"Taint" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which the wounded man had played his part. She remembered every look of the now closed eyes, and every expression of his well-loved features. She called to mind his words of hope, and the carefully-laid plans for his advancement. Nor was there any taint of his selfishness in her recollection of these things. Everything about him, to her, was good and true. She loved him with all the passionate intensity of one who had only just attained to perfect womanhood. He had been to her something ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... Margaret! my bride and saint! Red rose and white in the garden; There is on you no earthly taint: And the bird sings over ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to Russell the fall of Sumter, he stated that civil war had at last begun. The North he believed to be very much more powerful than the South, the South more "eager" and united as yet, but, he added, "the taint of slavery will render the cause of the South loathsome to the civilized world." It was true that "commercial intercourse with the cotton States is of vital importance to manufacturing nations[124]...." ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... much beauty, so much of innocent joy in life, there must be the fountain of perpetual youth, there must be gold, and diamonds, and sapphires—all those gewgaws, the worship of which shows the lingering taint of barbarism in the civilized man, and for which the English, Spanish, and Portuguese adventurers of three centuries ago, were ready to sacrifice home and ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... to the fact that either from ignorance or the casuistical sophistries of mal-interested teachers who have distorted the divine pristine truths for their own base ends, emanated superstition, the taint of all it looked upon; and with no unsparing hand he flagellated the professors of the numerous false faiths, bastardized from their original purity, which have in their decay, darkened the earth, and with all the force of his powerful pen, mightier than ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... This incident symbolises very aptly the attitude of America. The country has not yet recovered from the hostility which it once professed to George III. It assumes that a difference of policy always implies a moral taint. The American Colonies broke away from the mother country; therefore George III. was a knave, whose name may not be mentioned without dishonour, and all the brave men who served him in serving the colonies are dishonoured also. It is not quite clear why this feeling has been kept alive ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... creature!" exclaimed Aylmer, with fervid admiration. "There is no taint of imperfection on thy spirit. Thy sensible frame, too, ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... aspire; in fact, he was not merely contented with this strange condition of things, he was even able to persuade himself that he was proud of it. It seems to show that there isn't anything you can't stand, if you are only born and bred to it. Of course that taint, that reverence for rank and title, had been in our American blood, too—I know that; but when I left America it had disappeared—at least to all intents and purposes. The remnant of it was restricted to the dudes and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... his race. Men said that he was proud; but he could not look round him without having something to be proud of; that he was stern and harsh to his sailors: but it was only when he saw in them any taint of cowardice or falsehood; that he was subject, at moments, to such fearful fits of rage, that he had been seen to snatch the glasses from the table, grind them to pieces in his teeth, and swallow them: but that ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... weakest of your patients. With all this fuss over health, you will think nothing of allowing the son of a man who died with a loathsome hereditary disease to marry a woman whose family has never had a taint of blood. Here no such thing is thought of. To begin with, no person who is not thoroughly sound can remain with us. Every heart-beat is heard by our medical men and every vein is transparent. You see evidences of the benefit of our system in the men and women ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... body. The duke then became president of the new organizations, the Unionist Free Food League and the Unionist Free Trade Club. In the subsequent developments the duke played a dignified but somewhat silent part, and the Unionist rout in 1906 was not unaffected by his open hostility to any taint of compromise with the tariff reform movement. But in the autumn of 1907 his health gave way, and grave symptoms of cardiac weakness necessitated his abstaining from public effort and spending the winter ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... mam I sho was. Jes put up on a platform and auctioned off. Sold right here in Des Arc. Nom taint right. My old mistress [Mrs. Snibley] whoop me till I run off and they took me back when they found out where I lef from. I stayed way ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume II, Arkansas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... drink, Rayder, take a cistern full. 'Taint often we meet on auspicious occasions like this, and we won't go home 'till mornin,' and we won't go home 'till morning, hic—hurrah for Annie, Rayder, and ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... years Ann Edwards regarded her son Jerome with pride and admiration, and yet with a measure of disapproval. In spite of her fierce independence, a lifetime of poverty and struggle against the material odds of life had given a sordid taint to her character. She would give to the utmost out of her penury, though more from pride than benevolence; but when it came to labor without hire, ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... explained in the second lesson of this series. His soul was fresh from the hand of the Creator—His spirit had not been compelled to work through repeated incarnations, pressing forward for expression through humble and ignoble forms. It was free from taint, and as pure as the Fountain from which is flowed. It was a virgin soul in every ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... don't pay to show yo' hand even after you've won—the other feller might remember it nex' time. 'Taint good business sense. But I pumped it into Bonaparte at the right time when he was goin' round an' round an' undecided whether he'd take holt or git. This settled him—he got. The Lord was on the monkey's side, of course, but He needed Gypsy Juice ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... I as free from all other ills that 'flesh is heir to,' as I certainly am of the taint of catalepsy, I might indeed congratulate myself upon an immunity which would obviate the dire necessity of ever ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... "'Taint such good fun, though, sir, for the folk as meets the coach, nor for we who has to go back with it next day. Them Irishers last summer had all got stones ready for us, and was all but letting drive, and we'd got two reverend gents aboard too. We pulled ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... and no other. Whoever knows it, whoever serves it, whoever impresses it deeply on his soul and only breathes and moves in it, no longer has any taint of baseness; he soars high above the earth, and knows nothing of misery and death. It is with Art the Divinity bridges space and descends to man, to draw him up ward to brighter worlds. This word transfigures everything, and brings fresh green shoots even from the dry wood of souls defrauded of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... "'Taint no gal's picture," offered the man at the fire. He had removed his tin cup and was engaged in stirring its grimy contents with a small stick. "That's a charm; some kind of hoodoo business that one o' them priests gave him to keep him out o' trouble. I know them Cath'lics. That's how ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... which when I whisperingly inquired the reason, of my particular, he told me, "that as it was chiefly on my account that his convention was met, the parties intended at once to humour their taste of variety in pleasures, and by an open public enjoyment, to see me broke of any taint of reserve or modesty, which they looked on as the poison of joy; that though they occasionally preached pleasure, and lived up to the text, they did not enthusiastically set up for missionaries, and only ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... O'Neals and O'Connors, of Wallace and Bruce, and animated the bosoms of the old feudal barons of England, who extorted the great charter of human liberty from King John. There was no mixture of the pale Saxon to taint or dilute the noble current of the Anglo-Norman blood which flowed through and fired the hearts of these descendants of the nobility and gentry of Britain. They were the cavaliers in chivalry and daring, and despised, as their descendants despised, the Roundheads ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... the American Army to maintain the high ideals for which all of them have fought, to preserve the soldier comradeship and carry it over into civilian life as an element of broad helpfulness while keeping the record of the army free from the taint of selfish aims. It was also wisely intended to forestall by the creation of one big genuinely representative, nonpartisan and democratic body, the formation of numerous smaller organizations in various places by men intent on exploiting the soldier ...
— The Story of The American Legion • George Seay Wheat
... shelves of which reposed sorrowful examples of Doulton ware and a pair of wrought-iron candlesticks. It was a room divorced from all sense of youth and live beings, sunless, grave, unlovely; an arid room that bore to the nostrils the taint ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... themselves make undone what is done? She was none the worse—permanently—for what had happened in that distant scene—that play within a play? How was she the worse? She was "not a bad woman!"—as she had said so passionately to Janet, when they joined hands. There was no lasting taint left in mind and soul—nothing to prevent her being a pure and faithful wife to George Ellesborough, and a good mother to his children. It was another Rachel to whom all that had happened, a Rachel ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 'Man's chief end is to glorify God,' and that anything which I do, unless it is motived by this regard to Him as its 'chief end,' loses its noblest consecration, and is degraded from its loftiest beauty. The Altar sanctifies, and not only sanctifies but ennobles, the gift. That which has in it the taint of self-regard so pronouncedly and dominantly as that God is shut out, is like some vegetation down in low levels at the bottom of a vale, which never has the sun to shine upon it. But let it rise as some tree above the brushwood until its topmost branches are in the light, and then it is ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... received the seed of Christ into the body of this death;—I offer this my bounden nightly sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, in humble trust, that the fragrance of my Saviour's righteousness may remove from it the taint of my mortal corruption. Thy mercies have followed me through all the hours and moments of my life; and now I lift up my heart in awe and thankfulness for the preservation of my life through the past day, for the alleviation ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... at all events, nature had by this time lost its taint of sin, and had shaken off all trace of demoniacal powers. St. Francis of Assisi, in his Hymn to the Sun, frankly praises the Lord for creating the heavenly bodies and the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... as a lad he was honest, and to-day he is the same; he loves Poland above everything, he keeps up Polish customs, he will not yield to Muscovite fashions. Whenever I return from Prussia, and want to wash off the German taint, I drop in at Soplicowo, as the centre of Polish ways; there a man drinks and breathes his Country! In God's name, brothers Dobrzynski; I am one of you, but I will not let the Judge be wronged; nothing will come of that. It was not thus in Great Poland, brothers: what ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... Government. And it was to this noble quality of his character that he owed his death. Corruption had grown up in connection with the offices of State, and Garfield's last mission was to purge the Government of this taint. He was resolved to set his face against "the waste of time and the obstruction to public business caused by the greedy crowd of office-seekers." And he also announced that "rigid honesty and faithful service would be required from every officer ...
— The Story of Garfield - Farm-boy, Soldier, and President • William G. Rutherford
... soon caught. Sinfulness stood before him not as the liability to penalty for transgressing an arbitrary rule, but as a taint to the entire being, mastering the will, perverting the senses, forging fetters out of habit, so as to be a loathsome horror paralysing and enchaining the whole being and making it into the likeness of him who brought sin and death into the world. The horror seemed to grow on ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... degraded by the mere thought of their degradation. With his mother and sister, he took refuge in the heartfelt prayers which they used to say every evening after the day of deceptions and private humiliations, which to their innocence seemed to be a taint, of which they dared not tell each other. But, in contact with the latent spirit of atheism which is in the air of Paris, Olivier's faith was beginning to crumble away, without his knowledge, like whitewash trickling down a wall ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... Pollock, being a good democrat and holding office under a democratic administration, had deemed it wise to abbreviate his first name, thereby removing all taint of republicanism. He reduced Abraham to an initial, but, despite his supreme struggle for dignity, was forced by public indolence to submit to a sharp curtailment of his middle name. He ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... On the plain steeples of our English Church, Whose worship, 'mid remotest village trees, 420 Suffers for this. Even Science, too, at hand In daily sight of this irreverence, Is smitten thence with an unnatural taint, Loses her just authority, falls beneath Collateral suspicion, else unknown. 425 This truth escaped me not, and I confess, That having 'mid my native hills given loose To a schoolboy's vision, I had raised a pile Upon the basis of the coming time, That fell in ruins round me. Oh, what ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... likewise bewitched. In trying to break the spell, she drinks an antidote which kills her. The point of interest in both stories is the subtile connection, in the first, between the beauty of Georgiana and the taint of the birth-mark; and, in the second, the loveliness of Beatrice and the poison of ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... high degree that talent for discovering or inventing slights which is pride of race run crooked, and reveals the taint of mixed blood in a man's veins. As District Superintendent of Police he had relieved his predecessor in the middle of the hot weather. His sister being at Mussoorie, he had arrived alone; and, in accordance with the friendly spirit ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... the two dear cousins; Fitzjocelyn's eyes dancing with gladsomeness, and Mary's broad tranquil brow and frank kindly smile, free from the shadow of a single cloud! Clara's heart leapt up with joy, joy full and unmixed, the guerdon of the spirit untouched by vanity or selfishness, without one taint that could have mortified into jealous, disappointed pain. It was bliss to one of those whom she loved best, it was the winning of a brother and sister, and perhaps Clara's life had never had a ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... worthy to be the heir to a throne, than he, the king's own son, was. And, too, he felt such a thrill of affection for this new friend, David, that he could not help doing something to show it. And then and always, Jonathan's friendship for David was absolutely free from all taint of jealousy, and he always stood aside, that honours might be heaped upon his friend, even those which by the rights of inheritance, ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... part went about the business quietly, and even rated some of their former officers as midshipmen, in special token of esteem. At the Nore, however, and in Duncan's squadron at Yarmouth, the mutiny was marked by bloodshed and taint of disloyalty, little surprising in view of the disaffected Irish, ex-criminals, impressed merchant sailors, and other unruly elements in the crews. In the end 18 men were put to death and ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... people who love beauty, are always smiling and follow the Golden Rule far nearer than those who live by trade and are blest by civilization. Ah, that I might see such a people! The nearest I ever came was at Honolulu, and there was the taint of the Christian, alack-a-day! The White Man's Burden is the weight of the load of sin, disease, death, and misfortune he has dropped on the happy ones who never knew a Christian creed. We have given them bath tubs in exchange ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... lady, next to his heart, thus believing himself proof against evil influences. There we see already spiritual love groping for material objects in order to gain earthly support; not every man is a Dante, not every man is capable of keeping his soul free from the taint of this earthly sphere. But even the "plait-cutter," so well known to the reader of newspapers, the collector of garters, and similar desperadoes, require a relic, a fetich which they apparently worship. To the same category ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... shaved; he rejected all attempts of consolation; and remained deaf to the most earnest and respectful remonstrances of those who had a right to render their advice. In this case, the affliction of the mind must have been reinforced by some peculiarity in the constitution. He inherited a melancholy taint from his father, and this seems to have been dreaded as a family disease; for the infant don Louis, who likewise resided in the palace of Villa-Viciosa, was fain to amuse himself with hunting and other diversions, to prevent his being infected ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... back to our old home this winter, nor the next, nor—but I will not impose terms upon you. Stay as long as you can content yourself in this region. I am afraid for you. I know you are stronger and have less of the consumptive taint about you than I, but I am afraid. You would have worked for me when I was in college, and I have worked only for you, since that time. All that I have saved—and I have saved all I could, for I knew ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... what has become of the superb pride of the old regime—the pride which disdained all ostentation and clung to honor more closely than life! What a striking sign of the times too, is this: let a woman taint her virtue BEFORE marriage, she is never forgiven—her sin is never forgotten; but let her do what she will when she has a husband's name to screen her, and society winks its eyes at her crimes. Couple this fact with ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... estimate at their full value, to say the least. He was very well liked by women, and in turn considered himself irresistible. He was very impressionable to feminine charms, was at heart a libertine, and, as he grew older, became a debauchee whose memory will taint ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... been said that the German witnesses are imaginative and enthusiastic, and their confidence ought to be distrusted. That kind of enthusiasm is at least of a quiet sort, evidently the result of profound conviction and certainly free from any taint of worldly interest, and is by no means incompatible with the most perfect conscientiousness. If they are mistaken as to the identity of the plaintiff; if there be in truth two persons about the same age bearing a strong resemblance to the family of Miller [Mueller] and having ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... forms the only purifying and perennial element for individuals and for society. I must confess I want to see the agricultural occupation of America at first hand permanently broaden'd. Its gains are the only ones on which God seems to smile. What others—what business, profit, wealth, without a taint? What fortune else—what dollar—does not stand for, and come from, more ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... been, one of its benefactors. His travels are interesting, not merely to those who care about Africa, or the great schemes to his zeal for which he fell a martyr, but to all who take delight in the spectacle of unbounded courage and heroic ardour, unalloyed with any taint of ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... of race made Vesta reject this sympathy, precious to her parched breast despite the quadroon taint as the golden sand in the brooks of Africa, giving at once wealth and cooling. The slave girl's long white arms, scarcely less pale than ivory—for she had slipped in at the sign of sorrow, while making her simple toilet—drew Vesta into her lap and laid ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... of cure, we must recognize the necessity of studying the aetiology of insanity, including that damnosa haereditas, which is the cause of causes in so large a number of the cases coming under our treatment. But what induced the ancestral taint? It behoves us to pay more and more attention to those laws of inheritance in general to which Mr. Hutchinson has recently directed attention in his suggestive lectures at the ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... repeating the news, "turned the sore throat into a spotted fever, or a scarlet fever, she did not rightly know which, but both were said by the apothecary to be generally fatal, where there was any Jewish taint in ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... country. Ah, Pascal, how I loved you! And your son? An English Deschamps you say! A son born to perpetuate his father's degradation! No, Pascal, I shall save my honor! Your traitor blood shall never taint posterity. You may live your life of misery, but you shall live ...
— The City and the World and Other Stories • Francis Clement Kelley
... mother died that thou might'st live. He grieved as only strong, brave men can grieve For what is lost. Then wandered off a pace To seek new life in lands across the sea; He left thee here, thy life was wild and free. Long years ago came tidings of his death, Born sadly on the wind's taint whispering breath. He was a peer, the last of all his race, His Saxon strength was written on thy face. Yet in thy veins thy mother's Southern blood Is bounding with its warm, impetuous flood. Enough; my words are wandering; a will He ...
— Love or Fame; and Other Poems • Fannie Isabelle Sherrick
... would accept of it) the profits of the same works, published separately—but I would not mix myself up in this way with others. I would not become a partner in this sort of miscellaneous 'pot au feu,' where the bad flavour of one ingredient is sure to taint all the rest. I would be, if I were you, alone, single-handed, and, as ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... your breath and hair are free from the taint. Well, it may be as you say, and I am loth to suspect you of falsehood. But listen to me, my boy; I am not assuming that you have been smoking, mind, but only, as we are on the subject, that you might do so. It may seem very arbitrary that the rules against ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... golden hue—and the little lad was passionately devoted to his father. He was always a delicate boy, and had I suppose, therefore, been specially petted, and he fretted continually for "papa". It is probable that the consumptive taint had touched him, for he pined steadily away, with no marked disease, during the winter months. One morning my mother calmly stated: "Alf is going to die". It was in vain that it was urged on her that with the spring strength would return to the child. "No", she persisted. "He was lying asleep in ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... indignant that Lois should find anything in her meeting with Rosie that lent itself to humor. He knew that humor. The superior were fond of indulging in it at the expense of the less fortunate. Even Lois Willoughby had not escaped that taint of class. Fearing to wound her by some impatient word, he made zeal in his round of duties the excuse for an ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... accepted the conventions of the society to which he belonged, and devoted himself to motoring, bridge, and the encouragement of the lighter drama. But some deep-rooted habit of his childhood, or even perhaps some remote hereditary taint, led him to spend an appreciable fraction of his leisure time in the reading of works of fiction. Unlike most lovers of light literature, he read with a certain mental concentration, and was broad-minded enough to read good novels as ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... say it, if I could; but I have not the courage quite to shut out this dear face, and abandon all hope of its return. But do not come soon, do not come often! This is now a tainted place, and I well know the taint of it clings to me. You belong to much brighter and better scenes. You are not to look back here, my Little Dorrit; you are to look away to very different and much happier paths. Again, GOD bless you ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... it to be a religion of noble tolerance, of universal brotherhood, of righteousness and justice. It has no taint of selfishness, sectarianism or intolerance. They have done more than anything else to win for it the respect in which it is now held by the great pandits ...
— The Buddhist Catechism • Henry S. Olcott
... true, they were full of flattery. Why should this woman of whom they were speaking love him so dearly? She was nothing to him. She was highly born, greatly gifted, wealthy, and a married woman, whose character, as he well knew, was beyond the taint of suspicion, though she had been driven by the hard sullenness of her husband to refuse to live under his roof. Phineas Finn and Lady Laura Kennedy had not seen each other for two years, and when they had parted, though they had lived as friends, ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... the scene. At the spot where the game had entered the water stood the black hound, sniffing the air for some taint ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XIII, Nov. 28, 1891 • Various
... to plod around. In less than six months they passed from a bare goodnight to the exchange of soul thoughts on butter-making, the raising of calves, fattening of swine, and methods of feeding swedes that they might not taint cow's milk, and so had progressed by such tender paths through gentle dusks to the point where Timmins was ready to declare himself in the light of this ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... and so lost!" he said, bitterly. "So utterly deceitful and depraved! Surely what they tell of her mother must be true. The taint of dishonor is ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... to exist within things substantially beautiful, or yet by aid of images that coalesce out of the evolving memory of them, but outside of everything actual It is not merely that the dream itself is one of ideal purity; the wave of impulse is pure, and flows without taint of media that seem almost to know it ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... judicial office, must find an echo in every bosom. The principle which dictated them does not require the aid of argument or elucidation; it is native to the conscience, and will be apparent to all who consult the monitor in their own breast. The wrong is aggravated when the taint of personal interest mingles with it, as when committed by a party to the cause, but appears in the worst form when it is the act of attorneys or counsel, who are the sworn officers of the court, whose duty it is to act as guardians of the fountains of justice, and who are ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... weight. And it was this intuition that made self-control and reticence easier than they might otherwise have been. His theories might assure him that such integrity of purpose was magnificent; his manly common-sense told him that in a wife one wanted to be sure of the taint of personal preference; so that, while he knew that he would never need to weigh Imogen's worth against anybody else's, he watched and waited until some unawakened capacity in her should be able happily to respond to the more human aspects of life. Meanwhile the steamer ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... pity him. The morals of George IV.'s set had been handed on to him by the General,' said Lady Kirkaldy, rejoicing in the genuine indignation of the young face, free from all taint of vice, if somewhat rigid. ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... onnateral screech, that the chaplain thought old Davy had come aboard; and he told the skipper he guessed he'd take his trick at prayin'. 'Why,' says the skipper, 'we've got on well enough without, ever since we left the Hague, hadn't we better omit it now?' ''Taint possible,' says the parson. Now you all know you can't larn seamanship to a parson or passenger—and the bloody fool knelt down with his face to wind'ard. 'Hillo!' says the skipper, 'you'd better fill away, and come round afore the wind, hadn't you?' 'Mynheer ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... "'Taint a song, is it? I used fur to hear songs oncet; they don't sing songs in this village. They sells good ...
— Opportunities • Susan Warner
... huh question is yais swing towards huh and ifn taint be still. (The bottle slowly swung toward me.) Now missy see hit have done answered yo question and yo done seed hit say yes. Yes'm hit sho am yes and yo' jes wait and see ifn ole Uncle Marion aint right. Now yo jes answer the same question fuh tother ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Arkansas Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... de way you feel 'bout um, 'taint no use fer ter pester wid um. It done got so now dat folks don't b'lieve nothin' but what dey kin see, an' mo' dan half un um won't b'lieve what dey see less'n dey kin feel un it too. But dat ain't de way wid dem what's ol' 'nough fer ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... natural consequence of the above, limitations to the contact of persons of differing castes. If a Brahman cannot eat with a Sudra, because it supposedly brings a taint to his pure blood, no more can he, with impunity, come into personal contact with him. The touch of such is pollution to his august and pure person; and the very air the low castes breathe brings ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... the steps, is left open, but for what reason I never could make out. The further end of this vault opens into another great vault, which I shall presently describe. The passage is very dry, but the air has a cold "gravey" taint, very unpleasant to inhale. At the second landing there is a sort of recess, into which rubbish from the garden above is shot down through a spout or funnel. At the top of the passage is a doorway opening upon the back of a house in Mason-street. This passage ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... In truth, Mr Brooke belongs not to the present generation. His energy, his perseverance, which nothing can subdue, his courage which no dangers can appal, his simplicity which no possession of power and authority can taint, his integrity and honest mind, all belong to a more masculine and primitive age, and constitute a rare exception for our respect and gratitude in this. We take the earliest opportunity afforded us to pay our humble tribute to worth that cannot ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... with Aunty Boone till you come back. Girls can be trusted anywhere, but it may take the whole Army of the West, yet, to follow up and look after two little runty boys. And let me tell you something, Bev, something I heard Aunty Boone say this morning." She said: "Taint goin' to be more 'n a minnit now till them boys grows up an' grows together, same size, same age. They been little and big, long as they goin' to be. Now you know what ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... masculine, naive, rowdyish, Laugher, weeper, worker, idler, citizen, countryman, Saunterer of woods, stander upon hills, summer swimmer in rivers or by the sea, Of pure American breed, of reckless health, his body perfect, free from taint from top to toe, free forever from headache and dyspepsia, clean-breathed, Ample-limbed, a good feeder, weight a hundred and eighty pounds, full-blooded, six feet high, forty inches round the breast and back, Countenance sunburnt, bearded, calm, unrefined, Reminder of animals, meeter of savage ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... two things it can't taint," he answered quietly, but now you've really brought me to the very object ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... that whoever enters these streams a man, may go out thence {but} half a man, and that he may suddenly become effeminate in the waters when touched." Both parents, moved, give their assent to the words of their two-shaped son, and taint the fountain with drugs of ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... already referred, and which Mr. Britton kindly submitted to us with various other correspondence on the subject), he says, "there can now be no impropriety in mentioning what could not be said when the collected edition of Chatterton's works was published,—that there was a taint of insanity in his family. His sister was once confined; and this is a key to the eccentricities of his life, and the deplorable rashness of his death." Of this unhappy predisposition, indeed, he seems to have been himself conscious, for "in his last will and testament," written in April, 1770, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... was very kind-hearted; but was subject to peculiar fits of insanity, during which he did wild and foolish things for the mere love of notoriety. He had two natures—one bright and good, the other sullen and criminal. A taint of madness ran in the family—came down from drunken and unprincipled fathers of dead generations; under different conditions, it might have developed into genius in one or ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... you have nothing whatever to fear. Clemency is her mother's living and breathing image as far as looks go, and as far as I can judge in the innermost workings of her mind. I have not seen in her the slightest taint from her evil father, though God knows I have watched for it with horror as the years have passed. After she was born I smuggled her away by night, and gave out word that the child had died at the same time with the mother. There was ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... knawed as honest women as ever her is that's a done that, and more too, for to get their men safe off and out o' way—iss, and wasn't thought none the wus of, neither. You'm growed mighty fancikul all to wance 'bout what us is to do and what us dussn't think o'. I'm sick o' such talk. 'Taint nawthin' else fra' mornin' to night but Adam this and Adam that. I'm darned if 'tis to be wondered at if the maid plays 'ee false: by gosh! I'd do the trick, if I was she, 'fore I'd put up with such fantads from you or either man like 'ee. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... self-seeking. Such were the aims that, newly returned to England, he confides to the sister who had ever prophesied great things of "her boy"; and in the end he made good the works spoken so boldly, yet surely in no mere spirit of boasting. He "left his mark somewhere, clear and distinct," without taint of the insincerities which he had an almost morbid dread of discovering in any act of ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... 'Taint we as wants no new-fangled tunes; them as we sings be aal owld ones as ha' been used in our church ever since I can mind. But you only choose thaay as you likes out o' the book? and we be ready ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... characterized by a diseased imagination and morbid feelings; the latter, beautiful and virtuous, and instilling something of her own excellence into the wild heart of her brother, but not enough to cure the deep taint of his nature. The third person was a wizard; a small, gray, withered man, with fiendish ingenuity in devising evil, and superhuman power to execute it, but senseless as an idiot and feebler than a child ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... you were, you were in one of the very best. Mrs. Temperly, since her husband's death, had passed much of her life at hotels, where she flattered herself that she preserved the tone of domestic life free from every taint and promoted the refined development of her children; but she selected them as well as she selected her friends. Somehow they became better from the very fact of her being there, and her children were smuggled in and out in the most ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... died! He was driven to envy such a respectable bereavement, and one so perfectly free from any taint of misfortune that even his best friend or his best enemy would not have felt the slightest thrill of exultation. No one would have cared. He sought comfort in clinging to the contemplation of the ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... Table requisites teleraro, mangxelaro. Tacit neesprimita, silenta. Taciturn silentema. Tack najleto. Tack najleti. Tackle (apparatus) ilaro. Tact delikateco. Tactics taktiko. Tadpole ranido. Taffeta tafto. Tail vosto. Tailor tajloro. Taint difekti. Take preni. Take away forpreni. Take away (by force) rabi. Take care! atentu! Take care of zorgi pri. Take care (of a child) varti. Take from depreni. Take notice of observi. Take off (undress) ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... subservient to ownership and financiering—such as banking and the law. Banking employments also carry a suggestion of large ownership, and this fact is doubtless accountable for a share of the prestige that attaches to the business. The profession of the law does not imply large ownership; but since no taint of usefulness, for other than the competitive purpose, attaches to the lawyer's trade, it grades high in the conventional scheme. The lawyer is exclusively occupied with the details of predatory fraud, either in achieving or in checkmating ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... moral sentiment and fervent piety assembled in the Church to uplift society in this country, but he deeply regrets that it is not more enlightened in ethics and in doctrine, and that the Church has never got rid of its ancient taint, mentioned by the Apostle James, that the brethren paid more respect to the man with a gold ring than a ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... more than twelve square feet; where the air was foul, and the bilges reeked with a pestilential stench; where the purser's store-room near gave out the smell of rancid butter and poisonous cheese; where the musty taint of old ropes came to them, there was ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... would stream from his lips in a voice of crystalline purity that might have belonged to some little chorister chanting the Ave Maria. He would even try to assume a hoarse roughness of tone, seek to degrade and taint that exquisite freshness of childhood which made him resemble a bambino on the Madonna's knees. The fish-wives laughed at him till they cried; and he, encouraged, could scarcely say a couple of words ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... drawl; "ye don't say so! But it's jest like her—thet is. She's so cur'us, Dusk is. Thar aint no gettin' at her. Ye know the gals ses as she's allers doin' fust one quare thing 'n' then another to get the boys mad at each other. But Lor', p'r'aps 'taint so! Dusk's powerful good-lookin', and ...
— Lodusky • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... gay; But I want to tell you, pardner, that a rider sich as me Isn't built fer feedin' on sich crazy jamboree. Every bone I got's a-achin', an' my feet as sore as if I had hit a bed o' cactus, an' my hinges is as stiff From a-hittin' these hot pavements as a feller's jints kin git,— 'Taint like holdin' down a broncho on the range, ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... one who has shared her father's studies in bee-life, I would not introduce the subject of heredity. But you know, Miss Martin, that such racial characteristics are transmitted, or transmissible, I should say, by sex opposites. Thus, an epileptic mother is more likely to give her taint to a son than to a daughter.... Yes, I mean all that, and more," he went on, seeing the look of horror, not unmixed with fear, in Doris's eyes. "There must be no more irritating of Siddle, or playing on his ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... this degenerate Shirley "a low wretch, a mad assassin, and a wild beast." He was, as my story will show, all this. He was indeed an incarnate fiend. But was he to blame? He was possessed by devils; but they were devils of insanity. The taint of madness was in his blood before he uttered his first cry in the cradle. His uncle, whose coronet he was to wear, was an incurable madman. His aunt, the Lady Barbara Shirley, spent years of her life shut up in an asylum. And this hereditary taint shadowed Laurence Shirley's ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... or not as you like. 'Taint half the fun here that it used to be. I didn't think I cared so much ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas
... voices rouse no echo now, their footsteps have no speed; They sleep, and have forgot at last the sabre and the bit— Yon vale, with all the corpses heaped, seems one wide charnel-pit. Long shall the evil omen rest upon this plain of dread— To-night, the taint of solemn blood; to-morrow, of the dead. Alas! 'tis but a shadow now, that noble armament! How terribly they strove, and struck from morn to eve unspent, Amid the fatal fiery ring, enamoured of the fight! Now o'er the dim horizon sinks the peaceful pall of night: The brave have nobly done their ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... up since I came out of the bastile," said the old man. "'Taint jest the place for a gentleman, I can tell you that. It's mighty down-settin' on one's pride, which I had a heap of afore I was sent ...
— Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective - Or, The Crime of the Midnight Express • Frank Pinkerton
... criticism.[130] Brilliant attainments in so many departments were commended yet more to the admiration of beholders by a modest and unassuming deportment, by morals above reproach, and by a disinterested nature in which there was no taint of avarice. The sincerity of his unselfish love of knowledge was said to be attested by the liberality with which he renounced the entire income of his small patrimony in favor ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... looks, bull-faced, and freckled fair, With two left legs, and Judas-colored hair, And frowsy pores that taint the ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... what power it carries with it, Protestantism should find out whether or not the applicant believes in Protestantism, and learn, if possible, whether they or their family are tainted with the virus of Roman Catholicism, and if you should find that the taint extends to any part of their family then scratch them off your ballot, and by so doing you will help to woo back the spirit of both Protestantism and patriotism, as one is ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... taint of Muscovite intrigue about my attitude!" exclaimed Stampoff with a vehemence that showed how deeply he was moved. "I have given the best years of my life to my country, and I am too old now to be forced to act against my principles. Every man in this room is a Slav, and we Slavs ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... cannot change his duty, or ours. He is helping us to struggle for that which is our own; but he would mar his generosity if he put a taint on that which he is ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... died!—and, trusting to your commendations, and his apparent honesty, I raised him to my favor, and gave him a post, which he has but now most basely betrayed. Fool, that I was, to think he could have served with such a master, and not bring with him the taint of treachery!" ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... adulteress to her former shape. Then may he cast his Juno off, and lead The great Lycaon's offspring to his bed. But you, ye venerable powers, be kind, And, if my wrongs a due resentment find, Receive not in your waves their setting beams, Nor let the glaring strumpet taint your streams.' The goddess ended, and her wish was given. Back she returned in triumph up to heaven; Her gaudy peacocks drew her through the skies, 170 Their tails were spotted with a thousand eyes; The eyes of Argus on their tails were ranged, At the same time the ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... on her silver cross soft amethyst, And on her hair a glory, like a saint: She seem'd a splendid angel, newly drest, Save wings, for heaven: Porphyro grew faint: She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint. Eve of St. Agnes. ...
— A Day with Keats • May (Clarissa Gillington) Byron
... comin'," said a voice from behind the golden-rose bushes, and out stepped Aunt Lucy in a new turban, making a curtsey to me. "La, Marse Richard!" said she, "to think you'se growed to be a fine gemman! 'Taint but t'other day you was kissin' ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... above all in its position as the one representative of national order and in its policy of peace. For two hundred years England had been almost constantly at war, and to war without had been added discord and misrule within. The violence and anarchy which had always clung like a taint to the baronage grew more and more unbearable as the nation moved forward to a more settled peacefulness and industry. At the very time however when this movement became most pronounced under Edward the Third, the tendency of the nobles to violence received a new impulse from the war ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... the old story is known throughout the shore, and Rodolph proved, in his fight with you, the bad blood in his veins. It never does to cross the white blood with the red, for the treachery of the Indian will taint the ...
— The Tory Maid • Herbert Baird Stimpson
... home,' he said, with a quicker beat of the impetuous heart that longed to be there so intensely, he found it as hard to curb as one of his unbroken horses on the plains. 'Not yet. I must get over this first. They'd see and smell and feel the prison taint on me, if I went now, and I couldn't look them in the face and hide the truth. I can't lose Ted's love, Mother Bhaer's confidence, and the respect of the girls, for they did respect my strength, anyway; but now ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... these passages we feel that though it may be true that Machiavelli only spoke with scientific candor of the vices which were common to all statesmen in his age—though the Italians were so corrupt that it seemed hopeless to deal fairly with them—yet there was a radical taint in the soul of the man who could have the heart to cull these poisonous herbs of policy and distill their juices to a quintessence for the use of the prince to whom he was confiding the destinies of Italy.[1] Almost involuntarily we remember the oath which Arthur administered to his knights, when ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... got the taint in me. I've killed my man. If I kill another I'll go bad. I know it. Life will mean nothing to me. I can feel it ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... "'Taint Hunt—it's Mr. Williston," she announced. "What's he want, I wonder? Look—he's wavin' at us! I guess he forgot some paper he wants you to take—he's bound to have it legal," she added with a sigh. "No, dear, let me be. I'll see ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... thankful to God for this approval of the people; but, while deeply grateful for this mark of their confidence in me, if I know my heart, my gratitude is free from any taint of personal triumph. I do not impugn the motives of any one opposed to me. It is no pleasure to me to triumph over any one, but I give thanks to the Almighty for this evidence of the people's resolution to stand by free government and the rights ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... Charlotte recovered, and he escaped the taint of uttered suspicion—for Dr. Jedd's private opinion he cared very ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... that ever blessed your cruel foes! To scatter rage and traitorous guilt Where Peace her jealous home had built; A patriot-race to disinherit Of all that made their stormy wilds so dear; And with inexpiable spirit To taint the bloodless freedom of the mountaineer— O France, that mockest Heaven, adulterous, blind, And patriot only in pernicious toils! Are these thy boasts, Champion of human kind? To mix with Kings in the low lust of sway, Yell in the hunt, and share the murderous prey; ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... "Jest yet 'taint easy to tell. Thar's somethin' on foot among 'em—some darned Injun trick. Clar as I kin see, that big chief wi' the red cross on his ribs, air him they call the Horned Lizard; an' ef it be, thar ain't a cunniner ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... violently shed. Like living creeping things That writhe but have no stings To scare adulterers from the imperial bed Bowed with its load of lust, Or chill the ravenous gusts That made her body a fire from heel to head; Or change her high bright spirit and clear, For all its mortal stains, from taint of fraud or fear. ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... for some other translator less immediately under Wyclif's influence. The freedom with which the Bible admittedly circulated for many years, and the well-known allusion by Sir Thomas More to an English translation untouched by any taint of heresy, point also in the same direction. That the second version is really only a revision of the first can hardly be adduced as a strong argument on the other side. The ethics of literary acknowledgment were not appreciated in Trevisa's days, and I believe ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... is his fate. All men, moreover, are unequal. To one human being is given genius; to another, beauty; to another, strength; to another, exceptional judgment; to another, exceptional memory; to another, grace and charm; to still another, physical ugliness and spiritual obliquity, moral taint, and every sort of disabling weakness. To the majority of persons Nature imparts mediocrity, and it is from mediocrity that the derogatory denial emanates as to the superior men and women of our race. A woman of the average kind is not difficult to comprehend. There ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... Bounderby and Gradgrind now walked, was a triumph of fact; it had no greater taint of fancy in it than Mrs. Gradgrind herself. Let us strike the key-note, ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... that they are doing it in a mean way, sir; but of course soldiers hate thieves, and so the merest taint of a suspicion serves to make some of the men feel rather shy about having anything unnecessary to do with ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... intermarried, not very enviably, with the demon-tainted blood of Edward Longshanks, because it seems to me that these tales, when they are rightly considered, compose the initial portion of a troubling history. Whether (as some declare) the taint came from Manuel of Poictesme, or whether (as yet others say) this poison was inherited from the demon wife whom Foulques Plantagenet fetched out of hell, the blood in these men was not all human. These men might not tread equally with ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... believe that he was in little danger of injury, much less death. Kapolski, reckless, a despiser of all things American, eagerly consented to the plan, and Ugo saw a way to rid himself of a dangerous rival without the taint of suspicion besmirching his cloak. Sallaconi was an accomplished swordsman, but it would have been unwise to send him against Quentin. Ugo himself was a splendid shot and an expert with the blade, and it was ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... another world. And yet, as we have said, this vice, which entails such scathing disgrace and suffering, is encouraged in many seductive ways. The talk in good company often runs on wine; the man who has the deadly taint in his blood is delicately pressed to take that which brings the taint once more into ill-omened activity; but, so long as his tissues show no sign of that flabbiness and general unwholesomeness which mark the excessive drinker, he is left unnoticed. ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... daughter Alicia departed that evening for the Continent. Next day, Dr. Mosgrave, a mental specialist, arrived from London. He was fully informed of the history of Lady Audley, examined her, and finally reported to Robert: "The lady is not mad, but she has a hereditary taint in her blood. She has the cunning of madness, with the prudence of intelligence. She is dangerous." He gave Robert a letter addressed to Monsieur Val, Villebrumeuse, Belgium, who, he said, was the proprietor and ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... airth to do with itself, but flize about Scatterin leaves and bloin off men's hats; In short its jest as free as Are out dores; But O Sextant! in our church its scarce as piety, Scarce as bankbills when ajunts beg for mishuns, Which sum say is purty often, taint nuthin to me, What I give aint nuthing to nobody; but O Sextant! You shet 500 men women and children Speshily the latter, up in a tite place, Sum has bad breths, none of em aint too sweet, Sum is fevery, sum is scroflus, sum has bad ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... are known? Men, too—alas! how fast their number grows—whom I have known, have loved, and lost too soon; and all gleaming out of the gloom, as every image of the dead should do, in pure white marble, as if purged from earthly taint? To ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... yes, I have just died, as they call it, and 'taint so bad a change after all; only I suppose there'll be dry times here for the ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... should know of himself whether Jesus spoke truth or error.[840] The Master proceeded to show that a man who speaks on his own authority alone seeks to aggrandize himself. Jesus did not so; He honored His Teacher, His Father, His God, not Himself; and therefore was He free from the taint of selfish pride or unrighteousness. Moses had given them the law, and yet, as Jesus affirmed, none of them ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... benefits; you chose to take your reward in public esteem, not in riches. Therefore it was that this most righteous ruler chose you to be honoured by his glorious friendship, because he saw you to be free from all taint of corrupt vices. How often did he fix your place among his white-haired counsellors; inasmuch as they, by the experience of years, had not come up to the point from which you had started! He found ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... have hoped to be able to defecate such dialogue, and yet leave any of the wit, whose whole spirit is in the lees, behind. The very life of such characters as Berinthia is their licentiousness, and it is with them, as with objects that are luminous from putrescence,—to remove their taint is to extinguish their light. If Sheridan, indeed, had substituted some of his own wit for that which he took away, the inanition that followed the operation would have been much less sensibly felt. But to be so liberal ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... accomplished all but perfection, save for a few spots of red on the outer petals—like the persistent adhering taint of ancient sins.... But you have seen the Clovellys—they are the best we have found. They have made us deeper and wiser for their beauty. Like some saintly lives—they seem to have come all but the last of the ninety degrees between the green of the level water-courses and the flashing ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort |
