"Spleen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a great majority of the citizen being in that combustible state in which a feeble spark will suffice to kindle a formidable conflagration, the whole Colony was inflamed and distracted by the incontinence of female spleen ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... occurred on several occasions since the sending of the missive to Louis, and they offered the stormy duke opportunity to vent his boastfulness and spleen. While Charles was pouring out his wrath against his brother-in-law, Byron, the herald, appeared at the door of the great hall. He announced himself, and, when ordered to approach, ran to the dais, kneeled on the second step, ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... dangerous to himself. It did not however prevent him from realizing the certainty of exposure of his own criminal folly which must follow any attempt of his to disgrace Ivan on a trumped-up charge. But an interview with the Lieutenant in which he could vent some of his spleen in abusive threats, would be perfectly safe, and also a source of relief. Wherefore, a half-hour after the receipt of the foolish woman's letter, Lieutenant Gregoriev and Colonel Brodsky stood face to face ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... often scale these altitudes, but keep along the terraced glades by the side of olive-shaded streams. The violets, instead of peeping shyly from hedgerows, fall in ripples and cascades over mossy walls among maidenhair and spleen-worts. They are very sweet, and the sound of trickling water seems to mingle with their fragrance in a most delicious harmony. Sound, smell, and hue make up one chord, the sense of which is pure and perfect peace. The ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... said; but he also knows (if he is not as indifferent to mortals as the nonchalant deities of Lucretius), that you are the last person I want to offend. So, if I have,—why the devil don't you say it at once, and expectorate your spleen? ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... long after the regular supper hour, they succeeded in getting a fair meal cooked and served. Concluding that it would be pleasanter all around to give Lynch as much time as possible to recover from his spleen, Bud decided to defer his return to the ranch until early morning. So when they had finished eating, they walked down to the store to arrange for hiring one of Daggett's horses again. Here they were forced to spend half an hour listening to old Pop's garrulous comments ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... not been for the timely aid of these great men, many would have been irretrievably lost in the many revolutions and contentions that followed; and, had such been the case, the monks, of course, would have received the odium, and on their heads the spleen of the disappointed student would ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... place, I felt his pulse, which was very low and languishing. These circumstances confirmed me in an opinion, which I had entertained upon the first reading of his letter, that the gentleman was far gone in the spleen. I therefore advised him to rise the next morning, and plunge into the cold bath, there to remain under water till he was almost drowned. This I ordered him to repeat six days successively; and on the seventh to repair at the wonted hour to my Lady Haughty's, and to acquaint ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... Pantheon in which Carlyle had at once assigned to him a place. He meanwhile was busy in London making friends by his conspicuous, almost obtrusive, genius, and sowing the seeds of discord by his equally obtrusive spleen. To his visit of 1831-1832 belongs one of the worst of the elaborate invectives against Lamb which have recoiled on the memory of his critic—to the credit of English sympathies with the most lovable of slightly ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... common popular saying, that as the sensation of hunger is not connected with any pleasing or gentle emotion, so it is particularly remarkable for irritating those of anger and spleen. It is not, therefore, very surprising that Count Robert, who had been so unusually long without sustenance, should receive Hereward with a degree of impatience beyond what the occasion merited, and injurious certainly to the ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... day passed. Meeting no opposition—her husband had been invited to the gobernadorcillo's—she stored up spleen; the cells of her organism seemed slowly charging with electric force, which burst out, later on, in ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... atmosphere of the States, simplicity, the cheerful, alert spirit infects the foreigner, makes him a more frank, trustful, optimistic warrior for the truth, and causes him to forget what it means to be downcast in spirit, or what spleen and hypochondria are. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... to have been thrown away," observed the colonel, betraying the spleen he was unsuccessfully striving ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... Since each, in the other's eye, having something amiss, and each loving the other well enough to bear being told of it (and the rather perhaps as neither wishes to mend it); this takes off a good deal from that rivalry which might encourage a little (if not a great deal) of that latent spleen, which in time might rise into envy, and that into ill-will. So, my dear, if this be the case, let each keep her fault, and much good may do her with it: and what an hero or heroine must he or she be, who can conquer a constitutional fault? Let it be avarice, as in some I dare not name: ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... erect one-half of the buildings ascribed to her munificence, most undoubtedly laboured, by her architectural designs, to obliterate every trace of those simple scenes which might have been regarded with reasonable veneration in all ages of the church. Dr. Clarke, in a fit of spleen with which we cannot altogether refuse to sympathize, remarks, that had the Sea of Tiberias been capable of annihilation by her means, it would have been dried up, paved, covered with churches and altars, or converted into monasteries and markets of indulgences, ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... there likely the position would have been reversed, and Kearney compelled to "take the ditch." But the Governor of the Acordada had control of details, and to his hostility and spleen, late stirred by that wordy encounter with Rivas, the latter was no doubt indebted for the partiality shown him by ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... so accomplished—an exquisite courtesy of the much abused English climate when it makes up its meteorological mind to behave like a perfect gentleman. Of course the English climate is never a rough. It suffers from spleen somewhat frequently—but that is gentlemanly too, and I don't mind going to meet him in that mood. He has his days of grey, veiled, polite melancholy, in which he is very fascinating. How seldom he lapses into a blustering manner, after all! And then it is mostly in a season when, appropriately ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... gutturally, Hogarty sketched it all out: Young Denny's calm statement of his errand, his own groundless burst of spleen, and the outcome of the try-out which had sent him hurrying back to Denny's dressing-room with many questions on his tongue's tip and a living hope in his brain which he hardly dared ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... are remarkably bright: he has a sight keen as a hawk's. His frame is a little over the ordinary height; when walking, he has a firm but heavy tread, like that of an over-worked or fatigued man. I never observed any spleen or misanthropy about him. He has a fund of quiet humour, which he exhibits at all times when he is among friends. During the four months I was with him I noticed him every evening making most careful ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... cards receive; Rouge high, play deep, to lead the ton aspire, With nightly blaze set PORTLAND-PLACE on fire; Snatch half a glimpse at Concert, Opera, Ball, A Meteor, trac'd by none, tho' seen by all; And, when her shatter'd nerves forbid to roam, In very spleen—rehearse the girls at home. Last the grey Dowager, in antient flounces, With snuff and spectacles the age denounces; Boasts how the Sires of this degenerate Isle Knelt for a look, and duell'd for a smile. The scourge and ridicule of Goth and Vandal, Her tea she sweetens, as she sips, with ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers
... letter, which I am sure I forwarded to Clifton nearly three weeks ago? If I was not really very anxious to hear what you are doing, I should have allowed you to remain till you thought it worth while to treat me like a gentleman. And now having vented my spleen in scolding you, and having told you, what you must know, how very much and how anxiously I want to hear how you and your family are getting on at Clifton, the purport of this letter is finished. If you did but know how often ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... set on bread, A moon-parch'd grain of purest wheat, With some small glitt'ring grit, to eat His choice bits with; then in a trice They make a feast less great than nice. But all this while his eye is served, We must not think his ear was sterved; But that there was in place to stir His spleen, the chirring grasshopper, The merry cricket, puling fly, The piping gnat for minstrelsy. And now, we must imagine first, The elves present, to quench his thirst, A pure seed-pearl of infant dew, Brought and besweeten'd in a blue ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... find, in dress or equipage, the least reference to the circumstances of this country? Is it not the sole ambition of the Americans to be just like other nations, without the means of supporting the resemblance? We ought not to harbor any spleen or prejudice against foreign kingdoms. This would be illiberal. They are wise, they are respectable. We should despise the man that piques himself on his own country, and treats all others with indiscriminate contempt. I wish to see much less jealousy ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... that if Pope had not been in the spleen when he wrote, he would have remembered that humility is a moral virtue; and how, asks the writer, can you know that your moral life is above that of most of the wits 'since you tell me in the same letter that many of their names were ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... ambition seemed gratified in heaping these trophies to his genius, while his meaner passions could compile one of the most voluminous of the scandalous chronicles of literature. We are mortified on discovering so fine a genius in the text humbling itself through all the depravity of a commentary full of spleen, and not without the fictions of satire. The unhappy influence his Literary Quarrels had on this great poet's life remains to be traced. He adopted a system of literary politics abounding with stratagems, conspiracies, manoeuvres, ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... I'm old enough to understand a little about human nature. Don't you think I mind what a boy says or does in a fit of spleen. We shall understand one another better as time ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... within; there you will play for me some tiny questioning Chopin prelude, and forget this dolorous night." ... He had been staring hard at the moon when I aroused him. "As you will; let us go indoors by all means, for this moon gives me the spleen." Then we moved slowly toward ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... gloom; weariness &c 841; taedium vitae, disgust of life; mal du pays &c (regret) 833; anhedonia^. melancholy; sadness &c adj.; il penseroso [It], melancholia, dismals^, blues, lachrymals^, mumps^, dumps, blue devils, doldrums; vapors, megrims, spleen, horrors, hypochondriasis [Med.], pessimism; la maladie sans maladie [Fr.]; despondency, slough of Despond; disconsolateness &c adj.; hope deferred, blank despondency; voiceless woe. prostration of soul; broken heart; despair &c 859; cave of despair, cave ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... a match to mend his fortunes, and do him credit besides. However, his wit and his languishing glances and double meanings fell on barren ground. No tire-woman on the plantation was busier than Patty during the first few days of his stay. After that he grew sulky and vented his spleen on poor Tom, winning more money from him at billiards and picquet. Since the doctor was too much the macaroni to ride to hounds and to shoot ducks, time began to hang exceeding heavy ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... starts with any one clear conviction, it is that every part of a living creature is cunningly adapted to some special use in its life. Has not his Paley told him that that seemingly useless organ, the spleen, is beautifully adjusted as so much packing between the other organs? And yet, at the outset of his studies, he finds that no adaptive reason whatsoever can be given for one-half of the peculiarities of vegetable structure; ...
— The Darwinian Hypothesis • Thomas H. Huxley
... their secretions and cleansing and purifying the Blood), Digestives, etc., etc., etc. It will thus be seen that a more complete and uniform General Tonic-Regulator could not be devised, for it acts upon the Brain, Mind, Nervous System, Digestive Organs, Spleen and Pancreas, the Bowels (keeping them in a healthy and regular manner only—not purging or weakening), upon the Heart, Lungs, Skin, Blood ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... Further to instigate her, all the real and all the fancied wrongs that her son had suffered from his father rose up before her, magnified by her imagination, and prompting her to the gratification of her unreasoning spleen. Her purpose was soon put into execution. That night Narcisse came home sober; and giving him some warm supper, followed by a delicacy that she had set aside for him as a dessert, and which, with a half human, half animal affection, she watched him devour, ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... grown highly irascible during her illness, and as Bertha and her maid were the only ones upon whom she had a chance of venting her spleen, she spared neither. She experienced a sick longing for her native land; she more than ever detested the republican country in which she was sojourning, and she heaped upon Bertha the bitterest reproaches as the instigator of the exile which had been followed by so ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... thoracico-abdominal aorta, &c. Special relations of the aorta. Aortic sounds. Aortic aneurism and its effects on neighbouring organs. Paracentesis thoracis. Physical causes of dropsy. Hepatic abscess. Chronic enlargements of the liver and spleen as affecting the relative position of other parts. Biliary concretions. Wounds ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... which it was not in the power of fortune to repair." The account which he published of this expedition on his return, shews that he did not derive from it the relief which he had expected. The spleen with which he contemplated every object that presented itself to him, was ridiculed by Sterne, who gave him the name of Smelfungus. With this abatement, the narration has much to interest and amuse, and conveys some information ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... a series of organs in the body which has long puzzled physiologists,—organs of glandular aspect, but having no ducts,—the spleen, the thyroid and thymus bodies, and the suprarenal capsules. We call them vascular glands, and we believe that they elaborate colored and uncolored blood-cells; but just what changes they effect, and just how they effect them, it has proved a very difficult matter to determine. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... as a result of the existence of some infectious disease, and the symptoms caused by it merge with the symptoms of the accompanying causative disease. The spleen is seriously involved and becomes enlarged and soft in Texas fever, ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... spite, So weakly, but he can escape your gripe That are but hands of fortune: she herself, When virtue doth oppose, must lose her threats! All that can happen in humanity, The frown of Caesar, proud Sejanus' hatred, Base Varro's spleen, and Afer's bloodying tongue, The senate's servile flattery, and these Muster'd to kill, I'm fortified against; And can look down upon: they are beneath me. It is not life whereof I stand enamour'd; Nor shall my end make me accuse my fate. The coward and the valiant man must fall, ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... whist than of algebra. I wish my good aunt would be a little less busy! And to ask me in such a way too! without ceremony, before them all, so as to leave me no possibility of refusing. That is what I dislike most particularly. It raises my spleen more than anything, to have the pretence of being asked, of being given a choice, and at the same time addressed in such a way as to oblige one to do the very thing, whatever it be! If I had not luckily thought of standing up with you I could not have got ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... Bowstead, because of Sir Jovian's brother being there, who had got the black melancholics, and could not be removed. The lady says how good she was to suffer it, and she answers, that there was no being harsh with poor Sir Jovian's brother, though he had a strange spleen at her and her son, and always grew worse when they did but go near the house; but that some measures must be taken when her son came ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... time to come!—And thou, Zabastes—" here he turned upon the old Critic, who, while Theos spoke, had surveyed him with much cynical disdain—"get thee hence! Thine arguments are all at fault, as usual! Thou art thyself a disappointed author—hence thy spleen! Thou art blind and deaf, selfish and obstinate,—for thee the very sun is a blot rather than a brightness,—thou couldst, in thine own opinion, have created a fairer luminary doubtless had the matter been ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... thou hast been perpetually intriguing against the life of yonder poor old woman. It were a kingdom to thee to gratify thy spleen with thy own hands." ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... Horry," he replied; "when you see that your fellow man is wretched, can't you give him quarter? You must have observed, ever since we darkened his door, that with spleen and toryism, this poor gentleman is in the condition of him in the parable, who was possessed of seven devils. Since we have not the power to cast them out, let us not torment him before his time. Besides, this excellent woman his wife; these charming girls his daughters. They love ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... appreciative critic. The rancorous democrat who shared with Byron the infamy of sympathetic admiration for the enemy of England and the tyrant of France found for once an apt and a fair occasion to vent his spleen against the upper classes of his countrymen in criticism of the underplot of Heywood's most celebrated play. Lamb, thinking only of the Frankfords, Wincotts, and Geraldines, whose beautiful and noble characters are the finest ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of the foreigner in Buenos Ayres during the rainy season is not an enviable one. The Englishman who finds himself in that city when the rain falls for weeks at a time becomes a victim to the spleen, the American to "the blues," the Frenchman to ennui. The houses, built with a view mainly to protection against the torrid heats of summer, are not adapted to shelter their inmates from the dampness of winter, which penetrates through doors that do not fasten and windows that do ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... was in a chronic state of rage. He was a solitary old bull, driven out, for his bad temper, from the comfortable herd of his fellows, and burning to find vent for his bottled spleen. The herd, in one of its migrations, had just arrived in the neighborhood of the great lagoons, and he, in his furious restlessness, was unconsciously playing the part ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... the dull beer-apostle till he's hoarse Vent his small spleen and spite, Fate fill his sleepless night With nightmares of invincible remorse! We sing Champagne, the sparkling soul of mirth, That bubbling o'er with laughing gas, Flashes gay sunbeams in the glass, And like our flag goes ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... hold upon his State as unshakable as Gibraltar's famous rock. Patrick Henry Hanway might now be Senator for what space he pleased, and nothing left for that opposing nobility but to glare in helpless rancor and digest its spleen. ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... probably from the pen of Park Benjamin. It defended Cooper from the charge of vilifying his country in order to make his works salable in England, but it defended him in this way. No motive of that kind was necessary to be supposed. He had an inborn disposition to pour out his bile and vent his spleen. "He is as proud of blackguarding," the article continued, "as a fishwoman of Billingsgate. It is as natural to him as snarling to a tom-cat, or growling to a bull-dog.... He is the common mark of scorn and contempt ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... go to this extent of fury, but give vent to their spleen in a more cool and calculating manner. Their temper, for being less fiery, is more bitter. They are choleric rather than bellicose. They do not fly to acts but to desires and well-laid plans of revenge. If the ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... I own, with some small spleen, A most confounded ass I've been; The glory seems an empty breath, And I am nearly bored to death With Reason, Consciousness, and Will, And other things beyond my skill, Discussed in books all darkly ...
— The Scarlet Gown - being verses by a St. Andrews Man • R. F. Murray
... common during the seventeenth century. Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick, in her Diary (1667) speaks of herself as suffering from "a fit of the spleen ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... art thou, patience? Nay, rather, where's become my former spleen? I had a wife would ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... Impudence upheld; The Governments best Friends, the Crowns best Sheild, The Great and Brave with equal Treason brands. Faith, Honour, and Allegiance strongest Bands All broken like the Cords of Sampson fall, Whilst th'universal Leprosie taints all. These poysonous shafts with greater spleen they draw, Than the Outragious Wife of Potypha. So the chast Joseph unseduc'd to her Adult'ries, ...
— Anti-Achitophel (1682) - Three Verse Replies to Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden • Elkanah Settle et al.
... for your forbearance, in keeping your thoughts to yourself, for I did not deserve that from you. If I did flirt a little with Major F., it was done more to provoke the spleen of that ill-natured old maid, who acts the part of Cerberus for his proud, pompous wife, than for any wish to ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... Tidings shall cause a Chasm in the Paper. The Persons so mention'd, read these Relations themselves, and oftentimes with much pleasure, because they receive a real Benefit by 'em: for they divert the Spleen and Vapours, natural to old Age, and so prove a happy Means of preserving them alive, much longer than some ...
— The Tricks of the Town: or, Ways and Means of getting Money • John Thomson
... those for whom it was set apart; that which was livid, small or corrupted, presaged the most fatal mischiefs. The next thing to be considered was the heart, which was also examined with the utmost care, as was the spleen, the gall, and the lungs; and if any of these were let fall, if they smelt rank or were bloated, livid or withered, it ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... proud heart break; Go show your slaves how choleric you are, And make your bondmen tremble. Must I budge? Must I observe you? must I stand and crouch 45 Under your testy humour? By the gods, You shall digest the venom of your spleen, Though it do split you; for, from this day forth, I'll use you for my mirth, yea, for my ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... sky and water spaces, but a noisy one upon the shore. Early as it was—the night dusk was still lingering—the kettles were simmering, and the Indians decked for a holiday. The sense of approaching action was powder to my nostrils, and added to my spleen; so though I went down upon the beach, and joined Cadillac and his officers, I was but surly company, and soon turned my back upon them, to ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... have heard how the grasshoppers' feasts "Excited the spleen of the birds and the beasts;" How the peacock and turkey "flew into a passion," On finding that insects "pretended to fashion." Now, I often have thought it exceedingly hard, That nought should be said of the beasts by the bard; ...
— The Quadrupeds' Pic-Nic • F. B. C.
... was mistaken in thinking that the little man could forego his recreation for more than a moment. Suddenly he burst out with a great spleen: ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... Bodies of Persons who died of the Dysentery, it would appear; that there is no Part of the alimentary Canal which has not some time or other been found inflamed, or in a state of Suppuration or Gangrene; and the Liver, Spleen, and other Viscera, have likewise been found diseased, but the Rectum and Colon have almost in all been more or less affected. The following Account I had, in the Year 1748, from the late Dr. L. Fraser, who afterwards practised in the Island of Nevis, two Days ...
— An Account of the Diseases which were most frequent in the British military hospitals in Germany • Donald Monro
... o'ermuch Held from the general gossip-ground apart, Or tersely spoke, and tart: How should they guess what eagle tore, within, His quick of sympathy for humblest smart Of human wretchedness, or probed his spleen Of scorn against ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... can bear some deformities, and justly lay them on the imperfection of human nature, which is incapable of faultless productions. When an excellent drama appears in public, and by its intrinsic worth attracts a general applause, he is not stung with envy and spleen; nor does he express a savage nature in fastening upon the celebrated author, dwelling upon his imaginary defects, and passing over his conspicuous excellences. He treats all writers upon the same impartial foot, and ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... breast; sad that he was a loathesome thing in her eyes. But that it was pure happiness just to be near her, sufficed him for the time; of the morrow, what use to think! The little, grim, gray, old man of Torn nursed the spleen he did not dare vent openly, and cursed the chance that had sent Henry de Montfort to Torn to search for his sister; while the followers of the outlaw swore quietly over the vagary which had brought them on this long ride ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... which he has given of human life has a melancholy hue, but he feels conscious that he has drawn these dark tints from a conviction that they are really in the picture, and not from a jaundiced eye or an inherent spleen of disposition. The theory of mind which he has sketched in the two last chapters accounts to his own understanding in a satisfactory manner for the existence of most of the evils of life, but whether it will have the same effect ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... decay of the teeth, and even the loss of the mental faculties. But the Abbe Robin thought the ability of the Revolutionary soldiers to endure military flogging came from the use of tea. And others thought it cured the spleen and indigestion. ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... Smelfungus travelled from Boulogne to Paris, from Paris to Rome, and so on, but he set out with the spleen and jaundice, and every object he passed by was discoloured or distorted. He wrote an account of them, but 'twas nothing but the account of his miserable feelings." "I met Smelfungus," he wrote later ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... cousin," said Rashleigh, holding a candle toward Frank and surveying him from head to foot, "right welcome to Osbaldistone Hall. I can forgive your spleen. It is hard to lose an estate and a sweetheart in one night. For now we must take possession of this poor manor-house in the name of the lawful heir, ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... leafless grove, The hoary ground, the frowning skies! Nor only through the wasted plain, Stern winter! is thy force confess'd; Still wider spreads thy horrid reign, I feel thy pow'r usurp my breast. Enliv'ning hope, and fond desire, Resign the heart to spleen and care; Scarce frighted love maintains her fire, And rapture saddens to despair. In groundless hope, and causeless fear, Unhappy man! behold thy doom; Still changing with the changeful year, The slave of sunshine and ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... all, to satisfy our self-love, and our country's custom, call it very idolatry; but it was only a little envy which we, as it were, stole to ourselves, as a sweet unction to our sores, and when these were mended we loved her the more—nay, we could do nothing less; for even the devil's spleen couldn't detect an unevenness to hang upon it a suspicion ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... the German—is for that very reason, as the baser of the two, also the most pious: he has all the MORE NEED of Christianity. To finer nostrils, this English Christianity itself has still a characteristic English taint of spleen and alcoholic excess, for which, owing to good reasons, it is used as an antidote—the finer poison to neutralize the coarser: a finer form of poisoning is in fact a step in advance with coarse-mannered people, a step towards spiritualization. The ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... yet stirring, though it was two o'clock in the afternoon; the next she was engaged with an Italian vender of artificial flowers; the day after the prince and the devil does not know who beside were with her; and so on, till patience and spleen were at daggers drawn. ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... Gin'ral Dooley, th' hayro iv th' Ph'lippeens who is at home with a large spleen which he got into him in our beautiful island possissions made a speech before th' Locoed club las' night. He said we shud niver give up th' Ph'lippeens which had been wathered be some iv th best blood in our land—he might say all. He didn't know ...
— Observations by Mr. Dooley • Finley Peter Dunne
... put the bluebottle's eggs to hatch on a piece of meat and leave the worms to do their work as they please. The lean tissues, whether of mutton, beef or pork, no matter which, are not turned into liquid; they become a pea soup of a clarety brown. The liver, the lung, the spleen are attacked to better purpose, without, however, getting beyond the state of a semi-fluid jam, which easily mixes with water and even appears to dissolve in it. The brains do not liquefy either: they simply ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... armorer's, Who, with back turn'd, and bow'd above his work, Sat riveting a helmet on his knee, He put the self-same query, but the man Not turning round, nor looking at him, said: "Friend, he that labors for the sparrow-hawk Has little time for idle questioners." Whereat Geraint flash'd into sudden spleen: "A thousand pips eat up your sparrow-hawk! Tits, wrens, and all wing'd nothings peck him dead! Ye think the rustic cackle of your bourg The murmur of the world! What is it to me? O wretched set of sparrows, one ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... has lived—my spleen rises at the thought—in many of the capitals of Europe. For six months at a time he has walked around one end of the Louvre on his way home at night without once putting his head inside. Indeed, it is probable he hasn't noticed the building, or if he has, thinks it is an arsenal. ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... normal temperature at times. There may be prostration and profuse sweats. Even without emboli there may be meningeal symptoms: headache, restlessness, delirium, dislike of light and noise, and stupor; even convulsions may occur. The urine generally soon shows albumin; there may be joint pains; the spleen is enlarged and the liver congested. Some definite cardiac symptoms are soon in evidence, with more or less progressive cardiac weakness. Occasionally there are no symptoms ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... of kingly power; he had not a regular set of upper teeth, but in the place of them one continued bone, with small lines marked on it, resembling the divisions of a row of teeth. It was a general belief he could cure the spleen, by sacrificing a white cock, and gently pressing with his right foot on the spleen of the persons as they lay down on their backs, nor was any one so poor or inconsiderable as not to be welcome, if he ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... Allen, and foul be thy fate if thou hast abandoned thy post without good and sufficient cause. By St. Anselm of the Holy Grove, thou hadst best have never been born than rouse my spleen this night. Wherefore is it that you and your men are trailing over the moor like a flock of geese when Michaelmas ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... epithet. Peterborough came to me drenched, and wailing that he had never heard such language,—never dreamed of it. And to find himself the object of it!—and, worse, to be unable to conscientiously defend himself! The pain to him was in the conscience,—which is, like the spleen, a function whose uses are only to be understood in its derangement. He had eased his conscience to every question right out, and he rejoiced to me at the immense relief it gave him. Conscientiously, he could not deny that he knew the squire's ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of a man of resolution causes him to understand at once the emptiness of criticisms based on envy or spleen, the timid man, always ready to seize upon anything that can be possibly construed into an appearance of ridicule directed against himself, will give up a project that he hears criticized without stopping to weigh the value of ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke
... be found the beginnings of the greater Chopin, but not his vast subjugation of the purely technical to the poetic and spiritual. That came later. To the devout Chopinist the first compositions are so many proofs of the joyful, victorious spirit of the man whose spleen and pessimism have been wrongfully compared to Leopardi's and Baudelaire's. Chopin was gay, fairly healthy and bubbling over with a pretty malice. His first period shows this; it also shows how thorough and painful the processes by which ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... of Hercules, laxative and tartaric, had proved its efficacy in cases of enlarged spleen, hare-lip, vertigo, apoplexy, cachexia, cacodoria, cacochymia senilis and chilblains. It was also considered to be a sovereign remedy for that distressing and almost universal ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... passed away. The life in the veins of Treason lags, Her daring color-bearers drop their flags, And yield. Now shall we fire? Can poor spite be? Shall nobleness in victory less aspire Than in reverse? Spare Spleen her ire, And think ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... va-t-il:"—The activity of Pierre-Aime Lair is only equalled by his goodness of heart and friendliness of disposition. He is all kindness. Call when you will, and ask for what you please, the object solicited is sure to be granted. He never seems to rise (and he is a very early riser) with spleen, ill-humour, or untoward propensities. With him, the sun seems always to shine, and the lark to tune her carol. And this cheerfulness of feeling is carried by him into every abode however gloomy, and every society ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... good looks; a few scoundrels who bamboozle the master of the house, and put him to sleep, for the sake of gleaning after him in the fields of the mistress of the house. We seem gay, but at bottom we are devoured by spleen and a raging appetite. Wolves are not more famishing, nor tigers more cruel. Like wolves when the ground has been long covered with snow, we raven over our food, and whatever succeeds we rend like tigers. Never was seen such a collection ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... 'Philology, Natural Science, Poetry,' etc., one shall head them according to the diseases for which they are severally good, bodily and mental,—up from a dire calamity or the pangs of the gout, down to a fit of the spleen or a slight catarrh; for which last your light reading comes in with a whey-posset and barley-water. But," continued my father, more gravely, "when some one sorrow, that is yet reparable, gets hold of your ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in the nick of time. All the pent-up spleen and hatred of Peigan Charley had culminated in an irresistible desire. He had seized a rifle from one of the camp Indians standing by, and had flung himself on the banked up defences. Even as his boss shouted, his eye ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... words that he had run a great risk; but he saw at the same time the necessity of venting all his spleen, and, to facilitate the explosion of these important avowals, he accumulated all the professions he thought most calculated to provoke ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... fury had possessed, Thy vile inhuman spirit thus? What swelling rage was in thy breast, That could occasion this disgust, And make thee show such spleen and rage, Which life can't cure ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... counsels and presence. The debate on this motion was repeatedly adjourned. While the event was doubtful, William sent Dykvelt to expostulate with Howe. Howe was obdurate. He was what is vulgarly called a disinterested man; that is to say, he valued money less than the pleasure of venting his spleen and of making a sensation. "I am doing the King a service," he said: "I am rescuing him from false friends: and, as to my place, that shall never be a gag to prevent me from speaking my mind." The motion was made, but completely failed. In truth the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... his most favourite topics, on which he is rich indeed, and in descanting on which his spleen serves him for a Muse, is the disproportionate match between Desdemona and the Moor. This is a clue to the character of the lady which he is by no means ready to part with. It is brought forward in the first scene, and he recurs ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... common law; both of them reciprocally jealous of what they were unacquainted with, and neither of them perhaps allowing the opposite system that real merit which is abundantly to be found in each. This appears on the one hand from the spleen with which the monastic writers[e] speak of our municipal laws upon all occasions; and, on the other, from the firm temper which the nobility shewed at the famous parliament of Merton; when the prelates endeavoured to procure an act, to declare all bastards legitimate in case the parents intermarried ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... some skill in turning old coats. In his letters to Pope, while he acknowledged that the versification of the poems had been greatly improved, he spoke of the whole art of versification with scorn, and sneered at those who preferred sound to sense. Pope revenged himself for this outbreak of spleen by return of post. He had in his hands a volume of Wycherley's rhymes, and he wrote to say that this volume was so full of faults that he could not correct it without completely defacing the manuscript. "I am," he said, "equally afraid ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Ford(32) desired me to sit with him at next door; which I did, like a fool, chatting till twelve, and now am got into bed. I am afraid the new Ministry is at a terrible loss about money: the Whigs talk so, it would give one the spleen; and I am afraid of meeting Mr. Harley out of humour. They think he will never carry through this undertaking. God knows what will come of it. I should be terribly vexed to see things come round again: it will ruin the Church and clergy for ever; but I hope for better. I will send this on Tuesday, ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... certain pastures in Crete, on each side of the river Pothereus, which separates the two Cretan states of Gnosus and Gortyna. There are cattle at pasture on the right and left banks of that river, but while the cattle that feed near Gnosus have the usual spleen, those on the other side near Gortyna have no perceptible spleen. On investigating the subject, physicians discovered on this side a kind of herb which the cattle chew and thus make their spleen small. The herb is therefore gathered and used as a medicine for the ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... followed, the various discontents of the time, and a recrudescence of Jacobite sentiment, gave them hopes, only to be blighted. Charles no longer, as before, reports, 'My health is perfect.' The Prince's habits had become intolerable to his friends. The 'spleen,' as he calls it, had marked him for its own. His vigorous body needed air and exercise; unable to obtain these, it is probable that he sought the refuge of despair. Years earlier he had told Mademoiselle Luci that the Princesse de Talmond 'would not let him ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... she be obliged eventually to descend to Marian's level and fight her with her own weapons? She had more than once, of late, darkly considered the question. Now she knew that so long as Marian's spleen directed itself against her, and her alone, she could never do it. She would fight for her ...
— Jane Allen: Right Guard • Edith Bancroft
... dismission could appease; that if such hirelings should be thus continued from year to year, they might at last become a burden entailed upon the nation, and be made subservient, under some ambitious prince, to purposes destructive of British liberty. These were the suggestions of spleen and animosity: for, granting the necessity of a land war, the Hanoverians were the most natural allies and auxiliaries which Great Britain could engage and employ. How insolent soever some few individual generals of that ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... thus provided for all my relations, I do hereby devise the rest of my property to the said Solomon Lazarus and Hezekiah Flint, to have and to hold for the building and endowment of an hospital for diseases of the heart, lights, liver, and spleen, as set off by the provisions in the schedule annexed to my will as ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... characters. For a short time he flung himself into their squirrel's life of busy gyrations in a cage. Then he began to feel the want of variety, and grew tired of it. It was like the life of the cloister, cut short before it had well begun. He drifted on till he reached a crisis, which is neither spleen nor disgust, but combines all the symptoms of both. When a human being is transplanted into an uncongenial soil, to lead a starved, stunted existence, there is always a little discomfort over the transition. Then, gradually, ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... grew wild and rankly as the weed, GRAHAM with TANNER waged competitive trials, And vulgar bores of Billingsgatish breed Voided spleen's venomed vials. But gay or gloomy, fluent or infirm, None heeded their dull drawls, of hours' duration. The House was clearly in for a long term Of desolate stagnation. The SPEAKER yawned upon his Chair, he ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 21, 1892 • Various
... a care Of these indefinite and spleen-bred resolves. You know not half the dangers that attend Upon a life of wand'ring, which your thoughts now, Feeling the swellings of a lofty anger, To your abused fancy, as 'tis likely, Portray without its terrors, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb |
