"Miasma" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... change one half-acre of any part of our principality for a thousand of its richest acres," said David Gwynne, our surgeon, to whom he spoke. "Poets talk of the spicy gales of these islands; in most cases they come laden with miasma-bearing fevers and agues on their wings; while it a fellow has to live on shore he gets roasted by day, with a good chance of a sunstroke, and he is stewed at night, and bitten by mosquitoes and other winged and crawling things, and wakes to find a cobra de capella or green snake gliding ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... Buttons, after a long pause, "you are as pale as a ghost. I believe you must be beginning to feel the miasma from these plains." ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... allowing the damp air to envelop, to caress, to chill her, inviting the entrance into her blood of the fatal germs. How long did she remain thus, half-unconscious, in the atmosphere more and more laden with miasma in proportion as the sun sank? A cry made her rise and again take up the oars. It was the coachman, who, not seeing her return, had descended from the box and was hailing the boat at all hazards. When she stepped upon the bank and when he saw her so pale, the man, who had been in the Countess's service ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... were sent up the rivers to lie in wait for the slavers, or to attack them when they were known to be at anchor. This species of service caused a great mortality among their crews, as a night spent in the pestiferous miasma of an African river was sufficient to produce fever among all those exposed to it, while the hot sun of the day was almost equally trying to English constitutions. Thus for many years the mortality among the blockading squadron ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... bed. She has extinguished her candle, but the flame of the fire gives light. She has prayed; she throws off her dressing-gown and flings back the covering of the bed, to fall an instant victim to the miasma. She drops backward and is found dead next morning, by which time the bottle and bed are ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... dismissal. Out of his daily life a joy had gone, a constant object of thought and interest. Out of his heart a living presence had gone, leaving a void more harsh than death. And all this had happened in a connection peculiarly painful and distasteful to him; so that it was as though a foul miasma had arisen, and, drifting across the face of his fair friendship, distorted its proportions, rendering all his memories of it suspect. Further, in this discrediting of friendship his hope of the discovery of that ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... got up quickly from my knees. What abominable nonsense I had been talking—was there a miasma about that old grave that affected one? I whistled to Crusoe, who was trotting busily about on mysterious intelligence conveyed to him by his nose. He ran to me joyfully, and I stooped and patted ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... gets towards Kudum, where one strikes the Sefid River, we begin to rise and the country gets more hilly and arid. We gradually leave behind the oppressive dampness, which suggests miasma and fever, and begin to breathe air which, though very hot, is drier and purer. We have risen 262 feet at Kudum from 77 feet, the altitude of Resht, and as we travel now in a south-south-west direction, following the stream upwards, we keep getting higher, the elevation at Rustamabad being already ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... conciliation. When the States of the South sought to secede, Lincoln, the concatenator, welded them into a solid chain, one and inseparable. When brother sought the life of brother and father that of son, Lincoln, the pacificator, advised peace with honor. When the nation was stupefied with the miasma of human slavery, Lincoln, the alleviator, broke its horrid spell by diffusing through the fire of war the sweet ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... celebrated geologist, Count Keyserling ("Bulletin de la Soc. Geolog.", 2nd Ser., tom. x, page 357), suggested that as new diseases, supposed to have been caused by some miasma have arisen and spread over the world, so at certain periods the germs of existing species may have been chemically affected by circumambient molecules of a particular nature, and thus have given rise to ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... more freely than I do here. I know that I am hardly myself among these people,—or rather, I am hardly myself as you know me, and as I hope you always will know me. But, nevertheless, I am not so overcome by the miasma but what I can tell you how truly I love you. Even though my spirit should be here, which it is not, my heart would be on the Allington lawns. That dear ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... and servants, but imagination "bodies forth the forms of things unseen" and shudders. Let us rejoice that a merciful superstition, which regards the climate of India as deadly to European children, will step in and save the little soul. The climate would do it no harm, but there is a moral miasma more baneful than any which rises from the pestilential swamps of the Terai, or the ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... feast its peculative eyes upon hogs wallowing in mud; and cellars where swarming beggars, for six cents a night, cover with rags their hideous heads—where vice and crime are fostered, and into which your sensitive policeman prefers not to go, are giving out their seething miasma. The very neighborhood seems vegetating in mire. In the streets, in the cellars, in the filthy lanes, in the dwellings of the honest poor, as well as the vicious, muck and mire is the predominating order. The besotted ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... which superstitious people dare not enter—as if the Gospel were not as potent a talisman now as it was ages ago. Let us fearlessly enter these abodes of darkness, throw open the shutters, and let in the light of day, and the hobgoblins will flee. Let us explore every dark recess, winnow out the miasma and the mildew with the pure air of heaven, and the Sun of ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... succeed the acute stage, or may be due to stable miasma, blood poison, narcotism, lead poisoning, etc. This form may not be characterized in its initial stages by excitability, quick and hard pulse, and high fever. The animal usually appears at first stupid; eats slowly; the pupil ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... was wonderful to the mind of President Viglius, who could find no language strong enough with which to characterize and to deplore such blasphemous conduct. The field-preaching seemed in the eyes of government to spread with the rapidity of a malignant pestilence. The miasma flew upon the wings of the wind. As early as 1562, there had been public preaching in the neighborhood of Ypres. The executions which followed, however, had for the time suppressed the practice both in that place as well as throughout Flanders and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... cursed room, a swaying, swirling maelstrom of death, while the air grew thick with miasma, the floor foul with shreds of shrouds, and yellow parchment, clattering bones, and wisps ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... if it cannot be announced with certitude that Mrs. Grundy is no more, it may, at all events, be affirmed without hesitation that she is on her deathbed, and that surely, if slowly, she is breathing her last. Yes, that poisonous breath, which has so long pervaded like numbing miasma the free air of the world, will soon be out of her foolish, hypocritical old body; and though it may still linger on here and there in provincial backwoods and suburban fastnesses, from the great air centres of civilization it ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... the great plain traversed by the Po now is. And here too, though the acres are generally well cared for, I saw tracts of considerable extent which, from original defect or unskillful management, stand below the water level of the country, and so are given over to flags, bogs and miasma, when only a foot or two of elevation is needed to render them ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... of the discovery of paludal miasma and of its natural history, I ought in the first place to state that I have not had the opportunity of reading or studying the great original treatise of Professor Salisbury. I am acquainted with it only through ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... primrose or sweetbriar, only a musty, dank, earthy smell which gets more and more pronounced as the mists rise along with the deadly vapours of the night. Sleeping in these forests is very unhealthy. There is a most fatal miasma all through the year, less during the hot months, but very bad during and immediately after the annual rains; and in September and October nearly every soul in the jungly tracts is smitten with fever. ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... diseases sometimes have a local origin, as in the case of ague caused by miasma of swamps; and then they are named endemic. In other cases, they are caused by personal contact with the diseased body or its clothing, as the itch or small-pox; or else by effluvia from the sick, as in measles. ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... records of Cleveland, as in those of most western towns, the story of sickness and death fills a large part. Fever and ague, brought on by exposure, privations, and by the miasma from swamp, river and uncleared lands, disabled a large number of the early settlers, and hurried some to untimely graves. There were no physicians, and save a few drugs and the simples gathered from the river banks and forest, there were ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... momentarily posed. He looked disconcerted, took off his glasses and put them on again, and at length muttered something about storm-wind dissipating the miasma in the air and ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... women who volunteered to serve as nurses in the great American war of nationality. No soldier was braver, few were more under fire, than she; still plying her holy work with unfaltering love and fortitude, both in the horrid miasma of camps and before the charge of cavalry and the blaze of cannon. Many a time, the livelong night, under the solemn stars, equipped with assuaging stores, she threaded her way alone through the debris of carnage, seeking ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... seven days were fulfilled, the horror on the waters was gone. It went as miasma is dispelled by the sun and wind—as pestilence is killed by the frost—unseen, unprotesting. The lifting of the plague was as awesome as its coming, but it was not horrible. That was the only difference. Egypt ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... show it to be broad and coarse, divorced from the context, but the whole effect of the book is moral. The mind of the man who can say that "Les Miserables" will not tend as a whole to make a girl more womanly, a boy more manly, must be poisoned by the miasma from a filthy heart. What and who in it are immoral? Not Valjean! Not Fantine even, nor Cosette! Not Marius! Not Javert, the detective! Is the chapter on Cambronne's surrender the offending fragment of the great literary masterpiece? That chapter is the sublimity ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... who wrote back urgently for further particulars. Mrs. Wesley had indeed fallen into a low state of health, occasioned partly (as Kezzy declared in a letter) by "want of clothes or convenient meat," partly by the miasma from the floods. Ague was the commonest of maladies in the Isle of Axholme, and even the labourers fortified themselves ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... contend. Now he was in a death struggle, and to his horror he found himself being slowly but surely overpowered. A demoniac grin played upon the features of the other as he forced the reporter to his knees. It was Handlon.... Once more he was sinking into soft oblivion, the while a horrid miasma assailed his ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... mountain recesses and fell upon the valley, Saint-Prosper arose to shake off a troubled slumber. An unhealthy mist hung over the earth, like a miasma, and the officer shivered as he walked in that depressing and noxious atmosphere. It lay like a deleterious veil before the glades where myrtles mingled with the wild limes. It concealed from view a cross, said to have been planted by Cortez—the cross he worshiped because of ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... has been a cold one. The Loire has overflowed the island, part of which remained under water four months, and the air was filled with fogs and miasma. Jack has had a bad cough, and has passed some weeks in the infirmary. Occasionally a letter has come for him, tender and loving when his mother wrote in secret, didactic and severe when the poet looked over her shoulder. The only news sent by his mother was, that ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... execution of the work was left to our countrymen, and not in vain. Contractor after contractor abandoned the undertaking in despair; hundreds, if not thousands, of laborers—Irish, Chinese, and others—were sacrificed to the deadly miasma of the swamps and tropical jungle which thickly stud the route. But the work was at last completed, and the railroad has now been some six years in constant operation, reducing the average length of the actual transit from a week to two hours, and its expense ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... all the windows, and that seemed to disperse it for a time. Then, just as I was going out, it returned; it seemed to envelop me like a filthy miasma. You know, sir, it's hard to explain just the way I felt about it—but it all amounts to this: I was glad ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... penalties. But in the slave States we look for cruelty; we expect the rights of humanity and the laws of the land to be sacrificed on the altar of slavery. In the free States we had reason to hope for a greater deference to decency and morality. Yet even in these States we behold the effects of a miasma wafted from the South. The Connecticut Black Act, prohibiting, under heavy penalties, the instruction of any colored person from another State, is well known. It is one of the encouraging signs of the times, that public opinion has recently compelled the repeal of this detestable law. ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... want of drainage and the decomposition of vegetable matter. Its position was most insalubrious, for the marshy swamps commenced at the very base of hills, and thus as it were encircled the savannahs with a belt of miasma. ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... force Is mightier than genius. Rightly used, It leads to grand achievements; all things yield Before its mystic presence, and its field Is broad as earth and heaven. But abused, It sweeps like a poison simoon on its course, Bearing miasma in its scorching breath, And leaving all ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... familiar with these upper ranges of thought and experience and life? Do we feel at home there more than down in the bottoms, amongst the swamps, and the miasma, and the mists? Where is your home, brother? The Mass begins with Sursum corda: 'Up with your hearts,' and that is the word for us. But the way to get up is to keep ourselves in touch with Jesus Christ, and then He will, even whilst our ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... had rendered himself liable to the attack by exposure and over-fatigue. I mention the circumstance as a warning, but do not think there is much risk, with proper precautions, for men in good health, through most parts of the island, after the November rains have precipitated the miasma and purified the air. We ourselves slept in most pestiferous places, where the ravages of the disease were marked in the sallow countenances of the inhabitants, without experiencing ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... that he was not to enter it;[34] and those who followed the funeral cortege were purified by being sprinkled with water and by stepping over fire.[35] Society had effectually protected itself against the miasma in all these cases by the discovery of ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... in the United States, and in the neighbourhood of Acapulco and West Mexico. These lakes and bayous drying during summer, and exposing to the rays of the sun millions of dead fish, impregnate the atmosphere with miasma, generating typhus, yellow fever, ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... have been the bond slaves of passion, whose daily lives have been the output of iniquity, whose deeds have been for destruction, whose words have been poison, and whose inmost thoughts have been as the vapors of miasma—these all—have been transformed into fountains of purity, into angels of mercy, or as illuminated missals have been written full of the name and the glory of God; men whose every fibre was as the coarse and tangled threads of a brutal unrefinement have become men whose every line ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... protection from the heat of summer, and the cold of winter, and was after all far more desirable as a home than the crowded tenements of our larger cities, for those who occupied it had but to open the door and windows to breathe the pure air of heaven, uncontaminated by foul odors or the taint of miasma. ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... of a simple charge of dynamite, which nobody of any sense or importance would even think of condemning, has been most unaccountably deferred to the present year. This man is Mr. S.M. Hussey, the miasma of whose breath, according to a well-informed murder organ in Dublin, poisons one-half of the kingdom of Kerry. Let any man read the speeches delivered in Upper Sackville Street, and the articles in United Ireland ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... places in the world, and one needed guidance there, protection.... From Satan, who is not a spirit, but a horrible miasma, that floats in little vapors here and there, when the clean winds are resting ... from the warm inviting and evil jungle where one might seek relief in distress, or having been over-long in the high ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... hurtfulness &c (badness) 649 [Obs.]; painfulness &c (cause of pain) 830; scourge &c (punishment) 975; damnosa hereditas [Lat.]; white elephant. sting, fang, thorn, tang, bramble, brier, nettle. poison, toxin; teratogen; leaven, virus venom; arsenic; antimony, tartar emetic; strychnine, nicotine; miasma, miasm^, mephitis^, malaria, azote^, sewer gas; pest. [poisonous substances, examples] Albany hemp^, arsenious oxide, arsenious acid; bichloride of mercury; carbonic acid, carbonic gas; choke damp, corrosive sublimate, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Notwithstanding this general condition, fevers of a very serious kind have been occasionally known to attack persons on the coast, who had never exposed themselves to the miasma of the jungle. Such instances have occurred at Galle, and more rarely at Colombo. The characteristics of places in this regard have, in some instances, changed unaccountably; thus at Persadenia, close to Kandy, it was at one time regarded ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... family; the change from venison and wild turkey to the pork which early began to prevail in his diet was hardly a wholesome one. Besides, in cutting down the 25 trees he opened spaces to the sun which had been harmless enough in the shadow of the woods, but which now sent up their ague-breeding miasma. Ague was the scourge of the whole region, and it was hard to know whether the pestilence was worse on the rich levels beside the rivers, or 30 on the stony hills where the settlers sometimes ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... always do credit to your understanding. The wind re-establishes the equilibrium of the temperature, and purifies the air by dispersing in the mass exhalations that would be pernicious if they remained in one spot; it clears away miasma, it dissipates the smoke of towns, it waters some countries by driving clouds to them, it condenses vapor on the frozen summits of mountains, and converts it into rivers that cover the land ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien |
