"Miasma" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... honest livelihood. There, no longer as a lounger in a plaid, but as a working farmer, sweating at his work, he may prolong and begin anew his life. Instead of the bath-chair, the spade; instead of the regulated walk, rough journeys in the forest, and the pure, rare air of the open mountains for the miasma of the sick-room—these are the changes offered him, with what promise of pleasure and of self-respect, with what a revolution in all his hopes and terrors, none but an invalid can know. Resignation, the cowardice that apes a kind of courage and that lives in ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... until seven, and the French postilions broke another bolt before we got fairly rid of them, compelling us to wait an hour to have it mended. We were now in a low wet country, or one perfectly congenial to cholera; it was just the hour when the little demons of miasma are said to be the most active, and to complete the matter, we learned that the disease was in the village. The carriage-windows were closed, while I walked about, from door to door, to pacify uneasiness by curiosity. Use, however, had made us all tolerably indifferent, and little P—— ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... to depart from the house. I fancied, after Asmodeus's frightful revelations, the very air we breathed was impregnated with deadly miasma. Dancing had been interrupted for awhile; and in a hall, connected with a conservatory, filled with rare and odoriferous plants, a concert was beginning. Every note from a sonorous piano sounded in my ear like the wailing of one of those poor little beings the Amphitryons ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... been said of the "pestilential climate of Africa," and the certain doom of those who venture within the spell of its miasma. I dare not deny that the coast is scourged by dangerous maladies, and that nearly all who take up their abode in the colonies are obliged to undergo the ordeal of a fever which assails them with more or less virulence, according to the health, constitution, or condition of the patient. Yet I think, ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... the path, Jack was fain to rest beneath the shade of a giant tree-fern, and eat and drink. There was not a creature to harm him; no venomous reptile, no ravenous beast dwelt in those vast sub-tropical forests; no poisonous miasma reeked from the moist valleys below; in the evergreen trees countless pigeons cooed, kaka parrots and green paroquets screamed, and black parson-birds sang. It was a picture of Nature in one of her most peaceful and happy ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... look for cruelty; we expect the rights of humanity and the laws of the land to be sacrificed on the altar of slavery. In the free States we had reason to hope for a greater deference to decency and morality. Yet even in these States we behold the effects of a miasma wafted from the South. The Connecticut Black Act, prohibiting, under heavy penalties, the instruction of any colored person from another State, is well known. It is one of the encouraging signs of the times, that public opinion has recently compelled the repeal of this detestable ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... upon the yellow pallor of the first inhabitants of the western forests and doubtless correctly attributed this sickly appearance to the effects of malaria and miasma. The psychic influences of the forest wilderness also weighed heavily upon the spirits of the settlers, although, as Baily notes, it was the newcomers who felt the depression to an exaggerated degree. As ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... under a tropical sun, no fever rages; here indigenous diseases are unknown; even those so fatal in Europe rarely visit this hemisphere. The small pox, the measles, and various other disorders fatal to infancy are only occasionally seen, and are scarcely ever mortal. No miasma arises from the marshes: no decaying vegetation poisons the virgin soil. The clement skies and light atmosphere stimulate and confirm the health. Whether long life is the gift of this quarter of the globe is hardly yet determined. ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... more could be received. Still the Aspasia, from the precautions which had been taken, in fumigating, and avoiding all unnecessary contact with the shipping and the shore, had for nearly a fortnight escaped the infection; but the miasma was at last wafted to the frigate, and in the course of one night fifteen men, who were in health the preceding evening, before eight o'clock on the following morning were lying in their hammocks under the half-deck. Before ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... throat, and she lay down in the boat, allowing the damp air to envelop, to caress, to chill her, inviting the entrance into her blood of the fatal germs. How long did she remain thus, half-unconscious, in the atmosphere more and more laden with miasma in proportion as the sun sank? A cry made her rise and again take up the oars. It was the coachman, who, not seeing her return, had descended from the box and was hailing the boat at all hazards. When she ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... people in England are not daunted but depressed by the military successes of the enemy. Our soldiers in the field are not depressed. But we who are kept at home suffer from the miasma of the back-parlour. We read the headlines of newspapers—a form of literature that is exciting enough, but does not merit the praise given to Sophocles, who saw life steadily and saw it whole. We keep our ears to the telephone, ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... account of the discovery of paludal miasma and of its natural history, I ought in the first place to state that I have not had the opportunity of reading or studying the great original treatise of Professor Salisbury. I am acquainted with it only through a resume published in the American Journal ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... earth is still themselves, when they are the damp soil in which the mattock is buried. The earth is loaned to them, you say? But it does not even confine the odor of death! In summer, the wind that passes over this scarcely-covered human charnel-house wafts the unholy miasma to the city of the living. In the scorching days of August the keepers deny admission to the place: there are flies that bear upon them the poison of the carrion, pestilential flies whose sting ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... vaults they are indeed, whose air is putrid with the sickenin' miasma of moral loathsomness and deseese; whose walls are painted with hideous pictures of murder, rapine, lust, starvation, woe, and despair, earthly and eternal ruin. Shapes of the dreadful past, the hopeless future, that these livin' dead stare upon with broodin' ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... He looked disconcerted, took off his glasses and put them on again, and at length muttered something about storm-wind dissipating the miasma in the air and ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... water covering the low lands on which they were encamped during the famous canal experiment, induced much sickness. Intent to be where her kind offices were most needed, Mrs. Harvey proceeded thither about the first of April. After a few weeks' labor, she, herself, overcome by the terrible miasma, was taken seriously ill, and was obliged to return homeward. Months of rest, and a visit to the sea-side, were required to bring back a measure of her wonted strength, and so for the summer her services were lost to ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... and ghastly hate hung like a miasma over the besieged house and garden. Fifty eyes hungered for the blood of Wyndham bimbashi; not because he was Wyndham bimbashi, but because the heathen in these men cried out for sacrifice; and what so agreeable a sacrifice as the Englishman who had ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... under Sulla. Under Claudius and under Domitian there is a deformity of baseness corresponding to the ugliness of the tyranny. The foulness of the slaves is a direct result of the atrocious baseness of the despot. A miasma exhales from these crouching consciences that reflect the master; the public authorities are unclean, hearts are collapsed, consciences shrunken, souls puny. This is so under Caracalla, it is so under Commodus, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... age, are carried by their very genius all the more certainly to ruin. All that, in a more favorable period, would have raised them to be stars in the art firmament, now made them fall like some ignis fatuus, the brilliant light of which owes its illusory existence only to miasma. This striking fact appears, at first sight, inexplicable; but it is easy to understand, if we consider the different character of the two arts. Plastic art had formerly emulated painting, and thus, especially in relief, had suffered unmistakable injury to its own peculiar nature. At that ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... just at an end. Men stood about me with tears streaming from their eyes. Realizing that they had just stood in the presence of greatness, it seemed as if they had been lifted out of the selfish miasma of politics, and, in the spirit of the Crusaders, were ready to dedicate themselves to the cause of liberating their state from the bondage ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... below him. They obliterated, under their dispiriting gray, the valleys and lower forest-reaches, and his face, which was young and resolutely featured, held a kindred mood of shadowing depression. Beneath that miasma cloak of morning fog twisted a river from which the sun would strike darts of laughing light—when the sun had routed the opaqueness suspended between ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... be in a great degree attributable to the absolute want of drainage and the decomposition of vegetable matter. Its position was most insalubrious, for the marshy swamps commenced at the very base of hills, and thus as it were encircled the savannahs with a belt of miasma. ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... be destroyed by fire with remarkable facility at one season of the year; and it is well that this is the case; for, whether as a retainer of miasma, a shelter for wild beasts, both carnivorous and herbivorous, alike dangerous to man, or from their liability to ignite, and spread destruction far and wide, the grass-jungles are most serious obstacles to civilization. ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... and servants, but imagination "bodies forth the forms of things unseen" and shudders. Let us rejoice that a merciful superstition, which regards the climate of India as deadly to European children, will step in and save the little soul. The climate would do it no harm, but there is a moral miasma more baneful than any which rises from the pestilential swamps of the ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... no swamps, marshes, nor bayous, as in the United States, and in the neighbourhood of Acapulco and West Mexico. These lakes and bayous drying during summer, and exposing to the rays of the sun millions of dead fish, impregnate the atmosphere with miasma, generating typhus, yellow fever, dysenteries, ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... Buttons, after a long pause, "you are as pale as a ghost. I believe you must be beginning to feel the miasma ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... the influence of their example, there are raised up, even there, girls who are good daughters, loyal wives, and faithful mothers. They seem to rise in those rude surroundings as grows the pond lily, which is entangled by every species of rank growth, environed by poison, miasma and corruption, and yet which rises in the beauty of its purity and lifts its fair face unblushing to ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... shown him, through his second sight, by the spirit on the previous day. From the graves filled recently, and from many others, rose threads of coloured matter, in the form of gases, the forerunners of miasma. He now perceived shadowy figures flitting about on the ground and in the air, from whose eyes poured streams of immaterial tears. Their brains, hearts, and vertebral columns were the parts most easily seen, ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... before our return; for which, as for all else, a price was duly agreed upon, and was scrupulously paid. Unfortunately we learned, when too late, that both houses were too near the shore, exposed to unwholesome miasma, and productive of the dreaded fever and ague,—the most virulent and insidious enemy to all ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... and more freely than I do here. I know that I am hardly myself among these people,—or rather, I am hardly myself as you know me, and as I hope you always will know me. But, nevertheless, I am not so overcome by the miasma but what I can tell you how truly I love you. Even though my spirit should be here, which it is not, my heart would be on the Allington lawns. That dear ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... curing fevers, made a powerful impression upon him; which, however, declined as those novelties (especially the last) began to sink in credit. As to Dr. Jenner's discovery of vaccination, he was less favorably disposed to it; he apprehended dangerous consequences from the absorption of a brutal miasma into the human blood, or at least into the lymph; and at any rate he thought, that, as a guarantee against the variolous infection, it required a much longer probation. Groundless as all these views ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... and his 'town councillor's conservatism,' and hatred of change, as well as the amusement of skirmishing, had always made him the champion of things as they were; and in the present emergency the battle whether the enemy had travelled by infection, or was the product of the Pond Buildings' miasma, was the favourite enlivenment of the disagreeing doctors, in their brief intervals of repose in the stern conflict which they were waging with the fever—a conflict in which they had soon to strive by themselves, for the disease ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... affection known, that of a woman for a woman, had not such heroic constancy as the Church. Lisbeth, stifled by the miasma, went away. She found the physicians still in consultation. But Bianchon's opinion carried the day, and the only question now was how to try ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... Anxur,—the modern Terracina,—where the lofty rock stands like the giant that guards the last borders of the southern land of love? Away, away! and hold your breath as we flit above the Pontine Marshes. Dreary and desolate, their miasma is to the gardens we have passed what the rank commonplace of life is to the heart when it ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... of Peru: in summer, however, it is said that the climate is much pleasanter. In all seasons, both inhabitants and foreigners suffer from severe attacks of ague. This disease is common on the whole coast of Peru, but is unknown in the interior. The attacks of illness which arise from miasma never fail to appear most mysterious. So difficult is it to judge from the aspect of a country, whether or not it is healthy, that if a person had been told to choose within the tropics a situation appearing favourable for health, very probably he would have named this coast. The plain round ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... sure token that God was at work to produce it. The strongest demonstration that the Church can give the world of its really being God's Church is its unlikeness to the world. If it is wet with divine dew when all the threshing-floor is dry, and if, when all the floor is drenched with poisonous miasma, it is dry from the diffused and clinging malaria, the world will take knowledge of it, and some souls be set to ask how this unlikeness comes. When Haman has to say: 'There is a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among the peoples ... ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... cultivation is impossible in the hands of the white man. They tell you, that while the negro endures the labour of the rice field mid-leg deep in water, and with a scorching sun above his head, without danger, and can withstand the miasma-hanging in the night air on the plantations— the white man is attacked with hopeless fever if he exposes himself to these influences. They declare that the unconditional abolition of slavery, in a country abounding in unappropriated lands, ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... no delicate perfume of primrose or sweetbriar, only a musty, dank, earthy smell which gets more and more pronounced as the mists rise along with the deadly vapours of the night. Sleeping in these forests is very unhealthy. There is a most fatal miasma all through the year, less during the hot months, but very bad during and immediately after the annual rains; and in September and October nearly every soul in the jungly tracts is smitten with fever. The vapour only rises to a certain height above ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... the town of Porto Praya, Island of St. Jago, in nine fathoms. Porto Praya is a miserable town, built on a most unhealthy spot, there being an extensive marsh behind it, which, from its miasma, creates a great mortality among the inhabitants. The consul is a native of Bona Vista: two English consuls having fallen victims to the climate in quick succession, no one was found very willing to succeed to such a certain provision from the Foreign ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... Tajo, Tagus, which the fancy of poets has sanded with gold and embanked with roses, tracks much of its dreary way through rocks and comparative barrenness. The Guadiana creeps through lonely Estremadura, infecting the low plains with miasma. The Guadalquivir eats out its deep banks amid the sunny olive-clad regions of Andalucia, as the Ebro divides the levels of Arragon. Spain abounds with brackish streams, Salados, and with salt-mines, or saline deposits, after the evaporation ...
— A Supplementary Chapter to the Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... "There is no career which so rapidly wears away the powers of life, because there is no other which requires a greater activity of mind and body. He has to bear the changes of weather, continued fatigue, irregularity in his meals, and broken rest; to live in the midst of miasma and contagion. If in the country, he has to traverse considerable distances on horseback, exposed to wind and storm; to brave all dangers to go to the relief of suffering humanity. A fearful truth for medical men has been established by the table of mortality of Dr. Caspar, ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... learn. It is to be hoped that he found somewhere a more congenial and tolerant abode. It is evident that he could not breathe in an atmosphere of bigotry; and it was difficult to find one free from the miasma in those days. ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... and that seemed to disperse it for a time. Then, just as I was going out, it returned; it seemed to envelop me like a filthy miasma. You know, sir, it's hard to explain just the way I felt about it—but it all amounts to this: I was glad to ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... he was not to enter it;[34] and those who followed the funeral cortege were purified by being sprinkled with water and by stepping over fire.[35] Society had effectually protected itself against the miasma in all these cases by the discovery of the means ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... our country could keep hands off slavery in the South, no more than New York could keep hands off a borough infected with smallpox. The world has passed the point where one-third of its population can be allowed to breed miasma which the other two-thirds must breathe. Both for China's sake and for our own, we must continue this work. If this is true in the political and commercial realms, much more is it true in the religious. ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... care is taken to select a swampy spot, charged with all the elements of fever and miasma, splendidly unhealthy localities can be found in North Borneo, a residence in which would prove fatal to the strongest constitution, and I have also pointed out that on clearing new ground for plantations fever almost inevitably occurs, but, ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... that broke upon France had long been gathering. The rays that emanated from such false suns as Voltaire and Rousseau had already drawn up a moral miasma from the swamps of sensual ignorance: under the shade of a worthless government these noxious mists collected into the clouds from whence the desolating storm of the Revolution burst. It was, however, the example of popular success in the New World, and the republican training ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... her hands. He had an overwhelming desire to escape from the miasma of those ugly days, with their train of ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and the cure will be effected. In the old Athenian Anthesteria the blood of victims was poured over the unclean. A bath of bulls' blood was much in vogue as a baptism in the mysteries of Attis. The water must in ritual washings run off in order to carry away the miasma or unseen demon of disease; and accordingly in baptism the early Christians used living or running water. Nor was it enough that the person baptized should himself enter the water; the baptizer must pour it over his head, so that it run down his person. Similarly the Brahman takes care, after ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the moment. I had not thought of Jerry as being all these things. To me he was merely Jerry. But I struggled upward through the miasma of oppressive millions and met the ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... art of eloquent prose, who had transferred to the pages of his American Indian stories, "Atala" and "Rene," the mystery and enchantment of our dark forests and endless rivers. But Chateaubriand, like Brockden Brown, is feverish. A taint of old-world eroticism and despair hovers like a miasma over his magnificent panorama of the wilderness. Cooper, like ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... just 'phoned up from the smoking room to ask me if my hour isn't up. How his voice clears away all the miasma of my miserable thoughts! Please God, Dicky, I am going to lock up all my old ideas in the most unused closet of my brain, and try my best to be a good wife to you! I will be happy! I ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... himself liable to the attack by exposure and over-fatigue. I mention the circumstance as a warning, but do not think there is much risk, with proper precautions, for men in good health, through most parts of the island, after the November rains have precipitated the miasma and purified the air. We ourselves slept in most pestiferous places, where the ravages of the disease were marked in the sallow countenances of the inhabitants, without experiencing ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... Shafter's advancing army on the Siboney road increased his own chances of success and lessened those of his adversary; because the army of defense, already acclimated, could stand exposure to sun, rain, and miasma much better than the army of invasion could. Besides that, a column of five thousand regulars from Manzanillo was hurrying to his assistance, and it was of the utmost importance that these reinforcements should reach him before he should ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... full of noises and Verey lights—and this particular part of the line was no exception to the general rule. So our hero was not distracted by mundane influences or stress of work from elaborating his scheme. In addition, once the miasma had subsided, and the idea had been explained to them, the three supers became quite keen themselves. It was one of them, in fact, who ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... all right, then. Sorry to be so persistent, Reverend Sir, but any miasma of evil that may be left around is a very important clue, and it shouldn't be dispersed until it's been ...
— The Eyes Have It • Gordon Randall Garrett
... prejudice, and in this case I felt positive that, whatever faults the Atherton germ plasm might contain, he had combined others from the determiners of that of the other ancestors he boasted. I could not help feeling that Eugenia Atherton was in about as unpleasant an atmosphere of social miasma as could be imagined. ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... noses had sniffed a carrion scent in the air. Sunday was uncomfortable, for I realized that I might have to face bad conditions on the morrow. On Monday an ominous feeling began to rise and pervade "the Street" like a miasma mist in a tropical swamp. The bacillus of distrust had started its infection. I had to buy quite a lot of subscriptions and was now varying the price from 110, for it seemed possible any moment that something would ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... respect to the differences of race, a conjecture has occurred to me that much may be due to the correlation of complexion (and consequently hair) with constitution. Assume that a dusky individual best escaped miasma, and you will readily see what I mean. I persuaded the Director-General of the Medical Department of the Army to send printed forms to the surgeons of all regiments in tropical countries to ascertain this point, but I dare say I shall never ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... If she had any thought of a resulting consequence it was in the assumption that her presence as wife and woman of the world would dispel the noxious thing she had been striving to combat for the past two months, as the sun dissipates a miasma. ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... this spirit of indifference that has settled down like a miasma upon clubdom we must find James's original germ of interest—the twig upon which our cluster of bees is ultimately to hang. Here we may introduce two axioms: Everyone is deeply interested in something; ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... institutes for the segregation of those who will be unfit for social intercourse. The problem of criminality will thus be solved as far as possible, because the gradual transformation of society will eliminate the swamps in which the miasma of crime may form ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri
... long time, Marietta met with small measure of success. Miasma, Indian ravages, and the conservative temperament of the people combined to render slow the growth of this Western Plymouth. There were, for a time, extensive ship-building yards here; but that industry gradually declined, with ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... discountenanced, nevertheless, it is impossible but that it should in some degree prevail in the nursery. Nor was it probable that I should escape this infections malady, having passed my whole days in an atmosphere, charged more than any other with that impure miasma priest-craft."] ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... forging honest plates that hold great ships in time of storm, every patriot that redeems his land with blood; every martyr forgotten and dying in his dungeon that freedom might never perish; every teacher and discoverer who has gone into lands of fever and miasma to carry liberty, intelligence and religion to the ignorant, still walks among men, working for ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... all far more desirable as a home than the crowded tenements of our larger cities, for those who occupied it had but to open the door and windows to breathe the pure air of heaven, uncontaminated by foul odors or the taint of miasma. ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... minor tower, in which was the spiral stair, was built as a vent to carry up into the air, far above the roofs of the villa, any miasma, effluvium or exhalation from the drainage-water of the villa's baths, kitchen and latrines. On the subject of harmful vapours from drains my uncle was fanatical and to bear out his contentions he quoted from the works of many celebrated philosophers and ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... considered it all, he said, and had made up his mind. As he saw it, all the risk, and all the fatigue too, which was quite as important a thing, were on the road, and whatever safety there was, whether from brigands or miasma, lay in the inn. ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... this tender and serious spirit. The headlong precipitation of a people into the truth, a '93, terrified him; nevertheless, stagnation was still more repulsive to him, in it he detected putrefaction and death; on the whole, he preferred scum to miasma, and he preferred the torrent to the cesspool, and the falls of Niagara to the lake of Montfaucon. In short, he desired neither halt nor haste. While his tumultuous friends, captivated by the absolute, adored and invoked splendid revolutionary adventures, Combeferre was inclined to let ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... the case. They lived under the deadly shadow of the upas tree, and suffered the consequences of its stunting their development in all directions, as the ague-smitten inhabitant of the Roman Campana finds every sense and every muscle clogged by the filtering in of the insidious miasma. They did not compose songs and music, because they did not have the intellectual ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... was. They were marching in a dank world belonging to an earlier age than ours. They were in the age of the coal strata, among wet, green things, in a silence only broken by the sound of dropping or by the bellow of an alligator. They were there in the filth, in the heat haze, in a mist of miasma and mosquitoes. In all probability they were swearing at themselves for ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... and my heart to double its pulsations; beside me Smith was breathing more rapidly than usual. I knew now the explanation of the feeling which had claimed me when first I had descended the stone stairs. I knew what it was that hung like a miasma over that house. It was the aura, the glamour, which radiated from this wonderful and evil man as light radiates from radium. It was the vril, the ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... himself being slowly but surely overpowered. A demoniac grin played upon the features of the other as he forced the reporter to his knees. It was Handlon.... Once more he was sinking into soft oblivion, the while a horrid miasma assailed his nostrils. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... Goforth, on vaccination, milk-sickness and miasma, took the mail-packet for Gallipolis. Arlington, after transacting the business which brought him to Cincinnati, started for his distant Virginia home, not by water nor by the direct route through Kentucky to the Old Wilderness Road, but across ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... Cynic dropped in. I never could bear this latter woman; something malevolent seems to emanate from her; something that is more or less unhealthful to the moral nature of all who come in contact with it, just as the miasma from a swamp is ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... early records of Cleveland, as in those of most western towns, the story of sickness and death fills a large part. Fever and ague, brought on by exposure, privations, and by the miasma from swamp, river and uncleared lands, disabled a large number of the early settlers, and hurried some to untimely graves. There were no physicians, and save a few drugs and the simples gathered from the river banks and forest, there ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... apprehension, this miasma, came in slowly, like those autumn sea-mists; appearing once a month, twice this ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... indication of an improvement, give her warm praise. Be careful about bestowing caresses upon her, as she needs to be guarded against hysteria, I should judge from your description. To some children they are the sunlight, to others miasma. ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... spiritual body, subjective to, and more ethereal than the soul. It is an infinitesimal atom, and is related in substance to the spiritual or infinite mind of the universe. Just as the great physical sun, the center of visible light, life and heat, is striving to purify the foul miasma of the marsh and send its luminous messages of love into the dark crevices of the earth, so the Great Spiritual Sun, of which the former is a visible prototype or reflection, is striving to illuminate with Divine Wisdom the personal soul and mind of ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... revolting, having no note of the savage encounters which used to characterize the easy days in West Texas and New Mexico, when every man tossed his life away to the crackle of his own revolver. The moon shows pale through the leafy canopy on their evening fires, and the mists, the miasma, and the mosquitoes settle over their dreary camp talk. In place of the wild stampede, there is only the bellowing in the pens, and instead of the plains shaking under the dusty air as the bedizened vaqueros plough their ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... yesterday," Tallente said reminiscently. "This morning she told me she was going to ride out to inspect for herself the farm of the one black sheep amongst her tenants. I looked out towards Woolhanger as I came up in the train. It seemed like a miasma ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... I familiar with these upper ranges of thought and experience and life? Do we feel at home there more than down in the bottoms, amongst the swamps, and the miasma, and the mists? Where is your home, brother? The Mass begins with Sursum corda: 'Up with your hearts,' and that is the word for us. But the way to get up is to keep ourselves in touch with Jesus Christ, and then He will, even whilst our feet are travelling along this road of earth, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... that ruleth it: so if the first day in the year fall on First Day (Sunday) that day is the Sun's and this portendeth (though Allah alone is All-knowing!) oppression of kings and sultans and governors and much miasma and lack of rain; and that people will be in great tumult and the grain-crop will be good, except lentils, which will perish, and the vines will rot and flax will be dear and wheat cheap from the beginning of Tbah to the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... breath, Unhasting, unangered advancing, she dooms them to terror and death. But she the great mother of heroes, the shield and the sword of the weak, What lot or what part has her glory in madmen who gibber and shriek? Her eye is as death to assassins, the brood of miasma and gloom, Foul shapes that grow sleek upon slaughter, as worms that are hid in a tomb. In the dawn she has marshalled her armies, the millions go marching as one, With a tramp that is fearless as joy, and ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 23, 1890. • Various
... there is for me at present. I appreciate as never before the value of having lived an open life.... The parlor, the street corner, the newspapers, the very air seem full of social miasma.... Sad, sad revelations! There is nothing more demoralizing than lying. The act itself is scarcely so base as the lie which denies it.... It is almost an impossibility for a man and a woman to ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... Nero thirsted for blood and wallowed in the sewers of moral degradation, and when Domitian's frightful cruelty only equaled his gross sensualism. The saloon, the black plague of nineteenth century life, overlaps all other degrading evils, its miasma of death fills every rendezvous of degradation, and until its ever increasing power is checked, nay, more, until its power in American politics is broken, other allies in crime, debauchery, and moral death will flourish. By the side of the rum curse flourishes, as our author points ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... again, and it seemed to Walker that the man breathed the very miasma of the swamp and infected the room with it. He spoke of leopard societies, murder clubs, human sacrifices. He had witnessed them at the beginning, he had taken his share in them at the last. He told the whole story without shame, with ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... Rubens' nature had never been developed. He dallied with no "culture-beds," and the thought that any one could ever really equal him had never entered his mind. His conscious sense of power kept his head high above the miasma ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... metals from among national possessions, the national spirit has remained healthy. Covetousness is not natural to man—generosity is; but covetousness must be excited by a special cause, as a given disease by a given miasma; and the essential nature of a material for the excitement of covetousness is, that it shall be a beautiful thing which can be retained without a use. The moment we can use our possessions to any good purpose ourselves, the instinct of communicating that use to others ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... tainted by the discouragement of all good men, which penetrated every shire and every parish, than by the distant reports of the loose behaviour of Charles II. Servility, meanness, venality, time-serving, and a disbelief in virtue diffused themselves over the nation like a pestilential miasma, the depressing influence of which was heavy, even upon those souls which individually resisted the poison. The heroic age of England had passed away, not by gradual decay, by imperceptible degeneration, but in a year, in a single day, like the winter's snow ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... began to prevail in his diet was hardly a wholesome one. Besides, in cutting down the 25 trees he opened spaces to the sun which had been harmless enough in the shadow of the woods, but which now sent up their ague-breeding miasma. Ague was the scourge of the whole region, and it was hard to know whether the pestilence was worse on the rich levels beside the rivers, or 30 on the stony hills where the settlers sometimes ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... submerged. The sole inhabitants, you know, are the negroes, who cultivate the place, and the overseer who manages them.... As early as March the heat becomes intense, and by the beginning of April it is no longer safe for white people to remain there, owing to the miasma which exhales ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... you see that river, with more than half of its muddy bed exposed to the hot sun? Your farm lies upon its eastern side, and the poisonous miasma that arises from its surface and banks is steadily blown upon you by the south-westerly and westerly winds of summer. Is it any wonder that your family have become sick? I wouldn't live here if you would give me fifty farms like this! Already a whole family have died on this spot, ...
— Lizzy Glenn - or, The Trials of a Seamstress • T. S. Arthur
... collector. But I can tell you that you won't find it all sport and pleasure. You will have no cool sea breezes; there will be occasion for continual watchfulness, and perhaps long boat expeditions up sluggish streams, in an atmosphere laden with moisture and miasma." ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... of race, a conjecture has occurred to me that much may be due to the correlation of complexion (and consequently hair) with constitution. Assume that a dusky individual best escaped miasma and you will readily see what I mean. I persuaded the Director-General of the Medical Department of the Army to send printed forms to the surgeons of all regiments in tropical countries to ascertain this point, but I daresay I shall never get any returns. ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... lumps of offal, floating on the stagnant olive-green hell-broth—over the slow sullen rows of oily ripple which were dying away into the darkness far beyond, sending up, as they stirred, hot breaths of miasma—the only sign that a spark of humanity, after years of foul life, had quenched itself at last in that foul death. I almost fancied that I could see the haggard face staring up at me through the slimy water; but no, it was as ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... time of stubborn effort and crushing strain. Some of the men were sick and all had lost their vigor. The fierce sun had not burned but bleached their skin; their blood was poisoned by the miasma the land breeze blew off at night. For all that, Cartwright's promise was they should share his reward and somehow they ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... home and abroad; in the parlor, the street, the counting-room; in his school and in the Church;—he bore down on this apathy and its brood of scorns like a west wind that sweeps through a city dying under weight of miasma. And the wind might as well cease blowing yet not cease to be wind, as my father's influence stop and himself live. It scattered the good seed everywhere. How often have I heard him say, "I know nothing ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... defendant. The case is so plain that it seems like arguing an axiom to discuss it. I will not impugn the intelligence of this jury by a review of the evidence in so plain a case. But knowing the deadening miasma of race prejudice that hangs over, envelops and stifles us so often, I shall dwell briefly upon the nature of the crime ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... before the sister-republic; and but for American intervention France would have been nearer a peace of compromise in May 1917 than at any previous date in the war. The second battle of the Aisne gave rise to that miasma of dfaitisme, associated with the names of Bolo and Caillaux, which enfeebled the spirit and effort of France until they were revived by Clmenceau's ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... wings were spread above the fields—silent, scarce breathing, lay the body of the land. But to the south, where the town, that restless head, was lying, the stars seemed to have fallen and were sown in the thousand furrows of its great grey marsh, and from the dark miasma of those streets there travelled up a rustle, a whisper, the far allurement of some deathless dancer, dragging men to watch the swirl of her black, spangled drapery, the gleam of her writhing limbs. Like the song of the sea in a shell was the murmur of that ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... asleep, and slept all through that quiet night. He awoke to find the dawn spreading its pearly light over the sea. The great plain of Biguglia lay to the left under a soft blanket of mist, as deadly they say, as any African miasma, above which the distant mountains raised summits already tinged with rose. Ahead and close at hand, the old town of Bastia jutted out into the sea, the bluff Genoese bastion concealing the harbour from view. De Vasselot had never been ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... deadly nightshade, which kindles the red fires of fever and rots the roots of the tongue. There was the fetid powder of stramonium, that grips the lungs like an asthma; and quinia, that shakes its victims like the cold hand of the miasma of the Pontine marshes. The essence of poppies, ten times sublimated, a few grains of which bring on the stupor of apoplexy; and the sardonic plant, that kills its victim with the frightful laughter of madness on ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... Corporation might feast its peculative eyes upon hogs wallowing in mud; and cellars where swarming beggars, for six cents a night, cover with rags their hideous heads—where vice and crime are fostered, and into which your sensitive policeman prefers not to go, are giving out their seething miasma. The very neighborhood seems vegetating in mire. In the streets, in the cellars, in the filthy lanes, in the dwellings of the honest poor, as well as the vicious, muck and mire is the predominating ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... in the world, and one needed guidance there, protection.... From Satan, who is not a spirit, but a horrible miasma, that floats in little vapors here and there, when the clean winds are resting ... from the warm inviting and evil jungle where one might seek relief in distress, or having been over-long in the high ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... been fairly used up, and he had henceforth to turn to analyse the sufferings of well-to-do lower middle-class families, people who had 'neither inherited refinement nor acquired it, neither proletarian nor gentlefolk, consumed with a disease of vulgar pretentiousness, inflated with the miasma of democracy.' Of these classes it is possible that he knew less, and consequently lacked the sureness of touch and the fresh draughtsmanship which comes from ample knowledge, and that he had, consequently, to have increasing resort to ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... artist's mind is felt throughout his work: what he paints, or sings, or writes, conveys a lesson while it pleases. On the other hand, depravity in an artist or a poet percolates through work which has in it nothing positive of evil, and a very miasma of poisonous influence may rise from the apparently innocuous creations of a tainted soul. Now Correggio is moralised in neither way—neither as a good nor as a bad man, neither as an acute thinker nor as a deliberate voluptuary. He is simply sensuous. On his own ground he is even very fresh and ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... districts less densely populated, passing from one great city to another whither infection could not have been communicated. Cordons de sante and quarantine regulations were of no avail. The pestilence appeared to spread like miasma through the air and to kindle like gas wherever the assemblage of numbers disposed the atmosphere to its reception. The patients were seized with vomiting and diarrhoea, accompanied with violent convulsions, and often ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... hampered. Law, if you had asked him, and he had accurately expressed himself, was a mist formed out of the moods and the mistakes of men, which befogged the sea of life and prevented plain sailing for the little commercial and social barques of men; it was a miasma of misinterpretation where the ills of life festered, and also a place where the accidentally wounded were ground between the upper and the nether millstones of force or chance; it was a strange, weird, interesting, and yet futile battle of wits where the ignorant ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... fasting stage of his existence in his rooms or, when he was bloated with fresh blood, in a ruined building open to the air, but here the place was small and close, and the long disuse had made the air stagnant and foul. There was an earthy smell, as of some dry miasma, which came through the fouler air. But as to the odour itself, how shall I describe it? It was not alone that it was composed of all the ills of mortality and with the pungent, acrid smell of blood, but it seemed as though corruption had become itself corrupt. Faugh! It sickens me to think ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... or meningitis may succeed the acute stage, or may be due to stable miasma, blood poison, narcotism, lead poisoning, etc. This form may not be characterized in its initial stages by excitability, quick and hard pulse, and high fever. The animal usually appears at first stupid; eats slowly; the pupil of the eye does not respond to light ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... strange force Is mightier than genius. Rightly used, It leads to grand achievements; all things yield Before its mystic presence, and its field Is broad as earth and heaven. But abused, It sweeps like a poison simoon on its course, Bearing miasma in its scorching breath, And leaving all it ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... which is only lit by fires that carry and shed around them disease, famine, crime, madness, bloodshed, and death. How hot, sultry, and enervating to the whole constitution of man, physically and mentally, is the atmosphere we have been breathing so long! The miasma of the swamp, the simoom of the desert, the merciless sirocco, are healthful when compared to such an atmosphere. And, hark! what formidable being is that who, with black expanded wings, flies about from place to place, and from ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... (punishment) 975; damnosa hereditas[Lat]; white elephant. sting, fang, thorn, tang, bramble, brier, nettle. poison, toxin; teratogen; leaven, virus venom; arsenic; antimony, tartar emetic; strychnine, nicotine; miasma, miasm[obs3], mephitis[obs3], malaria, azote[obs3], sewer gas; pest. [poisonous substances, examples] Albany hemp[obs3], arsenious oxide, arsenious acid; bichloride of mercury; carbonic acid, carbonic gas; choke damp, corrosive sublimate, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... was not disposed, or had not vigour enough to throw the miasma to the surface in the form of biles, buboes, carbuncles, or blackish spots, the virulence is supposed to have operated inwardly, or on the vital parts, and the patient died in less than twenty-four hours, ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... mezcal; various Cactacese, and flora of singular forms, scarcely known to the botanist. There are swamps, dark and dank, overshadowed by the tall cypress, with its pendent streamers of silvery moss (Tillandsia usneoides). From these arise the miasma—the mother of ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... fire on the wide hearth in spite of the fine weather—peopled the gloom with fantastic quivering shadows as of lean fingers that unfolded themselves to filch, or clenched themselves to stab in the back. But its patrons seemed to like the place well enough in spite of its miasma, and Master Robin Turgis, the fat landlord, drowsy with his own wine and dripping from the heat, surveyed them complacently, and wallowed as it were in the rattle and clink of mug and can, the full-throated laughter and the shrill chatter, crisply emphasized by oaths, which assured ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... No! the miasma is dispelled: the curse is gone: the crimes are expiated. The devil in that jar is dispossessed, and with Simon's last gasp has returned unto his own place. The murderer is dead, and has thereby laid the ghost of his mate in sin, the murdered victim; while that victim has long ago paid by blood for ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... upper regions by means of a simple charge of dynamite, which nobody of any sense or importance would even think of condemning, has been most unaccountably deferred to the present year. This man is Mr. S.M. Hussey, the miasma of whose breath, according to a well-informed murder organ in Dublin, poisons one-half of the kingdom of Kerry. Let any man read the speeches delivered in Upper Sackville Street, and the articles in United Ireland against Mr. Hussey, and he must ask why the fiend incarnate has not been ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... pool and tank is dried up; the rivers forsake their banks, and a trifling stream trickles over the sandy bed. Thus all the rotten wood, dead leaves and putrid vegetation brought down by the torrent during the wet season are left upon the dried bed to infect the air with miasma. ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... the strawberry requires. If water stands or stagnates upon or a little below the surface, the soil becomes sour, heavy, lifeless; and if clay is present, it will bake like pottery in dry weather, and suggest the Slough of Despond in wet. Disappointment, failure, and miasma are the certain products of such unregenerate regions, but, as is often the case with repressed and troublesome people, the evil traits of such soil result from a lack of balance, and a perversion ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... great plain traversed by the Po now is. And here too, though the acres are generally well cared for, I saw tracts of considerable extent which, from original defect or unskillful management, stand below the water level of the country, and so are given over to flags, bogs and miasma, when only a foot or two of elevation is needed to render them salubrious ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... that mass of moral putridity these Ephesian Christians had been dragged. But its effects still lingered in them, and it was all about them with its pestilential miasma. So the first thing that they needed was to be guarded against it. The Apostle, in the subsequent context, with great earnestness gives a series of moral injunctions of the most elementary kind. Their very simplicity is eloquent. What sort of people ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... exertion, was compelled, from fatigue, to sit down in the deep black mud. Another respite from toil and another hour more of exertion, and I gave myself up for lost. The day was evidently fast closing in, the light over head was not near so bright as it had been, and I knew that a night passed in the miasma of the cane swamp was death. At last it became darker and darker. There could not be an hour of daylight remaining. I determined upon one struggle more, and reeking as I was with perspiration, and faint with fatigue, ...
— Stories about Animals: with Pictures to Match • Francis C. Woodworth
... Tom Mowbray's heavy, grey face, the livid and impotent hate that frothed in the crippled man, and his strange jerky gestures, the atmosphere of nightmare cruelty and suffering that enveloped them like a miasma these bit themselves into his imagination and left it sore. He saw and tasted nothing of what he ate and drank; he was lost in watching the three at the other table; the man who refilled his cup with coffee winked across his head ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... who permits, in her life, the alloy of vanity; the woman who lives upon flattery, coarse or fine, shall never be thus addressed, She is not immortal so far as her will is concerned, and every woman who does so creates miasma, whose spread is indefinite. The hand which casts into the waters of life a stone of offence knows not how far the circles thus ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... northward on her long snowshoes, northward, as if in pursuit of the sound that had gone before. She raised a mittened hand to him in ironic salutation. She seemed to beckon, north—north—into the Silence. Crossman shook himself. What was this miasma in his heart? He inhaled the vital air and felt the rush of his blood in answer, realizing the splendour of this beautiful, intensely living world of white and green, of sparkle and prismatic brilliance. Its elemental power like the urge of the ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... different from the modern stuff. Altogether different. I'm not discussing Shakespeare. I don't want to Bowdlerize Shakespeare. I'm not that sort I quite agree. But this modern miasma—" ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... lawyers, have contributed funds for farms and future homes in sections where they would not live if they owned half of the county. How many people have been separated from their cash by literature advertising rich, fertile lands in sections where the alligator will bask unmolested in miasma for the next fifty years, and where projects should be sold by the gallon instead ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... every weather We've soldiered, you and I, together." The sentry would not let him pass. "Go back," he growled, "you tiresome ass— Go back and rest till the next war, Nor kill by methods all abhor: Miasma, famine, filth and vice, With plagues of locusts, plagues of lice, Foul food, foul water, and foul gases, Rank exhalations from morasses. If you employ such low allies This business you will vulgarize. Renouncing then the field of fame To wallow in ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... where one strikes the Sefid River, we begin to rise and the country gets more hilly and arid. We gradually leave behind the oppressive dampness, which suggests miasma and fever, and begin to breathe air which, though very hot, is drier and purer. We have risen 262 feet at Kudum from 77 feet, the altitude of Resht, and as we travel now in a south-south-west direction, following the stream upwards, we keep getting higher, the elevation at Rustamabad being ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... John, who wrote back urgently for further particulars. Mrs. Wesley had indeed fallen into a low state of health, occasioned partly (as Kezzy declared in a letter) by "want of clothes or convenient meat," partly by the miasma from the floods. Ague was the commonest of maladies in the Isle of Axholme, and even the labourers fortified themselves ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the refuge of the valley,— Anywhere for life and safety From the grim, pursuing monster. 'Twas the cholera of Asia, Laying hands upon the city. 'Twas this skeleton so ghastly, With its breath of foul miasma, With its desolating vengeance, With its greedy, fatal cravings, Laying hands upon the city. And the doomed victims yielded To the swift-distilling poison; White and black and high and lowly, Fell beneath the sweeping scythe-blade. On the air was borne the crying ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... the education of the art-faculty. But this is a delusion. Its atmosphere has never been really favourable to the development of genius. There is a moral malaria of the place as fatal to the versatile life of the imagination as the physical miasma is to health. Roman Catholicism has petrified the heart and the fancy; and a petty round of ceremonies, feasts, and social parties dissipates energy and distracts the powers of those who are not under the influence of the Church. The decadence of art has kept pace with ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... perhaps is the dreadful night, and more sickening the miasma, which lies around the opium creeks, multiplying and increasing and slowly sucking down into their slimy depths thousands upon thousands of those who dare to seek momentary relief from sorrow in its lethal stream. Mr. Caine thus describes an ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... we at length came to a dark glen so deftly hidden by the surrounding copses, that were it not for the miasma thence wafted, an ignorant wayfarer might pass and repass it, time and again, never ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... so, too," he agreed. "Say somebody dislikes the looks of that accident, and starts investigating. Then he runs into all this miasma of suicide rumors, and promptly shrugs the whole thing off. Fleming killed himself, and the family made a few alterations and are passing it off as an accident. The families of suicides have been ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... quagmire, bog, fen, marish. Associated Words: paludine, paludinous, paludism, paludose, palustrine, draco, muck, effluvium, malaria, miasma. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... bit. The miasma of depression seemed blown clean away by the horseplay of the elements. He had been within an ace of taking unwarranted liberties with Nature. Now she retaliated by taking liberties with him; and her buffeting proved ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... the concatenator, welded them into a solid chain, one and inseparable. When brother sought the life of brother and father that of son, Lincoln, the pacificator, advised peace with honor. When the nation was stupefied with the miasma of human slavery, Lincoln, the alleviator, broke its horrid spell by diffusing through the fire of war the ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... The heavy sick-sweet miasma hung like a cloud around him, drenching the room. With every breath it grew thicker. He searched the table top frantically, but there were no empty bottles. His head began to spin ...
— The Coffin Cure • Alan Edward Nourse
... never failed her—the letters from home. How eagerly she longed for them! How they lifted her out of her surroundings and chased away for a time the moral miasma that surrounded her and often seemed to choke her as if it were physical. Some one wrote about the Synod meetings. "It is easy to be good," she said, "with all the holy and helpful influences about you. Fancy a crowd ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... proclaim, but if it cannot be announced with certitude that Mrs. Grundy is no more, it may, at all events, be affirmed without hesitation that she is on her deathbed, and that surely, if slowly, she is breathing her last. Yes, that poisonous breath, which has so long pervaded like numbing miasma the free air of the world, will soon be out of her foolish, hypocritical old body; and though it may still linger on here and there in provincial backwoods and suburban fastnesses, from the great air centres of civilization it will ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... He gets it over as soon as he can. He says Ben has ordered dinner and stepped out and that Lon has stepped out to look for him but they'll both be back in a minute, so set down and order one before this new waiter is overcome by the tropic miasma. We do the same, and in comes Lon looking very excited in the dress suit he was married in ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... with humanity and attention to rules; but in Holland and Belgium was enacted the most terrible frightfulness in the world; over the whole land, mingled with the reek of candles carried in procession and of incense burnt to celebrate a massacre, brooded the sultry miasma of human blood and tears. On the one side flashed the savage sword of Alva and the pitiless flame of the inquisitor Tapper; on the other were arrayed, behind their dykes and walls, men resolved to win that freedom which alone can give ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... the timber he could, destroying all the whisky, turning the white liquor traders off Indian lands, and fighting as only a young, earnest and inspired man can fight. These hours and conditions began to tell on his physique. The marshes breathed their miasma into his blood—the dreaded fever had him in its claws. Lydia was a born nurse. She knew little of thermometers, of charts, of technical terms, but her ability and instincts in the sick-room were unerring; and, when her husband succumbed to a raging fever, love lent her hands an inspiration ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... A miasma of benzine and camphor exhaled from these groups. The clothes, only that morning taken out of pickle to be aired by the good wife, were pestilential. The stove-pipe hats were to match. Left to themselves on wardrobe ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... backed by a wretched wilderness, alternately swampy and sandy, is comfortless to an extent calculated to make the healthiest lose health. Moreover, its climate, says Professor Palmer (p. 222), is very malarious: "owing to the low and marshy nature of the ground, there is a great deal of miasma even in the winter season." Finally, and worst of all, it is near enough to Suez for infection to travel easily. A wealthy pilgrim has only to pay a few gold pieces, his escape to the mountains is winked at; and thence he travels or voyages comfortably to Suez and Cairo. Even without such ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... that the new elements of life and character which are being imperceptibly introduced into society demand changes and innovations. Society can not become stagnant, otherwise it runs the risk of becoming like stagnant water, which generates pestilential miasma. The theory that woman exists for the home alone has been a dead issue for some time past. Woman has quietly taken her place in public life and aids and directs man, even though he may not notice it and may not recognize her right to do so. In modern society, woman participates in the ...
— The Woman and the Right to Vote • Rafael Palma
... Colosseum are recommended by the poets, they are deprecated by the doctors. The historic atmosphere was there, certainly; but the historic atmosphere, scientifically considered, was no better than a villainous miasma. Winterbourne walked to the middle of the arena, to take a more general glance, intending thereafter to make a hasty retreat. The great cross in the center was covered with shadow; it was only as he drew near it that he made it out distinctly. Then he saw that two ...
— Daisy Miller • Henry James
... the surgeon, "the night air can do no service to George, or these ladies, and it is incumbent on us to remove them where they can find surgical attendance and refreshment. Here is nothing but smoking ruins and the miasma of the swamps." ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... changed— transformed. Men who have been the bond slaves of passion, whose daily lives have been the output of iniquity, whose deeds have been for destruction, whose words have been poison, and whose inmost thoughts have been as the vapors of miasma—these all—have been transformed into fountains of purity, into angels of mercy, or as illuminated missals have been written full of the name and the glory of God; men whose every fibre was as the coarse and tangled threads of a brutal unrefinement ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... stifling, the moisture being excessive, and the miasma rising from the putrid water poisoning my men in a disastrous way. The drinking-water, too, from that swamp was full of germs of all sizes, so big that with the naked eye you could see hundreds of them in your cup. We could not ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... for herself and her husband a happy union of a mutual understanding of weaknesses held in common. Were Echo to remain always on the heights and Jack in the valley, sooner or later a cloud would have separated them, a ghostly miasma rising from the grave of Dick Lane, whom Echo would have ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... ingratitude, and have done? The romantic land of roses was notoriously a blight to hopes. Why should he seek to thrive despite the mysterious curse that seemed to hover over all things like a deadly miasma? ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... than one instance, a single night of mental agony has wrecked a life. Grief, long-standing jealousy, constant care and corroding anxiety sometimes tend to develop insanity. Sick thoughts and discordant moods are the natural atmosphere of disease, and crime is engendered and thrives in the miasma of ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... republic. It needed courage of a rather droll kind to make such propositions in Greece, under the shadow of the Parthenon. And hand in hand with this feudalism in philosophy there began that unhealthy preoccupation with the morals of our fellow-creatures, that miasma of puritanism, which has infected life and literature up ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... has been a cold one. The Loire has overflowed the island, part of which remained under water four months, and the air was filled with fogs and miasma. Jack has had a bad cough, and has passed some weeks in the infirmary. Occasionally a letter has come for him, tender and loving when his mother wrote in secret, didactic and severe when the poet looked over her shoulder. The only news sent by his mother was, ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet |
