"Taint" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Why, massa, 'taint worf while for to git mad about de matter— Massa Will say noffin at all aint de matter wid him—but den what make him go about looking dis here way, wid he head down and he soldiers up, and as white as a goose? And den he keep a syphon ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... the long pipe which runs by the bone should be taken out, being apt to taint, as likewise the kernels ...
— A Poetical Cook-Book • Maria J. Moss
... but she had 'La grace, plus belle encore que la beaute', according to the good La Fontaine. She had the soft abandonment, the supple and elegant movements, and the graceful carelessness of the creoles.—(The reader must remember that the term 'Creole' does not imply any taint of black blood, but only that the person, of European family, has been born in the West Indies.)—Her temper was always the same. ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... for a time. Then, coming to himself, he prostrated himself at my feet in acceptance of the relationship and did me reverence. When he rose his eyes were full of tears ... O little brother mine! I am fast going to my death—let me take all your sin away with me. May no taint from ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... of turning medicine-man. Gladly enough he shed the unlucky clothing. Vast quantities of water were brought from the spring and blessed by the Padre: the umbrella was sprinkled and sprinkled till no taint could remain; and then Pio, guarded by Jose, spent the afternoon in scrubbing the desecrated garments with bucket after bucket of holy water, while the assembled village, down to the smallest papoose, jeered at that most ignominious ...
— The Penance of Magdalena & Other Tales of the California Missions • J. Smeaton Chase
... was to be the property of the Co-operative Kosher Society, an association originally founded to supply unimpeachable Passover cakes. It was suspected by the pious that there was a taint of heresy in the flour used by the ordinary bakers, and it was remarked that the Rabbinate itself imported its Matzoth from abroad. Successful in its first object, the Co-operative Kosher Society extended its operations to more perennial commodities, and sought to save Judaism from dubious cheese ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... and spirit which seldom belong to the development of a Northern people; but upon more familiar acquaintance the vices of the social system to which they belong will be found to have infected them with their own peculiar taint; and haughty, over-bearing irritability, effeminate indolence, reckless extravagance, and a union of profligacy and cruelty which is the immediate result of their irresponsible power over their dependents, are some of the less ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... so sir Gyles, and withall use meanes To taint their high blouds with the shafte of Love. Sometimes a fingers motion wounds their mindes: A jest, a jesture, or a prettie laugh: A voyce, a present; ah, things done ith nicke Wound deepe, and sure; and let flie your gold, And we shall ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... mind was so full that she did not as usual observe every twig, almost every leaf, as she passed. Nor, now that she was alone, was that religious bias, which had so much to do with her daily life, very strong within her. There was no taint of hypocrisy in her character; but yet, with the force of human disappointment heavy upon her, her heart was now hot with human anger, and mutinous with human resolves. She had proposed to herself to revenge herself upon the men of her husband's family,—upon ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... a present, perhaps, (and Woodcock's lip began to quiver and his eye to moisten,) but I hope it'll do you some service. 'Taint anything't you can wear in your hair, or ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... never can pay back what I got from my parents. Next I am thankful that I was brought up in circumstances where I never became acquainted with wickedness." How delightful it is to think of a man who, without a taint of conscious insincerity, but simply out of the fulness of his heart, can get up before ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... "'Taint a question of what we couldn't do. What can we do? He's got money and plenty of it cached somewhere about the old camp, and five hundred dollars of it's mine. That's what I want. I don't care a damn what ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... Burmah live a happy people who love beauty, are always smiling and follow the Golden Rule far nearer than those who live by trade and are blest by civilization. Ah, that I might see such a people! The nearest I ever came was at Honolulu, and there was the taint of the Christian, alack-a-day! The White Man's Burden is the weight of the load of sin, disease, death, and misfortune he has dropped on the happy ones who never knew a Christian creed. We have given them bath tubs in exchange for ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... possible way. And first among those that should be encouraged is music, because it is always ennobling, and can be enjoyed simultaneously by the greatest number. Its effect is well described in Margaret Fuller's private journal: "I felt raised above all care, all pain, all fear, and every taint of vulgarity was washed out of the world." I think this is an extremely happy expression. Female writers sometimes have a knack of getting at the heart of a problem by instinct, more easily than men with their superior reasoning powers. "Every taint ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... results: 86 infants with hereditary taint of syphilis have been at the nursery. Of 6 fed exclusively on cow's milk, only 1 survived and the other 5 died. Forty-two were suckled by goats, of which 8 lived, 34 are dead, which is equal to a mortality of 80.9 per cent. Thirty-eight were ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883 • Various
... with generations of despair. Why should not the Anglo-Saxon triumph—why should it be weighed down with the rich blood typical of the tropics? Must the life-current of one race bind the other race in chains as strong and enduring as if there had been no Anglo-Saxon taint? By the laws of God and nature, as interpreted by man, one-half of my boy was free, and why should not this fair birthright of freedom remove the curse from the other half—raise it into the bright, joyous sunshine of liberty? I could not answer these questions of ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... right—refarrin' to the job afore us. I'm willin' to conceed, that you Spanish chaps hev hed most to do wi' the first plannin' o' the thing; as alser, that ye brought the rest o' us into it. But what signify the bringin' in compared wi' the gettin' out? In sich scrapes, 'taint the beginnin' but the eend as is dangersome. An' we've all got to unnergo that danger; the which I needn't particklarly speak o', as every man o' ye must feel it 'bout the nape o' his neck, seein' the risk he'll hev to run o' gettin' that ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... Sabbath-gathering? That must be the cousin of Elsie's who wants to marry her, they say. A dangerous-looking fellow for a rival, if one took a fancy to the dark girl! And who is she, and what?—by what demon is she haunted, by what taint is she blighted, by what curse is she followed, by what destiny is she marked, that her strange beauty has such a terror in it, and that hardly one shall dare to love her, and her eye glitters always, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... all things are and have life! Ere two years old, she, whose dream is now with us, all over the small silvan world, that beheld the revelation, how evanescent! of her pure existence, was called the "Holy Child!" The taint of sin—inherited from those who disobeyed in Paradise—seemed from her fair clay to have been washed out at the baptismal font, and by her first infantine tears. So pious people almost believed, looking on her so unlike all other children, in the serenity of that habitual smile ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... through her like a pang. I saw this; and the days to come Forewarned me with an iron clang, That drowned the music of the drum, That made the rousing bugle faint; And yet I sternly left my home,— Haply to fall by noisome taint Of foul disease, without a deed To sound in rhyme or shine in paint; But, oh, at least, to drop a seed, Humble, but faithful to the last, Sown by my Country in her need! O Death, come to me, slow or fast; I'll do my duty while I may! Though sorrow burdens every blast, And want ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... in silence. Greg smelled the smoke from Russ's pipe, mixed with the taint of lubricant and the faint lingering ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... heels of God to hurt man. But God is ever on the heels of Satan to cushion the hurt and save the man. It is a nip-and-tuck race with God a head and a heart in the lead. Something had to be done. Man had started sin in himself by his choice. The taint of disobedience, rebellion, had been breathed out into the air. He had gotten out of sorts with his surroundings. His presence would spoil his own heaven. The stain of his sin would have been upon his eternal life. The zero of selfishness would have been the atmosphere of his home. The touch ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... not," rejoined Edith, emphatically. "Poor Grant! He can't be very happy with Ninitta. She never can get the taint of Bohemia ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... his father and eldest brother. He had an open good-humoured face, and was very kind-hearted; but was subject to peculiar fits of insanity, during which he did wild and foolish things for the mere love of notoriety. He had two natures—one bright and good, the other sullen and criminal. A taint of madness ran in the family—came down from drunken and unprincipled fathers of dead generations; under different conditions, it might have developed into genius in one or ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... will see this and many other marvels which to-day are extravagant dreams. To what ideal height will the process of evolution lead mankind? To no very magnificent height, it is to be feared. We are afflicted by an indelible taint, a kind of original sin, if we may call sin a state of things with which our will has nothing to do. We are made after a certain pattern and we can do nothing to change ourselves. We are marked with the mark of the beast, ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... closely defined the scope of this remarkable work. Here we have a new phenomenon, history written for the labouring class and from the point of {8} view of the labouring class. And although not free from the taint of the party pamphlet, not of the first rank for historical erudition, intellectual force or artistic composition, Jaures' history presents the Revolution under the aspect that gives most food for thought and that places it most ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... some flasks of amber-coloured wine from his stores in the grotto. These we drank, lying full-length upon the tufa in the morning sunlight. The panorama of sea, sky, and long-drawn lines of coast, breathless, without a ripple or a taint of cloud, spread far and wide around us. Our horses and donkey cropped what little grass, blent with bitter herbage, grew on that barren summit. Their grooms helped us out with the hermit's wine, and turned to sleep face downward. The whole scene was very quiet, islanded in immeasurable ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... said to me, "to wars, and courts, and princes, and may God shield thee still from all evil, as He hath so marvellously done these perilous days. From Vale Cloister will I look out on thee in pride of thy knightly fame, if such a small taint of earth as pride ...
— The Fall Of The Grand Sarrasin • William J. Ferrar
... alert to watch the guests arriving, and a little bold, too, with their stares and their quizzing-glasses. There is, at times, something almost German in the British lack of delicacy, which is, so far, rare with us here, though I doubt not the French will taint a few among us. But insolence in stare and smirk is not among our listed sins, though, doubtless, otherwise the list is full as long as that of any nation, and longer, ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... leering looks, bull-faced, and freckled fair, With two left legs, and Judas-colored hair, And frowsy pores that taint the ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... he was a father then) "hailed this young Carolinian as one of the master spirits who stamp their names upon the age in which they live." This speech contains one passage which savors of the "chivalric" taint, and indicates the provincial mind. In replying to the objection founded on the expenses ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... discernible: great muscular strength accompanied by much awkwardness and many infirmities; great quickness of parts, with a morbid propensity to sloth and procrastination; a kind and generous heart, with a gloomy and irritable temper.[6] He had inherited from his ancestors a scrofulous taint, which it was beyond the power of medicine to remove. His parents were weak enough to believe that the royal touch was a specific for this malady. In his third year he was taken up to London, inspected by the court surgeon, prayed over by the court chaplains, and stroked ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... coiffure so strange and quaint, Features just lacking the prim of the saint, From the mischievous dimple that lurks below; High-heeled slippers and satin bow, Red lips mocking the heart's constraint, Free from passion, devoid of taint— This ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... you nothing? No?" he said, with the slightest taint of bitterness. "Well, well, I have found, Esther, the worst reality is never unendurable when it comes out from behind the clouds through which we at first see it darkly—never—not even the rack. I suppose it will be so with death. ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... another be grave. But swear you're a sinner whom she has reformed And the average feminine fortress is stormed. In rescuing men from abysses of sin She loses her head—and herself tumbles in. The mind of a woman was shaped for a saint, But deep in her heart lies the devil's own taint. With plans for salvation her busy brain teems, While her heart longs in secret to know how sin seems. And if with this question unanswered she dies, Temptation came not in the right sort of guise. There's my estimate, Reese, of the beautiful sex; I see by your ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... teachers. No lackadaisical ladies—no blasted rolling eyes. We can't have any weak or silly. Life is real again, and the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They ought to die. They ought to be willing to die. It's a sort of disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race. And they can't be happy. Moreover, dying's none so dreadful; it's the funking makes it bad. And in all those places we shall gather. Our district will be London. And we may even be able to keep a watch, and run about in the open ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... high degree that talent for discovering or inventing slights which is pride of race run crooked, and reveals the taint of mixed blood in a man's veins. As District Superintendent of Police he had relieved his predecessor in the middle of the hot weather. His sister being at Mussoorie, he had arrived alone; and, in accordance ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... removal hard rubbing and beating (for such is, according to some commentators, the force of the word); that he may be "cleansed"—the technical word for the priestly cleansing of the leper, and declaring him clear of the taint. He also, with similar recurrence to the Mosaic symbols, prays that he may be "purged with hyssop." There is a pathetic appropriateness in the petition, for not only lepers, but those who had become defiled by contact with a dead body, were thus purified; and on whom did ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... do you want for that Nighthawk?" he asked, stammering with eagerness. "'Taint wuth much, but—what—ten dollars? I'll give ye three, and not ...
— Nautilus • Laura E. Richards
... at all events, nature had by this time lost its taint of sin, and had shaken off all trace of demoniacal powers. St. Francis of Assisi, in his Hymn to the Sun, frankly praises the Lord for creating the heavenly bodies and the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... your chamber low, Neath the daisies and the dew, Can you hear me? Can you know All the good I owe to you? You, whose spirit dwells alway Free from earthly taint and thrall! You who taught me that sweet day God's dear love is ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... which I have pressed with regard to English universities, in the existence of a large volunteer order of students seeking only the liberalization, and not the profits, of academic life. In arguing upon their case, it is not the fair logic to say: These pursuits taint the decorum of the studious character; it is not fair to calculate how much is lost to the man of letters by such addiction to fox-hunting; but, on the contrary, what is gained to the fox-hunter, who would, at any rate, be such, by so considerable a homage paid to letters, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... money'd Worldlings with dismay: Even rich men, brave by nature, taint the air With words of apprehension and despair: While tens of thousands, thinking on the affray, Men unto whom sufficient for the day And minds not stinted or untill'd are given, Sound, healthy Children of the God of Heaven, Are cheerful ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... allowing itself to be employed as an ally of either side. Its proper role in industrial strife is to encourage the processes of mediation and conciliation. These processes can successfully be directed only by a government free from the taint of any suspicion that ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... his friends, his wives, his children, his court, and the whole nation, were viewed only as the instruments of his pride and pleasure. All his crimes and blunders proceeded from his extraordinary selfishness. If we could look on him without this moral taint, which corrupted and disgraced him, we should see an indulgent father and a generous friend. He attended zealously to the duties of his station, and sought not to shake off his responsibilities. He loved pleasure, but, in its pursuit, he did not forget the affairs of ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... late-espoused Saint Brought to me like Alkestis from the grave, Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave, Rescued from death by force, though pale and faint. Mine, as whom washed from spot of child-bed taint Purification in the Old Law did save; And such, as yet once more, I trust to have Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint, Came vested all in white, pure as her mind: Her face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight Love, ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... stretched himself out in his chair, when he heard the waggon drive away a few minutes later. He did not like Mrs. Hastings, and had a suspicion that she had no great regard for him, but he was conscious of a somewhat grim satisfaction. There was, though it seldom came to the surface, a taint of crude brutality in his nature, and it was active now. When Agatha had first come out the change in her had been a shock to him, and it would not have cost him very much to let her go. Since then, however, her coldness and half-perceived disdain had angered him, and the interview which was just ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... the journalistic taint very badly. He was always the first to get wind of any piece of School news. On this occasion he was in possession of an exclusive item. The Babe was the first person to ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... pure water blinded Ibrahim the Weeper. And there the foreign blood of my poor brother showed forth. He could not escape the taint and was weak. At the last moment he had wavered and, like a fool, had forgiven ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... and immunity from any taint of it was so fine a characteristic of public social life at Tilling, the expected passage of this distinguished visitor through the town on Saturday next became very speedily known, and before the wicker-baskets of the ladies in their morning marketings ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... them; our wealth Is marketed, and Phrygia hath a part Purchased, and part Maeonia's lovely land. But since the son of wily Saturn old 360 Hath given me glory now, and to inclose The Grecians in their fleet hemm'd by the sea, Fool! taint not with such talk the public mind. For not a Trojan here will thy advice Follow, or shall; it hath not my consent. 365 But thus I counsel. Let us, band by band, Throughout the host take supper, and let each, Guarded against nocturnal danger, watch. And if a Trojan ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... the close interbreeding itself, but on the tendency it has to perpetuate any constitutional weakness or other hereditary taints; and he attempts to prove this by the argument that "if crosses act by virtue of being a cross, and not by virtue of removing an hereditary taint, then the greater the difference between the two animals crossed the more beneficial will that act be." He then shows that, the wider the difference the less is the benefit, and concludes that a cross, as such, has no beneficial effect. ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... taint upon her pedigree, she proved herself to Amber at heart a simple, lonely Englishwoman—a stranger in a sullen and suspicious land, desiring nothing better than to return to the England she had seen and learned to love, the England of ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... little; Not that I like them so much, or care a bajocco for Vernon, But I am slow at Italian, have not many English acquaintance, And I am asked, in short, and am not good at excuses. Middle-class people these, bankers very likely, not wholly Pure of the taint of the shop; will at table d'hote and restaurant Have their shilling's worth, their penny's pennyworth even: Neither man's aristocracy this, nor God's, God knoweth! Yet they are fairly descended, they give you to know, well connected; Doubtless somewhere in some ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... called, that read aloud, she told The church commands her quick return for Florence With such a dower as Spain received with her, And that they will not hazard heaven's dire curse To yield to a match unlawful, which shall taint The issue of the King with bastardy. This done, in state majestic come you forth, Our new crowned Queen in sight of all ...
— The Noble Spanish Soldier • Thomas Dekker
... in English country life that made such a life good for human happiness; and the jolly Squires who with their 'dames' kept open house and celebrated Harvest Home and Christmas Festival with all the buoyancy and vigour of a sane and healthful manhood undeteriorated by any sickly taint of morbid pessimism and indifferent inertia, were the beneficent rulers of a merrier rural population than has ever been seen since their day. Squire Vancourt the elder, grandfather of the present heiress of Abbot's Manor, had been a splendid specimen of 'the fine old English gentleman, ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... upsetting. Manning had been removing the high pews from a church in Brighton, and putting in open benches in their place. Everyone knew what that meant; everyone knew that a high pew was one of the bulwarks of Protestantism, and that an open bench had upon it the taint of Rome. But Manning hastened to explain: 'My dear friend,' he wrote, 'I did not exchange pews for open benches, but got the pews (the same in number) moved from the nave of the church to the walls of the side aisles, so that the whole church has a regular arrangement of open benches, which (irregularly) ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... people averred that while it would be easy to sell the lands to the government for the benefit of the negro, by resorting to the usual methods of influencing votes, Senator Dilworthy was unwilling to have so noble a charity sullied by any taint of corruption—he was resolved that not a vote should be bought. Nobody could get anything definite from Laura about these matters, and so gossip had to feed itself chiefly upon guesses. But the effect of it all was, that Laura was considered to be ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... anything which I do, unless it is motived by this regard to Him as its 'chief end,' loses its noblest consecration, and is degraded from its loftiest beauty. The Altar sanctifies, and not only sanctifies but ennobles, the gift. That which has in it the taint of self-regard so pronouncedly and dominantly as that God is shut out, is like some vegetation down in low levels at the bottom of a vale, which never has the sun to shine upon it. But let it rise as some tree above the brushwood until its topmost ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... homewards to Damascus, and as we journeyed over the Lebanons and descended into the plain I could not help feeling the oriental charm of the scene grow upon me. Beyrout is demi- fashionable, semi-European; but Damascus is the heart of the East, and there is no taint of Europeanism about it. As I was nearing Damascus in the evening I fell in love with it. The first few weeks I had disliked it, but gradually it had grown upon me, and now it took a place in my heart from which it could never be thrust forth. I saw how lovely ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive Against thy mother aught."] for the express purpose of proving a charge, upon which judgment had been pronounced and ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... should never have quitted. In like manner, seamen can be procured in abundance, but cannot be kept from desertion whenever any matter goes wrong; and the total previous ignorance of their characters and dispositions renders this more likely, as the admission of one 'black sheep' goes far to taint the entire crew. ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... and bloin off men's hats; In short its jest as free as Are out dores; But O Sextant! in our church its scarce as piety, Scarce as bankbills when ajunts beg for mishuns, Which sum say is purty often, taint nuthin to me, What I give aint nuthing to nobody; but O Sextant! You shet 500 men women and children Speshily the latter, up in a tite place, Sum has bad breths, none of em aint too sweet, Sum is fevery, sum is scroflus, sum has bad teeth And sum haint none, and sum aint over clean; But evry ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... The woman inside had been listening to his voice with a quaking heart—had known it for that of her truant husband of twenty years ago, through all the changes time had made, and in spite of such colour of its own as the prison taint had left in it. And he stood there unsuspecting; not a thought in his mind of who she was, this Aunt M'riar! Why indeed should he have ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... wife and children—supposing your unsupposable case. Grant that my notions are as false and monstrous as you think them: a pleasant lot for my wife, wouldn't it, to be in constant contact with them? And my children would have my blood in them—the taint of eccentricity, perhaps of madness: O, I've seen it in your eye. Others would think so too—most, no doubt. No, Bob; better let it die out ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... now faint, But ever fever-sick, shook not his lyre With epileptic fervours. Sensual taint Of satyr heat, or bacchanal desire, Polluted not the passion of his song; No corybantic clangor clamoured through Its manly harmonies, as sane as strong; So that the captious few Found sickliness in pure Elysian balm, And coldness in such ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 15, 1892 • Various
... Uist, Miss Frere shows indignation at the invasion of southern ideas, and thinks that everything is being vitiated by the taint of Lochmaddy. Lochmaddy, characterised in so droll a way, is a tiny township with a Sheriff Court, a church, a few well-built modern houses, a school, and an excellent hotel. Cleanliness is a welcome ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... the uncle whose story they had not told Mademoiselle; after all, they knew little of the child; nothing of her family, except that her uncle had used his employer's money and had fled from justice. Was the taint of dishonesty in her blood? For all her candid appearance, Anne had been keeping a secret. But perhaps there was some explanation which she would make to her friends, though she had withheld ...
— Honey-Sweet • Edna Turpin
... somewhat dubious and two-headed form of popular success,—'vrai succes de scandale s'il en fut'—even the potent influence and unequivocal example of Rabelais had never once even in passing or in seeming affected or infected the progressive and triumphal genius of Shakespeare with a taint or touch of anything offensive to healthier and cleanlier organs of perception than such as may belong to a genuine or a pretending Puritan. But on taking in his hand that one of these two new dramatic pamphlets which might ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... to the Legation at The Hague and told simply what they knew. We got the real story of Miss Cavell, cruelly done to death by "field-gray" officers. We got full descriptions of the system of deporting the civil population—a system which amounted to enslavement, with a taint of "white slavery" thrown in. When the Belgian workmen were suddenly called from their homes, herded before the German commandant, and sent away, they knew not whither, to work for their oppressor, as they were ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke
... were in an hotel as it was to see that, if you were, you were in one of the very best. Mrs. Temperly, since her husband's death, had passed much of her life at hotels, where she flattered herself that she preserved the tone of domestic life free from every taint and promoted the refined development of her children; but she selected them as well as she selected her friends. Somehow they became better from the very fact of her being there, and her children were smuggled in and out in the most extraordinary way; ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... said a voice from behind the golden-rose bushes, and out stepped Aunt Lucy in a new turban, making a curtsey to me. "La, Marse Richard!" said she, "to think you'se growed to be a fine gemman! 'Taint but t'other day you was kissin' Miss ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... perfume of the lilacs and apple-blossoms, so that Gorham was fain every now and then to draw a deep breath in order to inhale their fragrance. There was no dust, and nature looked spruce and trig, without a taint of the frowziness which is observable in the foliage a ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... waiter and gave the order with a slight touch of imperiousness which was one of the few attributes that stamped him as a Spaniard. The feudal taint was still running ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... sobriquet. He was never seen in the cockpit, did not own a terrier, drank but seldom; when he did, desperately. He fought sometimes, but was always thrashed, pommelled to a jelly. The man was game enough, when his blood was up: but he was no favorite in the mill; he had the taint of school-learning on him,—not to a dangerous extent, only a quarter or so in the free-school in fact, but enough to ruin him as a good hand ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... chosen people might be kept from the taint of idolatry, Jacob left Laban; yet Rachel had stolen her father's images—and there is then great significance in that act by which Jacob renewed his covenant with God, when called upon to build the ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... in her virginal beauty As pure as a pictured saint, How should this sinning and sorrow Have for her danger or taint? ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... at such a thought; and whilst they laughed, she did it. Henceforth the single redress for the English of this capital oversight, but which never could have redressed it effectually, was—to vitiate and taint the coronation of Charles VII. as the work of a witch. That policy, and not malice, (as M. Michelet is so happy to believe,) was the moving principle in the subsequent prosecution of Joanna. Unless they unhinged the force of the first coronation in the popular mind, by associating it with power ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... Jacob. "I will charter two river steamboats, pack them full of these unfortunate children and—say ten thousand dolls and drums and a thousand freezers of ice cream, and give them a delightful outing up the Sound. The sea breezes on that trip ought to blow the taint off some of this money that keeps coming in faster than I can ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... provides for the cleansing of that part of our nature that clings to the things of life which in themselves are not sinful but are God-given blessings. Our unsanctified affections must also become purified from every taint of depravity. That this may be accomplished, it becomes necessary that the heart yield up to the death every cherished object, even though it be a God-given blessing; it must be yielded up and laid upon the altar as a "burnt offering." The affections cannot be purified until the ...
— Sanctification • J. W. Byers
... blasphemous. Moreover, as I have said, our foresight is limited to our lives on this planet. Any speculation beyond them would be purely conjectural, and our minds are repelled by the slightest taint of uncertainty. To us the conjectural and the unthinkable may be called almost ...
— The Blindman's World - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... physiognomy and fierce little eyes, he walked with his fists clenched, his body bent forward, darting suspicious glances from under an enormous cocked hat. His intelligence was limited, and his sanity itself was doubtful. The hereditary taint expressed itself, in his case, not by mystic leanings as in his two brothers, Alexander and Nicholas (in their various ways, for one was mystically liberal and the other mystically autocratic), but by the fury of an uncontrollable temper which generally broke out in disgusting ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... he, with great earnestness. "Nay, but you must; I will take no denial. I am not prone to feel ashamed of anything that I do, but I frankly confess that I am ashamed of my behaviour to you this afternoon, and I ask your pardon for it. To tell you the whole truth, I believe that there is a taint of madness in my blood, for there have been occasions when I have felt myself irresistibly impelled to actions for which I have afterwards been sorry, and that of this afternoon ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... drunk with the sweet and heady must of their new liberty. Fanaticism, engendered by persecution, and destined to engender persecution in turn, spread rapidly through society. Even the strongest and most commanding minds were not proof against this strange taint. Any time might have produced George Fox and James Naylor. But to one time alone belong the fanatic delusions of such a statesman as Vane, and the hysterical tears of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... were true, or at least meant to be true, they were full of flattery. Why should this woman of whom they were speaking love him so dearly? She was nothing to him. She was highly born, greatly gifted, wealthy, and a married woman, whose character, as he well knew, was beyond the taint of suspicion, though she had been driven by the hard sullenness of her husband to refuse to live under his roof. Phineas Finn and Lady Laura Kennedy had not seen each other for two years, and when they had parted, though they had lived as friends, there had been no signs of still ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... victims members of that great class of degenerates who are unfit to procreate healthy normal offspring. Many of these conditions are partly congenital and partly acquired, but in the majority of defectives a transmitted taint is present. ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... owned, most luminously into the question,—expressing his apprehension, lest the example of France, which had, at a former period, threatened England with the contagion of despotism, should now be the means of introducing among her people the no less fatal taint of Democracy and Atheism. After some eloquent tributes of admiration to Mr. Fox, rendered more animated, perhaps, by the consciousness that they were the last offerings thrown into the open grave of their ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... deluded breast, Where I had fondly hop'd to rest, With faith undoubting, sweet repose, Till Death should bid my eye-lids close. And sometimes yet will hope arise; Till now he ever scorn'd disguise; Some cursed fiend might taint his youth, And warp a temper form'd for truth. When late he humbly knelt for grace, And clasp'd my knees in close embrace, Upon his lips a secret hung, But something seem'd to stay his tongue; I prest not, for my anger slept, And fondness only saw he wept; Ah! fatal haste! then had I ...
— Elegies and Other Small Poems • Matilda Betham
... very likely. I had a young man's differences with my cousin, as lads will fall out, but there was the making of a fine fellow in him. But it was the wife, bringing in that Greek taint, worse even than the Italian, so that there's no believing a word out of ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... down, unwillingly, to the discredit of the Weymouth pine,—a symptom of some ancestral taint, perhaps,—that it suffers less than most trees from being thus encroached upon. Yet it does not entirely escape. True, it leans neither to left nor right, its trunk is seldom contorted; if it grow at all it must grow straight toward the zenith; but it is sadly ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... feudal relic—taken in all seriousness by everyone, including the author. It seems almost inconceivable that Mr. VACHELL's play deals with conditions that still survived only a few years ago. Yet the Squire's devotion to the science of eugenics establishes its date as quite recent. It was his sole taint of modernity; and indeed where his own son's marriage was concerned he omitted to apply his scientific principles, and made a choice for him in which no regard was paid to eugenics, but only to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various
... known? Men, too—alas! how fast their number grows—whom I have known, have loved, and lost too soon; and all gleaming out of the gloom, as every image of the dead should do, in pure white marble, as if purged from earthly taint? To ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... sphere of morality. By statistic methods of sociology the social problems of immorality and crime have been opened up, and external facts have been studied; and criminal anthropology has revealed the "inferior types" who by hereditary taint are those who have a predisposition to all the moral infection of their surroundings. Morel's theories concerning degeneration and the resulting theories of Lombroso concerning criminals have undoubtedly brought light into this chaos, wherein opinion as to human goodness and ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... the camp, they are Union men, and vote as they fight, and hold little in common with the political leaders of the Democratic Party in or out of this Hall—the Seymours, the Woods, the Vallandighams, the Woodwards, and their indorsers, who hold and control the Democratic Party here, and taint it with Treason, till it is a stench in the nostrils ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... nigger must do it hisself, not ez a slave, for slavery is abolished, but ez a free man. Ethiopean citizens uv Amerikin descent (wich is mulatters), and full-blooded blacks, and all hevin in the veins a taint uv Afrikin blood, must be restrained gently, and for their own good, I suggest laws ...
— "Swingin Round the Cirkle." • Petroleum V. Nasby
... rancho. He had done him harm rather than good in his ill-advised, and, perhaps, SELFISH attempts to help him. I have said that Gilroy's parting warning rankled in his breast, but not ignobly. It wounded the surface of his sensitive nature, but could not taint or corrupt the pure, wholesome blood of the gentleman beneath it. For in Gilroy's warning he saw only his own shortcomings. A strange fatality had marked his friendships. He had been no help to Jim; he had brought no happiness to ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... early triumphs only to show, that, while they would have spoiled nine men out of ten, they failed to taint the character of Moore. His modest estimate of himself was from first to last a leading feature in his character. Success never engendered egotism; honors never seemed to him only the recompense of desert; he largely magnified the favors he received, and seemed to consider ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... believe that men's virtues and their spirits most certainly, naturally and rightly proceed from mankind to the heroes, and from them to the genii, and from thence, if they be raised above and purified from all mortal and earthly taint, even as is done in the holy mysteries, then, not by any empty vote of the senate, but in very truth and likelihood they are received among the gods, and meet with the most blessed and ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... source of disappointment to them. They have noted her points; her beauty has burned itself into their jealousy; her merry laugh has fanned their scorn; her bountiful presence is an affront to them, as is her ripe and lissom figure. They pronounce her morally unsound; they say her nature has a taint; they chill her popularity with silent smiles of slow disparagement. But they have no particulars; their slander is not concrete. It is an amorphous accusation, sweeping and vague, spleen-born ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... escape the taint of degrading Plautus to the status of a petty moralizer[29]. In particular, he lauds the Aul unreservedly as a chef d'oeuvre of character delineation and pronounces it immeasurably superior ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... he could not help respecting Mary for taking such an interest in public questions. He looked at her as she leant forward, poking the fire, and expressing herself very clearly in phrases which bore distantly the taint of the platform, and he thought, "How absurd Mary would think me if she knew that I almost made up my mind to walk all the way to Chelsea in order to look at Katharine's windows. She wouldn't understand it, but I like her very much ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... afterwards notorious. "Human patience was not great enough to put up with Sir Francis Clavering," people said. "He was too hopelessly low, dull, and disreputable. You could not say what, but there was a taint about the house and its entourages. Who was the Begum, with her money, and without her h's, and where did she come from? What an extraordinary little piece of conceit the daughter was, with her Gallicised graces and daring affectations, ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... as free from all other ills that 'flesh is heir to,' as I certainly am of the taint of catalepsy, I might indeed congratulate myself upon an immunity which would obviate the dire necessity of ever meeting ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... this har day, Recowperate yer muscle; Let up a mite this day on toil, 'Taint made for holy bustle. Let them old sorrels jog along, With mighty slack-like traces; Half dreamin', es my sunbeams fleck Their ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... are still going on in your Majesty's royal exchequer in these islands, as well as many other serious affairs, demand, Sire, that your Majesty send a general inspector here, and choose for this a man who is of great integrity and with great reputation for purity from all taint of greed. If this inspection be not made, there is no redress for this land. All the said Chinese, about fifteen hundred, have been killed, except it be a few who have been kept as slaves in your ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 • Edited by Blair and Robertson
... addicted to all acts of cruelty and carnal pleasure. That person, however, who, possessed of faith and scriptural knowledge, is observant of the attribute of Goodness, attends only to all good things, and becomes endued with (moral) beauty and soul free from every taint."'" ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... would take the younger, Eugene, with him into the city, where his education could be attended to, and where he, at least, might be saved from the influence of the barbarous mannerism and irreligious taint of these country "common schools." His reverence the doctor furthermore added, that Mr. Prying had no objection to the arrangement he proposed, and that he had conquered the repugnance that Mrs. Prying had to the separation of the brothers by the very flattering terms on which ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... Hath dar'd to taint my name with slander? Thy Selim lives; nay, more, he soon shall reign, If ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... Take from me all taint of sadness; Fill my soul with trust unshaken In that Being who has taken Care for every living thing, In Summer, Winter, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... talked, out of the fullness of their own hearts or their own intelligence, and with no thought of a public; but it was only an incident in their lives, another form of diversion, which left them quite free from the dreaded taint of feminine authorship. Their peculiar gift was to inspire others, and much of the fascination that gave them such power in their day still clings to their memories. Even at this distance, they have a perpetual interest ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... Hal's memory. He stared at the sinister oblong of type, vaguely sensing in its covert promises the taint, yet failing to apprehend the ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... every-day things. To a realist a hansom-cab driver is a man who makes twenty-five shillings a week, lives in a back street in Pimlico, has a wife who drinks and children who grow up with an alcoholic taint; the realist will compare his lot with other cab-drivers, and find what part of his life is the product of the cab-driving environment, and on that basis he will write his book. To Stevenson and to the romanticist generally, a hansom ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... that there was a blankness about it all. He had won money, it is true. But all the money in the world could not free him from the taint that had been left upon him by a coroner's investigation, from the hint that still remained in the recommendation of the grand jury that the murder of Sissie Larsen be looked into further. Nor could it remove the stigma of the four charges against Harry, which soon were to come ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... since I came out of the bastile," said the old man. "'Taint jest the place for a gentleman, I can tell you that. It's mighty down-settin' on one's pride, which I had a heap of afore I was sent ...
— Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective - Or, The Crime of the Midnight Express • Frank Pinkerton
... a leetle cranberry tart I jis' tuk out ob de oben—it's on de kitchen table—I 'spect we might as well eat it, cause 'taint big enough ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... me, if it be always in the power of the most skilful of the faculty to pronounce, with any certainty, whether a person who has been under their care, in certain stages of this malady, is so effectually cured, as to leave no possibility of his being still capable of communicating the taint. I think I could mention some instances which justify my presuming to hazard this opinion. It is likewise well known, that amongst a number of men, there are, generally, to be found some so bashful as to endeavour to conceal ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... of wind outside, but the Dulcibella had begun to move in her sleep, as it were, rolling drowsily to some taint send of the sea, with an occasional short jump, like the start ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... of all people and animals?" "Ich!" (1). "If you mean yourself you should say "mich" (myself)", so she at once rapped "mich!" "And after yourself?" "Dich!" ("thee," the familiar of you commonly used in German). A frank remark, at all events, and without the taint ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... general MELEE, and to breathe the night air, which we find grateful and reviving. Phew! but it was hot and thick, we don't want to breathe it again. It is astonishing that people get used to it, and like it too! But it leaves its taint upon them, for it permeates their clothing; they carry it about with them, and any one who gets a whiff of it gets some idea of the breath of a common lodging-house. And its moral breath has its effect, ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... of the farmer is night soil, or human excrement. There has always been a false delicacy about mentioning this fertilizer, which has caused much waste, and great loss of health, from the impure and offensive odors which it is allowed to send forth to taint the air. ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... does. I git onto some new wrinkle of his every day. No; 'taint no sorter use to tell his tricks; you wouldn't believe, nor would I an' I hadn't seen with ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... bloodstained![134] We know not which of the two is of greater moment to us, viz., whether we should conquer them or they should conquer us. By slaying whom we would not like to live,—even they, the sons of Dhritarashtra, stand before (us). My nature affected by the taint of compassion, my mind unsettled about (my) duty, I ask thee. Tell me what is assuredly good (for me). I am thy disciple. O, instruct me, I seek thy aid.[135] I do not see (that) which would dispel that grief of mine blasting my very senses, even if I obtain a prosperous kingdom on earth ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... reading together Balzac's "Recherche de l'Absolu," your objecting to the character of Madame de Claees, and very justly, a certain meretricious taint which Balzac seldom escapes in his heroines, and which in some degree impaired the impression that character, in many respects beautifully conceived and drawn, would have produced? Well, there is a vein of something ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... of style he undoubtedly has, of which a word or two should perhaps be said. The first is the general taint of rhetoric, which is sometimes positively intolerable, and is liable to spoil enjoyment even of the best pieces occasionally. Were it not that 'Rhetoric made a Greek of me,' we should wish heartily that he had never been a rhetorician. It is the practice of talking on unreal cases, doubtless ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... he loves dogs, and hawks, and his wife well; he has a good riding face, and he can sit a great horse; he will taint a staff well at tile; when he is mounted he looks like the sign of the George, that's all I know; save, that instead of a dragon, he will brandish against a tree, and break his sword as confidently ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson
... Yes mam I sho was. Jes put up on a platform and auctioned off. Sold right here in Des Arc. Nom taint right. My old mistress [Mrs. Snibley] whoop me till I run off and they took me back when they found out where I lef from. I stayed way bout ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume II, Arkansas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... now, by successive 'scrutinies or epurations,' from all taint of Girondism, has become a great Authority: what we can call shield-bearer, or bottle-holder, nay call it fugleman, to the purged National Convention itself. The Jacobins Debates are reported in ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... bathing in the sea the widow and children shave their heads.[342] Both the bathing and the shaving are doubtless forms of ceremonial purification; in other words, they are designed to rid the survivors of the taint of death, or perhaps more definitely to remove the ghost from their persons, to which he may be supposed to cling like a burr. At Bartle Bay the dead are buried on their sides with their heads pointing in the direction from ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... as well as on grounds of interest, goes forth to the world as a separate and selfish scheme of ours; and that which we believe to be entitled to the dignity and credit of an effort on behalf of the general peace, stability, and interest of Europe actually contracts a taint of selfishness in the eyes of other nations because of the manner in which the subject of Belgian neutrality is too frequently treated in this House. If I may be allowed to speak of the motives which have ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... inheritance—the risk of the taint—of transmitting it. Her father's erratic brilliancy became more than eccentricity before I knew him. I would have told you that had I dreamed that you ever could have thought of marrying Alixe Varian. But how could I know ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... as anything else that Dore has done; but they are also vapid, and without any one merit whatever in point of art. The illustrations to the 'Contes Drolatiques' are full of power and invention; but those to 'Elaine' are merely and simply stupid; theatrical betises, with the taint of ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... He grieved as only strong, brave men can grieve For what is lost. Then wandered off a pace To seek new life in lands across the sea; He left thee here, thy life was wild and free. Long years ago came tidings of his death, Born sadly on the wind's taint whispering breath. He was a peer, the last of all his race, His Saxon strength was written on thy face. Yet in thy veins thy mother's Southern blood Is bounding with its warm, impetuous flood. Enough; my words are ...
— Love or Fame; and Other Poems • Fannie Isabelle Sherrick
... sweet, innocent, ladylike, high-spirited, joyous creature. Those struggles of her father to get rid of the last porcine taint, though not quite successful as to himself, had succeeded thoroughly in regard to her. It comes at last with due care, and the due care had here been taken. She was so nice that middle-aged men wished themselves younger that they might make ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... fellow's peddling spirit. Therefore he laughed; there was really nothing else to do. But his laughter was charged with more anger even than contempt. He had been deluding himself that he had done with piracy. The conviction that this French service was free of any taint of that was the only consideration that had induced him to accept it. Yet here was this haughty, supercilious gentleman, who dubbed himself General of the Armies of France, proposing a plundering, thieving raid which, when stripped of its mean, transparent mask of ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... herbs, and weaker arts, To change their limbs, but not their hearts! Man's life and vigour keep within, Lodg'd in the centre, not the skin. Those piercing charms and poisons, which His inward parts taint and bewitch, More fatal are, than such, which can Outwardly only spoil the man. Those change his shape and make it foul, But these deform and kill ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... might have struck me, to Ray Limbert's suit, which Mrs. Stannace was not the woman to stomach. Mrs. Stannace was seldom the woman to do anything: she had been shocked at the way her children, with the grubby taint of their father's blood (he had published pale Remains or flat Conversations of his father) breathed the alien air of authorship. If not the daughter, nor even the niece, she was, if I am not mistaken, the second cousin of a hundred earls and a great stickler ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... condition, which reveals that strange, apathetic obstinacy, that vis inertiae which was the spring even of his most decided actions in after life, and which at the same time raises grave doubts in my mind whether there may not have been an actual taint of insanity in this extraordinary being, is the incident of his having submitted, rather than give in after some misdemeanour, to being confined to his room in the Academy for nearly three months at a stretch. Alfieri was fifteen; he might have been ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... bamboo that grows through the gangrened flesh; I had hove him down by the mangroves brown, where the mud-reef sucks and draws, Moored by the heel to his own keel to wait for the land-crab's claws! He is lazar within and lime without, ye can nose him far enow, For he carries the taint of a musky ship—the reek of the slaver's dhow!" The skipper looked at the tiering guns and the bulwarks tall and cold, And the Captains Three full courteously peered down at the gutted hold, And the Captains Three called courteously from deck to scuttle-butt:— "Good Sir, we ha' dealt with that ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... their virgin beauty," speak of the conduct and vocation of "the erring sisters of the sex," in a manner that often amazes me, and has, in more than one instance, excited unpleasant feelings towards the fair satirists. This moral taint, for I can consider it as nothing less, I have heard defended, but only by men who are supposed to have had a large experience of the world, and who, perhaps, on that account, are not the best judges of female delicacy. "Every woman," as Pope says, "may be at heart ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... a peerage nor a gentle breeding. Instead he was reared meagrely, if not harshly, under the maternal roof and name, until he grew old enough to realize that he was on an island where bad birth is not forgiven, even if the taint be royal. Then he ran away, reached the coast of France, and made his way to the French court, where his father was now, and properly enough, an exile. He was a fine youth, with a prompt tongue and clever head, and some attention was finally shown him. They gave him a sword and a company, and he ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... moral character; his insolence and swaggering, bullying tone in the House of Lords have excited as much disgust out of the House as they have given offence in it, and the only excuse for him is—what many people believe—that there is a taint of madness about him. The other night, in his reply to the Duke of Wellington's violent and foolish speech, he chose to turn upon Lord Rolle, a very old man and a choleric, hard-bitten old Tory. Rolle was ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville |
