"Decay" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... easy to see that an orchestra thus constituted would be better adapted for making a great noise than for music, while the pantomime itself was of such a brutal nature that the degradation of art may be said to have been complete. As the decay of art in Egypt culminated under Ptolemy Auletes, so in Rome it culminated in the time of Caligula (12-41 A.D.), and Nero ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... Caesar, when Cassivelaunus was Governor of Britain, "in order to awe the Britons." It was called the "Castle of the Medway," or "the Kentishmen's Castle," and it seems, with other antagonisms, to have awed the unfortunate Britons pretty effectively, for it lasted until decay and dissolution came to it and to them, as to all things. It was replaced by a new castle built by Hrofe (509), which in its turn succumbed to the ravages ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... nothing for myself. So enamoured had I become of our new home in the Silver West, that I felt but little longing to return to the comparative bleakness and desolation of even Scottish Highland scenery. I must not be considered unpatriotic on this account, or if there was a decay of patriotism in my heart, the fascinating climate of Mendoza was to blame for it. I could not help feeling at times that I had eaten the lotus-leaf. Had we not everything that the heart of young men could desire? On my own account, therefore, I felt no desire ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... affairs, these leaders fell back upon a bigoted hostility to the Church of Rome, to which many of their original members in Louisiana and elsewhere belonged. The result was that the mighty organization had begun to decay before it attained its growth, and that the old political leaders became members that they might elbow the improvised chieftains from power when the effervescence of the movement should subside. ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... is to love Learn ye that list to prove, By me, I say, that no ways may The ground of grief remove, But still decay both nicht and day: Lo, quhat it ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... acquaintance. These fancied forms were vividly present to my imagination. I pictured them pale, with dark circles around their hollow eyes, visible by a light which glimmered within them; not the light of life, but a pale, greenish phosphorescence, generated by the decay of the brain inside. Their garments were white and trailing, but torn and soiled, as by trying often in vain to get up out of the buried coffin. But so far from being terrified by these imaginings, I used to delight in them; and in the long winter evenings, ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... blasphemous piece of presumption to present such a picture as that of the church. As if it were in its last stages of decay, indeed! It was well such a weak-minded idiot as Robert Elsmere died at the beginning of his career. I could never forgive the author if she hadn't killed him," she was saying in ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... rules all. He shall outlive the funeral, Change, and decay, of many Gods, Until he, too, lets fall his rods Of viewless power upon that minute When Universe cowers ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 • Various
... its best, their system of government had in it—like all human invention—original sin; an unnatural and unrighteous element, which was certain, sooner or later, to produce decay and ruin. The old Nobility of Europe was not a mere aristocracy. It was a caste: a race not intermarrying with the races below it. It was not a mere aristocracy. For that, for the supremacy of the best men, all societies strive, or profess to strive. And such a true aristocracy may exist independent ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... dream would never be more than a dream. In the dusty little office he sat and tears came into his eyes. At such times he was convinced that mankind would go on forever along the old road, that youth would continue always to grow into manhood, become fat, decay and die with the great swing and rhythm of life a meaningless mystery to them. "They will see the seasons and the planets marching through space but they will not march," he muttered, and went to stand by the window and stare down into the dirt and disorder ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... apparently better situated. Despite the campaign of obstruction that overthrew the Banffy and led to the formation of the Szell cabinet in 1899, the hegemony of the Liberal party which, under various names, had been the mainstay of dualism since 1867, appeared to be unshaken. But clear signs of the decay of the dualist and of the growth of an extreme nationalist Magyar spirit were already visible. The Army bills of 1889, which involved an increase of the peace footing of the joint Austro-Hungarian army, had been carried with ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... ancient hostelry, set well back from the road. To the manager's dismay, however, the door was locked and boards were nailed across the windows. Even the water pail, hospitably placed for man or beast, had been removed from its customary proximity to the wooden pump. Abandoned to decay, the tenantless inn was but another evidence of traffic diverted from the old stage roads by the Erie Canal Company. Cold was the fireplace before which had once rested the sheep-skin slippers for the guests; empty was the larder where at this season was wont to be game in abundance, ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... utmost faith in East Sussex. The nails are cut, the cuttings carefully wrapped in paper, and placed in the hollow of a pollard ash, concealed from the birds; when the paper decays, the warts disappear. For this I can vouch: in my own case the paper did decay, and the warts did all disappear, and, of course, the effect was produced by the cause. Does the ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 30. Saturday, May 25, 1850 • Various
... extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigour. The Catholic Church is still sending forth, to the farthest ends of the world, missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustin, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... condition. Feuds and misrule told fatally on ecclesiastical discipline. The bishops were political officers, or hard fighters, like the chiefs around them; their sees were neglected, their cathedrals abandoned to decay. Through whole dioceses the churches lay in ruins and without priests. The only preaching done in the country was done by the begging friars, and the results of the friars' preaching were small. "If the King do not provide a remedy," it was said in 1525, "there will be no ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... on high. Its architecture spoke of hoar antiquity, of a time long past, when the Moor still fought around these scenes, and rushed to the fight to the war-cry of Allah Akbar! But now, bathed in the mellow moonlight, this ancient castle showed all its grand proportions, with not a trace of decay or desolation; and its massive walls arose in solemn majesty; its battlements frowned in heavy shadows overhead; its lofty towers and turrets seemed still able to defy the assaults of time for ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... valets with great freedom, except of politics, on which he never utters a word in their presence, and he always sends them away when he sees anybody or speaks on business of any kind. Batchelor thinks that this new disorder is a symptom of approaching decay, and that ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... were hunted over again and again by officers and soldiers from the neighbouring city of Alexandria in search of young men who had entered the "spiritual warfare" to escape the earthly one. And as a background to all this seething heap of decay, misrule, and misery, hung the black cloud of the barbarians, the Teutonic tribes from whom we derive the best part of our blood, ever coming nearer and nearer, waxing stronger and stronger, learning discipline and civilization by ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... excepted,[102] and we can easily detect several stories retreating from east to west. About 9 m.—30 ft.—from its northern limits a double wall intersects the pile for one half of its width. The ruins beyond it, or rather the addition, is in a state of decay equal to that of the southern extremity. The western side is, generally, in a better state of preservation than the eastern, especially the north-western corner. Along the eastern side upright posts ...
— Historical Introduction to Studies Among the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico; Report on the Ruins of the Pueblo of Pecos • Adolphus Bandelier
... The Stuart kings were arbitrary rulers. 2. The climate of our country is changing. 3. Gutenberg did not invent the printing press. 4. The American Indians have been unjustly treated by the whites. 5. Nations have their periods of rise and decay. ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... upon their rear, to cut off their supplies, and to render their retreat difficult, if not disastrous. Volagases appears to have remained wholly inert and passive. His conduct is only explicable by the consideration of the rapid decline which Parthia was now undergoing, of the general decay of patriotic spirit, and the sea of difficulties into which a monarch was plunged who had ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... nervous as he showed him the bust. The Baron examined it closely, and then said to the artist, "You have got the General completely: his head, his face, his courage, his firmness, his identical self; and yet it will not do! You have also got all his wrinkles, all his age and decay. You forget that he is President of the United States and the idol of the people. You should have given him a dignity and elegance he does not possess. You should have employed your art, sir, and not merely your ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... bloom on your cheek, and the glance of your eye, Your roses and lilies may make the men sigh; But roses, and lilies, and sighs pass away, And passion will die as your beauties decay. ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... only a man facing eternity. But that was what gave him strength to endure. Somehow he was a part of it all, some atom in that vastness, somehow necessary to an inscrutable purpose, something indestructible in that desolate world of ruin and death and decay, something perishable and changeable and growing under all the fixity of heaven. In that endless, silent hall of desert there was a spirit; and Cameron felt hovering near him what he imagined to be ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... whose head was white with years of wisdom and experience, spoke to the despairing assemblage of creatures. From his lofty perch above the world the Eagle had looked down upon centuries of change and decay. He knew every force of nature and all the strange things of life. The hoary-headed sage said that the Good Hunter could not be restored until his scalp was found. Then all the animals clamored that they might be allowed to go and seek for the missing ...
— The Curious Book of Birds • Abbie Farwell Brown
... become parasites on the race, it has heralded the decay of that race. History has proven this over and over again. In ancient Greece, in the days of its strength and glory, the women bore their full share of the labor, both manual and mental; not only the women of the poorer classes, but queens and princesses carried water from the well; washed ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... in his green youth with hardly any knowledge of life or art, and then in his eventful maturity, with growing experience and new powers, in masterpiece after masterpiece; and at length in his decline with weakened grasp and fading colours, so that in him we can study the growth and fruiting and decay of the finest spirit that has yet been born among men. This tragedy of tragedies, in which "Lear" is only one scene—this rise to intensest life and widest vision and fall through abysms of despair ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... Mr Dedalus, he said. England is in the hands of the jews. In all the highest places: her finance, her press. And they are the signs of a nation's decay. Wherever they gather they eat up the nation's vital strength. I have seen it coming these years. As sure as we are standing here the jew merchants are already at their work of ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... the Shaksperean cultus at the present day among all English-writing peoples—of Tennyson, his poetry. I find it impossible, as I taste the sweetness of those lines, to escape the flavor, the conviction, the lush-ripening culmination, and last honey of decay (I dare not call it rottenness) of that feudalism which the mighty English dramatist painted in all the splendors of its noon and afternoon. And how they are chanted—both poets! Happy those kings and nobles to be so sung, so told! To run their course—to get their deeds and shapes in lasting ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... glories into the sky of time. The splendour of youth is its madness, and the splendour of that madness is its unconquerable belief. And great is the strength of it, because violence alone can destroy it. It does not yield to time nor to decay, to the long wash of experience that wears away the stone, nor to disintegration. It is always broken into pieces at a blow. In the morning all is well, and ere the evening come the radiant ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... she had a spell beyond Cheap dinners and Advertisement's array Of polychrome, of which Trade seems so fond. Alas! the Dogeless city's silent sway Will lessen momently, and fade away, When the Rialto echoes to the roar Of vaporetti, and in sad decay The Gondola, its swan-like flittings o'er, Neglected rots ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 3, 1887 • Various
... be something dead under the washboard. But upon going into the garret the origin of the smell became obvious. About half a ton of the Patent Imperishable Sausage lay on the floor in a condition of fearful decay. Then the commissioners put their fingers to their noses and adjourned, and the chairman went to the hotel to write out his report. It was ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... of every people and every nation will be subject to the same criticism, if it be regarded with the same severity. In all that man has done as yet in the way of government, the seeds of decay are apparent when looked back upon from an age in advance. The period of Queen Elizabeth was very great to us; yet by what dangers were we enveloped in her days! But for a storm at sea, we might have been subjected to Spain. By what a system of falsehood and petty tyrannies were ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... individual who is sick, the more likely his sickness is to be ascribed to the anger of a ghost whom he has offended, or to witchcraft. No great man would like to be told that he was ill by natural weakness or decay. The sickness is almost always believed to be caused by a ghost, not by a spirit.... Generally it is to the ghosts of the dead that sickness is ascribed in the eastern islands as well as in the western; recourse is had to them for aid in causing and removing sickness; and ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... looked with a vindictive scowl at the strangers. A second glance induced him to unclench his fists and reel round the corner on his way to a neighbouring grog-shop. Whatever other shops may decay in that region, the grog-shops, like ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... expedient introduced to provide for continual renewal without overcrowding. Now Circumstantial Selection does not account for natural death: it accounts only for the survival of species in which the individuals have sense enough to decay and die on purpose. But the individuals do not seem to have calculated very reasonably: nobody can explain why a parrot should live ten times as long as a dog, and a turtle be almost immortal. In the case of man, the operation has overshot its mark: men do not live long enough: they ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... lived, and some are still living that are known to be hundreds of years old. Certain kinds of wood, too, seem almost incapable of decay if ...
— Harper's Young People, June 1, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... mentioned the decay of trade in Ireland as insufficient to occasion the great increase of emigration, yet is it to be considered as an important ill effect, arising from the same cause. It may be said that trade is now in higher repute ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... remembering he had just come back from Paris, the eyes more especially reminding him forcibly of father and sister, failing to throw much light on the subject, however, he brought to mind instances of cultured fellows that promised so brilliantly nipped in the bud of premature decay and nobody to blame but themselves. For instance there was the case of O'Callaghan, for one, the halfcrazy faddist, respectably connected though of inadequate means, with his mad vagaries among whose other ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... into the thickest part of the wood. He paused in front of a large tree, partly gone to decay. The trunk was ...
— The Erie Train Boy • Horatio Alger
... a vegetarian I used to visit a dentist regularly every six months. I had done this for ten years, and nearly every tooth in my gums had its gold filling. The last time I visited the dentist I told him that I had become a vegetarian, and he replied that he rather thought my teeth would decay quicker in future on account of an increased consumption of vegetable acids. But from that day, now nearly six years ago, to the present time, I have never been near a dentist. My teeth seem to have taken a new lease of life. It is a fact that the acids in fruit and vegetables so far from injuring ...
— Food Remedies - Facts About Foods And Their Medicinal Uses • Florence Daniel
... keep as steady time here as in Britain, and the human clock-work is more liable to get out of repair for the same reason. Our women, especially, break down prematurely, and the decay of maternity in this country is no doubt greater than in any of the oldest civilized communities. One reason, doubtless, is that our women are the greatest slaves of fashion in the whole world, and, in following the whims of that famous courtesan, have the most fickle ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... had been abandoned by the late Marquis, and, being inhabited only by an old steward and his wife, had been suffered to fall much into decay. To superintend the repairs, that would be requisite to make it a comfortable residence, had been a principal motive with the Count for passing the autumnal months in Languedoc; and neither the remonstrances, ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... the signs and seals of the covenant of grace to dogs and swine, that is, to unclean persons, wallowing in the mire of ungodliness; and lest subtile men abuse such interims or intervals, so as that ecclesiastical discipline altogether decay, and the very decrees of synods be accounted as cobwebs, which none feareth ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... whole Church the latter part of the third century was a period of spiritual decay; and many returned to heathenism during the sifting time which now followed. Not a few incurred the reproach of their more consistent and courageous brethren by surrendering the Scriptures in their possession; and those who thus purchased their safety were stigmatised with the ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... it, they stopped the sinking here. This was so long ago that the rubbish which had formed a mound round the mouth of the shaft had been long covered with vegetation, and a fence placed round the pit had fallen into decay. ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty
... Visit to Mansolah. Customs of the Court of Katunga. Mansolah's Visit to the Landers. Intended Route of the Landers. The Master of the Horse. Decay of Katunga. The Markets of Katunga. Visit from Ebo. Intrigues of the Wives of Ebo. Visit of Houssa Mallams. Presents to the Head Men. Their Affluence. Site of Katunga. Character of the Natives. Political Constitution of Alorie. Exhibition of the Presents. Projected Departure ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... the tomb of the founder of the Abbey at Tewkesbury, the body of the Abbot was found clothed in full canonicals. The crosier was as perfect as when, perhaps, first put in the coffin, while the body showed scarcely any symptom of decay, though it had been entombed considerably above six hundred years. On exposure to the air, the boots alone of the Abbot were seen to sink, when the tomb was ordered to be sealed up, and his holiness again committed in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 544, April 28, 1832 • Various
... that must decay, I grieve to see your future doom; They died—nor were those flowers more gay— The flowers that did in Eden bloom; Unpitying frosts and Autumn's power Shall leave no ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... graceful and vigorous, but yet in his walk there was something just perceptible which betrayed in him a being already touched by decay, weak, and on the road to ruin. And all at once there was a whiff of spirits in the wood. Marya Vassilyevna was filled with dread and pity for this man going to his ruin for no visible cause or reason, and it came into her mind that if she had been his wife or sister she ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... rests. Then, as the coralline could not have fixed itself, if the Crania had been covered up with chalk mud, and could not have lived had itself been so covered, it follows, that an inch of chalk mud could not have accumulated within the time between the death and decay of the soft parts of the sea-urchin and the growth of the coralline to the full size which it has attained. If the decay of the soft parts of the sea-urchin; the attachment, growth to maturity, and decay ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... merrier multitude. White-armed Nuala, Aengus of the Birds, Feacra of the hurtling foam, and him Who is the ruler of the Western Host, Finvarra, and their Land of Heart's Desire, Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, Time an endless song. I kiss you and the world begins ...
— The Land Of Heart's Desire • William Butler Yeats
... and his wigs, without having his equanimity in the least shaken or his cheerfulness clouded, is highly valuable; although his contemporaries and fellow-citizens could not forgive him his happy turn of mind. The letter where he speaks of the decay of his strength and of his approaching death is in the highest degree worthy of respect; and Rabener deserves to be honored as a saint by all cheerful, intelligent men, who cheerfully resign themselves ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... whose birth, maturity, and age, Scarce fill the circle of one summer-day, Shall the poor gnat, with discontent and rage, Exclaim that Nature hastens to decay, If but a cloud obstruct the solar ray, If but a momentary shower descend! Or shall frail man Heaven's dread decree gainsay, Which bade the series of events extend Wide through unnumbered worlds, ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... His face was a collection of lines. When he frowned, all the lines pointed to hell, the grave, decay and damnation. ...
— The Last Place on Earth • James Judson Harmon
... been merely shabby I doubt whether I would have been interested. Every residence section has its shabby houses, monuments to departed aspirations, falling into slow decay in the midst of weedy yards, sometimes uninhabited and sometimes sheltering one or two members of the family who apparently have been left, like the ancient furniture, to be forgotten. The paint cracks and peels, the windows fall into impossible ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... was entirely deserted. The once thriving towns of Tumacacori and Tubac had not the sign of a living soul about them except the recent moccasin track of the Apaches. The orchards and vineyards of the once highly cultivated fields and gardens bore the marks of gradual decay and destruction. The ranchos of Calabazas, of San Bernardino, and numerous other places on this frontier, presented the same melancholy aspect, the result of the inability of Mexico to protect this portion of territory from the inroads of the savages. There are ...
— Memoir of the Proposed Territory of Arizona • Sylvester Mowry
... Study of Nature, he has the following reflective truths:—"If we look with wonder upon the great remains of human works, such as the columns of Palmyra, broken in the midst of the desert, the temples of Paestum, beautiful in the decay of twenty centuries, or the mutilated fragments of Greek sculpture in the Acropolis of Athens, or in our own Museum, as proofs of the genius of artists, and power and riches of nations now past away; with how much deeper feeling of admiration must we ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction—Volume 13 - Index to Vol. 13 • Various
... crown. The favour of Burleigh or of Walsingham, of a description far less striking than that by which he was himself upheld, was founded, as Leicester was well aware, on Elizabeth's solid judgment, not on her partiality, and was, therefore, free from all those principles of change and decay necessarily incident to that which chiefly arose from personal accomplishments and female predilection. These great and sage statesmen were judged of by the Queen only with reference to the measures they suggested, and the reasons ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... however, nothing to be called thought in the mind of Letty. She had even lost much of what faculty of thinking had been developed in her by the care of Cousin Godfrey. That had speedily followed the decay of the aspiration kindled in her by Mary. Her whole life now—as much of it, that is, as was awake—was Tom, and only Tom. Her whole day was but the continuous and little varied hope of his presence. Most of the time she had a book in her hands, but ever again book and hands would sink into her lap, ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... furnishing an ideal was performed in former times by these great men and more especially by those great men whom legend, myth and superstition converted into gods. But with the decay of the old faiths the only possible fruitful ideal left is the ideal upheld by Socialism, the ideal of the Co-operative Commonwealth in which the economic conditions will give birth to the highest, purest, most altruistic ethics the world has yet ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... place is as solitary now as it was thronged and bustling on the evenings of the festival; and in broad daylight one is surprised at the deathlike decay of the sacred surroundings which at night had seemed so full of life. Not a creature to be seen on the time-worn granite steps; not a creature beneath the vast, sumptuous porticoes; the colors, the gold-work are dim with dust. To reach the temple one must cross several deserted ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... marbles in pilastered colonnades, are fit abodes for the nobles who reared them five centuries ago, of whose refined and costly living we read in the pages of Dante or of Folgore da San Gemignano. And though the necessities of modern life, the decay of wealth, the dwindling of old aristocracy, and the absorption of what was once an independent state in the Italian nation, have obliterated that large signorial splendour of the Middle Ages, we feel that the modern Sienese are not unworthy of ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... plain below, We view well pleased at distance all the sights Of arms and palfreys, battles, fields and fights, And damsels in distress and courteous knights, But when we look too near, the shades decay And all the pleasing landscape ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... to say that there is not a farmer in this country of ours but who would go hungry, yea, he and his children would go bare-footed, but he would take some portion of the grain that he had and throw it broadcast over his field, knowing that it would lie there and decay, but trusting in the Lord that it would come back to him after many days. Why cannot we use the same wisdom ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 1, January, 1896 • Various
... and diminished zeal supply, no doubt, the main reason for the decay of the Poker Club, but other causes combined. Dr. Carlyle, who was an active member of the club, says it began to decline when it transferred itself to more elegant quarters at Fortune's, because its dinners became too expensive for the members; and Lord Campbell attributes its dissolution definitely ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... world's work and build bigger for the coming generations, just as there is something in nature that causes new growth to come out of old dirt and new worlds to be continually spawned from the ashes of old played-out suns and stars. When nature ceases to mold new worlds from the past decay, the universe will wither; and when man loses the urge to build and goes to tearing down, the end of his story ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... too, which puzzled our ancestors, are explicable by a natural process. The starting-point is a fungus, Marasmius oreades, which in due course sheds its spores in a tiny circle around it; the decay of the fungus supplies nitrogen to the grass, and renders it dark green in colour. The circle expands, always outwards, more and more fungi appearing every year; it does not return inwards because the mineral constituents of the soil are ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... soil, should be found in a mutilated state; the ends of hard and solid beds should present their fractures or abrupt sections immediately under the confused materials with which they are covered; and the softer strata should appear to suffer gradual resolution and decay, by which may be perceived their transition into soil, the most important part of all the operations of the globe which do not immediately concern ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... manners already passed away. He was the prophet of the middle class, and the manners of that great section of the community have greatly changed since the days when Charles Dickens lived among them and observed them. With the decay of these manners some part of present popularity must certainly pass out of his work; already a generation has appeared to whom a great deal of Dickens' work proves of no interest, because it portrays manners with which they are not familiar. They do not laugh ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... mother's wardrobe—the young creature in the picture confined itself to a ribonny dress which floated charmingly about it—and discharged her flowers. She was prepared for astonishment in her audience, and her reception was all she could ask; but what she was not prepared for was the insidious decay which had set in among the blooms, and which robbed them entirely of their natural colour and fragrance, transforming them into a composition recognized by polite people only upon their lawns. It had been Mary's first encounter with the baffling thaumaturgy of ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... descent, collaterally, or otherwise, with the six first, it would be a more logical distribution to combine them according to the fortunes of the state itself, and the succession of its prosperity through the several stages of splendor, declension, revival, and final decay. Under this arrangement, the first seventeen would belong to the first stage; Commodus would open the second; Aurelian down to Constantine or Julian would fill the third; and Jovian to Augustulus would bring up the melancholy rear. Meantime it will be proper, after ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... pretty large ones too, my brethren, with some twenty or five-and-twenty yards of good purple, superfine, marketable cloth in them—with large flowing folds and doubles, and in a great style of design.—All which plainly shews, may it please your worships, that the decay of eloquence, and the little good service it does at present, both within and without doors, is owing to nothing else in the world, but short coats, and the disuse of trunk-hose.—We can conceal nothing under ours, Madam, ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... countries, Hesper replies, That the human body is composed of a due proportion of the elements suited to the place of its first formation; that these elements, differently proportioned, produce all the changes of health, sickness, growth and decay; and may likewise produce any other changes which occasion the diversity of men; that these elemental proportions are varied, not more by climate than temperature and other local circumstances; that the mind is likewise in a state of change, and will take its physical character from the body and ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... manuscripts of the sixteenth century.* Finally, the religious difficulty in several Scottish versions is got over by the conversion and baptism of Sophia, who had professed the creed of Islam. That all these problems in 'Lord Bateman' are left unsolved is, then, the result of decay. The modern vulgar English version of the pot-house minstrel (known as 'The Tripe Skewer,' according to the author of the Introduction to Cruikshank's version) has forgotten, has been heedless of, and has dropped ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... outer steps, advanced into the vestibule. The wide corridor, flagged with black-and-white pavement, presented a cheerless aspect of bare walls discolored by damp, and adorned alternately by stags' heads and family portraits in a crumbling state of decay. The floor was thus divided: on the right, the dining-room and the kitchen; on the left, drawing-room and a billiard-hall. A stone staircase, built in one of the turrets, led to the upper floors. Only one of these rooms, the kitchen, which the justice and his bailiff entered, ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... he asked, "give credit to that oft-repeated assertion that democracy is the kind nurse of genius, and that high literary excellence has flourished with her prime and faded with her decay? Liberty, it is said, is all-powerful to feed the aspirations of high intellects, to hold out hope, and keep alive the flame of mutual rivalry and ambitious ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... household implements scattered about, indicated the "ranch." Like most pioneer clearings, it was simply a disorganized raid upon nature that had left behind a desolate battlefield strewn with waste and decay. The fallen trees, the crushed thicket, the splintered limbs, the rudely torn-up soil, were made hideous by their grotesque juxtaposition with the wrecked fragments of civilization, in empty cans, broken bottles, battered hats, ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... year! another year! Oh! who shall see another year? Shalt thou, old man, of hoary head, Of eye-sight dim, and feeble tread? Expect it not! Time, pain, and grief Have made thee like an autumn leaf; Ready, by blast or self-decay, From its slight hold to drop away; And some sad morn may gild thy bier, Long, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... failed in all his attempts to raise it, nor was Mr. Salt a whit more successful. One day, while the latter was thinking what a pity it was that such a precious monument should be left to perish by decay, a stranger asked to speak with him. Mr. Salt desired him to be admitted; and immediately, despite his visitor's Oriental garb and long beard, he recognized the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... the scenes of this morning's ramble That moments of happiness soon may decay; While plucking the flowers to beware of the bramble, Which hid ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... fingers failed to reach any wall on her left. Then came a step up which she stumbled, and farther on a short flight, each tread of which she had been told to test before she ventured to climb it, lest the decay of innumerable years should have weakened the wood too much to bear her weight. One, two, three, four, five steps! Then a landing with an open space beyond. Half of her journey was done. Here she felt she could give a minute to drawing her breath naturally, if the air, unchanged ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... charmers warbled o'er the main; My soul takes wing to meet the heavenly strain; I give the sign, and struggle to be free: Swift row my mates, and shoot along the sea; New chains they add, and rapid urge the way, Till, dying off, the distant sounds decay: Then scudding swiftly from the dangerous ground, The deafen'd ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... everyday events; and the forms of the Juden-gasse, rousing the sense of union with what is remote, set him musing on two elements of our historic life which that sense raises into the same region of poetry;—the faint beginnings of faiths and institutions, and their obscure lingering decay; the dust and withered remnants with which they are apt to be covered, only enhancing for the awakened perception the impressiveness either of a sublimely penetrating life, as in the twin green leaves that will become the sheltering tree, or of a pathetic inheritance in which all the grandeur ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... these personages were in the Queen's confidence, and that he was out of it. We may presume that it was more than Raleigh could bear to be shown a letter addressed to the Queen in which Essex deliberately accused him of 'wishing the ill success of your Majesty's most important action, the decay of your greatest strength, and the destruction of your faithfullest servants.' There were some things Raleigh could not forgive, and the accusation that he favoured Spain was one of these. Shut up among his creatures in his house in the Strand, and refused all ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... remember how small it is, when all is said and done; that even in his day there are those who can beat him on his own ground; and also that all worldly success, like the most perfect flower, yet bears in it the elements of decay. But he will have reflected with humble satisfaction on those long years of patient striving which have at length lifted him to an eminence whence he can climb on and on, scarcely encumbered by the jostling crowd; ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... the beam, or, as mostly happened, instead of the beam, to span the openings (Fig. 2). This use of the arch began with the Assyrians, and it reappeared in the works of the early Etruscans. The round-arched series of styles embraces the buildings of the Romans from their earliest beginnings to their decay; it also includes the two great schools of Christian architecture which were founded by the Western and the Eastern Church respectively,—namely, the Romanesque, which, originating in Rome, extended itself through Western Europe, and lasted till the time of the Crusades, ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... that during the past few decades there have been changes in certain aspects of family life throughout the English-speaking world leading to a decline in morality as it has generally been understood. A remedy must be found before this decline leads to the decay of the family itself as the centre and core of our ...
— Report of the Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents - The Mazengarb Report (1954) • Oswald Chettle Mazengarb et al.
... work and other interests he had no time for profound study. But his eloquence and descriptive powers were such as to attract a large class of students, and many can still read with pleasure his lectures on The Roman and the Teuton, in which he was fired by the moral lessons involved in the decay of the Roman empire and the coming of the vigorous young northern races. Apart from his lectures he had made his mark in Cambridge by the friendly relations which he established with many of the undergraduates and the personal ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... change as he looked again at the tray with its broken viands before the door, the worn, stained hall carpet, or the waiter who shuffled past him. He was apparently as critically conscious of them and of the close odors of the hall, and the atmosphere of listless decay and faded extravagance around him, as before the interview. But if the woman he had just parted from had watched him she would have supposed he still utterly disbelieved her story. Yet he was conscious that all that he saw was a part of his degradation, for he ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... was recalling this tragic episode. Boz remarks that pantomime actors—clowns and others "either die early or, by unnaturally taxing their bodily energies, lose prematurely their physical powers." This was what occurred to Grimaldi, the father, whose curious decay he was to describe later in the memoirs. It may be added that there is an Alderman Harmer, Hatton Garden, mentioned in the memoirs, with whom Grimaldi pere had some dealings; and, long after, this name was introduced by Boz into "Our ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... passed through so much in Mexico that he had not believed he would ever again enter that country. The land on the Mexican side was about the same as that on the Texan, but it seemed different to him. He beheld again that aspect of infinite age, of the long weariness of time, and of physical decay. ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... curiously without success), i. 179.]—yes, that thin long Gentleman, with high red-heeled shoes, and the daintiest polite attitudes and paces; in superfine coat, laced hat under arm; nose and under-lip ever more like coalescing (owing to decay of teeth), but two eyes shining on you like carbuncles; and in the ringing voice, such touches of speech when you apply for it! Thus they at Sceaux and elsewhere; walking their Life-minuet, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... death, he replaced it, that gave rise to the strange quarrel between the haughty monarch and his equally haughty minister, Louvois, of which St. Simon has left us so curious an account.[2] This had been allowed to fall into a state of decay; and a few years before his death, Louis XV. had pulled down what remained of it, and had built a third on its foundations, which had been the most favorite abode of Madame du Barri during his life, but which was now rendered vacant by her dismissal. The house was decorated with an exquisite ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... no! It was her lady mother. She Full long had seen her child Slowly decay. Her father's temper, too, had grown more wild. She could but pray that ere she passed away, Rowena's knight would safe ...
— Rowena & Harold - A Romance in Rhyme of an Olden Time, of Hastyngs and Normanhurst • Wm. Stephen Pryer
... forthcoming,—because then the ferryman would decline to take him, and he would be sent back into the living world. Lest the Stygian Lake should prove inadequate to the requirements of ghostly toilets, the corpse is next washed, anointed with the choicest unguents to arrest the progress of decay, crowned with fresh flowers, and laid out in sumptuous raiment; an obvious precaution, this last; it would not do for the deceased to take a chill on the journey, nor to exhibit himself to Cerberus with nothing on. Lamentation follows. The women wail; men and women alike weep and beat their ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... mighty Norman keep, above the inner court, with a gate tower at this date, only inhabited by an old soldier as porter with his family. A massive square tower at each angle of the huge wall likewise defied decay. ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... he says, the Decay and gloom of Nature seem reflected in—nay, as it were, to take a reflection from—the Hero's troubled Soul. In the Autumn Scene which Mr. Woodberry quotes, {282} and contrasts with those of other more imaginative Poets, would ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... both 'marsh gas' caused by the decay of the huge ferns and plants of the carboniferous age. Some of them hardened into coal and others rotted when they were buried, and the gas was caught in huge pockets. It is gas from these great pockets that people use for heating ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... a flourishing seaport town was afterwards established; founded by Ovando in 1502. It had fallen to decay in ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... the Temple a day has not passed without a curse; the dew does not come down with a blessing, and the fruits have lost their proper taste." Rabbi Yossi adds, "Also the lusciousness of the fruit is gone." Rabbi Shimon ben Elazar says, "With the decay of purity the taste and aroma (of the fruit) has disappeared, and with the tithes and richness of the corn." The sages say, "Lewdness ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... mentioned several which we are not now generally accustomed to consider in such a light. They would have pointed not merely to the building of churches, the founding of schools, the spread of peace, the decay of slavery; but to the importation of foreign literature, the extension of the arts of reading, writing, painting, architecture, the improvement of agriculture, and the introduction of new and more successful methods of ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... 218.) that reefs may possibly rise from very great depths through the means of small corals, first making a platform for the growth of the stronger kinds. This, however, is an arbitrary supposition: it is not always remembered, that in such cases there is an antagonist power in action, namely, the decay of organic bodies, when not protected by a covering of sediment, or by their own rapid growth. We have, moreover, no right to calculate on unlimited time for the accumulation of small organic bodies into great masses. Every fact in geology proclaims that ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... with no real interest in the lapse of time. For the house, with its round-shouldered Jacobean gables, its stone-cropped roof, lichen-spotted plaster, and ill-kept yew hedge, has an air of resignation to decay, well-bred but spiritless, and communicates it to the whole of its small landscape. Our old builders chose their sites for shelter rather than for view; and this—and perhaps a well of exquisite water bubbling by the garden gate on the very lip of the brook—must explain the situation ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... became our defenders of the faith, and they hated 'boets and bainters.' English comedy was thrown back upon the patronage and the inspiration of average England, and up to the time of writing has shown few signs of recovery. Of course, the decay was gradual: you may see it at a most interesting stage in The School for Scandal, a comedy of manners with a strong dash of common sentimentality. It would be just possible, one conceives, to play The School for Scandal as Charles ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... Hect. Boetius.] what people they were whome he so much praiseth: aduertising you hereof by the way, that as we haue before expressed, none of the Romane writers mentioneth any thing of the Scots, nor once nameth them, till the Romane empire began to decay, about the time of the emperor Constantius, father of Constantine the great: so that if they had beene in this Ile then so famous both in peace and warre, as they are reported by the same Boetius; maruell might it seeme, that the Romane ...
— Chronicles (1 of 6): The Historie of England (4 of 8) - The Fovrth Booke Of The Historie Of England • Raphael Holinshed
... happier. The healthy animal treads under his feet the helpless and the weak, who suffer that he may grow fat and kick. The attractive warmth and color and richness are found to be but rottenness and decay. ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... of the battlefield, where the blood from the wounded came in a fresh, bright stream, where the flesh the surgeon's knife cut into was firm and healthy; it was the decay and rottenness of the hospital, where the odor of fever and gangrene hung in the air, damp with the exhalations of the lingering convalescents and those who were dying by inches. Doctor Dalichamp had had the greatest difficulty in procuring ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... is ever lost we once have seen, We always may be what we might have been. Since Good, though only thought, has life and breath, God's life—can always be redeemed from death; And evil, in its nature, is decay, And any hour can blot it all away; The hopes that lost in some far distance seem, May be the truer life, and ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... palaces we are accustomed to see here; exhibiting the same strange contrast of ancient taste and magnificence, with present meanness and poverty. We were ushered into a lofty room of noble size and beautiful proportions, with its rich fresco-painted walls and ceiling faded and falling to decay; a common brick floor, and sundry window panes broken, and stuffed with paper. The room was nearly filled by the audience, amongst whom I remarked a great number of English. A table with writing implements, and an old shattered jingling piano, occupied ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... had never seen physical age before. No one on Rythar was older than she was herself—a sturdy, healthy, lusty twenty. The old man's infirmity disgusted her; for the first time in her life she was conscious of the slow decay of death. ...
— The Guardians • Irving Cox
... this meeting was called for the purpose of deciding whether to repair the old church, then greatly in decay, or to erect a new building. It would seem that the matter of abandonment of the site of the old church was also to be acted upon, and the erection of a new one in ...
— A Virginia Village • Charles A. Stewart
... fall; to repress the proud, and to lift up the lowly; and the sword they were girt with, was to protect the liberties of their people, to defend and help widows and orphans, restore the things which have gone to decay, maintain those which are restored, and confirm things that are in ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... youthful, all the more remarkable in his tanned face, because it had so long been ruddy with the florid hues of a Rubens; and now a certain discoloration and the deep tension of the wrinkles betrayed the efforts of a passion at odds with natural decay. Hulot was now one of those stalwart ruins in which virile force asserts itself by tufts of hair in the ears and nostrils and on the fingers, as moss grows on the almost eternal monuments ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... neighbourhood of which Horatius Cocles achieved his heroic action; and the Tullian prison, beneath the church of St. Joseph of Falignani, where Jugurtha was starved to death. The staircase leading up to the building is called "the steps of sighs." The Capitol has unfortunately fallen into decay; we can barely distinguish a few remains of temples ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... him for the same. Where is that simplicity, where that undisguised attachment to virtue and integrity, where that unaccommodating system of moral truth, that used to live in the bosom of my friend? All the lines of his character seem to suffer an incessant decay. Shall I fear that the time is hastening when that sublime and generous spirit shall no longer be distinguished from the San Severinos, the men of gaiety and pleasure of the age? And can I look back upon this alteration, and apprehensions ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... Style is never worse than it is in ages which employ themselves in teaching little else. Such teaching produces an emptiness of thought concealed under a plethora of words. This age of countless oratorical masters was emphatically the period of decadence and decay. There is a hollow ring about it, a falsetto tone in its voice; a fatiguing literary grimace in the manner of its authors. Even its writers of genius were injured and corrupted by the prevailing mode. ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... distribution of power. I acknowledge that the policy of England with respect to Europe should be policy of reserve, but proud reserve; and in answer to those statesmen—those mistaken statesmen who have intimated the decay of the power of England and the decline of its resources, I express here my confident conviction that there never was a moment in our history when the power of England was so great and her resources so vast ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... manifestation of Himself to the hearts and souls of them that love Him. And so the 'inheritance is incorruptible and undefiled, and fadeth not away'; not merely by reason of the communicated will of God operating upon creatures whom He preserves untarnished by corruption, and ungnawed by decay, but because He Himself is the 'inheritance,' and on Him time hath no power. On His wealth all His creatures may hang for ever; and it shall be as it was in the sweet parable of the miracle of old, the fragments that remain will be more than when the meal began. 'The riches of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... change and decay were calculated to make a profound impression, but my attention was called away from all such reflections. Upon a bench near the pulpit, in the section reserved for the coloured members, sat an old negro man whose face was perfectly familiar. I had known him in my boyhood as Mingo, ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
... synce in a deepe melancholye, w^{th} conceipte of her own death, and complayneth of many infirmyties, sodainlye to haue ouertaken her, as impost[u]mecon in her head, aches in her bones, and continuall cold in her legges, besides notable decay in iudgem^t and memory, insomuch as she cannot attend to any discourses of governm^t and state, but delighteth to heare some of the 100 merry tales, and such like, and to such is uery attentiue; at other tymes uery impatient, and testye, so as none of the Counsayle, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 69, February 22, 1851 • Various
... the jaw is still proceeding, and, although in lower races of man the last molar or wisdom tooth is almost as large as the molars in front of it, in the higher races the wisdom tooth is much smaller and frequently does not develop at all, or begins to decay very soon after its appearance. If the process of extinction of lower races were to proceed much further, so that civilised white races became the only human inhabitants of the earth, then the gap between the Anthropoids and ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... was due to the trade along this route, and its decay began when the route was abandoned. The present town of Tadmor is near the ruins ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... Head Lilies).—Soil, sandy loam, or well-drained, deep, rich mould. Plant in the open ground in autumn; take the bulbs up as soon as the leaves decay, and preserve them in a rather moist place. Increased by off-sets taken from the old roots every third year. They are not so suitable for pot culture as for outdoor decoration. They are quite hardy, and flower in the spring, bearing clusters of pendent bell-shaped flowers ...
— Gardening for the Million • Alfred Pink
... remark that "a man's faculties are strengthened by use, and weakened by disuse." To change the form of statement, they grow when they are fed and nourished, and decay when they are not fed and nourished. Moreover, every faculty demands appropriate food. What nourishes one will not always nourish another. Accordingly, one part of man's nature may grow while another withers; ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... (1148) lay great stress on Malachy's activities in this direction. He "consecrated many churches and cemeteries," and "founded churches and monasteries, for by him was repaired every church in Ireland which had been consigned to decay and neglect, and they had ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... injury which our institutions may receive. On the contrary, no care that can be used in the construction of our Government, no division of powers, no distribution of checks in its several departments, will prove effectual to keep us a free people if this spirit is suffered to decay; and decay it will without constant nurture. To the neglect of this duty the best historians agree in attributing the ruin of all the republics with whose existence and fall their writings have made ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... you now are, called fair, Do what you may do, what, do what you may, And wisdom is early to despair: Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done To keep at bay Age and age's evils, hoar hair, Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death's worst, winding sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay; So be beginning, be beginning to despair. O there's none; no no no there's none: Be beginning to despair, to ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... he dedicated to Pope Paul III., was completed in 1530; but he could not be prevailed upon to have it published until 1543, the year in which he died. In 1542 Copernicus had an apoplectic seizure, followed by paralysis and a gradual decay of his mental and vital powers. His book was printed at Nuremberg, and the first copy arrived at Frauenburg on May 24, 1543, in time to be touched by the hands of the dying man, who in a few hours after expired. The house in which Copernicus lived at Allenstein ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... to look more impartially on the matter than is possible to the children of the soil can perceive that the decay only too visible in many parts of Mayo is due in great measure to causes far beyond the control of exterminators, or even of the arch-devourer John Bull himself. In the old time, before the famine and ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... Captain Ben Meeker, who also had been not merely a farmer, as certain records proved. Captain Ben may have built the shop, though I think it was older, for when we examined the picturesque little building, with a view to restoration, it proved to be too far gone—too much a structure of decay. So we tore down "the shop," and, incidentally, Old Pop, who did the tearing, found a Revolutionary bayonet in the loft; also a more recent, and particularly hot, hornets' nest which caused him to leap through ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... and garlanded with ribbons and flowers; innumerable bed-rooms, some containing grim catafalques of beds with gilded cornices and funereal plumes, some empty, some full of stored-up furniture fast going to decay—all these in endless number we traversed, conducted by the good-tempered concierge, whose heavy sabots awakened ghostly echoes from ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... there was a dish of cacchi—that orange-coloured, pulpy Japanese fruit—persimmons. Aaron had never eaten these before. Soft, almost slimy, of a wonderful colour, and of a flavour that had sunk from harsh astringency down to that first decay-sweetness which is all autumn-rich. The Marchese loved them, and scooped them out with his spoon. ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... decay; and flowers do fleet; they fly all o'er the skies; Their bloom wanes; their smell dies; but who is there with them to sympathise? While vagrant gossamer soft doth on fluttering spring-bowers bind its coils, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... of which it reverently studies, and taught to call Him the Father by Christ, to whose instructions it yields a joyful obedience, it revolves around the Supreme Being as its light and security, through its relation to whom it is safe amidst the world's commotions and blessed in life's decay. ...
— The Religion of Politics • Ezra S. Gannett
... cabin of stout build, its thick logs fitted nicely together, and the boards of the roof had been strong and well laid. Many years must have passed to have caused so much decay. Dick entered and was saluted by a strong, catlike odor. Doubtless a mountain lion had been sleeping there, and this was the tenant that he had heard crashing away among the undergrowth. On one side was a window closed by a sagging oaken shutter, which ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... heritage indeed Be lost, be traded quite away For fatted sloth and fevered greed; If, inly rotting, we decay; Suffer we then what doom we must, But silent, as befits the dust Of them whose ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... "In the 'Decay of Lying,' Mr. Tutt," said Tutt thoughtfully, as he dropped in for a moment's chat after lunch, "Oscar Wilde says, 'There is no essential ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... time, speaks of some old folks who spoke Cornish only, and would not understand a word of English; but he tells us at the same time that Sir Francis North, the Lord Chief Justice, afterwards Lord Keeper, when holding the assizes at Lanceston in 1678, expressed his concern at the loss and decay of the Cornish language. The poor people, in fact, could speak, or at least understand, Cornish, but he says, "They were laughed at by the rich, who understood it not, which is their own fault in not endeavoring after it." About the beginning of the last century, Mr. Ed. Lhuyd ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... some mighty flood. They are worn into every shape—pyramids, castles, towers—standing desolate and brown, in long ranges, like the ruins of mountains. The plain is scarred with deep gulleys, adding to the look of decay which accords so well with the ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... the me,—in other words, that there is no longer any conscience. That white suit, I tell you, is a wonderful moral force; the white suit, put on fresh every morning, heavily starched, buttoned up to the chin, is like an armor, ironcladding you against the germ of decay buzzing about you, ceaselessly vigilant for the little vulnerable spot. Miller wore camisas, and then he began to go without shoes. I saw that myself. I was riding through his pueblo on my way to Dent's, and I ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... enjoyment from the study of history. There is first the pleasure which arises from the contemplation of some great historic drama, or some broad and well-marked phase of social development. The story of the rise, greatness, and decay of a nation is like some vast epic which contains as subsidiary episodes the varied stories of the rise, greatness, and decay of creeds, of parties, and of statesmen. The imagination is moved by ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... flesh full soon beneath the sod Doth perish and decay, Though cherished body is but clod, Yet in his soul man is a God, To do and live alway. So hence with gloom and banish fear, Come Mirth and Jollity, Since, though we pine in dungeon drear, Though these, our bodies, languish here, We in our ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... where is it? Had not Church-men pray'd, His thred of Life had not so soone decay'd. None doe you like, but an effeminate Prince, Whom like a Schoole-boy ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... bearable. We escaped as often as we could, and rode and drove and made secret visits to the city and saw the plays at matinees. There's nothing old about Mother. I suppose that's why she married again. But now that I'm left alone in this house of decay, where everybody and everything belongs to the past, I'm frightened of being so young, and catch looks that make me feel that I ought to be ashamed of myself. It's so long since I quarreled with a girl or flirted ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... broadcloth of a cut or dimension suitable to my figure. But my two friends chose me a hat, a light pale-tot (my second purchase in that sort on this eventful journey), a scented cambric handkerchief, a rosebud, and a snowy waistcoat, in which, as in a whited sepulchre, I concealed the decay of my toilet. These changes were judged to be sufficient for my accoutrement. They might have done very well, but on my way back I paused at a lace-shop window to inspect some present for Francine. A band, with many banners and figures in masquerade, swept past, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... himself in the library. The unfilled lamp had gone out, leaving a trail of smoke in the air. The sprigs of mignonette and rosemary, with which the room was sprinkled every day, were unrenewed, and scented the gloom with a close odor of decay. A costly manuscript of Theocritus was tumbled in disorder on the floor. Hermas sank into a chair like a man in whom the very spring of being is broken. Through the darkness some one drew near. He did not even lift his head. A hand touched him; a soft arm was laid ...
— The Lost Word - A Christmas Legend of Long Ago • Henry Van Dyke
... evicts his tenants nor raises their rents. The consequences are inevitable, and, over a large portion of the island, they are patent to every eye—they obtrude themselves everywhere. The people are poor; they are despondent, broken-spirited. In the south of Ireland decay is written on every town. In the poorer parts you may see every fifth or sixth house tenantless, roofless, allowed from year to year to moulder and moulder away, unremoved, unrepaired.... To make room for these large-scale operations, ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... the vows a grateful widow pays, Each future day and night shall hear her speak her Isaac's praise. Though thy beloved form must in the grave decay Yet from her heart thy memory no time, no change shall steal away. Do thou from mansions of eternal bliss Remember thy distressed relict. Look on her with an angel's love— Soothe her sad life and cheer her end Through this world's dangers ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... time-servers, or worse, they were monsters of lust and depravity. In the far-off capitals of the dominant heathen races vice had attained its full fruitage and was already going to seed and consequent decay. Athens, Corinth, Ephesus, and Antioch were steeped in iniquity, while the emperors who wielded the sceptre of the Roman empire were hastening the ruin of the existing civilization. It was in such an age and amid such surroundings that the Gospels and the Epistles came forth as the lotus springs, ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... on political economy, where the moralists? For one hundred years there were scarcely ten eminent men in any department of literature whose writings have come down to us. There was the most marked decay in all branches of knowledge, except in that knowledge which could be utilized for making money. The imperial regime cast a dismal shadow over all the efforts of independent genius, on all lofty aspirations, on all individual freedom. Architects, painters, and sculptors there ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... debility, resultant on her long watches during the eight weeks of Singleton's illness, and the extreme anxiety she had experienced for the safety of her friend. But when the malady remained obstinate to his prescriptions, and other insidious symptoms set in, pointing to a gradual decay of the vital energies, he divined that the ill was a mental one which would baffle his art unless he could ascertain its cause from the patient herself. Her confession of it would be half the cure. But he did not succeed in extracting ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... is explored as though it were absolutely uncharted. Nothing that has ever been said or thought of life is accepted without being brought to the test of Jean-Christophe's own life. What is not true for him does not exist; and, as there are very few of the processes of human growth or decay which are not analysed, there is disclosed to the reader the most comprehensive survey of modern life which has appeared in ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland |
