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Decay   /dəkˈeɪ/  /dɪkˈeɪ/   Listen
Decay

noun
1.
The process of gradually becoming inferior.
2.
A gradual decrease; as of stored charge or current.  Synonym: decline.
3.
The organic phenomenon of rotting.  Synonym: decomposition.
4.
An inferior state resulting from the process of decaying.  "The house had fallen into a serious state of decay and disrepair"
5.
The spontaneous disintegration of a radioactive substance along with the emission of ionizing radiation.  Synonyms: disintegration, radioactive decay.



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"Decay" Quotes from Famous Books



... steam-engines to the most nice and delicate parts of textile mechanism. "It is not too much to say," observes a writer in the Engineer, "that, without Nasmyth's steam-hammer, we must have stopped short in many of those gigantic engineering works which, but for the decay of all wonder in us, would be the perpetual wonder of this age, and which have enabled our modern engineers to take rank above the gods of all mythologies. There is one use to which the steam-hammer is now becoming extensively applied by some of our manufacturers that deserves ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles

... the springs run, and as the sun rises and the stars come up into the heavens, then we may be sure that great results will be attained and a great work done. And then it will most surely be seen that Masonry is not effete or impotent, nor degenerated nor drooping to a fatal decay. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... still this was never seen until the fall of 1841. Ages have doubtless rolled by since this was placed here, and yet it is perfectly sound; even the bark which confines the transverse pieces shows no marks of decay. ...
— Rambles in the Mammoth Cave, during the Year 1844 - By a Visiter • Alexander Clark Bullitt

... this higher portion of the cave. He was perched on a ledge which protruded into the water in the form of a wedge. At his back the wall of the cave was rough, and trails of weed were festooned on its projections. The smell of fishy decay was strong enough to register as Ross pulled off his mask. As far as he could now see there was no ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton

... the milk of mercy. It brings on painless consumption and decay. It eats the life out of a man while the moon empties and fills once or twice. His friends say he dies of quick decline, and so he does! ha! ha!—when his enemy wills it! The strong man becomes a skeleton, and blooming maidens sink into their graves blighted and ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... A hot friend cooling: ever note, Lucilius, When love begins to sicken and decay, It useth an enforced ceremony. There are no tricks in plain and simple faith; But hollow men, like horses hot at hand, Make gallant show and promise of their mettle; But, when they should endure the bloody spur, They fall their crests, and, like deceitful jades ...
— Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]

... Pepys, who was the daughter of French parents, usually wore drawers, which were seemingly of the closed kind. (Diary of S. Pepys, ed. Wheatley, May 15, 1663, vol. iii.) They were probably not worn by Englishwomen, and even in France, with the decay of the farthingale, they seem to have dropped out of use during the seventeenth century. In a technical and very complete book, L'Art de la Lingerie, published in 1771, women's drawers are not even mentioned, and Mercier (Tableau de Paris, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... thus from childhood's hour! My fondest hopes would not decay: I never loved a tree or flower Which was the first to fade away! The garden, where I used to delve Short-frock'd, still yields me pinks in plenty: The peartree that I climb'd at twelve I see still blossoming, ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley

... very mild climate, there is nothing carried off from the forests, and, were it not for the frequent and destructive fires which the natives kindle in many parts, no check worth mentioning would be placed upon the natural increase and decay of the woods of New Holland. The consequence of this is, that trees are to be seen there in every stage of growth or ruin; and, occasionally, in very thickly-planted spots, the surface of the ground is not a little encumbered by the fallen branches and trunks of the ancient ornaments ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden

... do not use me As you have used others. Better you did refuse me: You have refused others. Better, far better hope to banish A small child than, grown old, Hope should decay, his vigour vanish, And I be left ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman

... been disfigured, traditions are generally presented to us torn from their original connection with edifices once renowned for beauty and magnificence. It is our wish, as it has been our aim, to rescue these ruins from degradation and decay. Gathered from many an uninviting heap of chaotic matter, they are now presented in a different form, and under a more popular aspect. We cannot pretend to say that we have invariably assigned to them their true origin, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby

... castles of Sestos and Abydos. Constantinople stands about one hundred miles from its entrance into the Sea of Marmora, and at nearly the opposite extremity of this sea. The defences of the channel had been allowed to go to decay; but few guns were mounted, and the forts were but partially garrisoned. In Constantinople not a gun was mounted, and no preparations for defence were made; indeed, previous to the approach of the fleet, the Turks had not ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck

... that he can now subordinate one thing to another in importance, and introduce all manner of very subtle detail, to a degree that was before impossible. He can render just as easily the flourish of trumpets before a victorious emperor and the gossip of country market women, the gradual decay of forty years of a man's life and the gesture of a passionate moment. He finds himself equally unable, if he looks at it from one point of view—equally able, if he looks at it from another point of view—to reproduce a colour, a sound, an outline, a logical argument, a physical action. He ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... truth, Lord. When false creeds decay, When man-made dogmas vanish with the night, Then, Lord, on thee my darkened soul ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various

... Hibernia's land Or change the rocks of Scotland for the Strand There none are swept by sudden fate away; But all, whom hunger spares, with age decay. ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell

... as if an access of life came with the melting of the winter's snows, and as if every rootlet of grass, that lifted its first green blade from the matted debris of the old year's decay, bore my spirit upon it, nearer to the ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell

... my Lord, how perrelous this is to his Lordschip and his house, and decay thareof, in caise the Authoritie wold be scharpe, and wold use conforme bayth to civile and cannon, and als your awin municipall law of ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox

... not, mourning ones, but rather rejoice that He, who doeth all things well, hath summoned it, in its pristine purity, to a haven of innocence, where contamination nor decay cannot defile or enter. And when you miss the childish prattle or silvery laugh which fell so sweetly on your ears, think of the baby that is dead to you, as a rejoicing angel among angelic hosts that throng the "land of the blest." Baby is dead to earth, but ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur

... and die than decay in ideals and traditions and heritage!" Miss Lizzie Bettie looked around the room. "Here we are educating everything in Yorkburg. Next year two new handsome schools will be opened and filled with the riffraff of the town. What are we going to do with them after they're educated? Our streets have ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher

... of November [1878], the place [the farm] having been going to decay for fourteen months, Mr Palmer [the tenant] called to demand that Mr Borrow should put it in repair; otherwise he would do it himself and send in the bills, saying, 'I don't care for the old farm or you either,' and several ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins

... there be, but naught more wondrous than man; Over the surging sea, with a whitening south wind wan, Through the foam of the firth, man makes his perilous way; And the eldest of deities Earth that knows not toil nor decay Ever he furrows and scores, as his team, year in year out, With breed of the yoked horse, the ploughshare ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles

... some happier shore, If he be safe, Euphrasia dies content. Till that sad close of all, the task be mine To tend a father with delighted care, To smooth the pillow of declining age, See him sink gradual into mere decay, On the last verge of life watch ev'ry look, Explore each fond unutterable wish, Catch his last breath, and close his ...
— The Grecian Daughter • Arthur Murphy

... blustring Month of March, That does the Body's Maims and Bruises search, Brings by cold nipping Storms unwelcom Pains, And finds, or breeds, Distempers in our Veins; Renews old Sores, and hastens on Decay, And seldom does afford one pleasant Day. But Clouds dissolve, or raging Tempest blow, And untile Houses, like the wrangling Shrow; Thus March and Marriage justly may be said, } To be alike, then ...
— The Pleasures of a Single Life, or, The Miseries Of Matrimony • Anonymous

... fifteen feet, there is a spring to which cattle come from the near fields to drink. The old earth builders used material of very unequal hardness and durability when they built these hills, their contracts were not well supervised, and the result has been that the more rapid decay of the softer material has undermined the harder layers and led to their downfall. Every fifty or a hundred or two hundred feet in the Catskill formation the old contractors slipped in a layer of soft, slatey, red ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs

... as if to satisfy himself that there was no one near to observe his motions; then going to a large tree, and taking another look around to be sure of safety, he removed some bark from its base, which was very dextrously fitted to its place, and revealed a large hollow caused by the decay of the inner portions of the tree, from which he drew forth a bag of oats, and, cautiously approaching the horse, ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison

... power of Rome. Goats, carabaos, and ponies graze on the neglected plaza shaded with widespreading camphor-trees. The two school buildings bearing the forgotten Spanish arms are on the road to ruin and decay; no signs of life in the disreputable municipio; the presidente probably is deep in his siesta, and the solitary guard of the carcel is busily engaged in conversation ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert

... for ever in the hearts of the simple country folk. In small towns like Burford and Northleach, situated five or six miles from any railway station, the prosperity and happiness of the natives has suffered enormously by the decay of the stage coach; and even in smaller villages the cheering sound of the horn must have been very welcome, forming as it did a connecting link between these remote hamlets of Gloucestershire and the great metropolis a ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs

... suggestion in this that the site of the kiva was originally occupied by rectangular rooms, and there is a further suggestion, in the end sections referred to, that the kiva had at some period fallen into decay and was subsequently rebuilt. All this occurred before the first falling out ...
— The Cliff Ruins of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff

... despairing, as this heathen world we pass by so heedlessly. Beside it even the purlieus of Rome sink into insignificance. Now run your eye along the East side of Orange street. A sidewalk sinking in mire; a long line of one-story wooden shanties, ready to cave-in with decay; dismal looking groceries, in which the god, gin, is sending his victims by hundreds to the greedy grave-yard; suspicious looking dens with dingy fronts, open doors, and windows stuffed with filthy rags-in which crimes are nightly perpetrated, and where ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams

... Another said this must be the very place where Lot's wife was turned into a pillar of salt, and the pillar been broken up and spread around the country. He said if a man was to die he would never decay on account of the salt. Thus the talk went on, and it seemed as if there were not bad words enough in the language to properly express their contempt and bad opinion of such a country as this. They treated me to some of their meat, a little better than mine, and before daylight ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly

... rever'd his Sense, And long in Senates fam'd for Eloquence; But if to these Endowments of the Mind, A graceful Figure happily is join'd, Then flows thy Gall, then raves thy half-form'd Clay, Then frets thy putrid Carcass to Decay. ...
— Two Poems Against Pope - One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope and the Blatant Beast • Leonard Welsted

... a long time to convince his two workmates of the truth of his own account, but he succeeded at last, and they all three agreed that Old Sweater was a sanguinary rotter, and they lamented over the decay of the good ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell

... without barns. It will require the labor of a number of years to secure the requisite amount of lumber and other material to enable them to erect their barns. One of the farmers undertakes to shelter and protect from decay the lumber of both, until the requisite amount can be secured. This is a real favor to the other and is accepted readily. He even offers to pay him for the care and liability. But he discovers afterward that ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott

... of August, the carpenter examined the pumps, and to our great mortification, found them all in a state of decay, owing, as he said, to the sap's being left in the wood; one of them was so rotten, as, when hoisted up, to drop to pieces, and the rest were little better; so that our chief trust was now in the soundness of our vessel, which happily did not admit more than ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr

... and the Netherlands town life had been, as we have seen, slower of development.[13] Hence for these Northern cities the period of decay had not yet come. In fact, the fourteenth century marks the zenith of their power. Their great trading league, the Hansa, was now fully established, and through the hands of its members passed all the wealth of Northern Europe. The league even fought a war against the King of Denmark ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... man is the incessant walk of nature, wherein every moment is a step towards death. Even our growing to perfection is a progress to decay. Every thought we have is a sand running out of the ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston

... dreaming in the hot summer noon, with a book of old tales beside me, beneath a great beech; or, in autumn, grew sad because I trod on the leaves that had sheltered me, and received their last blessing in the sweet odours of decay; or, in a winter evening, frozen still, looked up, as I went home to a warm fireside, through the netted boughs and twigs to the cold, snowy moon, with her opal zone around her. At last I had fallen asleep; for I know nothing more that passed till I found myself lying under a superb beech-tree, ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald

... no new phase in human experience. It characterised all the civilisations of ancient times, at the height of their prosperity, and was really the beginning of their decay. ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple

... said, it is to be considered that the needful arts among them are managed with less labour than anywhere else. The building or the repairing of houses among us employ many hands, because often a thriftless heir suffers a house that his father built to fall into decay, so that his successor must, at a great cost, repair that which he might have kept up with a small charge: it frequently happens, that the same house which one person built at a vast expense, is neglected by another, who thinks he has a more delicate ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various

... which so far as is known is not essential to life. This list includes the rare elements, argon, helium, neon, krypton, and xenon; also hydrogen, ammonia, hydrogen dioxide, and probably ozone. Certain minute forms of life (germs) are also present, the decay of organic matter being due to ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson

... knowledge that she had never recovered the health she had previous to the terrible shock which his revelation of Donald's guilt had been to her. He forgot his own share in the shock and threw the whole blame of her early decay on Donald. "And if she dies," he kept saying in his angry heart, "I will make him ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... deep affection would have become subject to the natural influences of weakening and decay; and, in the instance of a man and woman, the soul-possessing passion might have passed, to be replaced by a more moderate, custom-worn affection. But the dead are beyond the reach of those mouldering fingers. ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard

... Redeem'd from decay. The bonds which imprison Your souls, rend away! Praising the Lord with zeal, By deeds that love reveal, Like brethren true and leal Sharing the daily meal, To all that sorrow feel Whisp'ring of heaven's weal, Still is the master ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

... gone, and all with them is gone! 155 Ne ought to me remaines, but to lament My long decay, which no man els doth mone, And mourne my fall with dolefull dreriment: Yet it is comfort in great languishment, To be bemoned with compassion kinde, 160 And mitigates the ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser

... my soul, "in the depths of thy slumber Sleep on, gentle bard! till the shades pass away; For the lips of the living the ages shall number That steal o'er thy heart in its couch of decay: Oh! thou wert beloved from the dawn of thy childhood, Beloved till the last of thy suffering was seen, Beloved now that o'er thee is waving the wild-wood, And the worm only living where ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... manifestation of Himself to the hearts and souls of them that love Him. And so the 'inheritance is incorruptible and undefiled, and fadeth not away'; not merely by reason of the communicated will of God operating upon creatures whom He preserves untarnished by corruption, and ungnawed by decay, but because He Himself is the 'inheritance,' and on Him time hath no power. On His wealth all His creatures may hang for ever; and it shall be as it was in the sweet parable of the miracle of old, the fragments that remain will be more than ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren

... cleave to Earth—her frail Decaying children dread decay. Yon wreath of mist that leaves the vale, And lessens in the morning ray: Look, how, by mountain rivulet, It lingers as it upward creeps, And clings to fern and copsewood set Along the green and dewy steeps: Clings to the fragrant kalmia, clings To precipices fringed with grass, Dark maples ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant

... empire and the establishment of a new government. In the end of all governments at the same point, is the strongest argument in support of the theory of reincarnation; a state, as a being, has its birth, mature age, and decay. None seemingly is endowed with the attribute of immutability. It was the fond hope of our forefathers that the United States should prove the exception. Imperialism was the reef on which the ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams

... upon it. On Stanley's remarking upon the great number that were in ruins, the officer replied that it was considered so much more meritorious an action to build a pagoda than to repair one that, after the death of the founder, they were generally suffered to fall into decay. ...
— On the Irrawaddy - A Story of the First Burmese War • G. A. Henty

... Revolution. A system of small States, which in the past of Greece and Italy had produced the finest types of energy and genius, had in Germany resulted in the extinction of all vigorous life, and in the ascendancy of all that was stagnant, little, and corrupt. If political disorganisation, the decay of public spirit, and the absence of a national idea, are the signs of impending downfall, Germany was ripe for foreign conquest. The obsolete and dilapidated fabric of the Empire had for a century past been sustained only by the European tradition of the Balance of Power, ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe

... no throbs of fiery pain, No cold gradations of decay, Death broke at once the vital chain, And freed ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various

... has not craved permission, it has come by tacit consent. Mitsha has felt that Say was approaching the point when the soul breaks loose and flits to another realm, and she wishes to remain with her to the last. If that soul should drop like a shrivelled fruit, to decay and perish forever, nobody would bend to gaze fondly at it. But if it flutter upward, we follow it with our eyes as long as we can, unconsciously thinking, "How happy you are, free now; and how much I wish to be with you." The ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier

... off the instant to view this house. It stood in a high-walled garden, which was entered through heavy iron-barred gates, one of them now open. The place had rather a forlorn look, due in part to the decay of the foliage which in summer shaded the lawn; blinds were drawn on all the front windows; the porch needed repair. He rang at the door, and was quickly answered by a dame of the housekeeper species. On learning his business, she began to conduct him through the rooms, ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing

... idlers, while cures, overburdened with work, have but seven hundred; in one monastery nineteen monks instead of eighty, and in another four instead of fifty;[2238] a number of monasteries reduced to three or to two inhabitants, and even to one; almost all the congregations of men going to decay, and many of them dying out for lack of novices;[2239] a general lukewarmness among the members, great laxity in many establishments, and with scandals in some of them; scarcely one-third taking an interest in ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... seem that we had found harbor at last. Days ran into weeks, weeks to months, and these became a year, at length—the first we had passed under any one roof. Then there came a change. The house was not so well built as it had appeared, and with the beginning of decay there came also a change of landlord and janitor. Our spruce and not unworthy colored man was replaced by one Thomas, who was no less spruce, indeed, but as much more severe in his discipline as his good-natured employer was lax in the matter of ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine

... looked its best, the watermen in charge of their wherry were directed to row up stream towards the creek on the northern side, where the old fortress, embowered in trees, nestled under the shelter of the Portsdown hills, a monolith of past grandeur and present decay! ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson

... fade From earth, before the enlivening ray; As o'er the brow the transient shade Of thought, the hues of fancy flit away:— Yet in the mystic womb unseen, Of the dark ruling hours that sway Our mortal lot, whate'er has been, With new creative germ defies decay. The blooming field is time For nature's ever-teeming shoot, And all is ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... often hear complaints of the shallowness of the present age, and of the decay of profound science. But I do not think that those which rest upon a secure foundation, such as mathematics, physical science, etc., in the least deserve this reproach, but that they rather maintain ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant

... the quality so prevalent in Bach of spiritual vitality. Exactly because the romantic element represents the human side of music, it is subject to the whims of fashion and is liable to change and decay. Bach carries us into the realm of universal ideas, inexhaustible and changeless in their power to exalt. Schumann says that "Music owes to Bach what a religion owes to its founder"; and it is true that a knowledge ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding

... interested: since the last time she came they had suffered a relapse—the malady had changed in nature, and had shown graver symptoms. It was a kind of deadly fatigue, killing them by a slows strange decay. She asked questions of the doctors but could learn nothing: this malady was unknown to them, and defied all the resources of their art. A fortnight later she returned. Some of the sick people were dead, others ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE

... in an exquisite taste which vulgarer generations have never yet succeeded in imitating. Nothing was concealed, but rather displayed with a half-cynical pride. All was moth-ridden, worm-eaten, fallen to decay—but it was of the Monarchy. Not half a dozen houses in Paris, where already the wealth, which has to-day culminated in a ridiculous luxury of outward show, was beginning to build new palaces, could show room after room furnished in the days of the Great Louis. The very air, faintly ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman

... down pretty easy, lodge-pole pine, fer instance. But a tree doesn't have to be blown down to be ruined. Even if a branch is blown off—an' you know how often that happens—insects and fungi get into the wound of the tree and decay follows." ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... subjection to our Creator, and it is also an act of love and reverence, for prayer looks upon God, as a Lord, a Father, and a Master. 5. Prayer is the pulse of a Christian, and here ye may find him. If he be vigorous and frequent here, he is well, a decay in this is a woful symptom of a dangerous and dwining(515) condition. This is the fountain of the spirit of life, and the Spirit's breath. For the Spirit helps our infirmities with groans which cannot be uttered, (Rom. ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... that it began with Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists. Having gone so far back, the historian would find cause for going further still. How could he justify any frontier? Every living organism is said to carry in itself the germ of its own decay, and perhaps a civilisation is no sooner alive than it begins to contrive its end. Gradually the symptoms of disease become apparent to acute physicians who state the effect without perceiving the cause. Be it so; circular fatalism is as cheerful as it ...
— Art • Clive Bell

... of the buds as they unfolded. She wished that she could have been going out of the garden in the brightness and fragrance of spring. The young beauty of the world would have been a good omen for the happiness of her new life. The sorrowful incense of Nature in decay cast a spell of sadness over her, even of fear, lest after all she were doing a wrong thing, making a mistake which could ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... civilization that has changed his fastness of strength and rapine to a beautiful adornment of this scene of peace and plenty, its glories all humbled, its terrors all passed away, and its great and only value the part it plays in a picture, and the lesson it preaches, in its decay, of the progress of ...
— Travellers' Tales • Eliza Lee Follen

... will be a noticeable discoloration of the sides or pen tracks which slowly spreads during a continuing period of from ten to fifteen years, until the entire pen marks are of a rusty brown tint. A species of disintegration and decay is now progressing and when approximately forty years of age, has destroyed ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho

... 'Decay of Lying,' Mr. Tutt," said Tutt thoughtfully, as he dropped in for a moment's chat after lunch, "Oscar Wilde says, 'There is no essential incongruity ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train

... to do what was most pressing; he cleared out the fosses which were choked up with ruins; he repaired the greater portion of the walls which, through the security engendered by a long peace, had been neglected, and had fallen into decay, and raised them again to the height of lofty towers, devoting himself zealously to the work of building. In this way the work was speedily completed, because he found that the sums which some time before had been collected for the erection of a theatre ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus

... manual labour; however, we contrive to perform what is absolutely requisite, and intend, with the Lord's blessing, to prepare for the building of a new church, as the present is much too small, and gone to decay, We thank you for your readiness to assist us ...
— The Moravians in Labrador • Anonymous

... their folly was not delayed long. God caused the sea to transgress its bounds, and a portion of the earth was flooded. This was the time also when the mountains became rocks, and the dead bodies of men began to decay. And still another consequence of the sin of idolatry was that the countenances of the men of the following generations were no longer in the likeness and image of God, as the countenances of Adam, Seth, and Enosh had been. They resembled ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg

... to the world of approximate sensations, and became bewildered in materialism, considering the conceptional whole or First Element as some refinement of matter, unchangeable in its essence, though subject to mutations of quality and form in an eternal succession of seeming decay and regeneration; comparing it to water, air, or fire, as each endeavored to refine on the doctrine of his predecessor, or was influenced by a different ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... political policy. The changes in price during the next few years drove out of competition many survivors of the small-farming free-labor system, and put the slave regime in position to dictate the policy of the nation. The zenith of the system and the first inevitable signs of decay came in the years 1850-1860, when the rising price of cotton threw the whole economic energy of the South into its cultivation, leading to a terrible consumption of soil and slaves, to a great increase in ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois

... name," she murmured, "though the sound of it is beautiful. Rouille! It signifies, for the moment, the decay of hopes, a mould of rust obscuring ambition. But in a little while the steel of your courage will shine bright once more. I am Madame Gilbert; my husband was of the Territorial Army—a Captain also." She had thought to have made him a Colonel on General Castelnau's ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone

... maid, had instantly a great desire to let him draw a troublesome tooth of hers which, she took pains to assure us, was not impaired by natural decay, but only accidentally broken in cracking a cherry-stone. "The edge is so rough," said she, "that it hurts my tongue; and since this honest gentleman can extract it painlessly, I have a great mind ...
— Jacques Bonneval • Anne Manning

... unsubstantial," she calmly replied; "it is subject to change and decay. A hundred years from now and there may be no visible sign that it had ever been. But the soul is imperishable and immortal; the only thing about man that is really substantial. And now," she added, "for the faces of our ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur

... to bear, and would give a weapon for forcing foreign countries to tear down their tariff barriers. The colonial market, the home market, and the foreign market would thus all be gained, and none too soon, if the complete decay of British industry and the triumph of its rivals were to be averted. 'We have reached our highest point,' declared Mr Chamberlain. 'Our fate will be the fate of the empires and the kingdoms of the past.... Sugar has gone, silk has gone, iron is threatened, wool is threatened, cotton ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton

... that neighborhood, suffered greatly, and only a sudden exhibition of spirit on Cousin Fanny's part saved it from a worse fate. After the war it went down; the fields were poor, and grew up in briers and sassafras, and the house was too large and out of repair to keep from decay, the ownership of it being divided between Cousin Fanny and other members of the family. Cousin Fanny had no means whatever, so that it soon was in a bad condition. The rest of the family, as they ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page

... other hand, that public order alone which cherishes the true liberty of the individual is strong in the approbation of God and in the moral sentiments of mankind. All else is weakness, and death, and decay. ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... Hague, seven years ago, I stayed not, as on my last visit, at the Oude Doelen, which is the most comfortable hotel in Holland, but at a more retired hostelry. It was spacious and antiquated, with large empty rooms, and cool passages, and an air of decay over all. Servants one never saw, nor any waiter proper; one's every need was carried out by a very small and very enthusiastic boy. "Is the hroom good, sare?" he asked, as he flung open the door of ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas

... get no intelligence of the Portuguese whom they were sent in search of. On Whitsunday, which happened that year about the middle of May, mass was said on shore and two crosses erected, at which the king appeared so much pleased that he engaged to restore them if they happened to fall or decay. During the holidays they discovered an island in lat. 18 deg. S. to which they gave the name of Espirito Santo[8], and half a degree farther they were in some danger from a sand bank 9 leagues long. On Trinity Sunday, still in danger from sand banks, they ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr

... description far less striking than that by which he was himself upheld, was founded, as Leicester was well aware, on Elizabeth's solid judgment, not on her partiality, and was, therefore, free from all those principles of change and decay necessarily incident to that which chiefly arose from personal accomplishments and female predilection. These great and sage statesmen were judged of by the Queen only with reference to the measures they suggested, and the reasons by which ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott

... stood another soldier on guard; a door suddenly was thrown open, and then a burst of light showed them a large hall with lofty ceilings, the walls hung with red and golden tapestry and with its rich medieval groined arches and gilded cornices, resembling, after all the ruins and decay of the town, a castle-hall in fairy-land rather than a positively real earthly room. Dazzled by the brilliance of the scene, Rocjean and Caper were standing near the door of entrance, when a tall, stout, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... to consult. The house adjoining, at the corner of Sudder Street, has always had the reputation of being haunted, and no one would go near the place for years, and it was gradually falling into decay, when one day to the surprise of everybody some natives appeared on the scene and occupied it, and later on Parrott & Co. leased the premises for their whisky agency. Let us hope that the material spirit has had the effect of exorciting the ...
— Recollections of Calcutta for over Half a Century • Montague Massey

... that at the end of the colonial period the older lands of Virginia and Maryland, where slavery and the plantation system had long existed, were approaching a period of decay. This was the logical result of slavery. An industrial readjustment was taking place involving the decline of the plantation system and with it the decline of slavery. It was at this juncture that the fate of slavery, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various

... books and listen to his daughter's conversation. Comparatively a young man, his energies were spent, his life was behind him. To Annabel it was infinitely sorrowful to have observed this rapid process of decay. She could not be persuaded that the failure of his powers was anything more than temporary. But her father lost no opportunity of warning her that she deceived herself. He had his ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing

... night, and the breeze that rolled down from the mountain peaks, so remote and passionless, was charged to overflowing with resinous odours, mingled with which, and just strong enough to be recognizable, was the faint, pungent smell of decay. A couple of hares, looking somewhat ashamed of themselves, sprang into upright positions, and with frightened whisks of their tails disappeared into a clump of ferns. With a startled hiss a big ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell

... himself with a palm-leaf fan on Sunday afternoons, watching the surreys go by, and where his daughter listened to mandolins and badinage on starlit evenings; but, although youth still held the veranda, both the youth and the veranda were in decay. The four or five young men who lounged there this afternoon were of a type known to shady pool-parlours. Hats found no favour with them; all of them wore caps; and their tight clothes, apparently from a common source, showed a vivacious fancy for oblique pockets, false belts, and ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington

... began the whole interior was infested with mean little dwellings which choked it like offensive weeds—while rain and frost steadily were eating into the unprotected masonry and hastening the general decay. ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier

... with some difficulty that he found the way to his own house, which he approached with silent awe, expecting every moment to bear the shrill voice of Dame Van Winkle. He found the house gone to decay—the roof fallen in, the windows shattered, and the doors off the hinges. A half-starved dog that looked like Wolf was skulking about it. Rip called him by name, but the cur snarled, showed his teeth, and passed on. This was an unkind cut indeed—"My very dog," sighed poor Rip, "has ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various

... head, he proceeded into the town straight to his own house. He found it sadly fallen to decay. Before it lay a strange herd-boy in tattered garments, and near him an old worn-out dog, which growled and showed his teeth at Peter when he called him. He entered by the opening, which had formerly been closed by ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous

... said, some of his aesthetic tastes had suffered a gradual decay, his love of scenery remained fresh and strong. Every walk at Coniston was a fresh delight, and he was never tired of praising the beauty of the broken hilly country at the ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin

... wheel revolves, and life is futile. Yes; so it is unless there is something more to be said, and the life that is thus futile is also, as it seems to me, inexplicable if you believe in God at all. If man, being what he is, is wholly subject to that law of mutation and decay, then not only is he made 'a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death,' but he is also inferior to that persistent, old mother-earth from whose bosom he has come. If all that you have to say of him is, 'Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return,' ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... of all the shortcomings in this world lay in the imperfection, reluctancy, or inherent grossness of this impracticable substance. God would have everything perfect, but the nature of the element in which He worked in some way defeated His purpose. Death, disease, decay, clung necessarily to everything which was created out of it; and pain, and want, and hunger, and suffering. Worse than all, the spirit in its material body was opposed and borne down, its aspirations crushed, its purity tainted by the passions and appetites of its companion, the fleshly ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude

... to which few of the wisest would have been equal. Those remains, with his valuable journals, instruments, and personal effects, must be carried to Zanzibar. But the body must first be preserved from decay, and they had no skill nor facilities for embalming; and if preserved, there were no means of transportation—no roads nor carts. No beasts of burden being available, the body must be borne on the shoulders of human beings; and, as no strangers could ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various

... set before his children. As Mr. Alboni gazed upon each familiar object, surrounding his beautiful villa, he was greatly surprised to find everything in the same state of preservation as when he had last beheld his home, once so dear; instead of an air of desolation, everything falling to decay, as would be a natural consequence attendant upon the long absence of the family, the scrupulous care and attention of some interested one, was apparent on all sides. Even the little ivied bower, which Mr. Sunderland had arranged with his own ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale

... but deeath, these two hearts could sever, An' that nobbut partly, net awl: For love like one's soul is immortal, If its love, it wont vanish away— Its birth wor inside o' th' breet portal Ov Eden, it knows noa decay. ...
— Yorkshire Tales. Third Series - Amusing sketches of Yorkshire Life in the Yorkshire Dialect • John Hartley

... absolutely believed and duly repeated the story he told her, which was briefly this:—His companion, whose many-syllabled Indian name he taught her, but who, in England, found his baptismal one of Christian more convenient, was the chief of a tribe once powerful, now fallen into decay. To raise this tribe again was his one idea, his fervent ambition. He had himself been educated by the French Jesuits, but, when fully informed, had seen the errors of their faith, and now earnestly ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill

... her; a certain common sense, which now and then very nearly achieves wit. For an instance—But yesterday a certain pompous lady lamented to her in my hearing (and with intention, as it seemed to me, who am grown suspicious), the rapid moral decay of Boston society. "Alas!" sighs my heroine; "but what a comfort, ma'am, to think that neither of us belongs to it!" Add to this that she has learning enough to equip ten precieuses—and hides it: has read Plato and can quote her Virgil by the page—but ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... all, and almost as well for the use, as in this crude state they are scarcely digestible by the strongest stomach. On the other hand, when over-boiled, they become vapid, and in a state similar to decay, in which they afford no sweet purifying juices to the body, but load it with a mass of mere feculent matter."—Domestic Management, 12mo. ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner

... situation was filled up by another. He was removed to what they call the helpless ward, where he was well nursed and attended. It is no uncommon, indeed I may say it is a very common thing, for the old pensioners, as they gradually decay, to have their health quite perfect when the faculties are partly gone; and there is a helpless ward established for that very reason, where those who are infirm and feeble, without disease, or have lost their faculties while their ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat

... grant, that your Pleasures may meet with no Interruption; your Charms know no Decay; and may ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire

... credit, Agricultural, decay, economics, problems of, prices, fall of, Agricultural, and rural population, Agriculture and crises, Agriculture, exhaustion of the soil, medieval, number in, the new, Aldrich report, Senator, plan, ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter

... remember the late Anna Spiesz, sometime wife of Herdegen Schopper; and as to the said Herdegen Schopper, my dear brother, Margery's book of memorabilia right truly shows forth the manner of his life and mind in the bloom of his youth, and verily it is a sorrowful task for me to set forth the decay and end ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... success, because, if he is a person of this calibre, he must remember how small it is, when all is said and done; that even in his day there are those who can beat him on his own ground; and also that all worldly success, like the most perfect flower, yet bears in it the elements of decay. But he will have reflected with humble satisfaction on those long years of patient striving which have at length lifted him to an eminence whence he can climb on and on, scarcely encumbered by the jostling crowd; till at length, worn out, ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard

... put our resolution into practice, we shall out of pure weakness come to be troubled at the performance, when the grace and goodliness, which rendered it before so amiable and pleasing to us, begin to decay and wear out of our fancy; like greedy people, who, seizing on the more delicious morsels of any dish with a keen appetite, are presently disgusted when they grow full, and find themselves oppressed and uneasy ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... Episcopal mode of worship. The High Commission Court was organized (1583) to try and to to punish heretics—whether Catholics or Puritans. The great number of paupers caused by the destruction of the monasteries under Henry VIII and the gradual decay of relations of feudal service caused the passage of the first Poor Law (1601) (S403), and so brought the Government face to face with a problem which has never yet been satisfactorily settled; namely, what to do with habitual paupers ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery

... sound of other days had died away. The creek bed had long since yielded up its treasure and lay neglected, exposed to the heat and frost. The old brick buildings rambling up the street were still left, but were fast tottering to decay. Side by side with the occupied buildings, stood half-fallen adobes and shattered blocks filled only with ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher

... to accept the theory because of the fact that, in old age, the mind in common with the body is subject to decay. ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome

... seasons due, Forget one Spring where veinlet tendrils lace Rose over rose to make this flower, thy face? Look round thee now, dear dupe of sweet hey-day! Of what once blooming joy canst thou find trace Save in the bosom of a cold decay? What violet of Summer's yester sway Usurps these clouds to throne her slender moon? Look on the wrinkling year, the shrunken way, The wintry bier of all that gaudy shone, And gather love ere loveliness wear pall, If thou, when all is ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan

... that men and women both should cease to grow old in any other way than as the tree does, full of grace and honor. The hair of the artist turns white, but his eye shines clearer than ever, and we feel that age brings him maturity, not decay. So would it be with all, were the springs of immortal refreshment but unsealed within the soul; then, like these women, they would see, from the lonely chamber window, the glories of the universe; or, shut in darkness, be ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... both for arts and arms, that (however degenerate at present) it still deserves your attention and reflection. View it therefore with care, compare its former with its present state, and examine into the causes of its rise and its decay. Consider it classically and politically, and do not run through it, as too many of your young countrymen do, musically, and (to use a ridiculous word) KNICK-KNACKICALLY. No piping nor fiddling, I beseech you; no days lost in poring upon almost imperceptible 'intaglios ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield

... co-mystery of all the ancient mysteries, shall remain ever present through all futurity like "the existing order of the Universe, or rather, of the part of it known to us," to use the phraseology of John Stuart Mill. Nations may rise and fall, theologies may flourish and decay, but this glorious and divine inheritance shall never pass away. Let pseudo-scientists avail themselves of stale and exploded arguments, and urge that there is no invisible world, and therefore no immortality for man, but honest scientists, like Professors Tait and Stewart, in the "Unseen Universe," ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran

... noble dome nearly a hundred feet across, called the Hall of Justice. The whole of this grand palace is now being thoroughly restored, after having been permitted for half a century and more to fall into partial decay. We must not forget to mention the banqueting hall of the palace; nothing finer of this character exists in modern architecture. The whole was a surprise and delight, as we had not even read or heard of this ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou

... flowerets in the sunlight shining, Blossoms flaunting in the eye of day, Tremulous leaves, with soft and silver lining; Buds that open only to decay; ...
— Graded Memory Selections • Various

... all The beauties parting day bestows, With deeper hues that slowly fall, To shadow Nature's soft repose; So sweet, so mild, thy transient sway, We mourn it should so soon decay. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, No. - 537, March 10, 1832 • Various

... "We are the lords of the kingdom of mind! We are the stem which can never decay!" ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen

... races were parcelled out and appropriated by the victors as the legitimate spoils of victory. Every day outrages were perpetrated, at the contemplation of which humanity shudders. They suffered the provident arrangements of the Incas to fall into decay. The poor Indian, without food, now wandered half-starved and naked over the plateau. Even those who aided the Spaniards fared no better, and many an Inca noble roamed a mendicant over the fields where he once held rule; and if driven, perchance, by his necessities to purloin something from ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray

... and made it impossible? Why did the day, which began with a certain amount of separation and decay, end with a closer consolidation than ever, so that they were, for the most part, gathered in the upper room; and forty days after they were all with one accord in one place? Why was it that they who ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer

... holding his nose for the stench of death which meets him; and before them are three open coffins, in which lie, in three loathsome stages of corruption, from blue and bloated putrescence to well-nigh fleshless decay, three crowned corpses. This is the triumph of Death; the grim and horrible jest of the Middle Ages: equality in decay; kings, emperors, ladies, knights, beggars, and cripples, this is what we all come to be, stinking corpses; ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various

... which she was exposed. The vulgar slanderer was allowed to escape after this valuable testimony. She comes into history like a will-o'-the-wisp, one of the marsh lights that mean nothing but putrescence and decay, and then flickers out again with her false witness into the wastes of inanity. That she should have been treated so leniently and Jeanne so cruelly! say the historians. Reason good: she was nothing, came of nothing, and meant nothing. It is profane to associate ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant

... hastened the slow decay of mellow autumn. Low on the landscape lay a soft mist, dense enough to conceal everything at twenty yards away, but suffused with golden sunlight; overhead shone the clear blue sky. Roadside trees ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing

... are surrounded by gardens fragrant with champa and orange-blossom, and gay with many other flowers. One can see that formerly the gardens must have been much more lovely and luxuriant than they now are. The decay and ruin were caused by the great siege in the days of Aurangzib. Extensive repairs have been carried out by Sir Salar Jung. He has restored the gardens, and saved the Tombs from the destruction which had gradually been ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey

... senses nor the intellect can give us any certain knowledge of reality.[2] He denied the possibility of studying phenomena as signs of the unknown.[3] He denied all possibility of truth, and the reality of motion, origin and decay. There was according to his teaching no pleasure or happiness, and no wisdom or supreme good. He denied the possibility of finding out the nature of things, or of proving the existence of the gods, and finally he declared that ...
— Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism • Mary Mills Patrick

... village till they came to the ruin. It was a very beautiful ruin, and the party spent more than an hour in rambling about it, and looking at the old monuments, and the carved and sculptured windows, and arches, and cornices, all wasted and blackened by time and decay. A part of the ruin was still in good repair, and was used as a church, though it was full of old sepulchral monuments and relics. There was a woman in attendance at the door, to show the church to those who wished to see the interior ...
— Rollo in Scotland • Jacob Abbott

... lady's decay I am degraded from a cook and I fear the devil himself will entertain me but for one of his blackguard, and he shall be sure to ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 39. Saturday, July 27, 1850 • Various

... of what he saw reminds me of what I once beheld myself in the famous vaults of St Michan's Church in Dublin, which possesses the horrid property of preserving corpses from decay for centuries. A figure inexpressibly thin and pathetic, of a dusty leaden colour, enveloped in a shroud-like garment, the thin lips crooked into a faint and dreadful smile, the hands pressed tightly over the region of ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James

... won for Islam on the west, and the civilization developed in the country by fifteen centuries of intensive and undisturbed Hellenization was completely blotted out. The cities wore isolated from one another till their commerce fell into decay. The elaborately cultivated lands around them were left fallow till they were good for nothing but the pasturage which was all that the nomad required. The only monuments of architecture that have survived in Anatolia above ground are the imposing khans or fortified rest-houses ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth

... drawing nearer to Gentz, and fixing her large, flaming eyes upon him, she asked in a whisper, "I suppose you love Germany? You would not like to see her devoured by France as Italy was devoured by her? You would not like either to see her go to decay and crumble to pieces from ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach

... soldiers that came now and then in drifts along with the cool wood-scents, there might have been no war at all. In the soft moonlight the great traceried windows and the buttresses and the high-pitched roof seemed as gorgeously untroubled by decay as if the carvings on the cusps and arches had just come from under the careful ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos

... is exceedingly delicate in its organization. It is, if in perfection, as we have stated, of a beautiful cream-color. It unfolds in the night, remains in its glory through the morn—at meridian it has begun to decay. The day following its birth it has changed to a deep red, and ere the sun goes down, its petals have fallen to the earth, leaving inclosed in the capacious calyx a scarcely perceptible germ. This germ, in its incipient and early stages, is called "a form;" in its more ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox

... the decay of the diary-keeping habit, with the natural result that several correspondents have written to say that they have kept diaries all their lives. No doubt all these diaries now contain the entry, "Wrote to the Daily ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne

... everybody and everything before his valets with great freedom, except of politics, on which he never utters a word in their presence, and he always sends them away when he sees anybody or speaks on business of any kind. Batchelor thinks that this new disorder is a symptom of approaching decay, and that the King thinks ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville

... to the south of France." For this fellow, who knows nothing of disordered liver or high-strung nerves, goes regularly to a great nerve specialist with the periodical belief that his nervous system is beginning to decay. ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various

... dark-skirted wilderness of the high forests on Montserrat the infant frost had never trodden; all basked in the equal heat of the perpetual summer; awaiting, it may be, in ages to come, a civilisation higher even than that whose decay Shelley deplored as he looked down on fallen Italy. No clumsy words of mine can give an adequate picture of the beauty of the streams and glens which run down from either slope of the Northern Mountain. The reader must fancy for himself the loveliest brook which he ever ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley

... threshold of one of the most striking and formidable of economic facts, the regular alternation of periods of good and bad trade, each very widespread, if not world-wide, in its range, each comprising certain regular phases of acceleration and decay, and each infallibly yielding sooner or later to the other. The details of these phenomena are highly complex, some of them obscure; an immense literature has already been devoted to the subject, ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson

... little people called the Hebrews; they alone, from all that mighty company, have stood the "wreckful siege" of thirty centuries. Watch its sinister movement down the ages and you will see the war cloud hover over Greece, and her republics melt to nothing in disunion and decay. It hovers over the Huns, and they suddenly sink from sight; over Islam, and its civilization crumbles faster than it grew; over Spain, and all the New World treasures cannot save her from decay. Finally, ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association

... ordinary course of events would have been the going on of the party until it died of dry rot and decay, as the Liberals had already died in Ontario; but fortunately, both for the party and for Laurier's subsequent fame—though it may not have seemed so at the time—emergence of the reciprocity question gave it an opportunity ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe

... closely drawn; No roseate flush predicted pomps to be, Or spoke of morning loveliness to me. But for those happy birds the night was gone! Darkling they sang, nor guessed what care consumes Man's questioning spirit; heedless of decay, They sang of joy and dew-embalmed blooms. My doubts grew still, doubts seemed so poor while they, Sweet worshippers of light, from leafy glooms Poured forth transporting ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various

... Tancred, with unusual animation, 'I find no charm in conquering the world to establish a dynasty: a dynasty, like everything else, wears out; indeed, it does not last as long as most things; it has a precipitate tendency to decay. There are reasons; we will not now dwell on them. One should conquer the world not to enthrone a man, but an idea, for ideas exist for ever. But what idea? There is the touchstone of all philosophy! Amid the wreck ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli

... killed on the altars. Human sacrifices were offered on important occasions, but always of men,—never of women or children. If no criminals or prisoners were available, the first gardener or fisherman was captured, knocked on the head, and his body left to decay on the altar. Oil and holy water were used to anoint the altar and sacred objects, and when a temple was newly finished its altar was piled with the dead. There is a striking universality among people in the brutal stage of development in this practice ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner

... judge of age by decay, my lord, it must be very ancient, indeed!—But this goes to something in the shape of supplies. [Untying the Papers.] "Covenant between Augustus Julius Braymore, Earl of Fitz Balaam, of Cullender Castle, in the county of Cumberland, and Simon Rochdale, Baronet, of Hollyhock House, ...
— John Bull - The Englishman's Fireside: A Comedy, in Five Acts • George Colman

... to the profane, clear instructions to the ignorant, milk to the babes in Christ, strong meat for the strong, strength to the weak, quickening and reviving for such as faint in the way, restoratives for such as are in a decay, reclamations and loud oyesses after backsliders to recall them, breasts of consolation for Zion's mourners. And to add no more, here are most excellent counsels and directions to serious seekers of fellowship ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... paste that will neither decay nor become moldy. Mix good clean flour with cold water into a thick paste well blended together; then add boiling water, stirring well up until it is of a consistency that can be easily and smoothly spread with a brush; add to this ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens

... savage allies, lay carelessly across his bare and sinewy knee. The expanded chest, full formed limbs, and grave countenance of this warrior, would denote that he had reached the vigor of his days, though no symptoms of decay appeared to have yet weakened ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper

... Footman does from every Guest that dines or sups with his Master; and I question whether the one does not often think a Shilling or Half a Crown, according to the Quality of the Person, his Due as much as the other. I have seen a decay'd Gentleman of as antient and honourable a Family as any in the Kingdom, sit in great pain at a Person of Quality's Table for want of Half a Crown in his Pocket to pay the Butler and Footman ...
— The Tricks of the Town: or, Ways and Means of getting Money • John Thomson

... story of Grandfather Munoz's letter, with a hint or two concerning the decay of the Van Diemen fortune, for Clara was not worldly wise enough to ...
— Overland • John William De Forest

... wood-pigeons in the high tree-tops, and underfoot the anemones and violets were busy pushing their gentle way through the dead leaves of autumn. The Squire's beechwoods were famous in the neighbourhood, and he was still proud of them; though for many years past they had gone unnoticed to decay, and were in some ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... gardens, are altogether fraught with melancholy associations. When we last saw them, the grounds and buildings presented a sorry picture of neglect and decay. The mimic lakes and ponds were green and slimy, the grottoes and shell-work crumbling away, the fountains still, and the cascades dry. But the latter are exhibited on certain days during the summer, when the gardens are thronged with gay Parisians. The most interesting ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 377, June 27, 1829 • Various

... in the old garden his heart grew sick and sore with disappointment and a bitter homesickness. It needed but a glance, even in the dimness of the summer night, to see that the old house was deserted and falling to decay. The kitchen door swung open on rusty hinges; the windows were broken and lifeless; weeds grew thickly over the yard and crowded wantonly up to the very threshold through the chinks of ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... quainter of the two, and commands, moreover, a noble view. As it stands at the turn of the bay, its skirts are all waterside, and round from North Reach to the Bay Front you can follow doubtful paths from one quaint corner to another. Everywhere the same tumble-down decay and sloppy progress, new things yet unmade, old things tottering to their fall; everywhere the same out-at-elbows, many-nationed loungers at dim, irregular grog-shops; everywhere the same sea-air and isleted sea-prospect; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... is an intellect, and nothing more—leastways, nothing more that matters. What else there is to him of trunk and limbs and organs he has neglected until it has all fallen into decay. His very lack of personal cleanliness, the squalor in which he lives, the insufficient sleep which he allows himself, his habit of careless feeding at irregular intervals, all have their source in his contempt for the physical part of him. This talented man of varied attainments, ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini



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