"Taint" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... advantage of nuts over meats is that they are absolutely free from any possible taint of disease. Those delectable foods, the walnut, the pecan, the hickory nut and the almond, are never the vehicle for parasites or other infections. Nuts are not subject to tuberculosis or any other disease which may be communicated ...
— Northern Nut Growers Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-First Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... that it should be the four men the most free from all taint of handicraft and all base commercialism, the four pens the most entirely devoted to art, that were arraigned before the public ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... even then, though sunk in earthly dross, Corrupted all, nor its ethereal touch Quite lost, but tasting of the fountain still. As some bright river, which has rolled along Through meads of flowery light and mines of gold, When poured at length into the dusky deep, Disdains to take at once its briny taint, Or balmy freshness, of the scenes it left. But keeps unchanged awhile the lustrous tinge, And here the old man ceased—a winged train Of nymphs and genii bore him from our eyes. The fair illusion fled! and, as I ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... open, but for what reason I never could make out. The further end of this vault opens into another great vault, which I shall presently describe. The passage is very dry, but the air has a cold "gravey" taint, very unpleasant to inhale. At the second landing there is a sort of recess, into which rubbish from the garden above is shot down through a spout or funnel. At the top of the passage is a doorway opening upon the back of a house in Mason-street. This passage or tunnel ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... from Apuleius was Plania, [14] and we gather from more than one notice in the poems that she was married [15] when Tibullus paid his addresses to her. If the form of these poems is borrowed from Alexandria, the gentle pathos and gushing feeling redeem them from all taint of artificiality. In no poet, not even in Burns, is simple, natural emotion more naturally expressed. If we cannot praise the character of the man, we must admire the graceful poet. Nothing can give a truer picture ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... to suspect the young man of a terrible taint—Poetry; with which idle disease if he be infected, there's no hope of him in astate course. Actum est of him for a commonwealth's man, if he goto't in rhyme once. Ben Jonson's ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... and ceremonies of the order forbid the presence of women;" and "the law proclaiming her exclusion is as unrepealable as that of the Medes and Persians." (P. 145.) Again: "Masonry requires candidates for its honors to have been free by birth; no taint of slavery or dishonor must rest upon their origin." (P. 143.) Once more this author remarks: "A candidate for Masonry must be physically perfect. As under the Jewish economy no person who was maimed or defective in his physical organism, though of the tribe ...
— Secret Societies • David MacDill, Jonathan Blanchard, and Edward Beecher
... alone my lady had a right. He told the Frenchman that this Mrs. Taylor was distantly related to him—that she had inherited the seeds of madness from her mother, as indeed Dr. Mosgrave had informed Monsieur Val; and that she had shown some fearful tokens of the lurking taint that was latent in her mind; but that she was not to be called "mad." He begged that she might be treated with all tenderness and compassion; that she might receive all reasonable indulgences; but he impressed upon Monsieur Val, that under no circumstances was she to be ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... been so pure from the smallest taint of earthliness, it can only be because he is a Seer, that he knows of crime. Not Julian's little (no, great) angel heart and life are freer from any intention or act of wrong than his. And this is best proof to me of the absurdity of ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... Harris's picture on the front page of the Times. Here was one Controller who neither looked nor acted like a megalomaniac. That wouldn't make much difference to the PD Police; as far as the officials were concerned, the ability to project telepathically and the taint of delusions of grandeur went hand in hand. Controllers were power-mad ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)
... smiling and follow the Golden Rule far nearer than those who live by trade and are blest by civilization. Ah, that I might see such a people! The nearest I ever came was at Honolulu, and there was the taint of the Christian, alack-a-day! The White Man's Burden is the weight of the load of sin, disease, death, and misfortune he has dropped on the happy ones who never knew a Christian creed. We have given them bath tubs ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... holy monster, with his lurking spies, his villainous casuistries, his flames and devils, and red-hot pincers, and whips of steel, has been defeated by the humanity he scorned and the knowledge he feared, yet he has left a taint behind him. It is still held that it ought to be an unpleasant thing ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... said that the German witnesses are imaginative and enthusiastic, and their confidence ought to be distrusted. That kind of enthusiasm is at least of a quiet sort, evidently the result of profound conviction and certainly free from any taint of worldly interest, and is by no means incompatible with the most perfect conscientiousness. If they are mistaken as to the identity of the plaintiff; if there be in truth two persons about the same age bearing a strong resemblance to the family of Miller [Mueller] and having the same identical ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... anger, and at these times the coarsest and vilest expressions would stream from his lips in a voice of crystalline purity that might have belonged to some little chorister chanting the Ave Maria. He would even try to assume a hoarse roughness of tone, seek to degrade and taint that exquisite freshness of childhood which made him resemble a bambino on the Madonna's knees. The fish-wives laughed at him till they cried; and he, encouraged, could scarcely say a couple of words without rapping out an oath. But in ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... coarseness, a possibility of weakness—which in the eyes of some, and of his sister among them, marred the grace and beauty of his features. Yet, as he was wont himself to say, when one thinks that each poor mortal is heir to a legacy of every evil trait or bodily taint of so vast a line of ancestors, lucky indeed is the man who does not find that Nature has scored up some long-owing family debt upon ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... interior; and both my eyes and spirit seemed drawn from the gloomy house—from the grey-hollow filled with rayless cells, as it appeared to me—to that sky expanded before me,—a blue sea absolved from taint of cloud; the moon ascending it in solemn march; her orb seeming to look up as she left the hill-tops, from behind which she had come, far and farther below her, and aspired to the zenith, midnight dark ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... to all lovers of freedom, to all true patriots, and to the Christian and philanthropist. It also afforded a superb opportunity for the old leaders in the South, who were not entirely relieved from the taint of secession, to come out and reconsecrate themselves to the country and her flag. Hence, Southern statesmen, who were utterly opposed to Negroes or colored men having any share in ruling at home, became very enthusiastic over the aspirations of the colored Cuban patriots and soldiers. The supporters, ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... ourselves to Him by faith. God will remit the death penalty to all who are "in Christ" and "justified by faith"; that is, we shall all rise from the dead as He rose. Apparently Paul's belief was that no one would ever have died but for the sin of Adam, a taint which has affected all Adam's descendants. Death in his view was ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... him to believe that he was in little danger of injury, much less death. Kapolski, reckless, a despiser of all things American, eagerly consented to the plan, and Ugo saw a way to rid himself of a dangerous rival without the taint of suspicion besmirching his cloak. Sallaconi was an accomplished swordsman, but it would have been unwise to send him against Quentin. Ugo himself was a splendid shot and an expert with the blade, and it was not cowardice that kept him from taking the affair in his ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... the coloring of this picture may appear, it is but a taint and imperfect sketch of the original. You must remember a thousand unutterable calamities; a thousand instances of domestic as well as national anxiety and distress; which mock description. You ought to remember them; you ought to hand ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... arranged. It is not re-formation, but re-novation, or, to go deeper still, re-generation, that the world needs; not new forms, but a new life; not the culture and development of what it has in itself, but extirpation of the old by the infusion of something now and pure that has no taint of corruption, nor any contact with evil. 'Verily, I say unto you, ye must be ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... I had a young man's differences with my cousin, as lads will fall out, but there was the making of a fine fellow in him. But it was the wife, bringing in that Greek taint, worse even than the Italian, so that there's no believing a word out ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... rivers on their backs. As the season advances and the water becomes chilled, they are flung in myriads on the shores, where the wolves and bears assemble to banquet on them. Often they rot in such quantities along the river banks as to taint the atmosphere. They are commonly from ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... Office— clerks and chiefs of certain bureaus, whom the land-grabbers kept on their private pay-rolls. This was a matter of public record. Fortunately for the government, however, it has generally managed to secure for the head of the Land Department able and incorruptible men to whom no taint of suspicion attached—men whom the land-grabbers ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... an American in his "Promise of American Life," pp. 89-99.] has observed, had no "embarrassing effects," because he shared so completely and genuinely the amusements and occupations of his neighborhood. No "taint of bookishness" disturbed the local fellowships which gave him opportunity to express in "familiar and dramatic form" of story and illustration his more substantial philosophy and so find for it the perfect speech. His neighbors called him by homely, affectionate ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... trapper will never succeed, unless he thoroughly enters into the habits of life and mind of wild animals. He must ever bear in mind how suspicious they are; how quickly their eye is caught by unusual traces; and, lastly, how strong and enduring a taint is left by the human touch. Our own senses do not make us aware of what it is disagreeable enough to acknowledge, that the whole species of man yields a powerful and wide-spreading emanation, that ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... generations. If two of these hybrids between the weak-minded and the strong-minded marry each other, one-quarter of the children will be feeble-minded, one-quarter thoroughbred strong-minded and the remaining half, though apparently strong-minded, will carry the taint in them just as their parents did. They are half-breeds. On the other hand, if two feeble-minded people marry, all of the children will be feeble-minded. Certainly we can and ought to forbid ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... and sobs and lamentations that rose around him, seemed far off and distant in his ear. "O eternity, eternity! I am going—I am going," he thought; and in that hour, strange to tell, not one of all his good deeds seemed good enough to lean on—all bore some taint or tinge, to his purified eye, of mortal selfishness, and seemed unholy before the ALL PURE. "I am going," he thought; "there is no time to stay, no time to alter, to balance accounts; and I know not what I am, but I know, O Jesus, what ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... have spoken. As the mother was a slave, the children were so also at their birth, but they had been manumitted by their father. One of them was being educated in Germany; and it was intended that both should spend their lives in that country, the taint in their blood being an insuperable bar to their ever acquiring social position at ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... merely to those who care about Africa, or the great schemes to his zeal for which he fell a martyr, but to all who take delight in the spectacle of unbounded courage and heroic ardour, unalloyed with any taint of ferocity, ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... schools the young folk are scarcely treated as human; their individuality—if they have any to begin with—is soon lost; they are known only by a number, and they are passed into the outer world like bundles of shot rubbish. There are seamen who have never cast off the peculiar workhouse taint—and no worse shipmates ever afflicted any capable and honourable soul: for these Union weeds carry the vices of Rob the Grinder and Noah Claypole on to blue water, and show themselves to be hounds who would fawn or snarl, steal or talk saintliness, lie or sneak just as interest ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... of February, about noon, we arrived at Evansville, on the Indiana side of the river. This was the prettiest place we had yet seen; and its charms were enhanced by the assurance that it was free from the taint of slavery. The rise of this little town has been rapid. Its population is about 3,000. Three "churches," with their neat and graceful spires, rising above the other buildings, were conspicuous ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... and bemirrored, upon the shelves of which reposed sorrowful examples of Doulton ware and a pair of wrought-iron candlesticks. It was a room divorced from all sense of youth and live beings, sunless, grave, unlovely; an arid room that bore to the nostrils the taint ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... civil from her military power. All states of the world, however great, fall at once when they use mercenary armies; and although it is a less instant form of error (because involving no national taint of cowardice), it is yet an error no less ultimately fatal—it is the error especially of modern times, of which we cannot yet know all the calamitous consequences—to take away the best blood and strength of the nation, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... resound in Katie's ears As sweet as when in distant years She heard them peal with jocund din A merry English Christmas in! We pass the abbey's ruined arch, And statelier grows my Katie's march, As round her, wearied with the taint Of Transatlantic pine and paint, She sees a thousand tokens cast Of England's venerable Past! Our reverent footsteps lastly claims The younger chapel of St. James, Which, though, as English records run, Not old, had seen full many a sun, Ere to the ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... neither of them had the least venereal Complaint. In a few Days afterwards, two Soldiers in other Hospitals, towards the Decline of very bad Petechial Fevers, had likewise Buboes formed in the Groin, without any Suspicion of a venereal Taint. Except in these three, I did not see any critical Buboes appear in this Fever while I was with the Troops in Germany; tho' Mr. Lovet, who served as a Mate to the Hospitals, and who was at Hoxter, where ...
— An Account of the Diseases which were most frequent in the British military hospitals in Germany • Donald Monro
... the better for the class he has to address. His powers are uncommon and unfettered in their play; his aim is worthy. He is fulfilling and will fulfil an important task as an educator of the people, if all be not marred by a taint of self-love and arrogance now obvious in his discourse. This taint is not surprising in one so young, who has done so much, and in order to do it has been compelled to great self-confidence and light heed of the authority ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... young in mind and in habits long after youth had left her. I was said to be the image of what she was when she rivalled Madame de Hautefort in the affections of the late King. You must consider, sweetheart, that he was the most moral of men, and that with him love meant a passion as free from sensual taint as the preferences of a sylph. I think my good grandmother loved me all the better for this fancied resemblance. She would arrange her jewels about my hair and bosom, as she had worn them when Buckingham came wooing for his master; ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... see its close. In some of his writings he affects one unpleasantly, gives an uncanny feeling; one divines the invalid as well as the mystic back of them; there is a hectic flush, perhaps a neurotic taint. Beautiful, yes, but not the beauty of health and sanity. It is the same indescribable feeling I get in reading that pathetically beautiful book, "The Road-Mender," by "Michael Fairless"—the gleam of the White Gate is seen all along ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... bottle of it," answered Tom: "I wouldn't use such rot-gut stuff, no, not for vinegar. 'Taint half so good as that red sherry you had up here oncet; that was poor weak stuff, too, but it did well to make milk punch of; it did well ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... she could not define: the warmth of Love, the sense of protection and security—almost as if unseen arms, that were strong and devoted and selfless, held her closely, shielding her from evil and from the taint of selfish human passions. ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... since you ask me," was the reply, "I'd shape a course due north. We'd be in the track of craft making up and down Channel before it gets dark. If we don't fall in with any vessel, we can carry on. 'Taint so very far to land, considering the number of hands we've got in ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... duplicity on his part, he got plenty of slander. His evil genius had prompted him, not to listen seriously to the temptings of the monk, but to deal with him on his own terms. He was obliged to justify himself against public suspicion with explanations and pamphlets, but some taint of the calumny stuck by him to ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... hold it a religious duty To love and worship children's beauty; They've least the taint of earthly clod, They're freshest from the hand of God; With heavenly looks they make us sure The heaven that made them must be pure; We love them not in earthly fashion, But with a beatific passion. I chanced to, yesterday, behold ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... against her, but I do as I'd be done by, and give you a friendly warning, such as I'd have anybody do by a child of mine, if they was around the world. For my part, I always consider it a safe plan to wait and see what other people think about them, before I make up to anybody myself. 'Taint expected that a woman that's got a character to lose should commit herself in the eyes of the world. Remember, too, that on account of your being in a public capacity, so to speak, you'd ought to be more particular about your morals. It's expected ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... world, as the daughter of Norman Westfall, to protect her from any consequences incident to his possible discovery and enforced return to Houdania, it is impossible to say. Hating royalty as he did, he may have sought thus to shield his daughter from its taint. Why he weakened and consigned the secret to paper—how or when he hid it in an ancient candlestick in the home of Norman Westfall, remains shrouded in utter mystery. It is but one of the ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... the mangroves brown, where the mud-reef sucks and draws, Moored by the heel to his own keel to wait for the land-crab's claws! He is lazar within and lime without, ye can nose him far enow, For he carries the taint of a musky ship — the reek of the slaver's dhow!" The skipper looked at the tiering guns and the bulwarks tall and cold, And the Captains Three full courteously peered down at the gutted hold, And the Captains Three called courteously ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... it made him head of the Government. And it was to this noble quality of his character that he owed his death. Corruption had grown up in connection with the offices of State, and Garfield's last mission was to purge the Government of this taint. He was resolved to set his face against "the waste of time and the obstruction to public business caused by the greedy crowd of office-seekers." And he also announced that "rigid honesty and faithful service would be required from every ...
— The Story of Garfield - Farm-boy, Soldier, and President • William G. Rutherford
... neither Day nor Night, Knowledge or Ignorance, Vice or Virtue; but a kind of Olio of them all. Even the highest Characters have their weak-sides, and the most refin'd, their Defects and their Failures, with all the Infirmities which Flesh is heir to, and this World where we dwell is apt to taint Men with. Nay I must tell you in some Verses of mine, which never fell ...
— A Dialogue Between Dean Swift and Tho. Prior, Esq. • Anonymous
... unwillingly, to the discredit of the Weymouth pine,—a symptom of some ancestral taint, perhaps,—that it suffers less than most trees from being thus encroached upon. Yet it does not entirely escape. True, it leans neither to left nor right, its trunk is seldom contorted; if it grow at all it must grow straight ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... cause we are here speaking of. This consideration of the thing itself, at a time when I thought not I the least on the subject which I am now treating of, suggested it to me. And if this be a weakness to which all men are so liable, if this be a taint which so universally infects mankind, the greater care should be taken to lay it open under its due name, thereby to excite the greater care ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... chamber low, Neath the daisies and the dew, Can you hear me? Can you know All the good I owe to you? You, whose spirit dwells alway Free from earthly taint and thrall! You who taught me that sweet day God's dear love is ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... insidious, fetid force as best she might. She was not evil by nature. She had been well grounded in principles of righteousness. Nevertheless, though she maintained the integrity of her character, that character suffered from the taint. There developed over the girl's original sensibility a shell of hardness, which in time would surely come to make her less scrupulous in her ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... was not aware of it. Is inconstancy to women cruelty and want of principle? If so, all men must bear the brunt of the accusation with me. For men were originally barbarians, and always looked upon women as toys or slaves; the barbaric taint is not out of us yet, I assure you,—at any rate, it is not out of me. I am a pure savage; I consider the love of woman as my right; if I win it, I enjoy it as long as I please, but no longer,—and not all the forces of heaven and earth should bind me to any woman ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... description of how he had striven to find a girl who had the strong qualities his family germ plasm seemed to have lost, mainly, I gathered, resistance to a taint much like manic depressive insanity. And as he talked, it was borne in on me that, after all, contrary to my first prejudice, there was nothing very romantic indeed about disregarding the plain teachings of science on the subject ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... translator less immediately under Wyclif's influence. The freedom with which the Bible admittedly circulated for many years, and the well-known allusion by Sir Thomas More to an English translation untouched by any taint of heresy, point also in the same direction. That the second version is really only a revision of the first can hardly be adduced as a strong argument on the other side. The ethics of literary acknowledgment ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... which had so unintentionally been exposed to his view? Why, too, had he evinced so much anxiety to remove from his mind all unfavourable impressions in regard to his mother? Why have been so energetic in his caution not to suffer a taint of impurity to attach to her memory? Why should he have supposed the possibility of such impression, unless there had been sufficient cause for it? In what, moreover, originated his triumphant expression of feature, when, on that occasion, he reminded him that HIS name was not Reginald? ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... of consumption; some phases of struma or scrofula; many forms of cachectic feebleness and impaired physical build—what are denominated delicate states of constitution—these and other types of disease are so directly or indirectly connected with the "specific" taint, it becomes impossible to be too careful in tracing it out, or in measuring the degree to which it extends in the field of morbid phenomenon, in our efforts to improve the vitality of the colored people and to enlighten them ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... of the Triumph of Death that one stays longest, trying to understand the dainty treatment of so horrible a subject. Those fair ladies riding on horseback with so brave a show of cavaliers, even they too must come at last to be just dust, is it, or like that swollen body, which seems to taint even the summer sunshine, lying there by the wayside, and come upon so unexpectedly? What love-song was that troubadour, fluttering with ribbons, singing to that little company under the orange-trees, cavaliers and ladies returned from the chase, or whiling away a summer afternoon ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... silent. At last I turned to him in the Cabinet meeting and I said, 'I should like to hear from the Attorney General on the legality of what we are doing.' Mr. Knox looked up and said, 'Mr. President, if I were you I should not have the slightest taint of ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... shrewdness of your reply," rejoined Aram; "but note how far more pure and lovely are its waters in these retreats, than when washing the walls of the reeking town, receiving into its breast the taint of a thousand pollutions, vexed by the sound, and stench, and unholy perturbation of men's dwelling-place. Now it glasses only what is high or beautiful in nature—the stars or the leafy banks. The wind that ruffles it, is clothed with perfumes; the rivulet that swells it, ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... "Oh, 'taint bein' poor I mind," laughed Willie, now quite himself again. "It's knowin' nothin' an' bein' nothin' that discourages me. If I'd only had the chance to learn somethin' when I was a youngster I wouldn't have to be goin' it blind now ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... democracy detected in him no taint of the patronizing or supercilious, and if he was new to the backwoods, he paid his arrears of knowledge with the ready ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... that they are doing it in a mean way, sir; but of course soldiers hate thieves, and so the merest taint of a suspicion serves to make some of the men feel rather shy about having anything unnecessary to do ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... Psyche—fresh upon her lips Alit the visionary butterfly, 290 Waiting my word to enter and make bright, Or flutter off and leave all blank as first. This body had no soul before, but slept Or stirred, was beauteous or ungainly, free From taint or foul with stain, as outward things 295 Fastened their image on its passiveness; Now, it will wake, feel, live—or die again! Shall to produce form out of unshaped stuff Be Art—and further, to evoke a soul From form be nothing? This new ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... with all, compact of courtesy: Real heroism is real piety: Before small truth great falsehoods shrink and faint If pots stain worse than pipkins, it were quaint To charge the pipkins with impurity: Freedom I crave: who craves not to be free? Yet life that must be feigned for, leaves a taint. Ill conduct brings repentance?—If you prate This wise to me, why prate not thus to all Philosophers and prophets, and to Christ? Not too much learning, as some arrogate, But the small brains of dullards have sufficed To make us wretched ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... it would be easy to sell the lands to the government for the benefit of the negro, by resorting to the usual methods of influencing votes, Senator Dilworthy was unwilling to have so noble a charity sullied by any taint of corruption—he was resolved that not a vote should be bought. Nobody could get anything definite from Laura about these matters, and so gossip had to feed itself chiefly upon guesses. But the effect of it all was, that Laura was considered to be very wealthy and likely to be vastly more ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... "'Taint 'umanly possible," declared the new arrival, staggering down the steps, "fer a 'ealthy sailorman to git drunk on coloured water just 'cause the publican calls it beer! I ain't drunk; I'm only miserable. Gimmee ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... shook his head. "That cuts no ice. Hard luck, sonny, but we've got to take our medicine in this world. 'Taint no medicine for kids, though," ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... bags, ground again in the mill, then replaced in the bags, and pressed a second time. The water used in the process of making oil must be quite pure; the mill, press, bags, and vessels sweet and clean, as the least taint would ruin the quality of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various
... as a natural consequence of the above, limitations to the contact of persons of differing castes. If a Brahman cannot eat with a Sudra, because it supposedly brings a taint to his pure blood, no more can he, with impunity, come into personal contact with him. The touch of such is pollution to his august and pure person; and the very air the low castes breathe brings to his soul and body taint and poison. This ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... voice of the angel; and early in the morning he found those men, and by his preaching he converted them unto the faith, and being converted, he baptized them in that fountain, and when baptized, he purified them from the leprous taint of either man. And this miracle when published abroad, was accounted a fair presage and a present sanction of the future city. And the angel, at the prayers of Patrick, removed far from thence an exceeding huge stone which lay in the wayside, and which ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... the blood of other races. It is a well-known fact in the crossing of breeds that the best traits predominate in the result. We in this land, have gained much from the purity of those bloods; we have suffered little from the taint. ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... there was, a light but bitter air drawing irregularly down out of the north-west, blew directly from the man to the herd, which was too far off, however, to catch the ominous taint and take alarm. Pete's first care was to work around behind the herd till this danger should be quite eliminated. For a time his hunger was forgotten in the interest of the hunt; but presently, as he toiled his slow way through the deep of ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... said Lilac, drawing up her little figure. "I'm stronger nor what I look. 'Taint the work as I mind—" She stopped, and her eyes filled suddenly ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton
... "'Taint a question of what we couldn't do. What can we do? He's got money and plenty of it cached somewhere about the old camp, and five hundred dollars of it's mine. That's what I want. I don't care a damn what they do with him so long as they don't send him to prison ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... that kingdom wage war on wrong, And the clash of their swords is sweet as song; Fair are the maids, and so pure from taint The flash of their eyes turns sinner to saint; There reptile is none, nor the ravening beast; There light has no shadow, no end ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... "Shraj"oil extracted from rape seed but especially from sesame. The Persians pronounce it "Sraj" (apparently unaware that it is their own word "Shrah"juice in Arabic garb) and have coined a participle "Musayrij" e.g., B-i- musayrij, taint of sesame-oil applied especially to the Jews who very wisely prefer, in Persia and elsewhere, oil which is wholesome to butter which is not. The Moslems, however, declare that its immoderate use in cooking taints the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... Continent. Next day, Dr. Mosgrave, a mental specialist, arrived from London. He was fully informed of the history of Lady Audley, examined her, and finally reported to Robert: "The lady is not mad, but she has a hereditary taint in her blood. She has the cunning of madness, with the prudence of intelligence. She is dangerous." He gave Robert a letter addressed to Monsieur Val, Villebrumeuse, Belgium, who, he said, was the proprietor and medical superintendent ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... Hal's memory. He stared at the sinister oblong of type, vaguely sensing in its covert promises the taint, yet failing to apprehend the full ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... there no taint of lesser passion, nothing of less noble emotion; only a fearless and overwhelming acknowledgment of her craving to employ the gifts with which her womanhood endowed her—love and life, ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... virtue and the moral sublime. His respectable Books on the Opera and other topics are now all forgotten, and crave not to be mentioned. To me he is not supremely beautiful, though much the gentleman in manners as in ruffles, and ingeniously logical:—rather yellow to me, in mind as in skin, and with a taint of obsolete Venetian Macassar. But to Friedrich he is thrice-dear; who loves the Sharp faceted cut of the man, and does not object to his yellow or Extinct-Macassar qualities of mind. Thanks to that wandering Baltimore ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... misshapen little scoundrel's eye, when bringing home her husband in a state of beastly intoxication, and for this reason, independently of her knowledge of his vile and heartless disposition, and infamous character, she detested him. After entering, he looked about him, and even with the taint light of the rush she could mark that his unnatural and revolting features were lit up ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... so human, and a youth of all but monastic seclusion had prepared her to love the man who aimed with frank energy at the joys of life. A taint of pedantry would have repelled her. She did not ask for high intellect or great attainments; but vivacity, courage, determination to succeed, were delightful to her senses. Her ideal would not have been a literary man at all; ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... purity as a mere human being. It was contended, that having been predestined from the beginning as the Woman, through whom the divine nature was made manifest on earth, she must be presumed to be exempt from all sin, even from that original taint inherited from Adam. Through the first Eve, we had all died; through the second Eve, we had all been "made alive." It was argued that God had never suffered his earthly temple to be profaned; had even ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... bee-life, I would not introduce the subject of heredity. But you know, Miss Martin, that such racial characteristics are transmitted, or transmissible, I should say, by sex opposites. Thus, an epileptic mother is more likely to give her taint to a son than to a daughter.... Yes, I mean all that, and more," he went on, seeing the look of horror, not unmixed with fear, in Doris's eyes. "There must be no more irritating of Siddle, or playing on his feelings—by you, at any rate. Treat him gently. If he insists on making love to you, be as ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... wild-hearted, pitifully ignorant. I thought that love had come to me. Girls are so eager for love. They snatch at the shadow of it.—That is what I did.—I am not trying to plead for myself.—Some things are not to be forgiven.—Somewhere in my nature there was a taint—a plague-spot.—If life is given me, I shall find it and root it out. I only ask for time to do that. But meanwhile I have done what I could. I have told you the truth. I have set you free. I have ...
— The Faith Healer - A Play in Three Acts • William Vaughn Moody
... set guards and send telegraph descriptions of him in all directions. 'Taint likely he can get clean away. He'll be a marked ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... and seek the food for mind and soul which gives rest and peace. Seek Christ, and through him victory over self and over sin. Do something to brighten your home life and to honor your Master. Clear your soul from the taint of vanity. Do not rejoice in conquests, either that your power to allure may be seen by other women, or for the pleasure of rousing passionate, feelings that gratify your love of excitement. It must happen, no doubt, that frank and generous women will excite ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... the man, with a facetious gesture. "See? The fight came through these here woods, here. 'Taint been much over twenty-four hours, I reckon, since every one o' them-ah sort o' shut-up-fan-shape sort o' fish-traps had a gray-jacket in it layin' flat down an' firin' through the rails, sort o' random-like, only not much so." His manner of speech seemed a sort of harlequin patchwork from the ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... Apostle did not shrink from the society of his body, as regards the nature of the body, in fact in this respect he was loth to be deprived thereof, according to 2 Cor. 5:4: "We would not be unclothed, but clothed over." He did, however, wish to escape from the taint of concupiscence, which remains in the body, and from the corruption of the body which weighs down the soul, so as to hinder it from seeing God. Hence he says expressly: "From the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... and innocent he lies; Like some small angel strayed, His face still warmed by God's own smile, That slumbers unafraid; Or like some new embodied soul, Still pure from taint of sin— My thoughts are reverent as I stoop To tuck ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... developing a collection agency, and gradually represented the Bad Accounts Department of more and more important concerns. At thirty- five he was out of debt. They were living well—too well it proved, for his nervous health. There must have been a neurotic taint, as expressed in Aunt Fannie's asthma. Early that fall he had his first attack of hay-fever. For years he had been self-indulgent; he always drank when drinks were offered; he used much tobacco and rich food. ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... a diseased imagination and morbid feelings; the latter, beautiful and virtuous, and instilling something of her own excellence into the wild heart of her brother, but not enough to cure the deep taint of his nature. The third person was a wizard; a small, gray, withered man, with fiendish ingenuity in devising evil, and superhuman power to execute it, but senseless as an idiot and feebler than a child to all ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... his father. "'Taint no door open to us or the likes on us. There ain't no open door for the likes of us but the ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... the scene. At the spot where the game had entered the water stood the black hound, sniffing the air for some taint of ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XIII, Nov. 28, 1891 • Various
... steps, and left me darkling in the abyss of wretchedness. Such as you describe this happy fair, was once my Serafina, rich in every grace of mind and body which nature could bestow. Had it pleased Heaven to bless her with a lover like Renaldo! but no more, the irrevocable shaft is fled. I will not taint your enjoyment ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... made the world, entered into the womb of the Virgin in the form (if I may with reverence say so) of a new organic cell; and around it, through the virtue of his creative energy, a material body grew again of the substance of his mother, pure of taint and clean as the first body of the first man was clean when it passed out under his hand in the beginning of all things. In Him thus wonderfully born was the virtue which was to restore the lost ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... the Will-o'-the-Wisp floating above the quagmire which held them fast. They ran after the stone that was to turn all to gold, or the elixir that should conquer death, or the signs in the heavens that should foretell their destinies; and the taint of this may be traced even when the dark period that followed was clearing away. Four hundred years after Roger's death, his illustrious namesake, Francis Bacon, was formulating his Inductive Philosophy, and with complete cock-sureness was teaching mankind ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... "'Taint no gal's picture," offered the man at the fire. He had removed his tin cup and was engaged in stirring its grimy contents with a small stick. "That's a charm; some kind of hoodoo business that one o' them priests ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... Khein Lakonlen, is entitled to the first rank. He composed about forty-nine books in lyric and dramatic verse, besides epigrams and elegies. Of his many poems, the few that remain afford passages of much elegance and sweetness, and even of sublimity,—almost sufficient to atone for the taint of grossness he derived from the licentious imagination of his land and time. While yet hardly out of his infancy, he was laid at the feet of the monarch, and reared in the palace at Lophaburee. Some dramatic pieces composed ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... And, like the haggard, check at every feather That comes before his eye. This is a practice As full of labour as a wise man's art: For folly that he wisely shows is fit; But wise men, folly-fall'n, quite taint ...
— Twelfth Night; or, What You Will • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... blundered on it unwittingly, eaten ignorantly and surely died?... Or was he going mad? Good God! Could that be it? Was there something they hadn't told him—a strange taint in his blood, or his mother's blood.... Would he end his days in a madhouse.... What a fate, what a dreadful fate! A slavering gray-headed man, wandering through the Valley of the Black ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... do occur do not depend on the close interbreeding itself, but on the tendency it has to perpetuate any constitutional weakness or other hereditary taints; and he attempts to prove this by the argument that "if crosses act by virtue of being a cross, and not by virtue of removing an hereditary taint, then the greater the difference between the two animals crossed the more beneficial will that act be." He then shows that, the wider the difference the less is the benefit, and concludes that a cross, as such, ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... in the scale with harmonic interpretation of instrumental rather than true vocal suggestion. His tunes are pathetic, melodious, and of truly national and popular character, the best of them almost unaccountably free from the indefinable secular taint that such qualities are apt to introduce, and which the bad following of his example did very quickly introduce in the hands of less sensitive artists. They are ...
— A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn-Singing • Robert Bridges
... morality and medical knowledge among their unmarried women, it did not take many years after the appearance of the Whites to taint the race throughout with certain diseases. A cold-blooded passage in Crozet's journal tells of the beginning of this curse. Though not altogether unskilful surgeons, the Maoris knew virtually nothing of medicine. Nor do they show much nervous power when attacked ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... anxious year there had been fear of lung trouble, and mental agitation of any kind told quickly upon him. Margot's thoughts flew longingly to the northern glen where the wind blew fresh and cool over the heather, with never a taint of smoke and grime to mar its God- given purity. All that would be medicine indeed, after the year's confinement in the murky city! Ron would lift up his head again, like a plant refreshed with dew; body and mind alike would then ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... (and among those who scaled the carriages, were many of the commonest men and boys), than for its innocent vivacity. For, odd as it may seem to say so, of a sport so full of thoughtlessness and personal display, it is as free from any taint of immodesty as any general mingling of the two sexes can possibly be; and there seems to prevail, during its progress, a feeling of general, almost childish, simplicity and confidence, which one thinks of with a pang, when the Ave Maria has rung ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... to God," Lincoln said, in response to the serenade, "for this approval of the people; but while grateful for this mark of their confidence in me, if I know my heart, my gratitude is free from any taint of personal triumph. I do not impugn the motives of any one opposed to me. It is no pleasure to me to triumph over any one, but I give thanks to the Almighty for this evidence of the people's resolution to stand by free government and ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... surgeon shook his head. "Captain Sharkey," said he, "it would be an ill deed to speak you false. The taint is on you. No man on whom the leper scales have rested is ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... masculine, naive, rowdyish, Laugher, weeper, worker, idler, citizen, countryman, Saunterer of woods, stander upon hills, summer swimmer in rivers or by the sea, Of pure American breed, of reckless health, his body perfect, free from taint from top to toe, free forever from headache and dyspepsia, clean-breathed, Ample-limbed, a good feeder, weight a hundred and eighty pounds, full-blooded, six feet high, forty inches round the breast and back, Countenance sunburnt, ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs |
