"Rankness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reddish and ragged bark. A decoction of the bark, I was told, is used as a red dye for cloth. A few days afterwards we tasted its milk, which was drawn from dry logs that had been standing many days in the hot sun, at the saw-mills. It was pleasant with coffee, but had a slight rankness when drunk pure; it soon thickens to a glue, which is excessively tenacious, and is often used to cement broken crockery. I was told that it was not safe to drink much of it, for a slave had recently nearly lost his life through taking ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... All the trees of this garden are of the most luxuriant size: gooseberries and currants in other gardens grow as shrubs; but here they form trees of four or five feet in height, and a circumference of five or six yards. In short, a luxuriance approaching to rankness, and a soil remarkable for its depth of colour and fatness, characterize every part. The abundant produce, as is usual through all this neighbourhood, is conveyed to Covent-Garden market in the night, and there disposed of ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... disciplined into a ferocity which has no parallel. To this ferocity there is joined not one of the rude, unfashioned virtues, which accompany the vices, where the whole are left to grow up together in the rankness of uncultivated nature. But nothing is left to ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... locks arise, who living, aye And at life's last extreme, of this offence, Through ignorance, did not repent. And know, The fault which lies direct from any sin In level opposition, here With that Wastes its green rankness on one common heap. Therefore if I have been with those, who wail Their avarice, to cleanse me, through reverse Of their transgression, such hath been my lot." To whom the sovran of the pastoral song: "While thou didst sing that cruel warfare wag'd ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... to perceive the pork; All animals are glad at sight of food: They lay their breviaries to sleep, and work With greedy pleasure, and in such a mood, That the flesh needs no salt beneath their fork. Of rankness and of rot there is no fear, For all the fasts ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... break head and brain at once, To be deliver'd of your fighting issue. Who can endure to see blind Fortune dote thus? To be enamour'd on this dusty turf, This clod, a whoreson puck-fist! O G——! I could run wild with grief now, to behold The rankness of her bounties, that doth breed Such bulrushes; these mushroom gentlemen, That shoot up in a night to ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson
... (April 4) Wilson, who has proved a genius in the invention of "plats," almost ruined his reputation. He proposed to fry the seal liver in penguin blubber, suggesting that the latter could be freed from all rankness.... The "fry" proved redolent of penguin, a concentrated essence of that peculiar flavour which faintly lingers in the meat and should not be emphasized. Three heroes got through their pannikins, but the rest of us decided to be contented with cocoa and biscuit ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... know of true happiness, they whom satiety fills, Who, flung on the rich breast of luxury, eat of the rankness that kills. Ah! little they know of the blessedness toil-purchased slumber enjoys, Who, stretched on the hard rack of indolence, taste of the sleep that destroys, Nothing to hope for, or labour for; nothing to sigh ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... run up to a great height without sufficient thickness, and are thus often lodged (or blown down) before the season for cutting them arrives. I have seen rice planted upon lands of this kind on the first year to decrease their rankness, and render them better adapted to the cane on the succeeding season. Some attempts have been made to plant cane upon the lands which reach down to the edge of the mangroves, and in a few instances pieces of land heretofore covered by the salt water at the flow ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... half smothered between undergrowths of velvet and tapestry and ramifications of marble and bronze. The fauna and the flora startled him alike, and among them his bruised spirit drew in and folded its wings. But he roamed and rested, exploring and in a manner enjoying the vast rankness—in the depth of which he suddenly encountered Mrs. Folliott, whom he had last seen, six months before, in London, and who had spoken to him then, precisely, of Phil Bloodgood, for several years previous her confidential American agent and factotum too, as she ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... and larkspurs which edge the beds of cabbages and carrots in the kitchen-garden, a humming-bird at work in the scarlet trumpets of the honeysuckle on the porch,—everywhere the sense of fullness and growth, with no shadow as yet of rankness or decay. August is over-ripe. September's smile is sad, but midsummer is all rosy hope, the crown ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... great way, they often smell so bad that they can scarcely be borne from the rankness of the butter, by managing them in the following manner, they may be as good as ever. Set a large saucepan of clean water on the fire, when it boils take off the butter at the top, then take the fowls out one by one, throw them ...
— A Poetical Cook-Book • Maria J. Moss
... but by establishing the antagonistic truth. The refutation which is to last must be positive, not negative. It is an endless work to be uprooting weeds: plant the ground with wholesome vegetation, and then the juices which would have otherwise fed rankness will pour themselves into a more vigorous growth; the dwindled weeds will be easily raked out then. It is an endless task to be refuting error. Plant truth, and the ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled or repressed; but in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy. The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissention, which, in different ages and countries, has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... of which tended always to defeat the conservatism and bigotry of its priests. So that their formalism, instead of frustrating or warping the growth of their art tradition, merely served as a check that may well seem to have been exactly proportioned to its need; preventing the weakness or rankness of over rapid growth such as detracts from the art of the Renascence, and at the same time causing no vital injury. The spirit of the race deserved and created and was again in turn ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... of all commonwealths by ambition, by avarice, envy, fraud, open injustice, and pretended friendship; vices which could draw little support from a state of nature, but which blossom and flourish in the rankness of political society. Revolve our whole discourse; add to it all those reflections which your own good understanding shall suggest, and make a strenuous effort beyond the reach of vulgar philosophy, to confess that the cause of artificial society ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... stand up. Through suppression of evidence, a jury of your—our—countrymen have been obliged to deliver a verdict concerning your case which stinks to heaven with the rankness of its injustice. By its terms you, the guilty one, go free with the innocent. Depart in peace, and come no more! The costs devolve upon the outraged plaintiff—another iniquity. The ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain |
