left alone in this house of decay, where everybody and everything belongs to the past, I'm frightened of being so young, and catch looks that make me feel that I ought to be ashamed of myself. It's so long since I quarreled with a girl or flirted with a boy that I can't remember it. I'm forgetting ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... God's creatures, just as you live and others have lived before you. And there are other worlds whose life-cycle has been run; where intelligent life has ceased: where world-disintegration has set in. For this is in accordance with the universal law of Growth and Decay—a law that exempts neither the one-celled amoeba, nor the complex Solar system ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... their muddy feet on the outer steps, advanced into the vestibule. The wide corridor, flagged with black-and-white pavement, presented a cheerless aspect of bare walls discolored by damp, and adorned alternately by stags' heads and family portraits in a crumbling state of decay. The floor was thus divided: on the right, the dining-room and the kitchen; on the left, drawing-room and a billiard-hall. A stone staircase, built in one of the turrets, led to the upper floors. Only one of these rooms, the kitchen, which the justice and his bailiff entered, was occupied by the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... man frowned. His face was a collection of lines. When he frowned, all the lines pointed to hell, the grave, decay and damnation. ...
— The Last Place on Earth • James Judson Harmon
... gains that last, To bless the soul for aye, When passing things are past, And things of earth decay? Are there no joys that linger long In sweetness, like a ...
— Hymns from the East - Being Centos and Suggestions from the Office Books of the - Holy Eastern Church • John Brownlie
... describ'd A hot friend cooling: ever note, Lucilius, When love begins to sicken and decay, 20 It useth an enforced ceremony. There are no tricks in plain and simple faith: But hollow men, like horses hot at hand, Make gallant show and promise of their mettle; But when they should endure the bloody spur, 25 They fall their crests, and, like deceitful jades, Sink in ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... hypothetical history in the subjunctive mood, it is hardly necessary for present purposes to discuss the internal changes which, had the missions been left to themselves, might in the long run have brought about their decay. For as a matter of fact the missions were not left to themselves. The closing chapter of their history, to which we have now to turn, is mainly concerned, not with their spiritual management, or ...
— The Famous Missions of California • William Henry Hudson
... condition of thorough responsibility to the central judiciary. Their privileges were not destroyed but were combined with the discharge of corresponding duties. Whatever their shortcomings, they were preserved from the decay which is the inevitable consequence of a ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... age the Attention is the first faculty to show signs of decay. Some authorities have held that the Memory was the first faculty to be affected by the approach of old age, but this is incorrect, for it is a matter of common experience that the aged manifest a wonderfully clear memory of events occurring in the ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... the House of Commons for his zeal in behalf of the South-Sea company, and who was shrewdly suspected to have been a considerable gainer by knowing the right time to sell out, was very magniloquent on this occasion. He said that he had seen the rise and fall, the decay and resurrection of many communities of this nature, but that, in his opinion, none had ever performed such wonderful things in so short a time as the South-Sea company. They had done more than the crown, the pulpit, or the bench could do. They had reconciled all parties in ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... general defection of Italy, to return into the friendship of the Romans, since now the Roman power too, which had almost come to ruin by the disaster at Cannae. was daily improving and increasing, while the strength of Hannibal was sinking into decay, and was almost reduced to nothing. He had told them that the Romans would be disposed to accept an atonement for their former offence; that there never was any state more easy to be entreated, or more ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... between Austria and Hungary and Hungary and Croatia opened in 1868 a period which ended in 1905—it was a period, on the one hand of the greatest decay and decomposition in the political life of the Jugo-Slavs, and, on the other, of the greatest literary and intellectual unity as shaped by Bishop Strossmayer and Peter II and Nicholas ...
— The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement • Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup Harper,
... LIFE.—Strive to attain unto a higher and better life. Beware of all excesses, of whatever nature, and guard your personal purity with sacred determination. Let every aspiration be upward, and be strong in every good resolution. Seek the light, for in light there is life, while in darkness there is decay and ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... debts swallowed up everything. It was a wretched stormy day when the pictures were sold, and Mr. Graves secured, at very moderate prices, five original portraits. All the paintings had suffered more or less decay, and some of them, with their frames, had fallen to the floor. One of the best preserved pictures inherited by the late Marquis was a portrait of Pope, painted from life by Richardson for the Earl of Burlington, ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... the power and commercial importance of Timbuctoo would naturally be accompanied by a corresponding decay of the city itself; and we cannot suppose that Adams' description of its external appearance will be rejected, on account of its improbability, by those, who recollect that Leo describes the habitations of the natives, in his time, almost in the very words of the narrative now [*], ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... visited that neighbouring country, which still presents to the eye, even of a passing stranger, the signs of a great dissolution and renovation of society? Have they never walked by those stately mansions, now sinking into decay, and portioned out into lodging rooms, which line the silent streets of the Faubourg St Germain? Have they never seen the ruins of those castles whose terraces and gardens overhang the Loire? Have they never heard that from those magnificent hotels, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... almost complete ignorance of natural law—Why? Centuries of centuries of monstrous misconceptions of human nature—Why? Measureless creations, wastings and destructions of wealth—Why? Endless rolling cycles of enterprise, stagnation, and decay—Why? Interminable alterations of peace and war, enslavements and emancipations—Why? Age after age of world-wide worship of man-made gods, silly, savage, enthroned by myth and magic, celebrated and supported ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... the people again, in the enjoyment of peace and in the security of their life and possessions; for these cannot be safeguarded unless contribution be made to the state. I know of several princes who have lost their kingdoms and their subjects by letting their strength decay through fear of taxing them; and subjects have before now fallen into servitude to their enemies, through wishing too much liberty under their natural sovereign. The proportion between the burden and the strength of those who have to support it ought to be even religiously observed; a prince cannot ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... people above and below the ground also that of the padrone, to let no profit slip. He had not taken the trouble to make many or recent repairs. The buildings had made a fair start; they promised well. But the promise had not been kept. In their premature decay they were distinctly as bad as the worst. I had the curiosity to seek out the agent, the middleman, and ask him why they were so. He shrugged his shoulders. With such tenants nothing could be done, he said. I have always held that Italians ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... timber had been exposed to the weather and subjected to heavy train service from the time it was treated until it was tested. The annual rainfall at New Orleans is about 60 in., and the humidity of the air is high. In spite of these conditions, there was no appearance of decay on any of the specimens tested. The specifications under which the timber was treated ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 - Tests of Creosoted Timber, Paper No. 1168 • W. B. Gregory
... of Caesar, the ivory house of Ahab, the gorgeous home of Pilate, have perished, but the loving tenderness of Ruth, the sweet ministry of Mary, and the holy affection of S. John, stand as monuments before God which shall never perish or decay. Never mind, my brothers, what sort of tomb they give us, never mind what epitaph they write upon it, they cannot know the truth. But let us try so to live near to Christ that our life may be a monument of His love and pardoning grace, and of our poor endeavour to do right. If we want to make ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... decay; and flowers do fleet; they fly all o'er the skies; Their bloom wanes; their smell dies; but who is there with them to sympathise? While vagrant gossamer soft doth on fluttering spring-bowers bind its coils, And drooping ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... it is that Harald Harfager's kingdom has gone to decay, none of his race being supreme king over Norway. But the people here in the country have experienced many things. When King Hakon, Athelstan's foster-son, was king, all were content; but when Gunhild's sons ruled over the country, all were so weary of their tyranny and injustice ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... country of ours but who would go hungry, yea, he and his children would go bare-footed, but he would take some portion of the grain that he had and throw it broadcast over his field, knowing that it would lie there and decay, but trusting in the Lord that it would come back to him after many days. Why cannot we use the same wisdom in ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 1, January, 1896 • Various
... up fresh in my mind. I was yet thinking of Willy Hammond's dreadful death, and of his broken-hearted mother, whose life went out with his, when the stage rolled by their old homestead. Oh, what a change was here! Neglect, decay, and dilapidation were visible, let the eye fall where it would. The fences were down, here and there; the hedges, once so green and nicely trimmed, had grown rankly in some places, but were stunted ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... in love so much less than they used to do is largely due to the decay of the imaginative faculty. As for women, although they are in the main as anxious to marry as ever, although it is universally acknowledged that the modern young woman does cultivate the modern young man unduly, their reasons for doing so are less and less concerned with the time-honoured ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... of great sanctity, had dominion over all creatures. Fire, air, water, and earth were also subject to him. He drove away wicked spirits; he gave sight to the blind, speech to the dumb, health to those in decay, and life to the dead. The elements could not affect him. He walked upon fire, held his hands in a burning hot oven without sustaining injury; and he and a companion passed over the sea upon his cloak spread on ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... is seen in his work, as described generally in verse 16. Only such a man can effect such a change, in a time of religious decay, as to turn many to God. It needs a strong arm to check the downward movement and to reverse it. No one who is himself entangled in sense, and but partially filled with God's Spirit, will wield great influence for good. It takes a Hercules to stop the chariot racing ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... reached "the hall of his fathers,"—for it was such, although he had not for years resided in it. It presented the wreck of a fine old mansion, situated within a crescent of stately beeches, whose moss-covered and ragged trunks gave symptoms of decay and neglect. The lawn had been once beautiful, and the demesne a noble one; but that which blights the industry of the tenant—the curse of absenteeism—had also left the marks of ruin stamped upon every object around him. The lawn was ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... monopolize the attention by their lofty passions, their sufferings, and their fate. We look on at a tremendous conflict waged between will and circumstance, between right and wrong, or we watch the gradual decay of goodness by the action of a poisonous thought introduced into the mind. The plot has undergone a similar intensification. With resistless evolution it bears the chief characters along to the fatal hour of decision or action, then drags them down the ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... finding of Him whom to seek is joyous effort, whom to find is an Elysium of rest. You will walk here not parted from Him, but with your thoughts and your love, which are your truest self, going up where He is, until you drop 'the muddy vesture of decay' which unfits you whilst you wear it for the presence-chamber of the King, and so you will enter in and be 'for ever ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... shortly. As her face was still inquiring, he added: "Brain trouble. In his case a kind of decay of the tissue; perhaps inherited, certainly hastened by his habits, probably precipitated ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... here. Sit down. Sit down immediately. Hesitation of any kind is a sign of mental decay in the young, of physical weakness in the old. [Turns to Jack.] Apprised, sir, of my daughter's sudden flight by her trusty maid, whose confidence I purchased by means of a small coin, I followed her at once by a luggage train. Her unhappy father is, I am glad to say, ...
— The Importance of Being Earnest - A Trivial Comedy for Serious People • Oscar Wilde
... one Spring where veinlet tendrils lace Rose over rose to make this flower, thy face? Look round thee now, dear dupe of sweet hey-day! Of what once blooming joy canst thou find trace Save in the bosom of a cold decay? What violet of Summer's yester sway Usurps these clouds to throne her slender moon? Look on the wrinkling year, the shrunken way, The wintry bier of all that gaudy shone, And gather love ere loveliness wear pall, If thou, when all is gone, ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... men were pushing to the wall the descendants of the (p. 121) families that had flourished before the Revolution, and had sought after it to keep up distinctions and exclusiveness which the very success of the struggle in which they had been concerned doomed to an early decay. This was especially noticeable in New York. In such a city social rank must tend, in the long run, to wait upon wealth. The result may be delayed, it cannot be averted. Wealth, too, in most cases, will find its way to the hands of those carrying on great commercial undertakings. That this class ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... historians dwelt particularly upon his visit to the tent of the English earl. His Majesty consoled him for the loss of his teeth by the consideration that he might otherwise have lost them by natural decay, whereas the lack of them would now be esteemed a beauty rather than a defect, serving as a trophy of the glorious cause in which he had ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... middy on board, so delicate and fragile, that the sea was clearly no fit profession for him; but he or his friends thought otherwise; and as he had a spirit for which his frame was no match, he soon gave token of decay. This boy was a great favorite with everybody; the sailors smiled whenever he passed, as they would have done to a child; the officers patted him, and coddled him up with all sorts of good things; and his messmates, in a style which did not altogether please him, but which ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... which Peter occupied while he was there. It is a small wooden building, leaning and bent with age and decrepitude and darkened by exposure and time. Within the last half century, however, in order to save so curious a relic from farther decay, the proprietors of the place have constructed around and over it an outer building of brick, which incloses the hut itself like a case. The sides of the outer building are formed of large, open arches, which allow the hut within to be seen. The ground on which the hut stands ...
— Peter the Great • Jacob Abbott
... the Christian religion; that what God has once pronounced true can never become a lie; that what was once really alive may change, but can never die; that Christianity is a fact, great, real, and permanent, as birth or death; and that its seeming decay is only the symptom that it is putting off the old skin, and about to ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... figures grew smaller and smaller in the distance. For some space they walked in silence; then the scholar paused, and, pointing to a low, rambling house that once had been a hunter's lodge and now had fallen into decay, exclaimed: ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... be the legacy to our children," was the reply, in a grave and almost contrite tone. "The works of man are rapid only when they are meant for decay. The American savage builds his wigwam in a week, to last for a year. The Parthenon took half an age and the treasures of a people, to last ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... sonnet is a tour-de-force of symbolism, under which are veiled the symptoms of senile decay followed by death. It is very likely that some of the symbols may be lost; but it is not difficult to see, without straining, a possible interpretation for each; and some of them have passed into traditional use. The poetic beauty ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... to the world chiefly by two great works. His 'Democracy in America' was the production of his early manhood. In New England he saw democracy at its best and brightest; saw nothing of that deterioration which the decay of the old Puritan severity, the infusion of a strong foreign element, the corruption and the passions of the Civil War, have confessedly caused. The colonial traditions and principles were still in modified force; simple habits of ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... Also called Govindgarh. Old names are Vikramagarh and Bhatrinda. Historically a place of great interest (page 167). Fell into decay in later Muhammadan times. Is now a great railway junction and a nourishing grain mart. The large fort is a conspicuous object for many miles ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... Early English roofs were high and acutely pointed. The original roofs of most of our old churches, from their exposure to the weather, have long since fallen to decay, and been replaced by others of a more obtuse shape; but in general the height and angular form of the original roof may be ascertained by the weather moulding still remaining on the side of the tower or steeple. The interior vaulting of stone roofs was composed of fewer parts and ribs, ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... second of those eternal days he shut himself in the library. The unfilled lamp had gone out, leaving a trail of smoke in the air. The sprigs of mignonette and rosemary, with which the room was sprinkled every day, were unrenewed, and scented the gloom with close odours of decay. A costly manuscript of Theocritus was tumbled in disorder on the floor. Hermas sank into a chair like a man in whom the very spring of being is broken. Through the darkness some one drew near. He did not even lift his head. A hand touched him; a soft arm was laid over ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... easily add to the preceding list, hundreds. The reader will remark that all the slaves, whose ages are given, are young—not one has arrived at middle age; consequently it can hardly be supposed that they have lost their teeth either from age or decay. The probability that their teeth were taken out by force, is increased by the fact of their being front teeth in almost every case, and from the fact that the loss of no other is mentioned in the advertisements. ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... as the former succumbed he was carried away from his own people, and his place knew him no more. But had all ended for him with the moment in which he had ceased to breathe? As to the body, no one was ignorant of its natural fate. It quickly fell to decay, and a few years sufficed to reduce it to a skeleton. And as for the skeleton, in the lapse of centuries that too was disintegrated and became a mere train of dust, to be blown away by the first breath of wind. The soul might have a longer career and fuller fortunes, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... Pennsylvania for four hundred and forty miles and with fifty-six pound iron west of there. As has been mentioned before, the first section was laid with cottonwood ties of local growth, treated by the burnettizing process, which was erroneously supposed would prevent decay. West of there hard wood ties from the East were used, some of them coming from far away Pennsylvania, and costing the Company two dollars and fifty cents laid down in Omaha. For the mountain section, ties of local growth were largely and ...
— The Story of the First Trans-Continental Railroad - Its Projectors, Construction and History • W. F. Bailey
... Constantinople. That empire lasted, from the time of Arcadius to that of Constantine IX and Mohammed the Conqueror, "one thousand and fifty-eight years," says Gibbon, "in a state of premature and perpetual decay."—A statement which, taken as an example of Gibbonese, is altogether delightful; but for the true purposes of history it may need a little modification. The position of this Byzantine Empire was ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... found the town intolerable, and, crossing by the ferry, walked over to Netley Abbey, and lay down idly in the shade of the old grey walls. Not a breath of wind stirred the great masses of ivy which were wreathed about the ruined church, and the place looked so lovely in its decay, that we felt disposed to judge the dissolute monks very leniently for having behaved so badly that their church and monastery had to be opened to the four winds of heaven. After all, when is a church so beautiful ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... building that, in the rosy days of the mining game, had been a roadhouse with its roulette wheels, its bar, its dining tables and its champagne, but which now, barely furnished in only a few of its rooms, inhabited by mountain rats and fluttering bats and general decay for the most part, formed the ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... refuge. In the full tide of unbelief the church should be his sanctuary, as it had been in former days to those great criminals of the Middle Ages, who, from the height of the cloister mocked at justice, detained at the doors like the beggars. Here should be consummated in silence and calm the slow decay of his body, here he would die with the serene satisfaction of having died to the world long before. At last he realised his hope of ending his days in a corner of the sleepy Spanish Cathedral, the only hope ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... is 'My sour friend.' Yet, after all, this is nothing, in fact, but what is perfectly natural; and, in this respect, marriage only follows the eternal law of nature in all earthly existence. Every form of life carries in itself decay and dissolution—a poisonous snake-king[3] gnaws even at the root ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... hardly a phase of human thought, of human action, which she has not touched, and she has never touched but to adorn. If she has faded, she has revealed a new power and beauty and fragrance at each stage in her decay. Nothing in her life has proved so becoming as her leaving it. The song of ingenuity, of triumph, of defence, which has run along the course of her decline, softens at its close into a swan-song of peace and gentleness and ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... Growth of the Anti-Military Spirit. The decay of the warlike spirit by the breeding out of fighting stocks has in recent years been reinforced by a more acute influence of which in the near future we shall certainly hear more. This is the spirit of anti-militarism. This spirit is an inevitable result of the decay ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... that the first blow should be struck at Fort Stanwix, on the head-waters of the Mohawk. This was an old English stronghold that had fallen into decay, but was being repaired and defended in the interest of the revolting colonies by Colonel Peter Gansevoort. It lay on the traffic-road to Oneida Lake, and was considered a strong point of vantage. Its garrison was made up of about seven hundred and fifty colonials. They had ...
— The War Chief of the Six Nations - A Chronicle of Joseph Brant - Volume 16 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • Louis Aubrey Wood
... some such poetic fancy, and would certainly have looked lovingly on the alluring colors and forms of decay. But Miss Greeby was no artist, and prided herself upon being an aggressively matter-of-fact young woman. With her big boots slapping the ground and her big hands thrust into the pockets of her mannish jacket, she bent her head in a meditative ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... at Camille. He had never yet seen the body of a drowned person presenting such a dreadful aspect. The corpse, moreover, looked pinched. It had a thin, poor appearance. It had shrunk up in its decay, and the heap it formed was quite small. Anyone might have guessed that it belonged to a clerk at 1,200 francs a year, who was stupid and sickly, and who had been brought up by his mother on infusions. This miserable frame, ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... on the Ketchum place, just below the town. Some of the older citizens of Fredericton remember old head boards placed at the graves, since fallen into decay. Many names that were painted or carved on them served to show the Dutch ancestry of the men of Van Buskirk's battalion. The names were such as Van Horn, Vanderbeck, Ackermann, Burkstaff, Ridner, Handorff, Van Norden, Blaicker, ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... men say that the worst symptom of our system is the gradual decay of justice among us. The judges have lost most of their influence, and the jurors are getting to be law-makers, as ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... where a bit of mortality, because it has a genealogical tree and a coat of arms, rears up like an Arabian horse, and prances in the street, and says in the room, 'People out of the street have been here,' when a commoner has been—that is nobility in decay, and become a mere mask—a mask of the kind that Thespis created; and people are glad when such an one is ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... wasted away by centuries of fire and weather. One of the most interesting fire-actions on the trunk is the boring of those great tunnel-like hollows through which horsemen may gallop. All of these famous hollows are burned out of the solid wood, for no Sequoia is ever hollowed by decay. When the tree falls, the brash trunk is often broken straight across into sections as if sawed; into these joints the fire creeps, and, on account of the great size of the broken ends, burns for weeks or even months without being much influenced by the weather. After the great glowing ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... stream of water, over which, in times long gone, a sawmill had been erected; but owing to the inefficiency of its former owner, or something else, the mill had fallen into disuse, and gradually gone to decay. The water of the brook, relieved from the necessity of turning the spluttering wheel, now went gayly dancing down, down, into the depths of the dim old woods, and far away, I never knew exactly where; but having heard rumors of a jumping-off place, I had a vague impression that at that spot ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes
... le roi. The King is dead— So move our lives from day to day. The triumph of to-morrow's lord Meets for our former chief's decay. ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... from Gledsmuir just as a stormy autumn twilight was setting in over the bare fields. A wild back-end had followed on the tracks of a marvellous summer. Though it was still October the leaves lay heaped beneath the hedgerows, the bracken had yellowed to a dismal hue of decay, and the heather had turned from the purple of its flower to the grey-blue of its passing. Rain had fallen, and the long road-side pools were fired by the westering sun. Glenavelin looked crooked and fantastic in the ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... woodpecker in the United States is worth twenty dollars in cash. Each nuthatch, creeper and chickadee is worth from five to ten dollars, according to local circumstances. You might just as well cut down four twenty-inch trees and let them lie and decay, as to permit one woodpecker to be killed and eaten by an Italian in the North, or a negro in the South. The downy woodpecker is the relentless enemy of the codling moth, an insect that annually inflicts upon ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... same confidence. The quantity in any district is probably small: the amount is great in the aggregate, but very widely diffused. Gold appears to be present in small amounts in almost all the volcanic rocks, so that as those rocks decay and new mineral substances are formed out of the decomposed products, the gold which they contained is often preserved and concentrated in thin and narrow veins of zeolitic minerals, which extend over the surface of these volcanic rocks. To what extent ...
— A Winter Tour in South Africa • Frederick Young
... the human body is composed of a due proportion of the elements suited to the place of its first formation; that these elements, differently proportioned, produce all the changes of health, sickness, growth and decay; and may likewise produce any other changes which occasion the diversity of men; that these elemental proportions are varied, not more by climate than temperature and other local circumstances; that the mind is likewise in a state of change, and will take its physical character from ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... this head, the old dates turn up again; the old calendars; the old names; the old edicts, which long since had sunk to the level of the antiquarian's learning; even the old bailiffs, who had long seemed mouldering with decay. The nation takes on the appearance of that crazy Englishman in Bedlam, who imagines he is living in the days of the Pharaohs, and daily laments the hard work that he must do in the Ethiopian mines as gold digger, immured in a subterranean prison, with ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... and, looking right and left, beheld Dirt and decay, the lowering tenements That leaned toward each other; broken panes Bulging with rags, and grim with old neglect; And reeking hills of formless refuse, heaped To fade and fester in a stagnant air. But he thought nothing of it: he had ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... from the missiles of mischievous persons, mostly, it is to be feared, of the class juvenis, and the garden in front overgrown with grass and weeds, luxuriating in the rankest of vegetation, and completing the picture of desolation and decay. ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... Froude's case, however, we cannot set down much of this incompleteness to the score of illness. The strength of his religious impressions, the boldness and clearness of his views, his long habits of self-denial, and his unconquerable energy of mind, triumphed over weakness and decay, till men with all their health and strength about them might gaze upon his attenuated form, struck with a certain awe of wonderment at the brightness of his wit, the intenseness of his mental vision, and the iron strength ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... clouding of the water, which, as Mr. Gosse had forewarned me, signified disaster of some sort, and, searching for the cause, I finally discovered the body of the little sepiola, which had died without being missed, and was contaminating with his decay the purity of the aquarium. The water must be changed at once. I sent out the servant for a fresh bucketful from the sea, while I poured the polluted liquid from ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... time seems to have been arrested amidst the decay of the place, since the bell of the church clock rusted from its bearings and the index of the old sun-dial fell a prey to accumulated canker. The spring brings a few green buds and feeble leaves upon the grimy trees; the ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... exceeding pain. She never caught again the goblin cry: "Come buy, come buy";— She never spied the goblin men Hawking their fruits along the glen: But when the noon waxed bright Her hair grew thin and gray; She dwindled, as the fair full moon doth turn To swift decay, and ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... The decay of the imperial house, the encroachments of the foreigner, and the opposition of the native Chinese to the rule of the Manchus, awoke the Empress Dowager to a realization of the fact that a stronger hand than that of her husband must be at the helm if the dynasty of her people ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... of the ancient chapel are less attractive. It stands, it may be, in some poverty-stricken corner or court of a town or city. Whatever picturesqueness it may have had once has long since vanished. Unlovely decay, an air of desolation, symptoms of neglect, present a mournful sight, and one wonders how much longer the poor relic will remain. Many places of the kind have already been swept away; others have been renovated, enlarged, and kept ...
— Unitarianism • W.G. Tarrant
... expiring, giving place to returning darkness. It is rather a spark of fervent heat, as well as radiant light, with power to enkindle the common mass of human mind; so that when it glimmers in its own decay, and finally goes out in death, no night follows, but it leaves the world all light, all on fire, from the potent contact of its own spirit. Bacon died; but the human understanding roused by the touch of his ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... heavy ploughshare and the yellow grain; And rising ports along the busy shore Protect the vessel from old Ocean's roar— All, all must perish. But, surviving last, The love of letters half preserves the past: True,—some decay, yet not a few survive, Though those shall sink which now appear to thrive, As custom arbitrates, whose shifting sway Our life and language must ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... wonder—wonder at a phenomenon rare in humanity, and suggestive of romantic reserves of power which seal not only our allegiance to them, but that of posterity. The mystery which resides in all greatness, in all charm, is not violated by the cynical explanations of decay. They remain fortunate as those whom the gods loved, wearing the ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... of belief was prevalent among some persons, that the body of a suicide would not decay until the time arrived when, in the ordinary course of nature, he would have died. This was founded upon another belief, that there is a day of death appointed for every man, which no one can pass; but as man is possessed of a free will, he may, by his own wicked determination, ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... sculptures which, surviving the destruction of the people who raised them, the wanton rage of barbarous enemies, and the inroads of the elements for near two thousand years, sill remain, in their decay, the wonder and admiration of the world, the models of modern sculptors, and the greatest treasure of art a nation ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... to the future with hope, or back to the past with regret. Some glory in the nineteenth century as one of rapid progress for good; as the commencement of a new era for humanity; as the inauguration of a Reformation as grand as that of the sixteenth century. Others bewail it as an age of rapid decay; in which the old landmarks are being removed, the old paths lost; in which we are rushing headlong into scepticism and atheism; in which the world and the Church are both in danger; and the last day is ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... creamy white in color and free from the black specks or blemishes so common to this vegetable should be selected for cooking. The only care that cauliflower requires before cooking is to keep it in a cool place, for it does not wilt nor decay quickly. ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 2 - Volume 2: Milk, Butter and Cheese; Eggs; Vegetables • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... on the stalk, rub the warts with the wheat's beard or bristles at the end of the ear, take these to four crosses or roads that cross each other, bury the straw, and the warts will decay with ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... walls were entirely of the local red sandstone, very similar in quality and appearance to that of which Chester Cathedral was built, and the extent of its decay, especially on the tower, was as grievous. Hardly a piece of external moulding or carving preserved its original profile or form, and some of the tower buttresses had lost so large a proportion of their substance ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Churches of Coventry - A Short History of the City and Its Medieval Remains • Frederic W. Woodhouse
... a long time in a state of ruin, but it has now been repaired and is used as a mission room. All the other old churches of Wareham have been swept away by fire or decay and with one or two exceptions their very ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... or Italy, and on those fairy Aladdin palaces, the creatures of Oriental gorgeousness and imagination, with which Spain alone can enchant the dull European; here let the man of feeling dwell on the poetry of her envy-disarming decay, fallen from her high estate, the dignity of a dethroned monarch, borne with unrepining self-respect, the last consolation of the innately noble, which no adversity can take away; here let the lover ...
— A Supplementary Chapter to the Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... watermen in charge of their wherry were directed to row up stream towards the creek on the northern side, where the old fortress, embowered in trees, nestled under the shelter of the Portsdown hills, a monolith of past grandeur and present decay! ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... a song which in the present mirthful state of the company ought to have been a humorous song, or a patriotic song, or a good, loud, inspiriting song, or anything, in short, but what it was—a slow, dull, sentimental song, about wasting gradually away in a sort of melancholy decay, on account of disappointed love, or some such trash, which was a false sentiment in itself, and certainly did not derive any additional tinge of truthfulness from a thin, weak voice, that was afflicted with chronic ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... himself in the library. The unfilled lamp had gone out, leaving a trail of smoke in the air. The sprigs of mignonette and rosemary, with which the room was sprinkled every day, were unrenewed, and scented the gloom with a close odor of decay. A costly manuscript of Theocritus was tumbled in disorder on the floor. Hermas sank into a chair like a man in whom the very spring of being is broken. Through the darkness some one drew near. He did not even lift his head. A hand touched him; a soft arm was laid ...
— The Lost Word - A Christmas Legend of Long Ago • Henry Van Dyke
... had been telling the story of the adventure with the gray whale, and the captain had been bemoaning the decay of the whaling industry, the work of bringing the dead whale to the surface had been under way. Letting out more slack on the rope attached to the harpoon a bight of it was passed through a sheave-block at the ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... when the profound principles underlying the most ancient doctrines had been lost or forgotten, and when through the decay of philosophy, and through the stimulation of the sensual in human nature, mankind had lost the power to reason abstractly, Destruction, which was symbolized by darkness or the absence of the sun's rays, finally became the ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... without giving them any others in their place. It does not appear to be the aim of the missionaries to improve the Indians by making citizens of them. Hence, in most cases, anarchy and confusion are the results. Nothing has more effectually contributed to the decay of several tribes than the course pursued by their missionaries. Let us look back to the first of them for proofs. From the days of Elliott, to the year 1834, have they made one citizen? The latter date marks the first instance ...
— Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts - Relative to the Marshpee Tribe: or, The Pretended Riot Explained • William Apes
... spares individuals, but uses them as means for the accomplishment of her ends. It is, therefore, for us to submit to Destiny, cultivating, as the things necessary to virtue, knowledge, temperance, fortitude, justice. We must remember that every thing around us is in mutation; decay follows reproduction, and reproduction decay, and that it is useless to repine at death in a world where every thing is dying. As a cataract shows from year to year an invariable shape, though the water composing ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... the world's governance, in the storms, earthquakes, pestilences, sufferings of all kinds—signs of failure, sickness, and decay, and death, signs of the victory of evil and the failure of good—we can only believe in God, and that all will issue in righteous ends. And our belief proceeds, as just stated, on two lines: one being our spiritual capacity for knowing that GOD IS, and ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... I should have the same cluster served me every morning that I might say to mine enemies, with truth, that I have Cretan grapes for breakfast daily. They will keep," he added presently, "for it is tradition that stores laid up for siege never decay." ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... or rent a coffin, the body is wrapped in a coarse mat, slung on a pole, and carried to the outer door of the church, to have a little water sprinkled thereon or service said over it. If the families are unable to rent a spot of earth in the cemetery, their dead are dumped into a pile and left to decay and bleach upon the surface. In contrast with this brutal neglect of the poor, is the lavish expenditure of the rich. The daughter of one of the wealthy residents having died, the body was placed ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... shapes, to multiply its liberalities to mankind. Nothing exhausts the earth; the more we tear her bowels the more she is liberal. After so many ages, during which she has produced everything, she is not yet worn out. She feels no decay from old age, and her entrails still contain the same treasures. A thousand generations have passed away, and returned into her bosom. Everything grows old, she alone excepted: for she grows young again every year in the spring. She is never wanting to men; but foolish men are wanting to themselves ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... life was one dose of nut oil. He had twenty-six children by different women. His appetite was always good, and a few days previous to his death, he walked a distance of four miles. His dissolution was gradual, and unattended by pain or sickness: It seemed indeed, to be the mere decay of nature. ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... had seen—and, yet, he was conscious of feeling a vague and awful doubt which shook him to the soul. The questions which had tortured the mind of Agnes, were now his questions too. He asked himself, 'In whose likeness might I have recognised it before the decay set in? The likeness of Ferrari? or the likeness of—?' He paused trembling, as Agnes had paused trembling before him. Agnes! The name, of all women's names the dearest to him, was a terror to him now! What was he to say to her? What might be the consequence ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... giggling "gels" or "gals" or "garls" or "gyurls" or "gurrls" according to their social sphere. Vast-stomached middle-aged men of all classes, and all crying aloud in fat-lipped silence of indulgence, physical sloth, physical decay before physical prime should have been reached, of mental, moral, and physical decadence from the great Past incredible, and who would one and all, if asked, congratulate themselves on living in these glorious modern times of 'igh civilization ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... house of silence, wherein naught moved save strange tiny birds—the strangeness of them making the mystery more profound, for they flitted on noiseless wings, emitting neither song nor chirp, and they were mottled with morbid colours, having all the seeming of orchids, flying blossoms of sickness and decay. ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... off from all the neighbourly duties which had in earlier years diversified and entertained his country life. He had been a great figure among the squires and farmers of the Cotswolds, but all this was now at an end, paralysed by the hopeless decay of his hearing. It grieved him, too, that he was unable to do any useful war-work in the county, and he was forced to depend upon his pen and his flying visits to London for refreshment. He was a remarkably ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... Testament, are all essential and valuable; but unless they are permeated by a spirit of devotion they will fail at the crucial point. Pectus facit theologum—it is the heart that makes the theologian; and a theology which does not spring from spiritual experience is doomed to decay, to deadness, and therefore ...
— The Prayers of St. Paul • W. H. Griffith Thomas
... drawback being that not all Miss FOWLER'S pleasantly persuasive efforts can make me believe a word of it. If she had dared a little more, and inflicted the husband with blindness, impaired hearing and slight mental decay, I would have stretched a point and supposed that, during a protracted courtship, he might never have recognised his own wife. Lacking these concessions I can only report an entertaining but ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 26, 1920 • Various |
