"Purblind" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... my head: on the contrary, not even a Friend will know of it except yourself, Mr. Norton, and Aldis Wright: the latter of whom would not be of the party but that he happened to be here when I was too purblind to correct the few Proofs, and very kindly did so for me. As for Mr. Norton (America), he it was for whom it was printed at all—at his wish, he knowing the MS. had been lying by me unfinisht for years. It is a Version of the two OEdipus Plays of Sophocles united as two ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... ears as should always be closed against poetry, there is no music in verse which has not in it sufficient fulness and ripeness of meaning, sufficient adequacy of emotion or of thought, to abide the analysis of any other than the purblind scrutiny of prepossession or the squint-eyed inspection ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... purblind prank, O think you, Friend with the musing eye Who watch us stepping by, With doubt and dolorous sigh? Can much pondering so hoodwink you? Is it a purblind prank, O think you, Friend with the ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... glorious and beneficent career, at the age of fifty-five (57?), Caesar, whose frank and fearless spirit disdained suspicion or precaution, was assassinated by a knot of rancorous, perfidious aristocrats, whom he had pardoned and promoted. Their purblind spite was powerless to avert the inevitable advent of monocracy. What they did effectually extinguish for more than a century, was the possibility of amnesty, conciliation, and mutual confidence. Careless as usual of historical truth, the great English poet ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... manufacture to turn out goods expressly made with a view to wearing as short a time as possible, so as to need the speedier renewal. They taught their very machines to be dishonest, and corrupted steel and brass. Even the purblind people of that day recognized the vanity of the pretended reductions in price by the epithet 'cheap and nasty,' with which they characterized cheapened goods. All this class of reductions, it is plain, cost the consumer ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... in the twilight undergrowth of a forest of nut-bearing trees a number of little purblind creatures wandered, singing for nuts. On some of these purblind creatures the nuts fell heavy and full, extremely indigestible, and were quickly swallowed; on others they fell light, and contained nothing, because the kernel had already been eaten up above, and these light and kernel-less ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... landau rolled on; then it came to a halt under the broad porte cochere of the Villa Irma, and two minutes after that Cleek and the Count stood in the presence of Madame Tcharnovetski, her purblind associate, ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... in the Well where blushing hides the shrinking and Naked Truth, I have dived, and dared to fetch ensnared this Fragment of tested Sooth; And one of the purblind Race of Men peered with a curious Eye Over the Curb as I fetched it forth, and besought me to drop that Lie: But all ye who long for Certitude, and who yearn for the Ultimate Fact, Who know the Truth and in spite of Ruth tear piecemeal the Inexact, Come list to my Lay that I sing to-day, ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... love! I that have been love's whip I A very beadle to a humorous sigh!— A domineering pedant o'er the boy,— This whimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy, This senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid, Regent of love-rhymes, lord of folded arms, The anointed sovereign of sighs ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... hand, there are those who take a different view of human nature, and who find in its contemplation a source of humility rather than of pride. They remind us how weak, how ignorant, how short-lived is the individual, how infirm of purpose, how purblind of vision, how subject to pain and suffering, to diseases that torture the body and wreck the mind. They say that if the few short years of his life are not wasted in idleness and vice, they are spent for the most part in a perpetually ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... three, But made a careless, slouching bow, And said, "Your highness will allow, That I am personable, tall, A rather handsome face withal, And fit to serve as volunteer, At least as any present here! Purblind, and deaf, and long and short, Without distinction here resort; Whilst I, neglected and forgot, Sate daily watching in my cot; And scarcely stirr'd, for fear there might, Arrive that morning or that night A captaincy, ...
— Vignettes in Verse • Matilda Betham
... printed Document, emanating, as it were, from a vile, mean, and ignorant miscreant of the name of ———, calumniating and vituperating me; it is evidently the production of a vain, supercilious, disappointed, frantic, purblind maniac of the name of ———, a bedlamite to all intents and purposes, a demon in the disguise of virtue, and a herald of hell in the paradise of innocence, possessing neither principle, honor, nor honesty; a vain and vapid ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... engines of oppression; toil as he may the ryot is never free from debt. The current rates of interest leave no profit from agriculture or trade. Twelve to 18 per cent. is charged for loans on ample landed security; and ordinary cultivators are mulcted in 40 to 60. A haunting fear of civil discord, and purblind conservatism in the commercial castes, are responsible for the dearth of capital. India imports bullion amounting to L25,000,000 a year, to the great detriment of European credit, and nine-tenths of it is hoarded ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... place at which we were was called Rhyd y fen, or the ford across the fen; that it was just half way between Festiniog and Bala, that the clergyman of the parish was called Mr Pughe, a good kind of man, but very purblind in a spiritual sense; and finally that there was no safe religion in the world, save that of the Calvinistic-Methodists, to ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... plunged into the back of her hut, the Epeira certainly cannot see her web. Even if she had good sight, instead of being purblind, her position could not possibly allow her to keep the prey in view. Does she give up hunting during this period, of bright sunlight? Not at ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... first of their liaison, when they made their love in that same room under the very nose of a purblind husband. ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... poor old man, should live to have the joy—what a stupid blockhead was I that I did not at a glance—oh, gracious powers! And you are really come back, and the dear old master is underground, and here you are again! What a purblind dolt I was, to be sure! (striking his forehead) that I did not on the instant—Oh, dear me!—-who could have dreamt it—What I have so often prayed for with tears—Oh, mercy me! There he stands again, as large as ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... all about that!' said Daddy, impatiently, adding in a mincing voice, '"I will not love; if I do hang me; i' faith I will not." No, my pretty dear, not till the "wimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy" comes this road—oh, no, not till next time! ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... it seems to our purblind eyes that so many girls should be married before they are women! The woman comes at length, and finds she is forestalled—that the prostrate and mutilated Dagon of a girl's divinity is all that is left her to do the best with she can! But, thank God, in the faithfully ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... but oddly enough these wonderful tales made no such impression on his fancy as the stories in a wretchedly inferior book made. He did not know the name of this book, or who wrote it; from which I imagine that much of his reading was of the purblind sort that ignorant grown-up people do, without any sort of literary vision. He read this book perpetually, when he was not reading his "Greek and Roman Mythology;" and then suddenly, one day, as happens in childhood with so many things, it vanished out of his ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... sufficiently finite for us to say: It was on such a day I made my decision; to such and such an event I can look back as the cause of all that has followed. The How thereof remains traceable to our purblind eyes for a month, a term of years, one generation, possibly two; the Where and When can generally be defined; but the Why we ask blindly, and ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... from Loki's right-hand came the flash of the fruitful ring, And at last spake Reidmar scowling: 'Ye wait for my yea-saying That your feet may go free on the earth, and the fear of my toils may be done That then ye may say in your laughter: The fools of the time agone! The purblind eyes of the Dwarf-kind! they have gotten the garnered sheaf And have let their Masters depart with the Seed of Gold and of Grief: O Loki, friend of Allfather, cast down Andvari's ring, Or the world shall yet turn backward and the high heavens lack ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... simple letter, which, to her excited imagination, merely confirmed the warning of her dream. At the date of its writing her mother had been sick in bed, with the symptoms of a serious illness. She had no nurse but a purblind old woman. Three days of progressive illness had evidently been quite sufficient to reduce her parent to the condition indicated by the third dream. The thought that her mother might die without the presence of any one who loved her pierced Rena's heart like a knife and lent wings to her ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... secrets of his soul to coarsefibred woman. He turned away, darkly conscious of having magnanimously given Ada a chance to mount with him into the upper air, which opportunity she, daughter of earth, had, in her purblind manner, refused. Thenceforward Ada was to him an unnoticeable item ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... And spears of the Morning; Sifting the nations, The slag from the metal, The waste and the weak From the fit and the strong; Fighting the brute, The abysmal Fecundity; Checking the gross, Multitudinous blunders, The groping, the purblind Excesses in service Of the Womb universal, The absolute drudge; Firing the charactry Carved on the World, The miraculous gem In the seal-ring that burns On the hand of the Master - Yea! and authority Flames through ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... deeply her beloved had sinned against the truth he owed her. They say that Love is blind, and so he may be at first. But when once his trust is shaken the bandage falls, and the purblind boy is turned into a many-eyed, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... men. Yea, and will Fortune pick out, now and then, The noblest for the anvil of her blows; Great names are few, and yet, indeed, who knows What greater souls have fallen 'neath the stroke Of careless fate? Purblind are most of folk, The happy are the masters of the earth Which ever give small heed to hapless worth; So goes the world, and this we needs must bear Like eld and death: yet there were some men there Who drank in silence to the memory Of those who failed on earth great men to be, Though ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... had prompted him to a vast desire to acquit himself of some terrible deed of readjustment, just what, he could not say, some terrifying martyrdom, some awe-inspiring immolation, consummate, incisive, conclusive. He fancied himself to be fired with the purblind, mistaken heroism of the anarchist, hurling his victim to destruction with full knowledge that the catastrophe shall sweep him also into ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... that preceded this proposed expedition, he went into one of the boxes at the playhouse, as usual, to show himself to the ladies; and reconnoitring the company through a glass (for no other reason but because it was fashionable to be purblind), perceived his mistress very plainly dressed, in one of the seats above the stage, talking to another young woman of a very homely appearance. Though his heart beat the alarm with the utmost impatience at sight of his Emilia, he was for some ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... But though they are ignorant of the artificial contexture of the least insect, they vaunt however, and brag that they know all things, when indeed they are unable to construe the mechanism of their own body: nay, when they are so purblind as not to be able to see a stone's cast before them, yet they shall be as sharp-sighted as possible in spying-out ideas, universals separate forms, first matters, quiddities, formalities, and a hundred such like niceties, so diminutively small, that were ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... the man whose eyes are red and weeping with the effects of intemperate drinking, we cordially pity purblind students, as in some sense martyrs to the cause of learning. Dr. Reynolds, a distinguished American oculist, administers a rebuke to such which we fear is too often merited: "A closer examination of their history presents a very different result. Our sympathy may grow cool if we regard ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... were gone. Coquettishly she plied all her wiles to captivate poor Pommer anew. His pulses hammered, his senses were aflame; but he remained master of himself, and sternly he resolved to sever these equivocal relations with a woman whom he could no longer respect. The weak, purblind man had been steeled against further temptation by seeing a few hours ago the abyss yawning at his feet, in which an illicit love had threatened to engulf him forever. The image of his mother, noble type of womanhood, rose before his mind, and ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... its youth, it had leisure to treasure its recollections; even to pause and look back; to see what flower of a fair thought, what fruit of a noble art, it might have overlooked or left down-trodden. But now it is so old, and is so tired; it is purblind, and heavy of foot; it does not notice what it destroys; it desires rest and can find none; nothing can matter greatly to it; its dead are so many that it cannot count them; and being thus worn and dulled with age, and suffocated under the weight of its innumerable memories, it is ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... woe, all calamity and disappointment, all shame and guilt. In Christ there come forward to meet her, love, hope, truth, light, salvation. In Simon are acted out doting conservatism, mean expediency, purblind calculation, carnal insensibility. Generosity in this scene is confronted with meanness, in the attempt to shelter misfortune. The woman is a tragedy herself, such as Aeschylus never dreamed of. The scourging Furies, dread Fate, and burning Hell ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... groaned, "it is hard to have to play second fiddle to this purblind old Scotchman." Alaric Hobbs had been a reporter upon that dainty sheet, The New York Whorl, in one of his "emergent" periods, and so he writhed in agony at being left at the post. "I must be content to tap old Fraser when he comes back from London with that embarrassing lump of ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... all there was, all there was! I could see him in the years to come ranging alone the fields that were sweet and the horizons that lifted for him, and ever returning to pace the common dusty mortal road by the side of a purblind wife. On general principles, as a case to point at, it would be a conspicuous pity. Nor would it lack the aspect of a particular, a personal misfortune. Dacres was occupied in quite the natural normal degree with his charming self; he would pass his misery on, and ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... a sign metaphysical, mystical, and esoteric. For, as to the last—it denoted that the task of the spectacles was over; that, when a philosopher has made up his mind to marry, it is better henceforth to be short-sighted—nay, even somewhat purblind—than to be always scrutinizing the domestic felicity to which he is about to resign himself, through a pair of cold, unillusory barnacles. And for the things beyond the hearth, if he cannot see without spectacles, is he not about to ally to his ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... missed her every moment; and, interested as were her regrets, they were not unmingled with some faint self-reproach when she remembered how lightly she had prized her services. The antiquated femme de chambre had never appeared so clumsy, purblind, and stupid; and the more her stately mistress chided her, the more bewildered Bettina became, the ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... if we allow ourselves to suppose that because that age knew less than ours, because its bounds were narrower and the undispelled clouds lower down, it therefore thought itself feeble and purblind. By contrast with the strenuous hurry-push of modern life such movement as we can see, looking backwards, seems slow and uncertain of its aim; before the power of modern armaments how helpless all the might of Rome! It is easy to fall into the idea that our mediaeval ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... foot the purblind hare, Mark the poor wretch; to overshoot his troubles, How he outruns the wind, and with what care, He cranks and crosses with a thousand doubles; The many musits through the which he goes Are like a labyrinth to ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... which might once have been supposed to be lost forever in the woods of America, but thrown upon the bosom of Nature, the breath of God revived it, and the world hath gathered its fruits. Even Ireland has contributed her share to the liberties of America; and while purblind statesmen were happy to get rid of the stubborn Presbyterians of the North, they little thought that they were serving a good cause in another quarter.—Yes! the Volunteers of Ireland still live—they live across the Atlantic. Let this ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... row of gentlemen along the streets Suspended may illuminate mankind, As also bonfires made of country seats; But the old way is best for the purblind: The other looks like phosphorus on sheets, A sort of ignis fatuus to the mind, Which, though 't is certain to perplex and frighten, Must burn more ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... passed through the Great Hall. This circumstance, together with what I saw that afternoon in every street, convinced me how much our friends were dispirited, and I therefore resolved next day to raise their courage. I knew the First President to be purblind, and such men greedily swallow every new fact which confirms them in their first impression. I knew likewise the Cardinal to be a man that supposed everybody had a back door. The only way of dealing with men of that stamp is to make them believe ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... evils recurred. Sculptors obtained high prices—the art became a trade—schools arose which professed to sell the holy spirit of art for money; pupils flocked from far and near to buy it, in the hopes of selling it later on, and were struck purblind as a punishment for the sin of those who sent them. Before long a second iconoclastic fury would infallibly have followed, but for the prescience of a statesman who succeeded in passing an Act to the effect that no statue ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... recondite, is found in 'Coriolanus' (II. i. 59-60) where Menenius asks the tribunes in the First Folio version 'what harm can your besom conspectuities [i.e. vision or eyes] glean out of this character?' Theobald replaced the meaningless epithet 'besom' by 'bisson' (i.e. purblind), a recognised Elizabethan word which Shakespeare had already employed in ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... knowledge? Confounded it shrivels at Wisdom laid bare! Have I forethought? how purblind, how blank, to the ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... conspicuous, and I was, alas the day! too true a prophet. His attachment to his cousin, who, on the death of her mother, had become an inmate of Don Picador's house, had been evident to all but the purblind old man for a long time; and when he did discover it, he imperatively forbade all intercourse between them, as, forsooth, he had projected a richer match for him, and shut Maria up in a corner of his large mansion, Federico, haughty and proud, could not stomach this. He ceased ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... with the evident view of marking the distinction between its duly artificial forms of speech and the duly natural forms of speech passing between the spectators, is but one among innumerable indications which only a purblind perversity of prepossession can overlook of the especial store set by Shakespeare himself on this favourite work, and the exceptional pains taken by him to preserve it for aftertime in such fullness of finished form as might make it worthiest of profound and perpetual ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... oppressed by the ghastliness of their abode. They sang their Beranger, and they pledged each other in cheap Bordeaux, and clinked their glasses noisily in their boisterous good-fellowship, and ate the messes compounded for them in a darksome cupboard, known as the kitchen, by old Nanon the cook, purblind, stone-deaf, and all but imbecile, and popularly supposed to be the venerable mother of Madame Magnotte. The youngsters grumbled to each other about the messes when they were unusually mysterious; and it must ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... so amiable and brave a man as Villeneuve because he proceeded out of Cadiz against orders and suffered a crushing defeat! It is quite permissible for a French admiral to put authority at defiance if doing so complies with the sentiments of anti-Napoleon writers, who were either ill-informed, purblind critics or eaten up with insincerity or moral malaria! But it is the maintenance of discipline to have men like Sir John Byng court-martialled and shot after being tried, it is said, by a not entirely impartial court, on the supposition ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... least charitable of worlds. Why, sir, in any case your game in Edinburgh is up. The public is dog-tired of you and your ascensions, as any observant child in to-day's crowd could have told you. The truth was there staring you in the face; and next time even your purblind vanity must recognise it. Consider; I offered you two hundred guineas for the convenience of your balloon. I now double that offer on condition that I become its owner during this trip, and that you manipulate it as I wish. Here are the notes; and out ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that I was not responsible for the crass and purblind idiocy of railway officials, I ignored this expression of ingratitude and ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... me! how purblind you are, you old fellows of the days of Saturn! Why, Zeus is poor, and I will clearly prove it to you. In the Olympic games, which he founded, and to which he convokes the whole of Greece every four years, why does he only crown ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... surrendered not as conquered, but as reclaimed. Lincoln went further. He found a Confederate legislature ready-made to his hand, and promptly permitted it to repair the situation. In thus mingling the gray with the blue he was neither color-blind nor purblind. He knew what he was doing. He desired to blend them, as emblematic of a more perfect Union. Possibly the Confederate legislature suited ...
— Memorial Addresses on the Life and Character of William H. F. Lee (A Representative from Virginia) • Various
... our Heavenly Father shown How sharp and bitter is the smart When sudden on the purblind heart The ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... new appearance with bated breath, and even the purblind committee of the Camels had to alter their views. They no longer denied the supernatural nature of the manifestations, but, with a strange misunderstanding of Mr. Blows's desires, attributed his restlessness to dissatisfaction with the projected tombstone, and, having plenty of funds, ...
— Odd Craft, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... blithesome voice, "marry, my good friend Master Martin, you are a rich and a prosperous man, but the best of all the blessings which the good Lord has given you is your lovely daughter Rose. If the hearts of old gentlemen like us who sit in the Town Council are so stirred that we cannot turn away our purblind eyes from the dear child, who can find fault with the young folks if they stop and stand like blocks of wood, or as if spell-bound, when they meet your daughter in the street, or see her at church, though we have a word of blame for our clerical ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... entremet, or a melodrama for a ragout; or the wit and waggery of a farce, sweet and soft-flowing like a petit-verre, to finish the repast. They go, and between the acts try to count the wax and gas, the feet, and foot lights till they are purblind; they return home and dream of Desdemona, sing themselves to sleep with the notes of the last song, are haunted with the odd physiognomy of Liston, and repeat the farce-laugh till the dream is broken. Next day it is mighty pleasant to read how many ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 360 - Vol. XIII. No. 360, Saturday, March 14, 1829 • Various
... and chin with a broad linen cravat, and he wore a loose damask powdering-gown secured by a cord round the waist. As he advanced he carried his masterful nose high in the air, but his head turned slowly from side to side in the helpless manner of the purblind, and he called in a high, querulous voice for ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and Sweden under the union had been guaranteed by the Constitution of 1814; but, as a matter of fact, the former kingdom is by all the world looked upon as a dependency, if not a province, of the latter. The Bernadottes, lacking comprehension of the Norwegian character, had shown themselves purblind as bats in their dealings with Norway. They had mistaken a perfectly legitimate desire for self-government for a demonstration of hostility to Sweden and the royal house; and instead of identifying themselves with ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... taken away Onwee's war-club too, if he could have carried it; but although he was twice the size and girth of Onwee, he had not the strength to lift it; so he borrowed a club from an old chief, who was purblind, and mistook Ko-ko for his brother who was a brave man; and raising a terrible tumult with his voice, and a great dust with his heels, ...
— The Indian Fairy Book - From the Original Legends • Cornelius Mathews
... done is wise and right? Unquestionably not. That what he has done may be wise and right, could we see his whole scheme of things, no careful thinker will deny; but to suppose it can be shown that he has done this, is an instance of purblind fanaticism which is most startling in a work on Theism. "The best world, we may be assured, that our fancies can feign, would in reality be far inferior to the world God has made, whatever imperfections we may think we see in it." Are we leading a sermon on the datum "God is love"? ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... from me. Bargain with him presently, upon as good conditions as you can procure, so you have direct motion from the Marquis to let him have it. Seem not to dive into the secret of it, though you are purblind if you see not through it. I have told Mr. Meautys how I would wish your Lordship now to make an end of it. From him I beseech you take it, and from me only the advice to perform it. If you part not speedily with it, you may defer the good which is approaching ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... far-darting nature this one, like an Apollo clad in sunbeams and in lightnings (after his sort); and with a back which all the world could not succeed in breaking!—Yes, if, by most rare chance, this were indeed a new man of genius, born into the purblind rotting Century, in the acknowledged rank of a king there,—man of genius, that is to say, man of originality and veracity; capable of seeing with his eyes, and incapable of not believing ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... of this terrific Truth! Another of the many shapes in which it started up about him, out of vacancy. This man, of all men in the world, a spy upon him; this man, changing his identity; casting off his shrinking, purblind, unobservant character, and springing up into a watchful enemy! The dead man might have come out of his grave, and not confounded and appalled ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... leaving growths of lies unpruned, 750 Nor see more danger in it—you retort. Your taste's worth mine; but my taste proves more wise When we consider that the steadfast hold On the extreme end of the chain of faith Gives all the advantage, makes the difference With the rough purblind mass we seek to rule: We are their lords, or they are free of us, Justas we tighten or relax our hold. So, other matters equal, we'll revert To the first problem—which, if solved my way 760 And thrown into the balance, turns the scale— How ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... there very long, I should have become purblind, and that would have been a great misfortune, for I have heard men say that a stone-blind horse was safer to drive than one which had imperfect sight, as it generally makes them very timid. However, I escaped without ...
— Black Beauty • Anna Sewell
... coole loues burning thirst, Yet ere she went (yet as she went) she hide, She had a care to decke her vp in pride, Respecting more his loue to whom she went, Then parents feare, though knowing to be shent, And trickt her selfe so like a willing louer, As purblind Cupid ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... time we live in is ophthalmia of intellect, affecting the higher classes. Monarchs, stone-blind, have tumbled headlong from their thrones, and princes have been conducted by their subjects out of their principalities. The aristocracy are purblind, and cannot distinctly decipher the "signs of the times." The hierarchy cannot discover why people would have religion at a reduced price: in fact, they are all blind, and will not perceive that an enormous mass, ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... calmly. "What do you suppose our Divine Master was about during the years between His appearance among the Rabbis of the Temple and the commencement of His public preaching? Do you, can you, imagine with the rest of the purblind world, that he would have left His marvellous Gospel in the charge of a few fishermen ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... emphasising or the softening, of his opinions, I do not think that he ever said anything but what he sincerely thought. The problem, therefore, is to discover and define, if possible, the critical standpoint of a man whose judgment was at once so acute and so purblind; who could write the admirable surveys of English poetry contained in the essays on Mme. de Stael and Campbell, and yet be guilty of the stuff (we thank him for the word) about the dancing daffodils; who could talk of "the splendid ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... true war begin. Yet all this may be but the prelude. When the war of weapons has been buried in its own ashes, another war may begin, the war of minds—the struggle of mighty nations, the battle of an ambition of which our purblind age has not even a glimpse—a terrible strife, yet worthy of the immortal principle of man, and to be rewarded only by a victory which shall throw all the exploits of soldiership into ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... Orleans boys such an hour of glory as this at Champion's Hill. For two years more, by the waning light of a doomed cause, they fought on, won fame and honor; but for blazing splendor—of daring, skill, fortitude, loss and achievement which this purblind world still sees plainest in fraternal slaughter—that was the mightiest hour, the mightiest ten minutes, ever spent, from 'Sixty-one to 'Sixty-five, by ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... this dear woman and the many others who are wasting their time and eyesight over fashions which perish could only be reached and aroused by the influence of the lovely old English stitchery of our great period! If only the purblind authorities and custodians of our National collections could awaken to the infinite possibilities which they hold, once again "Opus Anglicum" might rule the world, and the labour of even one woman's life might be of lasting value. It is useless to refer to the many schools ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... he at the back of his head to utter concerning woman? Did he leave her to be implicitly dealt with by Charles Darwin in his "Theory of Sexual Selection"? Or did he in the good old oriental way regard her as unimportant in the eyes of the Deity? If the latter, he was a purblind prophet and missed the very ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... characteristic moods of minds and men? "Fools, do you know anything of this mystery?" says Swift, stamping on a grave and carrying his scorn for mankind actually beyond it. "Miserable, purblind wretches, how dare you to pretend to comprehend the Inscrutable, and how can your dim eyes pierce the unfathomable depths of yonder boundless heaven?" Addison, in a much kinder language and gentler voice, utters much the ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... vnderstanding Pate but thine? For thy Conceit is soaking, will draw in More then the common Blocks. Not noted, is't, But of the finer Natures? by some Seueralls Of Head-peece extraordinarie? Lower Messes Perchance are to this Businesse purblind? say ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... is to tell whether a girl will make an industrious woman? How is the purblind lover especially, to be able to ascertain whether she, whose smiles and dimples and bewitching lips have half bereft him of his senses; how is he to be able to judge, from any thing that he can see, whether the beloved object will be industrious or lazy? Why, it is very ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... under our noses, what force remained in the dilemma—creation or nothing? It was obvious that hereafter the probability would be immensely greater, that the links of natural causation were hidden from our purblind eyes, than that natural causation should be incompetent to produce all the phenomena of nature. The only rational course for those who had no other object than the attainment of truth was to accept "Darwinism" as a working hypothesis and see what could be made of it. Either ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... sister, Lady Lyttelton, were "the beautiful Miss Glynnes." Robert Lowe, not yet Lord Sherbrooke, was a celebrity who might often be seen in Society,—a noteworthy figure with his ruddy face, snow-white hair, and purblind gaze. The first Lord Lytton—Bulwer-Lytton, the novelist—was dead before I came to London; but his brilliant son, "Owen Meredith," in the intervals of official employment abroad, was an interesting ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... us as the study of the contrast between "what was" and "what ought to have been," though such studies are inevitably mingled with regrets. We have every reason to regret that the Reformation was so hasty and ill-considered, and that the Papacy was as purblind as it was arrogant. The plant of the Roman Church machinery, which it had taken centuries to lay down, came into the hands of men who grossly ignored its function and the conditions of its working. They used its power ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... taught by the Rising Sun Detective Agency's Correspondence School of Detecting. For three hours the old man wandered the streets. Now he walked along Main Street, peering anxiously into the faces of the pedestrians, with purblind eyes, and now walking the residence streets. Detective Gubb kept ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... once on Pisgah purg'd was the sight Of a son of Circumcision, So may be, on this Pisgah height, Bob's purblind mental vision— Nay, Bobby's mouth may be opened yet, Till for eloquence you hail him, And swear that he has the angel met That met the ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... represented. Hence no occupation, no property qualification, could or did protect him. As early as 1705 old Justice, in his treatise on sea law, deplores bitterly the "barbarous custom of pressing promiscuously landsmen and seamen," and declares that the gang, in its purblind zeal, "hurried away tradesmen from their houses, 'prentices and journeymen from their masters' shops, and even housekeepers (householders) too." By 1744 the practice had become confirmed. In that year Capt. Innes, of His Majesty's armed sloop the ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... will thank me for not putting any such ideas in his head, but having kept him the pure and innocent lad that he is." I need not say that it was the one chapter that would have put the boy on his guard. Oh, befooled and purblind father! I happened to know that the school to which the boy was sent was swept at that time by a moral epidemic, and before that hapless lad had been a week in its corrupt atmosphere he would have had ideas put into his head with a vengeance. His father had handed ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... Galilee eighteen hundred years ago. Knowles, with his heated brain, fancied that the silence without in the night grew deeper, that the slow-moving air stopped in its course to listen. Perhaps the simple story carried a deeper meaning to these brooding mountains and this solemn sky than to the purblind hearts within. It was a dim, far-off story to them,—very far off. The old schoolmaster heard it with a lowered head, with the proud obedience with which a cavalier would receive his leader's orders. Was not the leader a knight, the knight of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... before Christ was crucified, before Moses was born, began the terrible and pathetic attempt of a predamned people to raise their heads and walk erect. The first lifting of purblind eyes destined never to see even ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... same as when she went to meet Owen at Berkeley Square, and in a strange lucidity of mind, she asked herself if it were not true that we are never more than mere machines set in motion by a master hand, predestined to certain courses, purblind creatures who do not perceive their own helplessness, except in rare moments of heightened consciousness. As if to convince herself on this point, she strove to raise her hand to open the trap in the roof of the hansom, and her fear ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... break in the cliffs half a mile ahead and slowly crossed the sands to the edge of the surf, the line of which he began, after a pause, to follow as slowly northwards. His back was turned thus upon the Collector's equipage, to which in crossing the beach he had given no attention, being old and purblind. ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... curiously enough as it seems to purblind law-loving man,—should the favored one be openly convicted, that alters not one whit his ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... searched in the presence of that important functionary, a meagre old captain of invalids, who had been roused from his bed, and was evidently half asleep. I stoutly denied my being "the criminal who had offended the majesty of the people." But as the governor himself, on gazing at me with his purblind eyes, was perfectly satisfied of my identity, there was no use in contesting the point. A couple of sentinels were placed at the door of my cell, and I was left, like himself, to my slumbers. Before the door closed, I grasped my guide by the throat. The thought that I had been entrapped, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... is a statement in many books that this is a reminiscence of the theme in the Finale of the Ninth Symphony. How such a legend started it is difficult to say; it must be due to what the late W.F. Apthorp called "purblind criticism." For my part I see a resemblance in only one measure—save that both melodies are in quadruple rhythm—between the theme of ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... weakened by loss of rest and sleep now, her tired mind would be dazed and drowsy on the morrow, and in ill condition to stand out against persuasions, threats, and the sight of the stake, and also be purblind to traps and snares which it would be swift to detect when in its ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... higher scale," as they say in the Courts. It is curious that, when I explain to my creditors this most promising source of prospective income, they don't seem to see it! But creditors always were a purblind ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 18, 1893 • Various
... Booth's observation had suspicion given him the least hint to remark; but this, indeed, is the great optic-glass helping us to discern plainly almost all that passes in the minds of others, without some use of which nothing is more purblind than human nature. ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... it so often that he really does behave it," said Solomon, laughing. "But what seems curious is, that it is always Madge—purblind old woman, as wants to be thought a witch—as sees these things—drowned sailors, and Flying Dutchmen, and so forth. I should like to know who else has ever ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... trusteth not in the Supreme Wisdom of the Enlightened One, clinging unto his own purblind knowledge, must suffer by fire ...
— Buddhist Psalms • Shinran Shonin
... be near rocks—an unpleasant complication in a hurried dive. There would, probably, very soon be boats out too, seeking with a machine-gun or pompom for a chance at your occasionally emergent conning-tower. In no way can a submarine be more than purblind, it will be, in fact, practically blind. Given a derelict ironclad on a still night within sight of land, a carefully handled submarine might succeed in groping its way to it and destroying it; but then it would be much better to attack such a vessel and capture it boldly with a few desperate ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... 307)—this habit the Burneys did not as yet know—'became completely absorbed in silent rumination; very unexpectedly, however, he shewed himself alive to what surrounded him, by one of those singular starts of vision, that made him seem at times, though purblind to things in common, gifted with an eye of instinct for espying any action that he thought merited reprehension; for all at once, looking fixedly on Mr. Greville, who without much self-denial, the night being very cold, kept his station before the chimney-piece, he exclaimed:—"If it were ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... we went nearer to the gate, to take a peep at the follies of the palace of Love, the purblind king; it is a place easy to enter and difficult to escape from, and in it there is a prodigious number of chambers. In the hall opposite to the door was insane Cupid, with his two arrows upon his bow, shooting tormenting poison, which ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... not be ashamed to hear what any man might have to preach to them, unless he preached false doctrine; in which case, let the bishop silence him. So spoke our friend; vainly; for human ends must be attained by human means. But the dean saw a ray of hope out of those purblind old eyes of his. Yes, let them tell the bishop how distasteful to them was this Mr. Slope: a new bishop just come to his seat could not wish to insult his clergy while the gloss was yet fresh on ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... to have seen that old man listening! His ears must have grown before my purblind eyes! But his story was an extraordinarily interesting and circumstantial effort. And to come back to your question, it did fit in with the theory of a fatal accident on your boy's part; he was frightened to show his face at school after ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... beckons and the others are hastening, urged by the deep voice of benevolent powers, these pass by, not hearing; and, vouchsafed no advice or warning but that of their intellect, the very wise old guide whose purblind eyes see only the tiny paths at the foot of the mountain, they go astray in a world that human reason has not yet understood. These men have surely the right to exclaim against destiny; and yet not on the grounds that they would prefer. They have the right to ask why it has withheld ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... on, are alike surprising to him. He says: "Catharine's Generals were unacquainted with the first elements of Castrametation and Tactic; but the Generals of the Sultan had a still more prodigious depth of ignorance; so that to form a correct idea of this War, you must figure a set of purblind people, who, by constantly beating a set of altogether blind, end by gaining over them a complete mastery." [OEuvres de Frederic, vi. 23, 24.] This, as Friedrich knows, is what Austria cannot suffer; this is what will involve Austria and Russia, and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... a slick and easy deduction from present circumstances. Even in France I do not think things will move as lucidly and generously as that. There will be a conflict everywhere between wisdom and cunning, between the eyes of youth and the purblind, ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... O purblind race of miserable men, How many among us at this very hour Do forge a life-long trouble for ourselves, By taking true for false, or false for true; Here, through the feeble twilight of this world Groping, how many, until we pass and reach That other, ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... I can trust my eyes; I am purblind, or you are white marble; you were quarried, I take it, from Pentelicus, turned by Praxiteles's fancy into Aphrodite, and ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... In teaching the brown bees that careful lore, And frugal ants, whose millions would have end, But they lay up for need a timely store, And travail with the seasons evermore; Whereas Great Mammoth long hath pass'd away, And none but I can tell what hide he wore; Whilst purblind men, the creatures of a day, In riddling wonder his ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... supercilious frown, The strange reserve, the proud, affected state Of upstart knaves grown rich, and fools grown great. No more that abject wretch[93] disturbs my rest, Who meanly overlooks a friend distress'd. 90 Purblind to poverty, the worldling goes, And scarce sees rags an inch beyond his nose; But from a crowd can single out his Grace, And cringe and creep to fools who strut in lace. Whether those classic regions are survey'd Where we in earliest youth ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... mettle in them? have they not in them power to loose the bands of nature, and to harden the soul against sorrow? flow they not, think you, from faith of the finest sort, and are they not bred in the bosom of a truly mortified soul? are these the effects of a purblind spirit? are they not rather the fruits of an eagle-eyed confidence? O these desires! they are peculiar to the righteous; they are none others but the desires ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... moving onwards in a restless, purblind state, should open her eyes wide, should give herself fair-play, by accepting our coals, iron, and machinery, and, under the stimulus of a wholesome competition, should take to manufacturing upon a large scale, even these three millions of ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... thorns nor briers, with no evil insects nor any beasts save the gentle breed of llamas they had lugged and thrust and followed up the beds of the shrunken rivers in the gorges up which they had come. The seeing had become purblind so gradually that they scarcely noticed their loss. They guided the sightless youngsters hither and thither until they knew the whole valley marvellously, and when at last sight died out among them the race lived on. They had even time to adapt themselves to the blind control of fire, which they ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... like treating a symptom without getting at the root of the disease. Prophylactic treatment is clearly indicated. The boy who flings mud and stones is entering his protest in his own way against the purblind policy that gave him jails for schools and the gutter for a playground; that gave him dummies for laws and the tenement for a home. He is demanding his rights, of which he has been cheated,—the right to his childhood, the right to ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... displays very exactly the bent of his temperament. During the whole of his long career Mr. Hardy has not budged an inch from his original line of direction. He holds that, abandoned by God, treated with scorn by Nature, man lies helpless at the mercy of "those purblind Doomsters," accident, chance, and time, from whom he has had to endure injury and insult from the cradle to the grave. This is stating the Hardy doctrine in its extreme form, but it is not stating it too strongly. This has been called ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... with a parti-colored green and blue roof, an orange standard, and red supports. Yet these are no fancy pictures I have painted, and if the child places the tablets in this fashion, they are often allowed so to remain without criticism from the purblind kindergartner. She even sometimes dictates, herself, extravagant and vulgar combinations of color, such as a violet centre-piece with green corners ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Still Peking remained purblind. During the month of January the splendour of the dream empire, which was already dissolving into thin air, filled the newspapers. It was reported that an Imperial Edict printed on Yellow Paper announcing the enthronement was ready for universal distribution: ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... Lady Yarmouth was called, and sent for Princess Amelia; but they only told the latter that the King was ill and wanted her. She had been confined for some days with a rheumatism, but hurried down, ran into the room without farther notice, and saw her father extended on the bed. She is very purblind, and more than a little deaf They had not closed his eyes: she bent down close to his face, and concluded he spoke to her, though she could not hear him-guess what a shock when she found the truth. She wrote to the Prince of Wales—but so had one of the valets de chambre ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... veterans, but, in great part, the very rawest of recruits. The enemy's officers and soldiers were not inferior to his own; their leaders were at least equal in capacity to Colli, Beaulieu, and Alvinzi, and the statesmen who directed them were not more purblind than the Aulic Council. Moreover, Jackson was merely the commander of a detached force, which might at any moment be required at Richmond. The risks which Napoleon freely accepted he could not afford. He dared ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... being made a Field Marshal, and glory not so much an object as a good salary"; in another (A Grand Military Spectacle) we find the heroes of the campaign engaged in inspecting the Field Marshals, a pair of decrepid, purblind, old men seated in arm chairs; in the third we recognise the amiable Prince Consort, who was most unjustly suspected in those days of a desire to interfere in the administration of our military matters—it would be moonshine to term it military system, ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... Kate cried fiercely. "I understand, and I tell you they're all mad. Hopelessly mad." She laughed wildly. "Disaster? Oh, blind, blind, fools. There'll be disaster, sure enough. The old Indian curse will be fulfilled. Oh, Helen, I could weep for the purblind skepticism of this wretched people, this consequential old fool, Mrs. Day. And I—I am the idiot who has ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... to do in such a land where favouritism and backstair influence win the day over even the merits of a Schubert? Supposing you were a second Beethoven, what could you do in that land without faith or hope? that land which is like a disappointed, churlish, and aged man with tottering feet and purblind eyes, who has long ago exhausted all enjoyment and sees nothing new under the sun. The world is wide—faith is yet extant—and the teachings of Christ are true. 'Believe and live; doubt and die!' That ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... size had by this time become enormous, so that when he had first entered the Tower it was jestingly said that the doors must be enlarged to receive him. He could neither walk nor ride, as he was almost helpless; he was deaf, purblind, eighty years of age, ignorant of English law, and it was therefore not a matter of surprise that the high-born tribes, who thronged to his trial, were disappointed in the brilliancy of his parts, and in the readiness of his wit. "I see little of parts ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... I believe this purblind policy of delaying the expedition instead of freely aiding it had much to do with the result. Virginia did her part with some degree of willingness, but Pennsylvania, whence the general expected to draw a great part of his transport and provision, would do nothing. ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... actual causes of the deluge. Now, it is certainly true, that the Bible does describe things as they appear to men. It is, however, beginning to be discovered, that these popular appearances are closely connected with philosophical reality. Our purblind astronomy and prattling geology may be as inadequate to expound the mysteries of the Bible philosophy as was the incoherent science of Strabo and Ptolemy. The experience of another planet, now transacting before our eyes, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... recognition as a specially effective apostle of the new dispensation. Abraham himself entertained his angel no more unawares than we, but gleams of fine radiance sometimes broke through even to our purblind perceptions. Once unfurling a quite too long and heedless pair of ears to what I supposed would be a dull technical deliverance, I found myself suddenly ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... takes one stride onward nearer home. Believe me, 'tis the mass of men He loves; And, where there is most sorrow and most want, Where the high heart of man is trodden down The most, 'tis not because He hides his face From them in wrath, as purblind teachers prate: Not so: there most is He, for there is He Most needed. Men who seek for Fate abroad 140 Are not so near his heart as they who dare Frankly to face her where she faces them, On their own threshold, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... experiment of consulting the police came to an untimely end. The one result obtained was the expression of purblind opinion by the authorities of the detective department which pointed to Isabel, or to one of the servants, as the undiscovered thief. Thinking the matter over in the retirement of his own office—and not forgetting his ...
— My Lady's Money • Wilkie Collins
... knew him well, were fixed for all time. He was here described as one who had 'mounted to the highest heights, closely akin to all that we esteem'; and posterity was besought to give him that which life had denied. Henceforth it was possible only for purblind partisanship to think otherwise than nobly of a man concerning whom a Goethe could say such ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... of Florence was not a little harassed in its peace and its comfort, if not in its wisdom and its power, by the unneighborly and unmannerly conduct of the people of Arezzo. These intolerant and intolerable folk were not only so purblind and thick-witted as not to realize the immeasurable supremacy of the city of Florence for learning, statesmanship, and bravery over all the other cities of Italy put together, but had carried the bad taste of their opinions into the still worse taste of offensive action. For a long time past Arezzo ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... of an explorer, I need hardly say, results not so much from the extent, or the marvels of his explorations, as from the consequences to which they lead. Judged by this test, my little list of discoveries has not been unfavoured of fortune. Where two purblind fever-stricken men plodded painfully through fetid swamp and fiery thorn-bush over the Zanzibar-Tanganyika track, mission-houses and schools may now be numbered by the dozen. Missionaries bring consuls, and consuls bring commerce and colonisation. On the Gold Coast of Western Africa, whence came ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... life, in the things that make a nation rich and the things that make it scrupulous and just, he had only limited perception and moderate faith. Where Peel was strong and penetrating, Palmerston was weak and purblind. He regarded Bright and Cobden as displeasing mixtures of the bagman and the preacher. In 1840 he had brought us within an ace of war with France. Disputes about an American frontier were bringing ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... the certainty of resurrection in their pulseless hearts, and a faded Hebrew inscription on a tomb, or an unread entry on a synagogue brass is their only record. And yet, perhaps, their generation is not all dust. Perchance, here and there, some decrepit centenarian rubs his purblind eyes with the ointment of memory, and sees these pictures of the past, hallowed by the consecration of time, and finds his shrivelled cheek wet with the pathos sanctifying the joys ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... startled out of my conceits; I want to be put to shame in my own eyes; I want to feel the bridle in my mouth, and be continually reminded of my own weakness and the omnipotence of circumstances. (5) If I from my spy-hole, looking with purblind eyes upon the least part of a fraction of the universe, yet perceive in my own destiny some broken evidences of a plan and some signals of an overruling goodness; shall I then be so mad as to complain that all cannot be deciphered? Shall I not rather wonder, with ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is right. Though purblind man Sees but a part o' the chain, the nearest link: His eyes not carrying to the equal beam, That poises ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... instant about any of the characters. Thus one of the sources of amusement lies in the fact that while the audience occupies somewhat the attitude of omnipotence, it has the pleasure of observing the characters of the play living their lives in the purblind way usual to mortals. Lessing said that a comedy should make us laugh at vices, but the vices must be those of characters who have good qualities also. Does 'Twelfe Night' answer to this description? Analyze the causes why the fun of ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... where Stultitia speaks of her father, Plutus, the god of wealth, at whose beck all things are turned topsy-turvy, according to whose will all human affairs are regulated—war and peace, government and counsel, justice and treaties. He has begotten her on the nymph Youth, not a senile, purblind Plutus, but a fresh god, warm with youth and ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... purblind mortals to say to what height human discoveries and improvements may arrive, when the gloom of despotism subsides, which makes us stumble at every step; but, when morality shall be settled on a more solid basis, then, without being gifted with ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... regard it from the shopkeeping point of view. When a new world began to arise at the Antipodes, our rulers saw an opportunity not for planting new offshoots of European civilisation, but for ridding themselves of the social rubbish no longer accepted in America. With purblind energy, and eyes doggedly fixed upon the ground at their feet, the race had somehow pressed forwards to illustrate the old doctrine that a man never goes so far as when he does not know whither he is ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... they took arms against me to enforce it, to pull you down from the place to which I had raised you out of the dust. Yet you can forget it, and in your purblind folly turn to these very men to right the wrongs you fancy I have done you. Do you think that men, holding you in such esteem as that, can keep any sort of faith with you? Do you think these are the men who are likely to fortify and maintain your title ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... Purblind and short-sighted friends! You will listen to me,—you will sympathize with me; for you know by painful experience what I mean when I say that we near-sighted people do not receive from our hawk-eyed neighbors that sympathy and consideration ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... reported, through its far-fetched and monotonous irregularities, but nobody realizes the extraordinary scene from which so many columns emanate, either by aid of the reporters' scanty descriptions, or by the purblind sketches ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... his thigh, so had his posterity, as Trogus records, lib. 15. Lepidus, in Pliny l. 7. c. 17, was purblind, so was his son. That famous family of Aenobarbi were known of old, and so surnamed from their red beards; the Austrian lip, and those Indian flat noses are propagated, the Bavarian chin, and goggle eyes amongst the Jews, as [1317] ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... extract numbers out of matter, And keep them in a glass, like water; Of sov'reign pow'r to make men wise; 555 For drop'd in blear thick-sighted eyes, They'd make them see in darkest night Like owls, tho' purblind in the light. By help of these (as he profess'd) He had First Matter seen undress'd: 560 He took her naked all alone, Before one rag of form was on. The Chaos too he had descry'd, And seen quite ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... will get it before long, of course, for Tom is a good provider, and he knows his wife to be economical. Still he cannot see—poor innocent that he is!—why his dear little woman cannot just as well go to church in her last fall's bonnet, which, to his purblind vision, is quite as good as new. What, Tom! don't you know the dear little woman has too much love for you, too much pride in you, to make a fright of herself, upon any consideration? Don't you know that, were your wife to venture ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... are foolish. Thus, in a whole imbroglio of Capabilities, we go stupidly groping about, to grope which is ours, and often clutch the wrong one: in this mad work must several years of our small term be spent, till the purblind Youth, by practice, acquire notions of distance, and become a seeing Man. Nay, many so spend their whole term, and in ever-new expectation, ever-new disappointment, shift from enterprise to enterprise, and from side to side: till at length, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... ask for verse from me, the feeble prey Of this self-seeking world, a waif and stray With none to whom to cling; From me—unhappy, purblind, hopeless devil! Who e'en in what is good see only evil In any ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... "Introductory Essay to the Tasmanian Flora" as a whole, see "Life and Letters," II., page 257.), i.e. to where you treat of the Australian Flora itself; and the latter part I remember thinking most of in the proof-sheets. Either you have altered a good deal, or I did not see all or was purblind, for I have been much more interested with all the first part than I was before,—not that I did not like it at first. All seems to me very clearly written, and I have been baulked at only one sentence. I think, on the whole, I like the ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... when priests believed in her and artists thought the labor of a lifetime well employed in painting but one picture of her—Kharvani the sorrowful, grieving for the wickedness of earth; Kharvani, Bride of Siva, ready to intercede with Siva, the Destroyer, for the helpless, foolish, purblind ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy |
