"Noisome" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mire at every step, covered the area now occupied by stately buildings, the palaces of great commercial societies. There was only a single street in which two wheeled carriages could pass each other. From this street diverged to right and left alleys squalid and noisome beyond the belief of those who have formed their notions of misery from the most miserable parts of Saint Giles's and Whitechapel. One of these alleys, called, and, by comparison, justly called, Broad Lane, is about ten ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Mr. Smellie. No one knows who led the charge down upon the boats, or gave the cry to stave in the barrels on board. But in a trice the preventive men were driven overboard and, as they leapt into the shallow water, were caught and held and drenched in the noisome mess; while the Riding Officer, plastered ere he could gain his saddle, ducked his head and galloped up the beach under a torrential shower of ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... extreme youth, learned, through dear experience, the putrid qualities of this noisome quadruped. It was on one bright Sunday, in New England, and he was out in his Sunday clothing, gathering wild strawberries. He suddenly discovered a pretty little playful animal with bushy tail, romping in the grass near him. The creature was seemingly gentle, and ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... the Pelican Valley, which had broadened to a wide meadowy plain, and about ten miles from the camp we began a rough ride up the lessening creek from the level. The valley was half a mile wide, noisome with sulphur springs and steam-vents, with now and then a gayly-tinted hill-slope, colored like the canyon of the Yellowstone. Some one seeing deer above us on the hills, Dr. T., Mr. K. and Houston rode off in pursuit. Presently came a dozen shots far above us, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... bear no longer to hear the precepts which he disdained to practice, sternly commanded OMAR to depart: 'Be gone,' said he, 'lest I crush thee like a noisome reptile, which men cannot but abhor, though it is too contemptible to be feared.' 'I go,' said OMAR, 'that my warning voice may yet again recall thee to the path of wisdom and of peace, if yet again I shall behold thee while it is to ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... and female, haven't you, reader? Such people are great nuisances—half the discomforts of life are bred by them; they contaminate and poison the air they breathe, with their noisome breath, like the odor ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... consents to make himself as much a prisoner as if he were within the rules of the Fleet; to be tethered during eleven months of the year within the circle of half a mile round Charing Cross; to sit, or stand, night after night for ten or twelve hours, inhaling a noisome atmosphere, and listening to harangues of which nine-tenths are far below the level of a leading article in a newspaper? For what is it that he submits, day after day, to see the morning break over the Thames, and then totters home, with bursting temples, ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... floating one in to Eternity And leaving the other alive as ever—— As each wades through that ghastly stream, The satins that rustle and gems that gleam, Will grow pale and heavy, and sink away To the noisome River's bottom-clay! Then the costly bride and her maidens six Will shiver upon the bank of the Styx, Quite as helpless as they were born—— Naked souls, and very forlorn; The Princess, then, must shift ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... listen to any lawyer; so he lay there till the circuit court convened. All through the slow inferno of that endless summer he had cursed the law's delay; but it held him, regardless, until the calm-eyed judge returned for the fall term of court. The jail was full to the last noisome cell-room and, caught ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... that demanded only their obedience. His church soon disintegrated. With but a remnant of his following, he returned in 1583 by way of Scotland into England, finding everywhere the strong hand of the government stretched out in persecution. Three years later, after having been imprisoned in noisome cells some thirty times within six years, utterly broken in health, if not weakened also in mind, and never feeling safe from arrest while in his own land, Browne finally sought pardon for his offensive teachings and, obtaining ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... battened hatch I leaned and caught Sounds from the noisome hold,— Cursing and sighing of souls distraught And cries too sad to be told. Then I strove to go down and see; But they said, "Thou art not of us!" I turned to those on the deck with me And cried, "Give help!" But they said, "Let be: ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... distant. Three miles west southwest, was the Creve-coeur lake, a body of water several miles in length and half a mile in width, connected by an outlet with the Missouri river. The water of this lake was entirely stagnant, covered with a thick scum, and sent forth a noisome smell. Fish in it died. My oldest son, a robust youth of ten years of age, and my brother-in-law, a hale and stout young man, sickened and died the first week in October. I was attacked the 5th day of July, came as near dying as a person could and recover. All my ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... vibrating wing-cases of this deceptive masquerader are made to look as thin and hornet-like as possible, in all underlying points of structure any competent naturalist would see at once that the creature must really be classed among the noisome Hemiptera. I seldom trouble the public with a Greek or Latin name, but on this occasion I trust I may be pardoned for not indulging in all the ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... and mitred no more; whose mandates had once made the nations tremble, and before whose judgment seats Mercy pleaded in vain, and Justice muffled up her face and sat dumb and weeping in the dust. Over the wolds of their desolation hyenas prowled, snuffing the noisome air as for a living prey; ghouls and vampyres shrieked in hellish chorus, as they tore up forgotten graves; and all manner of hateful and obscure things crawled familiarly in and out of palaces and holy places, as ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... that of every English generation, a hundred and fifty thousand perish in our gaols? that in every century, a nation eminent for science, studious of commerce, ambitious of empire, should willingly lose, in noisome dungeons, five hundred thousand of its inhabitants; a number greater than has ever been destroyed in the same time by pestilence and ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... and sank into its chest. I pounded, smashed; broke the shell of its distended body ... noisome ... the revulsion, the nausea of ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... this palace is; how grey the walls! No minstrel now wakes echoes in these halls. The broken chain lies rusting on the door, And noisome weeds have split the marble floor: Here lurks the snake, and here the lizards run By the stone lions blinking in the sun. Byron dwelt here in love and revelry For two long years—a second Anthony, Who of the world another Actium made! Yet suffered ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... leaving the poet staggering as if but half awake. They were succeeded by a thick and noisome fog, through which he followed his leader with the caution of a blind man, Virgil repeatedly telling him not to quit him a moment. Here they heard voices praying in unison for pardon to the "Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world." They were the spirits of the angry. Dante ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... about a yard apart, and running a lead discharge pipe over the parapet. When the stop cocks are turned the gas streams out and since it is two and a half times as heavy as air it rolls over the ground like a noisome mist. It works best when the ground slopes gently down toward the enemy and when the wind blows in that direction at a rate between four and twelve miles an hour. But the wind, being strictly neutral, may change its direction without warning ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... speak of equality; thy newspapers speak of progress; all thy governments speak of the common people; and this is where thou castest those who die in thy service, those who kill themselves ministering to thy luxury, those who perish in the noisome odors of thy factories, those who have sweated their lives away working for thee, giving thee thy prosperity, thy pleasures, thy splendors, those who have furnished thy animation and thy noise, those who have lengthened with the links of ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... the careful King, "'tis time he see! But let the criers go about and bid My city deck itself, so there be met No noisome sight; and let none blind or maimed, None that is sick or stricken deep in years, No leper, and no feeble folk come forth." Therefore the stones were swept, and up and down The water-carriers sprinkled all the streets From spirting ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... some one dying like a poisoned rat in a ditch is a powerful one. The same writer, in hunting down an unworthy man, with his cutting criticism, says, that he did it not on account of his power, but to put down what might prove noisome if not settled, much as a Dutch burgomaster might hunt a rat, not for its value, but because by its boring it might cause the water to break through his dikes, and ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... three days' journey lay between. He went forward vacantly, without food and without rest. A falling leaf, as it is said, would have turned the balance of his destiny, and at the wayside village of Li-yong so it chanced. The noisome smell of burning thatch stung his face as he approached, and presently the object came into view. It was the bare cabin of a needy widow who had become involved in a lawsuit through the rapacity ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... on "Popery, British and Foreign," Landor freely expresses himself. "The people, by their own efforts, will sweep away the gross inequalities now obstructing the church-path,—will sweep away from amidst the habitations of the industrious the moral cemeteries, the noisome markets around the house of God, whatever be the selfish interests that stubbornly resist the operation.... It would grieve me to foresee a day when our cathedrals and our churches shall be demolished or desecrated; when the tones of the organ, when the symphonies of Handel, no longer swell and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... spluttering wick, glimmering in a dirty little oil-lamp. With this feeble light he turned his back upon the lovely moonlight, and stumbled down into a low-ceilinged cabin, darksome and dirty, with berths which were as black and dingy, and altogether as uninviting as the shelves made to hold coffins in a noisome underground vault. ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... there, and so enlist volunteers for their abatement. That riles the kept keepers of lesser fames because they have agreed that the fine art of letters should be to spray the attar of posies to counteract the noisome smells of that which is rotten in the state of the world, where the many reek and sweat in filth and poverty that the few ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... water, are nowadays scarcely less important than the coal gas itself. The ammonia water furnishes large quantities of salts to be used, among other applications, as food for plants. We thus restore to-day to our vegetation the nitrogen which existed in plants of primeval times. The tar, black and noisome though it be, is a marvelous product, by the reason of scores of beautiful substances which are ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various
... a black robe, with a basket in her hand, passed like a shadow through the mists that hang about the river's edge, and in silence, always looking behind her, like one who fears a hidden foe, culled flowers of noisome plants that grow in the marsh. Her basket being filled, she passed round the stead to a hidden dell upon the mountain side. Here a man stood waiting, and near him burned a fire of turf. In his hand he held an iron-pot. It was Koll ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... gone, To the rice-swamp dank and lone, Where the slave-whip ceaseless swings, Where the noisome insect stings, Where the fever demon strews Poison with the falling dews, Where the sickly sunbeams glare Through the hot and misty air, Gone, gone—sold and gone, To the rice-swamp dank and lone, From Virginia's hills and waters, Woe ...
— The Liberty Minstrel • George W. Clark
... was clutching Wyk's little shoulder arm, with fingers still gripping the weapon. I had jerked it out of his shoulder socket. With a shudder I cast the noisome thing away. Whether Wyk was dead or not we did not know. He lay on his back; ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... artistic temperament of one who was made for other things. In a short time he wearied of the service. 'Art,' he tells us, in words that still move many by their ardent sincerity and strange fervour, 'Art touched her renegade; by her pure and high influence the noisome mists were purged; my feelings, parched, hot, and tarnished, were renovated with cool, fresh bloom, simple, beautiful to the simple-hearted.' But Art was not the only cause of the change. 'The writings of Wordsworth,' he goes on to say, 'did much towards calming ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... the dirty, narrow, ill-paved or unpaved streets of the suburbs, and overpowered by the noisome vapour arising from a deep open fosse that ran along the street behind the wharf. This ditch seemed the receptacle for every abomination, and sufficient in itself to infect a whole town with ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... gifts and graces On such as well deserve; And borne about in noisome places, From ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... and lizards crawling upon the scattered sand heaps among the coarse sea-grasses, while small fish brought unexpected dimples to the deeper pools that lay between. And the mingled odor of waters fresh and salt was broken into a breath now pungent and pleasant, now almost noisome, as the light breeze stirred the shallows of this strange domain which was neither land nor sea. Yet even here the pale sea-holly and the evening primrose made redeeming spots of beauty, with their faint hues of violet and yellow; and ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... struggle, are pushed back upon themselves, and, by a reversal of their whole functions, fester to gangrene, to death,—and instead of what was but just now the delight and boast of the creation, there will be cast out in the face of the sun a bloated, putrid, noisome carcass, full of stench and poison, an offence, a horror, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... with delirium, and he dropped the aching lids and fell away into slumber again; for he had thought himself vexed with the creak of cordage and noise of feet, stived in his dark and narrow cabin, on a filthy bed in a foul air, if any air at all were in that noisome place, reeking with heat and the ferment of bilge-water and fever-smell; and here, unless a new delirium chained him, a mattress lay upon the deck with the awning of an old sail stretched above it and making soft shadow out of searching sun, a gentle wind was blowing over him, a land-breeze ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... their lamps benign quenched out, And cruel stars in heaven did signorize, Whose influence cast fiery flames about And hot impressions through the earth and skies, The growing heat still gathered deeper rout, The noisome warmth through lands and kingdoms flies, A harmful night a hurtful day succeeds, And worse than both next morn ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... servants drive a herd of Yahoos into the field, laden with hay, and oats, and milk, for a repast to the Houyhnhnms; after which, these brutes are immediately driven back again, for fear of being noisome to the assembly. ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... position as officers. We begin again as soon as we have been paid off; they depart, inebriated and uxorious, to their homes. They enjoy what the political economists call "the rewards of abstinence"; we put on our boiler suits and crawl about in noisome bilges, ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... the road, and inculcate patience on myself. Why may not I take a lesson in easy-mindedness from Vick? Was not it Hartley Coleridge who suggested that perhaps dogs have a language of smell; and that what to us is a noisome smell, is to them a beautiful poem? If so, Vick is searching for lyrics and epics in the ditch. I stroll along the wintry brown hedge-row, and begin to pick Roger a little, scant nosegay. He shall see how patient I am! how unsulky! with what sunny mildness I can wait his leisure! I have already ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... them were kept in store, which he had aforehand prouided to cast out to the destruction of the said towne. For he had gathered togither serpents, scorpions, todes, and other kinds of venemous things, which he had closed and shut vp in little barrels, that when the flesh or substance of those noisome creatures was rotten, and dissolued into filthie matter, he might laie siege to Calis, and cast the said barrels let out of engines into the towne; which with the violence of the throw being dasht in peces, might choke them that were within, poison the harnessed men ...
— Chronicles (3 of 6): Historie of England (1 of 9) - Henrie IV • Raphael Holinshed
... fair light which greeteth us, before Those other nations, that, beneath us far, In noisome cities pent, draw painful breath, Swear we the oath of our confederacy! A band of brothers true we swear to be, Never to part in ...
— Wilhelm Tell - Title: William Tell • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... poor mud-walled cabin, facing the door of which there was a green pool of stagnant water; and before the window, of one pane, a dunghill that, reaching to the thatch of the roof, shut out the light, and filled the house with the most noisome smell. The ground sloped towards the house door; so that in rainy weather, when the pond was full, the kitchen was overflowed; and at all times the floor was so damp and soft, that the print of the nails of brogues was ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... when the post was held by Arnold Babyngton, complaint being made of the noisome smell arising from the burning of bones, horns, shavings of leather, &c., in preparing food for the City's hounds, near Moorgate, the Common Hunt was allowed a sum of 26s. 8d. in addition to his customary fees for the purpose ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... the use of reason. He says also that there are great numbers of bears in those countries, which feed on fish, and catch them by diving into the water; and being thus satisfied with abundance of fish, are not noisome to man. He says likewise that he saw large quantities of copper among the inhabitants of these regions. Cabot is my dear and familiar friend, whom I delight to have sometimes in my house. Being called out of England by the Catholic king of Castille, on the death of Henry ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... advancement of learning and liberty! With what meanness does he take bribes from the rich against the poor! His mind seems like a palace of marble with splendid galleries and library and banqueting hall, yet in this palace the spider spins its web and vermin make the foundations to be a noisome place. ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... study, with nothing to distract us. I do not know about that; I fancy it is about equally hard for us all; but it is possible. I have been in Alpine villages where, at the end of every squalid alley, there towered up a great, pure, silent, white peak. That is what our lives may be; however noisome, crowded, petty the little lane in which we live, the Alp is at the end of it there, if we only choose to lift our eyes and look. It is possible that not only 'into the sessions of sweet silent thought,' but into the rush and bustle of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... man-of-war:—'Here I saw about fifty miserable distempered wretches, suspended in rows, so huddled one upon another, that not more than fourteen inches space was allotted for each with his bed and bedding; and deprived of the light of the day as well as of fresh air; breathing nothing but a noisome atmosphere ... devoured with vermin.' &c. The doctor, when visiting the sick, 'thrust his wig in his pocket, and stript himself to his waistcoat; then creeping on all fours under their hammocks, and forcing up his bare pate between two, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... man, who seeks to comply with the laws of Nature, and to fulfil the great ends of his existence, will choose for his sleeping-apartment the closest quarters possible, and will welcome the fumes which would be noisome by day. For my part, therefore, I feel profoundly grateful even for one night of this little crib. It has already done much for me. I feel confident that it has contributed greatly to my span of life. I am deeply beholden to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... had it that the place held the ghosts of those who had died in agony within its noisome dungeons; but she had always been far too matter-of-fact to accept stories of the supernatural. Yet at that moment her ears did not deceive her. That pile of grim, gaunt ruins was a House ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... then delay? No talk of thine can charm me, Forbid it Heaven! And my discourse no less Must evermore sound noisome to thine ear. Yet where could I have found a fairer fame Than giving burial to my own true brother? All here would tell thee they approve my deed, Were they not tongue-tied to authority. But kingship hath much profit; this in chief, That it may do ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... hands with dirty foes: 850 For where no honour's to be gain'd, 'Tis thrown away in b'ing maintain'd. 'Twas ill for us we had to do With so dishonourable a foe: For though the law of arms doth bar 855 The use of venom'd shot in war, Yet, by the nauseous smell, and noisome, Their case-shot savours strong of poison; And doubtless have been chew'd with teeth Of some that had a stinking breath; 860 Else, when we put it to the push, They have not giv'n us such a brush. But as those pultroons, that fling dirt, Do but defile, but cannot hurt, So all the honour they ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... celebrated botanist[1] and indefatigable Chinese traveller, gives to Tient-sin the glory of being the filthiest and most noisome of Chinese cities, although he mentions Shanghai with high honor. Canton, from which Europeans have mainly derived their ideas of China, is comparatively a clean and neat place, far superior to the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... ah sly deluding sleep, That in one moment giv'st me joy and pain! How do my hopes dissolve to tears in vain, As wont the snows, 'fore angry sun to weep! Ah noisome life that hath no weal in keep! My forward grief hath form and working might; My pleasures like the shadows take their flight; My path to bliss is tedious, long and steep. Twice happy thou Endymion that embracest The live-long ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Phillis - Licia • Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher
... of sensual mire, Is't to the mark of thine own purity Thy loftier aims and holier hopes aspire? Harshly thy fleshly fetters bear on thee, In dark and dreary prison-house confined, Cramped and diseased with long captivity, And hath divine Intelligence designed That noisome dungeon for her own restraint— By her own act to galling bonds consigned,— Self-doomed, with wilful purpose, to acquaint Herself with sin and sorrow, and pollute Aethereal essence with corporeal taint? ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... water gouvernement, Are to mankind alike malevolent; They trouble seas, flouds, rivers, brookes, and wels, Meres, lakes, and love to enhabit watry cells; Hence noisome and pestiferous vapours raise; Besides, they men encounter divers ways. At wreckes some present are; another sort, Ready to cramp their joints that swim for sport: One kind of these, the Italians fatae name, Fee the French, we sybils, and the same; Others white nymphs, and those that have ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... growing at any rate. It is a marvel whence it derives its loveliness and perfume, sprouting as it does from the black mud over which the river sleeps, and from which the yellow lily likewise draws its unclean life and noisome odor. So it is with many people in this world; the same soil and circumstances may produce the good and beautiful, and the wicked and ugly. Some have the faculty of assimilating to themselves only what is evil, ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... forth a spirit From out of Judas' circle. Lowest place Is that of all, obscurest, and remov'd Farthest from heav'n's all-circling orb. The road Full well I know: thou therefore rest secure. That lake, the noisome stench exhaling, round The city' of grief encompasses, which now We may not enter without rage." Yet more He added: but I hold it not in mind, For that mine eye toward the lofty tower Had drawn me wholly, to its burning top. Where in ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... cities, the thermometer had climbed and climbed. Pavements were blistering hot; watering carts went lumbering round only to send up a reek of noisome mist and to leave the streets whitening again a few yards behind them. Blinds were closed up and down the avenues, where people had either long left their houses vacant or were sheltering themselves ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... now he takes it, And drinks, perchance, to Lingua; she craftily Kisses the cup, but lets not down a drop, And gives it to the rest: 'tis sweet, they'll swallow it: But when 'tis once descended to the stomach, And sends up noisome vapours to the brain, 'Twill make them swagger gallantly; they'll rage Most strangely, or Acrasia's art deceives her; When if my lady stir her nimble tongue, And closely sow contentious words amongst them, O, what a stabbing there will be! ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... realized that the effect of the drug the giant had taken was about at its end. The growth presently stopped. That huge noisome mass of pulp which once had been human shoulders no ...
— Beyond the Vanishing Point • Raymond King Cummings
... animosity was directed. Unlawful and detested words and mysteries were called into action to conjure up demons who should yield their powerful and tremendous assistance. Songs of a wild and maniacal character were chaunted. Noisome scents and the burning of all unhallowed and odious things were resorted to. In later times books and formulas of a terrific character were commonly employed, upon the reading or recital of which the prodigies ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... purifying thyself, even as He is pure? Be much with Jesus now, that thou mayst exult in meeting Him hereafter. Thus taking Him as thy Guide and Portion in life, thou mayst lay thee down in thy dark and noisome cell, and look forward with triumphant hope to the dawn of a resurrection morn, saying, "What time I awake, I ...
— The Faithful Promiser • John Ross Macduff
... pestilential trash. Hence a grave frigid rheum and frequent cough Shook me till fled I to thy bosom, where Repose and nettle-broth healed all my ills. 15 Wherefore recruited now best thanks I give To thee for nowise punishing my sins: Nor do I now object if noisome writs Of Sestius hear I, but that cold and cough And rheum may plague, not me, but Sestius' self 20 Who asks me only his ill writs ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... person with the upright form of a man can be allowed, without violation of all decency, to switch out from his tongue the perpetual stench of offensive personality. Sir, that is not a proper weapon of debate, at least, on this floor. The noisome, squat, and nameless animal, to which I refer, is not a proper model for an American Senator. Will the Senator from Illinois take notice?" And upon Douglas's unworthy retort that he certainly would not imitate the Senator in that ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... wait a while. They were no longer under the spell of its influence. This different world in which they now dwelt so contentedly made their adventures seem like shadowy figments with precious little romance in them. And neither lad expressed any great anxiety to go exploring the noisome Cherokee swamp and to challenge the ghost ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... excited nothing more than a dull and transient interest. They took her out, and the gold for which two lives had been sacrificed was left unheeded, scattered in the dust. They went out the way they had come, through the noisome court, up the narrow flight of rotten, slippery stairs ...
— A Girl of the Klondike • Victoria Cross
... The stern grey walls remained unbroken, except for occasional sentry trees which had survived the years of storm and flood. Carpets of Arctic lichen sometimes clothed their nakedness, and even wide wastes of noisome fungus. But these things had no power to depress Marcel and Keeko; the Indians, too, passed them all unheeded. They were concerned alone with the perils of the waters ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... weeks poultices were applied to it, which in continuance of time broke the skin, and then abundance of watery thin stuff came from it, but nothing else; at length the matter came to suppuration, but never any great store issued forth; it was exceeding noisome and painful; from the beginning of it until she died, she would permit no surgeon to dress it but only myself; I applied every thing unto it, and her pains were so great the winter before she died, that I have been called out of my bed two ...
— William Lilly's History of His Life and Times - From the Year 1602 to 1681 • William Lilly
... else REBECCA STRYPE Could least endure a pipe. She rail'd upon the filthy herb tobacco, Protested that the noisome vapour Had spoilt the best chintz curtains and the paper And cost her many a pound in stucco: And then she quoted our King James, who saith "Tobacco is the Devil's breath." When wives will govern, husbands must obey; For many a day DICK mourn'd and miss'd his favourite ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... matters that still remain in darkness, in spite of M. Longnon's diligent rummaging among archives. When we next find him, in summer 1461, alas! he is once more in durance: this time at Meun-sur-Loire, in the prisons of Thibault d'Aussigny, Bishop of Orleans. He had been lowered in a basket into a noisome pit, where he lay all summer, gnawing hard crusts and railing upon fate. His teeth, he says, were like the teeth of a rake: a touch of haggard portraiture all the more real for being excessive and burlesque, and all the more proper to the man for being a caricature of his own misery. His eyes were ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... heathens, descendants of Ham, and consigned by divine appointment to perpetual bondage. The planters may, if they reasoned at all on the subject, have supposed that they were even performing a humane act in releasing these Africans from the noisome hold of the ship. They might well believe that the condition of the negro slave would be less degraded and wretched in Virginia than it had been in his native country. This first purchase was not probably looked upon as a matter of much consequence, and for several years the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... the infected. Geographical boundaries are no barriers against contagion. Rivers and mountains are easily crossed by corrupting example. Ardent spirits, like all other fluids, perpetually seek their level. In vain does the farmer eradicate from his fields the last vestige of the noisome thistle, while the neighboring grounds are given up to its dominion, and every wind scatters the seed where it listeth. The effort against intemperance, to be effective, ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... churches. In the midst of it the prisoner saw Preston and Lady Hare. They were so near that he could have touched them with his hand as he passed. They did not see him. He noted the name of the church and its minister. In a few minutes he was delivered at the jail—a noisome, ill-smelling, badly ventilated place. The jailer was a tall, slim, sallow man with a thin gray beard. His face and form were familiar. He heard Jack's name with a look of great astonishment. Then ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... forming its grassy vesture. Polluted with the stench of sinners, and miry with flesh and blood, it abounded with gadflies and stinging bees and gnats and was endangered by the inroads of grisly bears. Rotting corpses lay here and there. Overspread with bones and hair, it was noisome with worms and insects. It was skirted all along with a blazing fire. It was infested by crows and other birds and vultures, all having beaks of iron, as also by evil spirits with long mouths pointed like needles. And it abounded ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... door, and a colored servant, half dressed, with a broom in her hand, came slouching down the passage. Beatrice turned and fled out of the greasy, noisome atmosphere, down the wooden, uneven steps, out into the ugly street. She turned toward the nearest elevated as though by instinct, but when she came to the bottom of the stairs she stopped short with a little groan. She knew very well that she had ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... them forth again to renewed toil. It was a gloomy courtyard, with cells around it in which the captives slept. A fountain in the middle kept the floor damp and seemed to prove an attraction to various centipedes, scorpions, and other noisome creatures ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne
... former, though considered only as its suburb. The bottom of the basin or lake which forms the harbour of Porto Cabello, turns behind this suburb to the south-west. It is a marshy ground filled with noisome and stagnant water. The town, which has at present nearly nine thousand inhabitants, owes its origin to an illicit commerce, attracted to these shores by the proximity of the town of Burburata, which was founded in 1549. It is only since the ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... fens of that land there dwelt a monster—fierce, noisome, and cruel, a thing that loved evil and hated all that was joyous and good. To its ears came the ring of the laughter and the shouts of King Hrothgar's revellers, and the sweet song of the gleemen and the melody of harps filled it with fierce hatred. From its wallow in the marshes, where ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... all you've done,' he muttered to himself, as he lay curled up in the black shadow like a noisome reptile. 'Tit for ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... flagged passage. A blade of light crept across the floor towards us. My brain was growing clearer. The place had a damp, earthen smell. It was slimy—some noisome cellar. A door was thrown open and a man entered, carrying a lantern. Its light showed my surmise to be accurate, showed the slime-coated walls of a dungeon some fifteen feet square—shone upon the long yellow robe of the man who stood watching us, ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... the book says things we do not say now openly—though the traditional corpus scriptorum nondum scriptorum which almost all men and even some women know is handed on, a rather noisome torch, from generation to generation, solely by word of mouth, and flickers now and again in The Ten Pleasures. But they were said openly then, and by great writers. There is nothing here so nauseatingly ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... follow the course of events after the capture of these two unfortunate, if lively, young fellows. They were clapped into prison as a natural course, into a dark, noisome cell, which would have been but indifferent accommodation for some malefactor. They were half-starved, bullied, browbeaten, and even beaten by their jailers, they were threatened with death as spies—though there was not an atom of evidence against them—and, ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... towns, and which recruit those very dangerous classes from the class which ought to be, and is still, in spite of our folly, England's strength and England's glory. Let us no longer stand by idle, and see moral purity, in street after street, pent in the same noisome den with moral corruption, to be involved in one common doom, as the Latin tyrant of old used to bind together the dead corpse and the living victim. But let the man who would deserve well of his city, well of his country, ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... me, Lord, that I so long have dwelt In noisome cities, whence Thy sacred works Are ever banished from my sight; where lurks Each baleful passion man has ever felt. Here human skill is shown in shutting out All sight and thought of things that God hath made; Lest He should share the constant homage paid ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... for we were stifled by the dreadful stench of the seabred seals. But the goddess saw our distress, and found a remedy; for she brought ambrosia and set it beneath our nostrils, and that heavenly perfume overpowered the noisome stench. ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... than two minutes from the instant of their encounter, they stood outside Troyon's back door, facing a cramped, malodorous alley-way—a dark and noisome souvenir of that wild mediaeval Paris whose effacement is an enduring monument to the fame of the good ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... forces set in motion continue indefinitely in one direction. The laws of love are as exact as the laws of the tides that moan and cry and beat upon the shores, the round world over. A family of ten children born and reared in a noisome Ghetto, and all strong and healthy? Impossible, you say, yet such is the fact, and not a rare exception either. Happiness is the great prophylactic, and nothing is so sanitary as love, even though ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... greatest care is necessary to prevent these pests from reaching the milk and butter, which they will taint in a second. Scarcely less of a plague than the swarms of flies, are the myriads of fleas which torment the tired farmer, and cheat him out of many an hour's sleep: these noisome disturbers are in the soil, and not all the care the best housewife can bestow, can diminish ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson
... Carrbroke, to raise his eyelids one by one. "Pah!" he ejaculated. "The odour is quite strong. The poor lad has been drugged by some pungent medicament." And then as he drew back his hand he took a kerchief from his pouch to wipe his hands. "The noisome poison is still wet ...
— The King's Esquires - The Jewel of France • George Manville Fenn
... vegetable kingdom having supplied in most parts of the world almost countless charms to counteract the evil designs of these malevolent beings. In our own country the little pimpernel, herb-paris, and cyclamen were formerly gathered for this purpose, and the angelica was thought to be specially noisome to witches. The snapdragon and the herb-betony had the reputation of averting the most subtle forms of witchcraft, and dill and flax were worn as talismans against sorcery. Holly is said to be antagonistic to witches, for, as Mr. Folkard[24] says, "in its name they see but another form ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... clattered; rattling noises, grunting noises, screeching noises escaped from every part; it creaked and clanked like an over-insured tramp-steamer in a typhoon; it lurched as though afflicted with loco-motor ataxy; and noisome vapours belched forth from the open exhaust-pipe as though the car were a Tophet on wheels. But all was music in the ears of Aristide. The car was going (it did not always go), the road scudded under him, and the morning air dashed stingingly into his face. For the moment he ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... Treasury underground and when the sheen of day and the thine of sun smote his face he found himself unable to keep his eyes open; so he began to unclose the lids a little and to close them a little until his eyeballs regained force and got used to the light and were purged of the noisome murk.—And Shahrazad was surprised by the dawn of day and ceased to say her ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... for Fruit and early Salleting, nothing is more unwholsom: Men in the Country look so much more healthy and fresh; and commonly are longer liv'd than those who dwell in the Middle and Skirts of vast and crowded Cities, inviron'd with rotten Dung, loathsome and common Lay Stalls; whose noisome Steams, wafted by the Wind, poison and infect the ambient Air and vital Spirits, with those pernicious Exhalations, and Materials of which they make the Hot Beds for the raising those Praecoces indeed, and forward Plants ...
— Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets • John Evelyn
... occupied by glittering chandeliers were now shrouded with immense spider webs, in which a whole colony of spiders lived subsisting on the noisome vapors of this ...
— The Home in the Valley • Emilie F. Carlen
... horses, blind in their delirium and racing against each other, bore down through all obstacles toward its brink. Death was rarely ever closer; one score yards more, one plunge, one crash down the declivity and against the rails, one swell of the noisome tide above their heads, and life would be closed and passed for both of them. For one breathless moment his eyes met hers—in that moment he loved her, in that moment their hearts beat with a truer, fonder impulse to each other than they had ever done. Before the presence ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... Water murmuring in his Ear: On rifted Rocks, the Dragon's late Abodes, The green Reed trembles, and the Bulrush nods. Waste sandy Vallies, once perplexd with Thorn, [8] The spiry Fir and shapely Box adorn: To leafless Shrubs the flow'ring Palms succeed, And od'rous Myrtle to the noisome Weed. The Lambs with Wolves shall graze the verdant Mead [9] And Boys in flow'ry Bands the Tyger lead; The Steer and Lion at one Crib shall meet, And harmless Serpents Lick the Pilgrim's Feet. The smiling Infant ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... of all in Bassett's brain, was the dank and noisome jungle. It actually stank with evil, and it was always twilight. Rarely did a shaft of sunlight penetrate its matted roof a hundred feet overhead. And beneath that roof was an aerial ooze of vegetation, a monstrous, parasitic dripping of decadent life- forms that rooted in death and ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... habitation, where lay a woman in rheumatic fever, whose three children had developed measles on the previous day, and, seeing about the door of a neighbouring hovel a particularly noisome aggregation of garbage and waste, he paused but to give a brief direction to the mild-faced Sister who had assumed charge of the sick. Then his voice rang out above all the feminine and childish ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... dirt. The heart of one was a blob of mud, which gave off a most baleful vapour. This was the result of the house-cleaning of a common, edible rock oyster, and the pearl, dirty green and lustreless, merely a thin casket, for the noisome mud had not solidified. The care with which the impurity had been rendered innocuous demonstrated the correct ideas of the oyster on sanitation. No doubt the germ of the special form of tape-worm which troubles oysters, ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... in a roost. They come padding after the pilgrim, they show themselves obscurely, swollen by the mist at the corners of the road. They give the sense of being banded together in a numerous ambush, they can deceive eye and ear, and even nose with noisome stenches; but they cannot show themselves, and they cannot hurt. If they could be seen, they would be nothing but limp ungainly things that would rouse disdain and laughter and even pity, at anything at once so weak and so malevolent. ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... can in any way be thoroughly ventilated. The vaults and sewers which are to carry off the filth of the 126 families have grated openings in the alleys, and door-ways in the cellars, through which the noisome and deadly miasmata penetrate and poison the dank air of the house and the courts. The water-closets for the whole vast establishment are a range of stalls without doors, and accessible not only from the building, but even from the street. Comfort is here out of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... in the shadow of the handkerchief his quivering lips move in the act of speaking, and her ear caught the words of an oath. Her situation now was far from pleasant; but it was still a relief that no one was by to witness what she saw and was doing. She conveyed pailful after pailful of the noisome shavings to the dunghill at the back of the cottage, wondering the while that the inhabitants of the dwelling were not all dead of the fever long ago. She almost gave over her task when a huge toad crawled upon her foot from its resting-place ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... hotels, the only one in any way habitable being the "Hotel Metropole," a name which has become suggestive of gold-laced porters and gilded halls. It was, therefore, rather a shock to enter a noisome den, suggestive of a Whitechapel slum, although its prices equalled those of the Carlton in Pall Mall. The house was new but jerry-built, reeked of drains, and swarmed with vermin. Having kept us shivering for half an hour in the cold, a sleepy, shock-headed lad with ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... the parts of the great mystery over which he brooded so often; the noisome things of the world, its weakness, its decay; the shivering repugnance of the spirit, the almost impossibility of joy or courage in the presence of such thoughts; that was the strangest part of it, the rebellion ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... wives' tales were dug up and passed along, growing as they went. Little eyes and mouths grew permanently rounded with horrors, and the ground was thoroughly well spaded and planted with sturdy shoots warranted to yield a noisome harvest of superstition for generations ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... victims had to be carried on night and day. Even then there was only time to huddle the corpses together in a fosse commune, and to cover them with a scanty supply of earth. Small wonder if complaints were made to the Court of Aldermen of noisome smells arising from the churchyard of St. Mary's Bethlem. The court immediately (5 Sept.) gave orders for remedying the evil. No more pits were to be dug, but each corpse was to occupy a separate grave, fresh ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe
... might have been in Greek, for all that they conveyed to the Somersetshire peasants, yet they crowded round him as he departed and called blessings upon his head. I felt as though he had brought a whiff of his own pure ocean breezes into our close and noisome prison, and left us the ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... pits and ditches, and sloughs, which were made the receptacle of all kind of filth, dead and putrid horses, and cattle, &c. In the time of Henry VIII. many parts are described as "exceedingly foul and full of pits and sloughs, and very noisome," and some years after (1625) in a tract, the author says, "Let not carkasses of horses, dogs, cats, &c. lye rotting and poisoning the aire, as they have done in More and Finsbury Fields, and elsewhere round about the cittie. Let the ditches towards Islington, Olde-street, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 287, December 15, 1827 • Various
... across the corridor, and suddenly opened a small barred door. Whatever preconceived idea Miss Keene may have had of her unfortunate country-woman immured in a noisome cell, and guarded by a stern jailer, was quite dissipated by the soft misty sunshine that flowed in through the open door. The prison of Mrs. Markham was a part of the old glacis which had been allowed to lapse into a wild garden that stretched to the edge of ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... heat, and the noxious odour of some mineral product—the healing waters. He strayed in the twilight through halls and corridors, past ample saloons and rows of cells which had apparently served for convenience of disrobing. Everywhere that noisome smell accompanied his footsteps; the place was reeking with it. And all was in decay. Gaudy paper hung in tatters from the ceilings; the dust lay thick, undisturbed for generations. Unclean things littered in musty corners. Through gaping skylights a sunny ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... are considered, they are found to cover nearly every abuse of authority on the part of the pettiest official which can be conceived. Hence, all persons are obliged to submit to gross injustice and to a certain amount of blackmail if they wish to avoid the noisome experiences ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... been crushed in from above; and through the splintered timbered entrances you peered into a dark interior of dishevelled blankets and scattered clothing. It was only too evident that there had been no time as yet, in the hustle of battle, to search these ghastly, noisome dug-outs for the Germans who had been bombed there. The mine craters in the white chalk of La Boiselle are big enough to hide a ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean |
