"Pestilence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with savage jests, with cries of "To the river!" The most cruel of cities had burst its bounds and was not to be stayed; nor would be stayed until the Seine ran red to the sea, and leagues below, in pleasant Normandy hamlets, men, for fear of the pestilence, pushed the corpses from the bridges with poles ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... Ill-government, a discontented nobility, and a feeble King, had brought England so low, that the troops could not shake off their dejection, and a hundred would flee before two or three Scottish soldiers. Bruce ravaged the northern counties every summer, leaving famine and pestilence behind him; but Edward II. had neither spirit nor resolution to make war or peace. The mediation of the Pope and King of France was ineffectual, and years of warfare passed on, impressing habits of perpetual license and robbery upon ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... on half time, and the men, women and children who operate them grow pinch-faced, lean and haggard, from insufficient nutriment, and are old and decrepit while yet in the bud of youth; the tenements are crowded to suffocation, breeding pestilence and death; while the wages paid to labor hardly serve to satisfy the exactions of the landlord—a monstrosity in the midst of civilization, whose very existence is a crying protest against our pretensions ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... consequent shutting up of more than half the houses. Thousands of men, women, and children had fled to Caney and other suburban villages to escape the bombardment, and the long rows of closed and empty houses in some of the streets suggested a city stricken by pestilence and abandoned. At the time when we landed there was not a shop or a store open in any part of Santiago. Here and there one might see a colored woman peering out through the grated window of a private house, or two or three naked children ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... their minds with other thoughts than the petty doings of neighbors. A What-to-do Club is one step toward higher village life. It is one step toward disinfecting a neighborhood of the poisonous gossip which floats like a pestilence around localities which ought to furnish the most desirable homes in ...
— The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking - Adapted to Domestic Use or Study in Classes • Helen Campbell
... just able to turn his eyes and gaze through the window near his cot at the trickle of river running by in the sands, at the straggling milk-bush of the Karoo beyond. He knew what the Karoo was now, even if he had not seen a Boer roll over like a rabbit, or heard the whine of flying bullets. This pestilence had sneaked on him before he had smelled powder. A thirsty day and a rash drink, or perhaps a tainted fruit—who knew? Not he, who had not even strength left to grudge the evil thing its victory—just enough to know that there were many lying here with him, that he was sore with frenzied ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... chapter of the Revelation of St. John the Divine.—And I looked and beheld a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the FOURTH part of the Earth to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with pestilence, and with the beasts of the Earth.—And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held; and white robes ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... her little hand with a variety of threatening gestures, suddenly made a rush at the knot of her enemies, and put them all to flight. She resembled, in her fierce pursuit of them, an infant pestilence—the scarlet fever, or some such half-fledged angel of judgment—whose mission was to punish the sins of the rising generation. She screamed and shouted, too, with a terrific volume of sound, which, doubtless, caused the hearts of the fugitives ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... one between his two brothers, rivalled both of them in vices. He hastened away as if he were being driven away by the senate into Macedonia, not as if he were prohibited from proceeding thither. What a storm, O ye immortal gods! what a conflagration! what a devastation! what a pestilence to Greece would that man have been, if incredible and godlike virtue had not checked the enterprise and audacity of that frantic man. What promptness was there in Brutus's conduct! what prudence! what valour! Although the rapidity of the movement of Caius Antonius also is not despicable; ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... the Lord, while the very air they breathe in this place is pestilence, in the gardens of Santa Maria degli Angeli we inhale the sweet scent of the laburnums. Come you with me to the House of the Poor Brethren, and you will ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... his very presence,—for the sun was his shechinah,—there enters an element of solemnity, which, in certain connections, is almost overwhelming: as, for instance, in the first book of the "Iliad,"—where, after the pestilence which has sent up an endless series of funeral pyres,—after the strife of heroes and the return of Chryseis to her father, the priest of the angry Apollo,—after the feast and the libation from the wine-crowned cups, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... forebodings I kept watch and ward Against the dreaded evil that must come; Of small avail, door locked or window barred, To keep the pestilence from hearth and home. The dreadful pestilence that walks by night, Stepping o'er barriers, an unwelcome guest, Came, and with scorching touch to sear and blight, Drew my fair child into her loathsome breast; ...
— Verses and Rhymes by the way • Nora Pembroke
... Beh-diang-khlam festival takes place annually at Jowai and elsewhere in the Jaintia Hills in the deep water moon month (u Jyllieu, or June). Khlam is the Khasi word for plague or pestilence and beh-dieng signifies to drive away with sticks. The festival may be described as follows:—The males rise betimes on the day fixed and beat the roof with sticks, calling upon the plague-demon to leave the house. ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... great scarcity of bread began to be felt. The animals, which they procured by the gun and the chase, were not sufficient to supply the wants of the settlers, and famine—actual famine—stared them in the face, and increased the violence of the pestilence. Many sank beneath the accumulated evils of hardship, privation, and sickness, and the number of the little settlement was sadly reduced during the inclement months of January ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... veil, and thinking that she must suffer here to expiate the fate of Dr. Grimshaw, who, scorpion-like, stung himself to death with the venom of his own bad passions. She is a Sister of Mercy, devoted to good works, and leaves her convent only in times of war, plague, pestilence or famine, to minister to the suffering. She nursed me through the yellow fever, when I lay in the hospital at New Orleans, but when I got well enough to recognize her she vanished—evaporated—made herself 'thin air,' and another ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... to Voltaire).... Prussian Lithuania is a Country a hundred and twenty miles long, by from sixty to forty broad; ["Miles ENGLISH," we always mean, UNLESS &c.] it was ravaged by Pestilence at the beginning of this Century; and they say three hundred thousand people died of disease and famine." Ravaged by Pestilence and the neglect of King Friedrich I.; till my Father, once his hands were free, made personal survey of it, and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... at that? Truly, I was never with her; but I know I shall speed: 'for t'other day she looked on me and laughed, and that's a good sign, ye know. And therefore, old Silver-top, never talk of charging or discharging: for I tell you, I am my father's heir; and if you discharge me, I'll discharge my pestilence at you: for to let my house before my lease be out, is cut-throatery; and to scrape for more rent, is poll-dennery;[143] and so fare you well, good grandsire Usury. Come, father, let's ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... thought," she said, "Sir Tom was alone. Lucy, my angel, my sweetest, do not come near me!" She recoiled to the door which Williams had just closed. "I will say what I have to say here. Dearest people, I love you, but you are charged with pestilence. My Lucy, how glad I am for your little boy—but every moment they tell me increases the danger. Where is Bice? Bice! I have ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... the Gorgon spirit of death by pause, freezing or turning to stone: both of the great divinities taking their glory from the evil they have conquered; both of them, when angry, taking to men the form of the evil which is their opposite—Apollo slaying by poisoned arrow, by pestilence; Athena by cold, the black ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... time, found on the site of the town, going to prove that the people were not wandering in their habits, but that instead, they occupied their time in farming, raising cattle and mining. The wild Indians may have murdered the inhabitants, and then destroyed the town; or, civil war and pestilence might have caused it to become deserted, when, as a natural result, it fell to decay. The most plausible theory to entertain is the former, as every old Mexican town of the north contains relics ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... taxation and the severe pressure of administrative regulations had caused a decline in wealth and population. Now disorder, incessant ravages of the barbarians, isolation from other lands, probably famine and pestilence, brought rapid decay to the prosperity and civilization of the country. Cities lost their trade, wealth, and population, and many of them ceased altogether for a time to exist. Britain was rapidly sinking again into a ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... stages and classes, and of society in all its forms, but as the only means of preserving our Constitution from its natural enemies, the spirit of sophistry, the spirit of party, the spirit of intrigue, the profligacy of corruption, and the pestilence of foreign influence, which is the angel of destruction to elective governments; if a love of equal laws, of justice, and humanity in the interior administration; if an inclination to improve agriculture, commerce, and manufacturers ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... tormented spirit, to bear it swiftly to the place where that last star ceased to shine, and to let it down into the restful depths of an unremembering eternity. But into that place, which is the soul of man, no destroyer can penetrate; that solitary life neither the sword, nor pestilence, nor age, nor eternity can extinguish; that immortal memory no night can obscure. There was a beginning indeed, but end ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... degrees among men. War, therefore, necessary to establish subordination, and to found cities, kingdoms, &c., as also to purge bodies politic of gross humours. Wise princes find it necessary to have wars abroad to keep peace at home. War, famine, and pestilence, the usual cures for corruption in bodies politic. A comparison of these three—the author is to write a panegyric on each of them. The greatest part of mankind loves war more than peace. They are but few ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... question on which they foresee there will be a difference of opinion.) From both of those classes of disputants, my dear Jefferson, keep aloof as you would from the infected subjects of yellow fever or pestilence. Consider yourself, when with them, as among the patients of Bedlam, needing medical more than moral counsel. Be a listener only, keep within yourself, and endeavor to establish with yourself the habit of silence, especially on politics. In the fevered ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... necessity, not to fail him.... You see him bending over the face of the river, talking to its spirit with proper incantations, asking it when it meets an enemy to upset his canoe and destroy him ... or, as I have myself seen in Congo Francaise, to take down with it, away from his village, the pestilence of the spotted death. ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... low—nothing save the most extreme disgust. If you are ambitious to be classed among the vilest and most ruffianly of your species, use such language; but if your ambition soars higher than this, avoid it as you would the pestilence. ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... Greek legend, ancestor of the Aeacidae, was the son of Zeus and Aegina, daughter of the river-god Asopus. His mother was carried off by Zeus to the island of Oenone, which was afterwards called by her name. The island having been depopulated by a pestilence, Zeus changed the ants upon it into human beings (Ovid, Met. vii. 520), who were called Myrmidones (murmekes ants) . Aeacus ruled over his people with such justice and impartiality that after his death he was made judge of the lower world together with Minos ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... was Sujin, a younger son of the Emperor Kaikwa. He reigned sixty-seven years and died at the age of one hundred and nineteen. It is narrated that during his reign a pestilence broke out which was so severe that the country was almost depopulated. The emperor was greatly disturbed by this calamity, and there appeared to him in the night a divine vision. The Great Deity, ...
— Japan • David Murray
... other side, Incensed with indignation, Satan stood Unterrified, and like a comet burned That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge In the arctic sky, and from his horrid hair Shakes pestilence and war." ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... thing that there is nothing in nature which has not been serviceable in taking His place; the stars, the heavens, earth, the elements, plants, cabbages, leeks, animals, insects, calves, serpents, fever, pestilence, war, famine, vices, adultery, incest. And since man has lost the true good, everything can appear equally good to him, even his own destruction, though so opposed to God, to reason, and to ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... the age. All this must have aged the heart of the old gateway, and especially the sad sight of the countless burials that took place in the year of the Plague, 1349, when fifty thousand were interred in the burial ground of the Carthusians, and few dared to attend the fair for fear of the pestilence. ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... returned in triumph from some dubious battle joined with a barbarian invader who threatened to trample all her cherished rights, and the institutions which are their safeguard, under his iron heel. Perhaps the Angel of Mercy had at length set again the seals upon some wide-wasting pestilence which had long been walking in darkness, with Terror going before her and Death following after. Or was it the desolating course of Famine that had been stayed, as it swept, gaunt and hungry, over the land, and consumed its inhabitants from off its face? Peradventure, the prayers of holy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... always." For when those who go ahead are darkened, they who follow are easily inclined to bear the burdens of sinners. Therefore priests must endeavor to cast off ignorance from them as if it were a sort of pestilence. For although, in a few instances, it is said that a slave is flogged who does not do his master's will through ignorance of that will, this is not, generally understood of all. For the Apostle says: "If any man be ignorant, let him be ignorant," which is to ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton
... draped in black, the sight of one was an unpleasant surprise: when I had to go under the black awning, I could not help remembering the cholera-scare some time earlier. I certainly felt I was taking part in a funeral procession during a pestilence. Karl assured me that every one felt the same at first, but that one soon got accustomed to it. Next came the long sail through the twists and turns of the Grand Canal. The impression that everything made on me here did not tend to dispel my melancholy frame of ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... explanation in regard to all classes of phenomena of which the laws have been fully ascertained; though some have not yet reached the point of referring all phenomena to the idea of Law, but believe that rain and sunshine, famine and pestilence, victory and defeat, death and life, are issues which the Creator does not leave to the operation of his general laws, but reserves to be decided by express acts of volition. M. Comte's theory is ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... by the pestilence of 1637 was much more severe than those periodical afflictions by which the Indians were visited. Virulent smallpox was a feature of the plague, and the pious offices of priests and the incantations of the medicine-men alike proved unavailing. Clearly, some black ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... fourteenth century. A generation after the Black Death, the commutation of villain services and the introduction of the leasehold system had made notable progress. The leasing of the demesne has been attributed to the direct influence of the pestilence, which by reducing the serf population made it impossible to secure enough villain labor to cultivate the lord's land. The substitution of money rents in place of the labor services owed by the villains has been ...
— The Enclosures in England - An Economic Reconstruction • Harriett Bradley
... banyan, and could take his ease after his meal in his own quarters. While that precious hour of taboo lasted, no wandering dragon or spirit of the air could hurt the holy tree, and no human assailant dare touch or approach it. Even the disease-making gods, who walk in the pestilence, could not blight or wither it. At all other times Tu-Kila-Kila mounted guard over his tree with a jealousy that fairly astonished Felix Thurstan's soul; for Felix Thurstan only dimly understood as yet how implicitly Tu-Kila-Kila's own life and office were bound up with the inviolability ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... justly censured by the greatest Criticks. I do not know any imaginary Person made use of in a more sublime manner of thinking than that in one of the Prophets, who describing God as descending from Heaven, and visiting the Sins of Mankind, adds that dreadful Circumstance, Before him went the Pestilence. [6] It is certain this imaginary Person might have been described in all her purple Spots. The Fever might have marched before her, Pain might have stood at her right Hand, Phrenzy on her Left, and Death in her Rear. She might have been introduced as gliding ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... in a dumb, despairing sort of way that all the foods you like are fattening, and all the advice you read and hear is that you must avoid them as a pestilence. And you settle down to your joyless fatness, realizing that it is beyond human strength to do that forever, and that you would rather die young and fat, anyway, than to have nothing to eat all your life but a little meat, fish, and sloshy vegetables. ...
— Diet and Health - With Key to the Calories • Lulu Hunt Peters
... pure air, the plague that walks unseen. The maize leaf and the maple bough but take, From thy strong heats, a deeper, glossier green. The mountain wind, that faints not in thy ray, Sweeps the blue steams of pestilence away. ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... bridal chamber, Death, Come to the mother, when she feels, For the first time, her first-born's breath; Come when the blessed seals That close the pestilence are broke, And crowded cities wail its stroke; Come in consumption's ghastly form, The earthquake shock, the ocean storm; Come when the heart beats high and warm, With banquet song and dance and wine,— And thou art terrible; ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... lawyer recalled Balzac's remark, "One, in order to succeed, must either cut one's way through life like a sword, or glide through the world quietly like a pestilence." ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... proves that the man who obstructs a war in which his nation is engaged, no matter whether right or wrong, occupies no enviable place in life or history. Better for him, individually, to advocate "war, pestilence, and famine," than to act as obstructionist to a war already begun. The history of the defeated rebel will be honorable hereafter, compared with that of the Northern man who aided him by conspiring against his government ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... pressed into the service as burying parties, and the English Embassy has received complaints from Englishmen of having been seized for this purpose. The smell of corpses in some places is offensively strong, and it is feared this hot weather following upon the heavy rain may breed a pestilence. ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy
... been supposed that we were eager to reach some port where friends and pleasure awaited us. But it was far otherwise. We were quitting England and our home, that spot which contains all a seaman holds most dear, and were bound for a land of pestilence and death, the little delectable coast of Africa, to be employed for the next three years in chasing, capturing, or destroying, to the best of our power and ability, all vessels engaged in the traffic of human flesh. We touched at the ...
— Tales of the Sea - And of our Jack Tars • W.H.G. Kingston
... continental Circe also spread her fascinations, and made the recreants forget their fathers and their country, as well as their mistresses? Surely, in that case Dr. Lloyd would have sent some qualified account of their temptation and fall. Had they all perished in some tremendous undertaking; had a pestilence swept them away; had they fallen into the hands of banditti, or perished silently, ensnared by the still more merciless machinations of regicide-informers? There was no form in which danger and death could appear, that did not present itself to the alarmed ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... remembrance of the two British knights who had spoiled him at Paris, hung over his imagination with the most frightful presages. Besides, he perceived that gaming was now managed in such a manner, as rendered skill and dexterity of no advantage. For the spirit of play having overspread the land, like a pestilence, raged to such a degree of madness and desperation, that the unhappy people who were infected, laid aside all thoughts of amusement, economy, or caution, and risked their fortunes upon issues equally extravagant, childish, ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... are tired of you—tired of bad harvests, ill-luck, sickness, and continued poverty. You are the cause of all our miseries,—and we have resolved you shall not stay among us. Go quickly,—take the blight and pestilence of your presence elsewhere! Go! ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... blow fell, and no second was needed. We are not told where the Assyrian army was, but clearly it was not before Jerusalem. Nor do we learn what was the instrument of destruction wielded by the 'angel of the Lord,' if there was any. The catastrophe may have been brought about by a pestilence, but however effected, it was 'the act of God,' the fulfilment of His promise, the making bare of His arm. 'By terrible things in righteousness' did He answer the prayer of Hezekiah, and give to all ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... potato crop in 1846—that calamity which revolutionized Ireland—not less than a million of people must have left its shores to try their fortunes this side the Atlantic. Between emigration and the ravages of famine and pestilence, we may calculate that the population of Ireland has diminished by at least a million and a half or two millions since the autumn of 1846. How long the emigration will continue, it is, of course, impossible to predict, as every new settler in America ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... place, the brother tells us of the opinions of Gualther, Bulhager, Erastus, Aretius. The question is of the examples of churches, not of the opinions of men. But what of the men? As for that pestilence that walketh in darkness through London and Westminster, Liastus' book against Beza, let him make of it what he can, it shall have an antidote by and by. In the meanwhile, he may take notice, that, in the close of the sixth book, Erastus casts down ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... the songs they sang together at the festivals, she in her sweet Quaker garb and demure Quaker beauty, he lithe, alert, and full of the joy of life and loving. As he sat so, thinking, he wondered where she was, and why he should be thinking of her now, facing the dreary sorrow of this pestilence and his own anger and vengeance. He nodded softly to the waving trees far down in the valley, for his thoughts had drifted on to his wife as he first saw her. She was standing bare-armed among the grape-vines by a wall of rock, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... by these special marks: first, you have learned, like Sir Proteus, to wreath your arms like a malcontent; to relish a love-song, like a robin redbreast; to walk alone, like one that had the pestilence; to sigh, like a school-boy that had lost his A B C; to weep, like a young wench that had buried her grandam; to fast, like one that takes diet; to watch, like one that fears robbing; to speak puling, like a beggar at Hallowmas. You were wont, when you laughed, to crow ...
— The Two Gentlemen of Verona • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... the light, and createth darknesse; Who maketh peace, and createth evill: He it is that hath given a charge to the Sword, so that it cannot be still: He it is that hath his other Arrows ready upon the string to shoot at us, the Pestilence ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... as zealous and as hasty as the Commons. The Bishop of Rochester said the scheme had been like a pestilence. The Duke of Wharton said the House ought to shew no respect of persons; that, for his part, he would give up the dearest friend he had, if he had been engaged in the project. The nation had been plundered in a most shameful and ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... from another source burst forth upon the inhabitants of the happy valley. A dreadful famine first broke out, during which it is said that slaves sold for four pice (three half-pence) each. The famine produced its natural result, a pestilence, which swept away many thousands of the people; an eclipse also added to their terror, and storms of rain followed by floods carried ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... fructiferous incarnation of the Son of God had reached the number of one thousand three hundred and forty-eight, when into the illustrious city of Florence, beautiful beyond every other in Italy, entered the death- fraught pestilence."—"Introduction to the Decameron". ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... restriction was waived in the next reign, as we find from the puritanical Prynne:—"There are none so much addicted to stage-playes, but when they goe unto places where they cannot have them, or when, as they are suppressed by publike authority, (as in times of pestilence, and in Lent, till now of late) can well subsist without them," &c. Histrio Mastix, 4to, Lond. ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... Bard, and guide his hand To drive this pestilence from out the land. E'en I—least thinking of a thoughtless throng, Just skilled to know the right and choose the wrong, 690 Freed at that age when Reason's shield is lost, To fight my course through ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... The city of Cashel had had much of its property alienated and long enjoyed by local magnates whom none were willing to offend. Doheny fought and defeated them and regained the purloined estates for the people. He was made Legal Adviser to the Borough of Cashel and when later the pestilence fell upon the place, and even the men employed to carry the sick to hospital lost courage and fled, Doheny showed the same manly example of citizenship and duty which years later forced him "on the Felon's ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... adopting its worst American abuses. But it will do no harm if Englishmen in general recognise that what is, it is to be hoped, still far from inevitable, was a short time ago impossible. If Great Britain must admit an influence which has, even though only incidentally, bred pestilence and corruption elsewhere, it might be well to take in time whatever sanitary and preventive measures may be available ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... heat. A French man-of-war was going out, homeward bound; she lay in the middle distance of the port, an ant heap for activity. In the night a schooner had come in, and now lay far out, hard by the passage; and the yellow flag, the emblem of pestilence, flew on her. From up the coast, a long procession of canoes headed round the point and towards the market, bright as a scarf with the many-coloured clothing of the natives and the piles of fruit. But not even the beauty and the welcome warmth of ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... us," said Dick—"certain. He held the clapper of his bell in one hand, saw ye? that it should not sound. Now may the saints aid and guide us, for I have no strength to combat pestilence!" ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... supporting different aspirants to his power; and we may be sure that Mantua had some share in the common quarrel. As I have found no explicit record of this period, I distribute to the city, as her portion of the calamities, at least two sieges, one capture and sack, and a decimation by famine and pestilence. We certainly read that, fifty years later, the Emperor Rudolph attacked it with his Hungarians, took it, pillaged it, and put great part of its people to the sword. During the siege, some pious ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... increased to a dozen, filling the enclosure. Then, just as doctors and nurses despaired of coping with it, the influx of wounded slackened and ceased, almost of a sudden. In the city nothing remained now but to bury the dead, and in haste, lest their corpses should breed pestilence. It was horribly practical; but every day, as she awoke, her first thought was for the set of the wind; her first fear that in the night it might have shifted, and might be blowing from the east across Lisbon. The wind, however, kept northerly, as though it had been ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... the evil times—and the wicked town in which Caterina Benincasa was born—as long ago as 1347. A pestilence swept away four-fifths of the populace. One man told how he had buried five of his sons in one trench. People said that the end of the ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... July and August were calamitous to the allied armies at Varna; not from battles, but from pestilence, which was fearful. On the 26th of August it was determined to re-embark the decimated troops, sail for the Crimea, and land at some place near Sebastopol. The capture of this fortress was now the objective point of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... quite perplexed as I read on, remarked, "The Bible is a very mysterious book." I read to him also the thirty-fourth chapter of Jeremiah, wherein the sad prophet of Israel records the denunciations by Jehovah of sword, pestilence, and famine against the Jews for not proclaiming liberty to their servants and handmaids. He had not known before that there were ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... I knew not after how many days forgotten in detail—after passing, each avoided as a pestilence, many cities prosperous in commerce—alongside the river port of the city of St. Louis, crowded with motley and misfit shipping of one sort or other, where our craft might moor without fear of exciting any suspicion, in spite of our ominous name; for I had the precaution to lower our flag ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... masked mystery—a walking tale of plague, woe, and desolation—a wandering, lonely, decayed gentlewoman: we read her history in her look, and in her walk. Her relations have all been smitten, swept away by the pestilence; her mind is made callous by utter misery; she wanders about careless, without any motive; a childish curiosity may be her pleasure, any incident to divert thoughts that make her sensible of her own bereavement. She stops to listen to the denunciations ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... first to assume the title of Grand Duke of all the Russias; and, acting in that capacity, he graciously confirmed the charter of Novgorod, for which he demanded and obtained payment. Simeon died in 1353 of the "black death," a pestilence which was ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... the oriental world have been mentioned as the probable locality of the first appearance of the plague or pestilence known as the "black death," but its origin is most generally referred to China, where, at all events, it raged violently about 1333, when it was accompanied at its outbreak by terrestrial and atmospheric phenomena of a destructive character, such as are said ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the low externals of humanity, this is doubtless a humane age. Let men, women, and children have bread; let them have if possible no blows, or, at least, as few as may be; let them also be decently clothed; and let the pestilence be kept out of their way. In venturing to call these low, I have done so in no contemptuous spirit; they are comparatively low if the body be lower than the mind. The humanity of the age is doubtless suited ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... silence, for they were holding none of the set services, but rather as it seemed doing the bishop's bidding, and praying with him in the best way for the ceasing of this new trouble, as in time of pestilence once I remembered that he made litanies for us. And Humbert himself knelt before the altar during that psalm, fully vested, but as in ...
— Wulfric the Weapon Thane • Charles W. Whistler
... Delcasse can do nothing—his hands are tied by the red tape of his position. There remains only Crochard! If I sit idle, if I fold my hands, within a month Germany will declare war and will sweep over France like a pestilence. Yesterday she struck the first blow; I tremble to think what the ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... moment, to this assembled group, entered Hannah, bearing in her hands a tray, on which was a cup of beef-tea for Lena. She was close to her little lady before she perceived the stranger, whom she would have shunned as she would a pestilence. The recognition was mutual, and to Hannah most unpleasant, and in the start it gave her she nearly dropped the ...
— Bessie Bradford's Prize • Joanna H. Mathews
... mother, were of dusky faces, of loose white raiment, of waving fans, of breezes perfumed with the sweet exhalations of sandal-wood, of gorgeous flowers and glowing fruit, of shady verandas, of gliding palanquins, and all the languid luxury of the South. The pestilence which has its natural home in India, but has journeyed so far from its birth place in these later years, took her father and mother away, suddenly, in the very freshness of their early maturity. A relation ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... in the Empire, and now and then a double ear of corn in the fields—a phenomenon which will be duly recorded in the Peking Gazette. But should there be anything like laxness or incapacity, or still worse, degradation and vice, then a comet may perhaps appear, a pestilence may rage, or a famine, to warn the erring ruler to give ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... admire in the works of Rembrandt, united to beautiful forms and an elevation of mind to which Rembrandt had no pretensions. The prophetical agitation of Tiresias and Juno, enveloped in clouds, hanging over the scene like a black pestilence, can never be too much admired, ...
— Rembrandt and His Works • John Burnet
... loathsome they were, and we knew that they owed their existence to, and fattened on, the putrid corpses of dead men and animals which lay rotting and unburied in every direction. The air was tainted with corruption, and the heat was intense. Can it, then, be wondered that pestilence increased daily in the camp, claiming its victims from every regiment, native as ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... clerks had died, and others had fled the pestilence, but Arthur and Guly still remained; the one, in order to gain enough to carry on his career of dissipation, the other, from a high sense of duty, which, though in the midst of danger, kept him faithful ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... ye rid me of this pestilence? By the beard of St Cuthbert, I will dispose of him, and ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.... Surely He shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler and from the noisome pestilence. He shall cover thee with His feathers, and under His wings shall thou trust.... Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day.... For He shall give His angels charge over thee to keep thee in ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... the other side the noise of the drums and the wild music grew louder and louder, interrupted from time to time by the piercing war-cries of the Abyssinians. When the enemy was within half a mile our men discharged a single volley: the front line of the enemy collapsed as if smitten by a blast of pestilence; their ranks wavered and had to be formed anew. No second shot was as yet fired by the Freelanders; but when the Abyssinians again pressed forward with wild cries, and now at a more rapid pace, there thundered a second volley; and as the death-seeking brown warriors this time stormed forward ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... Biscione, the blood-thirst of Gian Maria, the dark designs of Filippo and his secret vices, Francesco Sforza's treason, Galeazzo Maria's vanities and lusts; their tyrants' dread of thunder and the knife; their awful deaths by pestilence and the assassin's poignard; their selfishness, oppression, cruelty and fraud; the murders of their kinsmen; their labyrinthine plots and acts of broken faith;—all is tranquil now, and we can say to each what Bosola found for the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... alternative was so little to the taste of the Erewhonians, that the laws against killing animals were falling into desuetude, and would very likely have been repealed, but for the breaking out of a pestilence, which was ascribed by the priests and prophets of the day to the lawlessness of the people in the matter of eating forbidden flesh. On this, there was a reaction; stringent laws were passed, forbidding the use of meat in any form or shape, and permitting ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... forbidden buildings was, at length, enveloped in terror as in a shroud, and the plunderer himself was often scared away by the horrors his own depreciations had created; leaving the entire vast circuit of prohibited district to gloom, silence, pestilence, and death. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... but I was not so minded, and hurried down the gorge as fast as my snow-shoes would carry me. Then I remembered that the Indian population of the north had been reduced to a skeleton of its former numbers by the pestilence in 1780, and recalled that my Uncle Jack had said the native's superstitious dread of this disease knew no bounds. That recollection checked my sudden flight. If the Indians had such fear, why had this band camped within ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... in my mind for the next step which should be taken. Ordination I knew there could now be none. The pestilence of anger and shame and sin was upon us all. Dark horror sat upon the faces of the waiting congregation, their eyes still fixed on these two actors of this so sudden tragedy. It may have been that ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... few days a pestilence carried off the whole of their men-servants and maid-servants; and before long the sheep, horses, and cattle also perished. Robbers plundered their habitation, and despoiled them of every ornament; while he himself, together with his wife and sons, fled naked and in the deepest distress. But ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... than a year after their return from their grand expedition to the Texan prairies, the "old Colonel" had died. It was one of the worst years of that scourge of the South—the yellow fever—and to this dread pestilence he had fallen ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... neither person nor thing to be seen behind him. He turned back again to the woman. The woman had left him, under the influence of some sudden panic. She was hurrying away from him—running, old as she was—flying the sight of him, as if the sight of him was the pestilence. ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... further building within a given distance from the City walls. Country gentlemen receive peremptory orders to reside on their estates, and not to visit London except by licence; for the authorities are afraid lest the influx of visitors should cause famine and pestilence. There is no drainage; for every householder pours his slops into the street, with a warning shout, that the passengers below may run out of the way. There are few watches, and fewer carriages; no cabs, no police, no post-office; no potatoes, tea, coffee, newspapers, brown paper, copper ...
— For the Master's Sake - A Story of the Days of Queen Mary • Emily Sarah Holt
... that this had been her first airing from the herald's office,-and wished her nothing worse, than that it might also be the last. I assure you, that but for gaining the freedom of her house, I would fly her as I would plague, pestilence, and famine. Mrs. Selwyn, indeed, afforded some relief from this formality, but the unbounded ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... do I, but I think they refer to the march of pestilence or plague. Numbers, colour, race, nothing matters, the plague sweeps all away. Ah, then, I was right," he added. "There is the story ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... contract”—should he forget that so inwoven is human life that truth spoken at the wrong moment may be a greater mischief-worker than error—he may, if conscientious, have to remember that forgetfulness of his during the remainder of his days. He who thinks that truth may not be sometimes as mischievous as a pestilence knows but little of this mysterious and wonderful net of human life. But if this is so with regard to truth, how much more is it so with regard to mere matter of fact? Fact-worship, document-worship, is at once the crowning folly and the crowning vice of ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... our daily bread, Let us be duly clothed and fed, And keep thou from our homes afar Famine and pestilence and war, That we may live in godly peace, Unvexed by ...
— The Hymns of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... and the very shining of its eyes is supposed to represent the fiery element whence it is thought to have proceeded. Flying into their apartments in an evening, it at times extinguishes the light, foretelling war, pestilence, famine, and death to man and beast. * * * This insect has been thought to be peculiarly gifted in having a voice and squeaking like a mouse when handled or disturbed; but, in truth, no insect that we know of has the requisite ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 541, Saturday, April 7, 1832 • Various
... cities from the greatest to the least occupied in watching for the most favorable moment for falling upon and pillaging their neighbors; sieges terminated by unspeakable atrocities, and after all this, famine, speedily followed by pestilence to complete the devastation. Then let us picture to ourselves the rich Benedictine abbeys, veritable fortresses set upon the hill-tops, whence they seemed to command all the surrounding plains. There was nothing surprising in their prosperity. Shielded by their inviolability, they were in ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... but never so full and hearty as when bidding a friend welcome. The speaker, Richard Burton, is a living proof that intense work, mental and physical, sojourn in torrid and frozen climes, danger from dagger and from pestilence, 'age' a person of good sound constitution far less than may ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... its tendency to promote the interests of society; yet a man has but a bad grace, who delivers a theory, however true, which, he must confess, leads to a practice dangerous and pernicious. Why rake into those corners of nature which spread a nuisance all around? Why dig up the pestilence from the pit in which it is buried? The ingenuity of your researches may be admired, but your systems will be detested; and mankind will agree, if they cannot refute them, to sink them, at least, in eternal silence and oblivion. Truths which are pernicious ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... A terror of icy chill O'er-shivered my being from hand to brain, Freezing the blood in each pulsing vein, As I followed this most mysterious guide Through the solid floor at the chancel side, Into a passage whose stifling breath Reeked with the pestilence of death. Down through a subterranean vault, Over broken steps with never a halt, Till we stood in the midst of a spacious room, A charnel-house in its shroud of gloom. Only a window, narrow and small, Left in the build of the heavy wall, Through which ...
— Debris - Selections from Poems • Madge Morris
... the lower classes. So great was the misery of the common people in medieval Europe that for them it seemed not a hardship, but rather a relief, to leave their homes in order to better themselves abroad. Famine and pestilence, poverty and oppression, drove them to emigrate ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... the fact that upon their shoulders rests the responsibility of having a healthier nation. Too many people are dying of avoidable diseases. Rich foods have taken more toll of life than war and pestilence, dietitians tell us. More and more stress is being placed upon diet—not for the sick only, but for those in good health, that they may preserve it. By diet we mean the proper combinations of foods ...
— American Cookery - November, 1921 • Various
... Pestilence and famine contributed to fill up the measure of the calamities of Rome. [25] The first could be only imputed to the just indignation of the gods; but a monopoly of corn, supported by the riches and power of the minister, was ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... the campaign until the greater part of Northern Greece submitted to their authority, and peace was declared in 1696. During the Venetian occupation of Greece through the ravages of war, oppressive taxation, and pestilence, the Greek inhabitants decreased from 300,000 ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... breastplate, which, judging from the numerous dents thereon, had turned the force of many a savage thrust and blow. The face of the man was one which had long been exposed to both sun and storm, and even pestilence had not spared it, for in many places the disfiguring finger of smallpox had left its mark. His beard was worn in the style favored by the soldiers of the Spanish, rather than the English army, for it was pointed and surmounted by a long, black and up-curling moustache, which added ...
— The Fifth of November - A Romance of the Stuarts • Charles S. Bentley
... companies were formed; hundreds of superb structures sprang up monthly; people who had been beggars but a few months before rode in carriages and bestowed gold by handfuls on whoever came first. The wind or some mysterious agency which no one could explain brought this financial pestilence to Pesth, where it raged until the Krach—the Crash, as the Germans very properly call it—came. After the extraordinary activity which had prevailed there came gloom and stagnation; but at last, as in America, business in Pesth and in Hungary generally is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... of his birth was long remembered as one of the hardest ever experienced in Denmark. The country's unsuccessful participation in the Thirty Year's War had brought on a depression that threatened its very existence as a nation; and a terrible pestilence followed by new wars increased and prolonged the general misery, making the years of Kingo's childhood and youth one of the darkest periods in ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... came to an end. Haldane of necessity had been much away, and he welcomed the cool and quiet evening; and yet he knew that with the shadow of night, though so grateful after the glare and heat to which he had been subjected, the fatal pestilence approached the nearer, as if to strike a deadlier blow. As the pioneer forefathers of the city had shut their doors and windows at nightfall, lest their savage and lurking foes should send a fatal arrow from some dusky covert, so now again, with the ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... talk, swagger, an air of presumed superiority and affectation of "knowing the whole thing," browbeat and ride rough-shod over all their fellows. It is in the want of that wholesome corrective, public opinion, that this pestilence is possible. Of public opinion the Continent knows next to nothing in any shape; and yet it is by the unwritten judgments of such a tribunal that society is guided in England, and the same law that discourages the bully supports and encourages the timid, without ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... swallowed of it a mouthful. I feel it in me. The sin be upon thy head, Alfred Stevens—why did you not tell me, before I drank, that it was the soul's poison?—the poison that slays more than the sword or the pestilence;—the liquor of the devil, distilled in the vessels of sin—and sent among men for the destruction of the soul! I feel it now within me, and it burns—it burns like the fires of damnation. Is there no water nigh that I may quench my thirst?—Show ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... evil, or sin; and penal evil, or the punishment of sin. Looking at the context, it is perfectly clear that the prophet has reference to the last-mentioned. The people had broken God's laws, and were punished by God for their misdeeds. It might take the form of pestilence or famine, but whatever was its shape, it was a messenger from God. He sent it because the people had done wrong. This interpretation is in harmony with the usage of the word, ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... several wars in Africa, and he took advantage of this to besiege Gibraltar. He was some months over the business, and the garrison were nearly starved out; when pestilence broke out in the Spanish camp, by which the king and many of his soldiers ...
— Held Fast For England - A Tale of the Siege of Gibraltar (1779-83) • G. A. Henty
... phantom of the past; so many things had happened since the old times when he had loved her. He had crossed the Indian Ocean and the China Sea; he had seen long stretches of interminable coast-line; he had beheld misery, and glory, and all the painful scenes that wait on warfare; he had seen pestilence, and death in every shape, and all this had wrought in him a sort of stoicism, the result of long acquaintance with solitude and danger. He remembered his old love as a flower he had once admired as he passed it, a treacherous ...
— Jacqueline, Complete • (Mme. Blanc) Th. Bentzon
... I bid you to this truth; let those who are in captivity contradict you as much as they will, God will come and oppose their pride. Ye proud, however, if you do not turn about and become better, then will the sword and the pestilence fall upon you; with famine and war will Italy be turned upside down. I foretell you this because I am sure of it: if I were not, I would not mention it. Open your eyes as Balaam opened his eyes when the angel said to him: "Had it not been ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume I - Basil to Calvin • Various
... under His protection will find repose in the mercy of the Omnipotent One. He will cover thee with His wings. Under their shelter thou wilt be in safety. His truth will be thy shield, thou wilt fear neither the arrows that fly by night; nor the pestilence that wastes by day! I cannot express how deeply I am moved and how grateful I am ...
— Marie Bashkirtseff (From Childhood to Girlhood) • Marie Bashkirtseff
... depend upon getting them quickly buried. We have no such custom of cutting off heads, in our country, but that is no affair of mine. But the bodies now lie in what is, in fact, a grave; and a few hours' labour would be the means of saving the town from a pestilence, later on. ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty
... that a pestilence fell on the city, Presaged by wondrous signs, and mostly by flocks of wild pigeons, Darkening the sun in their flight, with naught in their craws but an acorn. And, as the tides of the sea arise in the month of September, Flooding ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... that the black cloud which sometimes produces, besides famine, contagious fevers and pestilence, like that which in 1799 depopulated the cities and country of Barbary, is led by a king ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... found one vast coating of almost unbroken forest overspreading it from shore to prairie. To make room for civilization, that forest must go. What were Indians, however deadly,—what starvation, however imminent,—what pestilence, however lurking,—to a solid obstacle like this? No mere courage could cope with it, no mere subtlety, no mere skill, no Yankee ingenuity, no labor-saving machine with head for hands; but only firm, unwearying, bodily muscle to every stroke. Tree by tree, in two centuries, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... seemed given over to destruction. It is hard to say whether the provinces suffered more from the inroads of barbarians who ravaged them almost at their will, or from the exactions of a mutinous soldiery who set up an emperor for almost every army; yet both calamities were surpassed by the horrors of a pestilence which swept away the larger part of mankind. There was little hope in an effete polytheism, still less in a corrupt and desponding society. The emperors could not even make head against their foreign ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... It's one of the tunes that are always being born somewhere in the Empire. They run like a pestilence for six months or a year, till another one pleases the Legions, and then they ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... bore four niches, two at each side of the center and upper windows, and these contained time worn statues of the noble counts of Alost. On the wall below was a tablet bearing the inscription "Ni Espoir, Ni Craint," and this I was told referred either to the many sieges which the town suffered, or a pestilence which depopulated the whole region. A huge gilt clock face shone below the upper gallery, at each corner of which sprang a ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... or a bit o' food for th' mother; when they hear of folk lying down to die i' th' streets, or hiding their want i' some hole o' a cellar till death come to set 'em free; and when they hear o' all this plague, pestilence, and famine, they'll surely do somewhat wiser for us than we can guess at now. Howe'er, I han no objection, if so be there's an opening, to speak up for what yo say; anyhow, I'll do my best, and yo see now, if better times don't come after ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... their strength, not in their starvation. Look around this island of yours, and see what you have to do in it. The sea roars against your harbourless cliffs—you have to build the breakwater, and dig the port of refuge; the unclean pestilence ravins in your streets—you have to bring the full stream from the hills, and to send the free winds through the thoroughfare; the famine blanches your lips and eats away your flesh—you have to dig the moor and dry the marsh, to bid the morass give forth ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... imagination as fiery as his native Desert, and an intellect as luminous as his native sky, he wanted, like that land, those softening dews without which the soil is barren, and the sunbeam as often a messenger of pestilence as an angel ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... papers, records, and accounts would from that moment be lost. Government being unable to collect the taxes, and failing to maintain its authority, the hand of violence and rapine would go uncontrolled. In every large town famine would be proclaimed, pestilence and death following in its train." {240a} Great allowance should be made for a first work, and I admit that much interesting matter is found in Mr. Darwin's journal; still, it was hardly to be expected that the ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... the hereditary system injures directly; its crime lies in what it engenders—the pestilence of snobbery, which poisons nearly all who come into contact with it, titled and untitled, frocked and unfrocked, washed and unwashed. The very servants create a comic-opera set of rules for their below-stairs ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... antenatal dream. It is an isle 'twixt heaven, air, earth, and sea, Cradled, and hung in clear tranquillity; Bright as that wandering Eden, Lucifer, Washed by the soft blue oceans of young air. It is a favoured place. Famine or Blight, Pestilence, War, and Earthquake, never light Upon its mountain-peaks; blind vultures, they Sail onward far upon their fatal way. The winged storms, chanting their thunder-psalm To other lands, leave azure chasms of calm Over this isle, or ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... ingeniously diversified. Some were decapitated, others hung; still others were drowned in the waters of the Loire.[835] The streets of Amboise ran with blood, and the stench of the unburied corpses threatened a pestilence. Ten or twelve dead bodies, in full clothing and tied to a single pole, floated down from time to time toward the sea, and carried tidings of the wholesale massacre to the cities on the lower Loire. Neither trial nor ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... separations of human life upon which nationalist emotion depends. The old tradition insists upon its ancient blood-letting of war; the new knowledge carries that war to undreamt of levels of destruction. The ancient system needed an unrestricted breeding to meet the normal waste of life through war, pestilence, and a multitude of hitherto unpreventable diseases. The new knowledge sweeps away the venerable checks of pestilence and disease, and confronts us with the congestions and explosive dangers of an over-populated world. The old tradition demands a special prolific class doomed to ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... beginning of the spring equinox famine and pestilence together fell upon the inhabitants of the city. There was still, it is true, some grain for the soldiers, though no other kind of provisions, but the grain-supply of the rest of the Romans had been exhausted, ...
— Procopius - History of the Wars, Books V. and VI. • Procopius
... gods (and their irony was pestilence; Pain was in their mockery, affliction in their scorn. The ryotwari cried On a stricken countryside, For the scab fell on the sheepfold and the mildew on ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... a sun-god whom from his throne in the fires of the Lord of Day, gave life to men, or slew them if he willed with his thunderbolts of drought and pestilence and storm. He was no gentle king of heaven, but one who demanded blood-sacrifice from his worshippers, yes, even that of maids and children. So it came about that the people of Kor, who saw their virgins slain and eaten by the priests of Rezu, and their infants burned to ashes in ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... no romancer's dream. It is a succinct account of a superstition, which to this day survives in the east of Europe, where little more than a century ago it was frightfully prevalent. At that epoch, vampyrism spread like, an epidemic pestilence through Servia and Wallachia, causing innumerable deaths, and disturbing all the land with apprehension of the mysterious visitation, against which no one felt ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... past, will waft the soul into a felicity which forgets its pain,—than it may be under the sterner, and to many not unwise minds, more probable, apprehension, that 'what a man soweth that shall he also reap'—or others reap,—when he, the living seed of pestilence, walketh no more in darkness, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... the character of the pestilence, the warden's wife fled with her little children to her mother's home in a neighboring county; maternal solicitude having extinguished her womanly reluctance to desert her husband, at a juncture when ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... has made use of the moon to get rid of its immense amount of garbage and sewage. It would soon breed a pestilence, and the city be like the buried cities of old; but the moon comes to its aid, and carries away and buries all this foul breeder of a pestilence, and washes all the harbor and bay with clean floods of water twice a day. Good moon! It ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... naught came of it. There are always men and women with disordered minds, who think that they are prophets, and have power to see further into the future than other people, but no one minds them or thinks aught of their wild words save at a time like the present, when there is a danger of war or pestilence. You remember Bill ...
— When London Burned • G. A. Henty
... their youth in the flattering light of distance. The life was neither enjoyable nor wholesome. The rank woods were full of malaria, and singular epidemics from time to time ravaged the settlements. In the autumn of 1818 the little community of Pigeon Creek was almost exterminated by a frightful pestilence called the milk-sickness, or, in the dialect of the country, "the milk-sick." It is a mysterious disease which has been the theme of endless wrangling among Western physicians, and the difficulty of ascertaining anything about it has been greatly increased ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... go in and have lunch alone. I simply can't," I confessed to the young man whose society I had intended to avoid like a pestilence. "You see, I—I never—this is the ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... great a multitude; and because, although lacking the further light and aid of the faith, it is maintained with such peace and quiet, so much wealth, happiness, and plenty, that never since its foundation, so far as is known, has it suffered war, pestilence, or famine, in the main body of the realm, although there are wars on the Tartar frontiers. If that government were destroyed, they must suffer all these evils, wherefore they should be kept under that or a similar government. To appreciate the importance of this, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume VI, 1583-1588 • Emma Helen Blair
... thought that he had done all that his duty required. On the morrow he asked for a truce of forty-eight hours in order that the hundreds of corpses which choked the ditches and which would soon have spread pestilence among both the besiegers and the besieged might be removed and interred. His request was granted; and, before the time expired, he intimated that he was disposed to capitulate. He would, he said, deliver up the castle in ten days, if he were not relieved sooner. He was informed that the allies ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... share of the changeful fortunes of England, and, like our motherland, it has risen strongly out of them all. War's mad havoc has swept over it in many a troubled period of our history. Plague, pestilence, and famine have afflicted it sorely; and it has suffered from trade riots, "plug-drawings," panics, and strikes of most disastrous kinds. Proud Preston—the town of the Stanleys and the Hoghtons, and of "many a crest ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... find our tender here which we had so long given up for lost. Never was social affection more eminently pourtrayed than in the meeting of these poor fellows; and from excess of joy, and a recital of their mutual sufferings, from pestilence, famine, and shipwreck, a flood of tears filled every ...
— Voyage of H.M.S. Pandora - Despatched to Arrest the Mutineers of the 'Bounty' in the - South Seas, 1790-1791 • Edward Edwards
... Khania what happened if there was a bad season. She replied grimly that famine happened, in which thousands of people perished, and that after the famine came pestilence. These famines were periodical, and were it not for them, she added, the people would long ago have been driven to kill each other like hungry rats, since having no outlet and increasing so rapidly, the land, large as it was, could not ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... those who survived the hunger and the pestilence of that pilgrimage had reached Russian soil, it is probable that in all Armenia there was not a man of their race left alive, nor a woman either unless she had accepted Islamism and the life of the harem. A peaceful and ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... to the introduction of objects not properly belonging to the series. It is distorted or defective vision. The terrified traveller sees a highwayman in what is really a sign-post in the twilight; and in the twilight of knowledge, the terrified philosopher sees a Pestilence foreshadowed ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... before these same rumors had come up from the south, and the Red Terror had followed. The horror of it still remained with the forest people; for a thousand unmarked graves, shunned like a pestilence, and scattered from the lower waters of James Bay to the lake country of the Athabasca, gave evidence of ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... buildings in Cuzco, caused rivers to change their courses, destroyed towns, and was followed by the outbreak of a disastrous epidemic. The chiefs were obliged to give up their plans, although in healthy Tampu-tocco there was no pestilence. Their kingdom became more and more crowded. Every available square yard of arable land was terraced and cultivated. The men were intelligent, well organized, and accustomed to discipline, but they could not raise enough food for their families; so, about 1300 A.D., they were forced to ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... Rotterdam, I have noticed a filthy ditch, from four to ten feet wide, between the house and the road. It is nearly filled with water, which is covered with a vile green scum. The wonder is, that this stagnant water does not breed a pestilence. ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... through ignorance, fallen into practices that have arrested your physical growth and development in any of your organs or parts, shun all such unscientific and worse than worthless contrivances as you would shun a pestilence. No matter how plausible the web of arguments woven to entrap you, be assured, they are the utterance of knaves who care not what false hopes they encourage so they ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... in her passionate dreams, And dim forebodings of thy loveliness, Haunting the human heart, have there entwined 305 Those rooted hopes, that the proud Power of Evil Shall not for ever on this fairest world Shake pestilence and war, or that his slaves With blasphemy for prayer, and human blood For sacrifice, before his shrine for ever 310 In adoration bend, or Erebus With all its banded fiends shall not uprise To overwhelm in envy and revenge ...
— The Daemon of the World • Percy Bysshe Shelley |
