"Blight" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... house as put to rights by Clem would be found at least endurable. It had not the solid grace nor the columned front of the houses I had somewhat hurriedly admired in the Southland some years before, but its lower rooms were wide, its windows abundant, and outwardly it had escaped the blight of ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... the loftiest hopes man nurses, Never deem them idly born; Never think that deathly curses Blight them on a ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... years behind the Ohio side, in improvements of every sort. Thus far, we have not ourselves noticed differences of that degree. Doubtless before the late civil war,—all the ante-bellum travelers agree in this,—when the blight of slavery was resting on Virginia and Kentucky, the south shore of the Ohio was as another country; but to-day, so far as we can ascertain from a surface view, the little villages on either side are ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... souls," answered the dark man impressively, "who return to blight the living with the spectacle ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... upon me I will tell you as we go,— The blight of the shadow hunter Who walks the ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... Black Jack gives him hard an' narrow looks, nothin' su'gestive of trouble occurs. In less'n a week he shakes down into his proper place, an' all as placid as a duck-pond. He's even a sort o' fav'rite with Nell, Missis Rucker an' Tucson Jennie, they claimin' that he's sufferin' from soul blight because of a lost love. Certainly, thar's nothin' in this yere fem'nine bluff, but of course none of us don't say so at ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... of useless days in the society of flies and lizards, with only, as a very occasional treat, the smallest glimpse of anything resembling a Front. And all this is in a country so desolated by centuries of war that in spite of obvious natural fertility it is a sullen treeless desert—a desert of blight and thistles, as profitless to our men as their periodically deferred anticipations of a grand advance. A book that sets out to record vacuity can hardly be crammed with thrilling literature, and I am not going to pretend that Mr. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various
... walked by Witham stream There fell no chilling shade To blight the drifting naiad's dream Or make ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... listening attentively to the warning against Krovitch, determined to put a quietus on that province, which once and for all time would blight her hopes of independence. He wired many questions and voluminous suggestions to his agent in Paris, Casper Haupt, who was a sub-chief of the White Police. This ardent subject of Nicholas II had ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... you dive me tandy, Dive me only white,— 'Tause there's poison in the tolored, Which my health will blight; But you better dive me sudar, Let the tandy be,— 'Tause I shall not want so much, And that ...
— Mother Truth's Melodies - Common Sense For Children • Mrs. E. P. Miller
... lured me to destruction,' she said, 'become a curse to you and your descendants forever! May it blight and kill all those whom it looks upon, and render it dreadful and dreaded to all those who will place confidence in ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... a mother's love, had touched her tender heart. That which was afterward told to her she had identified with her own humble life; she heard with a shudder that it was to the malice of his brother that this unhappy being owed the injury which, like a poisonous blight, had marred for him all the joys of existence, while she owed all that was loveliest and best in her young life to a ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Bay, founded in 1826, fared no better, although controlled during its last year by the gifted and unfortunate Captain Barker. A blight of stagnation seemed in those days to hang over all attempts at settlement in the tropical regions, and in three years' time Fort Wellington was abandoned, and with it ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... wondered why our country people—who are so kind to one another, and to tramps and beggars, that they seem to live by the rule of an old woman in a Galway sweet-shop: 'Refuse not any, for one may be the Christ'—speak of a visit of the tinkers as of frost in spring or blight in harvest. I asked why they were shunned as other wayfarers are not, and I was told of their strange customs and of ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... printed in the Fifteenth Century: of which they possessed about fifteen hundred." This intelligence recruited my spirits; and I began to look around with eagerness. But alas! although the crop was plentiful, a deadly blight had prevailed. In other words, there was number without choice: quantity rather than quality. Yet I will not be ill-natured; for, on reaching the third of these rooms, and the last in the suite, Monsieur Thiebaut placed before me the ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... another kind of impoverishment which is somewhat mysterious in its causes and perhaps impossible to prevent. This is the kind of blight which attacks many of our most ancient, beautiful, and expressive words, rendering them first of all unsuitable for colloquial use, though they may be still used in prose. Next they are driven out of the prose vocabulary into that of poetry, and at last removed into that limbo ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 3 (1920) - A Few Practical Suggestions • Society for Pure English
... call you friend, I wish you this— No gentle destiny throughout the years; No soft content, or ease, or unearned bliss Bereft of heart-ache where no sorrow nears, But rather rugged trouble for a mate To mold your soul against the coming blight, To train you for the ruthless whip of fate And build your heart up for the ...
— Bobby of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... that the United States was stunned is but to expose the inadequacy of language. The whole world was stunned. It confronted that blight of the human brain, the unprecedented. Human endeavour was a jest, a monstrous futility, when a lunatic on a lonely island, who owned a yacht and an exposed village, could destroy five of the proudest fleets of Christendom. And how had he done it? Nobody knew. The ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... miserable of men, and wrecked all chance of happiness between Ethel and myself—have you no heart that you can refuse to repair a little of the harm that you have done? You are a cruel woman—I could almost say a wicked woman: hard, false, and cowardly; and I wish my words could blight your life as your ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... years' war, the free companies, the abasement of the church, the great schism—these things were misfortunes to which our modern time can find no parallel. They came suddenly upon Western Europe and defiled it like a blight.... They have made the mediaeval idea odious to every half-instructed man and have stamped even its ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... She was full of self-satisfaction and trivial pleasure. She looked really happy as she tried the effect of one bit of color after another, holding the hat up. Joan had never known her to show such interest in anything before. One would never have fancied, seeing the girl at this moment, that a blight lay upon her life, that she could only look back with shrinking and forward without hope. She was neither looking backward nor forward now,—all her simple energies were concentrated in her work. How was it? Joan asked herself. Had she forgotten—could she ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... righteousness. Fame and wealth and pleasure are good when they are born of high thinking and right living, when they lead to purer faith and love; but if they are sought as ends and loved for themselves, they blight and corrupt. The value of culture is great, and the ideal it presents points in the right direction in bidding us build up the being which we are. But since man is not the highest, he may not rest in himself, and culture therefore is a means rather than an end. If we make it the ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... death, and suddenly had been called back to life and real happiness—had been, in effect, raised from the dead—by the accident of meeting a congenial female companion. But, secondly, that very lady from whose lips I first heard this remarkable case of blight and restoration, had herself passed through an equal though not a similar blight, and was now seeking earnestly, though with what success I could never estimate, some similar restoration to some new mode ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... powers! Growing one's own choice words and fancies In orange tubs and beds of pansies; One's sighs and passionate declarations In odorous rhetoric of carnations; Seeing how far one's stocks will reach; Taking due care one's flowers of speech To guard from blight as well as bathos, And ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... profit by it. It holds its position by love. No publisher may say to it: "Buy my books, not those of my rival"; no scientist may forbid it to give his opponent a hearing; no religious body may dictate to it; no commercial influence may throw a blight over it. It ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... a richer and fuller life, a softer beauty. But although an intimacy greater than he and she had yet known, would seem to be enforced by this winter of isolation and leisure, she did not, for a time, see as much of him as before. A constraint, almost like a blight upon their friendship, seemed to have fallen between them ever since the night that she had danced. Seagreave did not come down to Gallito's cabin quite so frequently in the evenings, and, according to Jose, spent ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... American Israel. American Judaism needs peace to carry out the great task confronting it. Zionism is no less in need of peace in order to gain the hearts of those whose hearts are still Jewish. The very possibility of a conflict has bred a spirit of suspicion and unfriendliness which falls like a blight upon every attempt at united action. The non-Zionists may succeed in defeating their opponents; they can never dispense with Zionism which is a driving force in American Jewish life. The victory may perch on the banners of the Zionists but they can never ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... alongside, which has often to be used. The compass {22} itself is so placed that you can see it well while either sitting or standing up, or when lying at full length on the deck, with the back against a pillow propped by the mizen mast, the blight sun or moon overhead, and a turn or two of the mainsheet cast about your body to keep the sleepy steersman from rolling over into the water, ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... he flipped a rosebud covered with blight, kicked off a snail which was crawling on the path; then, halfway down the path, he suddenly raised his head and gave a look ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... Frightened, repentant, maybe, Hua himself fled to Hawaii, and his retainers scattered themselves in Molokai, Oahu, and Kauai. They could not escape the curse. Like the Wandering Jew, they carried disaster with them. Blight, drouth, thirst, and famine appeared wherever they set foot, and though the wicked king kept himself alive for three and a half years, he succumbed to hunger and thirst at last, and in Kohala his withered frame ceased to be animate. To this day "the rattle of Hua's ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... In Blantyre, for example, according to MacDonald, "to be called a liar is rather a compliment." Once more: English sentiment is such that the mere suspicion of incontinence on the part of a woman is enough to blight her life; but there are peoples whose sentiments entail no such effect, and, in some cases, a reverse effect is produced: "Unchastity is, with the Wetyaks, a virtue." It seems, then, that in respect of all the leading divisions of human conduct, different races ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... mother's life now; knew that there had been a blight upon it, of which a bad unscrupulous man had been the cause. And that man was the father ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... The first symptoms of the dread potato disease showed themselves in the autumn of 1845, and even that year there was much suffering, though a trifle to what was to follow. Many remedies were tried, both to stop the blight and save the crops, but all alike proved unavailing. The next year the potatoes seemed to promise unusually well, and the people, with characteristic hopefulness, believed that their trouble was over. The summer, however, ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... and Christians from the first dawn of its existence; it lingers among ourselves in our Liturgy and in the popular belief; and in spite of the emphatic censure of Him after whose name we call ourselves, is still the instant interpreter for us of any unusual calamity, a potato blight, a famine, or an epidemic: such vitality is there in a moral faith, though now, at any rate, contradicted by the experience of all mankind, and at ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... Despite my cheerful words, and despite the belief I did feel in him, I could not help seeing that he carried himself now as a marked man. The free, open look was gone; a blight had fallen upon him, and he withered under it. There was what the English call a "down" look upon his face, which had not been there formerly, even in those worst days when the parting from Sigmund was immediately before ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... system of education may do to the child, there is one thing which it cannot fail to do to him,—to blight his mental growth. What particular form or forms this blighting influence may take will depend in each particular case on a variety of circumstances. Experience tells us that what happens in most cases is that Western education strangles some faculties, arrests the growth ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... liable to several diseases, which affect the flour made from it, and render it unfit for good bread. The principal of these are the blight, mildew, and smut, which are occasioned by microscopic fungi, which sow themselves and grow upon the stems and ears, destroying the nutritive principles, and introducing matter of a deleterious kind. The farmer is at the utmost ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... of Iconoclasm, which did so much to devastate the East, and which, by the emigration of some {162} 50,000 Christians, cleric and lay, to Calabria, exercised so important an influence on the history of Southern Italy, might have cast a fatal blight on the Church in Constantinople had it not been for the stand made by the Monks of the Studium. [Sidenote: The Monks of the Studium and the Iconoclastic Controversy.] The age of the Iconoclasts was the golden age of the ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... house was a gruesome place. Everything in it and for yards around it, was covered with a yellow blight, as if the slight beard of some pestilential fungous were sprouting ... the only people the company could induce to work there were foreigners who knew little of America.... Swedes mostly ... attentive churchgoers ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... a desert, and the fruitful places into a wilderness. How different to Mortimer would have been the scene viewed through another medium! His soul was ardent, devoted, full of high and glorious imaginings; but a blight was on them all, and they became chill and decayed—an uninformed ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... descending from the lofty heights of logic to the common level of impulse and affection. Many years before, Warwick, when a lad of eighteen, had shaken the dust of the town from his feet, and with it, he fondly thought, the blight of his inheritance, and had achieved elsewhere a worthy career. But during all these years of absence he had cherished a tender feeling for his mother, and now again found himself in her house, amid the familiar surroundings of his childhood. His visit had brought joy to his mother's heart, and ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... Louis. The center of the old city is one big shapeless blob of a dead area; so nice and cold that St. Louis has reversed the usual city-type blight area growth. Ever since Rhine, the slum sections have been moving out and the new buildings have been moving in. So with the dead area and the brand-new, wide streets and fancy traffic control, St. Louis was the place to go in along one road, get lost in traffic, ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... prejudices, there can be but one answer to that question. Oriental superstition cast its blight upon the fair field of science, whatever compensation it may or may not have brought in other fields. But we must be on our guard lest we overestimate or incorrectly estimate this influence. Posterity, in glancing backward, is always prone to stamp any given age of the past with one idea, and ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... struck—more appalled, let us say—at the strangeness of the surrounding scene, than even by his own ruin. As he looked upon his fellow-gamesters, he seemed, for the first time in his life, to gaze upon some of those hideous demons of whom he had read. He looked in the mirror at himself. A blight seemed to have fallen over his beauty, and his presence seemed accursed. He had pursued a dissipated, even more than a dissipated, career. Many were the nights that had been spent by him not on his couch; great had been the exhaustion that he had often experienced; haggard ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... it is quite fair to regard comedy as a curse or a yoke. Certainly Eugene Field never suffered under the blight of the one nor staggered under the burden of the other. If there is any curse in comedy, unadulterated by lying, malice, or envy, he never knew it. He knew—none better—that the author who would command the tears that purify and sweeten ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... yourselves, oh! men of the Sagalie Tyee, or I shall blight you with my evil eye. Care for yourselves and do not follow me." On and on she danced through the thickest of the wilderness, on and on they followed until they reached the very heart of the seagirt ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... word from Don Lovell, and it was my intention to send one of the boys into that station to inquire for mail. There was a hostelry at Grinnell, several stores and a livery stable, all dying an easy death from the blight of the arid plain, the town profiting little or nothing from the cattle trade. But when within a half-day's drive of the railway, on overtaking the herd after dinner, there was old man Don talking to the boys on herd. The ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... my departure to-night. The cause hangs upon it. A blight on my evil luck!" he cried. "Were Colonel Myddelton at home, I should not be fleeing from my own country empty-handed. I shall be writing to him most of this day, but a spoken word is worth a volume ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas
... Bright with luxuriant clusters of roses and purple amorphas. Over them wander the buffalo herds, and the elk and the roebuck; Over them wander the wolves, and herds of riderless horses; Fires that blast and blight, and winds that are weary with travel; Over them wander the scattered tribes of Ishmael's children, Staining the desert with blood; and above their terrible wartrails Circles and sails aloft, on pinions majestic, ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... winds, ye are dead, with your voices attuned, That thrilled the green life in the sweet-scented sheaves, When I touched a warm hand which has faded, and swooned To a trance of the darkness, and blight on ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... trash, and taxing him to support such publications, is the fostering patron to which he owes his difficulties. Thus does America nip her young genius in the bud; and when it perchance comes to flower and fruit, she is not behind-hand with a blight. The unknown production of the American author is brought into a depressing competition with works which have been tried in England, and found certain of success in America. The popular British author, whom ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... people happy. I breathe through his lips, I live in his life, his passions are my own; and it is impossible for me to know noble and pure emotions excepting in the heart of this being unsoiled by crime. You have your fancies, here I show you mine. In exchange for the blight which society has brought upon me, I give it a man of honor, and enter upon a struggle with destiny; do you wish to be of ...
— Vautrin • Honore de Balzac
... against the profligate wretch as warmly as the Catos of the pit could desire; because in a modern play I am to judge of the right and the wrong. The standard of police is the measure of political justice. The atmosphere will blight it; it cannot live here. It has got into a moral world, where it has no business, from which it must needs fall headlong; as dizzy, and incapable of making a stand, as a Sweden-borgian bad spirit that has ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... been an early bird, and had the first pick at the worms, was up, high up, in the cedar at the corner of the field, whistling away as though the happiest of birds. The roses were getting washed clear of the blight that had begun to cover them; and everything seemed to be drinking in the soft cooling drops that fell so gently and bathed the face of nature, for during Fred's visit the only rain that had fallen ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... always to be avoided is monotony in colour. Who can not recall barren rooms, without a spark of attraction despite priceless treasures, dispersed in a meaningless way? That sort of setting puts a blight on any gathering. "Well," you will ask, "given the task of converting such a sterile stretch of monotony into a blooming joy, how should one begin?" It is quite simple. Picture to yourself how the room would look if you scattered flowers about it, roses, tulips, mignonette, flowers of yellow ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... have no sin Leading them astray, No false heart within That would them bewray, Nought to tempt them in An evil way; And if canker come and blight, Nought ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... large and fine, but the ant destroys the blossom as fast as it flowers. Rice has been sown twice, viz. once each year, but the south-east winds blighted a great part of it: that which escaped the blight, yielded a great increase. The quantity of ground cleared and in cultivation on the 13th of March, 1790, was thirty acres belonging to the crown, and about eighteen acres cleared by free people and convicts, for ...
— An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island • John Hunter
... daylight seemed to pry into the secrets of the past night. I would fain shun it—the garish light disturbed me. The morning sun, which had ever been my delight, seemed now a mocking imp of curiosity; the house and grounds looked bare and desolate; a blight had fallen upon ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... either heard or read of this poisonous tree, supposed to carry death to every living thing for a wide distance around it, not even sparing shrubs or plants—things of its own kind—but inflicting blight and destruction wherever its envenomed breath may ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... always so willing to do whatever Georgina wished. And now to think that instead of being the like-everybody-else kind of a young lady she seemed, she was like a heroine in a book who had lived through trouble which would "blight ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... child's speech, neither promise nor confession, but allowing love to cherish its fairest hopes without fear or torment! How pure a memory for life! What a free blossoming of all the flowers that spring from the soul, which a mere trifle can blight, but which, at that moment, everything ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... compounded mixtures that Dr. Spencer promised should do no more harm than was reasonable to himself, or any one else. Ethel suspected that, if Tom had chanced to singe his eyebrows, his friend would not have regretted a blight to his nascent coxcombry, but he was far too careful of his own beauty to do any ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... as much like heaven as heaven itself could be, if it were not for the unspeakable Turk, but his blight rests on everything. I could have kept awake that morning without Fred's irreverent music, simply for sake of the scenery, if its freshness had been untainted. But there hung a sickly, faint pall of smoke that robbed ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... man of the world, who did not involve himself with unpleasant people. But his imagination presented the picture of the two sad women; their last hope knocked away by this cropping out of the family blight. Perhaps he could put it to them in a better light than either Roper or his father. He saw again the girl's face standing on the lawn in the summer twilight—a face that must ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... improvements, that he may cultivate his sense of justice, his benevolence, and the desire of perfection. Toil is the school for these high principles; and we have here a strong presumption that, in other respects, it does not necessarily blight the soul. Next, we have seen that the most fruitful sources of truth and wisdom are not books, precious as they are, but experience and observation; and these belong to all conditions. It is another ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... in moments of vanity, deemed they could have gained heaven if they were possessed of Madeleine's wealth, her jewels, her carriages, her dresses; but were the veils that shroud the hypocrisy of human joy raised for the warning of the uninitiated, many a noble heart like Madeleine's would show the blight of disappointment, with the thorns thick and sharp under the flowers that are strewn on their path. The sympathy of manhood, ever flung over the couch of suffering beauty, must hover in sighs of regret over ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... not done so, dear father," she answered, gently, "it has been because I knew your secret must be a painful one. I have lain awake night after night, wondering what was the cause of the blight that has been upon you and all you have done. But why should I ask you questions that you could not answer without pain? I have heard people say cruel things of you; but they have never said them twice in my hearing." Her eyes flashed through ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... came the blight Of a little thoughtless fight; Then, alas! each passing day Farther bore these ...
— Ballads of Peace in War • Michael Earls
... you wretched blight, you miserable weed!" said Mr. Brewster, having recovered enough breath to be going on with. He glowered at his son-in-law despondently. "I might have, expected it! If I was at the North Pole, I could ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... emphasize her words. "Am I not left deserted in my age? The child Britta,—sole daughter of my sole daughter,—is she not stolen, and kept from me? Has not her heart been utterly turned away from mine? All through that vile witch,—accursed of God and man! She it is who casts the blight on our land; she it is who makes the hands and hearts of our men heavy and careless, so that even luck has left the fishing; and yet you hesitate,—you delay, you will not fulfill your promise! I tell you, there are those in Bosekop who, at my bidding, would cast ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... the attic contents were to furnish forth the Cape Cod cottage with no unnecessary additions. Here were eight cane-seated chairs of the late Empire years. Four had been painted a dirty brown to simulate black walnut; four represented the white enamel blight which, in turn, had chipped enough to display the "grained" painting of the golden oak years beneath. A scraper applied to a leg revealed the mellow tone of honey-colored maple. Patience and paint remover did the rest. Brought up in the natural finish, they blended beautifully with the old ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... to urge that patronage is the curse and blight of all such endeavours, and to impress upon the working men that they must originate and manage for themselves. And to ask them the question, can they possibly show their detestation of drunkenness better, or better strive to get rid of it from among them, than to make ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... potent to blight and to shrivel. Not time, but man, is the great destroyer. History is full of the ruins of cities and empires. "Innumerable Paradises have come and gone; Adams and Eves many," happy one day, have been "miserable exiles" the next; and always ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... Dicko Smith, in gaudy putties girt, With sand-blight in his optics, and much leaner than he started, Round the 'Oly Land cavorting in three- quarters of a shirt, And imposin' on the natives ez one Dick ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson
... and imagine that they're having a good time because they're making enough noise for six and drinking too much for ten. I loathe New York, Bertie. I wouldn't come near the place if I hadn't got to see editors occasionally. There's a blight on it. It's got moral delirium tremens. It's the limit. The very thought of staying more than a day in it makes me sick. And you call this thing pretty soft ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... if you are willing to waste your time listening to their twaddle, that there is something radically wrong in any innovation, that both "Church and State" will be imperilled if things are altered. No blight, no mildew is more fatal to a plant than the "complacent" are to the world. They resent any progress and are offended if you mention before them any new standards or points of view. "What has been good ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... filched with light fingers from the pockets of the crowd, saw the crowd looking up to these trainers and employers of pickpockets, hailing them "captains of industry"! They reaped only where and what others had sown; they touched industry only to plunder and to blight it; they organized it only that its profits might go to those who did not toil and who despised those who did. "Have I gone mad in the midst of sane men?" I asked myself. "Or have I been mad, and have I suddenly become sane ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... laid along the waters of the Cumberland, the lair of moonshiner and feudsman. The knight is a moonshiner's son, and the heroine a beautiful girl perversely christened "The Blight." Two impetuous young Southerners fall under the spell of "The Blight's" charms and she learns what a large part jealousy and pistols have in the ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... show such a speech could make, for the irresistible charm it could take from his dazzling sincerity; and before she could do anything but blink at excess of light she heard this very word sound on Mrs. Wix's lips, just as if the poor lady had guessed it and wished, snatching it from her, to blight it like a crumpled flower. "You're dreadful, you're terrible, for you know but too well that it's not a small thing to me that you should address me in terms that are princely!" Princely was what he stood there and looked and sounded; that was what Maisie ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... stood shoulder to shoulder with them all in the fight for the establishment of the new order of things and his generosity with himself and his wealth had been superb. The delight with which he made a gift of himself to any cause whatsoever, rather tended to blight the prospects of what might have been a brilliant career at law. With his backing Hobson Capers had opened the cotton mills on a margin of no capital and much grit. Then Tom Cantrell had begun stock manipulations on a few blocks of gas and water, which ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... N'gombi people, who were wont to ascribe all their misfortunes to his machinations. To Bula Matadi (which was the generic name by which the Government of the Congo Free State was known) was traceable the malign perversity of game, the blight of crops, the depredations of weaver birds. Bula Matadi encouraged leopards to attack isolated travellers, and would on great occasions change the seasons of the year that the N'gombi's gardens might ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... the light, when a wider and saner understanding of motherhood and marriage is at hand. And it is not an untimely spring either, not one which the treacherous sun of January calls forth only to blight with later snow and frost. No, it is the real light and life-giving spring, which comes when the sap begins to run, when the sun calls up smoky mists from out the brown earth, ready to enclose the seed, which shall bring forth ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... warmth delight:— What of Winter and its blight? Snowy fields and forests cold? Flowers ...
— What Sami Sings with the Birds • Johanna Spyri
... curse. If I could draw aside the veil and let you look into the desolate homes of your own city tonight, you would feel Ex-Governor Hanley of Indiana did not give an overwrought picture when he said: "Personally, I have seen so much physical ruin, mental blight and moral corruption from strong drink that I hate the traffic. I hate it for its arrogance; I hate it for its hypocrisy; I hate it for its greed and avarice; I hate it for its domination in politics; I hate it for its disregard of law; I hate it for the load it straps ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... use much of the old literature, simply substituting for "factory" the word "school" when condemning "hazardous occupations likely to sap [children's] nervous energy, stunt their physical growth, blight their minds, destroy their moral fiber, and fit them for the ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... are to develop some districts and depress others; to stimulate cities and blight villages; to destroy established industries; to foster monopolies at favored points; and to sacrifice the future revenues of the road by forcing industry to move in the competing points to get the low rates. ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... and faintly scented with the sea. Fame and wealth shall slip like sand from him. She may be set aside for the cadence of a rhyme, for the flowing line of a limb, but when the passion of art has raged itself out, she shall return to blight ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... streak nor strain Of soil, but is like wool to sight; And souls that free of sin remain The Lamb receiveth with delight; And, though each day a group we gain, There comes no strife for room nor right, Nor rivalry our bliss to blight. The more the merrier, I profess. In company our love grows bright, In honour more ...
— The Pearl • Sophie Jewett
... directions of the Police Inspector. Uneasily, he had remained in the library until the allotted time was elapsed. He fidgeted from place to place, his mind heavy with distress under the shadow that threatened to blight the life of his cherished son. Finally, with a sense of relief he put out the lights and went to his chamber. But he did not follow the further directions given him, for he was not minded to go to bed. Instead, he drew the curtains closely to make sure that no gleam ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... love and fortune at a blow, as it were, his manly spirit did not cower and sink beneath the strokes; that he suffered is true, but he bore up bravely under the adverse fortune. He was proud, as all great minds are, and the blight so publicly cast on Annie Evalyn's good repute, cut him to the quick; but he hoped she might be able to refute the aspersions cast on her by Sumpter, for he was loth to think ill of a being that had appeared so amiable and exalted in her nature, so lofty in soul and ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... will sicken In that pure and holy light, When he feels the hopes I've stricken With an everlasting blight! For, so wildly in my madness Have I poured abroad my wrath, I've been changing joy to sadness; And with ruins ...
— The Youth's Coronal • Hannah Flagg Gould
... when a sceptical philosophy came down like a blight, and destroyed the bloom of his art and faith, he thus recognized that growing knowledge was an essential condition of growing goodness. Pompilia shone with a glory that mere knowledge could not give (if there were such a thing as ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... the people seemed to have been of a serious cast of mind, which led to speculation, criticism, and the cultivation of the exact sciences. From Ferrara came Savonarola, the fanatical prophet who appeared during the moral blight which characterized the age of the Borgias, and Lucretia must frequently have recalled this man in whom her father, by the executioner's hand, sought to stifle the protestations of the faithful and upright against ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... blight on their labours lay, And ever their quarry would vanish away, Till the sun-dried boys of the Black Tyrone Took a brotherly interest in Boh Da Thone: And, sooth, if pursuit in possession ends, The Boh and his trackers were best ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... angry aspect of the waters has been acclaimed as one of the origins of that river-dragon idea which used to be common in south Italy, before the blight of Spaniardism fell upon the land and withered up the pagan myth-making faculty. There are streams still perpetuating this name—the rivulet Dragone, for instance, which falls into the Ionian not far from ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... action. It was therefore with no little anxiety that the council of Henry VIII. perceived his male children, on whom their hopes were centred, either born dead, or dying one after another within a few days of their birth, as if his family were under a blight. When the Queen had advanced to an age which precluded hope of further offspring, and the heir presumptive was an infirm girl, the unpromising aspect became yet more alarming. The life of the Princess Mary was precarious, for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... were amazing; countless as the tears shed for perfidious lovers. Far abroad on both flanks, they swam in long lines, tier above tier; the water alive with their hosts. Locusts of the sea, peradventure, going to fall with a blight upon some green, mossy province of Neptune. And tame and fearless they were, as the first fish that swam in Euphrates; hardly evading the hand; insomuch that Samoa caught many without ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... the absent, whose going cast a blight On hearts and did afflict them with anguish and affright! Let gladness then accomplish its purification-time,[FN47] For, by a triple divorcement,[FN48] I've ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous
... have been the more commendable, singer. And your tale might have been the better worth listening to. But since tales have nothing in common with truth, it's a matter of indifference to me whether Hobb's rose suffered perpetual blight or not. ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... to labor gratefully for the destitute and the dying. It was expected, and justly too, that the land of apostolic revivals would be the first to imitate the apostles in the work of saving the heathen. A failure to do this may bring a blight upon the churches, if it has not brought ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble
... event to eat his heart in jealousy and impatience. When he found him he burned to insult him by asking him what tailor he advertised, or by addressing him as the Housemaid's Terror or the Nursegirl's Blight. He ground tegmenta of 'Maud' between his teeth as he looked at him. 'His essences turn the live air sick,' and 'that oiled and curled Assyrian bull, smelling of musk and of insolence.' And it happened one night that Captain MacMadden, arriving late, and in a mighty hurry and ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... he stirred nervously in the darkness, and broke into silent invective against the man who could so insult the memory of one who had perished under the blight of his own coldness and misunderstanding. Then he suddenly started back surprised and apprehensive. Brotherson had unlocked his door, and was coming rapidly his way. Sweetwater heard his step in the hall and had hardly ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... draw and strike In nature's right, And Freedom's might, To break the night Of Slavery's blight, And make our ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... cotton, had a deeper meaning Than the great presence of the awful mountains Glorified by the sunset; and his daughter, A delicate flower on whom had blown too long Those evil winds, which, sweeping from the ice And winnowing the fogs of Labrador, Shed their cold blight round Massachusetts Bay, With the same breath which stirs Spring's opening leaves And lifts her half-formed flower-bell on its ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... son of a sinless couple can be found and if his blood be mixed with the soll of Tara the blight and ruin will depart from ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens
... large popularity; but his alliance with President Johnson was fatal to his political fortunes. He had placed himself in a position from which he could not with grace retreat, and to go forward in which was still further to blight his hopes of promotion in his party. It was an extremely mortifying fact to Mr. Raymond that with the power of the Administration behind him he could on a test question secure the support of only one Republican member, and he a colleague ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... us all in gloom Because thy song is still, Nor blight the banquet-garland's bloom ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... it. Emissaries of the Pope and the devil, as the strangers were considered—the smell of sulphur hardly yet shaken out of their canonicals—what islander would venture to jeopardize his soul, and call down a blight on his breadfruit, by holding any intercourse with them! That morning the priests actually picknicked in grove of cocoa-nut trees; but, before night, Christian hospitality—in exchange for a commercial equivalent of hard dollars—was given them ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... never strip the bowers, Or icy Winter cast A blight upon the flowers; But Spring, in all her bloom, For ever flourish there, And the children of the tomb ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... whether in an individual or a nation, the latter is half concealed. Fear is more demonstrative, and as it is essentially destructive, its effects are more sudden and visible. In its acuter forms, as Fright and Terror, it may blanch the hair in a night, blight the mind and destroy the life of the individual. As Panic, it is eminently epidemic, carrying crowds and armies before it; while in the aggravated form of Despair it swallows up all other emotions and prompts to self destruction. Its physiological ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... of ages had whipped the sand down into the valleys. Little clusters of green poplars, like vast goatees, nestled on the northern chin of the hills across the valley, where the Chinook had failed to spread its balmy winter-blight among them; here and there were glimpses of thousands of cattle feeding on the brown ranges. The sun, like a bubble of molten gold blown from the bowl of heaven, hung very close in a steel-bright, cloudless sky. Lower it fell, and lower, until a fang of rock two miles high pierced ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... the cottage. Mrs. Pascoe was his aunt. Both women surveyed a bush. Mrs. Durrant stooped and picked a sprig from it. Next she pointed (her movements were peremptory; she held herself very upright) at the potatoes. They had the blight. All potatoes that year had the blight. Mrs. Durrant showed Mrs. Pascoe how bad the blight was on her potatoes. Mrs. Durrant talked energetically; Mrs. Pascoe listened submissively. The boy Curnow knew that Mrs. Durrant was saying that it is perfectly simple; you mix the powder in ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... And I have tamed my sorrow. Pain and grief Are transitory things, no less than joy; And though they leave us not the men we were, Yet they do leave us. You behold me here, A man bereaved, with something of a blight Upon the early blossoms of his life, And its first verdure,—having not the less A living root, and drawing from the earth Its vital juices, from the air its powers: And surely as man's heart and strength are whole, His appetites ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... gentleman became excessively gallant, entreated his fair visitor to remain where she was for a tiny instant until he could descend and admit her, implored her with expansive gestures not on any account to go away and blight his life. As the sweep of the arm and the shrug of the shoulders betrayed only too plainly the fact that the hospitable gentleman was very much in a state of nature, except for the lather on his face, Esther took fright and bolted out of the gate, inwardly execrating the Gallic race and their ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... time been awakened to woman's privileges in tergiversation even when it involves another person's possible blight. That Bathsheba was a firm and positive girl, far less inconsequent than her fellows, had been the very lung of his hope; for he had held that these qualities would lead her to adhere to a straight course for consistency's sake, and accept him, though her fancy might not flood him with the iridescent ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... water in the soil. It would seem, by the remarks of those who till the earth, as if there were never a season just right—as if Providence had bidden us labor for bread, and yet sent down the rains of heaven so plentifully as always to blight our harvests. It is rare that we do not have a most remarkable season, with respect to moisture, especially. Our potatoes are rotted by the Summer showers, or cut off by a Summer drought; and when, as in the ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French |
