"Blight" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... 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
... to which I was subject disposed me to believe the incredible with reference to all that relates to it. I have never ceased to have the feeling that, sooner or later, I should find myself freed from the blight laid upon me in my infancy. It seems as if it would naturally come through the influence of some young and fair woman, to whom that merciful errand should be assigned by the Providence that governs our destiny. With strange hopes, with trembling fears, with mingled belief ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... all—knew, and lived through the full force of the blight and misery—would persuade me that it all means nothing, and is a mere amusing trifle! Trifle, indeed, that breaks hearts and leads to despair and self-destruction and dishonour! No, no, no—nothing shall lead me to a gamester! ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the waters of the Cumberland, the lair of moonshiner and feudsman. The knight is a moonshiner's son, and the heroine a beautiful girl perversely christened "The Blight." Two impetuous young Southerners fall under the spell of "The Blight's" charms and she learns what a large part jealousy and pistols have in the love making ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... While fightin' blight and blister, We hardly get a chance To read about our "comrades" A-doin' things in France. To raise the grub to feed 'em Is some job, believe me—plus! And I ain't so sure a soldier— A shootin', scrappin' soldier, That's livin' close to ...
— With the Colors - Songs of the American Service • Everard Jack Appleton
... the little detour in silence, the corners of her mouth wilting, he would have declared, had he the words, like a field flower in the hands of a picnicker. Marylin could droop that way, so suddenly and so whitely that almost a second could blight her. ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... natural force are in striking antagonism to each other, this may take place. Man, when he interprets the kindly influences of nature as the blessings of the good god, naturally interprets the agencies which blight or ruin as being also the manifestation of a living power, but of an evil one. Thanks to the good god alternate, in this case, with efforts to counteract or to appease the bad one; if the two appear to be nearly balanced, then neither is ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... measured accents, and the calm pallor of her features told how complete was the change that had set its stern seal on body and soul; and Dr. Grey's heart ached, as he realized how withering was the blight that had fallen on her once buoyant, ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... endowed a creature may The keenest sufferings feel; Not such as rack the frame of clay, Which art of man may heal; But pain untold at others' woes, And deadly blight of sin, Which right and virtue overthrows, And ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... The grass grew rare, A blight lurked in the darkening air, The very moss grew hueless and spare, The last daisy stood all astunt; Behind his back the soil lay ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right, And the choice goes by forever 'twixt ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... one; whose presence blight All space doth occupy—all motion guide— Thou from primeval nothingness didst call First chaos, then existence. Lord, on thee Eternity had its foundation: all Sprung forth from thee—of light, joy, harmony, Sole origin: all life, all beauty thine. Thy ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... this fever, now known as a form of Typhoid, the disease spreads a sort of blight over the nervous centres, and from the first greatly lowers their power. The patient is too weak to bear the powerful cooling recommended in Fever; there is also a tendency to prolonged and "low" fever. First of all, in such a case, the feet and legs must be fomented. ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... commencement of this year, condescended to call to his aid the co-operation of Mr. Addington, Lord Buckinghamshire, and other members of that Administration, which had withered away, but a few months before, under the blight of his sarcasm and scorn. In alluding to this Coalition, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... creatures, whose warm enthusiastic feelings bind them to every heart capable of generous emotions; those in whom we see life most beautified, most glad. Oh, it is so sad to see them weep; to feel that even on them sorrow hath cast its blight, and paled the cheek, and dimmed the laughing eye, the speaking smile, and the first grief in such as these is agony indeed: it is the breaking asunder of every former joy. They shrink from retrospection, for they cannot bear to feel they are not now as then, and ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume II. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes • Grace Aguilar
... passed in a kind of peculiar stillness and languor. Fenitchka gave no sign of her existence; she sat in her little room like a mouse in its hole. Nikolai Petrovitch had a careworn air. He had just heard that blight had begun to appear in his wheat, upon which he had in particular rested his hopes. Pavel Petrovitch overwhelmed every one, even Prokofitch, with his icy courtesy. Bazarov began a letter to his father, but tore it up, and ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... were over 700,000 children under sixteen years of age at work in the mills, mines, factories, and sweat-shops of the United States. Nearly all of the States had child-labor laws, but they were ordinarily poorly enforced and no State was wholly free from the blight of this child slavery. While fourteen years was the minimum in most of the States, a few permitted the employment of children of ten years of age. In the majority of cases there was no legal closing hour after which children might ...
— History of the United States, Volume 6 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... is great beyond all human calculation. A child rightly trained may be a world-wide blessing, with an influence reaching onward to eternal years. But a neglected or misdirected directed child may live to blight and blast mankind, and leave influences of evil which shall roll on in increasing volume till they plunge into the gulf of ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... him with their terrors everywhere, Snatch from his clutching fingers every prop That guilt or error flings him, till he fall Into the waves of truth a drowning man With not a straw to grasp at. Let them smite Wrong and oppression like a gnawing blight, Eating into the heart, till like dead leaves, Shrivell'd and pow'rless, beggars tread them down. Let them fall on the pure in heart like dews, To strengthen and to nourish all sweet thoughts, Raising the drooping and the weary up, And adding sweetness to the ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... woodsman to whom trees in their general sense were common things. In this great growth he felt a quality and a presence. Its moods were as varied as those of life itself—as it stood triumphing over decades of vicissitude, blight, and storm. ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... may call you friend, I wish you this— No gentle destiny throughout the years; No soft content, or ease, or unearned bliss Bereft of heart-ache where no sorrow nears, But rather rugged trouble for a mate To mold your soul against the coming blight, To train you for the ruthless whip of fate And build your heart up ...
— Bobby of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... behind him in the garden of Jeanne's house—bare and leafless, or if covered at all, covered only with their Christmas dress of snow and icicles—these trees were clothed with the loveliest foliage, fresh and green and feathery, which no winter's storms or nipping frosts had ever come near to blight. And in the little space between the door where Hugh stood and these wonderful trees was drawn up, as if awaiting him, the prettiest, queerest, most delicious little carriage that ever was seen. It was open; the cushions with which it was lined were of rose-coloured plush—not velvet, I think; ...
— The Tapestry Room - A Child's Romance • Mrs. Molesworth
... and dreary prospect steals.— Spring claims our tender, grateful, gay delight; Winter our sympathy and sacred fear; And sure the Hearts that pay not Pity's rite O'er wide calamity; that careless hear Creation's wail, neglect, amid her blight, THE SOLEMN LESSON ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... gone, And I have tamed my sorrow. Pain and grief Are transitory things, no less than joy; And though they leave us not the men we were, Yet they do leave us. You behold me here, A man bereaved, with something of a blight Upon the early blossoms of his life, And its first verdure,—having not the less A living root, and drawing from the earth Its vital juices, from the air its powers: And surely as man's heart and strength are whole, His appetites regerminate, his heart Reopens, and his objects ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... responsible for this coming young life. Could they be sure, after all, that they could adequately feed and clothe it and prepare it for its way in the world? Where was the guaranty? She remembered, dimly, the blight of hard times in the past, and the plaints of fathers and mothers in those days returned to her with a new significance. Almost could she understand ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... word, when the King with a furious oath sprang upon him, grasped him by the throat, and thrusting him fiercely down on the steps of the dais, placed one foot on his prostrate body. Then drawing his gigantic sword he lifted it on high, . . the blight blade glittered in air...an audible gasp of terror broke from the throng of spectators, . . another second and Khosrul's life would have paid the forfeit for his temerity...when crash! ... a sudden and tremendous clap of thunder shook the hall, and every lamp ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... is 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 ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... the same roof with Tai-yue in dowager lady Chia's suite of rooms, he naturally became comparatively more friendly with her than with his other cousins; and this friendliness led to greater intimacy and this intimacy once established, rendered unavoidable the occurrence of the blight of harmony from unforeseen ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... little bird and a little blight and a little balance to a best button. A little bright ...
— Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein - With Two Shorter Stories • Gertrude Stein
... that we supported the Sirdar named Shere Ali at Candahar seemed to blight his authority over the tribesmen in that quarter. All hope of maintaining his rule vanished when tidings arrived that Ayub Khan, a younger brother of the deported Yakub, was marching from the side of Herat to claim the crown. Already the new pretender had ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... of the lank youth's voice and presence, Iskender felt dismay at his own boastfulness, and repented of it humbly before Allah. He knew that a jealous eye is fixed upon the heart of every man to mark when pride leaps up and straightway blight it. To show elation was to court calamity. However, he repeated divers formulas reputed potent to avert the evil; and when, from a high point of the dunes, he saw the minarets and the square roofs of the town standing forth clear and white with the ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... crowd of gypsies came the oldest of them all, who was the King's great-grandmother, and she looked from the angry parents to the unhappy lovers and said, "You can blight the tree and make the lantern dark; nevertheless you cannot extinguish the flower and the light of love. And till these things lift the curse and are seen again united among you, there will be no Lords in Gay Street nor Kings ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... the chilling blight Their shadows cast on me, My thought by day—my dream by night— Was of my own country. But independent souls will brave All hardships to be free; No more I weep to cross the wave, My native land ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... driven back and forced to keep within his own bounds—though such names as Dissenter and Nonconformist, which were formerly used in society as fatal darts, seem to have lost all the poison which they once contained—Mill's principal fears have nevertheless not been belied, and the blight of uniformity which he saw approaching with its attendant evils of feebleness, indifference, and sequacity, has been spreading more widely ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... of a good, quiet night suffered no blight, for nothing happened to disturb their sleep, and morning found ...
— Motor Boat Boys Down the Coast - or Through Storm and Stress to Florida • Louis Arundel
... was frequent intelligence of the going over of another patient to Mr Walcot; the summer was not a favourable one, and everybody else was complaining of unseasonable weather, of the certainty of storms in the autumn, of blight, and the prospect of scarcity; yet, though Mr Grey shook his head, and the parish clerk could never be seen but with a doleful prophecy in his mouth, Morris's young master and mistresses were gay as she could desire. She ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... they serve Him?" inquired the child. "If He is the great God Father Jamay teaches He can do everything, have everything. It is all His. Then why does He not keep people well, so they can work, and not blight the crops with fierce storms. Sometimes great fields of maize are swept down. And the little children die; the Indians kill each other, and at times the ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... of homes destroyed every year by the drink curse. If I could draw aside the veil and let you look into the desolate homes of your own city tonight, you would feel Ex-Governor Hanley of Indiana did not give an overwrought picture when he said: "Personally, I have seen so much physical ruin, mental blight and moral corruption from strong drink that I hate the traffic. I hate it for its arrogance; I hate it for its hypocrisy; I hate it for its greed and avarice; I hate it for its domination in politics; I hate it for its disregard of law; I hate it for the ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... profession of a passion which, however well acted, was not half so deeply grounded as he had led the unsuspecting object of it to believe. That he really loved her was to some extent true. That his love was earnest and pure, such as the blight of coldness and inconstancy would render painful, was not true,—far from it. He had sought her hand, not to lay at her feet the offering of a hallowed affection, but to realize the object we have before mentioned,—to enable him, by the ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... rolling in shadow and sunshine, Bright with luxuriant clusters of roses and purple amorphas. Over them wandered the buffalo herds, and the elk and the roebuck; Over them wandered the wolves, and herds of riderless horses; Fires that blast and blight, and winds that are weary with travel; Over them wander the scattered tribes of Ishmael's children, Staining the desert with blood; and above their terrible war-trails Circles and sails aloft, on pinions majestic, the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... 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 ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... his light, Reverting to its (source so) bright, Will from his body ward all blight, And hides the unchanging ...
— Tao Teh King • Lao-Tze
... managing that the double event:—Angela Bradley's marriage with Errington and Katherine's with Lord de Burgh,—might come off on the same day, even in the same church: that would be a culmination of excitement! Now some mysterious blight had fallen on all her schemes. What had happened? What could they have quarrelled about? Then when Katherine emerged from her refuge she was hopelessly mysterious; there was no penetrating the reserve ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... what the eyes of one Would burn me for no kindness done; And wretched women I passed by Sent after me a moan or sigh. Ah, wretched days: for in that place My soul's leaves sought the human face, And not the Sun's for warmth and light— And so was never free from blight. But seek me now, and you will find Me on some soft green bank reclined; Watching the stately deer close by, That in a great deep hollow lie Shaking their tails with all the ease That lambs can. First, look for the trees, ...
— Foliage • William H. Davies
... was quite plentiful in different sections of the southern hardwood belt. It was valued quite highly for the nuts. It has been killed out by the chestnut blight and it is very rarely that live ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... cheerfulness, and promised to bring me up from Trinlay-Knowe, "twa true-blue Presbyterians like himself, that would face and out-face baith the Pope, the Devil, and the Pretender—and blythe will I be o' their company mysell, for the very last night that I was at Osbaldistone Hall, the blight be on ilka blossom in my bit yard, if I didna see that very picture" (pointing to the full-length portrait of Miss Vernon's grandfather) "walking by moonlight in the garden! I tauld your honour I was fleyed wi' a bogle that night, but ye wadna listen to me—I aye thought there was witchcraft ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... went from door to door asking if Death had visited there, and in every home the answer was "yes!" Nowhere could she find a house that was free from the blight of Death. Then the woman saw that the only happiness lay in renouncing the ties that bound her to other human beings and in seeking the peace of Nirvana, for Buddha had taken this way of teaching her that Death is the common lot of all; and she entered the Buddhist sisterhood ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... Mr Boffin, with a wave of his hand, as the office door was opened by the dismal boy, whose appropriate name was Blight. 'Governor in?' ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... forms, she speaks A various language; for his gayer hours She has a voice of gladness, and a smile And eloquence of beauty, and she glides Into his darker musings, with a mild And healing sympathy, that steals away Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts Of the last bitter hour come like a blight Over thy spirit, and sad images Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall, And breathless darkness, and the narrow house, Make thee to shudder and grow sick at heart;— Go forth, under the open sky, and list To Nature's teachings, while from all around— Earth ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... 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 ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... 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 ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... announced one day in public, that in consequence of the impiety of the Omaguas, he should retire to a neighboring tribe, of more religious turn of mind; and taking with him the precious instrument, leave their palms to blight, and ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... dress for a dinner that he looked forward to with dread, and Philip to make his way home. As he passed up through the little flower-garden at the Abbey House, he came across his daughter, picking the blight from ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... was made from the dead body of an insect too. There is a sort of blight which gives this red ...
— Dick and His Cat and Other Tales • Various
... something which is not a means to the attainment of happiness, which is happiness itself. It is an inner sympathy of hearts and souls and minds, a perfect union of all that is most worthy in the natures of man and woman; it is a plant so sensitive that a breath of unkindness will hurt it and blight its beauty, and yet it is a tree so strong that neither time nor tempest can overthrow it when it has taken root; and if you would tear it out and destroy it, the place where it grew is as deep and as wide as a grave. It ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... man nurses, Never deem them idly born; Never think that deathly curses Blight them ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... strong gentle hand of Holy Church shielding them ever from evil. The archers doffed caps to them as they passed, for the boldest and roughest dared not cross that line guarded by the dire ban and blight which was the one only force in the whole steel-ridden earth which could stand betwixt the weakling ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... breathe through his lips, I live in his life, his passions are my own; and it is impossible for me to know noble and pure emotions excepting in the heart of this being unsoiled by crime. You have your fancies, here I show you mine. In exchange for the blight which society has brought upon me, I give it a man of honor, and enter upon a struggle with destiny; do you wish to be of my ...
— Vautrin • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... rock, which in this place overhung the stream, in some places brawling and foaming in hasty current, and in others seeming to slumber in deep and circular eddies. The temptations which this dangerous scene must have offered an excited and desperate spirit, came on Mowbray like the blight of the Simoom, and he stood a moment to gather breath and overcome these horrible anticipations, ere he was able to proceed. His attendants felt the same apprehension. "Puir thing—puir thing!—O, God send she may not have been left to hersell!—God send ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... of relief, but a vague regret that I had not been allowed to make my great test and so establish, to my own satisfaction, at least, the perfect innocence of my lover even at the cost of untold anguish to this confiding girl upon whose gentle spirit the very thought of crime would cast a deadly blight. ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... have read thy life, its mournful story Of loneliness and blight; But o'er its close there shines a solemn glory, A setting star's ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... recriminations, intense commercial rivalries had plagued the colonies. The traditional methods available to a sovereign for the settlement of such disputes were diplomacy and war. Suit in this Court was provided as an alternative."[505] Discriminatory freight rates, said he, may cause a blight no less serious than noxious gases in that they may arrest the development of a State and put it at a competitive disadvantage. "Georgia as a representative of the public is complaining of a wrong which, if proven, limits the ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... find their joy in this netherworld! For here every restraint may be abandoned and every decency may be outraged. Here are men and women whose presence casts a blight upon everything fresh and virtuous that ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... published in England on the subject of our country, that does not circulate through every part of it. There is not a calumny dropt from an English pen, nor an unworthy sarcasm uttered by an English statesman, that does not go to blight good-will, and add to the mass of latent resentment. Possessing, then, as England does, the fountain-head whence the literature of the language flows, how completely is it in her power, and how truly is it her duty, to make it ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... early in the season, but jam fruit sells at an average of 2-1/2d. per lb., at which price it pays fair wages, but is not a bonanza. As a rule the plants are very healthy, and any fungus pests to which they are subject, such as leaf blight, are easily kept in check by spraying, a knapsack pump being used for this purpose. The ground is kept well worked and free from weeds, whilst the plants are fruiting, and occasionally the ground is mulched, as is the case in the plot shown in ...
— Fruits of Queensland • Albert Benson
... the vines, We laughed to see him trot, Then frisk along the silent lines To chase the rolling shot; And, when the work waxed hard by day, And hard and cold by night, When that November morning lay Upon us, like a blight; ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... bloom and Autumn's blight, For bending wheat and blasted maize, For health and sickness, Lord of light, And Lord of darkness, hear ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... cotton, had a deeper meaning Than the great presence of the awful mountains Glorified by the sunset; and his daughter, A delicate flower on whom had blown too long Those evil winds, which, sweeping from the ice And winnowing the fogs of Labrador, Shed their cold blight round Massachusetts Bay, With the same breath which stirs Spring's opening leaves And lifts her half-formed flower-bell on its stem, Poisoning ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... breakfast that Kentucky was fifty years behind the Ohio 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 ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... came upon me I will tell you as we go,— The blight of the shadow hunter Who walks ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... laughed ironically. "I dare to tell you now to your face what all men say of you in your absence. They believe you to be—and rightly—a conscienceless pirate. You are a scathe and a blight; a pestilential ogre, drunk with self-worship. When first I saw you, you were gloating over having bought lambs that you had never seen for seven dollars which you sold, still unseen, for ten. Since then you have simply amplified, on the scale of a Colossus, that ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... therefore, was to return and report the success of 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 ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... heavy autumn work for him and his hands. If no blight happens before the setting the apple yield will be such as we have not had ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... Smith, in gaudy putties girt, With sand-blight in his optics, and much leaner than he started, Round the 'Oly Land cavorting in three- quarters of a shirt, And imposin' on the natives ez one ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson
... the Truth—whose steady day Shines on through earthly blight and bloom, The pure, the everlasting ray, The lamp that shines e'en in the tomb; The light that out of darkness springs, And guideth those that blindly go; The word whose precious radiance flings ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... monstrosity among the races of men which originated as a hybrid somewhere in the dark fastnesses of interior Asia, and spread itself like an inhuman yellow blight over the face of the globe—for that race, like all of us, she felt nothing but horror and the ...
— The Airlords of Han • Philip Francis Nowlan
... mother. Can this inquiring jury, this thinking twelve, feel as fathers only can feel when their children are on the precipice of danger? Could they but break over that seeming invulnerable power of slavery which crushes humanity, freezes up the souls of men, and makes the lives of millions but a blight of misery, and behold with the honesty of the heart what a picture of misery their voice "Guilty!" spreads before these unfortunate children, how ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... long bridge touch the farther shore, So fleet and fierce and strong are these Who limb them as their fancies please. Away with grief and sad surmise That mar the noblest enterprise, And with their weak suspicion blight The sage's plan, the hero's might. Come, this degenerate weakness spurn, And bid thy dauntless heart return, For each fair hope by grief is crossed When those we love are dead or lost. Arise, O best of those who know, Arm for the giant's overthrow. None in the ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... with hand relentless, may shed ruins o'er the earth, May strew our path with sorrow, make a desert of our hearth— Change may blight our fairest blossoms, shroud our clearest light in gloom; But the flow'ry fields of early years shall ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the old and hardened, and education for the young and tender. I would tell the schoolboys and schoolgirls that alcohol will destroy the framework of their beautiful bodies, and that cruelty to any of God's living creatures will blight and ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... always to be avoided is monotony in colour. Who can not recall barren rooms, without a spark of attraction despite priceless treasures, dispersed in a meaningless way? That sort of setting puts a blight on any gathering. "Well," you will ask, "given the task of converting such a sterile stretch of monotony into a blooming joy, how should one begin?" It is quite simple. Picture to yourself how the room would look if you scattered flowers ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... attentively to the warning against Krovitch, determined to put a quietus on that province, which once and for all time would blight her hopes of independence. He wired many questions and voluminous suggestions to his agent in Paris, Casper Haupt, who was a sub-chief of the White Police. This ardent subject of Nicholas II had cabled ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... careful about descending 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 of ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... to do, and certain obstacles with which to contend. The conditions with which the farmer deals, whether as obstacles or resources, have their own structure and operation independently of any purpose of his. Seeds sprout, rain falls, the sun shines, insects devour, blight comes, the seasons change. His aim is simply to utilize these various conditions; to make his activities and their energies work together, instead of against one another. It would be absurd if the farmer set up a purpose of farming, without any reference ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... quite as eclipses occur, but that are not referable to any known eclipsing body. Of course there is no suggestion here that these darknesses may have been eclipses. My own acceptance is that if in the nineteenth century anyone had uttered such a thought as that, he'd have felt the blight of a Dominant; that Materialistic Science was a jealous god, excluding, as works of the devil, all utterances against the seemingly uniform, regular, periodic; that to defy him would have brought on—withering by ridicule—shrinking away by publishers—contempt ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... think of other things. With her arm through his they paced the turf along the shore, and all the while her heart sank lower and lower. She was in the presence of something so mysterious that even wise men in those days shrank from it in fear. It was the finger of God alone, they said, that laid a blight on human minds, and there before her was ...
— Vandrad the Viking - The Feud and the Spell • J. Storer Clouston
... learning: a Royal University, founded in 1733, a medical and law school, and chairs of all the natural sciences. In spite of their liberal purposes and capabilities, however, there is a blight hanging over them. Pupils enlist cautiously and reluctantly. Among other schools there is a Royal Seminary for girls, scarcely more than a name, a free school of sculpture and painting, and a mercantile school, with ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... quarries, and who served as oarsmen on the ships. The system of slavery enabled many an Athenian to live a life of leisure, but it lowered the dignity of labor and tended to prevent the rise of the poorer citizens to positions of responsibility. In Greece, as in the Orient, [13] slavery cast its blight ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... building, as all factories are, 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 ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... bier she falleth over, And her shrieks are loud and shrill— "I will have my lord, my lover! In the grave I seek him still. Shall that godlike frame be wasted By the fire's consuming blight? Mine it was—yea mine! though tasted Only one delicious night!" But the priests, they chant ever—"We carry the old, When their watching is over, their journeys are told; We carry the young, when they pass ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... process is 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 ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... myself—have you no heart that you can refuse to repair a little of the harm that you have done? You are a cruel woman—I could almost say a wicked woman: hard, false, and cowardly; and I wish my words could blight your life as your coquetry ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... 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
... the land the devastating flood passed like the besom of destruction. Hundreds of those who had struggled manfully against the blight of the wheat crops, and Kafir thefts, and bandit raids, and oppression on the part of those who ought to have afforded aid and protection, were sunk to the zero of misfortune and despair by this overwhelming calamity, for in many cases the ruin was total and apparently irremediable. Everywhere ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... ornamental flower garden; "out of Weathersfield" Wethersfield (the modern spelling), Connecticut, was famous for its onions (there is still a red onion called "Red Weathersfield"), until struck by a blight about 1840; "old Egyptians" ancient Egypt was proverbial for worshiping ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... was apparent on the surface. But, as the danger was of an entirely unprecedented character, it is not to be wondered at that I should be completely at a loss to divine what its meaning was. It was a blight some people said; and many were of opinion that it was caused by clouds of animalculae coming, as is described in ancient writings, to destroy the crops, and even to affect the health of the population. The doctors scoffed at this; ...
— A Beleaguered City • Mrs. Oliphant
... station to the esteem I profess for the cultivation of hair, and to my persecution of the clippers of it. And in this kingdom is no one that beareth such a crop as I, saving one, a clothier, an accursed one!—and may a blight fall upon him for his vanity and his affectation of solemn priestliness, and his lolling in his shop-front to be admired and marvelled at by the people. So this fellow I would disgrace and bring to scorn,—this Shagpat! for he is mine enemy, and the eye of the King my master is on him. Now ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... her weary smile, Just as of old; She looked around a little while, And shivered at the cold. Her passing touch was death to all, Her passing look a blight; She made the white rose-petals fall, And ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... worm to gnaw the bud, And none to blight the youthful bloom; Where spirits sing in joyful mood, "Behold our ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... alone, is judgment; But He strikes with the hands of men, And His blight would wither our manhood If we smote not the ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... larger number of paying scholars. The most popular classes often reached the number of 300. The foundation of the Collegium Trilingue by Erasmus's friend Jerome Busleiden in 1517 was an attempt, as its name indicates, to give instruction in Greek and Hebrew as well as in the Latin classics. A blight fell upon the noble institution during the wars of religion. Under the supervision of Alva it founded professorships of catechetics and substituted the decrees of the Council of Trent for the Decretum of Gratian in the law school. Exhausted by the hemorrhages caused ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... nor spare a sigh Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie; And yet you will weep and know why. Now no matter, child, the name: Sorrow's springs are the same. Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed What heart heard of, ghost guessed: It is the blight man was born for, It is ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... tree, they say, in the Garden of Eden. And it grew so high, flowered so wonderfully, and gave so much pleasure that Diablo, who is also called the Devil, wanted to kill it. He made up his mind that he would blight and scatter every shining leaf of its snowy bloom. So one dark night he climbed a Honey Locust tree near the gate, and swung by his tail over the wall, intending to tear off all the lovely blossoms. But he got a shock when he found that every flower was in the shape ...
— Woodland Tales • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... those who do not live there to realise the cross between canker and blight that has settled on England for the last couple of years. The effects of it are felt throughout the Empire, but at headquarters we taste the stuff in the very air, just as one tastes iodoform in the cups and bread-and-butter ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... be too hasty! Give me opportunity for explanation. I admit that I did wrong, but there are extenuating circumstances. Let me explain, I entreat you, before you thus blight my life, and ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... standing, your influence, your usefulness—all depend upon your faithfulness; and if you are faithful, you will be faithful to your promises. Think seriously over these things. If you are at fault, set about to amend. Such a fault will be a blight upon your life and upon your character until it is corrected. When the Psalmist pictures a righteous man, he says that he "sweareth [promiseth] to his own hurt, and changeth not." Are you that sort of ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... of its great prophets, such as Isaiah, Joel, Amos and Ezekiel—the stern rebuke of the oppressors of the poor and downtrodden, the scathing denunciation of the despoilers of the people, the great vision of a unified world in which there should be peace, when war should no more blight the world and when the weapons of war should be forged into plowshares and pruning hooks? Leaving matters of theology aside, are not these the principles which make Judaism a living religion to-day for so many? And I say to you, Jonathan, ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... Western blight (Yellows).—In the North Pacific and Rocky Mountain states, serious losses are annually caused by a disease apparently unlike any eastern trouble. It is marked by a gradual yellowing of the foliage and fruit. Development is checked, the leaves curl upward and the plant dies without wilting. ...
— Tomato Culture: A Practical Treatise on the Tomato • William Warner Tracy
... death to drink as water; that the light Might ebb, drawn backward from their eyes, and night Hide for one hour the imperishable faces. That they might rise up sad in heaven, and know Sorrow and sleep, one paler than young snow, One cold as blight of dew and ruinous rain, Rise up and rest and suffer a little, and be Awhile as all things born with us and we, And grieve as men, and like slain ...
— Atalanta in Calydon • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... thing worth remembering. Moreover their hearts were faint and feeble; for they felt that the people scorned and detested them. They had no friends, no defence, except in the bayonets of the British troops. A blight fell upon all their faculties, because they were contending against the rights ...
— True Stories from History and Biography • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... as bad can be with the sandy blight,' says Maddie, 'wears green goggles, poor old gentleman. He'll never know nothing, and he'll be able to swear up for Jim if the police pull him anywhere this side ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... are themselves, suggesting, if you are willing to waste your time listening to their twaddle, that there is something radically wrong in any innovation, that both "Church and State" will be imperilled if things are altered. No blight, no mildew is more fatal to a plant than the "complacent" are to the world. They resent any progress and are offended if you mention before them any new standards or points of view. "What has been good enough for us and our parents should ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... which is above flesh and above brain; which is, in fact, the unifying force of the brain faculties, called here Intuition. The founders of this society reckoned, too, with the fact that psychology as it has been taught from a material basis in schools and colleges is a blight. One can't, as a purely physical being, relate himself to mental processes; nor can one approach the super-mental area by the force ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... what way it was her duty to answer it. It would be very 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's infamy had been deserved, and it ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... all, avoided by its fellow-creatures of the jungle, a blight to all and everything, it drew in a line with me. Not once did its eyes meet mine, O'Donnell; not once did it glare at the natives who were hiding on the banks of the cutting; but it stole silently on its way with a something in its movements that left no doubt ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... 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, ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... 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 water, ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... one of those crises of 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 |
