"Decay" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... any idea of the complete spell thus cast over thought both in Islam and Christendom, we may look at the words of European scholars of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, living far from Islam, long after its intellectual glory had begun to decay, and at a time when Christian scholastic philosophy had reached an independent position. Gerard of Cremona and Adelard of Bath (the translator of the great Arabic geographer, Mohammed Al-Kharizmy) in the twelfth century, Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... the mercy of the savages of the north and of the pirates of North Germany and Scandinavia, he would have seen that the extinction of the martial qualities of the British would lead to their ruin; but that Rome would decay and fall to pieces and become the prey of barbarians, was a contingency beyond human ken, and he and those who worked with him thought that the greatest blessing they could bestow upon their country was to render it a contented ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... minutes, Fred took one of the candles and advanced into a stone vault about a dozen feet square, with a very low, arched doorway opposite to them, and another flight of steps descending into darkness, while on one side lay a little heap of rusty iron in the last stages of decay. ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... such originators as Gregory VII or St. Francis of Assisi. Ignorant of History, they allowed themselves to be governed by the unknown Past; ignorant of Science, they never believed in hidden forces working onwards to a happier future. The sense of decay was upon them; and each generation seemed so inferior to the last, in ancient wisdom and ancestral virtue, that they found comfort in the assurance that the end of ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... and the atmosphere, as distinguished from the pure air, is mixed with exhalations from countless sources on the land and the sea. Wherever man moves, his fire, his food, the materials of his dwellings, the soil he disturbs, all add their volatile parts to the atmosphere. Vegetation, death, and decay pour into it copiously substances foreign to the composition of pure air. The combustion of one ton of coal adds at least sixteen tons of impurity to the atmosphere; and when we estimate on the daily consumption ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... and Early English roofs were high and acutely pointed. The original roofs of most of our old churches, from their exposure to the weather, have long since fallen to decay, and been replaced by others of a more obtuse shape; but in general the height and angular form of the original roof may be ascertained by the weather moulding still remaining on the side of the ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... went there, and asked for her as his wife, and they were married. Sometime after, another wife of the Prince, being jealous of the Rajah's daughter, stole her necklace, and put it on her own neck, and then the Rajah's daughter died. But her body did not decay, nor did her face lose its bloom; and the Prince went every day to see her, for he loved her very much although she was dead. Then he found out the secret of the necklace, and got it back again, and put it on his dead wife's neck, and her soul was born again in her, and ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce
... pressing as to require us to act without waiting for the decision of the responsible advisers of the Crown. But the danger may be upon us before we are aware of its being near; for, as I said in a former letter, the sudden decay of potatoes dug up in an apparently sound state sets all calculation at defiance. Some precautionary measures must be adopted, and adopted promptly, for there is ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... to the ancient bounds of the empire." In accordance with this statement, the same historian entitles the first part of his history up to the victory over the Poles in 1672 the History of the Growth of the Othman Empire, and the remaining portion, The Decay of the ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... the people or purple of kings sway not, not maddening discord among treacherous brethren, nor the Dacians swarming down from the leagued Danube, not the Roman State, or realms destined to decay; ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... of it which relates to this monastery, and give it, when I am dead, to the sisters who may then be living in it. It will encourage them greatly, who shall come here both to serve God and to labour, that what has been thus begun may not fall to decay, but ever grow and thrive, when they see how much our Lord has done through one so mean and vile as I. As our Lord has been so particularly gracious to us in the foundation of this house it seems to me that she will do very wrong, and that she will be ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... the works of man gave no ideas but those of young existence, and prospective improvement; there was something inexpressibly touching in the sight of enormous piles of architecture, gray with antiquity, and sinking into-decay. I cannot describe the mute but deep-felt enthusiasm with which I have contemplated a vast monastic ruin, like Tintern Abbey, buried in the bosom of a quiet valley, and shut up from the world, as though it had existed ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... be very quiet. Only just after the day was finally fixed, Mrs. Merrifield's long decay ended unexpectedly, and Sir Jasper had to hasten to London, and thence to the funeral at Stokesley. She was a second wife, and he her only son, so that he inherited from her means that set him much more at his ease with regard to his large family ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in Europe. The trade of Holland, it has been pretended by some people, is decaying, and it may perhaps be true that some particular branches of it are so; but these symptoms seem to indicate sufficiently that there is no general decay. When profit diminishes, merchants are very apt to complain that trade decays, though the diminution of profit is the natural effect of its prosperity, or of a greater stock being employed in it than before. During the late war, the Dutch gained the ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... long disused and fallen into decay, stood upon the brink. It was a painful suggestion of collapsed energies, despite its picturesque drapery of vines. No human being could live there, but in the doorway abruptly appeared a boy of seventeen, dressed, like Jack, ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... breathes of the old Irish hills, holy with old-world rites, and the haunted woods, and the magical twilight and dewy dawns. And beneath all the folklore, and animating it, is the passion for Ireland herself, the mother, deathless and ever young, whom neither the desolation of the time nor the decay of hope ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... the details. It's decay of the optic nerve—a Russian from St. Petersburg. Both eyes completely blind, the nerves destroyed, and he saw light yesterday for the first time. He'll be down from the Russian hospice about eleven. We expect ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... contained in them cannot be used as a means of ascertaining the position which belongs to each nation respectively in the scale of morality. Nor is the moral progress of a nation to be measured solely by an apparent decay of crime. On the contrary, an increase in the amount of crime may be the direct result of a moral advance in the average sentiments of the community. The passing of the Elementary Education Act of 1870 and of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 have added considerably to the number of persons ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... part of the refuse it had cast out, and left to corruption and decay, the girl we had followed strayed down to the river's brink, and stood in the midst of this night-picture, lonely and still, looking ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... were the first to bring the culture and the practical ideals of Roman civilization home to the English people; and this at a critical time, when England had produced her best, and her own literature and civilization had already begun to decay. Second, they forced upon England the national idea, that is, a strong, centralized government to replace the loose authority of a Saxon chief over his tribesmen. And the world's history shows that without a great nationality a great literature is impossible. ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... gentility, stood in one of those forgotten streets where needy gentlewomen do "light housekeeping" in an obscure hinterland of respectability. Hill Street, which had once known fashion, and that only yesterday, as old ladies count, had sunk at last into a humble state of decay. Here and there the edges of porches had crumbled; grass was beginning to sprout by the curbstone; and the once comfortable homes had opened their doors to boarders or let their large, high-ceiled rooms to the impoverished relicts of Confederate soldiers. Only a few blocks away the ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... criticism occupies a position among the questions of which the present says: that is the question.[4] That which represents the decaying elements of practical life among the progressive nations with modern State conditions first of all becomes critical decay in the philosophical reflexion of these conditions in Germany, where the conditions themselves do ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... on assumptions, but they are not baseless assumptions. One other assumption must be made before we can proceed in our study, and that one is the truthfulness of the Christian teaching that death is not cessation of being, but only the decay of the ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... summer-day Attunes the soul to tender sadness: We love, but joy not in the ray,— It is not summer's fervid gladness, But a melancholy glory Hov'ring brightly round decay, Like swan that sings her own sad story, Ere she floats ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... the soil was springy with the mould of numberless autumns. The axe had never hurried slow old servant decay. Once in a while we came across a prostrate trunk lying in the trough of destruction its fall had occasioned. But the rest of the time we trod a carpet to the making of which centuries of dead forest warriors had wrapped themselves ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... to good men a guileless and holy second childhood, in which the soul becomes childlike, not childish, and the faculties in full fruit and ripeness are mellow without sign of decay. This is that songful land of Beulah, where they who have travelled manfully the Christian way abide awhile to show the world a perfected manhood. Life, with its battles and its sorrows, lies far behind them; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... careless, obsessed only with the one idea of having a good time,—never mind who paid for it,—Joan knew nothing of the danger of trifling with the feelings of a high-strung man who had never been denied, a man over-civilized to the point of moral decay. If she had paused in her determined pursuit of amusement and distraction to analyze her true state of mind she might have discovered an angry desire to pay Fate out for the way in which he had made things go with Martin by falling really and truly ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... of pulling over cutting are several: It benefits the bed. If we cut over a mushroom and leave its stump in the ground, in a few days decay sets in and a fluffy or spongy substance grows around the old butt, which destroys many of the little mushrooms around it, as well as every thread of mycelium that comes in contact with it. One should be particular to scoop out these stumps ...
— Mushrooms: how to grow them - a practical treatise on mushroom culture for profit and pleasure • William Falconer
... which my father belonged was three-quarters of a mile from his farm. But when this fort went to decay and was unfit for use, a new one was built near our own house. I well remember, when a little boy, the family were sometimes waked up in the dead of night by an express, with the report that the Indians were at hand. The express came softly to the door and by a gentle tapping ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott
... tolerable, is nowhere excellent; there are no new farm-houses or farm-steadings; no signs of recent agricultural improvements; and the chateaux, in general, still bear the aspect of desertion and decay. ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... mammoths, reindeer, and other animals. Vast heaps of rubbish still exist in various parts of Europe, which are found to consist of the bones, shells, and other refuse thrown out by these later Palaeolithic men, who had no reverence for the dead, casting out the bodies of their relations to decay with as little thought as they threw away oyster-shells or reindeer-bones. Traces of Palaeolithic men of this type have been found as far north as Derbyshire. Their descendants are no longer be met with in these islands. The Eskimos of the extreme north of America, however, have the same artistic ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... is a world of progress. A nation cannot remain stationary; she must advance or retrograde. Turkey is not what she was, while Russia, with the rest of Christendom, has advanced; her faults grew with her strength, but did not die with her decay. It will not be sufficient for her merely to regain her former power; she must overtake Christendom in the progress made during her decadence. Her spirit of vitality is not yet extinct; it wants guidance and development to strengthen and elevate it. There is still ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... hypocrisy; all alike worn and stamped with the indelible signs of a panting cupidity? What is it they want? Gold or pleasure? A few observations upon the soul of Paris may explain the causes of its cadaverous physiognomy, which has but two ages—youth and decay: youth, wan and colorless; decay, painted to seem young. In looking at this excavated people, foreigners, who are not prone to reflection, experience at first a movement of disgust towards the capital, that vast ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... previously noticed showed itself among the trees on her left hand. Her curiosity was excited; she strayed aside to examine it more closely. The crumbling walls, as she approached them, looked like the remains of an ordinary dwelling-house. Age is essential to the picturesque effect of decay: a modern ruin is an unnatural and depressing object—and here the horrid ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... amused with everything, with the people, with the houses, with the shops, with being stared at, with being cheated, with being dragged to the ends of the vast city only to see flowerless gardens and temples in decay. ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... Occident."[36] He discusses at length Indian, Persian, Greek, Roman, and European cultures; in each case, he concludes, the culture is created by the ruling Nordic element and declines through the racial decay of the Nordics resulting from their intermixture with ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... in the courtyard of Tristan's castle in Brittany. It is in a state of decay. In the hot afternoon sun the sea shines like burnished metal, and Tristan, who has been brought there by Kurvenal, lies delirious. Presently one of the saddest songs ever written sounds from a shepherd's pipe without. It half awakens ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... self-deceived, and are we so incapable of peering into the future as to be unable to see that many of the steps which now appear calculated to enhance and to stereotype Anglo-Saxon domination, are but the precursors of a period of national decay and senility? ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... east of Genoa; on the last day of their stay, they have taken a conveyance and, Sims as driver, in descending by another road they came suddenly upon one of those mediaeval castles, or rather its ruins, the greater part having fallen to decay. ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... Bracciano, and was attached to the possession of the title, which had been sold and subsequently bought back by the original holders of it.] and the hereditary traits of character which had been fostered by ages of power had not disappeared with the decay of feudalism. Under the circumstances which seemed imminent, it would not have been thought unnatural if Giovanni had confined his wife during the remainder of her days in his castle among the mountains. The idea may excite surprise ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... if he be? 'Tis no matter for that, his wit will excuse that. A wit should no more be sincere than a woman constant: one argues a decay of ...
— The Way of the World • William Congreve
... not have been detached until the ligaments had decayed, and if it had been separated after the decay of the soft parts, the bones would have been thrown into disorder. But the egg-patches are all on the palmar surface, showing that the bones were still in their normal relative positions. No, Berkeley, that hand was thrown into the pond ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... her,—the solemn gayety of her gondolas, the silence of her canals, the late hours of her theatres and soirees, the movement and animation reigning on St. Mark's, where the gay world nightly assembled. Even the decay of the town (which saddened him later), harmonizing then with the whole scene, was not displeasing. He regretted the old costumes given up; but the Carnival, though waning, still recalled ancient Venice, and rejoiced his heart. Familiar with the Italian language, he took pleasure in studying, ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... 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
... all the earth and was so hot that not a single one of the now existing plants and living beings could then exist, the life in that ocean and on its bottom was so infinitely grand in its proportions that men can now form no adequate conception of the same. The force of growth as well as of decay was immense, and all that was grown or made by its decay only increased the ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... Soul could give her any Tale or Tidings of such a Lady. After she had thus fruitlessly rambled, till she, the Coachman, and the very Horses were even tired, by good Fortune for her, she happen'd on a private House, where lived a good, discreet, ancient Gentlewoman, who was fallen to Decay, and forc'd to let Lodgings for the best Part of her Livelihood: From whom she understood, that there was such a kind of Lady, who had lain there somewhat more than a Twelvemonth, being near three Months after she was married; but that she was now gone ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... our Cathedral school.' And then he went on to explain that a great reformation was going on. There was a foundation-school attached to the Cathedral, with exhibitions at the University, to which the Cathedral choristers had the first claim. There had been, of course, a period of decay, but an excellent Precentor had been just appointed, who would act as head master; and the singing-boys would be kept on free of expense after their voices became unavailable, provided that by such time they had passed ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... is by no means one of our finer Highland lochs, it furnished, to at least my eye at this time, a delightful prospect in still October mornings, when the light gossamer went sailing about in white filmy threads, and birch and hazel, glorified by decay, served to embroider with gold the brown hillsides which, standing up on either hand in their long vista of more than twenty miles, form the barriers of the lake; and when the sun, still struggling with a blue diluted haze, fell delicately ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... loveliness was the beauty of decay, the prelude to the fall of the leaf; the forests were but arrayed in their richest garb for ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... the one Puritan to whose failure I have referred, it is spread all over the whole of our dying Puritan civilisation. For instance, social reformers have fired a hundred shots against the public-house; but never one against its really shameful feature. The sign of decay is not in the public-house, but in the private bar; or rather the row of five or six private bars, into each of which a respectable dipsomaniac can go in solitude, and by indulging his own half-witted sin violate his own half-witted ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... eyes could roam over the city and the adjoining plain, and follow the course of the great river until it disappeared on the south amid groves of waving palm. After the rise of Seleucia and Ctesiphon, however, the gardens would rapidly hasten to decay, but they must have been solidly built in the first instance to last as long as they did. The pise vaults of the Ninevite palaces could never have stood so well. In spite of the layers of lead and bitumen ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... and it is only the decayed matter returned to the earth, which enables the lofty cedar to extend its boughs, or the lowly violet to exhale its perfume. This is a world of eternal reproduction and decay—one endless cycle of the living preying on the dead—a phoenix, yearly, daily, and hourly springing from its ashes, in renewed strength and beauty. The blade of grass, which shoots from the soil, flowers, casts its ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... The otherwise unattractive refreshment-room becomes an oasis of repose amid the turmoil of a fretful world. All things conspire to aid him: the ancient joints, ranged side by side like corpses in a morgue, each one decently hidden under its white muslin shroud, whispering of death and decay; the dish of dead flies, thoughtfully placed in the centre of the table; the framed advertisements extolling the virtues of heavy beers and stouts, of weird champagnes, emanating from haunted-looking chateaux, situate—if one may judge from ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold: There 's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st But in his motion like an angel sings, Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins. Such harmony is in immortal souls; But whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in, ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... Sense, And long in Senates fam'd for Eloquence; But if to these Endowments of the Mind, A graceful Figure happily is join'd, Then flows thy Gall, then raves thy half-form'd Clay, Then frets thy putrid Carcass to Decay. ...
— Two Poems Against Pope - One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope and the Blatant Beast • Leonard Welsted
... mowing-machine stood in the field where it had been left the summer before, rusty and forlorn, and dead weeds marked the edges of a field wherein the spring ploughing was now only half done. The whole farmstead, indeed, looked tired. As for the house and barn, they had reached that final stage of decay in which the best thing that could be said of them was that they were picturesque. Everything was as different from the farm of the energetic and joyous Stanleys, whose work I had shared only a few days before, as anything that ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... refuse heaps of the winter before, now buried under the snow, they dug out pieces of bone and a few deer-skins; on this, with a little tripe de roche, they endeavoured to subsist. The log house was falling into decay. The seams gaped and the piercing air entered on every side with the thermometer twenty below zero. Franklin and his companions had tried in vain to stop the chinks and to make a fire by tearing up the rough boards of the floor. But their strength ...
— Adventurers of the Far North - A Chronicle of the Frozen Seas • Stephen Leacock
... questions of potestas seem to have exercised any influence in bringing about the transition from matrilineal to patrilineal descent. It does not appear necessary, therefore, to do more than allude in passing to a fact which may well have had something to do with the decay of matria potestas, at any rate, so far as the mother's brother is concerned, even if it did not actively hasten the coming of patria potestas. This fact is the considerable size of the area over which, with the rise of the so-called nations, it is possible ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas
... condition of thorough responsibility to the central judiciary. Their privileges were not destroyed but were combined with the discharge of corresponding duties. Whatever their shortcomings, they were preserved from the decay which is the inevitable consequence of a divorce of duties ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... did, and hearing her complaints of shortness of breath, (which she attributed to inward decay, precipitated by her late harasses, as well from her friends as from you,) he was for advising her to go into ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... a smile did then his words repeat And said that gathering leeches far and wide He travelled; stirring thus about his feet The waters of the pool where they abide. Once I could meet with them on every side; But they have dwindled long by slow decay; Yet still I persevere and find them where ...
— Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children • W. Houghton
... paints may dine equally well. But you know that's the petty, bourgeois, kitchen, grey side of life, and surely it is revolting to live for that alone? If some insects do enslave others, bother them, let them devour each other! We need not think about them. You know they will die and decay just the same, however zealously you rescue them from slavery. We must think of that great millennium which awaits humanity in ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... most pernicious are those who beggar you inchmeal. If a maid is a downright thief she strips you, it once, and you know your loss; but these retail pilferers waste you insensibly, and though you hardly miss it, yet your substance shall decay to such a degree, that you must have a very good bottom indeed not to feel the ill effects of such moths in ...
— Everybody's Business is Nobody's Business • Daniel Defoe
... shortly. As her face was still inquiring, he added: "Brain trouble. In his case a kind of decay of the tissue; perhaps inherited, certainly hastened by his habits, probably precipitated ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... venture was rich in experience. Susan took time out for sightseeing, visiting the "President's house" and Mt. Vernon, which to her surprise she found in a state of "delapidation and decay." "The mark of slavery o'ershadows the whole," she wrote in her diary. "Oh the thought that it was here that he whose name is the pride of this Nation, was the ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... oppression, sighed involuntarily, had palpitations of the heart, and spitting of blood, accompanied with a lingering fever, which I have never since entirely overcome. How is it possible to fall into such a state in the flower of one's age, without any inward decay, or without having done ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... citizen who thinks he sees that the commonwealth's political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal; he is a traitor. That he may be the only one who thinks he sees this decay, does not excuse him; it is his duty to agitate anyway, and it is the duty of the others to vote him down if they do not see ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... militant and pacific, he has expressed in literature, as indeed in the other forms of art, his pacific and militant moods. Nor are these moods, of necessity, incompatible. War may become the price of peace, and peace may so decay as inevitably to bring about war. Of the dully unresponsive pacificist and the jingo patriot, quick to anger, the latter no doubt is the more dangerous to the cause of true freedom, yet both are "undesirable citizens." He who believes that peace is illusory ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... has been lamenting the decay of the diary-keeping habit, with the natural result that several correspondents have written to say that they have kept diaries all their lives. No doubt all these diaries now contain the entry, "Wrote to the Daily —— to deny the assertion that the diary-keeping habit is on the wane." ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... une vie splendide." Therefore, till the right lady was found, Balzac toiled unceasingly; and when in Madame Hanska the personification of his ideal at last appeared, he redoubled his efforts, till overwork, and his longing for her, caused the decay of his physical powers, and his ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... emerges from the last tube some three minutes later at a consistency of from 30 to 32 Baume, which is found on cooling to be the proper point for perfect jelly. This point is found to vary one or two degrees, according to the fermentation consequent upon bruises in handling the fruit, decay of the same, or any little delay in expressing the juice from the cheese. The least fermentation occasions the necessity for a lower reduction. To guard against this, no cheese is allowed to stand over night, no pomace left in the ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... start—checked himself—and stood staring at her. He wore spectacles, and was leaning on a stick. She had a quick impression of physical weakness and decay. ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Zooelogical Gallery, Northern Zooelogical Gallery, and the Mineral Gallery. The specimens in all these are very fine. Nothing can be finer than the mammalia. The preservation has been perfect, and far surpasses what I have been accustomed to see in museums, where decay seems to be often rioting upon the remains of nature. The department of ornithology is wonderful, and I could have enjoyed a whole day in examining the birds of all climates. In conchology the collection is very rich. I do not often ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... its accumulation of dust, and the rain washed down its quota from the bank above. In the slow process of countless years the rock formation extended over the whole sea; the alluvial deposit deepened; seeds lodged in it, and the buffalo-grass and sage-brush began to grow, their yearly decay adding to the ever-thickening layer ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... hour of her walk, Kirstie interfered. Kirstie took this decay of her mistress very hard; bore her a grudge, quarrelled with and railed upon her, the anxiety of a genuine love wearing the disguise of temper. This day of all days she insisted disrespectfully, with rustic fury, that Mrs. Weir should stay at home. But, "No, no," she said, "it's ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was not even in a condition to maintain a good system of government. Oppressed by the tyranny of officials, industry and improvement had been neglected, and a state of languor and depression prevailed. The public buildings were even falling into a state of ruin and decay. There was not a Court House in the province, nor a sufficient prison nor house of correction. Nor was there a school house between Tadousac and Niagara. The country upon the Great Lakes was a wilderness. Lymburner ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... year was in decay, summer had lent this night to autumn, it was so soft and sweet. The moonbeam fell brightly upon Ducie Bower, and the illumined salon contrasted effectively with the natural splendour of the exterior scene. Mr. Temple reminded Henrietta of a brilliant fete which had been given at a ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... light enough to enable us to crawl off the branches to which we had clung, and make our way down to the ground—if ground it could be called, for, in reality, in every direction it was covered thickly with logs in all stages of decay, some only lately fallen, others which could be knocked to pieces with a kick, while the feet sank at almost every step in decomposed vegetable matter. Still this was the region through which, somehow or other, ...
— In the Rocky Mountains - A Tale of Adventure • W. H. G. Kingston
... arms were empty of delight," LAMIA had fled! Would that some sage cool head, some modern APOLLONIUS, with the might Of sense magnanimous, would banish thus the bestial Lamia of our later day, Whose fascination draws a noble nation To sordid slow decay! ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 4, 1891 • Various
... likely to come back, and as she was not really his wife, however pleasing the fiction had been in which they had both indulged, it seemed to him wiser to end their happy romance thus suddenly and while much of its glamour remained, than to linger on and see it decay day by day before their eyes till nothing but bitterness remained. He loved her and felt the wrench more than she did, but duty and his obligations as a man, etc., etc., till it ended in his signature limited to ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... 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 and cooking all about here ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... fixed grin of decay in Coventry Street, we mounted a motor-'bus, and dashed gaily through streets of rose and silver—it was October—and dropped off by the Poplar Hippodrome, whose harsh signs lit the night to ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... neither to-day nor yesterday in the powerful echoes of memory; there is only always. He who no longer feels has never felt. There are two memories,—the memory of the senses, which wears out with the senses, and in which perishable things decay; and the memory of the soul, for which time does not exist, and which lives over at the same instant every moment of its past and present existence; it is a faculty of the soul, which, like the soul, enjoys ubiquity, ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... in Carolina, at least, four sorts. The Pitch-Pine, growing to a great Bigness, most commonly has but a short Leaf. Its Wood (being replete with abundance of Bitumen) is so durable, that it seems to suffer no Decay, tho' exposed to all Weathers, for many Ages; and is used in several Domestick and Plantation Uses. This Tree affords the four great Necessaries, Pitch, Tar, Rozin, and Turpentine; which two last are extracted by tapping, and the Heat of the ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... there must 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)
... much less than would be expected, and the roughness and slightly yielding surface make excellent footing for animals. Surface corduroy is perishable and can last but a short time. In marshes, where the logs can be placed below the ground-water level, they are preserved from decay, and if any suitable material can be found, to put a thin embankment over them, a good permanent road ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... valour, received them back with the condition of feudal services [e], which, though a burden somewhat grievous, brought him ample compensation, by connecting him with the neighbouring proprietors, and placing him under the guardianship of a potent chieftain. The decay of the political government thus necessarily occasioned the extension of the feudal: the kingdoms of Europe were universally divided into baronies, and these into inferior fiefs: and the attachment of vassals to their chief, which was at first an essential part of the German manners, was still supported ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... long-gone day have the dead of this fabled land been carried to the Carrion Caves, that in death and decay they might serve their country and warn away invading enemies. Here, too, is brought, so the fable runs, all the waste stuff of the nation—everything that is subject to rot, and that can add to the foul ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... can't think why they do it. Nor why I have written a real letter. If you write a real letter back, damme, I'll try to CORRESPOND with you. A thing unknown in this age. It is a consequence of the decay of faith; we cannot believe that the fellow will be at the pains to ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of these California pines is shown by their sound condition in California buildings that have stood for generations, many of them in regions where climatic conditions are more conducive to decay than in the middle western and ...
— The Marvelous Exploits of Paul Bunyan • W.B. Laughead
... those blest regions yonder With the feelings true that ne'er decay. Venture thou to dream, then, and to wander Noblest thoughts oft lie in ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... has been replete with blessings, for which we owe to the Giver of All Good our reverent acknowledgment. For the uninterrupted harmony of our foreign relations, for the decay of sectional animosities, for the exuberance of our harvests and the triumphs of our mining and manufacturing industries, for the prevalence of health, the spread of intelligence, and the conservation of the public credit, for the growth of the country in all the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 8: Chester A. Arthur • James D. Richardson
... observed my emotion; and, as my eye met his, shook his head and pointed to the ruin. 'These walls,' said he, 'were once the seat of luxury and vice. They exhibited a singular instance of the retribution of Heaven, and were from that period forsaken, and abandoned to decay.' His words excited my curiosity, and I enquired further ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... of the gas company; at another, of the drainage contractors. They seemed to delight in turning up the fetid soil, cutting deep trenches through various strata of filth, and piling up for days or weeks matter that reeked with vegetable and animal decay. One needs not affirm that Rosemary Street was not so called from its fragrance. If the Ginxes and their neighbors preserved any semblance of health in this place, the most popular guardian on the board must own it a miracle. ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... have been excessively hungry, or blessed with powerful imaginations, for, on cross-examination, these "wild turkeys" proved to be TURKEY BUZZARDS, or carrion vultures, most filthy creatures, which, in many places where the decay of animal matter is common, act faithfully the part of scavengers, and their flesh is strongly tinctured with the quality of ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... winter, When the great sun has turned his face away, The earth goes down into the vale of grief, And fasts, and weeps, and shrouds herself in sables, Leaving her wedding garments to decay; Then leaps in ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... who betrayed him were ever after holden in the greatest detestation, and are said to have fallen into decay, and to have never thriven afterwards. The house where she lived, which overlooked the spot, has since fallen down. It was with the greatest difficulty that any one could be ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 6. Saturday, December 8, 1849 • Various
... to Belfast, from Dublin to Galway, are scattered the ruins of churches, abbeys, and ecclesiastical buildings, the relics of a country once rich, prosperous and populous. These ruins raise their castellated walls and towers, noble even in decay, sometimes in the midst of a village, crowded with the miserably poor, sometimes on a mountain, in every direction commanding magnificent prospects; sometimes on an island in one of the lakes, which, like emeralds ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... will, in time, your fortune be: This to your coyness I will tell, And, having spoke it once, farewell. The lily will not long endure, Nor the snow continue pure; The rose, the violet, one day, See, both these lady-flowers decay: And you must fade as well as they. And it may chance that Love may turn, And, like to mine, make your heart burn And weep to see't; yet this thing do, That my last vow commends to you: When you shall see that I am dead, For pity let a tear be shed; And, with your mantle o'er me ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... a new weirdness to what the sky possesses in its size and formlessness, there is involved the quality of decay. For all the wonder of these everlasting stars, eternal spheres, and what not, they are not everlasting, they are not eternal; they burn out like candles. You see that dying one in the body of the Greater Bear? Two centuries ago it was as bright as the others. The senses ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... Age's summons I obey, Resigned to dull rheumatics and decay, Still on one text my hearers I'll exhort, As long as hearers within range will stay: "Cricket in sooth ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various
... A small household of the Emperor's chosen servants quietly kept house there. The gloomy walls re-echoed to no music; the dark alleys of the dreary garden seemed the very impersonation of solitude and decay. Nothing broke the dull monotony of the tiresome day, except when occasionally, near sunset, the clash of the guard would be heard turning out, and the clank of presenting arms, followed by the roll of a heavy carriage into the gloomy courtyard. ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... took notice, that the decay of the liberties of the Dutch republic proceeded from three causes. 1. The perfect unanimity requisite on all occasions. 2. Their obligation to consult their constituents. 3. Their voting by provinces. This last destroyed ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... enjoyment of physical activity, so the less turbulent nature of Chekhov has made him reproduce in his creatures of the imagination his own sufferings and fears. I think he was afraid of mental as well as physical decay, for he has studied insanity with the same assiduity as that displayed by Andreev in his nerve-wrecking ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... it is the clean shaven face of the mock priest, the slow, cold eyes and the sharp, cunning sneer of the cynical libertine who will be tempted that he may better know the worthlessness of temptation. "Les Fleurs du Mal!" beautiful flowers, beautiful in sublime decay. What a great record is yours, and were Hell a reality how many souls would we find wreathed with your poisonous blossoms. The village maiden goes to her Faust; the children of the nineteenth century go to you, O ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore |
