"Decay" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... objects are best fitted to human infirmities. I well know how far in wisdom, in feature, in stature, proportion, beauty, in all the gifts of the mind, thou exceedest my Penelope: she is a mortal, and subject to decay; thou immortal, ever growing, yet never old; yet in her sight all my desires terminate, all my wishes—in the sight of her, and of my country earth. If any god, envious of my return, shall lay his dreadful hand upon me as I ...
— THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES • CHARLES LAMB
... which were wasting away. Their disintegration is identical with our own. They have their decay, their ruptures, their tumors, their madnesses. A piece of furniture gnawed by worms, a gun with a broken trigger, a warped drawer, or the soul of a violin suddenly out of tune, such are the ills which ...
— Romance of the Rabbit • Francis Jammes
... "the sylv' y^t ys about the same hed," which they claim as belonging to the parish on the ground that it was made by the charity of the parishioners in times past. "Our chyrche," they say, "ys in gret ruyn and decay and our toure ys foundered and lyke to fall and ther ys no money left in [o] chyrche box and by reason of great infyrmyty and deth ther hath byn thys yere in oure parysh no chyrche aele, the whych hath hyndred [o] ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Wimborne Minster and Christchurch Priory • Thomas Perkins
... for nervous people, ladies, and children he was par excellence the one man to consult. The house adjoining, at the corner of Sudder Street, has always had the reputation of being haunted, and no one would go near the place for years, and it was gradually falling into decay, when one day to the surprise of everybody some natives appeared on the scene and occupied it, and later on Parrott & Co. leased the premises for their whisky agency. Let us hope that the material spirit has had the effect of exorciting ...
— Recollections of Calcutta for over Half a Century • Montague Massey
... above an inch across may be protected by a coat of good linseed-oil paint; but smaller wounds, if the tree is vigorous, usually require no protection. The object of the paint is to protect the wound from cracking and decay until the healing ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... had been upon the bank of the rivulet, previous to the formation of the dam; and they were now surrounded on all sides, forming a kind of timber islet. It was evident, however, that they were destined to decay, as they were trees of the poplar species, and such as could not live with their roots ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... hope must hinder liues decay: And I the rather waine me from dispaire For loue of Edwards Off-spring in my wombe: This is it that makes me bridle passion, And beare with Mildnesse my misfortunes crosse: I, I, for this I draw in many a teare, And stop the rising of blood-sucking sighes, Least with my sighes or teares, I ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... with fifty-six pound iron west of there. As has been mentioned before, the first section was laid with cottonwood ties of local growth, treated by the burnettizing process, which was erroneously supposed would prevent decay. West of there hard wood ties from the East were used, some of them coming from far away Pennsylvania, and costing the Company two dollars and fifty cents laid down in Omaha. For the mountain section, ties of local growth were largely and satisfactorily ...
— The Story of the First Trans-Continental Railroad - Its Projectors, Construction and History • W. F. Bailey
... Therefore, till the right lady was found, Balzac toiled unceasingly; and when in Madame Hanska the personification of his ideal at last appeared, he redoubled his efforts, till overwork, and his longing for her, caused the decay of his physical powers, and his strength ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... of deerskin, dyed by a strange process which turned it white, and doctored by some cunning medicine. It is like a perfect parchment, and shows no decay. It has a centre-pole of excellent fir, and from its peak flies a strip of snake-skin, dyed a red which never fades. For the greater part of the year the plateau whereon the Tent stands is covered ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... deceived him in the slightest degree. Lyon had never seen her before the day she planted herself in his studio; but he knew her and classified her as if he had made her. He was acquainted with the London female model in all her varieties—in every phase of her development and every step of her decay. When he entered his house that September morning just after the arrival of his two friends there had been no symptoms whatever, up and down the road, of Miss Geraldine's reappearance. That fact had been fixed in ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... king alone, and members of the royal family, enjoyed the privilege of having glazed windows, whitened walls, and tiles; the palace, and some of the Buddhist temples, are the only ancient edifices which remain, and even these are crumbling to decay. The chief temple was one built to contain the tooth of Buddha. Not that the original tooth really exists, because that was burned by the Portuguese. The present relic worshipped by all the Buddhists is more like the tooth of a crocodile than that of a man. It is preserved in an inner chamber, without ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... sometimes the Mood and Tense is signified by the Verb, sometimes they are signified of the Verb by something else.'"—Johnson's Gram. Com., p. 254. "The Verb and the Noun making a complete Sense, which the Participle and the Noun does not."—Ib., p. 255. "The growth and decay of passions and emotions, traced through all their mazes, is a subject too extensive for an undertaking like the present."—Kames El. of Crit., i, 108. "The true meaning and etymology of some of his words was lost."—Knight, on the Greek Alph., p. 37. "When the ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... eyes are dim with childish tears, My heart is idly stirr'd, For the same sound is in my ears Which in those days I heard. Thus fares it still in our decay, And yet the wiser mind Mourns less for what age takes away Than ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... the time of Nineveh and Babylon it had attained to a high civilization, and has remained the same through 4000 years. Of Nineveh and Babylon only rubbish heaps are left, but China still shows no sign of decay. Western Asia is like a vast graveyard with innumerable monuments of bygone times. There devastating migrations of peoples took place, and races and dynasties contended and succeeded one another. But China is still the same as ever. The isolated position of the country and ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... and bankrupt nation, this air of discouragement and decay could not be greater. Outside of the big cities one looks in vain for some sign of American dash and enterprise in the appearance of our ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... of surprisingly perfect preservation, and indeed had the appearance of having only recently fallen asleep, the intense cold having seized upon them with such fierce rapidity that their bodies had completely congealed before even the primary stages of decay had had time to manifest themselves. Indeed, judging from appearances, they had succumbed, in the first instance, to starvation, and, overcome by weakness, had been frozen to death. They were all of lofty stature and muscular build, with fair hair ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... and insoluble perplexity which tormented the Southern people lay in dealing with the colored race. Sections of the so-called black belts still weltered in unthrift and decay, as in the darkest reconstruction days. These belts were three in number. The first, about a hundred miles wide, reached from Virginia and the Carolinas through the Gulf States to the watershed of the State of Mississippi. The second bordered the Mississippi from Tennessee to just above ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... Thomas Gourlay's were so exhausting to his weak frame that they left very little strength behind them. Yet he complained of no particular illness; all he felt was, an easy but general and certain decay of his physical powers, leaving the mind and intellect strong and clear. On the day following the scene in the baronet's house, we must present him to the reader seated, as usual—for he could not be prevailed upon to keep his bed—in his ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... from the sea, having been completely destroyed in 1287 by an inundation. It was afterwards rebuilt by Edward I. on higher ground. The French made several attempts on the town, and in 1380 succeeded in capturing and burning it. The gradual decay of the port was due to the retiring of the sea in the fifteenth century, which rendered the harbour useless. Winchelsea is a pretty place with massive gateways, survivals of the old fortified town. In the centre of the village is a square containing the remains of the old Parish ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... funeral wait, A widowed mother's heart made desolate O'er a war-honor'd Sire's low place of rest; These are the tales that Memory may relate: They have a moral for the aspiring breast, A lesson of Decay ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... of Mary the friars retired, and the choir became, once more, the parish church, and for the next century neglect and decay continued the ruin of the fabric. But with the advent of Laud to the See of London, some attempts were made at reparation. It is said that the steeple had become so ruinous that it had to be taken down, and in 1628 ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... as Prince and Saviour, to give repentance and remission of sin and all needed grace to those who thus believe in Him, and are brought into union with Him. And the Reformed Church will never perish or decay while it continues to set forth this Gospel, and is honoured by its divine Head to bring it home to the hearts and consciences of men, with the same power as its first teachers were honoured with in the brave days ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... a hundred tons' burden, which was bound to Buenos Ayres. As the weather was not fair, we moored early in the day to a branch of a tree on one of the islands. The Parana is full of islands, which undergo a constant round of decay and renovation. In the memory of the master several large ones had disappeared, and others again had been formed and protected by vegetation. They are composed of muddy sand, without even the smallest pebble, and were then about four ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... of the Middle Ages, contribute to health and the preservation of life, and by the development of railroads make possible such a gathering as this,—these sciences, we cheerfully admit, outrank our modest enterprise, which, in the words of Herodotus, is "to preserve from decay the remembrance of what men have done." It may be true, as a geologist once said, in extolling his study at the expense of the humanities, "Rocks do not lie, although men do;" yet, on the other hand, the historic sense, which during our century ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... the least part of which was caused by the necessity of threading our way, when in the immediate neighbourhood of the cliffs, among enormous masses of seaweed stacked in huge heaps and left to undergo the process of decay, which turns it into very valuable manure. The odour which impregnated the whole surrounding atmosphere from these heaps was decidedly the worst and most asphyxiating I ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... very lovely girl, rummaging about the great house, came upon a tall mirror, the mirror that the withered and bitter old woman had long been wont to use and that for all these many lonely years had seen and reflected naught but acrimony and decay and despair and ugliness. And the very lovely girl looked into the mirror—and suddenly cried out. For what the mirror reflected was not her very lovely self, but something hateful and withered ...
— A Book Without A Title • George Jean Nathan
... who begins to feel stirring in his breast those impulses to serve God and bless the world which are native to the Christian spirit, to obtain a definite sphere to fill and a definite work to do. Otherwise these God-inspired impulses, expressing themselves in mere words and sentiments, gradually decay through want of exercise, or they are dispersed over so many objects that nothing is done. But, when a special task is obtained, the force of these sentiments is concentrated upon it and transmuted into actual work. The Christian man says: Here is my own task; if ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... stealing hand of Time May pluck the blossoms of their prime; Envy may talk of bloom decay'd, How lilies droop and roses fade; But Constancy's unalter'd truth, Regardful of the vows of youth, Affection that recalls the past, And bids the pleasing influence last, Shall still preserve the lover's flame In every scene of life the same; And still with fond endearments blend The ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... unsubstantial," she calmly replied; "it is subject to change and decay. A hundred years from now and there may be no visible sign that it had ever been. But the soul is imperishable and immortal; the only thing about man that is really substantial. And now," she added, "for the ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... writ large maddens and kills, writ small is our meat and drink; it attends each minutest and most impalpable detail of the ceaseless fusion and diffusion in which change appears to us as consisting, and which we recognise as growth and decay, or ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... conversation, and because the revelation of self is so full and so delightful, that Sydney Smith's immortality, now that the generation which actually heard him talk has all but disappeared, is still secured without the slightest fear of disturbance or decay. With a few exceptions (the Mrs. Partington business, the apologue of the dinners at the synod of Dort, "Noodle's Oration," and one or two more), the things by which Sydney is known to the general, all come, not from his works, but from his Life or Lives. No one with any sense ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... while others, considering rather the lies and humbug, the vice and servility, which went framed and glazed and enshrined, creaking along in those old Juggernaut cars, with fools worshipping under the wheels, console themselves for the decay of institutions that may have been splendid and costly, but were ponderous, clumsy, slow, and unfit for daily wear. The guardian of these defunct old carriages tells some prodigious fibs concerning them: he pointed out one carriage that was six ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... single one of the now existing plants and living beings could then exist, the life in that ocean and on its bottom was so infinitely grand in its proportions that men can now form no adequate conception of the same. The force of growth as well as of decay was immense, and all that was grown or made by its decay only increased the mass ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... whispering and gurgling sounds which came from out of the darkness, before and behind; while now, to fully prove what was wrong, they noticed the peculiar odour of the sea-water when impregnated with seaweed in a state of decay, and directly after Gwyn had called attention to the fact ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... portion nearest the church, which is roofed over, several curious sarcophagi may be seen; the rest is a series of pillars and arches from which the roof has long vanished. In the photographs (which may be bought at the inn) there is some appearance of order even in the midst of the decay, but this was probably carefully effected prior to the artist's visit; for when we were there the whole space was overgrown completely with weeds, among which a rose-bush and a few other flowers struggled to bloom, untended and apparently ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... which occurring within a short time of one another had startled the community. This last subject begot a somewhat doleful train of commentary and gave the lugubrious their cue. Complaints were made of our easygoing standards of morality, and our disposition not to be severe on anybody; of the decay of ideal considerations and the lack of ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... and viscera were removed, placed in a tin box, and reverently buried in the ground, one of Livingstone's Christian servants reading the Funeral Service. The body was then filled with salt and exposed for fourteen days to the sun in order to dry and thus be preserved from decay. The legs were bent back to make the package shorter, and the body was sewed up tightly in cotton. A cylinder of bark was cut from a tree and in this the body was enclosed. Round the whole a piece of canvas was ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... waste of savage vegetation survives, in some part, to this day, with the same prodigality of vital force, the same struggle for existence and mutual havoc that mark all organized beings, from men to mushrooms. Young seedlings in millions spring every summer from the black mould, rich with the decay of those that had preceded them, crowding, choking, and killing one another, perishing by their very abundance,—all but a scattered few, stronger than the rest, or more fortunate in position, which survive by blighting those about them. They in turn, as ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... flowers and a clump of grey wormwood, while the damp cracks which seamed the clay of the ravine were lined with round leaves of the "mother-stepmother plant," and round about us little birds were hovering, and from both the bushes and the bed of the ravine there was ascending the moist smell of decay. Yet over our heads the sky was clear, as the sun, now sole occupant of the heavens, declined slowly in the direction of the dark marshes across the river; only above the roofs of Zhitnaia Street could there be seen fluttering about in alarm a flock of snow-white ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... extended history where the object of the historian should be to describe the various aspects of the national life, and to trace through long periods of time the ultimate causes of national progress and decay. The history of religion, of art, of literature, of social and industrial development, of scientific progress, have all their different methods. A writer who treats of some great revolution that has transformed human affairs should deal largely in retrospect, for the most important part of his ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... have not yet reckoned sufficiently with the disastrous influence which this worship of insanity,—for it is often nothing less—has exercised on the fortunes of peoples and on the development or decay ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... rest of the fabric. Mark did not put this to the credit of the antiquarians; but now perceiving for the first time these two austere shapes of divine women under conditions of atmosphere that enhanced their austerity and unearthliness he ascribed their freedom from decay to the interposition of God. To Mark's imagination, fixed upon the images while Esther wandered solitary in the field beyond the chapel, there was granted another of those moments of vision which marked like milestones his spiritual progress. He became suddenly assured that he would neither ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... and the Norman transepts stand astonishingly complete in their splendid decay, and the lower portions of the nave, which, until 1922, lay buried beneath masses of grass-grown debris, are now exposed to view. The richly-draped hill-sides appear as a succession of beautiful pictures framed by the columns ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... of a house is very much like that of one of its human tenants. The roof is the first part to show the distinct signs of age. Slates and tiles loosen and at last slide off, and leave bald the boards that supported them; shingles darken and decay, and soon the garret or the attic lets in the rain and the snow; by and by the beams sag, the floors warp, the walls crack, the paper peels away, the ceilings scale off and fall, the windows are crusted with clinging dust, the doors drop from their rusted hinges, the ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... "The place is in decay and is an excellent specimen of their monastic buildings. It is now in as romantic a state as the most poetic imagination could desire. Here are gloomy halls and dark and decayed rooms; long corridors of chambers, uninhabited except by the lizard ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... afternoon the steam whistle called us together to finish our memorable trip. There was no trace of decay in the sky; a glorious sunset gilded the water and cleared away the shadows of our meditations among the ruins. We landed at the Wrangell wharf at dusk, pushed our way through a group of inquisitive Indians, across the two crooked ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... the complete spell thus cast over thought both in Islam and Christendom, we may look at the words of European scholars of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, living far from Islam, long after its intellectual glory had begun to decay, and at a time when Christian scholastic philosophy had reached an independent position. Gerard of Cremona and Adelard of Bath (the translator of the great Arabic geographer, Mohammed Al-Kharizmy) in the twelfth century, Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus in the later thirteenth, are all as clear ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... diameter, and extended from two and a half to three feet into the ground, except one a few feet from the center, which went down fully five feet. All the holes were filled with the loose dark dirt which results from decay of wood; a few contained fragments of charcoal, burned bones or stone, but no ashes; nor was the surrounding ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 664, September 22,1888 • Various
... results are no happier. The healthy animal treads under his feet the helpless and the weak, who suffer that he may grow fat and kick. The attractive warmth and color and richness are found to be but rottenness and decay. ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... from the hurried way that they glanced from the door to the deed and back to the door again. And it was clear that the welcome was to be a bolted door. But such bolts, and such a door! Rust and decay and fungus had been there far too long, and it was not a barrier any longer that would keep out even a determined wolf. And it seemed to be something worse than ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany
... butterflies flew hither and thither. The ideal of preventive medicine was attained. Diseases had been stamped out. I saw no evidence of any contagious diseases during all my stay. And I shall have to tell you later that even the processes of putrefaction and decay had been profoundly affected by ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... finished or roofed. It does not owe its decorations to the hand of the architect. They are of a rarer kind. From the ends of poles fastened into the top of the wall, two or three dozen heads, in all stages of decay, overlook the residence of a Christian bishop. These are Turks or Albanians who have fallen in different encounters, or possibly in cold blood, as the Montenegrians never spare the life of a prisoner. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... lamentable image of shattered royalty the man must be noble and lovable. Nothing that is puny or artificial can ever wear the investiture of that colossal sorrow. McCullough embodied Lear as, from the first, stricken in mind—already the unconscious victim of incipient decay and dissolution; not mad but ready to become so. There is a subtle apprehensiveness all about the presence of the king, in all the earlier scenes. He diffuses disquietude and vaguely presages disaster, and the observer looks on him with solicitude ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... no gains that last, To bless the soul for aye, When passing things are past, And things of earth decay? Are there no joys that linger long In sweetness, like ...
— Hymns from the East - Being Centos and Suggestions from the Office Books of the - Holy Eastern Church • John Brownlie
... foliage. The branches yielded me a passage, and closed again beneath, as if only a squirrel or a bird had passed. Far aloft, around the stem of the central pine, behold a perfect nest for Robinson Crusoe or King Charles! A hollow chamber of rare seclusion had been formed by the decay of some of the pine branches, which the vine had lovingly strangled with its embrace, burying them from the light of day in an aerial sepulchre of its own leaves. It cost me but little ingenuity to enlarge the interior, and open ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of January we went on to Horal, ten miles over a plain, with villages numerous and large, and in every one some fine large building of olden times—sarai, palace, temple, or tomb, but all going to decay.[16] The population much more dense than in any of the native states I have seen; villages larger and more numerous; trade in the transit of cotton, salt, sugar, and grain, much brisker. A great number of hares were here brought to us for sale at threepence apiece, a rate at which they ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... this general's daughter came to me—or I should say one of the general's daughters did. There were three of these bachelor ladies, of nicely graduated ages, who held a neighbouring farm-house in a united and more or less military occupation. The eldest warred against the decay of manners in the village children, and executed frontal attacks upon the village mothers for the conquest of courtesies. It sounds futile, but it was really a war for an idea. The second skirmished and scouted all over the country; and it was that one who pushed a reconnaissance ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... properties appreciable by other organs besides the eyes, and to dwell bodily with the trees. The soil was mainly of sand, the soil to delight the long tap roots of the fir trees, covered above with a thick layer of slow forming mould, in the gradual odoriferous decay of needles and cones and flakes of bark and knots of resinous exudation. It grew looser and sandier, and its upper coat thinner, as she approached the shore. The trees shrunk in size, stood farther apart, and grew more individual, ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... duration of human and animal life does not fall within the scope of this article, and the reader is referred to LONGEVITY. But the word "age'' has been used by physiologists to express certain natural divisions in human development and decay. These are usually regarded as numbering five, viz. infancy, lasting to the seventh year; childhood to the fourteenth; youth to the twenty-first; adult life till fifty; ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... may deserve addition. Fini, which might have been mentioned in the last group, is a very perfect thing. A well-preserved dandy in middle age meets, after many years, an old love, and sees, mirrored in her decay, his own so long ignored. Nobody save a master could have done this as it is done. Julie Romain is a quaint half-dream based on some points in George Sand's life, and attractive. The title of L'Inutile Beaute has also always been so to me (the story is worth little). It would be, I think, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... happen that these roots sent down into the cavity of a decaying trunk may, after a time, become completely concealed within it, by the gradual formation and extension of new wood over the orifice of the cavity formed by the death and decay of the old wood. Such is presumed to be the explanation of a specimen of this kind in the possession of the writer, and taken from a cavity in an apparently solid block of rosewood; externally there were no marks to indicate the existence of a ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... is at length completed, and Mr. Wiley has published it in two handsome volumes, profusely illustrated. There is a variety of opinions among the critics as to its rank among the works of "Boz"; but it is not contended by any that it evinces a decay of his extraordinary and peculiar genius. We copy a paragraph which strikes us as just, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... will be drawn only to those incidents in which the history of France is concerned, and which give a good idea of Henry IV.'s character, the effectiveness of his government, and the rapid growth of his greatness in Europe, contrasted with his rival's slow decay. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... instant, thou art then As great as is thy Master: Greater, for His Fortunes all lye speechlesse, and his name Is at last gaspe. Returne he cannot, nor Continue where he is: To shift his being, Is to exchange one misery with another, And euery day that comes, comes to decay A dayes worke in him. What shalt thou expect To be depender on a thing that leanes? Who cannot be new built, nor ha's no Friends So much, as but to prop him? Thou tak'st vp Thou know'st not what: But take it ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... countenance and port. But viscounts, earls, marquesses, and dukes exceed them according to the proportion of their degree and honour. But though by chance he or his son have less, yet he keepeth this degree: but if the decay be excessive, and not able to maintain the honour (as Senatores Romani were amoti a senatu), so sometimes they are not admitted to the upper house in the parliament, although they keep the name of "lord" still, ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... observe both the growth and the decay of this polarization. For ten or fifteen minutes after its first appearance, the light from a vividly illuminated incipient cloud, looked at horizontally, is absolutely quenched by a Nicol prism with its ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... remark applies to the side of the tree that faces the south-east only. The north-west side is perfectly healthy-looking and green, when its opposite is the very picture of blight and decay.] ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson
... part of the body-dress which the Malays call kain-sarong; but this manufacture had much decreased at the period when my inquiries were made, owing, as the people said, to an unavoidable failure in the breed of silkworms, but more probably to the decay of industry amongst themselves, proceeding from their continual ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... and drama is a thing of yesterday, a mere efflorescence of decay, a stage-dream, which the first ray of daylight must dissipate into dust. No prisoner whose name is worth remembering, or whose sorrows deserved sympathy, ever crossed that Bridge of Sighs, which is the centre of the Byronic ideal of Venice; no great merchant of Venice ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... in love so much less than they used to do is largely due to the decay of the imaginative faculty. As for women, although they are in the main as anxious to marry as ever, although it is universally acknowledged that the modern young woman does cultivate the modern young man unduly, their reasons for ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... longer used as a beacon. The changing of the channel and the building of the breakwater in the harbor of St. Pierre had made it necessary to have the light there and the old one was abandoned. It now stood silent and lonely, gradually falling into decay under the buffeting of wind and waves. Looking south from the island the eye was greeted only by a wide waste of waters; the seemingly endless waters of Lake Huron. This was the place where the Winnebagos and the Sandwiches, with Mr. and Mrs. Evans ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... Or ere the first sun fledged his wings of flame, Calm Night, the everlasting and the same, A brooding mother over chaos lay. And whirling suns shall blaze and then decay, Shall run their fiery courses and then claim The haven of the darkness whence they came; Back to Nirvanic peace shall ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... be a mother at twelve. Country girls (and boys) usually mature several months or a year later than those living in cities. Too early a puberty in girls may well arouse concern. It usually indicates some inherent constitutional weakness. Premature puberty is often associated with premature decay. ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton
... desolate fields and decrepit fences. Only among the peaceful shades of the Ursuline convent and the warlike flanking towers at the barracks was there aught that spoke of anything but demoralization and decay. Back from the levee a block or two the double lines of strap-iron stretched over a wooden causeway between parallel wet ditches gave evidence of some kind of a railway, on which, at rare intervals, jogged a sleepy mule with a ...
— Waring's Peril • Charles King
... were beautifully decorated, and must have cost a good deal of money in their day, but they were now rapidly falling into decay. ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... aim, repressed by long control, 155 Now sinks at last, or feebly mans the soul; While low delights, succeeding fast behind, In happier meanness occupy the mind: As in those domes where Caesars[22] once bore sway, Defaced by time and tottering in decay, 160 There in the ruin, heedless of the dead, The shelter-seeking peasant builds his shed; And, wond'ring man could want the larger pile, Exults, and owns his cottage with a smile. My soul, turn from ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... their coffins, and one evening he alluded to it, asking me by significant gestures if they would ever open their eyes again. Considering that he had often been present at the interment of the dead, and had also witnessed the decay of animals cast out to perish, it struck me as a singular question, plainly indicating that the consciousness of immortality is natural to man, and unbelief in a future state foreign to his untaught ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... and striking sight. The sea since Wednesday has been very rough, blowing in straight upon the land. Yesterday, the shore was strewn with hundreds of oxen, sheep, and pigs (and with bushels upon bushels of apples), in every state and stage of decay—burst open, rent asunder, lying with their stiff hoofs in the air, or with their great ribs yawning like the wrecks of ships—tumbled and beaten out of shape, and yet with a horrible sort of humanity about them. Hovering among these carcases ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... what was my arm—my arm on which he had leaned in his decay? I looked at it with a sort of surprise, dubiously. What was expected of it? I asked myself. Would it have the strength? Ah, let her ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... we considered certain aspects of the attitude assumed by our Aryan forefathers towards the great processes of Nature in their ordered sequence of Birth, Growth, and Decay. We saw that while on one hand they, by prayer and supplication, threw themselves upon the mercy of the Divinity, who, in their belief, was responsible for the granting, or withholding, of the water, ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... the group are here modified and strengthened so as to become adapted for an imitation of the venation of a leaf. We come now to a still more extraordinary part of the imitation, for we find representations of leaves in every stage of decay, variously blotched and mildewed and pierced with holes, and in many cases irregularly covered with powdery black dots gathered into patches and spots, so closely resembling the various kinds of minute fungi that grow on dead leaves that it is impossible to avoid thinking ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... ceremonies, and manners, but hardly any, that I remember, of the organization of the Papal Government,—that wonderful power which long played the chief part in the social and political revolutions of Europe, which, even in its decay, preserves so much of its original grandeur, and still clings to its traditions with a tenacity of conviction that commands our respect, although the remembrance of the evil that it has done compels us, ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... "The decay of religion," said Bianchon, "and the pre-eminence of finance, which is simply solidified selfishness. Money used not to be everything; there were some kinds of superiority that ranked above it—nobility, genius, ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... caution akin to awe she approached the windfall where a cyclone years before had levelled a wide swath through the heavy growth. Giant trunks and branches, resisting decay, littered the floor of the lane and formed a barrier impenetrable to those inhabitants of the jungle confined to a life on the ground. Second growth sprouts had pushed their way through the tangled, ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... the story of its expansion, the foundation and growth of its colonial empire. While to a sixth, its religious history is the one that claims most attention, and the struggles with Rome, the rise and decay of Puritanism, and the development of modern thought will fill his pages. Each of these six will select just those facts, and those facts only, that are relevant to his subject. The introduction of irrelevant facts would be felt to mark ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... was the daughter of French parents, usually wore drawers, which were seemingly of the closed kind. (Diary of S. Pepys, ed. Wheatley, May 15, 1663, vol. iii.) They were probably not worn by Englishwomen, and even in France, with the decay of the farthingale, they seem to have dropped out of use during the seventeenth century. In a technical and very complete book, L'Art de la Lingerie, published in 1771, women's drawers are not even mentioned, and Mercier (Tableau ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... his hand. The English atmosphere, together with the coal smoke, settling down in the space of centuries from the chimneys of the Hospital, had roughened and blackened this venerable piece of sculpture, enclosing it as it were in a superficies of decay; but still (and perhaps the more from these tokens of having stood so long among men) the statue had an aspect of venerable life, and of connection with human life, ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... speedy. Next morning the guard found him dead, with six empty bottles out of the case. His body was denied the rites of sepulture. It was left lying in chains as he perished, to rot in the sun and be devoured by the insects generated from his decay. ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... inhibitions of monogamy and has little taste for the so-called comforts of a home; at sixty he is beyond amorous adventure and is in need of creature ease and security. What he is oftenest conscious of, in these later years, is his physical decay; he sees himself as in imminent danger of falling into neglect and helplessness. He is thus confronted by a choice between getting a wife or hiring a nurse, and he commonly chooses the wife as the less expensive and exacting. The nurse, indeed, would probably ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... many beautiful but dead words of our language have been unhappily banished. It is not that these words lose their lustre, as many words lose it, by hackneyed use and common handling; the process is exactly opposite; by not being used enough, the phosphorescence of decay seems to attack them, and give them a kind of shimmer which makes them seem too fine for common occasions. But once a word falls out of colloquial speech its life is threatened; it may linger on in literature, but its radiance, at first perhaps brighter, will ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 3 (1920) - A Few Practical Suggestions • Society for Pure English
... his triumphs brook; Which had the right 'twere impious to enquire; Each for his cause can vouch a judge supreme; The victor, heaven: the vanquished, Cato, thee. (7) Nor were they like to like: the one in years Now verging towards decay, in times of peace Had unlearned war; but thirsting for applause Had given the people much, and proud of fame His former glory cared not to renew, But joyed in plaudits of the theatre, (8) His gift to Rome: his triumphs in the ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... slung on a pole, and carried to the outer door of the church, to have a little water sprinkled thereon or service said over it. If the families are unable to rent a spot of earth in the cemetery, their dead are dumped into a pile and left to decay and bleach upon the surface. In contrast with this brutal neglect of the poor, is the lavish expenditure of the rich. The daughter of one of the wealthy residents having died, the body was placed in ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... Cork to Belfast, from Dublin to Galway, are scattered the ruins of churches, abbeys, and ecclesiastical buildings, the relics of a country once rich, prosperous and populous. These ruins raise their castellated walls and towers, noble even in decay, sometimes in the midst of a village, crowded with the miserably poor, sometimes on a mountain, in every direction commanding magnificent prospects; sometimes on an island in one of the lakes, which, like emeralds in a setting of deeper green, gem ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patines[114] of bright gold. There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st But in his motion like an angel sings, Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins: Such harmony is in immortal souls, But whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it ...
— The Merchant of Venice [liberally edited by Charles Kean] • William Shakespeare
... impure region, properly so called. The searching sunbeams and the winds are inimical to all the lush concomitants of decay; the sand also plays its part; so every dead dog, and every dead camel, arrests the flying grains and is straightway interred—transformed into a ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... persons see in the words of the "good grey poet," only an immodest and brazen shamelessness. But these are mental perverts and are to be pitied; they see "through a glass darkly" and everything looks black with decay; they are trying to build an eternal future upon a foundation of tissue paper; they are seeking to encompass immortal life by denying the very beginning and source of all life—Sex; they are attempting the impossible feat of foisting ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... suggested, that if all the iron manufacturers of Great Britain should be obliged to depend upon a supply of iron from the plantations, which must ever be rendered precarious by the hazard of the seas and the enemy, the manufactures would probably decay for want of materials, and many thousand families be reduced to want and misery. On the other hand, the ironmongers and smiths belonging to the flourishing town of Birmingham in Warwickshire, presented a petition, declaring, That the bill would be of great ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... pronounces Elias Ashmole to have been circa 1686 'the leading spirit, both in Craft Masonry and in Rosicrucianism,' and is of opinion that his diary establishes the fact 'that both societies fell into decay together in 1682.' He adds: 'It is evident therefore that the Rosicrucians ... found the operative Guild conveniently ready to their hand, and grafted upon it their own mysteries ... also, from this time Rosicrucianism ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... me two months longer at sea, and in a tempestuous latitude, which we were not in a condition to struggle with. Our sails and rigging were so much worn, that something was giving way every hour; and we had nothing left either to repair or to replace them. Our provisions were in a state of decay, and consequently afforded little nourishment, and we had been a long time without refreshments. My people, indeed, were yet healthy, and would have cheerfully gone wherever I had thought proper ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... see, within yon wasted hall, O'erhung with tapestry of ivy green, The grim old king Decay, who rules the scene, Throned on a crumbling column by the wall, Beneath a ruined arch of ancient fame, Mocking the desolation round about, Blotting with his effacing fingers out The inscription, razing off its hero's name— And lo! ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... place of prayer and fasting with visions of radiant and happy motherhood. One of these may still be seen in the cell sometimes called the Capella Giovanato. It instantly recalls the Tempi Madonna of Raphael, both in the pose of the figure and in the genuineness of feeling exhibited. Damp and decay have warred in vain against it, and the modern visitor lingers before the Mother ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... they feel pleasure in satisfying. They must propagate their respective species; an absolute necessity which proves the wisdom of the Creator, since without reproduction all would, be annihilated—by the constant law of degradation, decay and death. And, whatever St. Augustine may say, human creatures would not perform the work of generation if they did not find pleasure in it, and if there was not in that great work an irresistible attraction for them. In the third place, all creatures have a determined and invincible propensity ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Events long past are barely known; they are not considered. We read with as little emotion the violence of Knox and his followers, as the irruptions of Alaric and the Goths. Had the university been destroyed two centuries ago, we should not have regretted it; but to see it pining in decay and struggling for life, fills the mind with mournful images ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... my vigour's flown, I have years to bring decay; Few the locks that now I own, And the few I have are grey. Yet, old Jerome, thou mayst boast, While thy spirits do not tire; Still beneath thy age's frost Glows a spark of ...
— The Duenna • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... uninterrupted succession, down to the year 1670. To them succeeded, somehow or another, a race of Von Rokortzowas, who again in 1710, made way for the house of Kinsky, and in their possession it has ever since remained, neglected, indeed, till of late, but holding time and decay alike ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... inquiry into the causes of the decay of eloquence—'cur nostra potissimum aetas deserta et laude eloquentiae orbata vix nomen ipsum oratoris retineat' (Dial. 1). Some critics have supposed that Tacitus meant this work to be an apologia pro vita sua, a justification of his preference for a literary to a rhetorical career, ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... well founded decision will be given. About his fortieth year the physical constitution of Napoleon sustained considerable change; and it may be presumed that his moral qualities were affected by that change. It is particularly important not to lose sight of the premature decay of his health, which, perhaps, did not permit him always to, possess the vigour of memory otherwise consistent enough with his age. The state of our organisation often modifies our recollections, our feelings, our manner of viewing objects, and the impressions we receive. This ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... these things must in short, to use the energetic language of the Balm of Columbia advertisement, 'bring every generous thinking youth to that heavy sinking gloom which not even the loss of property can produce, but only the loss of hair, which brings on premature decay, causing many to shrink from being uncovered, and even to shun society, to avoid the jests and sneers of their acquaintances. The remainder of their lives is consequently ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... found more profitable than unskilful tillage: whole estates were laid waste by enclosures; the tenants, regarded as a useless burden, were expelled their habitations; even the cottagers, deprived of the commons on which they formerly fed their cattle, were reduced to misery; and a decay of people, as well as a diminution of the former plenty, was remarked in the kingdom.[*] This grievance was now of an old date, and Sir Thomas More, alluding to it, observes in his Utopia, that a sheep had become in England a more ravenous ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... always take up the work where he left it, and begin at once to beautify it with her rich and luxuriant verdure. For example, as soon as the fires went out over the clearing, she began, with her sun and rain, to blanch the blackened stumps, and to gnaw at their foundations with her tooth of decay. If Albert made a road or a path she rounded its angles, softened away all the roughness that his plow or hoe had left in it, and fringed it with grass and flowers. The solitary and slender trees which had been left standing ...
— Mary Erskine • Jacob Abbott
... a part of the refuse it had cast out, and left to corruption and decay, the girl we had followed strayed down to the river's brink, and stood in the midst of this night-picture, lonely and still, ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... heaps of the winter before, now buried under the snow, they dug out pieces of bone and a few deer-skins; on this, with a little tripe de roche, they endeavoured to subsist. The log house was falling into decay. The seams gaped and the piercing air entered on every side with the thermometer twenty below zero. Franklin and his companions had tried in vain to stop the chinks and to make a fire by tearing up the rough boards of the floor. But their strength was insufficient. Already for two weeks ...
— Adventurers of the Far North - A Chronicle of the Frozen Seas • Stephen Leacock
... writers the idea that expiring races pass through a death-agony, and seem to die a natural death of old age like individuals. The Trilobites are quoted as another instance; and some ingenious writers add the supposed eccentricities of the Roman Empire in its senile decay and a number ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... which was built by some early settler, had long ago been abandoned, and was partly fallen into decay. Tall weeds grew up through the ruins where the pole stable had stood; the roof and one side of the smoke-house had fallen in; and the chinking had crumbled from between the logs of the house; while the yard was overgrown with brush and a tangle of last season's dead grass and leaves, now wet and ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... great underhung jaw turning slowly from right to left as he menaced the crowd with his sinister gaze. Already a close observer might have marked upon his face a heaviness and looseness of feature, the first signs of that physical decay which in a very few years was to stretch him, a helpless wreck, too weak to utter his own name, upon the causeway of the London streets. At present, however, he was still an unbeaten man, the terror of the Ring, and as his ill-omened face was ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... distinctly traced even under the reign of Louis the Fourteenth. That reign is the time to which the Ultra-Royalists refer as the Golden Age of France. It was in truth one of those periods which shine with an unnatural and delusive splendour, and which are rapidly followed by gloom and decay. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to raise her eyes towards either. Anxious and unhappy for them both, the thought stole on her through the crowd, that it might have been better for them if this noise of tongues and tread of feet had never come there,—if the old dulness and decay had never been replaced by novelty and splendour,—if the neglected child had found no friend in Edith, but had lived her solitary life, unpitied ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... on the devotion of a whole community, from its youngest to its eldest member, to its maintenance. As it is the tow-barge is something of an anachronism, but the withdrawal of the youthful recruits, whose up-bringing alone rendered it possible, will entail its inevitable extinction. The decay and break-up of the guild of tjalk owners will be hastened by the introduction of steam and electricity as means of locomotion. The canals will lose the bright-coloured barges which are to-day their ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... off through his unsystematic, excessive demands on them, night work and overwork. In his later years his work was nearly always more or less jaded, his eye failing in the perception of forms, as has so often been the case in even the greatest painters in their decay. ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... hyar, and take a bref," remarked Cudjo, grimly, placing Virginia on a log too dank with decay and moss to catch fire easily. "Den ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... being autumn—and rather an English autumn than otherwise. It is my intention to remain at Venice during the winter, probably, as it has always been (next to the east) the greenest island of my imagination. It has not disappointed me; though its evident decay would, perhaps, have that effect upon others. But I have been familiar with ruins too long to dislike desolation. Besides, I have fallen in love, which, next to falling into the canal (which would be of no use, as I can swim,) is ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 474 - Vol. XVII. No. 474., Supplementary Number • Various
... horizon, too lazy or too happy to move. The sky itself was of the palest blue, paling to white where it approached the earth; and the earth, brown, wet, and odorous, was engaged beneath it on its yearly duty of decay. Rickie was open to the complexities of autumn; he felt extremely tiny—extremely tiny and extremely important; and perhaps the combination is as fair as any that exists. He hoped that all his life he would never be ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... to talk, and dispenses them from thinking. But I was discontented with such a view of things as it afforded; man is a being of high aspirations, 'looking both before and after,' whose 'thoughts wander through eternity,' disclaiming alliance with transience and decay; incapable of imagining to himself annihilation; existing but in the future and the past; being, not what he is, but what he has been and shall be. Whatever may be his true and final destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with nothingness and dissolution. This is the character ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... is very important to understand here that there were two courses of action still open to the disappointed capitalist confronted by the new peril of this real or alleged decay. First, he might have reversed his machine, so to speak, and started unwinding the long rope of dependence by which he had originally dragged the proletarian to his feet. In other words, he might have seen that the workmen had more money, more leisure, more luxuries, more status in the ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... purchased, at a bargain, by Legree, who used it, as he did everything else, merely as an implement for money-making. The place had that ragged, forlorn appearance, which is always produced by the evidence that the care of the former owner has been left to go to utter decay. ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... which are in strange contrast to those of its perishing congeners, and which seem to mock many hard-and-fast rules concerning animal life. It is omnivorous, and will thrive on anything from grass to flesh, found dead and in all stages of decay, or captured by means of its own strategy. Furthermore, its habits change to suit its conditions: thus, where nocturnal carnivores are its enemies, it is diurnal; but where man appears as a chief persecutor, it becomes nocturnal. It is ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... which shall befal us then: and they will befal us too surely, and too irresistibly, unless, by earlier watchfulness and prayer, we may have been enabled to avoid them. For vain will it be, with faculties at once weakened by the decay of nature and perverted by long habits of worldliness, to essay, for the first time, to force our way into the kingdom of heaven. Old age is not the season for contest and victory; nor shall we then be so able to escape unharmed from the temptations ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... committal, the decay that had imperceptibly begun in his wife's bodily and mental strength during her illness of the previous winter, had been making quicker progress. She lost her reticence of speech, and often talked to herself. She had not so much forethought as ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... frost is on it, and the worm is in the core, and decay has progressed to rottenness! Speak you in this way to the hungry boy, whose eyes have long anticipated his appetite, and he may listen to you and be patient—I neither can nor will. Look to it, Munro: I will not much longer ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... having straggled against the corruptions of Babylon, boldly foretells the decay of that empire with terrible power. His conceptions and images are truly sublime; but his style is less correct and regular than that of his predecessors, his language being a mixture ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta |
