"Blight" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... diffusion of useful knowledge amongst the people; neither cheap pamphlets nor cheap magazines written for their amusement or instruction; but this is less owing to want of attention to their interests on the part of many good and enlightened men, than to the unsettled state of the country; for the blight of civil war prevents the ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... Think of it: a father who tries to kill his daughter! A father who, for months on end, repeats his monstrous attempt four, five, six times over again!... Well, isn't that enough to blight a less sensitive soul than Jeanne's for good and ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... 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 ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... stole their bait; How their nets were tangled in loops and knots, And they found dead crabs in their lobster-pots. Poor Danvers grieved for her blasted crops, And Wilmington mourned over mildewed hops. A blight played havoc with Beverly beans,— It was all the work of those hateful queans! A dreadful panic began at "Pride's," Where the witches stopped in their midnight rides, And there rose strange rumors and vague alarms 'Mid the peaceful ...
— The One Hoss Shay - With its Companion Poems How the Old Horse Won the Bet & - The Broomstick Train • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... which, stunned and dazed, he could give up life, hardly aware of its relinquishment, but through days of deadly languor, through weeks of agony that was not less agony because silently borne, with clear sight and calm courage he looked into his open grave. What blight and ruin met his anguished eyes whose lips may tell—what brilliant broken plans, what baffled high ambitions, what sundering of strong, warm, manhood's friendships, what bitter rending of sweet household ties! Behind him a proud, expectant nation; a great host of ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... the Plague swept over Kennons. That mysterious blight, rising in the orient, traveling darkly and surely unto the remotest West, laid its blackened hand upon the fair House ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... them can measure the coming forces of Freedom. Rosalie Leese, the pioneer white child of California, born in 1838, at Yerba Buena, was the first of countless thousands of free-born American children. In the unpolluted West the breath of slavery shall never blight a single human existence. Old Captain Richardson and Jacob Leese, pioneers of the magic city of San Francisco, gaze upon the beautiful ranks of smiling school-children, in happy troops. They have no regrets, ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... had gone through the winter of 1950 and 1951, at a temperature of nineteen below zero without injury. It may have been they were caught last fall by a hard freeze in full foliage, early before the apples were all picked; and, again, it may be blight. I hope not. But this I do know, the hickory and black walnut in their ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... vital, Wally," she answered. "It's all part and parcel of some singular kind of change that's been coming over you, lately, like a blight. You haven't been yourself, at all, these few days past. Something or other, I don't know what, has been coming between us. You've got something else on your mind, beside me—something bigger and more important to you than ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... eagerly listens—but listens in vain, To catch the loved tones of his mother again! The curse of the broken in spirit shall fall On the wretch who hath mingled this wormwood and gall, And his gain like a mildew shall blight and destroy, Who hath torn from his mother ...
— The Liberty Minstrel • George W. Clark
... their natures causes him continual anxiety; knowing her mortality, he is always in fear that death or sudden blight will deprive him of her; and he consults with Phraerion on the best means of saving her from the perils of ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... was not constituted to forget. He was constituted to remember, and to remember with all his soul. Every day of his life he had missed her; never was there a night that she was not in his thoughts before he dropped to sleep. What would have been his career had fate brought them together before the blight fell upon her? What intimacies, what enjoyment, what ideals nurtured and made real. And the companionship, the instant sympathy, the sureness of an echo in her heart, no matter how low and soft his whisper! These thoughts were ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith
... cultivate his sense of justice, his benevolence, and the desire of perfection. Toil is the school for these high principles; and we have here a strong presumption that, in other respects, it does not necessarily blight the soul. Next, we have seen that the most fruitful sources of truth and wisdom are not books, precious as they are, but experience and observation; and these belong to all conditions. It is another important consideration, that almost all labour demands intellectual activity, and is best ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... a holy, blest companionship In the sweet intercourse thus held with those Whose tear and smile are guileless; from whose lip The simple dictate of the heart yet flows;— Though even in the yet unfolded rose The worm may lurk, and sin blight blooming youth, The light born with us long so brightly glows, That childhood's first deceits seem almost truth, To life's cold after lie, selfish, and void ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... slow, 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 ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... fertile must be reinforced with friendship. It is the sap that preserves from blight and withering; it is the sunshine that beckons on the blossoming and fruitage; it is the starlight dew that perfumes life with sweetness and besprinkles it with splendor; it is the music-tide that sweeps ...
— For Auld Lang Syne • Ray Woodward
... jocular treatment of a serious and formal subject was just what she wanted. It would help show the listening Abner that the wearing of the social uniform was nothing very formidable after all, and did not necessarily doom one's moral and spiritual fibre to utter blight and ruin. ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... 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, Then, if you seek ...
— Foliage • William H. Davies
... I should slow diverge, and listless stray Into some thought, feeling, or dream unright, O Watcher, my backsliding soul affray; Let me not perish of the ghastly blight. Be thou, O Life eternal, in me light; Then merest approach of selfish or impure Shall start me up ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... is still mademoiselle, with her new-formed friends in Paris—may a pestilence blight them all! There are still the lands of La Vauvraye to lose. The only true end to our troubles as they stand at present lies in ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... the last 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 was extinguished! ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... laid along 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 ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... want to be hard on anything 'cept blight, Master Nic," said the old man one day; "but it comes nat'ral to a man to feel shy of a gaol bird who may rise agen you at any time and take ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... the Evil One. Sometimes they are tied round the necks of camels, and even placed on trees, especially at the time when bearing fruit, for the purpose of preserving the camel from mange, or the tree from blight. These talismans usually have a diagram of this and other shapes, with certain Arabic signs, letters, words, and ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... Horst,[35] "the world seemed to be like a large madhouse for witches and devils to play their antics in." Satan was believed to be at every body's call to raise the whirlwind, draw down the lightning, blight the productions of the earth, or destroy the health and paralyse the limbs of man. This belief, so insulting to the majesty and beneficence of the Creator, was shared by the most pious ministers of religion. Those who in their morning and evening prayers acknowledged ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... her people? This, of course, was only preliminary to the larger question: Shall the National Government, under lead of the Slave Oligarchy, be given power to spread over new territory, at will, the blight and curse of human bondage? Upon this foremost question of the day, Senator Broderick stood side by side with Stephen A. Douglas in opposition to the Buchanan Administration, and its mad attempt to force slavery upon the people of the New West. The attitude of California ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... 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, ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... each standing or falling by and for itself, every step in the advance of the arts and sciences was gained only at the cost of an amount of loss and ruin to particular portions of the community such as would be wrought by a blight or pestilence. The march of invention was white with the bleaching bones of innumerable hecatombs of victims. The spinning jenny replaced the spinning wheel, and famine stalked through English villages. The railroad supplanted the stagecoach, and a thousand hill towns died ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... answer; mark a soothfast word, Not the true parent is the woman's womb That bears the child; she doth but nurse the seed New-sown: the male is parent; she for him, As stranger for a stranger, hoards the germ Of life; unless the god its promise blight. And proof hereof before you will I set. Birth may from fathers, without mothers, be: See at your side a witness of the same, Athena, daughter of Olympian Zeus, Never within the darkness of the womb Fostered nor fashioned, but a ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... of London that many an ill has spread over the land? London is the antithesis of the domestic ideal; a social reformer would not even glance in that direction, but would turn all his zeal upon small towns and country districts, where blight may perhaps be arrested, and whence, some day, a reconstituted national life may act upon the great centre of corruption. I had far rather see England covered with schools of cookery than with schools of the ordinary kind; the issue would be infinitely more hopeful. Little girls should ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... bitterness," he answered. "Don't pay the least attention to me. You mustn't let moodiness of mine cast a blight upon ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... "Nation," I can remember how my blood boiled one day when I saw in a shop window a cartoon of "Punch"—a large potato, which was a caricature of O'Connell's head and face, with the title—"The Real Potato Blight." ...
— The Life Story of an Old Rebel • John Denvir
... a respectable and civilised life, reside in houses which, in 99 cases out of 100, are in the lowest and most degraded part of the towns, among the scum and offscouring of all nations, and like locusts they leave a blight behind them wherever they have been. Others have their tents and vans, and there are many others who I have tents only. A tent as a rule is about 7ft. 6in. wide, 16ft. long, and 4ft. 6in. high at the top. They are covered with pieces of old cloth, sacking, &c., to keep the rain ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... Steynlin captured him and began to talk music. He repeated that remark, too good to be lost, about the spinet; it led to Scarlatti, Mozart, Handel. He said Handel was the saviour of English music. She said Handel was its blight and damnation. Each being furnished with copious arguments, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... the conversation had been prospering hitherto, if, at Holy Mass or jovial supper board, Laurence so much as breathed a question concerning the subject next his heart, an instant blight passed over the gaiety of his companions. Fear momently wiped every other expression from their faces, and they answered with lame evasion, or ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... surly husband, a dissipated father, or a reckless son may blight a home and destroy its happiness, so may a thoughtful, virtuous, and kind man in the home change its very atmosphere and help to make it a heaven. As a home-maker man has the ruggeder part. It is his to provide. The man who falls ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... love affair is going on with a tranquillity quite inconsistent with the rules of romance, I cannot say that the under-plots are equally propitious. The "opening bud of love" between the general and Lady Lillycraft seems to have experienced some blight in the course of this genial season. I do not think the general has ever been able to retrieve the ground he lost when he fell asleep during the captain's story. Indeed, Master Simon thinks his case is completely ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... proudly take their place as men, knowing that by their own conduct and talents they may work their way to fortune, or, at least, "rough hew" it, without dread that the might of custom's icy breath can blight their fate for lack of birth or fortune. This gives a noble feeling to the heart and a higher tone to the character, although a sense of the ridiculous is often attached to this by a native of the old countries, when it is shown forth by the ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... was made to be eaten, not to be drank, To be husked in a barn, not soaked in a tank; I come as a blessing when put in a mill, As a blight and a curse when run through a still. Make me up into loaves, and your children are fed; But made into drink, I will starve them instead. In bread I'm a servant the eater shall rule, In drink I'm a master, the drinker a fool. Then ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... regard to the Bouddha had already become a blight, but it was, perhaps, the growing crisp decision in Gregory's manner that made Karen first aware of constraint. Her eyes then turned from Tante to the shrine at the end of the room, and she said: "You don't care for the way it looks ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... to put them down, Christ is not. Though man neglect to put them down, Christ will not. If man dare not fight on the Lord's side against sin and evil, the Lord's earth will fight for Him. Storm and tempest, blight and famine, earthquakes and burning mountains, will do His work, if nothing else will. As He said Himself, if man stops praising Him, the very stones will cry out, and own Him as their King. Not that ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... BLIGHT (Cercospora Halstedii): This disease of pecan leaves causes them to turn brown, wither up and drop prematurely. At first, small brown spots are noted. These become larger, and at length the whole leaf is destroyed. When attacked by this disease ...
— The Pecan and its Culture • H. Harold Hume
... there is death; There is frost in your breath Which would blight the plants. * * * * * In the heart of the garden the merry bird chants; It would fall to the ground if ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... as Aunt Philippa invariably remarked, as a suitable conclusion to any discussion on the subject of her brother or any of his family. How she personally had managed to escape the general blight that rested upon them was a mystery that no one—not Aunt Philippa herself—had ever been able ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... was sanguine in this expectation; and for a moment her hopes were contagiously exciting to mine. But the hideous despondency which in my mind had settled upon the whole affair from the very first, the superstitious presentiment I had of a total blight brooding over the entire harvest of my life and its promises, (tracing itself originally, I am almost ashamed to own, up to that prediction of the Hungarian woman)—denied me steady light, anything—all in short but a wandering ray of hope. ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... 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 has been reflected ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... Caldegard hinted at. He lays his plans to grab the stuff and the formula. Just as he gets his fingers on it, up pops the only being on earth he'd give a damn about knifing. Twenty years' clink if he leaves her to talk. Takes her with him—hell's blight on him! Wouldn't have been dosing himself on a game like this. Used the ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... concerning which he wrote to his agent. It deals with a great variety of subjects, such as of roots and leaves, of food of plants, of pasture, of plants, of weeds, of turnips, of wheat, of smut, of blight, of St. Foin, of lucerne, of ridges, of plows, of drill boxes, but its one great thesis was the careful cultivation by plowing of such annuals as potatoes, turnips, and wheat, crops which hitherto had been tended by hand or left to fight ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... crimes and woes Deform that peaceful bower; They may not mar the deep repose Of that immortal flower. Though only broken hearts be found To watch his cradle by, No blight is on his slumbers sound, No touch of ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and unerring movements would slow down simultaneously, as if they had been the functions of a living organism, stricken suddenly by the blight of languor; and Mr. Rout's eyes would blaze darker in his long sallow face. He was fighting this fight in a pair of carpet slippers. A short shiny jacket barely covered his loins, and his white wrists protruded ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... sensational story-writers. No intelligent person really trusted the army, although its ranks, such as they were, were filled with as gallant soldiers as ever carried a rifle, but it had been afflicted ever since men could remember with the bane and blight of politics and social influence. It had never been really a serious profession, and its upper ranks had been little better than the playground of the sons of the ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... 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
... that they ought not to be carried away by flattering promises from the speedy growth of this tree; because in rich soils and sheltered situations, the wood, though it thrives fast, is full of sap, and of little value; and is, likewise, very subject to ravage from the attacks of insects, and from blight. Accordingly, in Scotland, where planting is much better understood, and carried on upon an incomparably larger scale than among us, good soil and sheltered situations are appropriated to the oak, the ash, and other deciduous trees; ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... horse he stood a poor chance of being able to aid his chum. The Indian would know the bush as well as his namesake fox. He would not be likely to take any risk that would imperil his safety or blight any evil ...
— The Fiery Totem - A Tale of Adventure in the Canadian North-West • Argyll Saxby
... chilly blast Shall never strip the bowers, Or icy Winter cast A blight upon the flowers; But Spring, in all her bloom, For ever flourish there, And the children of the tomb ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... o'er the spirit of my dream. The wanderer was alone as heretofore, The beings which surrounded him were gone, Or were at war with him; he was a mark For blight and desolation, compassed round With hatred and contention; pain was mixed In all which was served up to him, until, Like to the Pontic monarch of old days, He fed on poisons, and they had no power, But were a kind of nutriment; ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... enjoyed all that seems pleasant in the eyes of a wealthy youth, but in spite of that he had remained fresh and open-hearted even to the smallest things; and this was what most rejoiced his father. In him there was no trace of the satiety, the blunted faculty for enjoyment, which fell like a blight on so many men of his age and rank. He could still play as merrily with little Mary, still take as much pleasure in a rare flower or a fine horse, as before his departure. At the same time he had gained keen insight into the political situation of the time, into the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... suffer any great pain; but his manners were too often cold, his conduct wilful or thoughtless. He did not love her—perhaps no child can love his parents—with all the abandon and intensity wherewith she loved him. The fact is, a blight lay upon Kenrick whenever he was at home—the Fuzby blight he called it. He hated the place so much, he hated the people in it so much, he felt the annoyances of their situation with so keen and fretful a sensibility, ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... took Brown's hand, applauded His generous care, and lauded Dobbs' Ferry to the skies. A shade came o'er his features, "We should be happy creatures, And this a paradise, But, ah! the deep disgrace is, This loveliest of places A vulgar name should blight! But, death to Dobbs! we'll change it, If money can arrange it, So, ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... on rapidly, but with equal pace, unheeding whether, as a "swift-winged and beautiful angel," he opens flowers on the way for some, or, as a "relentless, unsparing destroyer," he nips the budding hopes and scatters the blight of disappointment on others; but still bearing the record of each minute to eternity, the gliding hours are silently working for all. Their passage had seemingly, as yet, brought no change in the circumstances of our little shoemaker; unloved and unloving, as at ...
— Watch—Work—Wait - Or, The Orphan's Victory • Sarah A. Myers
... while Brian paced up and down the room, pale and wan, as he had looked yesterday in the church. He offered his arm to Bessie at his wife's bidding, without a word. Mr. Jardine followed, with Lady Palliser and Ida; and the little party of five sat down to dinner with a blight upon them, the awful shadow of domestic misery. There are many such dinners eaten every day in England—than which the Barmecide's was a more cheerful feast, a red herring and bread and butter in a garret a ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... hour they saw the poor girl droop and begin to fade like some flower stricken by blight. No murmur escaped her lips, and John Grange's name was never mentioned. But it was noted at home that she appeared to be more gently affectionate to those about her, and anxious to please her father, while many a time poor Mrs Ellis told ...
— A Life's Eclipse • George Manville Fenn
... with pity then, you will surely pity me the more now; yet not too much, Reuben, for my pride as a woman is as strong as ever. The world was made for me, as much as it was made for others; and if I bear its blight, I will find some flowers yet to cherish. I do not count it altogether so grim and odious a world,—even under the broken light which shines upon it for me,—as in your last visits you seemed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... back and was shaking with laughter. I had never in my life heard anything so bitter as that noise. It fell like a blight on all the merriment about donkeys, pyramids, bazaars, or what not. Along the whole dim length of the gallery the voices dropped, the pale blotches of faces turned our way with one accord, and the silence became so profound that the clear tinkle of a teaspoon falling on the tesselated floor ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... islands offering a dead-level of mediocrity which I have never seen equalled except in the workingmen's cottages of Ampere, New Jersey, the home of the General Electric Company.] Add to the geographic sameness the universal blight of white civilization with its picture post-cards, professional hula and ooh-la dancers, souvenir and gift shops, automat restaurants, movie-palaces, tourists, artists and explorers, and you have some idea of the boredom which had settled down ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... him to condense into small compass, and drop into her tender bosom a germ of evil that would be sure to blossom darkly soon, and bear black fruit betimes. Such was his sense of power over this virgin soul, trusting him as she did, that the minister felt potent to blight all the field of innocence with but one wicked look, and develop all its opposite with but a word. So—with a mightier struggle than he had yet sustained—he held his Geneva cloak before his face, and hurried onward, making no sign of recognition, and leaving the young sister to digest ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... granted him an endless life; and he dwelt in the broad Libyan plains, tending his flocks, and bringing forth rich harvests from the earth. For him the bees wrought their sweetest honey; for him the sheep gave their softest wool; for him the cornfields waved with their fullest grain. No blight touched the grapes which his hand had tended; no sickness vexed the herds which fed in his pastures. And they who dwelt in the land said, "Strife and war bring no such gifts as these to the sons of men; therefore let us ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... A blight, something similar to mealy bug, now and again appears on the roots of some of the varieties of Echinocactus and Cereus. This may be destroyed by dipping the whole of the roots in the mixture recommended for the stems when ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... disposition which was not so exhausted on his scholarly compeers that there was none to spare in other directions. There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire: it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... on his horizon spread and darkened, gathered sinister shape of storm, harboring lightning and havoc. It was the cloud in his mind, the foreshadowing of his soul, the prophetic sense of like to like. Where he wandered there the blight fell! ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... gratified father, smiling sadly; 'but Castle Blanch training might make the mischief more serious. It is a gay household, and I cannot believe with Kit Charteris that the children are too young to feel the blight of worldly influence. Do not you think with me, Nora?' he concluded in so exactly the old words and manner as to stir the very depths of her heart, but woe worth the change from the hopes of youth to this premature fading into ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Onatah, she lay a trembling captive in the dark prison-cave of the Evil One. She mourned the blight of her cornfields, and sorrowed over her ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... watchfulness and her father's absolute commands, our grief and indignation knew no bounds. The pair went to St. Louis and were married. The Colonel and his wife never recovered from the shock, which seemed to blight the happiness of their home. They never saw their child again. There was no reconciliation between the parties, and the beloved, misguided daughter died in six months after leaving home. He who treacherously beguiled her away from her happy home is an old man now, and must soon go to his ...
— 'Three Score Years and Ten' - Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other - Parts of the West • Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve
... many of the old-world cottages to right and left of the Abbey Inn had exhibited every indication of being deserted, and the lack of patrons instanced by the emptiness of the bar-parlor was certainly not ascribable to the quality of the ale, which was excellent. A sort of blight it would seem had descended upon humanity in Upper Crossleys. It ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... absorb from the atmosphere, and thus forms food for the vine and fruit. It is the leaves, and not the fruit, which need the sun: the leaves are the lungs, upon the action of which the life and health of the fruit depend. Blight of the leaves destroys the fruit, and a frequent repetition of it destroys the vine. Grape-vines should not be pruned at all until three years old, as it retards the growth of the roots, and thus weakens the vines. Older vines should be freely pruned in November ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... hate him, the absurd imbecile, with his fine boots and plumes, and tragedy airs. He was not to be pitied, for he recovered health, he found a fortune, he won his Marie. His sufferings were nothing; there was no fatal blight on him, and he had time and power to conquer his ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... possessed by the new Government; but time is requisite for the development of a policy which had, and still has, to contend against such numerous and formidable obstacles. Confidence, especially mercantile confidence, is a delicate flower, of slow growth, and very difficult to rear. A breath may blight it. It will bloom only in a tranquil and temperate air. If ever there was a man entitled to speak, however, with authority upon this subject, it was Mr Baring, the late candidate, and unquestionably the future member, for the city of London—a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... like that?" Sir Richard looked a trifle wistfully at the younger man, envying him his superior youth and more robust physique. "For my part I confess to a distrust of the desert. It seems to me as though there were a blight on these huge tracts of sand, as though the Creator had regretted their creation, yet was too perfect a Worker to try, by altering the original purpose of His handiwork, to turn them into something for which they were ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... my murdered mother, who lies beneath—I swear not to know rest, never more seek contentment, till I've punished her murderer! Night and day—through summer and winter— shall I search for him. Yes; search till I've found and chastised this man, this monster, who has brought blight on me, death to my mother, and desolation to our house! Ah! think not you can escape me! Texas, whither I know you have gone, will not be large enough to hold, nor its wilderness wide enough to screen ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... gardens they can behold snowy peaks across blue bays, which must be good for the soul. Though they face a sea out of which any portent may arise, they are not forced to protect or even to police its waters. They are as ignorant of drouth, murrain, pestilence locusts, and blight, as they are of the true meaning ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... "God's blight on thee!" he cried, "thou pair of fools who wish to wed so much that ye venture out in such a night as this. Well, have your way, and let me have my rest. In the name of the law of Scotland I pronounce ye man and wife. There, that will bind two fools together ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... he cried, "'tis nigh the midnight hour and she a noted witch—heed her not lest she blight thy fair ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... revealed another side to the country's history. The rainy weather in the summer brought to sudden hideous maturity the lurking potato disease. Any one who recalls the time and the aspect of the fields must retain a vivid recollection of the sudden blight that fell upon acres on acres of what had formerly been luxuriant vegetation, under the sunshine which came late only to complete the work of destruction; the withering and blackening of the leaves of the plant, the sickening foetid odour of the decaying ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... as they, We laugh'd at their biting, and kiss'd all the time, For the spring of her beauty was just in its prime! But now for their frolics I never can sleep, So I crack 'em by dozens, as o'er me they creep: Curse blight you! I cry, while I'm all over smart, For I'm bit by the arse, while I'm stung ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... miserably, and the fish which haunt the shallow stream beneath the big stream near the channel took it into their silly heads to migrate to other distant waters. Here, then, was the consequence of Bones' murder demonstrated to a most alarming extent. There was a blight in the potatoes; the maize crop, for some unaccountable reason, was a meagre one; there were three unexpected cases of sleeping sickness followed by madness in an interior village, and, crowning disaster of all, one of those sudden storms which ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... Russell, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, Mr. Cobden, Lord Ashburton, Lord Ellenborough, Lord Derby, and many others, were at this time touched with the blight of these theories and to them there was no sense, and nothing but expense, in trying to cultivate Colonial loyalty ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... to gnaw the bud, And none to blight the youthful bloom; Where spirits sing in joyful mood, "Behold our triumph ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... thou tomb! be his horrors set in blight? * Hast thou dark ened his countenance that sickeneth the soul? O thou tomb! neither cess pool nor pipkin art to me * Then how cometh it in thee are conjoined soil ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... man's form may seem victorious, War may waste and famine blight, Still from out the conflict glorious, Mind comes forth with ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... 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 gentle 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 and her waters, and the depths ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... passion for the weak and defenceless, who from the first has cultivated a chivalrous loyalty to women, putting far from him the lowering talk, the cynical expression, the moral lassitude of society, and guarding his high enthusiasm from the blight of worldly commonplace, has no need to fight against the lower instinct that would degrade them or wrong the weak and defenceless. The conflict is there, but it is removed to a nobler and higher battle-field, a battle against the sacrifice ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... Waverley and pondered over the absolute ruin which threatened his house from a source against which all his courage was of no avail. As well take up sword and shield to defend himself against the black death, as against this blight of Holy Church. He was powerless in the grip of the Abbey. Already they had shorn off a field here and a grove there, and now in one sweep they would take in the rest, and where then was the home ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... anything 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 of their ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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 take infection: it is a peculiar mind: it is a unique one. Happily I do not mean to harm it: but, if I did, it would not take harm from me. The more you and I converse, the better; for while I cannot blight you, you may refresh me." ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... face is a veil of white sea-mist, Only thine eyes shine like stars; bless or blight me, I will hold close to the leash at thy ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... upon her in my desperation dumb, Knowing well that when her awful opportunity was come She would give us battle, murder, sudden death at very least, As a skeleton of warning, and a blight upon the feast. ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... of Scottish Agricultural statistics Allotment gardens, by Mr. Bailey Apple trees, cider Arrowroot, Portland, by Mr. Groves Berberry blight Books noticed Calendar, horticultural —— agricultural Cartridge, Captain Norton's Cattle, Tortworth sale of Chrysanthemum, culture of Crayons for writing on glass, by M. Brunnquell Crickets, traps for Crops, returns respecting the state of Dahlias, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... the mill, so I'd lie awake at night about it, and then when I got it all the machinery was worn out. It's always that way and always will be, I reckon." And it appeared to him that this terrible law of incompleteness lay like a blight over the over the whole field of human endeavour. He saw Molly, fair and fitting as she had been yesterday after the quarrel, and he told himself passionately that he wanted her too much ever to win her. On the ground by the brook he saw the spray of last year's golden-rod, and the ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... 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
... that he forgot the seasonable miseries which had been wont to drive him from London at the approach of November. When the first fog blackened against his windows, he merely lit the lamp and wrote on, indifferent. Two years ago he had declared that a London November would fatally blight his soul; that he must flee to a land of sunshine, or perish. There was little time, now, to think about ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... are shallow: essences, Once spiritual, are like muddy lees, Meant but to fertilize my earthly root, 910 And make my branches lift a golden fruit Into the bloom of heaven: other light, Though it be quick and sharp enough to blight The Olympian eagle's vision, is dark, Dark as the parentage of chaos. Hark! My silent thoughts are echoing from these shells; Or they are but the ghosts, the dying swells Of noises far away?—list!"—Hereupon He kept an anxious ear. The humming ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... was a gathering together of creatures hurtful and terrible to man, to name their king. Blight, mildew, darkness, mighty waves, fierce winds, Will-o'-the-wisps, and shadows of grim objects, told fearfully their doings and preferred their claims, none prevailing. But when evening came on, a thin mist curled up, derisively, amidst ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... city, the people seemed to have been of a serious cast of mind, which led to speculation, criticism, and the cultivation of the exact sciences. From Ferrara came Savonarola, the fanatical prophet who appeared during the moral blight which characterized the age of the Borgias, and Lucretia must frequently have recalled this man in whom her father, by the executioner's hand, sought to stifle the protestations of the faithful and upright against the ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... wondrous, beautiful prairies, Billowy bays of grass ever 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 vulture, Like the implacable soul of a chieftain slaughtered in battle, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... the time has been child welfare, not child age, and will be able to use much of the old literature, simply substituting for "factory" the word "school" when condemning "hazardous occupations likely to sap [children's] nervous energy, stunt their physical growth, blight their minds, destroy their moral fiber, and fit them for the ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... Constitutionnel; yet nothing could extinguish his debts, those debts which he had been so long carrying like a cross. "Why," said he, "I have been bowed down by this burden for fifteen years, it hampers the expansion of my life, it disturbs the action of my heart, it stifles my thoughts, it puts a blight on my existence, it embarrasses my movements, it checks my inspirations, it weighs upon my conscience, it interferes with everything, it has been a drag on my career, it has broken my back, it has made me an ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... before him; and placing the lamp upon the ground, and shading it with his coat, there, sure enough, not more than a dozen yards away, was a patch of light—blight moonlight. ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... in the affections of those who use and profit by it. It holds its position by love. No publisher may say to it: "Buy my books, not those of my rival"; no scientist may forbid it to give his opponent a hearing; no religious body may dictate to it; no commercial influence may throw a blight over it. ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick |
