"Blighting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... things troubled the mother also, but her bitterest pang was the cruelty of Sophia. A slow, silent process of alienation had been going on in the girl ever since her engagement to Julius: it had first touched her thoughts, then her feelings; now its blighting influence had deteriorated her whole nature. And in her mother's heart there were sad echoes of that bitter cry that comes down from age to age, "Oh, my son Absalom, Absalom! My ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... thoughts round the shock to her consciousness. By that terrible expression of his face, by those thundering words of scorn, would she come to realize the mighty truth of his descent into the abyss and his rise to the heights. Vaguely she began to see. An awful sense of her deadness, of her soul-blighting selfishness, began to dawn upon her as something monstrous out of dim, gray obscurity. She trembled under the reality of thoughts that were not new. How she had babbled about Glenn and the crippled soldiers! ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... The blighting effects of the Civil War were still visible; and when a beginning at teaching was actually made, the class had to be content with the accommodation of a tumble-down kind of building which was a very imperfect protection from the weather. In some respects ...
— From Slave to College President - Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington • Godfrey Holden Pike
... spirit. Thus the Psalter was a mighty contribution in one direction, as the synagogue in another, to the development of spiritual religion. It kept alive the prophetic element in Israel's religion, and did much to counteract the more blighting influences of Judaism. The place of the law is occasionally recognized (i., xix. 7ff.), once very emphatically (cxix.), but it is honoured chiefly for its moral stimulus. It is not, as in later times, an incubus; it is still an inspiration. [Footnote 1: The addition of the last verse ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... a strong nature, and yet can not hide that consuming passion which underlies all the words, and makes them burn with intensest heat. Here the hot fire of his indignation seemed to be expressed in a blighting and withering power; and Hilda shrank within herself involuntarily in fear, ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... sub-Mongol physiognomy of the city editor, Banneker suspected something. As he sat writing page after page, conscientiously setting forth every germane fact, the recollection of that speculative, estimating smile began to play over the sentences with a dire and blighting beam. Three fourths of the way through, the writer rose, went to the file-board and ran through a dozen newspapers. He was seeking a ratio, a perspective. He wished to determine how much, in a news sense, the death of the son of an obscure East-Side plasterer was worth. On his return he tore ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... with, on the land, carved by Donatello, painted on by Fra Angelico. And it is not the wood's fault, but the fault of Florence in not taking proper care of it, that the panel of Sandro Botticelli's loveliest picture has cracked, (not with heat, I believe, but blighting frost), a quarter of an inch ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... should have made of them allies, and "let loose those horrible hell-hounds of war against their countrymen in America, endeared to them by every tie which should sanctify human nature," was a most lamentable circumstance—in its consequences, blighting and desolating the fairest portions of the country, and covering the face of [157] its border settlements, with the gloomy mantle of ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... go to bed, and let my mother stay with you." Calmly she heard him, and, rising, she slowly but deliberately left the room, and proceeded up stairs with a degree of steadiness which surprised her mother. The only words she uttered on hearing this blighting communication, ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... and observe the Golden Rule. Not another tear or sigh would ever be seen or heard again upon earth. But O the pity of it! Man, willfully blind, goes stumbling on through the short span of life, blighted and blighting everything about him with unbelief. Full of misery and heartaches here, he goes into Eternity to stand at the bar of God, naked and undone, and hears the fearful sentence, 'Anathema Maranatha!' or 'Cursed and banished from God!' ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... we come, too, from graveyards lonely, From mocking revels held 'mid tombstones tall, Tearing the withered leaves from off the branches, The clinging ivy from the time-stained wall,— Uprooting, blighting every tiny leaflet That hid the grave's bleak nakedness from sight, Driving the leaves in hideous, death like dances, Around the lowly ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... empire long— A blighting curse, a cruel reign; By mimic scenes, and mirth and song Alluring souls ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... blighting look. "He would if he could. He isn't to blame—you mustn't think that. He is one of the best men in the world, but he can't help her. He can't help her because he doesn't know. He doesn't ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... friends, And what disgrace his fall attends. The Court he quits to fly from Care, And seeks the peace of rural air: 50 His groves, his fields, amused his hours; He pruned his trees, he raised his flowers. But Care again his steps pursues; Warns him of blasts, of blighting dews, Of plund'ring insects, snails, and rains, And droughts that starved the laboured plains. Abroad, at home, the spectre's there: In vain we seek to fly from Care. At length he thus the ghost address'd: 'Since thou must be my constant guest, 60 Be kind, and follow me no ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... Sydney. I now beheld man in his wild state; and, reader, rest assured there is nothing can equal such a sight. Before me stood two of the aboriginal inhabitants of Australia who had never, until then, encountered the hitherto blighting look of ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... milder zone afforded man A seeming shelter, yet contagion there, 420 Blighting his being with unnumbered ills, Spread like a quenchless fire; nor truth availed Till late to arrest its progress, or create That peace which first in bloodless victory waved Her snowy standard o'er this favoured clime: 425 There ...
— The Daemon of the World • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... cholera, for the handsome Siva Rathor, is an event of our own times (1874); she proposed to him, but his heart being pre-engaged he rejected her; and in consequence his earthly bride was smitten sick and died, and the hand of the goddess fell heavily on Siva himself, thwarting all his schemes and blighting his fortunes and possessions, until at last he gave himself up to her. She then possessed him and caused him to prosper exceedingly, gifting him with supernatural power until his fame was noised abroad, and he was venerated as the saintly Siva Bhaia or ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... the slow change—slow in its progress, but awfully rapid to look back upon. The pain, the regret, with which she noted her father's decay were little indeed compared with the sharp agony which rent her heart as she perceived the alteration in this dear friend, the blighting of this fair ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... Jedge, Nance ain't so bad as whut they make her out. She's got her faults. I ain't claimin' she ain't. But she ain't got a drop of meanness in her, an' that's more than I can say for some grown folks present." Mrs. Snawdor favored Mr. Mason with such a sudden and blighting glance that the janitor ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... There, under the kind care of Mr. Moyese, he began to exhibit great signs of intelligence. The atmosphere into which he was now thrown, the kindness of which he was hourly the recipient, called into vigour abilities that would have been stifled for ever beneath the blighting influences that surrounded him under his former master. The old gentleman had him taught to read and write, and his aptness was such as to highly gratify the ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... already perceived unmistakable evidences of the blighting effect which was being steadily produced upon certain members of the community by the consciousness—which I think some of them were only now beginning to fully realise—that industry and individual ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... surprised into a sudden pause, while the fiery youth shot across him like a flash of lightning, regarding him as he passed, as if he had wished to dart from his eyes the same power of blighting and of consuming. But no sooner had he crossed the chapel, and shut with violence behind him the door of the vaulted entrance by which it communicated with the castle, than the impropriety of his conduct supplied Warden with one of those happier subjects for ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... misfortune seated at the root of things if, disregarding overlaying prettiness of summer days, of green leaf and gay blossom, you dare draw near, dig deep, look close? And can nothing, no one, escape the blighting touch of that canker stationed at the very foundations of being? Certainly it would seem not—Richard reasoned—listening to the words of the radiant woman beside him, ordained, in right of her talent and puissant grace, to be a queen and idol of men. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... earth can gratify. If his "great riches" afford him any enjoyments, yet these are by no means permanent and lasting. The desolating flame may lay them in ruins—the storms on the ocean may sink them in its waves—the famine or blighting mildew may wither them forever, and leave him stript of all his fancied joys. But nothing of this can happen to virtue. That remains forever unharmed amidst the shocks of earth. A good name is, therefore, of inconceivably ...
— Twenty-Four Short Sermons On The Doctrine Of Universal Salvation • John Bovee Dods
... heads, no one would believe a single noble family without at least one unrecorded, undiscovered, or well concealed irregularity in its descent; and he would judge it the cruellest thing to have let him know the blighting fact, seeing that in ignorance he might have succeeded with a ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... parched bushes, or lizards vanishing in the clefts of the rock. By night the jackals prowled and barked in the distance, and the lion made the black ravines echo with his hollow roaring, while a bitter, blighting chill followed the fever of the day. Through heat and cold, the Magian ...
— The Story of the Other Wise Man • Henry Van Dyke
... with granite, and we supposed them to be impregnable; and laying as they did in the centre of the continent, and in proximity to one another, we hoped yet to withstand them. But, alas! we had another foe to encounter. Gaunt hunger and famine came with their ghastly forms and bony arms, blighting the strong and the brave. But it could not make traitors or cowards of us, and dying we hurled defiance at our foes. The walls of our cities unmanned, were scaled—the gates thrown open; and our streets filled with the murderers whom we had reared to exterminate us. A few ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... supernatural and encourages the worship of the intellect—an idolatry as deadly to spiritual progress as the worship of images made by human hands. The injury that it does would be even greater than it is but for the moral momentum acquired by the student before he comes under the blighting influence of ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... was exceptional in the weaver's experience. It was only the want of adequate knowledge that could have made it possible for Godfrey deliberately to entertain an unfeeling project: his natural kindness had outlived that blighting time of cruel wishes, and Nancy's praise of him as a husband was not founded entirely ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... They swore, gambled genteelly, and drank. It is not strange that in this icy atmosphere the growth of any young friend in the Christian life was stunted. Such influences are like the dreaded north wind that at times sweeps over the valleys of California in the spring and early summer, blighting and withering the vegetation it does not kill. The brightness of his hope was dimmed, and his soul knew the torture of doubt—a torture that is always keenest to him who allows himself to sink in the region of fogs after he has once stood upon the sunlit summit ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... Kenwigses were thrown into a fever of rage and disappointment, by receiving the cruel news of their Uncle Lillyvick's marriage, which blow was a terrible one to Mrs. Kenwigs, blighting her hopes for her children's future. After weeping and wailing in the most agonized fashion, Mrs. Kenwigs drew herself up in proud defiance, and denounced her uncle in terms direct and plain, stating that he should never again darken her doors. In this ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... to the short sighted views of faction must destroy all hope of settling it satisfactorily to the great body of the people and for the general interest. I can not, therefore, in taking leave of the subject, too earnestly for my own feelings or the common good warn you against the blighting consequences of ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, - Vol. 2, Part 3, Andrew Jackson, 1st term • Edited by James D. Richardson
... from what they say. For certain of these doughty Pacifists having told you how much their one object is to secure peace, then proceed to tell you that this thing which they hope to secure is a very evil thing, that under its blighting influence nations wane in luxury and sloth. And of course they imply that our own nation, about a third of whom have not enough to eat and about another third of whom have a heart-breaking struggle with small means and precariousness of livelihood, ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... what a blighting effect these multitudinous preparations and ceremonies have upon the pleasures they profess to subserve. Who, on calling to mind the occasions of his highest social enjoyments, does not find them to have been wholly informal, perhaps impromptu? How delightful ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... the plot is laid, Ruin awaits thee,—hapless maid! Seduction sly assails thine ear, And gloating, foul desire is near; Baneful and blighting are their smiles, Destruction waits upon their wiles; Alas! thy guardian angel sleeps, Vice clasps her hands, ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... lightning, had destroyed some great tree. That any creature of the jungle could produce the red-and-yellow fangs which devoured wood and left nothing but fine dust surprised Tarzan greatly, and why the black warrior had ruined his delicious repast by plunging it into the blighting heat was quite beyond him. Possibly Ara was a friend with whom the Archer was ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... evil is apparently as old as civilization, and no country seems able to escape its blighting influence. Even the Puritan colonies had to contend with it. In 1638 Josselyn, writing of New England said: "There are many strange women too (in Solomon's sense,"). Phoebe Kelly, the mother of Madam Jumel, second wife of Aaron Burr, made her living as a prostitute, ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... held up to obloquy by the admirable eulogist of Columbus, Mr. Irving, "as a warning example of those perfidious beings in office, who too often lie like worms at the root of honorable enterprise, blighting by their unseen influence the fruits of glorious action and disappointing the hopes of nations." This denunciation he incurred by thwarting the schemes of Columbus, in their minor details at first, ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... lecture, particularly with young students. There is no surer method of blighting the interest of students, of murdering their minds, and of ossifying the instructor than to persist in the pernicious habit of the formal lecture. Some men plead large classes in excuse. If they were honest ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... sons of Britain—the holy flame that punished two kings for trespassing on the rights of their people, was not entirely extinguished—the deadly paralysis of the Septennial Act had not then produced its blighting effects on the whole body politic. But London ceased to be influenced by the lost voice of Barber, and the Excise system triumphed—the barriers of freedom were passed—trial by jury was, in certain cases, either dispensed with, or nullified by well-trained special juries—the ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... wind in general in the Mediterranean, but also denoting a peculiar cold and blighting wind, ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... meditation. But three or four times—and it was when the assumed airs and affected importance of the musician and their hostess rose to the most extravagant excess—he observed that Fenella dealt askance on them some of those bitter and almost blighting elfin looks, which in the Isle of Man were held to imply contemptuous execration. There was something in all her manner so extraordinary, joined to her sudden appearance, and her demeanour in the King's presence, so oddly, yet so well ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... observation at the time of the destruction. They were at once issued to the public, by whom they were hailed with delight, as the first "bit of blue" in the monetary sky. Under these re-assuring circumstances the panic soon subsided, but it left its blighting legacy of misery, ruin, diminished credit, ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... death to dishonour, and was, above all, shocked at the lack of physical courage. Never had I liked our old Admiral so well as when I heard how his chief anger was directed against the general mismanagement, and the cruelty of blighting a poor lad's life when not yet seventeen. His father might have been warned to remove him without the public scandal of ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... their parents; insubordination is an evil, blighting the buddings of self-government. Parents should teach their children at the 236:24 earliest possible period the truths of health and holiness. Children are more tractable than adults, and learn more readily to love ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... competitive capitalism for producing and distributing the necessities of life (food, clothing and shelter) for the profit of capitalists, the few who live by owning the materials and machines of production and distribution; and this blighting malady cannot be cured by charity, but it will spread until this system is supplanted by the just one of co-operative industrialism, a system by which these necessities shall be produced and distributed for the use of laborers, those who live by ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... that ghastly pantomime, They've felt its blighting breath, They know that rollicking Christmas-time Meant Cold and Want ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... explain the general putting of mills in Lancashire and Lanarkshire on short time, the fall in the value of all kinds of stock and general decline in the vent for all kinds of manufactured produce. It is in the home markets that the real and blighting deficiency is experienced. And what is the cause of this decline in the home market? The Free-Traders are the first to tell us what has done it. It is the famine in Ireland. The total manufactured produce of the island is certainly not under L200,000,000[10] annually, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... It would have been well if I had contented myself with this goodly outside; for penetrating, by a long narrow passage and complicated stairway, to the interior of the house, I found that it had nothing to offer me but the usual number of commonplace rooms in the usual blighting state of restoration. I must say that the people of the house, considering they had nothing in the world to show me, were kind and patient under the intrusion, and answered with very polite affirmation my discouraged inquiry if ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... enterprize with more boldness and address. He had entered the English navy in boyhood; and, after many years of faithful service, was rapidly acquiring rank and distinction, when the unhappy dissensions of the times threw their blighting influence on his prospects, and disappointed his well-founded hopes of still higher advancement in his profession. His father, an inflexible Puritan, fled to New-England from the persecution of a church which he abhorred, and, with the malevolence of narrow-minded ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... measure he received from Herder, who showed no mercy for "whatever of self-complacency, egotism, vanity, pride and presumption was latent or active" in him. Herder, he says elsewhere, "exercised such a blighting influence on me that I began to doubt my own powers." Whether or not Goethe learned from Herder the lesson of modesty regarding his own gifts, it is the truth that of all the sons of genius none has been freer than Goethe was ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... matters of mere omission, with a man of Mr. Lovelace's penetration. Nor with any man; since if love has not taken root deep enough to cause it to shoot out into declaration, if an opportunity be fairly given for it, there is little room to expect, that the blighting winds of anger or resentment will bring it forward. Then my poor sister is not naturally good-humoured. This is too well-known a truth for me to endeavor to conceal it, especially from you. She must therefore, ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... will not be able to vanquish. Why then hath that Jishnu endued with great strength been subject to death? Oh, why doth that Dhananjaya, relying on whom we had hitherto endured all this misery, lie on the ground blighting[66] all my hopes! Why have those heroes, those mighty sons of Kunti, Bhimasena and Dhananjaya, came under the power of the enemy,—those who themselves always slew their foes, and whom no weapons could resist! Surely, this vile heart of mine ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... he felt the hand of Ailsa drawing him back as though to keep him from the blighting touch of the ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton
... years—when men once get the habit—who knows where it will end—it is hard enough to keep them at home now! No, history is full of unhappy examples of men in public life; Nero, Herod, King John—you ask me to set these names before your young people. Politics has a blighting, demoralizing influence on men. It dominates them, hypnotizes them, pursues them even after their earthly career is over. Time and again it has been proven that men came back and voted—even ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... seemed, in his simple "good-night," very fervently spoken, to express far more than his cousin had done. But it was not fatigue that had chased for a moment the color from the sweet face of Lilias: it the blighting breath of that deadly thing, the hate of a human heart. Never before had this innocent child come in contact with such a passion. Of love, she knew enough; its fragrant atmosphere had been around her from her cradle, it had come to her night by night in the fond kiss ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... spirit, which was incapable of attaining wisdom, and which had fabricated those false notions that governed the practical world and constrained the natural feelings. Instances of the unhappiness caused by such constraint, he gave in Songs of Experience, where The Garden of Love describes the blighting curse which church law had laid upon free love. To overthrow intellectualism and discipline, Man must liberate his most precious faculty, the imagination, which alone can reveal the spiritual character of the universe and the beauty that life will wear when the feelings cease to be unnaturally ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... Clifford's counsel shake any part of their evidence in his cross-examination. The main witness depended on by the crown was now summoned, and the solemn countenance of Peter MacGrawler rose on the eyes of the jury. One look of cold and blighting contempt fell on him from the eye of the prisoner, who did not again deign to regard him during ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... vague about her, And her thoughts turned fearfully To her heart, if there some shelter From the silence there might be, Like bare cedars leaning inland From the blighting of the sea. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... life I watched o'er; and the danger, at last, The kind Physician said, was past. Howbeit, for seven harsh weeks the East Breathed witheringly, and Spring's growth ceased, And so she only did not die; Until the bright and blighting sky Changed into cloud, and the sick flowers Remember'd their perfumes, and showers Of warm, small rain refreshing flew Before the South, and the Park grew, In three nights, thick with green. Then she Revived, no less ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... achieved my room in the garret of the International Hotel than I was called upon by an intoxicated man who said he was an Editor. Knowing how rare it was for an Editor to be under the blighting influence of either spiritous or malt liquors, I received this statement ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... "Marry, this follows, that you will owe good deed, as well as good will, to him who shall put you in the way to walk with your beaver cocked in the presence, as an ye were Earl of Kildare; bully the courtiers; meet the Prince's blighting look with a bold brow; confront the favourite; ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... carolling on every spray, And every leaf glittered with perfumed dew; Nature was full of joy, but, wretched man! Does God indeed bless only birds and flowers? As thus I stood—the glowing morn without, Within, the Raven with its blighting cry, All light the world, all gloom the hopeless heart— I prayed in agony, if not in faith; Yet still my saddened heart refused to soar, And even summer winds the burden ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... beauteous than they were? And can that opium do more than God To waken beauty in a human brain? Is this the real, the cold, undraperied truth— A skeleton admitted as a guest At life's loud feast, wearing a life-like mask? No, no; my heart would die if I believed it. A blighting fog uprises with the days, False, cold, dull, leaden, gray. It clings about The present, far dragging like a robe; but ever Forsakes the past, and lets its hues shine out: On past and future pours the ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... accommodation man pleaded, had its effect on the weak-minded man. He loved dearly the girl, but poverty hung like a leaden cloud over him. Poverty stripped him of the means of gratifying her ambition; poverty held him fast locked in its blighting chains; poverty forbid his rescuing her from the condition necessity had imposed upon her; poverty was goading him into crime; and through crime only did he see the means of securing to himself the cherished object ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... training, and instinct. Yet, because of a lack of clear knowledge, his life has been one of hardship, privation, disappointment, disillusionment, galling poverty, and utter failure. He has been subjected to ridicule and the even more blighting cruelty of good-natured, patronizing, contemptuous tolerance. His reputation is that of a lazy, good-for-nothing, disreputable dead beat and loafer. And yet, in a sense, nothing is further from the truth. Notwithstanding his many disappointments, no one ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... her in her own right—it had been given her by her father at the period of her marriage—so that notwithstanding the dissipated habits of the husband and father they still possessed a home, although many of the comforts of former days had disappeared before the blighting influence of the demon of intemperance. After being dismissed by his employers Mr. Harland seemed to lose all respect for himself, as well as for his wife and children, and, but for the unceasing toil of the patient mother, his children might have often ...
— Stories and Sketches • Harriet S. Caswell
... confided in me no more beyond the limits of literary criticism and theology—and botany. I remember we were among the few roses of her small flower-beds at the time, and I was trying to show her what was blighting them all in the bud. She ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... of a perfect restoration to full mental, bodily and sexual vigor within the reach of all, and no man has any right now to enter either blindly or wilfully into so sacred and important a relationship as marriage, and to lower and stultify its ends by blighting the happiness of a fair young wife, exhausting his own vitality in the vain attempt to have offspring, or in having such as shall be a curse to ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... sword, Clamour of currents, and foam, Rains making ruin on earth, Winds that wax ravenous and roam As wolves in a wolfish horde; Fruits growing faint in the tree, And blind things dead in their birth Famine, and blighting of corn, When thy time was ...
— Atalanta in Calydon • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... retained and recited, under the same circumstances, by any irrational, as well and better, than by any rational being, if, to recite well, mean to repeat without missing a syllable. How far our literature may in future suffer from these blighting swarms, will best be conceived by a glance at what they have already withered and blasted of the favourite productions of our most popular poets, Gray, Goldsmith, Thomson, ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... pillage. Within three months Wallenstein had nearly fifty thousand men under his standard, drawn to him by the tempting offers of plunder that his agents held out. If the war had been terrible before, imagine the awful phase it now assumed, and the blighting curse ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... the current system of education may do to the child, there is one thing which it cannot fail to do to him,—to blight his mental growth. What particular form or forms this blighting influence may take will depend in each particular case on a variety of circumstances. Experience tells us that what happens in most cases is that Western education strangles some faculties, arrests the growth of others, stunts the growth of a third group, and distorts ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... mad house, too, as well as the debtor's gaol, is in part peopled by the same blighting power, and nature recovers itself from a state of languid apathy, only by the terrific excitement of frenzy. Or a passion for suicide ensues; the mind revels in the contemplation of the grave, and covets the ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... world of sin.' The outstanding first characteristic of the whole Gospel message is the new gravity which it attaches to the fact of sin, the deeper meaning which it gives to the word, and the larger scope which it shows its blighting influences to have had in humanity. Apart from the conviction of sin by the Spirit using the word proclaimed by disciples, the world has scarcely a notion of what sin is, its inwardness, its universality, the awfulness of it as a ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... It was as if his real, true, honest, and loving character had made one more vigorous effort to assert itself,—as though it had for a moment broken through the hard and selfish crust that was forming around him; but the blighting influence which was at work proved seemingly too strong for him to struggle against, and riveted its chains again upon him with a weight heavier than before. That there was some malefic influence, mental or physical, thus working on him, no one who had known ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... They are not giving any particular attention to field work, but are working on these special problems. I think you all appreciate that progress of investigations on this kind of subjects is rather slow, and in the meantime the man who has his trees and his nurseries blighting is ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Second Annual Meeting - Ithaca, New York, December 14 and 15, 1911 • Northern Nut Growers Association
... in vain, that the blighting winds of unkindness or indifference, seemed destined to counteract the superiority of Mary's mind. It surmounted every obstacle; and, by degrees, from a person little considered in the family, she became in some sort its director and umpire. The despotism of her education cost ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... the assertion, it is nevertheless true, that whenever questions of an intricate nature arose those whose legitimate business it was to act in the matter were either moved by the narrowest aspirations of party, or, yielding to their own more contracted views, were disposed to keep alive dissensions blighting to their ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... it was the general notion in your day that woman's physical constitution doomed her by its necessary effect to be sick, wretched, and unhappy, and that at most her condition could not be rendered more than tolerable in a physical sense. A more blighting blasphemy against Nature never found expression. No natural function ought to cause constant suffering or disease; and if it does, the rational inference is that something is wrong in the circumstances. The Orientals invented the myth of Eve and the apple, and the curse pronounced upon ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... elastic in mind and body. I hope, for the sake of my American friends, it will be very long before these healthful hours are changed to those which custom has made fashionable in England; hours that soon fade the roses even on their most genial soil, the cheeks of the fair girls of Britain, blighting the healthful and the young, and withering ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... alive to the objects and interests of his profession knows too well the baneful influence of these premature and pernicious tendencies. Many times has the teacher watched with a sad heart the withering of all his hopes for the intellectual progress of a naturally gifted scholar by this blighting influence. The most dangerous period for boys and girls exposed to temptations of this sort is that just following puberty, or between the ages of twelve and eighteen or twenty. This period, a prominent educator in one of our Western States once denominated, not inappropriately, "the ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... cheerful sight, were it not for that odious motto, "Non Possumus," graven over the mantel-shelf where it must inevitably meet every eye. Never could I read it without a tightening at my heartstrings; a potency of blighting evil seemed to lie ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... evil repute in Plymouth in the last century. It was said that she had taken pay for luring a girl into her old farm-house, where a man lay dead of small-pox, with intent to harm her beauty; she was accused of blighting land and driving ships ashore with spells; in brief, she was called a witch, and people, even those who affected to ignore the craft of wizardry, were content to keep away from her. When the Revolution ended, Southward Howland demanded Dame Crewe's ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... myrtle leaves, (Methinks his fittest crown would be A chaplet from the cypress tree;) With hope his breast is swelling high, And brightly beams his laughing eye; But soon his hopes are mixed with fears, And soon his smiles are quenched in tears: Then Disappointment's blighting breath Breathes o'er him, and he droops to death; While the Destroyer glideth by, And smiles, as if in mockery. How strong a hand hath Time! Fame wins The eager youth to her embrace; With tameless ardour he begins, And follows up the bootless race; Ah! bootless—for, as on he hies, With ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... should be any reverse to such a picture! that there should still linger in her churches and religious life the fluttering rays of a blighting superstition! that there should be a want of true modesty and cleanliness in the habits of her people! that an ignoble love of ease should still characterize her upper classes, while the lowest orders generally are steeped in ignorance and importunate ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... high and noble life lived in such bliss as rarely fell to lot of woman—on this one man she knew that she could lavish all the splendour of her nature, and make his life a heaven, as hers would be. Behind her lay the mad, uncared-for years, and one black memory blighting all to come, though 'twould have been but a black memory with no power to blight if the heaven of love had not so opened to her and with its light cast all ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... ravages of many kinds of doubt. The philosopher does not do so till unity has been reached, and is warranted against the inroads of those considerations, but only practically, not essentially, secure from the blighting breath of the ultimate Why? If he cannot exorcise this question, he must ignore or blink it, and, assuming the data of his system as something given, and the gift as ultimate, simply proceed to a life of contemplation or of action based on ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... robb'd Achilles of his lawful prize. What could I do? a Goddess all o'erruled, Daughter of Jove, dread Ate, baleful power Misleading all; with light step she moves, Not on the earth, but o'er the heads of men. With blighting touch, and many ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... showed not only that the nervous impulse in plant and in man is exalted or inhibited under identical conditions but carried the parallelism very far and pointed out the blighting effects on life of a complete seclusion and protection from the world outside. "A plant carefully protected under glass from outside shocks", says Sir Jagadis "looks sleek and flourishing; but its higher nervous function is then found to be atrophied. But when a succession of blows is rained ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... not watched or felt it, knows the laming of all spiritual energy, the hardening, the blighting of all noble impulse which comes from this sort of knowledge of the world; and who can say that he has never (more or less) been thus guilty?—it is more truly blood-guiltiness than anything else, for it helps to ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... with elastic rebound from what seemed final extinction; with the spirit of adventure carried to the utmost limits of heroism; with self-devotion on the sublimest scale, and the very frenzy of patriotic martyrdom; with resurrection of everlasting hope upon ground seven times blasted by the blighting presence of the enemy; and with flowers radiant in promise springing forever from under the very ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... probability would have very genial manners. But the fact was so, for at the next bend in the lane Maggie actually saw the little semicircular black tent with the blue smoke rising before it, which was to be her refuge from all the blighting obloquy that had pursued her in civilized life. She even saw a tall female figure by the column of smoke, doubtless the gypsy-mother, who provided the tea and other groceries; it was astonishing to herself ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... election arrived. It was no longer an individual struggle, but a party contest between the ins and outs. The question was, whether the withering influence of the overseers, the domination of the churchwardens, and the blighting despotism of the vestry-clerk, should be allowed to render the election of beadle a form—a nullity: whether they should impose a vestry-elected beadle on the parish, to do their bidding and forward their views, or whether the parishioners, fearlessly asserting their ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... of humiliation. It must also be apparent that the whole system of penance is an unauthorized addition to the ordinances of primitive Christianity. Of such a system we do not find even a trace in the New Testament; and under its blighting influence, the religion of the Church gradually became little better than a ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... colonies would take fire at being taxed now."[30] The expulsion of the French from America had already lessened the dependence of the colonies upon the home country, when the House of Commons directed its corrupt and blighting attention to the English colonial system. The Stamp Act was passed in 1764, and repealed in 1766. In 1768 came Charles Townshend's mischievous duty on tea; and the American Congress met at Lexington in 1774. At this time the resident population of Newfoundland amounted ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... ferocity of war, and England had begun to make some approach toward a respect for law and a veneration for the Christian religion, when the Danes came, and with them another period of disgraceful atrocities and blighting heathenism. The Danish invasion had almost extirpated the monastic institution in the northern districts. Carnage and devastation reigned everywhere. Celebrated monasteries fell in ruins and the monks were slain or driven into exile. Hordes of barbaric warriors ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... brought up amid the free churches and free schools of New England. He always expounded history to me in the light of that conviction; and he mourned that temporary difficulties should prevent lawgivers from checking the growth of evils that must have a blighting influence on the souls of many generations. He considered slavery a cumulative poison in the veins of this Republic, and predicted that it would some day act all at ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... song of wo! For never more our joys uniting, With Sorrow's sigh no more to glow; No more shall Pity's tear together flow, Our love, our hopes, our joys forever blighting. ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... of expanding our nature and bringing us into a finished and satisfactory condition, and setting our life in right relations with other men, we find the new gift to be a curse to us, hampering us, cutting us off in unexpected ways from our usefulness, thwarting and blighting our life ...
— How to become like Christ • Marcus Dods
... in the meanest man; there is a philanthropist in the stingiest miser; there is a hero in the biggest coward,—which an emergency great enough will call out. The blighting greed of gain, the chilling usages and cold laws of trade, encase many a noble heart in crusts of selfishness; but great emergencies break open the prison doors, and the whole heart pours itself forth in deeds of ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... provisional offspring of four years of desolating war I can well believe them. But a year or two of peace, and the city will rise again, as after the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune, which laid upon it a sufficiently blighting hand. In spite of fickle fortune and its many ups and downs it is, and will ever remain, ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... my stormy mood, Instead of blighting, does some good. Sooner a thunder-clap, think me, Than sunstroke sent in ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... breathlessly silent in that glorious twilight. Rays of heaven were blending with all that was loveliest on earth; but though the mother's eye was fixed upon the scene, it was evident she did not see it, nor feel its healing power. What wonder? The agony was too recent,—the blighting of all her hopes too sudden for resignation and peace to come into her soul at once. The heavy blow had fallen, and her heart was crushed! No tear was in her eye, no trembling in her voice, as she replied to questions; but a face more expressive of utter woe I have ...
— Arthur Hamilton, and His Dog • Anonymous
... seem that here, where all was peace and contentment, the cruel scourge of war had fallen upon the land with its blighting power, leaving in its wake thousands of widows and orphans. "But here are evidences of gruesome warfare between unknown Indian tribes long before the day of the Pioneer. At Redbanks Farm, north of Mount Jackson, is a great mound filled with the skeletons of a whole tribe ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... you were right, mater, and it was all the kid that prevented Mr. Leith from sticking to his promise," Jimmy announced, as he helped Dion to "the strawberry," with a liberality which betokened an affection steadfast even under the stress of blighting circumstances. ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... and have come to be known, taken collectively, as the "Witchcraft Persecutions." The Devil, with his subordinate demons and the human beings who sold their souls to him, were supposed to be both capable and guilty of blighting the crops; causing the lightning; bringing destructive storms; withholding the rain; drying up cows; killing domestic and wild beasts; afflicting the nations with pestilence, famine, and war; causing all manner of diseases; betwitching men, women, and children; planting doubts in the mind and weeds ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... survivor of the old benefactors, who has outlasted whole hierarchies of outworn myths and, yet firm in the devotion of the heart of childhood, snaps his fingers alike at arid science and blighting stupidity, was driving his reindeer, his teeming sleigh filled with wonders from every region: dolls that walked and talked and sang, fit for princesses; sleds fine enough for princes; drums and trumpets and swords for young heroes; horses that looked ...
— Santa Claus's Partner • Thomas Nelson Page
... unsuspected before, sank deep into Sylvia's thoughts, and gave her a strange interest in Hester—poor Hester, whose life she had so crossed and blighted, even by the very blighting of her own. She gave Hester her own former passionate feelings for Kinraid, and wondered how she herself should have felt towards any one who had come between her and him, and wiled his love away. When she remembered Hester's unfailing sweetness and kindness towards herself from ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Walloon population, on the one side, contending with the democratic insanity of the Ghent populace on the other, have been restrained within bounds by the moderate counsels of William of Orange, it would have been possible to unite seventeen provinces instead of seven, and to save many long and blighting years ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Captain Pharo, with blighting sarcasm, new-lighting his pipe preparatory to leaving the hall; "I ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... for weeping and for wailing, For bitter hail and blighting frost, For high hopes on the low earth trailing, For sweet joys missed, ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... mass of honey-coloured masonry rising like a vast fortress from its buttresses of stone; lingering under the bell-tower of the Puerta del Perdon because Pilar "felt as if something would happen there." But nothing did happen; and we went to face the blighting of renewed hopes in the Court of Oranges, whose melancholy charm and sensuous perfume was sad as the song of a nightingale when ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... from hate or scorn arise?— 45 Yes! one more sharp there is that deeper lies, Which fond Esteem but mocks when he would heal. Yet neither scorn nor hate did it devise, But sad compassion and atoning zeal! One pang more blighting-keen than hope betray'd! 50 And this it is my woeful hap to feel, When, at her Brother's hest, the twin-born Maid With face averted and unsteady eyes, Her truant playmate's faded robe puts on; And inly shrinking from her own disguise ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... out the dismal strain which meant disgrace for him and the blighting of all his hopes, he sat his horse with rigid face and eyes from which all life had fled. He had been taught the lesson ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... blight natural and permanent? or has it been caused by accidental and artificial circumstances which may be only temporary? Doubtless, each ruin has its tale of horror, but all trace their destruction to Islamism, and especially to the blighting and desolating presence of ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... objects Miss Quincey's imagination ran voluptuous riot. But upon such things as history or poetry she had a somewhat blighting influence. The flowers in the school Anthology withered under her fingers, and the flesh and blood of heroes crumbled into the dust of dates. As for the philosopher under the roofs, who he was, and what was his philosophy, and how he ever came to be under the roofs ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... soberly. Discuss the matter.—Yes, my hand, but I must have my wits. Leave me free to use them till we choose our path. Let it be the brains between us, as far as it can. You ask me to join my fate to yours. It signifies a sharp battle for you, dear friend; perhaps the blighting of the most promising life in England. One question is, can I countervail the burden I shall be, by such help to you as I can afford? Burden, is no word—I rake up a buried fever. I have partially lived it down, and instantly I am covered with spots. The old false charges and this plain offence ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Chick with an emphasis of blighting contempt on the last syllable. 'More like a professional singer with the hydrophobia, than a man in your ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... slavery at the sight of negroes chained and scourged, and that then and there the iron entered into his soul. No boy could grow to manhood in those days as a poor white in Kentucky and Indiana, in close contact with slavery or in its neighborhood, without a growing consciousness of its blighting effects on free labor, as well as of its frightful injustice and cruelty. In the Legislature of Illinois, where the public sentiment was all for upholding the institution and violently against every movement for its abolition ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... upon the "little, glassy-headed, hairless man," and hung upon his every utterance! And with what unerring gift of prophecy could he foretell the long and husky droughts of summer—the gracious rains, at last,—the milk-sick breeding autumn and the blighting winter, simply by the way his bones felt after a century's casual attack of inflammatory rheumatism! And, having annually frosted his feet for some odd centuries—boy and man—we can fancy with what quiet delight he was wont to practise his prognosticating facilities on "the boys," ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... us, "sitting down under a spreading walnut-tree, by the side of a murmuring mill stream, he was led by the charming woodland scenery around to reflect upon that mysterious Providence, by which so beautiful a country has been placed under such a blighting government, in the hands of so ignorant and ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... battle, while there will be none whom he will not be able to vanquish. Why then hath that Jishnu endued with great strength been subject to death? Oh, why doth that Dhananjaya, relying on whom we had hitherto endured all this misery, lie on the ground blighting[108] all my hopes! Why have those heroes, those mighty sons of Kunti, Bhimasena and Dhananjaya, came under the power of the enemy,—those who themselves always slew their foes, and whom no weapons could resist! Surely, this vile heart of mine must be made ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... composed various denunciatory answers with which to annihilate his brother. He hesitated between two courses, whether he should hurl himself upon him in righteous indignation and demand physical satisfaction, or whether he should rise in a calm and manly attitude and wither him with blighting sarcasm. And while the decision was pending, he still sat with his hands in his pockets, and his feet stretched forth, and blinked indignantly ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... those awful songs of joy. In all the nightmares that men have ever dreamed, there has never been anything so blighting and horrible as the faces of those five men, looking out of their poke-bonnets; the figures of district visitors with the faces of devils. I cannot think there is ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... will admit; reductions of taxation and tariff, to be so arranged as to afford the greatest relief to the greatest number; honest and fair dealings with all other peoples, to the end that war, with all its blighting consequences, may be avoided, but without surrendering any right or obligation due to us; a reform in the treatment of Indians and in the whole civil service of the country; and, finally, in securing a pure, untrammeled ballot, where every man entitled to cast a vote may do so, just once ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ulysses S. Grant • Ulysses S. Grant
... approach it from the economic and political standpoint. But when I say political I do not mean it in any party sense. This is not a party question; may it never become one. The organisers of this exhibition have done what lay in their power to prevent the blighting and corrosive influence of party from being extended to it. The fact that the position which I occupy at this moment will be occupied to-morrow by the wife of a distinguished member of the present Government (Mrs. Herbert Gladstone), and on Saturday by a leading ...
— Constructive Imperialism • Viscount Milner
... such a dominant position as Antwerp, and there is none whose history has involved such amazing changes of fortune. In the middle of the sixteenth century she was the foremost city in Europe, at its close she was ruined. For two hundred years she lay prostrate under the blighting influence of Spain and Austria, and throttled by the commercial jealousy of England and Holland. A few weeks ago she was the foremost port on the Continent, the third in the world; now her wharves stand idle, and she herself is a prisoner in the ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... vague, rude threats. So she sat and waited ... and waited. The shadows on the grass changed their shapes before her eyes; distant chapel-bells tinkled their quarter of an hour and were still again; the blighting torpor of a Sunday afternoon lay over the world. Would to-morrow ever come? She counted on her fingers the hours that had still to crawl by before she could get back to school—counted twice over to be sure of ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... scaffold. I am willing to believe that, as you see her on his canvas, so she turned towards him, in the crowd, from the first sight of the axe, and stamped upon his mind a look which he has stamped on mine as though I had stood beside him in the concourse. The guilty palace of the Cenci: blighting a whole quarter of the town, as it stands withering away by grains: had that face, to my fancy, in its dismal porch, and at its black, blind windows, and flitting up and down its dreary stairs, and growing out of the darkness ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... of the reaper Takes the ears that are hoary, But the voice of the weeper Wails manhood in glory. The autumn winds rushing, Waft the leaves that are searest, But our flower was in flushing When blighting was nearest. ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... springing up with a start, and a reply aloud to an imaginary voice. Of cursing himself for being there, for having fled, for having let her go, for not having confronted and defied him. Of having a deadly quarrel with the whole world, but chiefly with himself. Of blighting everything with his black mood as he was ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... fellow-citizens, as men overwhelmed with calamity by the sudden disruption of the ties of friendship or affection, or as in despair for the republic by the untimely blighting of its hopes. Death has not surprised us by an unseasonable blow. We have, indeed, seen the tomb close, but it has closed only over mature years, over long-protracted public service, over the weakness of age, and over life itself only when the ends of living had been fulfilled. These ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... danger—this blighting influence of the evil eye which environed the years of childhood—there was also this other danger, already mentioned, that of being spirited away by fairies. The danger from this source was greater when the baby was pretty, ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... blighting contempt] Yes: you like an old man to hit, don't you, when you've finished with the women. I ain't seen you hit ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... where Freda lived, was the bleakest settlement in the world. Even its inhabitants, who loved it, had to admit that. The northeast winds swept whistling up the bay and blew rawly over the long hill that sloped down to it, blighting everything that was in their way. Only the sturdy firs and spruces could hold their own against it. So there were no orchards or groves or flower ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... apart, not asking her to give him up. In real life these violent situations are not closed as they are in books, by death or cleverly contrived catastrophes; they end far less poetically—in disgust, in the blighting of every flower of the soul, in the commonplace of habit, and very often too in another passion, which robs a wife of the interest which is traditionally ascribed to women. So, when common sense, the law of social ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... new movement, guided its philanthropic efforts, and brought to noble issue its spiritual philosophy. Early in the year 1804, Joseph Stevens Buckminster was settled over the Brattle Street Church; and, though he preached but a little over six years before a blighting disease took him away, yet he left behind a tradition of great pulpit gifts and a wonderfully attractive personality. Another to die in early manhood was Samuel Cooper Thacher, who was settled at the New South in 1811, and who was ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... good name from the critics. It was truly an innocent affair and an unpretending performance. But notwithstanding these, at least seeming, qualities of young doubtfulness and timidity, they did not soften the austere nature of the bleak and blighting criticism which ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... Women. Spirit of the unseen habitation, Walking distress, Blighting presence, Nemesis, Evil, Good-in-Darkness, Passing from breast to breast, Reaching easily all men, And the vine in the orchard, And the thick clusters of the grape, And the bending branches of the young peach trees, When the south wind blows death upon their ...
— The Treason and Death of Benedict Arnold - A Play for a Greek Theatre • John Jay Chapman
... in all the festive arrangements of this jovial regiment, and were at last as regular at table, as the adjutant and the paymaster, and so might they have continued, had not prosperity, that in its blighting influence upon the heart, spares neither priests nor laymen, and is equally severe upon mice (see Aesop's fable) and moral philosophers, actually deprived them, for the "nonce" of reason, and tempted them to their ruin. You naturally ask, what ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... purposes, it offered the pupils more content and better training than the ordinary school drill in its colorless and vapid subject matter. This fact is necessary to bear in mind, but it should not obscure the even more significant fact that the blighting character of industry is due to its motivation, which is wealth exploitation and not wealth creation. All of the industrial educational experiments have succumbed to the fatalism involved in the adaptation of ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... and moved it away from the blighting shadow into warmth and brightness once more. Yet was this but for a moment, as again the shadow of Jonas fell over them. Once more she moved the child, but with like result. Then with a great effort she rose from her knees, carrying the child to go away with it, far, ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... that the Indian converts should at once be made to understand all the duties and responsibilities of the new life on which they were entering, he was a fearless man, and boldly declared unto them the whole counsel of God. Knowing the blighting, destroying influences of the "fire water" upon the poor Indian race, he made the Church a total abstinence society, and, as all missionaries should, he set them the example of his own life. Then, as regards the keeping of the Sabbath, he took his ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... expression "right hand" is used, you will plainly see that "right hand," when spoken of as the "right hand" of God, means power, the power of God. As applying to man, it means the same, the power of man. In this sense the right hand of every unconverted man and woman is withered under the blighting curse of sin. But Jesus is present to heal. He is ever ready to heal all who have need of healing now, just as truly as when he was visibly among men. But he cannot heal you without your willing consent to obey his commands. ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... my mind, that day I robb'd Achilles of his lawful prize. What could I do? a Goddess all o'er-rul'd, Daughter of Jove, dread Ate, baleful pow'r, Misleading all; with lightest step she moves, Not on the earth, but o'er the heads of men, With blighting touch; and many hath caus'd to err. E'en Jove, the wisest deem'd of Gods and men, In error she involv'd, when Juno's art By female stratagem the God deceiv'd, When in well-girdled Thebes Alcmena lay In travail of the might of Hercules. In boastful tone amid the Gods he spoke: 'Hear ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... 'ear you. There's a most almighty row going on all round. They must be charging, I think, or our front line's fallen back, because the rifles is going nineteen to the dozen, a-a-ah! They're getting stronger too, and it sounds like a lot more bombs going; hold on, there's that blighting maxim again." ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... degraded material philosophy of the eighteenth century. They surpassed the histories of other nations in comprehensiveness and power, and became standard works in France and Germany, but in all of them we can trace a lack of true philosophy, due to the blighting influence of the eighteenth century skepticism; for, as the greatest minds, in which Christianity and science are blended, have agreed—"without some reasonable and due idea of the destiny and end of man, it is impossible to ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... little concurrence on his part, that, when Weseloff in a private 5 audience humbly remonstrated upon the injustice done him and the cruelty of thus sporting with his feelings by setting him at liberty, and, as it were, tempting him into dreams of home and restored happiness only for the purpose of blighting them, the good-natured prince disclaimed 10 all participation in the affair, and went so far in proving his sincerity as even to give him permission to effect his escape; and, as a ready means of commencing it without raising suspicion, the Khan ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... would be Paris with the year. In Bohemia, you find the flower doomed to wither and come to nothing; the flower of the wonderful young manhood of France, so sought after by Napoleon and Louis XIV., so neglected for the last thirty years by the modern Gerontocracy that is blighting everything else—that splendid young manhood of whom a witness so little prejudiced as Professor Tissot wrote, 'On all sides the Emperor employed a younger generation in every way worthy of him; in his councils, ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... tares. Ah, boys, beware of the first seeds of hate! Pluck them from you, as you would your hand from the fire. Otherwise they will spring up so quickly that they will wind themselves, like poisonous weeds, round every fibre of your being, blighting and strangling all the better impulses of your nature, killing, above all, the choicest blossom that comes to us from the Divine garden—the blossom of love. Where hate flourishes, love cannot be. There is no room for the two. Never since the world began have they ever flourished side by side—never ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... the only person whom the sudden change in the financial position of the Winfield family had hit hard. The blighting effects of sudden wealth had touched Steve while ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... seriously hindering your christian life. It may be something that goes into your mouth or comes out of it that prevents those lips speaking for the Master. Perhaps it is some organization you belong to. If there is lack of freedom and power for Christ you may be sure there is something that is blighting your life and dwarfing your usefulness. It may possibly be that practically in your daily life you are exerting no more power for God than a dead man! A christian, indeed, but without power because of compromise with something questionable or outrightly wrong! Is that so with you? I do not say ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... coal-dust and factory smoke darkened the shrinking leaves, and coarse rank flowers, and where the struggling vegetation sickened and sank under the hot breath of kiln and furnace, making them by its presence seem yet more blighting and unwholesome than in the town itself—a long, flat, straggling suburb passed, they came, by slow degrees, upon a cheerless region, where not a blade of grass was seen to grow, where not a bud put forth its promise in the spring, where nothing ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... (Fig. 258) and Ceresa, abound on the leaves of plants, sadly blighting them; and the Tettigonias frequent damp, wet, swampy places. A very abundant species on grass produces what is called "frog's spittle." It can easily be traced through all its changes by frequently examining ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... perspiration, much as, in the Orient, scent is substituted for soap—and with no more satisfactory result. This false notion of dignity has since then, by keeping men out of flannels, gymnasium suits, running-tights, and overalls, performed prodigies in the work of blighting the flowers of the mind and stunting the ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... fell upon both the men, blighting the joy with which they welcomed her back to life. She took her father's head between her hands, and kissed his bruised face. "I thought you were dead; and I thought that mamma—" She stopped, and they waited breathless. "But that was ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... her heart had fearful forebodings of a second blighting of all its dearest hopes. Not the less painful, were those anticipations, because she had ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... of four filberts—not blighting, but not thriving this year or last. Reason unknown. Soil is heavy clay hardpan near top. Top ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting • Various |
