"Canker" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "What do I care who has the first place? It's well I do not, for she would not permit such a reprobate as I, with evil in my heart like that cursed worm in the chestnut, to have any place worth naming—unless I can introduce a little canker of evil in her heart also. I wish I could. That would bring us nearer together and upon the same level." Annie saw the landscapes. She looked away from the man by her side and for a few moments forgot him. The scenes upon which she was gazing were ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... to the ultimate terms of surrender were not uncommon. Not that there was in any mind a disposition to give in until it was humanly impossible to hold the fort. But it was coming to that stage. Horseflesh on the top of other trials had implanted the canker of despair in more than one sensitive soul. We had a great deal of horseflesh of the tram and cab kind, and much as the obligations of Empire might induce us to perform, it was too much to expect us to rise to the occasion on foreign food. The physical needs of ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... of slavery is enervating and demoralizing. It is a canker that eats into the vitals of any nation that harbors it, no matter what form it assumes. The free territory had all the vigor, wealth and capacity for long endurance that self-dependence gives. It was in every respect prepared for a long and severe struggle. Its forces ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... God sees that the way to destroy that man is to let him get on. He does not want money in order to roll the old chariot along. God sees that prosperity would eat his soul like a canker, and so He won't let him get on. The Spirit of God never leads the soul to a selfish prayer. No; it leads the soul to weep because men keep not His law, to cry more about His interests than its own. It is willing for its own house to lie desolate, if that will promote ...
— Godliness • Catherine Booth
... expenses, as far as was consistent with the honour of the kingdom, and to assist him to new lawful sources of revenue, without throwing an unjust burden upon the people. 'The only disease and consumption which I can ever apprehend as likeliest to endanger me, is this eating canker of want, which being removed I could think myself as happy in all other respects as any other king or monarch that ever was since the birth of Christ: in this disease I am the patient, and yee have promised ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... degree; why the liver of a good life was happy, no matter what his place in the earth-life might be: and why the evil liver, no matter how high he might stand in his own or others' sight, carried the canker of past misdeeds in his heart. Standing, as she now did, in the midway of the present, looking with single gaze on past and future, she saw at once the honest striver after good in his yesterday-life rise to his reward in the life of to-day, and the ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... nothing," quoth Rosader; "for it is a restless sore that hath no ease, a canker that still frets, a disease that taketh away all hope of sleep. If then so many sorrows, sudden joys, momentary pleasures, continual fears, daily griefs, and nightly woes be found in love, then is not he to be accounted patient ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... his wonderful constitution, and Jerry's care, that had kept him up at the cab work so long; now he broke down very much. The farrier said he might mend up enough to sell for a few pounds, but Jerry said, no! a few pounds got by selling a good old servant into hard work and misery would canker all the rest of his money, and he thought the kindest thing he could do for the fine old fellow would be to put a sure bullet through his head, and then he would never suffer more; for he did not know where to find a kind master for the ...
— Black Beauty • Anna Sewell
... wench: it eats and sleeps, and hath such senses As we have, such. This gallant which thou see'st Was in the wreck; and, but he's something stain'd With grief, that's beauty's canker,[390-105] thou mightst call him A goodly person: he hath lost his fellows, And strays about to ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... Love had, like the canker-worm, Consumed her early prime: The rose grew pale, and left her cheek; She died ...
— A Bundle of Ballads • Various
... employment of money, is chiefly either merchandizing or purchasing; and usury waylays both. The sixth, that it doth dull and damp all industries, improvements, and new inventions, wherein money would be stirring, if it were not for this slug. The last, that it is the canker and ruin of many men's estates; which, in process of time, breeds a ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... love she's like a white, white rose! And I am the canker-worm: Never the bud to a blossom blows; It falls in ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... when we shall meet In combat face to face, Then only would Arminius greet The renegade's embrace. The canker of Rome's guilt shall be Upon his dying name; And as he lived in slavery, So shall he fall ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... out the elasticity of her spirits, withering her glorious beauty, and making her aged before her time. Perchance she mourned the absence of one she loved, and was wearied with anxiety for his return; perhaps the canker-worm of remorse was at work within her, for a fault committed and irretrievable; perhaps she was the victim of lawless outrage, a captive against her will; perhaps she had been severed from all she loved on earth, and the bright hopes of life had been blasted for ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... door-latch, ashes at the root, Dry rot in the ridge-pole, canker in the fruit; Growing, growing, all ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott
... The canker of civilisation had got to him even in Bogota, and he could not find it in himself to go down and assassinate a blind man. Of course, if he did that, he might then dictate terms on the threat of assassinating them all. But—Sooner or later he must ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... Ray had fearfully snubbed and afterwards "cut" in Arizona; there was Wilkins, whom Ray had treated with scant courtesy for over a year, because of some gossip that veteran had been instrumental in putting into circulation; there was Captain Canker, who used to like and admire Ray in the rough old days in the canons and deserts, but who had forfeited his esteem while they were stationed at Camp Sandy, and when they met again in Kansas, Ray touched his cap to his superior officer but withheld his hand. Canker felt very bitterly towards Ray, ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... the guest of Moroello Malaspina, what time he was yet finishing the "Inferno." There is a little old neglected garden, full to south, enclosed upon a rampart which commands the Borgo, where we found frail canker-roses and yellow amaryllis. Here, perhaps, he may have sat with ladies—for this was the Marchesa's pleasance; or may have watched through a short summer's night, until he saw that tremolar della ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... writers say, as in the sweetest bud The eating canker dwells, so eating love Inhabits in the finest ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... so fast, friend? Dost canker thy soul with sordid business when all that be leal men and true ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the discontent of America was so great, that, in 1766, the British Parliament was compelled to repeal the Stamp Act. The people made great rejoicings, but took care to keep Liberty Tree well pruned, and free from caterpillars and canker worms. They foresaw, that there might yet be occasion for them to assemble ...
— True Stories from History and Biography • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... this be conceded—yet you are no nearer than before to the conclusion that you possess power which may deal with other subjects as effectually as with this. Slavery, we are further told, with some pomp of metaphor, is a canker at the root of all that is excellent in this republican empire, a pestilent disease that is snatching the youthful bloom from its cheek, prostrating its honor and withering its strength. Be it so—yet if you have power to medicine ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... in cutting out the diseased bark, it is advisable to cut out also a few of the outer annual rings of wood (of course tangentially), especially if the canker is one of long-standing, since we know that the fungus eventually penetrates the outer rings of wood. Since that is true, the canker might enlarge later on from this same source of infection. Further it may also be possible for spores or bits of mycelium to be ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... influence of cats on the growth of clover in their neighborhood. We all have read of the effects of the European rabbit in New Zealand, and we have many of us taken part in the controversy about the English sparrow here,—whether he kills most canker-worms, or drives away most native birds. Just so the great man, whether he be an importation from without like Clive in India or Agassiz here, or whether he spring from the soil like Mahomet or Franklin, brings about ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... continue so to re-form as persuasion flowed back upon Jenny's egotism, until it crystallised hard and became unchallengeable; but at any rate for this instant Jenny had had a glimmer of insight into that tamer discontent and rebelliousness that encroached like a canker upon Emmy's originally sweet nature. The shock of impact with unpleasant conviction made Jenny hasten to dissemble her real belief in Emmy's born inferiority. Her note was changed from one of complaint into one of ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... thing in their hearts their mouths must speak, even though the subjects be of the delicate nature that would naturally be hidden. Such mental constitutions are at least healthful. Concealed trouble never preys upon them like the canker in the bud. Everything comes to the surface and is ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... pronounced on things in gineral, when Adam fell, and showed how every thing was allowed to go contrary ever since. There was pig-weed, and pusley, and Canady thistles, cut-worms, and bag-worms, and canker-worms, to say nothin' of rattlesnakes. The doctor made it very impressive and sort o' improvin'; but Huldy, she told me, goin' home, that she hardly could keep from laughin' two or three times in the sermon when she thought of ...
— Oldtown Fireside Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... origin or use; and he who sets out to philosophise upon them, or make the separation Mr. Burke talks of in this spirit and with this previous determination, will be very likely to mistake a maggot or a rotten canker for the precious kernel of truth, as was indeed the case with ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... conventional code which masquerades in our midst as a system of morals. If he had continued to "live single" as we hypocritically phrase it, and so helped by one unit to spread the festering social canker of prostitution, on which as basis, like some mediaeval castle on its foul dungeon vaults, the entire superstructure of our outwardly decent modern society is reared, his father no doubt would have shrugged his shoulders and blinked his ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... attends money got with ease, namely, that it is never hoarded; otherwise, as we have frequent opportunities of growing rich, that canker care might prey upon our quiet, as it doth on others; but our money stock we spend as fast as we acquire it; usually at least, for I speak not without exception; thus it gives us mirth only, and no trouble. Indeed, the luxury of our lives might introduce diseases, ...
— From This World to the Next • Henry Fielding
... over the castle, hard to endure by every one who dwelt within its walls. Disease lurked in the family like canker in a flower. Since the dark hour when the dying son had been carried into his father's presence, the baron had never left his room. His small measure of remaining strength had been broken; grief consumed mind and body. He would sit silently brooding throughout the livelong day, and neither the ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... new ideas: those are the evil that is destroying us. The school-masters are poisoning the minds of the young. The very army is smitten with the canker. Whole regiments are on ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... would be a terrible thing for their 'rust' to 'witness against me,' and eat my 'flesh as it were fire'; and it would be yet more dreadful for the money which has such power for good to be itself given up to canker and rust!" Then he would meditate on the uncompromising declarations of Christ—"How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the Kingdom of God!" "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God." ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... distinctly that the novel with which I was to revolutionize society and my own fortunes, and with the purpose of writing which in an unvexed seclusion I had buried myself in this expedient hamlet on the South Coast, was withered in the bud beyond redemption. To this lamentable canker of a seedling hope the eternal harmony of the sea was a principal contributor; but Miss Whiffle confirmed the blight. I had fled from the jangle of a city, and the worries incidental to a life of threepenny ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... be christened. Well, Madge knew that sometimes they flee at touch of holy water, but no; though the thing mourned and moaned enough to curdle your blood and screeched out when the water touched him, there he was the same puny little canker. So when madam was better, and began to fret over the child that was nigh upon three months old, and no bigger than a newborn babe, Madge up and told her how it was, and the way to get ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... leprosy of social states; suspicion, craft, hypocrisy, servility to the great, oppression to the low, the waxlike mimicry of courtly vices, the hardness of flint to humble woes; thought, feeling, the faculties and impulses of man, all ulcered into one great canker, Gain,—these make the general character of the middling class, the unleavened mass of that mediocrity which it has been the wisdom of the shallow to applaud. Pah! we too are of this class, this potter's earth, this paltry mixture of mud and stone; ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... frequently on a twentieth part of that amount. Prosperity is a more severe ordeal than adversity, especially sudden prosperity. "Easy come, easy go," is an old and true proverb. A spirit of pride and vanity, when permitted to have full sway, is the undying canker-worm which gnaws the very vitals of a man's worldly possessions, let them be small or great, hundreds, or millions. Many persons, as they begin to prosper, immediately expand their ideas and commence expending for luxuries, ...
— The Art of Money Getting - or, Golden Rules for Making Money • P. T. Barnum
... disobliging. If he has what is asked, he will either give it, or adopt the worse course of telling a lie about it, by saying that he has it not, or that it is promised to some one else. This communistic system is a sad hindrance to the industrious, and eats like a canker-worm at the roots of individual or national progress. No matter how hard a young man may be disposed to work, he cannot keep his earnings: all soon passes out of his hands into the common circulating currency of the clan to which all have a latent right. The only thing which reconciles ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... in the yellow leaf; The flowers and fruits of love are gone: The worm, the canker, and ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... makes his meat Of bitter leaves, as though he found them sweet: If, with a thousand wine-casks—call the hoard A million rather—in his cellars stored, He drinks sharp vinegar: nay, if, when nigh A century old, on straw he yet will lie, While in his chest rich coverlets, the prey Of moth and canker, moulder and decay, Few men can see much madness in his whim, Because the mass ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... represented right Methodism. But they fairly exemplified a sorry side of it; those little offshoots of which dozens have separated from the parent tree; and they exhibited most abundantly in themselves that canker-worm of Pharisaism which gnaws at the root of all Nonconformity. This offense, combined with such intolerance and profound ignorance as was to be found amid the Luke Gospelers, produced a community merely sad or comic to consider according to ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... under no obligation either to love or respect it. He is the traitor to America, and American institutions, who reckons slavery as one of them, and, as such, screens it from assault. Slavery is a blight, a canker, a poison, in the very heart of our republic; and unless the nation, as such, disengage itself from it, it will most assuredly be our ruin. The patriot, the philanthropist, the Christian, truly enlightened, sees no other alternative. The developments of the present session of our national Congress ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... where many a canker gnaws Within the walls they fancy free from sin; I know how officers infringe their laws, I know the corners where the men climb in; I know who broke the woodland fence to bits And what platoon attacked the Shirley cow, While the dull Staff, for all their frantic chits, Know not the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CL, April 26, 1916 • Various
... woods and desert caves, With wild thyme and the gadding vine o'ergrown, And all their echoes mourn. The willows, and the hazel-copses green, Shall now no more be seen Fanning their joyous leaves to thy soft lays. As killing as the canker to the rose, Or taint-worm to the weanling herds that graze, Or frost to flowers, that their gay wardrobe wear, When first the white-thorn blows; Such, Lycidas, thy loss to shepherds' ear. Where were ye, ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... the pressure of debt, and the struggle for existence. It had eaten into her flesh like a canker, and had turned her heart into wormwood. In her pinched circumstances, even the pittance paid by her brother for doing his cooking and washing had been a consideration. This now ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... belonging to Adam Jellicoe, his partner's father, where he succeeded in obtaining considerable Government orders for iron made after his patents. To all ordinary eyes the inventor now appeared to be on the high road to fortune; but there was a fatal canker at the root of this seeming prosperity, and in a few years the fabric which he had so laboriously raised crumbled into ruins. On the death of Adam Jellicoe, the father of Cort's partner, in August, 1789,[8] defalcations were discovered in his public accounts to the ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... undermined him and Death had been his most intimate companion, there was in him such an abundant, such a tyrannical force of life, that it burst forth even in his elegies, shining forth from his eyes, his lips, his gestures. But a gnawing canker had crept into the heart of his force. Christophe had fits of despair, transports rather. He would be quite calm, trying to read, or walking: suddenly he would see Olivier's smile, his tired, gentle face.... It would tug at his heart.... He would falter, lay his hand on his breast, ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... mission field indeed, for in this world-out-of-joint there is little danger of going astray in looking for misery of one sort or another. If the sorrows of the poor are greater, they have, if not consolation, at least a fortunate numbness produced by the never-ending battle for bread; but the canker has time to gnaw the very heart ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... women and animals is more fully developed than in man. Besides, at that time you had not learned all about Colonel Annesley, whose guests we are to be this evening. Whoever would have imagined a Karloff accepting the hospitalities of an Annesley? Count, hath not thy rose a canker?" ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... shame!" chimed in a voice from the front seats. "We keep out of the way as much as we can; we eat every kind of troublesome worm and insect,—the cutworm, canker-worm, tent caterpillar, army-worm, rose-beetle, and the common house-fly; we ask for no wages or food or care,—and what do we get in return? Not even protection and common kindness. If we had places where we could live in safety, who could tell the amount of ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... last he said: "You have had the canker of disease in you practically from your birth"—the actual word he ...
— Ghosts - A Domestic Tragedy in Three Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... thrilling frame to bear And eagle-spirit of a Child of Song— Long years of outrage—calumny—and wrong; Imputed madness, prisoned solitude,[176] And the Mind's canker in its savage mood, When the impatient thirst of light and air Parches the heart; and the abhorred grate, Marring the sunbeams with its hideous shade, Works through the throbbing eyeball to the brain, With a hot sense of heaviness ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... their silly stories of shooting exploits, though he knew the underlying purpose of them. It was the darker, sordid wickedness that was daily practised on him that ate like a canker into mind and body until he was a shattered wreck. It was the foul treatment of this great man that caused Dr. Barry O'Meara to revolt and openly proclaim that the captive of St. Helena was being put to death. As an honourable ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... had forced aside those drawn blinds. She had pierced to the innermost corners. And Avery herself was shocked by that which had been revealed. It had never before been given to her to see her own motives, her own soul, thus. She had not dreamed of the canker of selfishness that lay at the root of all. With shame she remembered her assurance to her husband that her love should never fail him. What of that love now—Love the Invincible that should have shattered the gates ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... a great deal of pain in the ear in common canker. He will be almost incessantly scratching it, crying piteously while thus employed. The ear is, oftener than any other part, bitten by the rabid dog, and, when a wound in the ear, inflicted by a rabid dog, begins ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... will set Paris alight!'—'Take very good care that you don't,' said Blucher. 'France will die of that, nothing else can kill her,' and he waved his hand over the glowing, seething city, that lay like a huge canker in the valley of the Seine.—There are no journalists in our country, thank Heaven!" continued the Minister after a pause. "I have not yet recovered from the fright that the little fellow gave me, a boy of ten, in a paper cap, with the sense of an ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... far away into some quiet corner of the world, and devote my life to hers? Alas! alas! she, too, would be a woman and beautiful—she was a flower born of a poisoned tree, who could say that there might not be a canker-worm hidden even in her heart, which waited but for the touch of maturity to commence its work of destruction! Oh, men! you that have serpents coiled round your lives in the shape of fair false ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... Saviour was of a virgin born, His head was crowned with a crown of thorn; It never canker'd nor fester'd at all, And I hope in Christ Jesus this ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 33, June 15, 1850 • Various
... shrieked out her secret in the tongues of men and of angels, she could have added nothing further to his knowledge. The wonderful child quality which still survived in her beneath all her shallow worldliness dawned suddenly in her wide-open, angry eyes, and he saw clearly at last the hidden canker which was eating at her impatient heart. So this was what it meant, and this was why she had reminded him at times of a pierced butterfly that hides a mortal anguish beneath the beauty ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... he dislikes, For standing 'twixt him, and the hope of Empire; While Envy, like a rav'nous Vulture, tears His canker'd heart, ...
— The Prince of Parthia - A Tragedy • Thomas Godfrey
... will cause the rain to flow; It will tell of youthful love, Fond but blighted love; It will tell of father's cruelty; It will cause the rain to flow; It will tell of two lovely flowers That grew in the wilderness; And the mildew that touch'd the leaf; And the canker that struck the bud; And the lightning that wither'd the stem; And 't will speak of the Spirit-dove, That summon'd them away, Deeming them all too good and true, For aught save ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... know the meadows where the best flag-root grew, the thicket where the sassafras was spiciest, the haunts where the squirrels went for nuts, the white oak whose bark was most valuable, and the little gold-thread vine that Nursey liked to cure the canker with. All sorts of splendid red and yellow leaves did Dan bring home for Mrs. Jo to dress her parlor with, graceful-seeded grasses, clematis tassels, downy, soft, yellow wax-work berries, and mosses, red-brimmed, white, or ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... blunt, coarse wretch, and his sense threw something respectable around his vices. But in Clarke you saw the traces of happier opportunities of better education; it was in him not the coarseness of manner so much as the sickening, universal canker of vulgarity of mind. Had Houseman money in his purse, he would have paid a debt and relieved a friend from mere indifference; not so the other. Had he been overflowing with wealth, he would have slipped from ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... more than those which are remote; interests which affect ourselves, more than those which affect our descendants. Citizens of the Southern States, to save a petty individual interest, are nursing in the bosom of society a malignant canker, which, if let alone, must one day, in the inevitable course of destiny, eat into its vitals. Heroic treatment will alone meet the demands of the case. It must be a surgical operation that will penetrate to the very roots of the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... future by dwelling too long upon what we are surely still young enough to bury if not forget? I acknowledge that I would have behaved in a more ideal fashion, if, after I had been forsaken by you, I had turned my face from society, and let the canker-worm of despair slowly destroy whatever life and bloom I had left. But I was young, and society had its charms, so did the prospect of wealth and position, however hollow they may have proved; you who are the master of ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green
... blessings which are the pride of an Epicurean civilization? And who gave the last support, who raised the last barrier, against that inundation of destructive pleasures in which some see the most valued fruits of human invention, but which proved a canker that prepared the way to ruin? It was that pious Emperor who learned his wisdom from a slave, and who set a haughty defiance to all the grandeur and all the comforts of the highest position which earth could give, and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... hateful, heartless, and disgusting of human beings were she allowed to unsex herself; and where would be the protection which man was intended to give the weaker sex? The Queen is sure that Mrs. Martin agrees with her." The argument was irrefutable; Mrs. Martin agreed; and yet the canker spread. ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... but jarring of interests, opposition, repulsion, disregard of law in so far as it clashes with private ends, and thus, finally, social and political disruption more or less extensive? Thus our trouble lies deeper than slavery. Remove the canker of slavery to-day, and yet the tendency to disruption and dissolution would evermore go on while prevailing ideas actuated society. The remorseless mill of selfishness would keep on grinding, grinding, grinding toward dissolution. Look at our literature, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... its canker and its moth! These modern Esaus, bartering rights for broth! Taxing our justice, with their double claim, As fools for pity, and as knaves for blame; Who, urged by party, sect, or trade, within The fell embrace of Slavery's sphere of sin, Part at the outset with their moral sense, The watchful ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... North, "The Union as it is," mean? A Union half free and half slave; a dual government, if not in fact, certainly in the brains and hearts of the people; two civilizations at eternal and inevitable war with each other; a Union with the canker-worm of slavery in it, impairing its strength every year and threatening its life; a Union in which two hostile ideas of political economy were at work, and where unpaid slave labor was inimical to the interests of the free workingmen. And it should ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... its very sanctuary. Rebel! dost thou know what punishment that crime demands? Now answer! (GIANETTINO appears struck, and fixes his eyes on the ground without speaking). Wretched Andreas! In thy own heart hast thou fostered the canker of thy renown. I built up a fabric for Genoa which should mock the lapse of ages, and am myself the first to cast a firebrand into it. Thank my gray head, which would be laid in the grave by a relation's hand—thank my unjust ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Senor Don Diego; gold is often in the earth. But had I the unholy knowledge, I would lock it in my breast. Gold is the canker in the heart of the world. It is not for the Church to scatter ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... days are in the yellow leaf; The flowers and fruits of love are gone; The worm, the canker, and the ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... conquer in Love's Lists that fall, And Wounds renewed for Wounds are captain Cure. He doubly is inslaved that gilts his Chain, Saith Reason, chaffering for his Empire gone, Bestir, and root the Canker that hath ta'en Thy Breast for Bed, ...
— Silverpoints • John Gray
... ornamented them, but their own dim faces looking wan from the windows of some huge old homestead, a world too wide for the shrunken family. All April long the door-yard trees crouch and shudder in the sour east, all June they rain canker-worms upon the roof, and then in autumn choke the eaves with a fall of tattered and hectic foliage. From the window the fading sisters gaze upon the unnatural liveliness of the summer streets through which the summer boarders are driving, or upon the death-white ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... the yellow leaf, The flowers and fruits of love are gone, The worm, the canker, and ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... petition to. Could triumph balm The wounds of ages, here were balm indeed; But blood revolts. Race of the changeless creed, And ever-shifting sojourn, SHAKSPEARE's type Deep meaning hides, which, when the world is ripe For wider wisdom, when the palsying curse Of prejudice, the canker of the purse, And blind blood-hatred, shall a little lift, Will clearlier shine, like sunburst through a rift In congregated cloud-wracks. Shylock stands Badged with black shame in all the baser lands. Use him, and—spit on him! That's Gentile wont; Make him ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 16, 1891 • Various
... school sermon which Mr Paton preached about this time, and which Walter felt was meant in part for him. It was on the danger and unwisdom of brooding continually on what is over; and it was preached upon the text, "I will restore to you the years which the locust hath eaten, the canker-worm, the caterpillar, and ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... canker of the mind, The discord that disorders sweet heart's tune, The abortive bastard of a coward mind, The lightfoot lackey that runs post by death, Bearing the letters which contain our end; The busy advocate that sells his breath Denouncing ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 486 - Vol. 17, No. 486., Saturday, April 23, 1831 • Various
... prayer-books up the aisle, and opened and shut the pew! There too was the portly Dr. Griffiths, of the Monthly Review, with his literary wife in her neat and elevated wire-winged cap! And oftimes the vivacious and angelic Duchess of Devonshire, whose bloom had not then suffered from the canker-worm of pecuniary distress, created by the luxury of charity! Nor could I forget the humble distinction of the aged sexton, Mortefee, whose skill in psalmody enabled him to lead that wretched group of singers, whom ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 269, August 18, 1827 • Various
... of self-degradation. The kind, calm Pastor of Einsiedeln sees at first only the splendour that hangs around the name of his early comrade, the hero of his hopes. And Paracelsus for a while would forbear with tender ruth to shatter his friend's illusion, would veil, if that were possible, the canker which has eaten into his own heart. But in the tumult of old glad memories and present griefs, it ceases to be possible; from amid the crew of foolish praisers he must find one friend having the fidelity of genuine insight; he must confess his failure, and once for all correct the prophecy ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... studious paperworms and lean scholars, and niggarly scraping usurers, and a troop of heart-eating, envious persons, and those canker-stomached, spiteful creatures that furnish up commonplace books with other men's faults. The time hath been, in those golden days when Saturn reigned, that, if a man received a benefit of another, I was presently sent for to put him in mind of it; but now, in these iron afternoons, save your friend's ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... the chord in her which could only give one response, and he knew it. There lay the canker which made her energy and cheerfulness a mere task to hide the real disease. Half unconsciously she had loved Stafford and half unconsciously she had built her life upon him. When he had been taken from her, the foundations had been shaken, and she found herself crippled by a horrible ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... insect pests in the Sleeping Giant Plantation are the spring canker worms, the mites (Paratetranychus bicolor), Japanese beetles ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... indigenous insects, birds, and quadrupeds, welcomed the apple-tree to these shores. The tent-caterpillar saddled her eggs on the very first twig that was formed, and it has since shared her affections with the wild cherry; and the canker-worm also in a measure abandoned the elm to feed on it. As it grew apace, the bluebird, robin, cherry-bird, king-bird, and many more, came with haste and built their nests and warbled in its boughs, and so became orchard-birds, and multiplied more than ever. It was an era in ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... of transformation to desirable result, is the purest joy the human mind can experience. Fourteen hours a day is not too much for this kind of task. The difficulty is to gain skill of hand and eye, or training of mind, to this end. A fallacy, a canker at the heart of our social fabric today, is that the daily task is something ...
— Euthenics, the science of controllable environment • Ellen H. Richards
... decent equipment and some pocket money. As yet the curse of pillage was not synonymous with conquest, as yet the free and generous ardor of youth and military tradition exerted its force, as yet self-sacrifice to the extreme of endurance was a virtue, as yet the canker of lust and debauchery had not ruined the life of the camp. Emancipated from the bonds of formality and mere contractual relation to superiors, manhood asserted itself in troublesome questionings as to the motives and plans of officers, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... quadrupeds, welcomed the apple tree to these shores. The butterfly of the tent-caterpillar saddled her eggs on the very first twig that was formed, and it has since shared her affections with the wild cherry; and the canker-worm also, in a measure, abandoned the elm to feed on it. As it grew apace the bluebird, robin, cherry-bird, king-bird, and many more, came with haste and built their nests and warbled in its boughs, ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... of this hope, none knew save herself. For Queen of Night though the white men called her, Sultana though she was named with fear and submission by the blacks, though her power was second only to that of Red Jabez, and barely less than his, a canker gnawed at the heart of Dolores, the canker of a suspicion that her power was but a paltry power, her freedom but a ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... A. M., July 26, 1823. From this time forward, the mother never had a well day. After ten years of ill health and suffering, she died from too much calomel and from slow starvation, being able to take but little food on account of canker in her mouth and throat. Carleton, her pet, was very much with her during his child-life, so that his recollections of his mother were ever very clear, very tender, ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... behaviour, and affectation, of manners: it implies a want of solid merit."—Ib. "If love and unity continue, it will make you partakers of one an other's joy."—Ib. "Suffer not jealousy and distrust to enter: it will destroy, like a canker, every germ of friendship."—Ib. "Hatred and animosity are inconsistent with Christian charity; guard, therefore, against the slightest indulgence of it."—Ib. "Every man is entitled to liberty of conscience, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... to me to follow you here. I did so; first because I loved you; but you soon cured me of that; whatever gentle feeling, whatever pity, whatever humanity, was in my heart you withered up and destroyed, as the canker worm eats the corn, and the plague kills the child. You bade me cast out love from my breast as a vile thing, you turned my hand to iron, and my heart to stone; you told me to live for freedom and for revenge. I have done so; but ...
— Vera - or, The Nihilists • Oscar Wilde
... coffin or on a cross, and on Fridays hung herself for two hours on a cross attached to it by her hair and by ropes. On broiling hot days she denied herself a drop of water to quench an almost intolerable thirst. Verily Manichaeism has eaten like a canker into the ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... of this year's German offensive was the creation in the heart of an efficient and gallant army of this canker of disaffection by propaganda that has been as energetic and as dangerous to our cause as any of the enemy's operations in the field. In every Allied country it has been active; among the English it is at work corrupting labor, preying on the nerves of the overstrained worker, and whispering ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... Estate is dipped, and is eating out with Usury; and yet he has not the Heart to sell any Part of it. His proud Stomach, at the Cost of restless Nights, constant Inquietudes, Danger of Affronts, and a thousand nameless Inconveniences, preserves this Canker in his Fortune, rather than it shall be said he is a Man of fewer Hundreds a Year than he has been commonly reputed. Thus he endures the Torment of Poverty, to avoid the Name of being less rich. If you go to his House you see great Plenty; but served in ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... archbishops and bishops and over thirty doctors of divinity in the Anglican Church, some of their utterances being very violent and all of them running their roots down into texts of Scripture. Typical among these is a sermon of Bishop Sands, in which he declares, regarding the taking of interest: "This canker hath corrupted all England; we shall doe God and our country true service by taking away this evill; represse it by law, else the heavy hand of God hangeth over us and will ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... live in the tiny room with the canary bird and the engraving of the "Rock of Ages." This was putting lime to the canker, but, somehow, she felt that she could go to no other place. She told the landlady that her young man had not done so well in business as they had expected, and had sought work in another city. He would come ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... for its subject the lawless pathologic love of Phaedra for her step-son. She is "seized with wild desire;" she "pines away in silence, moaning beneath love's cruel scourge;" she "wastes away on a bed of sickness;" denies herself all food, eager to reach death's cheerless bourn; a canker wastes her fading charms; she is "stricken by some demon's curse;" from her eyes the tear-drops stream, and for very shame she turns them away; on her soul "there rests a stain;" she knows that to ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... which we do, and the words which we speak. And the work which we collective children of God do, our grand centre of life, our city which we have builded for us to dwell in, is London! London, with its unutterable external hideousness, and with its internal canker of publice egestas, privatim opulentia,[406]—to use the words which Sallust puts into Cato's mouth about Rome,—unequalled in the world! The word, again, which we children of God speak, the voice which most hits our collective thought, the newspaper with the largest circulation ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... this is a dreary season for travelling northward, I think if papa continues pretty well I shall go in a week or two. I feel to my deep sorrow, to my humiliation, that it is not in my power to bear the canker of constant solitude. I had calculated that when shut out from every enjoyment, from every stimulus but what could be derived from intellectual exertion, my mind would rouse itself perforce. It is not so. Even intellect, even imagination, will not dispense with the ray of domestic ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... bullet, and, above all, the appearance of the man himself, told the real story. Sometimes the victims would say their weapon went off by accident as they were cleaning it, and this was perhaps worst of all, for it put the canker of doubt into genuine cases of this sort, and there are bound to be ...
— Ned, Bob and Jerry on the Firing Line - The Motor Boys Fighting for Uncle Sam • Clarence Young
... it works, the falling sickness is so; they cannot have names enough, from what it does, nor where it is, but they must extort names from what it is like, what it resembles, and but in some one thing, or else they would lack names; for the wolf, and the canker, and the polypus are so; and that question whether there be more names or things, is as perplexed in sicknesses as in any thing else; except it be easily resolved upon that side that there are more sicknesses than names. If ruin were reduced ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne |
