"Noisome" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... together, herbs and men, Struggling through stifling earth-weights unto light, Earnestly longing to be clothed upon With one high possibility of bloom? And He, He is the Light, He is the Sun That draws us out of darkness, and transmits The noisome earth-damp into Heaven's own breath, And shapes our matted roots, we know not how, Into fresh leaves, and strong, fruit-bearing stems; Yea, makes us stand, on some consummate day, ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... dark fens of that land there dwelt a monster—fierce, noisome, and cruel, a thing that loved evil and hated all that was joyous and good. To its ears came the ring of the laughter and the shouts of King Hrothgar's revellers, and the sweet song of the gleemen and ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... stood wide open in this sultry weather, in order to let a free current of air pass through the house, and they inhaled more strongly still the aromatic perfumes, which were not yet strong enough entirely to overcome that other noisome odour which was one of the most fatal means of ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... resumed their coats, switched on their searchlight, and made a rapid examination of the engine, which appeared to have suffered no injury: then took their places. When the sparking began, and noisome smoke poured from the exhaust, the workmen again yelled, but as the machine, after a short run, sailed noisily into the air, they fell prostrate in ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... symptom, large black or deep-blue spots over the body, from which came the name of "Black Death." Some of the victims became sleepy and stupid; others were incessantly restless. The tongue and throat grew black; the lungs exhaled a noisome odor; an insatiable thirst was produced. Death came in two or three days, sometimes on the very day of seizure. Medical aid was of no avail. Doctors and relatives fled in terror from what they deemed a fatally contagious disease, and the stricken were left to die alone. Villages and towns ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... The planets mild their lamps benign quenched out, And cruel stars in heaven did signorize, Whose influence cast fiery flames about And hot impressions through the earth and skies, The growing heat still gathered deeper rout, The noisome warmth through lands and kingdoms flies, A harmful night a hurtful day succeeds, And worse than both ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... Simulacrum, will it be able either to come, or to stand when come. With union grounded on falsehood, and ordering us to speak and act lies, we will not have anything to do. Peace? A brutal lethargy is peaceable, the noisome grave is peaceable. We hope for a living ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... search of means to pull, to hammer, to fetch, to carry. We waste our future resources to get this strength, while we leave all the living fuel to burn itself out in mere pestiferous breath, and production of its variously noisome forms of ashes! Clearly, if we want fire for force, we want men for force first. The industrious hands must already have so much to do that they can do no more, or else we need not use machines to help them. Then use the idle hands first. Instead of dragging petroleum ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... there was a thatch-palm, stunted, and looking like the head-dress of some savage African warrior. Inland, the creek, all white sand and golden sunny water at its opening, spread out far and near into noisome swamps overgrown with mangroves. Those strangest of all trees, that had something tender and idyllic as they stepped out into the ripple with their fresh child-like laurel-line leaves and dangling rods of emerald, that were really the suckers of their banyan-like ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... so that the wealthy prisoner was soon reduced to beggary. Resistance to the will of the jailers, and refusal to submit to their exactions, were severely punished. Loaded with fetters, and almost deprived of food, the miserable captive was locked up in a noisome subterranean dungeon; and, if he continued obstinate, was left to rot there. When he expired, his death was laid to the jail-fever. Rarely were these dark prison secrets ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 2 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... No talk of thine can charm me, Forbid it Heaven! And my discourse no less Must evermore sound noisome to thine ear. Yet where could I have found a fairer fame Than giving burial to my own true brother? All here would tell thee they approve my deed, Were they not tongue-tied to authority. But kingship hath much profit; ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... the believers. Sabbatai was scouted as a madman. The Jewry was torn by dissensions and disturbances. But Sabbatai took no part in them. He had no communion with the bulk of his brethren, save in religious ceremonies, and for these he would go to the poorest houses in the most noisome courts. It was in a house of one room, the raised part of which, covered with a strip of carpet, made the bed-and living-room, and the unraised part the kitchen, that his next manifestation of occult power was made. The ceremony was the circumcision of ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... descended from the roofs of the house wherein was the wheat [so that the latter rotted]; and needs must the merchant give the porters five hundred dirhems from his purse, so they should carry it forth and cast it without the city, for that the smell of it was noisome. So his friend said to him, 'How often did I tell thee thou hadst no luck in wheat? But thou wouldst not give ear to my speech, and now it behoveth thee to go to the astrologer and question him of thy star.' Accordingly the merchant betook himself to the astrologer and questioned him of his ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... of thy sweet face. Thou gentle, virtuous maid, as fair in soul As body, with a heart as white and pure As are thy snowy draperies! Like a dove, A pure, white dove with shining, outspread wings, Thou hoverest o'er this life, nor yet so much As dipp'st thy wing in this vile, noisome slough Wherein we wallow, struggling to get free, Each from himself. Send down one kindly beam From out thy shining heaven, to fall in pity Upon my bleeding breast, distraught with pain; And all those ugly scars that grief and hate And evil fortune e'er have written there, Oh, cleanse thou ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Francois agreed to point out the haunts which his former ally had been in the habit of frequenting. Such dens of vice and misery, where crime, starvation, and disease went hand in hand, I had never beheld. I wondered how any one could live in such noisome places even for a day. The sufferings of the people were terrible; a dreadful pestilence mowed them down in scores. Small marvel that a clever agitator like De Retz could obtain hundreds of willing tools ready for any act ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... crabs and lizards crawling upon the scattered sand heaps among the coarse sea-grasses, while small fish brought unexpected dimples to the deeper pools that lay between. And the mingled odor of waters fresh and salt was broken into a breath now pungent and pleasant, now almost noisome, as the light breeze stirred the shallows of this strange domain which was neither land nor sea. Yet even here the pale sea-holly and the evening primrose made redeeming spots of beauty, with their faint hues of violet and yellow; and a distant water-meadow shimmered like the sea, with the tender ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... the flames leaped from gable to gable. Like mats rolled together by a scrupulous hand, the thatched roofs curled up; first they sizzled, then they flared, but then—hi!—the ripe grain, every kernel a spark, exploded like powder and shot sheaves of fire into the air. A noisome exhalation mounted to the heavens and darkened the sky; from the stables came the desperate cries of ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... by Crumps—he being a timid old man who stood in awe of his senior partner; that, after this, they had a good long period of comparative quiet, during which they held a riotous game of hide-and-seek across the lane and down among sewers and dust holes, and delightfully noisome and fetid places of a similar character; interrupted at irregular intervals by a vagrant street boy, or a daring cat, or an inquisitive cur; that this game was stopped at about ten o'clock by the advent of Mr Denham, who generally ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... sin, he hates it, one would say, as he hates its cause, and would drive it out of the body with all noisome appliances. "Sickness is in Fact Flagellum Dei pro peccatis mundi." So saying, he encourages the young mother whose babe is wasting away upon her breast ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... shades of melancholy ascending and brooding over his mind, and enveloping his throbbing heart in their—their adamantine chains. Yielding to the overwhelming force, he thus exclaimed, 'Such is life—we require but one flower, and we are offered noisome thousands—refused that we wish, we live in loathing of that not worthy to be received—mourners from our cradle to our grave, we utter the shrill cry at our birth, and we sink in oblivion with the faint, ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... then, took the gaol-fever in a week, and died raving in that noisome den: his secret, if he had one, perished with him, and nothing but vague suspicion was left as to Rose Salterne's fate. That she had gone off with the Spaniard, few doubted; but whither, and in what character? On that last subject, be sure, no mercy was shown ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... late as 1662 Dugdale writes that here "no element is good. The air cloudy, gross and full of rotten harrs[1]; water putrid and muddy, yea, full of loathsome vermin; the earth spongy and boggy; and the fire noisome by the stink of smoking hassocks[2]." But during the Stuart period wide ditches or drains were dug, into which the water could flow and be pumped into rivers. This reclamation has been continued to the present time, and the black soils as well as ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell
... foul night birds, reptiles, and beasts of prey," of precipice after precipice, abyss after abyss, in apparently endless succession, and of an explorer who perished there and lay "even now rotting in the bowels of the mountain, preyed upon by its blind and noisome worms." ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... to view. But for his advanced age, and the fact that imprisonment in a damp and noisome cell had made him a cripple for life, he would have stood in Seabury's place as our first bishop. He is now in his sixty-eighth year, having been born in Durham in 1717. He lived to the age of nearly eighty- eight, and one who remembered him ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... immured in a dank and noisome dungeon, and knew that all the grim darkness of a medieval fortress lay between him and the outer world of sunshine and well-metalled high roads where he had lately been so happy, disporting himself ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... inhabitants of almost every age. Some were glad of this excuse for remaining peaceably at their houses, and those who made any opposition were threatened to be sent across the river, and thrown into a noisome prison." ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... He was in bed, on November 11, when they sighted Cape Orange, now the most northerly point belonging to the Empire of Brazil. On the 14th they anchored at the mouth of the Cayenne river, and Raleigh was carried from his noisome cabin into his barge; the 'Destiny' got across the bar, which was lower then than it now is, on the 17th. At Cayenne, after a day or two, Raleigh's old servant Harry turned up; he had almost forgotten his English in twenty-two years. Raleigh began ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... new set of stories were told of it. Now it was no longer described as a sort of earthly paradise, but as a place of horror and misery. It was a land of noisome marsh and gloomy forest, where prowled every imaginable evil beast. At certain times of the year the river flooded the whole land, so that the people were obliged to take refuge in the trees. There they lived more like monkeys than men, springing from tree to tree in search of food. ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... alleys and courts of our great towns, and which recruit those very dangerous classes from the class which ought to be, and is still, in spite of our folly, England's strength and England's glory. Let us no longer stand by idle, and see moral purity, in street after street, pent in the same noisome den with moral corruption, to be involved in one common doom, as the Latin tyrant of old used to bind together the dead corpse and the living victim. But let the man who would deserve well of his city, well of his country, set his heart and brain to the great ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... decorative qualities; if any boy had gathered flowers the other boys would have laughed at him; though boys gather every kind of thing that they think will be of the slightest use or profit. I do not believe they appreciate the perfume of flowers, and I am sure that they never mind the most noisome stench or the most loathsome sight. A dead horse will draw a crowd of small boys, who will dwell without shrinking upon the details of his putrefaction, when they would pass by a rose-tree in bloom with indifference. Hideous reptiles and insects interest them more than ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... he said, and led us through a long, noisome passage, which was pitch dark and very unevenly paved. Then he unlocked a door and with a swirl the wind caught it and blew ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... we are going down to the sea in ships with the vortrekkers of civilization, those who are making the ways straight; who, in a few weeks, will be leaving us to lose themselves in great forests, who clear the paths of noisome jungles where the sun seldom penetrates, who sit in sun-baked "factories," as they call their trading houses, measuring life by steamer days, who preach the Gospel to the cannibals of the Congo, whose voices are the voices of those calling in ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... blessed futurity for those hideous hugs and many-footed worms as for these brethren of our humanity and co-heirs of all our heavenly inheritance. Ah, what a mystery! Slowly, slowly, as after groping at the bottom of a deep, noisome, stagnant pool, my hope struggles upward to the surface, bearing the half-drowned body of a child along with it, and heaving it aloft for its life, and my own life, and all our lives. Unless these slime-clogged nostrils can be made capable of inhaling celestial air, I ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... those in front receded upon those behind and the street was blocked by struggling beasts and resounded with roaring snarls, the thud of wooden bales clashing together, and the desperate protests of the camel-drivers, one of whom was sent rolling into a noisome dust heap with his turban torn ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... brigade led down into the noisome basin which holds Hopetown, and took up temporary quarters on the first patch against the water into which it could squeeze its long line of transport. It wedged in between two columns, and the bad condition of both gave evidence of the severity of the work in which they had ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... saw about fifty miserable distempered wretches, suspended in rows, so huddled one upon another, that not more than fourteen inches space was allotted for each with his bed and bedding; and deprived of the light of the day as well as of fresh air; breathing nothing but a noisome atmosphere ... devoured with vermin.' &c. The doctor, when visiting the sick, 'thrust his wig in his pocket, and stript himself to his waistcoat; then creeping on all fours under their hammocks, and forcing up his bare pate between two, kept them asunder with one shoulder until he had ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... One of the 'hireling priests' of such noisome odour in the nostrils of thy friends of the stricter ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... her battered hatch I leaned and caught Sounds from the noisome hold,— Cursing and sighing of souls distraught And cries too sad to be told. Then I strove to go down and see; But they said, "Thou art not of us!" I turned to those on the deck with me And cried, "Give help!" But they said, "Let be: Our ship sails ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... bubbles of the latest wave Fresh pearls to their enamel gave, And the bellowing of the savage sea Greeted their safe escape to me. I wiped away the weeds and foam, I fetched my sea-born treasures home; But the poor, unsightly, noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar. The lover watched his graceful maid, As 'mid the virgin train she strayed, Nor knew her beauty's best attire Was woven still by the snow-white choir. At last she came ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... pictures, and musical instruments, and marble busts, half shadowed by classic draperies—and all the delicate elegancies of womanly refinement—still invested the chamber with a grace as cheerful as if youth and beauty were to be the occupants for ever—and the dark and noisome vault were not the only lasting residence for the ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... towers and towns, So firmly won that thirty years of strife Made of their followers dukes, their leaders kings! While you! like jackal and the bird of prey, Who lurk in copses or 'mid muddy beds— Crouching and hushed, with dagger ready drawn, Hide in the noisome marsh that skirts the way, Trembling lest passing hounds snuff out your lair! Listen at eventide on lonesome path For traveller's footfall, or the mule-bell's chime, Pouncing by hundreds on one helpless man, To ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... against contagion. Rivers and mountains are easily crossed by corrupting example. Ardent spirits, like all other fluids, perpetually seek their level. In vain does the farmer eradicate from his fields the last vestige of the noisome thistle, while the neighboring grounds are given up to its dominion, and every wind scatters the seed where it listeth. The effort against intemperance, to be effective, ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... heathens, descendants of Ham, and consigned by divine appointment to perpetual bondage. The planters may, if they reasoned at all on the subject, have supposed that they were even performing a humane act in releasing these Africans from the noisome hold of the ship. They might well believe that the condition of the negro slave would be less degraded and wretched in Virginia than it had been in his native country. This first purchase was not probably looked upon as a matter of much consequence, and for several years the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... rustling noise, and a rat scurried across the rickety floor, drawing a startled gasp from Audrey and a disgusted 'Oh, piffle!' from the Nugget. Whatever merits this final refuge might have as a stronghold, it was beyond question a noisome place. ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... at large. The mayor and a large body of civil officers accompanied the prisoner to the guard-house, and a number of citizens volunteered their services, to strengthen the escort; but all their efforts scarcely sufficed to keep him from the grasp of the infuriated multitude. He was placed in a noisome cell, to await his trial, and the customary guard was increased for his protection. Portions of the mob continued howling round the prison all night, and the mayor was sent for several times to prevent their bursting in. A gallows was erected, with a barrel of feathers ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... spoke in undertones so that the general public was happily unaware of his ignominy. They hauled him aboard a yacht manned by strange, unsympathetic Orientals, and partly they thrust him and partly he fell down a gangway into a noisome, dark place, where he was to remain many days—how many he does not know, because he lost count among other things when he was seasick. They fed him on biscuits and incomprehensible words; they gave him water to drink mixed with unwished-for rum. And there were cockroaches where they ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... lines Rule ruggedly. You doubtless have perused This vicious cry against the Emperor? He's outlawed—to be caught alive or dead, Like any noisome beast! ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... support which each wretched hovel gave to its neighbour. The mud walls were stained with yellow patches of lichen, the palings round the little gardens were broken and ruinous. Close beside them all was a sort of open drain or water-course, stagnant and noisome, which dribbled into the river a little above the bridge. Behind them rose a high gravel bank edged by firs, and a line of oak trees against the sky. The houses stood in the shadow of the bank looking north, and on this gray, lowering day, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sometimes to understand Why there are folk whose flesh should seem Like carrion puffed with noisome steam, Fly-blown to the eye that looks on it, Fly-blown to the touch of a hand; Why there are men without any legs, Whizzing along on little trollies With long long arms like apes': Failing to see why God the Topiarist Should train ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... not only the two stores, but a cellar both large and deep, to which one obtained access by a staircase pitch dark, crooked, and everlastingly covered with moisture, owing to the proximity of the river. The floor of the cellar was a kind of noisome cesspool: one slipped on the greasy mud—floundered about in it: for all that, this cellar was almost entirely filled with cases of all kinds, with queer-looking bundles, with objects of various shapes and sizes. Evidently the jumble store of ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... or five hours they proceeded, at a steady gallop, towards the south. The country was flat; the road sandy, but even; and the cool night air was exhilarating, indeed, after the confinement in the dark and noisome dungeon at Lima. So rejoiced were the boys, with their newly-recovered freedom, that it was with difficulty they restrained themselves from bursting into shouts of joy. But they were anxious that no sounds ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty
... food, neither Amerindian nor Eskimo was squeamish. They were almost omnivorous, and specially delighted in putrid or noisome substances from which a European would turn in loathing, and from the eating of which he ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... to ask how he was feeling. Prince Andrew answered all his questions reluctantly but reasonably, and then said he wanted a bolster placed under him as he was uncomfortable and in great pain. The doctor and valet lifted the cloak with which he was covered and, making wry faces at the noisome smell of mortifying flesh that came from the wound, began examining that dreadful place. The doctor was very much displeased about something and made a change in the dressings, turning the wounded man over so that he groaned again and grew unconscious and delirious from the agony. He kept ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... I sat in the hotel window on two legs of my chair, with my feet on the brass rail, a figure of dejection. The glamour of my great adventure was gone. I had come quickly to the waste places of which the Professor had spoken. When I closed my eyes to the noisome street and the clamor, when I saw the pines on the ridge-top clear cut against the moonlit sky, when I heard the whippoorwill calling from the elm and the sheep bleating in the meadow, I believed that I was marching to barren conquests and fighting for worthless booty. ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... had been, despised and humiliated beyond description; victims of the knout and the pogrom; tortured by Cossacks and Black Hundreds; robbed by official extortions; their women shamed and ravaged and their babies doomed to rot and die in the noisome Pale—the Jews owed no loyalty to the Czar or even to the nation. Had they sought revenge in the hour of Russia's crisis, in howsoever grim a manner, it would have been easy to understand their action and hard indeed to regard it with condemnation. It ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... abortion, the foetus is often putrid before it is discharged; and the placenta, or after-birth, rarely or never follows it, but becomes decomposed, and, as it drops away in fragments, emits a peculiar and most noisome smell. This smell seems to be peculiarly annoying to the other cows: they sniff at it and then run bellowing about. Some sympathetic influence is exercised on their uterine organs, and in a few days a greater or less ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... on the flagged passage. A blade of light crept across the floor towards us. My brain was growing clearer. The place had a damp, earthen smell. It was slimy—some noisome cellar. A door was thrown open and a man entered, carrying a lantern. Its light showed my surmise to be accurate, showed the slime-coated walls of a dungeon some fifteen feet square—shone upon the long yellow robe of the man who stood watching us, ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... end of the passage with Gaydon at his heels. The two men came to a flight of stone steps, which they descended. The steps led to a dark and dripping cellar with no pavement but the mud, and that depressed into puddles. The air was cold and noisome; the walls to the touch of Gaydon's hand were greasy with slime. He followed Edgar across the cellar into a sort of tunnel. Here Edgar drew an end of candle from his pocket and lighted it. The tunnel was so low that Gaydon, though a shortish ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... mud-walled cabin, facing the door of which there was a green pool of stagnant water; and before the window, of one pane, a dunghill that, reaching to the thatch of the roof, shut out the light, and filled the house with the most noisome smell. The ground sloped towards the house door; so that in rainy weather, when the pond was full, the kitchen was overflowed; and at all times the floor was so damp and soft, that the print of the nails of brogues was left in it wherever ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... then by a little wholesome compulsion, we must oblige the owners of property haunted by death and contagion, to yield to the demands of society. If a man may not harbour a ferocious bull-dog in his alley, is he to keep a noisome ditch running at large there?—and if he may not hold a main of fighting cocks, is he to keep cholera and typhus in his house? For my part, I cannot see, if a justice of the peace can stop a man from ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... in groups against the steep face of the terrace; filthy lanes wind amongst them, so narrow, that if you are not too tall, you look into the slits of windows on either hand, by turning your head, and feel the noisome warm air in whiffs against your face. Glacial boulders lie scattered throughout the village, around and beneath the clusters of houses, from which it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the native rock. I entered one house by ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... respect to the parish-poor, who have no choice but to live with them, every county ought to be provided with a special Asylum for idiots; whose purpose should be to smoothen their passage through life, and to render it as little noisome to others, and to one ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... him without one word of remonstrance, much wondering what was likely to happen next, till he found himself suddenly driven into that noisome hut, where he was forced to enter ignominiously on all fours, like ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... several so-called hotels, the only one in any way habitable being the "Hotel Metropole," a name which has become suggestive of gold-laced porters and gilded halls. It was, therefore, rather a shock to enter a noisome den, suggestive of a Whitechapel slum, although its prices equalled those of the Carlton in Pall Mall. The house was new but jerry-built, reeked of drains, and swarmed with vermin. Having kept us shivering for half ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... ancient times, when Job, after solemnly protesting his righteousness, called on his own land to bear record against him if his words were false. "Let thistles grow instead of wheat, and cockle instead of barley," he cried, according to James the First's translators; but the "noisome weeds" of the original text seem to indicate that these good men were more anxious to give the English people an adequate conception of Job's willingness to suffer for his honor's sake than to translate literally. ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... of charcoal wind their way Into the brain, unless beforehand we Of water 've drunk. But when a burning fever, O'ermastering man, hath seized upon his limbs, Then odour of wine is like a hammer-blow. And seest thou not how in the very earth Sulphur is gendered and bitumen thickens With noisome stench?—What direful stenches, too, Scaptensula out-breathes from down below, When men pursue the veins of silver and gold, With pick-axe probing round the hidden realms Deep in the earth?—Or what of deadly bane The mines of gold exhale? O what a look, And what a ghastly hue they give to ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... than two minutes from the instant of their encounter, they stood outside Troyon's back door, facing a cramped, malodorous alley-way—a dark and noisome souvenir of that wild mediaeval Paris whose effacement is an enduring monument to the fame of the ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... flesh and blood, it abounded with gadflies and stinging bees and gnats and was endangered by the inroads of grisly bears. Rotting corpses lay here and there. Overspread with bones and hair, it was noisome with worms and insects. It was skirted all along with a blazing fire. It was infested by crows and other birds and vultures, all having beaks of iron, as also by evil spirits with long mouths pointed like needles. And it abounded with inaccessible fastnesses like the Vindhya mountains. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... life had been squandered in the streets, and among the most noisome of the stews and dens of London, but there was something of the woman's original nature left in her still; and when she heard a light step approaching the door opposite to that by which she had entered, and thought of the wide contrast which the small room would in ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... stretched out his hand. Cecil and Forrest obeyed her command to the letter. Engleton held the torch, and they all four made their way along the noisome passage. Forrest turned his head once cautiously toward his companion's, but Cecil shook ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... great wonder befell; for when they woke in the morning, King Uriens found himself at home in his own land, and Sir Accolon was in his own chamber at Camelot; but the King lay a prisoner, bound and fettered and weaponless, in a noisome dungeon that echoed to the groans of ...
— Stories from Le Morte D'Arthur and the Mabinogion • Beatrice Clay
... unpoetical. In fact, when I say that the people has been its own poet I do not mean the people which goes to music halls and reads halfpenny newspapers. To the true folk we owe the legend of Lord Bateman in its ancient germs; and to the folk's degraded modern estate, crowded as men are in noisome streets and crushed by labour, we owe the Cockney depravation, the Lord Bateman of Cruikshank and Thackeray. Even that, I presume, being old, is now forgotten, except by the ancient blind woman in the workhouse. ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... Echo of our times, The gossip, with an eager ear for crimes, Lurks, half-admiring, all-recording there, Watching Narcissus with persistent stare, And ready note-book. Nothing but a Voice? No, but its babblings travel, and rejoice A myriad prurient ears with noisome news, Fit only for the shambles and the stews. These hear, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 23, 1892 • Various
... quite insincerely when it suited his purpose. But "that rejuvenated old dame," and "that old Zattiany woman" crawled like reeking vapors across some fair landscape a man had spent his life seeking, blotting out its loveliness, turning it to a noisome morass. ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... master. I saw no light for myself in the business. My father's ill-repute with the Government would tell heavily in my disfavour, and it was beyond doubt that I had assaulted a dragoon. There was nothing before me but the plantations or a long spell in some noisome prison. ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... then came and flew upside down without being killed at Brooklands. One man flew over the Simplon Pass and another over the Alps. Colonel Cody flew to his death in one waterplane, and Mr. Hawker made a superb failure to fly around Great Britain in another waterplane. The suffragists threw noisome and inflammable matter into the letter boxes, bombs into Mr. Lloyd George's house at Walton and into other almost equally sacred shrines of the great, stones into windows, axes into pictures, chained their misguided bodies to railings and gates, jammed their miserable bodies into prisons, ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... There are, for instance, big facts and little facts,—clean facts and dirty facts. Imagination raises you and gives you a high and comprehensive view of them all; your mere reason keeps you down in some noisome corner, like the ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... his look, and while one part of her shrank from him as from some noisome thing, another part of her—to her dismay and anger—understood him, and did not resent him. It was the Past dragging at her life. It was inherited predisposition, the unregulated passions of her forebears, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... thickness of the ballium wall which led from Beauchamp Tower to Develin Tower. On either side of the corridor was a range of low, strong doors which gave entrance to dungeons, and horrible thoughts of what the inmates of these noisome cells must endure flashed across the girl's mind, rendering her faint ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... bear no longer to hear the precepts which he disdained to practice, sternly commanded OMAR to depart: 'Be gone,' said he, 'lest I crush thee like a noisome reptile, which men cannot but abhor, though it is too contemptible to be feared.' 'I go,' said OMAR, 'that my warning voice may yet again recall thee to the path of wisdom and of peace, if yet again I shall behold thee while it ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... one dying like a poisoned rat in a ditch is a powerful one. The same writer, in hunting down an unworthy man, with his cutting criticism, says, that he did it not on account of his power, but to put down what might prove noisome if not settled, much as a Dutch burgomaster might hunt a rat, not for its value, but because by its boring it might cause the water to break through his dikes, and thus ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... the dense undergrowth in white pillars against the grey-blue sky. Sometimes we strode down a picturesque sunny glade, and at others struggled through deep dark crypts of massive bamboo clumps. Here the noisome smell of decaying vegetation nauseated us, for the air in those forest depths is deadly. Beautiful scarlet wax-flowers would gleam high among the dark-green foliage of the giant cotton-tree, whose stem would be covered with orchids ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... I offered her my hand, and in another moment we stood together in the noisome precincts of that abominable spot, with whose doleful story she had just ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... terms speaketh absolutely and properly of fleas, punies, hand worms, flies, gnats, and other such-like scurvy vermin, whereof some are black, some dun, some ash-coloured, some tawny, and some brown and dusky, all noisome, molesting, tyrannous, cumbersome, and unpleasant creatures, not only to sick and diseased folks, but to those also who are of a sound, vigorous, and healthful temperament and constitution. It is not unlikely that he may have ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... thou know'st, I would not anything That in the heart of God holds not its root; Nor falsely deem there is any life at all That doth in him nor sleep nor shine nor sing; I know the plants that bear the noisome fruit Of burning and of ashes and of gall— From God's heart torn, rootless ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... some booby rebuke, some prolix prattler a judgment? Vettius, all were said verily truer of you. Tongue so noisome as yours, come chance, might surely on order Bend to the mire, or lick dirt from a beggarly shoe. Would you on all of us, all, bring, Vettius, utterly ruin? 5 Speak; not a doubt, 'twill come utterly, ruin ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... tales were dug up and passed along, growing as they went. Little eyes and mouths grew permanently rounded with horrors, and the ground was thoroughly well spaded and planted with sturdy shoots warranted to yield a noisome harvest of superstition for ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... the city. A gloomy archway, surmounted by windows grimly guarded by iron lattice-work, forms the general thoroughfare from the aristocratic Plaats and Kneuterdyk and Vyverberg to the inner court of the ancient palace. The cells within are dark, noisome, and dimly lighted, and even to this day the very instruments of torture, used in the trials of these and other prisoners, may be seen by the curious. Half a century later the brothers de Witt were dragged from this prison to be literally torn to ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... her like a river and left her clean. In the eye of nature and before the presence of nature's innumerable creatures she stood as innocent as they. She had entered into noisome places, but so had the marsh-hawk poising grandly on motionless wing there above. She had scrambled in the mire, and she was ruffled and draggled and besmirched; so likewise had been the silent flame-bird in the thicket, but he ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... refinement of the Venetian architecture must have been exchanged for the walls and bulwarks of an ordinary seaport. Had there been no tide, as in other parts of the Mediterranean, the narrow canals of the city would have become noisome, and the marsh in which it was built pestiferous. Had the tide been only a foot or eighteen inches higher in its rise, the water access to the doors of the palaces would have been impossible; even as it is, there is sometimes a little difficulty, at the ebb, in landing ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... at midnight, when the light was low and folk slept, Groa rose, and, veiled in a black robe, with a basket in her hand, passed like a shadow through the mists that hang about the river's edge, and in silence, always looking behind her, like one who fears a hidden foe, culled flowers of noisome plants that grow in the marsh. Her basket being filled, she passed round the stead to a hidden dell upon the mountain side. Here a man stood waiting, and near him burned a fire of turf. In his hand he held an iron-pot. It was Koll ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... a gloomy stream in whose depths lurks death itself; to reach out his hand to the golden truth, fruit of much winnowing of human knowledge, and as he grasps the precious grains to be borne back by a grim spectre whose very breath is horrible with the noisome odors of the tomb; to choose an arduous life, and learn to love it because it has high aims, and then to give it up at once and utterly!—alas, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... not uncommon to find near them mines of salt and nitre; and caverns sending forth pestilential exhalations. The Elysian plain, near the Catacombs in Egypt, stood upon the foul Charonian canal; which was so noisome, that every fetid ditch and cavern was from it called Charonian. Asia Proper comprehended little more than Phrygia, and a part of Lydia; and was bounded by the river Halys. It was of a most inflammable soil; and there were many fiery eruptions about Caroura, and in Hyrcania, which latter was styled ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... enter, to draw forth a spirit From out of Judas' circle. Lowest place Is that of all, obscurest, and remov'd Farthest from heav'n's all-circling orb. The road Full well I know: thou therefore rest secure. That lake, the noisome stench exhaling, round The city' of grief encompasses, which now We may not enter without rage." Yet more He added: but I hold it not in mind, For that mine eye toward the lofty tower Had drawn me wholly, to its burning top. Where in an instant I beheld ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... recoil with a painful sense of material incongruity, as did Hawthorne, when contemplating the noisome suburban street where Burns lived; but all the humane and poetical associations connected with the long struggle sustained by him, of "the highest in man's soul against the lowest in man's destiny," recur in sight of the Bridge of Doon, and the two "briggs of Ayr," whose "imaginary conversations" ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... had it that the place held the ghosts of those who had died in agony within its noisome dungeons; but she had always been far too matter-of-fact to accept stories of the supernatural. Yet at that moment her ears did not deceive her. That pile of grim, gaunt ruins was a House ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... words is but foule wind, and foule wind is but foule breath, and foule breath is noisome, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... words of mine justly paint the wild riot and brutal licence of this crowded 'tween-deck, foul with the reek of tobacco and a thousand worse savours, its tiers on tiers of dark and noisome berths where men snored or thrust forth shaggy heads to rave at and curse each other; its blotched and narrow table amidships, its rows of battered sea chests, its loathsome floor; a place of never-ceasing stir and ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... creeping things and vermin spring out of the corruption and rottenness of the excrement, and these entering into the bowels of him, his body is consumed. When the man is manifestly dead, the uppermost boat being taken off, they find his flesh devoured, and swarms of such noisome creatures preying upon and, as it were, growing to his inwards. In this way Mithridates, after suffering for seventeen days, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... upon Antwerp; wherever we turn in its narrow streets his glory lies therein, so that all mean things are thereby transfigured; and as we pace slowly through the winding ways, and by the edge of the stagnant water, and through the noisome courts, his spirit abides with us, and the heroic beauty of his visions is about us, and the stones that once felt his footsteps and bore his shadow seem to arise and speak of him with living voices. For the ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... For e'en the fells are useless; nor the flesh With water may they purge, or tame with fire, Nor shear the fleeces even, gnawed through and through With foul disease, nor touch the putrid webs; But, had one dared the loathly weeds to try, Red blisters and an unclean sweat o'erran His noisome limbs, till, no long tarriance made, The fiery ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... writing to Coleridge for advice on smoking, Lamb asks: "What do you think of smoking? I want your sober average noon opinion of it.... May be the truth is, that one pipe is wholesome, two pipes toothsome, three pipes noisome, four pipes fulsome, five pipes quarrelsome; and that's the sum on't. But that is deciding rather upon rhyme than reason." And Telfourd tells us that when Parr saw Lamb puffing like some furious enchanter, he asked how he had acquired the power of smoking at such a rate. ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... in the ditches, killing one another on the side of the hill; at last, the fort is taken and they begin routing the enemy. But, at this moment, Claudet stoops to pick up a cartridge, a ball strikes him in the forehead, and, without a sound, he drops to the ground, among the noisome fennels which flourish in graveyards—he drops, thinking of the clock ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... cottage she sped, shuddering as she recognized the stone steps and path that ran up the hillside to the haunted house. Ghosts, witches, hobgoblins fell into the procession of pursuers, cheered on by the shrieking wind that grew more noisome as her feet carried her higher up the mountain. Now she was on new ground. She had never before explored so far as this. The hill was steep and the road had black abysses ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... the lovely moonlight, and stumbled down into a low-ceilinged cabin, darksome and dirty, with berths which were as black and dingy, and altogether as uninviting as the shelves made to hold coffins in a noisome underground vault. ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... that they were there, and so enlist volunteers for their abatement. That riles the kept keepers of lesser fames because they have agreed that the fine art of letters should be to spray the attar of posies to counteract the noisome smells of that which is rotten in the state of the world, where the many reek and sweat in filth and poverty that the few may live in ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the shadow of the handkerchief his quivering lips move in the act of speaking, and her ear caught the words of an oath. Her situation now was far from pleasant; but it was still a relief that no one was by to witness what she saw and was doing. She conveyed pailful after pailful of the noisome shavings to the dunghill at the back of the cottage, wondering the while that the inhabitants of the dwelling were not all dead of the fever long ago. She almost gave over her task when a huge toad crawled upon her foot from its resting-place among the shavings. She shrunk ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... pincxi. Nippers prenileto. Nitre salpetro. Nobility nobelaro. Noble nobla. Nobleman nobelo. Nobleness nobleco. Nobody neniu. Nocturnal nokta. Nocuous pereiga. Nod (beckon) signodoni. No ne. No one neniu. Noise bruo. Noisome nauxza, malbonodora. Noisy (of children) petola. Nomad migranto. Nomadic migranta. Nom-de-plume pseuxdonomo. Nomenclature nomaro. Nominal nominala. Nominative nominativo. Nonchalance apatio. Nonconformist ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... not exploited, they do not exercise any influence or control in the government of the city, and they are suppressed in as far as it has been found practicable. Municipal graft is inconsiderable. There are interior courts in the city that are noisome and centers of disease and the refuge of criminals, but Congress has begun to clean these out, and progress has been made in the case of the most notorious of these, which is known as "Willow Tree Alley." This movement ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... skin will be thoroughly cleansed, and the coat beautified. Dogs should never be allowed to suffer the torment imposed on them by these detestable vermin. If the owners could only realise the importance of ridding them of these ever-noisome pests, there would be far less of snappishness, mange, fits, &c. I have seen animals literally worried to death by fleas, perfectly exhausted from incessant irritation, at last worn to a skeleton, and gradually extinguished by a creeping consumption. Besides, who (for ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... extending farther and farther west as the city melted rapidly into the country. London itself was a town lying high upon a hill—the hill of Lud—and consisted of a coil of narrow, tortuous, unseemly streets, each with a black, noisome rivulet running through its centre, and with rows of three-storied, leaden-roofed houses, built of timber-work filled in with lime, with many gables, and with the upper stories overhanging and darkening the basements. There were one hundred ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... she realise that she had deliberately stirred up a mud-heap and sent noisome insects ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... like. It is a crypt of the cathedral church. You enter it by a little door in the choir, leading to a tortuous flight of steep steps going down. It is a chamber cut out of the rock of the little island, dark, damp, and noisome. A small aperture lets in the light, as well as the sound of the sea beating on the rocks below. The roof, if you could see it in the gloom, is groined and ribbed, and above it is the mould of many graves, for in the old days bodies ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... that the Gods, being angry with the inhabitants of Thebes, sent into their land a very noisome beast which men called the Sphinx. Now this beast had the face and breast of a very fair woman, but the feet and claws of a lion; and it was wont to ask a riddle of such as encountered it; and such as answered not ...
— Stories from the Greek Tragedians • Alfred Church
... by her bitter logic. His heart, in the actual physical state of it, ached for her. She would not let him save her, he thought despairingly; indeed, perhaps she could not. For she alone knew the noisome perils of her way. He relinquished his proposition, without comment, and he could see at once what relief that ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown |
