"Blight" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the colonel's words. He is thinking—thinking with a bursting heart and whirling brain. For a time all sense of the loss of his only son seems deadened in face of this undreamed-of, this almost incredible shadow that has come to blight the sweet and innocent life that is so infinitely dear to him. What can he say to Bessie when he meets those beautiful, pleading, trusting, anxious eyes? She has borne up so bravely, silently, patiently. Their journey ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... Considine would be taken off to see the stables, and Gabrielle conducted to a walled garden, heavy with the scent of ripening fruit, where there was no shade but that of huge apple trees, frosted with American blight, that reminded her, in their passive mellowness, of the people who owned them. Nothing more violent than archery, in its old and placid variety, ever invaded the lives of these county families. If it had not been for the headaches with ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... with straight rows of window-frames; but both walls and roof were mouldering into ruin, and looked as though they must before long sink into the brawling waters that were sapping the foundations. A more mournfully-dilapidated place I had never seen. A blight seemed to have fallen upon it; some solemn curse might be brooding over it, and slowly working out its ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... cause, after they had gone through the winter of 1950 and 1951, at a temperature of nineteen below zero without injury. It may have been they were caught last fall by a hard freeze in full foliage, early before the apples were all picked; and, again, it may be blight. I hope not. But this I do know, the hickory and black walnut in their natural habitat were ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... waltz. For what would be sleep if it did not contrast life? Then I came to a solitary chamber, in which a girl, in her tenderest youth, knelt by the bedside in prayer, and I saw that the death-spirit had passed over her, and the blight was on the leaves of the rose. The room was still and hushed, the angel of Purity kept watch there. Her heart was full of love, and yet of holy thoughts, and I bade her dream of the long life denied to her,—of a happy home, of the kisses ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... had barred the gateway lay strewn in a sprouting undergrowth, and naught but the kitchen middens remained to prove that once they had sheltered human tenants. Phorenice's influence seemed to have spread as though it were some horrid blight over the whole face of what was once a smiling and an ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... a woman, who has cursed my life, blasted my prospects, and ruined my youth; a woman who gained my early affection only to blight and wither it; a woman who should be nearer to me and dearer than all else, and yet who is further than the uttermost depths of hell from me in sympathy or feeling; a woman that I should cleave to, but from whom I have been flying, ready ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... a version of a moral sentence. The moral law lies at the centre of Nature and radiates to the circumference. What is a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun—it is a sacred emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow of winter overtakes in the fields. Who can guess how much firmness the sea-beaten rock has taught the fisherman? How much tranquillity has been reflected to man from the ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... done? Keep out of his way, at all costs, if he be grown up. If it be a child, labor day and night, as you would with a tendency to paralysis, or distortion of limb, to prevent this blight on its life. ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... these shores, dear Gertrude, unless you are honoured with the chivalry that belongs to them? What wind, what blight, can harm me while within the circle of your presence; and what sleep can bring me dreams so dear as ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... no untimely blight fall on thy garland of love, no thorns be found with its glowing blossoms, no canker-worm of jealousy feed on ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... Knox, in spite of her parents' watchfulness and her father's absolute commands, our grief and indignation knew no bounds. The pair went to St. Louis and were married. The Colonel and his wife never recovered from the shock, which seemed to blight the happiness of their home. They never saw their child again. There was no reconciliation between the parties, and the beloved, misguided daughter died in six months after leaving home. He who treacherously beguiled her away from her ...
— 'Three Score Years and Ten' - Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other - Parts of the West • Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve
... believed, and his mother taught him, filling all things and meaning all things,—no Power with whom, in his last extremity, awaits him a final refuge. With the quickening doubt falls a tenfold blight on the world of poetry, both that in Nature and that in books. Far worse than that early chill which the assertions of science concerning what it knows, cast upon his inexperienced soul, is now the shivering death which its pretended ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... merits of a scarlet japonica and a double fuchsia, giving the palm of merit to the former, though the latter had some wondrous lobes; and I was also asked my opinion whether her favourite maidenhair fern would survive a sudden and unaccountable blight which had fallen upon it a ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Spencer's departure, or the early-falling dusk, had brought back all her misery to Toni's mind, banishing in a flash all her recent joyful animation; and when, after observing her for a moment, Herrick came forward, he saw that a blight had fallen ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... spider out along the south wall—ugh, ugh," persisted Simon, without seeming to hear her; "and your new g'raniums a'most covered wi' blight. I wur a tacklin' one of 'em just ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... some more,—and will be, I hope! For the Destinies are opulent; and send here and there a man into the world to do work, for which they do not mean to pay him in money. And they smite him beneficently with sore afflictions, and blight his world all into grim frozen ruins round him,—and can make a wandering Exile of their Dante, and not a soft-bedded Podesta of Florence, if they wish to get a Divine Comedy out of him. Nay that ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... this angry aspect of the waters has been acclaimed as one of the origins of that river-dragon idea which used to be common in south Italy, before the blight of Spaniardism fell upon the land and withered up the pagan myth-making faculty. There are streams still perpetuating this name—the rivulet Dragone, for instance, which falls into the Ionian not far ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... for the first time been awakened to woman's privileges in tergiversation even when it involves another person's possible blight. That Bathsheba was a firm and positive girl, far less inconsequent than her fellows, had been the very lung of his hope; for he had held that these qualities would lead her to adhere to a straight ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... surf, under the skilful guidance of Congdon, the boat moved slowly along the line of beach to the line of cliff. All was open as the day. The blazing sun picked out each detail of jut and hollow. Evidently the poisonous vapours from the volcano had not spread their blight here, for the face of the precipice was bright with many flowers. So close in moved the boat that its occupants could even see butterflies fluttering above the bloom. But that which their eager eyes sought was still denied them. No opening offered in that smiling cliff-side. Not by so ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... months' siege ended at last, but it was not until the brightness of May was on the fields outside, and the deadly blight of famine on all within, that a haggard, wasted-looking deputation came down from the upper city to treat with ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a long time, happily absorbed, and Mrs. Orton Beg's memory, as she watched her, slipped back inevitably to her own love days, till tears came of the inward supplication that Evadne's future might never know the terrible blight which had fallen upon ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... speech, neither promise nor confession, but allowing love to cherish its fairest hopes without fear or torment! How pure a memory for life! What a free blossoming of all the flowers that spring from the soul, which a mere trifle can blight, but which, at that ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... enter into, support, and direct—like Macbeth's witches—the evil thoughts of men; they rejoice in the battle, in the wounds and pain and death of men; they shriek and scream and laugh around the head of the hero when he goes forth, like Cuchulain, to an unwearied slaughter of men. They make the blight, the deadly mist, the cruel tempest. To deceive is their pleasure; to discourage, to baffle, to ruin the hero is their happiness. Some of them are monsters of terrific aspect who abide in lakes or in desolate rocks, as the terrible tri-formed horse whom Fergus mac ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... the almost exclusive, publication of trash, and taxing him to support such publications, is the fostering patron to which he owes his difficulties. Thus does America nip her young genius in the bud; and when it perchance comes to flower and fruit, she is not behind-hand with a blight. The unknown production of the American author is brought into a depressing competition with works which have been tried in England, and found certain of success in America. The popular British author, whom the public have long demanded, is furnished at the lowest price—while the yet unheard-of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... clearly with the animals and the mermen. But those who were in the beginning born of Terra shall always have a common heritage. There are and will be other lost colonies among the stars. We could not have been the only outlaws who broke forth during the rule of Pax, and before the blight of that dictatorship, there were at least two expeditions that went forth ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... mine, take care! Take care! The great white witch rides out to-night. Trust not your prowess nor your strength, Your only safety lies in flight; For in her glance there is a snare, And in her smile there is a blight. ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... I speak to you so! How could I! Oh, that some blight may come upon this unhappy tongue! I, who have had nothing but good from you! I to insult you, who are the author of all my happiness! Oh, sire, forgive me, forgive me! for ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and to remember with all his soul. Every day of his life he had missed her; never was there a night that she was not in his thoughts before he dropped to sleep. What would have been his career had fate brought them together before the blight fell upon her? What intimacies, what enjoyment, what ideals nurtured and made real. And the companionship, the instant sympathy, the sureness of an echo in her heart, no matter how low and soft his whisper! These thoughts were never absent from ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the Romans at their first landing, which would carry them far eastward of Cornwall. Hals thought that the Mawgan figures were brought from the old chapel of their manor-house, which stood here by the Carminow creek; but Blight is of opinion that the effigies were removed from Bodmin. In Loe Bar we have a formation slightly resembling the famous Chesil Ridge of Dorset, and the bar at Slapton Sands in Devon; but this Loe Bar is on a much smaller scale. Being formed ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... Spaniards found in Cuba and St. Domingo had withered before them as if struck by a blight. Many died under the lash of the Spanish overseers; many, perhaps the most, from the mysterious causes which have made the presence of civilisation so fatal to the Red Indian, the Australian, and the Maori. It is with men as it is with animals. The ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... prolong, but there are others in which time no longer is; and as Mary shrank in the blight of Judas' stare, both felt that the culmination of ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... been but one oasis in the desert of gloom through which he had traveled, and that had been on his interminable trip across the continent, when for ten brief minutes his blight had been lifted, and he had caught a breath of the incense for which ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... regard of all, shall we find any thing to repay us for the swelling extacy of our young hearts, as those who have cradled and loved us grow proud in our successes? For myself, a life that has failed in every prestige of those that prophesied favourably—years that have followed on each other only to blight the promise that kind and well-wishing friends foretold—leave but little to dwell upon, that can be reckoned as success. And yet, some moments I have had, which half seemed to realize my early dream of ambition, and rouse my spirit within me; but what were they all compared to my boyish glories? ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... echo of his footsteps might never float down from heavenly paths to gladden his ears; yet, though he realized this, there was a wonderful peace and joy in thinking of the lad as happy and joyous in a sphere where nothing would ever blight his happiness; where he had found those who bore him a great love and had been long waiting for his coming. Trafford sat down on the great pile of broken timbers, and once more looked upward at the stars. Pure and unwavering ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... seems, does not always consort with a powerful frame," he said; "but how come you to have scraped acquaintance with these pirates, whose existence is a blight upon the commerce of the Mediterranean, and a disgrace ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... A rheum, like blight, hangs on the briars, And from the clammy ground suspires A sweet frail sick autumnal scent Of stale frost furring weeds long spent; And wafted on, like one who sleeps, A feeble vapour hangs or creeps, Exhaling on the fungus mould A breath ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... hours, lest I myself mislead By blind desire wherewith my heart is torn, E'en while I speak away the moments speed, To me and pity which alike were sworn. What shade so cruel as to blight the seed Whence the wish'd fruitage should so soon be born? What beast within my fold has leap'd to feed? What wall is built between the hand and corn? Alas! I know not, but, if right I guess, Love to such joyful hope has only led To plunge my weary life in worse distress; ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... and golden, looked dull and lifeless in the shadow of her hat; and over the whole dainty face and figure there was an indefinable blight, a sort of shadow which dimmed and blurred their ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... young soldier was dead; and something more than ordinary reasoning will be necessary to persuade the two cousins—the younger and more impressive, especially—that their gazing after him did not cast an evil omen on his fate and a blight upon his life. Another near relative has since gone away on the same patriotic errand; but when the farewells were spoken in the lighted room, the two girls escaped at once and hid themselves in another apartment, so that they should ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... Spirit seated deep in every creature's heart; From Me they come; by Me they live; at My word they depart! Vishnu of the Adityas I am, those Lords of Light; Maritchi of the Maruts, the Kings of Storm and Blight; By day I gleam, the golden Sun of burning cloudless Noon; By Night, amid the asterisms I glide, the dappled Moon! Of Vedas I am Sama-Ved, of gods in Indra's Heaven Vasava; of the faculties to living ...
— The Bhagavad-Gita • Sir Edwin Arnold
... darker shades of this picture. Autumn comes, when the contadini of Lucca and Siena and Pistoja go forth to work in the unwholesome marshes of the Maremma, or of Corsica and Sardinia. Dismal superstitions and hereditary hatreds cast their blight over a life externally so fair. The bad government of centuries has perverted in many ways the instincts of a people naturally mild and cheerful and peace-loving. But as far as nature can make men happy, these husbandmen are surely to be reckoned fortunate, and in their songs ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... or before Both shrines of Pallas congregate, or where Ismenus gives his oracles by fire. For, as thou seest thyself, our ship of State, Sore buffeted, can no more lift her head, Foundered beneath a weltering surge of blood. A blight is on our harvest in the ear, A blight upon the grazing flocks and herds, A blight on wives in travail; and withal Armed with his blazing torch the God of Plague Hath swooped upon our city emptying The house of Cadmus, and the murky realm Of Pluto is full fed with ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... needs peace to carry out the great task confronting it. Zionism is no less in need of peace in order to gain the hearts of those whose hearts are still Jewish. The very possibility of a conflict has bred a spirit of suspicion and unfriendliness which falls like a blight upon every attempt at united action. The non-Zionists may succeed in defeating their opponents; they can never dispense with Zionism which is a driving force in American Jewish life. The victory may perch on the banners of the Zionists but they can never forego the assistance ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... the White Mountains, stood up round and bare, rimmed bright gold in the last glow of the setting sun. Then, as the fire dropped behind the domed peak, a change, a cold and darkening blight, passed down the black spear-pointed slopes over all that ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... kingdom is found in London; is it not with the exorbitant growth of London that many an ill has spread over the land? London is the antithesis of the domestic ideal; a social reformer would not even glance in that direction, but would turn all his zeal upon small towns and country districts, where blight may perhaps be arrested, and whence, some day, a reconstituted national life may act upon the great centre of corruption. I had far rather see England covered with schools of cookery than with schools of the ordinary kind; the issue would be infinitely more hopeful. Little girls should ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... But if the greater part of the officer corps were ever to become absorbed in the business of taking men apart to see what makes them tick, thereby superinducing self-consciousness all down the line, an irremediable blight would come upon the services. There is no need to look that deeply. What matters mainly is that an officer will know how men are won to accept authority, how they can be made to unify their own strength, how they can be helped ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... of hope will soon take flight And on your form and features leave a blight; Since Time, who heals full many an open wound, More ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... great Pagan statesman like Julius Caesar, whose brain was free from all superstition! Were the "mighty Julius" to re-appear on earth, and see a great statesman believing the story of devils being turned out of men into pigs, he would wonder what blight had fallen upon the human intellect in two ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... their enterprise to the governor at Panama. Pizarro acquiesced in the reasonableness of this demand. He had now penetrated nine degrees farther than any former navigator in these southern seas, and, instead of the blight which, up to this hour, had seemed to hang over his fortunes, he could now return in triumph to his countrymen. Without hesitation, therefore, he prepared to retrace his course, and stood again ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... magnificence of these their representative chiefs, and complete the grand spectacle as that of a nation? Determine that; and then inquire what actually was the state of the people all this while. There is evidence that it was, what the fatal blight and blast of popery might be expected to have left it, generally and most wretchedly degraded. What it was is shown by the facts, that it was found impossible, even under the inspiring auspices of the ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... (receding). Alas! alas! Like a vapor the golden vision Shall fade and pass, And thou wilt find in thy heart again Only the blight of pain, ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... "'The Blight of Respectability,' by Geoffrey Mortimer, is well worth reading, and by more of us, perhaps, than imagine it. The shoddy god has votaries in England, where one would ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... Blight, for there was a dreadful east wind over at our farm that destroyed all the little young crops just out of the ground, and the farmers called it the Blight. And I would rather be hail, sleet, frost, or snow than ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... stuffed like Christmas turkeys with abstracts and notes, the pemmican of school-boy learnings, are more or less a weariness and a bore; but the youth who comes out from the admiring circle of sisters and aunts with the airs of a man of the world and the blight of a premature ennui is peculiarly insufferable. Of course he has never known at home any grown-up people beyond the chrysalis stage of undergraduatism, except to receive from them patronising hospitalities and little attentions in the shape of guineas and stalls at the opera, such ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... thee the Graces lead the dancing hours, And Nature's ready pencil paints the flowers: When thy short reign is past, the feverish sun The sultry tropic fears, and moves more slowly on. So may thy tender blossoms fear no blight, Nor goats with venomed teeth thy tendrils bite, As thou shalt guide my wandering feet to find The fragrant greens I seek, my brows to bind." His vows addressed, within the grove he strayed, Till Fate or Fortune near the place conveyed ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... so. Despite my cheerful words, and despite the belief I did feel in him, I could not help seeing that he carried himself now as a marked man. The free, open look was gone; a blight had fallen upon him, and he withered under it. There was what the English call a "down" look upon his face, which had not been there formerly, even in those worst days when the parting from Sigmund was immediately before ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... by ten years Debussy's junior, and were he less positive an individuality, less original a temperament, less fully the genius, he could never have realized himself. There would have descended upon him the blight that has fallen upon so many of the younger Parisian composers less determinate than he and like himself made of one stuff with Debussy. He, too, would have permitted the art of the older and well-established man to impose upon him. He, too, would ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... been residing in that country, as was learned from Paolo. Now everybody knows that the evil eye is not rarely met with in Italy. Everybody who has ever read Mr. Story's "Roba di Roma" knows what a terrible power it is which the owner of the evil eye exercises. It can blight and destroy whatever it falls upon. No person's life or limb is safe if the jettatura, the withering glance of the deadly organ, falls upon him. It must be observed that this malign effect may follow a look from the holiest personages, ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Agriculture, or a speedy way to grow rich" concerning which he wrote to his agent. It deals with a great variety of subjects, such as of roots and leaves, of food of plants, of pasture, of plants, of weeds, of turnips, of wheat, of smut, of blight, of St. Foin, of lucerne, of ridges, of plows, of drill boxes, but its one great thesis was the careful cultivation by plowing of such annuals as potatoes, turnips, and wheat, crops which hitherto had been tended ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... through the Fifty-ninth Street end of the Park, looking strangely seared and bereft from the first blight of the frost, he turned to her again. This time his tone was as serious as ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... this atmosphere of Ascalon and its bad influence on the country wouldn't be good for their young folks, they said. So they backed off. And that's the way it's gone, that's the way it will go. The blight of Ascalon falls over this country for fifty miles around, the finest country the Almighty ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... antagonistic influences of the general cosmic process were no longer sedulously warded off, or counteracted. The walls and gates would decay; quadrupedal and bipedal intruders would devour and tread down the useful and beautiful plants; birds, insects, blight, and mildew would work their will; the seeds of the native plants, carried by winds or other agencies, would immigrate, and in virtue of their long-earned special adaptation to the local conditions, these despised ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... well," her mother agreed. "But remember, we have had great good luck. No epidemic or disease came to blight the lives of our caterpillars; nor did annoyances of any sort interrupt their spinning. We did our part, certainly; but favorable conditions had much to do with ...
— The Story of Silk • Sara Ware Bassett
... cases of asexual multiplication, and there are other instances, and still more extraordinary ones, in which this process takes place naturally, in a more hidden, a more recondite kind of way. You are all of you familiar with those little green insects, the 'Aphis' or blight, as it is called. These little animals, during a very considerable part of their existence, multiply themselves by means of a kind of internal budding, the buds being developed into essentially asexual animals, which are neither male nor female; they become converted into young 'Aphides', which ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... of perpetuity, and little that is truly wisdom. Our vaunted elixir vito is the art of printing with moveable types. What good will those do when posterity, struck by the inevitable intellectual blight, shall have ceased to read what is printed? Our libraries will become its stables, our ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... and there amalgamates with what they absorb from the atmosphere, and thus forms food for the vine and fruit. It is the leaves, and not the fruit, which need the sun: the leaves are the lungs, upon the action of which the life and health of the fruit depend. Blight of the leaves destroys the fruit, and a frequent repetition of it destroys the vine. Grape-vines should not be pruned at all until three years old, as it retards the growth of the roots, and thus weakens the vines. Older vines should be freely pruned in November or December; pruned in winter they ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... on its haughty height, And came to know its starry joys, Its sudden blackness, and the withering blight Of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... obliged to call on the gods in general, and, dismissing the whole polytheistic pantheon, to invoke some unknown god, or the supreme being. Sometimes, however, in these emergencies, new deities were created for the occasion. Thus they came to invoke the pestilence, defeat in battle, blight, etc., as dangerous beings whose hostility must be placated by sacrifices. A better part of their mythology was the worship of Modesty (Pudicitia), Faith or Fidelity (Fides), Concord (Concordia), and the gods of home. It was the business of the pontiffs ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... done so, dear father," she answered, gently, "it has been because I knew your secret must be a painful one. I have lain awake night after night, wondering what was the cause of the blight that has been upon you and all you have done. But why should I ask you questions that you could not answer without pain? I have heard people say cruel things of you; but they have never said them twice in my hearing." Her eyes flashed ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... sin Leading them astray, No false heart within That would them bewray, Nought to tempt them in An evil way; And if canker come and blight, Nought will ever put ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... had been nearly stricken down and confidence in the General Government was so much impaired that-loans of a small amount could only be negotiated at a considerable sacrifice. As a necessary consequence of the blight which had fallen on commerce and mechanical industry, the ships of the one were thrown out of employment and the operations of the other had been greatly diminished. Owing to the condition of the ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... were having a regular feast; while one thrush, who had evidently been an early bird, and had the first pick at the worms, was up, high up, in the cedar at the corner of the field, whistling away as though the happiest of birds. The roses were getting washed clear of the blight that had begun to cover them; and everything seemed to be drinking in the soft cooling drops that fell so gently and bathed the face of nature, for during Fred's visit the only rain that had fallen was that which accompanied the thunderstorm, and since ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... know as much about certain features of this chestnut disease as I do myself; for I have only worked over certain sides of the whole question. I also presume that you are all acquainted with the fact that this disease, which is known as chestnut blight or the chestnut bark disease, is without doubt the most serious disease of any forest tree which we have had in this country at any time, that is, so far as its inroads ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Second Annual Meeting - Ithaca, New York, December 14 and 15, 1911 • Northern Nut Growers Association
... clothes. You can shake Dandy Dale's outfit, except when we're on the trail.... And, say, if you knew what I had to pay for this stuff you'd think there was a bigger robber in Alder Creek than Jack Kells.... And, come to think of it, my name's now Blight. You're my daughter, if any one asks." Joan was so grateful to him for the goods and the permission to get out of Dandy Dale's suit as soon as possible, that she could only smile her thanks. Kells stared at her, then turned abruptly away. ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... I heard I was going home to America, I heaved up one of the largest sighs that ever burst from a young-manly bosom. I'm better now, thank you. In short, I feel that if I were to be deprived of the fun of the voyage, it would blight a youth of ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... murmured Mrs. Channing, her own tears dropping upon the fair young face, as she gathered it to her sheltering bosom. "What have you done that this blight should extend ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... unlearned? Does knowledge exert an acidulating influence upon female temper, or produce an ossifying effect on female hearts? Is ignorance an inevitable concomitant of refinement and delicacy? Does the knowledge of Greek and Latin cast a blight over the flower-garden, or a mildew in the pantry and linen closet; or do the classics possess the power of curdling all the milk of human-kindness, all the streams of tender sympathy in a woman's nature, as rennet coagulates a bowl ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... when love is so pure, suspicion blights it. To that young soul, that tender flower, a blight—yes, a ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... Though 'neath the blight of sorrow's smart, Her woman's heart oft faileth, She moaneth not but with fond wiles Her pain in smiles she veileth; So sings she through the live-long night, Till hope's bright light appeareth, Which glittering like a radiant eye, ...
— Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century • Edmund O. Jones
... forces of Freedom. Rosalie Leese, the pioneer white child of California, born in 1838, at Yerba Buena, was the first of countless thousands of free-born American children. In the unpolluted West the breath of slavery shall never blight a single human existence. Old Captain Richardson and Jacob Leese, pioneers of the magic city of San Francisco, gaze upon the beautiful ranks of smiling school-children, in happy troops. They have no regrets, like the knights of slavery, to see their places ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... her tell granny once all about it. She said there was a blight on her house—I don't know what that is; but I guess it's something big and heavy—and that it fell on every one of her children, as fast as they came, ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... industry and carefulness, it was part of the incompleteness of Daddy Darwin's nature, and the ill-luck of his career, that he had a sensitive perception of order and beauty, and a shrewd observation of ways of living and qualities of character, and yet had allowed his early troubles to blight him so completely that he never put forth an effort to rise above the ruin, of which he was at least as conscious as ...
— Jackanapes, Daddy Darwin's Dovecot and Other Stories • Juliana Horatio Ewing
... to be expected, that the alarm about the Potato Blight and the Famine would be first raised through the public Press. This was done by letters from various localities, and by Special Reporters and Commissioners, who travelled through the country to examine ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... manner for a long time. At last came a very wet summer, and everything went wrong in the country around. The hay had hardly been got in, when the haystacks were floated bodily down to the sea by an inundation; the vines were cut to pieces with the hail; the corn was all killed by a black blight; only in the Treasure Valley, as usual, all was safe. As it had rain when there was rain nowhere else, so it had sun when there was sun nowhere else. Everybody came to buy corn at the farm, and went away pouring maledictions on the Black Brothers. They asked what ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... the rattle of hoydens and the giggling of the nursery. The class of superior men of the quiet old school were fast disappearing before the "wine-discussing, trade-talking, dollar-dollar set" of the day. Under the blight of this bustling, fussy, money-getting race of social Vandals, simplicity of manners had died out, or was dying out. The architecture of the houses, like the character of the society, was more ambitious than of old, but in far worse taste; in a taste, ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... dreary wet weather—one of innumerable wet summers that blight the potatoes and blacken the hay and mildew the few oats and rot the poor cabin roofs. The air smoked all day with rain mixed with the fine salt spray from the ocean. Out of doors everything shivered and was disconsolate. Only the bog prospered, ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... or bullock, decomposing in the sun, seemed to have nothing of offence for Republican noses. The yellow smear of lyddite was everywhere, and, looking over the rock-rampart upon the works below, you saw it like a blight, or yolk of egg spilt ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... discouragement so frequent with those who long to realize the ideal in this world. Had he discovered the warning signs of the misfortunes which were to come upon his family? Had he come to see that the necessities of life were to sully and blight his dream? Had he seen in the check of his missions in Syria and Morocco a providential indication that he had to change his method? We do not know. But about this time he felt the need of turning ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... London, in a continual conflict of mind, I was still growing better—whilst here, bowed down by the despotic hand of fate, forced into resignation by despair, I seem to be fading away—perishing beneath a cruel blight, that withers up ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... explained, "on my departure to-night. The cause hangs upon it. A blight on my evil luck!" he cried. "Were Colonel Myddelton at home, I should not be fleeing from my own country empty-handed. I shall be writing to him most of this day, but a spoken word is worth a volume of ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas
... was to leave her here, she said. He was to go back to his own country. How badly had his reception fared so far? Why not, then, leave Mexico to ingratitude, and have done? The romantic land of roses was notoriously a blight to hopes. Why should he seek to thrive despite the mysterious curse that seemed to hover over all things ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... had crop failures before. All of them had seen the labour of months go for naught in the blight of an evening's frost, or the sweep of a prairie fire. So here on this virgin isle, in soil whose sod had never been turned, they sowed from the bins of the slumbering ship. Wheat and oats and flax, brought from the Argentina plains; potatoes, squash and beet-root; even beans and peas were ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... land into broad estates; but it had been tacitly understood that this sprinkling of water established a claim for a return, and this both father and son had solemnly promised. Its magic turned everything they touched to gold, but it brought a blight on the peace of the household. One branch, which had grown up in the traditions of the old Macedonian stock, had separated from the other; and her husband's great lie lay between them and the family still living in the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... sun, unkindly hot, My garden makes a desert spot; Sometimes the blight upon the tree Takes all my fruit away from me; And then with throes of bitter pain Rebellious passions rise and swell— But life is more than fruit or grain, And so I sing, and all ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... scattered weapons and piled them all in one corner, farthest from the door, where I now proposed to set about getting free. With the fearful blight of uncovered treason in his soul, Broussard obeyed me cringingly as a servant, and worked as hard, for his safety lay in mine. We went first to the door by which we entered, and after a tedious examination failed ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... trial and had sat all day yesterday and to-day listening feverishly, avidly to every word that was said, waiting to hear, and praying against hearing the name of the man she had loved. The idea of protecting his name and his memory from the blight of his deed had become more than a religion, more than a sacred trust to her. It filled not only her own thought and life but it seemed even to take up that great void in her world ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... I have hired men to seek out good objects for me, and I have tried my best to find for myself causes and institutions and persons who might be helped without hindering others as worthy, but sometimes it seems as if every dollar of my money carried a blight with it, and infected whoever touched it with a moral pestilence. It has reached a sum where the wildest profligate couldn't spend it, and it grows and grows. It's as if it were a rising flood that had touched my lips, and would go over my head before I could reach the shore. I ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... pity me, O pity me! Alas! how soon is the cup of bliss dashed from the lips of us poor mortals. I can hardly write, hardly hold my pen, or hold my head up. I cannot bear that, from my hand, you should be informed of the utter blight of all our hopes which blossomed so fully. Alas! alas! but it must be. O my head, my poor, poor head—how it swims! I was sitting at the fireside, thinking when you would return, and trying to find out if the wind was fair, when I ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... fulfill all that I have herein obligated myself to perform, may the heavens become black above me, may the earth become thorns and thistles, and a curse to me in body and in soul; may my life be devoid of peace, and harassing care be my portion, with blight and mildew on all my hopes, and all that my hand shall touch; may my friends desert me, and my own blood rise up and curse me; may I become an outcast, among men, a wanderer and a vagabond on the face of the earth, a prey to fear, and to the lashings of conscience: and, finally, when death comes, ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... hospitality, gave him a large popularity; but his alliance with President Johnson was fatal to his political fortunes. He had placed himself in a position from which he could not with grace retreat, and to go forward in which was still further to blight his hopes of promotion in his party. It was an extremely mortifying fact to Mr. Raymond that with the power of the Administration behind him he could on a test question secure the support of only one Republican member, ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... From Kansas, on the prospect of the corn crop: they said the number of hogs in Kansas will double. Congratulated them. From Idaho, on the blight on the root crop: they say there will soon not be a hog left in Idaho. Expressed my sorrow. From Michigan, beet sugar growers urging a higher percentage of sugar in beets. Took firm stand: said I stand where I stood and I stood where I stand. ...
— Further Foolishness • Stephen Leacock
... hard on anything 'cept blight, Master Nic," said the old man one day; "but it comes nat'ral to a man to feel shy of a gaol bird who may rise agen you at any time and ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... saw that Dr Graham had been right in his reference to the Ring of Polycrates, for although he was outwardly still prosperous and high-placed, shame had come upon him, and evil was about to befall. From the moment of Jentham's secret visit a blight had fallen on his fortunes, a curse had come upon his house, and in a thousand hidden ways he had been tortured, although for no fault of his own. There was his secret which he did not dare even to think of; ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... Margaret, for the wrong I did you. I should never have spoken love to you at all, or if I did, I should have told you of the blight upon it; but the sky and the trees and the hill were clothed that night in the beauty that wrapt my soul and I thought that God had forgotten and had shrived me in the same sacred light. But He does not forget. That light itself cannot drive the shadow ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... to leave them to the world as an assurance—to how many will it give a new delight in living, to how many will it remove the bitterness of living, to how many may it bring resignation and hope—that the blight of Death is only an incident in a continuous ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... sticks are kept throughout the year and laid on the hearth-fire during heavy thunder-storms to prevent the house from being struck by lightning, or they are inserted in the roof with the like intention. Others are placed in the fields, gardens, and meadows, with a prayer that God will keep them from blight and hail. Such fields and gardens are thought to thrive more than others; the corn and the plants that grow in them are not beaten down by hail, nor devoured by mice, vermin, and beetles; no witch harms them, and the ears of corn stand close and full. The charred sticks are ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... idleness, but, like the volcanic fires, its passions and thirst for revenge, when not in open eruption, are actively at work in secret and darkness, preparing for new outbursts, bearing death along their path, and leaving devastation, blight and ruin in their wake. This was much the case with Louis Durant, after the failure of his attempt on the boat. He was resolved to accomplish the villainy on which he had set his heart, and to this end determined to leave no means untried, be they ever so base, ...
— Ellen Walton - The Villain and His Victims • Alvin Addison
... spoke not, as they raised me; For they knew that in the night I had seen the shadow hunter, And had withered in his blight. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... not alone; she held, within, A second principle of Life, which might Have dawned a fair and sinless child of sin;[dz] But closed its little being without light, And went down to the grave unborn, wherein Blossom and bough lie withered with one blight; In vain the dews of Heaven descend above The bleeding flower and blasted ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... blight of the gravest character upon the local industry of the inhabitants, and it is a suicidal and unstatesmanlike policy that crushes and extinguishes all enterprise. What Englishman would submit to such a prying and humiliating position? And still it is expected that the ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... feelings were not less deep because they were inactive, remembered this man and his associates, in after times. The historian of the sect affirms that, by the wrath of Heaven, a blight fell upon the land in the vicinity of the "bloody town" of Boston, so that no wheat would grow there; and he takes his stand, as it were, among the graves of the ancient persecutors, and triumphantly recounts the judgments that overtook them, in old age or at the parting hour. He tells us that ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... followed were trying ones at Prospect. The blight that ruined the potato crop in 1846, and the loss of the wheat crop a few years later by the weavil, were felt more keenly because of the loss of the controlling mind. To give an idea of the financial loss, I may mention the fact that in 1843 two thousand bushels of potatoes were ...
— The Chignecto Isthmus And Its First Settlers • Howard Trueman
... a rosebud covered with blight, kicked off a snail which was crawling on the path; then, halfway down the path, he suddenly raised his head and gave a ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... United States was stunned is but to expose the inadequacy of language. The whole world was stunned. It confronted that blight of the human brain, the unprecedented. Human endeavour was a jest, a monstrous futility, when a lunatic on a lonely island, who owned a yacht and an exposed village, could destroy five of the proudest fleets of Christendom. And how had he done it? Nobody knew. The ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... and is seldom curbed by the reflection of possible evil. Ronald would have served Maurice at all hazards, and by all means in his power, or out of his power. He was expressing to his mother the chagrin he felt at the sad position of his friend, and his fear that it would throw a blight over his energies, when the ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... crowd looking up to these trainers and employers of pickpockets, hailing them "captains of industry"! They reaped only where and what others had sown; they touched industry only to plunder and to blight it; they organized it only that its profits might go to those who did not toil and who despised those who did. "Have I gone mad in the midst of sane men?" I asked myself. "Or have I been mad, and have I suddenly become sane in ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... Father Benedict, those who were to carry the banner of that father into the isle lost to Christ. In that island he appointed the primate of Canterbury, and designed the primate of York. Through St. Leander and St. Isidore, and the martyr St. Hermenegild, he recovered Spain from the Arian blight; through the queen Theodelinda he made some impression upon Lombard cruelty and misbelief; through the Frankish monarchy he won back France from dissolution and heresy. As he saw the palaces around him deserted, and the broken aqueducts mourn ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... but never hate: Man is but grass and hate is blight, The sun will scorch you soon or late, Die wholesome ...
— Country Sentiment • Robert Graves
... There are wide open resorts on more than twenty streets outside of the big "levee." Segregation as practised is not a restriction of vice so much as it is a practical license to lawbreakers to wreck human lives and blight the homes of the people, by corrupting husbands and sons and taking captive wives and daughters. You would be astounded to learn how many ruined women are wives who have ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... history of Scottish Agricultural statistics Allotment gardens, by Mr. Bailey Apple trees, cider Arrowroot, Portland, by Mr. Groves Berberry blight Books noticed Calendar, horticultural —— agricultural Cartridge, Captain Norton's Cattle, Tortworth sale of Chrysanthemum, culture of Crayons for writing on glass, by M. Brunnquell Crickets, traps for Crops, returns ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... that man, if left free, would wantonly heap ruin, vice, or shivery, or curse his species with the withering blight of war; and he ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... from the lofty heights of logic to the common level of impulse and affection. Many years before, Warwick, when a lad of eighteen, had shaken the dust of the town from his feet, and with it, he fondly thought, the blight of his inheritance, and had achieved elsewhere a worthy career. But during all these years of absence he had cherished a tender feeling for his mother, and now again found himself in her house, amid the familiar surroundings ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... gloom, That leads to azure isles and beaming skies And happy regions of eternal hope. Therefore, O Spirit! fearlessly bear on: 550 Though storms may break the primrose on its stalk, Though frosts may blight the freshness of its bloom, Yet spring's awakening breath will woo the earth, To feed with kindliest dews its favourite flower, That blooms in mossy banks and darksome glens, 555 Lighting the green wood with its ...
— The Daemon of the World • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... municipality lies in the affections of those who use and profit by it. It holds its position by love. No publisher may say to it: "Buy my books, not those of my rival"; no scientist may forbid it to give his opponent a hearing; no religious body may dictate to it; no commercial influence may throw a blight ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... and righteousness. Fame and wealth and pleasure are good when they are born of high thinking and right living, when they lead to purer faith and love; but if they are sought as ends and loved for themselves, they blight and corrupt. The value of culture is great, and the ideal it presents points in the right direction in bidding us build up the being which we are. But since man is not the highest, he may not rest in himself, and culture therefore is a means rather than an end. ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... in her trance of anguish. She had up till that moment, with the instinctive aversion which mourners only know, and which we have formerly alluded to in the case of Martha, been shrinking from facing the gladsome light of heaven, caring not to look abroad on the blight of an altered world. But the few words her sister uttered, and which the other auditors manifestly had not comprehended, all at once rouse her from her seat of pensive sadness, and her shadow is seen hurrying by the darkened lattice. They can form but one surmise: that, in accordance with wont, ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... leather loop alongside, which has often to be used. The compass {22} itself is so placed that you can see it well while either sitting or standing up, or when lying at full length on the deck, with the back against a pillow propped by the mizen mast, the blight sun or moon overhead, and a turn or two of the mainsheet cast about your body to keep the sleepy steersman from rolling over into the ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... important improvements, that he may cultivate his sense of justice, his benevolence, and the desire of perfection. Toil is the school for these high principles; and we have here a strong presumption that, in other respects, it does not necessarily blight the soul. Next, we have seen that the most fruitful sources of truth and wisdom are not books, precious as they are, but experience and observation; and these belong to all conditions. It is another important consideration, that almost all labour ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... autumn, when women were still walking with an absurd sidewise gait, like a duck, or a filly that is too tightly hobbled, the junior partner of the firm began to show unmistakable signs of business aberration. A blight seemed to have fallen upon her bright little office, usually humming with activity. The machinery of her day, ordinarily as noiseless and well ordered as a thing on ball bearings, now rasped, creaked, jerked, stood still, jolted on again. ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... expedient, of course, that some story should be told for Linda which might save her from the ill report of all the world,—that some excuse should be made which might now, instantly, remove from Linda's name the blight which would make her otherwise to be a thing scorned, defamed, useless, and hideous; but the truth was the truth, and even to save her child from infamy Madame Staubach would not listen to a lie without refuting it. The punishment of ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... the shoemaker. "It was the most miserable place within the ring of Ireland. It lay under the blight of a good landlord, no better. That was its misfortune, and especially my misfortune. If the Gobstown landlord was not such a good landlord it's driving on the box of an empire I would be to-day instead of whacking tips ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... equally potent to blight and to shrivel. Not time, but man, is the great destroyer. History is full of the ruins of cities and empires. "Innumerable Paradises have come and gone; Adams and Eves many," happy one day, have been "miserable exiles" ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... pleasing toil Along youth's and fertile meads; I too within Hope's genial soil Have, trusting, placed Love's golden seeds; I too have feared the chilling dew, The heavy rain when thunder pealed, Lest Fate might blight the flower that grew For me in Hope's ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... printed in the Fifteenth Century: of which they possessed about fifteen hundred." This intelligence recruited my spirits; and I began to look around with eagerness. But alas! although the crop was plentiful, a deadly blight had prevailed. In other words, there was number without choice: quantity rather than quality. Yet I will not be ill-natured; for, on reaching the third of these rooms, and the last in the suite, Monsieur Thiebaut placed before me ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... disqualified from ministering in the service of song in God's house. Scripturally this seems incontestable; and as to the teaching of experience, we should hardly know how to name any custom which has brought a sorer blight upon the life of the church, or a heavier repression upon its spiritual energy, than the habit, now so general, of introducing unsanctified, unconverted, and even notoriously worldly persons into the ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... like Hagar, mourn, When some unlook'd for blight Drives us away, no more to turn To joys we fancied bright! Forced from our idols to retreat, And seek the Almighty's care, Perchance we are sent forth ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... side, in improvements of every sort. Thus far, we have not ourselves noticed differences of that degree. Doubtless before the late civil war,—all the ante-bellum travelers agree in this,—when the blight of slavery was resting on Virginia and Kentucky, the south shore of the Ohio was as another country; but to-day, so far as we can ascertain from a surface view, the little villages on either side are equally dingy and woe-begone, and large Southern towns like Wheeling, Parkersburg, ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... interest all the time has been child welfare, not child age, and will be able to use much of the old literature, simply substituting for "factory" the word "school" when condemning "hazardous occupations likely to sap [children's] nervous energy, stunt their physical growth, blight their minds, destroy their moral fiber, and fit them for the ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... would have cast away if their faith had been full, and if they had held with their whole hearts and souls and minds, that there was one God, of whom are all things. They believed that the Devil and evil spirits had power to raise thunderstorms, and blight crops, and change that course of nature of which the Psalmist had said, that all things served God, and continued this day as at the beginning, for God had given them a law which could not be broken. They believed in magic, and astrology, and a hundred other dreams, ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... to have been married just a year ago. To-day I have been going over her own story of her life—of her meeting with Darmstetter, of the blight he cast upon her, of her growth in loveliness, her brief fluttering in the sunshine, her failure, her supping with ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... by reforms of detail, there was more danger to society than in the crass indifference of the selfish and the unreflecting. When the natural leaders of society avow that they despair of the future, fatalism spreads like a contagious blight among the rank and file, until even discontent is numbed into silence. Nor does the evil end here. The idealists pay for their contempt of the real, not merely with their fortunes and their lives, but, worse still, with their intellectual patrimony. Just as a government deteriorates when ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... first of these, the black death, the famines, the hundred years' war, the free companies, the abasement of the church, the great schism—these things were misfortunes to which our modern time can find no parallel. They came suddenly upon Western Europe and defiled it like a blight.... They have made the mediaeval idea odious to every half-instructed man and have stamped even its ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... a blight of uncertainty must have pervaded the atmosphere when I was born, and penetrated, not certainly my nature, but my whole earthly destiny, with its influence; from my plans and projects for to-morrow on to those of next year, all is mist and indistinct ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... reed: That the dew of your youth is rubb'd off you: I see You have no feeling left in you, even for me! At honor you jest; you are cold as a stone To the warm voice of friendship. Belief you have none; You have lost faith in all things. You carry a blight About with you everywhere. Yes, at the sight Of such callous indifference, who could be calm? I must leave you at once, Jack, or else the last balm That is left me in Gilead you'll turn ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... of the opinion that rust is but an earlier stage of mildew or blight, the one form of parasite being capable of development into the other, and the fructification characteristic of the two supposed genera having been evolved on one and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883 • Various
... and, amongst others, by Gray. He specially praises a passage which has often been quoted as representing Pope's highest achievement in his art. At the conclusion the goddess Dulness yawns, and a blight falls upon art, science, and philosophy. I quote the lines, which Pope himself could not repeat without emotion, and which have received the highest eulogies from ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... shape of the Puritan leader their only guide. Yet the deepening twilight could not altogether conceal that the iron man was softened. He smiled at the fair spectacle of early love; he almost sighed for the inevitable blight of early hopes. ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... talent, to obstruct the natural play of supply and demand in the teaching profession, to foster academic snobbery by the prestige of certain privileged institutions, to transfer accredited value from essential manhood to an outward badge, to blight hopes and promote invidious sentiments, to divert the attention of aspiring youth from direct dealings with truth to the passing of examinations,—such consequences, if they exist, ought surely to be regarded ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... lifting of her eyelids was like the rise of the curtain upon some scene of tragedy which was all the more impressive because it seemed somehow mixed with shame. This poor girl, whom he had pitied as an invalid, was a sufferer from some spiritual blight more pathetic than broken health. He pulled his mind away from the conjecture that tempted it and went on: "One of the advantages of going over the fourth or fifth time is that you're relieved from a discoverer's duties to Europe. I've got absolutely nothing before me now, but at first I had to ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... makes holy gauge and nearly that, nearly more states, more states come in town light kite, blight not white. ...
— Tender Buttons - Objects—Food—Rooms • Gertrude Stein
... money and dared to stake it on the future of the telephone was Thomas Sanders, and he did this not mainly for business reasons. Both he and Hubbard were attached to Bell primarily by sentiment, as Bell had removed the blight of dumbness from Sanders's little son, and was soon to marry ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... all because of too much cold water in the soil. It would seem, by the remarks of those who till the earth, as if there were never a season just right—as if Providence had bidden us labor for bread, and yet sent down the rains of heaven so plentifully as always to blight our harvests. It is rare that we do not have a most remarkable season, with respect to moisture, especially. Our potatoes are rotted by the Summer showers, or cut off by a Summer drought; and when, as in the season ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... upon her in my desperation dumb, Knowing well that when her awful opportunity was come She would give us battle, murder, sudden death at very least, As a skeleton of warning, and a blight ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... attests its former sanctity. We landed on Queen Mary's Island, a miserable scene, considering the purpose for which the Castle was appointed. And yet the captivity and surrender of the Percy was even a worse tale, since it was an eternal blight on the name of Douglas. Well, we got to Blair Adam in due time, and our fine company began to separate, Lord Chief Baron going off after dinner. We had wine and wassail, and John Thomson's delightful flute to help us ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott |
