"Blight" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shall blight our vines Nor Sirius blaze above us. But you and I shall drink our wines And sing to the loved ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... what could your father be thinking of? Here had we got three of the ugliest Philistines in Coombeland in our hand, and we've let 'em go to blight and freeze and blast everything. What could Sir Godfrey ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... industries are the ones occupying most attention, the workers in the Department of Agriculture have not been unmindful of other native nut-bearing plants, such as the native black walnuts, the hickories and the chestnut up to the time of the very destructive attack of blight. The chestnut, however, has not passed out of our sphere of activity, because at the present time, (and I think you will see tomorrow at the Bell Station, some interesting possibilities in the future of chestnut ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... would go to nothing. To prevent this I determined to take my measures with such thought and fore-thought, such cautions and precautions, that all the malignant planets in the hemisphere should be unable to blight my designs .... Heaven and Earth! must I remember? my damned star wheeled about to the zenith, by whose baleful rays Fortune took the alarm.[15a] ... In short, Pharaoh at the Red Sea, Darius at Arbela, ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... easy to say: sometimes the tangle descends on us like a net of blight on a rose-bush. There is then an instant choice for us between courage to cut loose, and desperation if we do not. But not many men are trained to courage; young women are trained to cowardice. For them to front an evil ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... this manner for a long time. At last came a very wet summer, and everything went wrong in the country round. The hay had hardly been got in, when the haystacks were floated bodily down to the sea by an inundation; the vines were cut to pieces with the hail; the corn was all killed by a black blight; only in the Treasure Valley, as usual, all was safe. As it had rain when there was rain nowhere else, so it had sun when there was sun nowhere else. Everybody came to buy corn at the farm, and went away pouring maledictions on the Black Brothers. ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... not fail, spring is here, and a thousand and one buds of promise are pushing toward the light, when a wider and saner understanding of motherhood and marriage is at hand. And it is not an untimely spring either, not one which the treacherous sun of January calls forth only to blight with later snow and frost. No, it is the real light and life-giving spring, which comes when the sap begins to run, when the sun calls up smoky mists from out the brown earth, ready to enclose the seed, which shall bring forth ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... one of the most perfectly beautiful territories the tourist can find, and still fertile,—though the hills have forgotten their fruit and the plain its river,—and capable of sustaining a much larger population than it now supports, if the Mohammedan blight were ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... of trust, should exclude from the places under him those persons with whom he is best acquainted, and of whose fidelity to himself and to his employers he has most reason to be sure. On the other hand, a disgrace to one member of a family spread its blight on all the others, and the judicial condemnation of one man might exclude his near relations from the public service—a state of things which was beginning to be repugnant to the public conscience, but which had at least the merit of forming a strong band ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... deforestation; soil erosion; a majority of the population does not have access to potable water natural hazards: floods, droughts, and blight international agreements: party to - Climate Change, Environmental Modification, Nuclear Test Ban; signed, but not ratified - ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... bloom shall pass away, By winter overtaken, Thoughts of the past will charms display, And many joys awaken. When time shall every sweet remove, And blight thee on my bosom, Let beauty fade!—to me, my love, Thou'lt ne'er ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... later the young soldier was dead; and something more than ordinary reasoning will be necessary to persuade the two cousins—the younger and more impressive, especially—that their gazing after him did not cast an evil omen on his fate and a blight upon his life. Another near relative has since gone away on the same patriotic errand; but when the farewells were spoken in the lighted room, the two girls escaped at once and hid themselves in another apartment, so that they should not even see him disappear through the door. ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... need the energy that slumbers in the black man's arm to make us stronger. We want no longer any heavy-footed, melancholy service from the negro. We want the cheerful activity of the quickened manhood of these sable millions. Nor can we afford to endure the moral blight which the existence of a degraded and hated class must necessarily inflict upon any people among whom such a class may exist. Exclude the negroes as a class from political rights,—teach them that the high and manly privilege of suffrage is to be enjoyed by white citizens only,—that they ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... atheist. Why am I punished so? What crimes have I committed in a previous existence—Karma, again!—that I must perforce study the writings of impious men? Yet I submitted myself as a candidate for the task, to save my brethren in Christ from soiling their hearts. Heaven preserve me from the blight of spiritual pride, but I believe that I am now a scapegoat for the offences of my fellow-monks, and, thus, may redeem my ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... you that your speech is monotonous may mean very little to you, so let us look at the nature—and the curse—of monotony in other spheres of life, then we shall appreciate more fully how it will blight an ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... people in submitting to a king like Hua had brought its punishment. Frightened, repentant, maybe, Hua himself fled to Hawaii, and his retainers scattered themselves in Molokai, Oahu, and Kauai. They could not escape the curse. Like the Wandering Jew, they carried disaster with them. Blight, drouth, thirst, and famine appeared wherever they set foot, and though the wicked king kept himself alive for three and a half years, he succumbed to hunger and thirst at last, and in Kohala his withered frame ceased to be animate. To ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... since the virtue of holiness or taboo is, so to say, a powerful explosive which the smallest touch may detonate, it is necessary in the interest of the general safety to keep it within narrow bounds, lest breaking out it should blast, blight, and destroy whatever ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... resign my high position, leave this beloved college, give no more lectures to entranced audiences. In the interests of science, ought I to refuse, and sacrifice my heart's affections for the cause of mathematics? But if I say 'No,' I must give up—him; sacrifice his happiness too, and blight his life. Was ever anyone so perplexed? Science, aid thine obedient servant! May I not determine this vital question ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right, And the choice goes by forever 'twixt ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... multitude it did not seem extravagant. So natural a craze, therefore, however baseless, would never have carried Lord Monboddo's name into that meteoric notoriety and atmosphere of astonishment which soon invested it in England. And, in that case, my childhood would have escaped the deadliest blight of mortification and despondency that could have been incident to a most morbid temperament concurring with a situation of visionary (yes! if you please, of fantastic) but still of most ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... miners' blast, upon her height, Yet shows of what she was, when shell and ball Rebounding idly on her strength, did light; A tower of victory! from whence the flight Of baffled foes was watched along the plain: But peace destroyed what war could never blight, And laid those proud roofs bare to summer's rain, On which the iron shower for years had poured ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... Smells— Loathsome Smells! What a lot of typhoid their intensity foretells! Through the pleasant air of night, How they spread, a noxious blight! Full of bad bacterian motes, Quickening soon. What a lethal vapour floats To the foul Smell-fiend who glistens as he gloats On the boon. Oh, from subterranean cells What a gush of sewer-gas voluminously wells! How it swells! How it dwells In our houses! How it tells ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Nov. 1, 1890 • Various
... prospect steals.— Spring claims our tender, grateful, gay delight; Winter our sympathy and sacred fear; And sure the Hearts that pay not Pity's rite O'er wide calamity; that careless hear Creation's wail, neglect, amid her blight, THE SOLEMN LESSON ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... The Germans never would have complained about their war-time coffee, made from chicory and acorns, had they once tasted the Java product. Yet I was assured that this was the choicest coffee grown in Java. I might add that, as a result of a blight which all but ruined the industry in the '70s, fifty-two per cent of the total acreage of coffee plantations in the island is now planted with the African species, called Coffea robusta, and thirteen per cent with another African species, Coffea liberia, and the rest with Japanese and ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... war-time. Their faith in the "big canoes" of King George was so firm that, sea-sickness notwithstanding, they had no doubts or fears concerning their safe arrival in the land where Briton, Boer, Indian and African were doing their level best to stamp out the blight of German kultur. ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... he looked at. It was very well to undertake to give him a proof of loyalty; the real fact was that the knowledge of his expecting a thing raised a presumption against it. It was as if he had had the evil eye; as if his presence were a blight and his favour a misfortune. Was the fault in himself, or only in the deep mistrust she had conceived for him? This mistrust was now the clearest result of their short married life; a gulf had opened between them over which they looked at ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... turned their plot of land into broad estates; but it had been tacitly understood that this sprinkling of water established a claim for a return, and this both father and son had solemnly promised. Its magic turned everything they touched to gold, but it brought a blight on the peace of the household. One branch, which had grown up in the traditions of the old Macedonian stock, had separated from the other; and her husband's great lie lay between them and the family still living in ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... upon her in my desperation dumb, Knowing well that when her awful opportunity was come She would give us battle, murder, sudden death at very least, As a skeleton of warning, and a blight upon the feast. ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... dishonourable, shady Bohemia that is always with us, bounded by the greenroom, the racecourse, the gambling club, and the Bankruptcy Court, but the Bohemia that is as unreal as Shakespeare's "desert country near the sea," the land of light purses and light loves, set against the spiritual blight that sometimes follows on pecuniary and connubial blessedness. For, after all, morality is larger than a single virtue, and Charles Surface is always more agreeable than Joseph or Tom Jones than Blifil, even when Joseph or Blifil is as proper as he pretends. And if Tom ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... dawdle over the arms of chairs. Then I was a boy, with a boy's haughty way of regarding girlish softness. I was haughtier that day because I sought in my pride to cover up my debt to her. Now I am a man, but the boy's picture of Penelope Blight, the little girl in the patched blue frock and broken shoes, standing by the mountain stream, holds in the memory with clear ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... unnatural lilac tinge to the eye; at the same time, in too many instances, the head is found flaccid to the touch, and possessing no substance. The barley crop, too, in many places, exhibits the effect of a powerful blight. In some places, also, where turnips have been grown, they present—as, indeed, has been the case in other parts of the county—a healthier exterior in top and skin, but, on being opened, are found deeply impregnated with a taint similar to that which has smitten the potato, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... are paired these Cinaedes sans shame Mamurra and Caesar, both of pathic fame. No wonder! Both are fouled with foulest blight, One urban being, Formian t'other wight, And deeply printed with indelible stain: 5 Morbose is either, and the twin-like twain Share single Couchlet; peers in shallow lore, Nor this nor that for lechery hungers more, As rival wenchers who the maidens claim Right well are paired these Cinaedes ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... been imported from the Hawaiian Islands to the Philippines, they are not subject to the blight that affects them there; they have a wonderfully sweet flavor. An increase of a million dollars in the industry has recently been reported, our party ...
— The Log of the Empire State • Geneve L.A. Shaffer
... slow diverge, and listless stray Into some thought, feeling, or dream unright, O Watcher, my backsliding soul affray; Let me not perish of the ghastly blight. Be thou, O Life eternal, in me light; Then merest approach of selfish or impure Shall start me up alive, ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... red colour was made from the dead body of an insect too. There is a sort of blight which gives this red colour after it ...
— Dick and His Cat and Other Tales • Various
... generous hospitality, gave him a large popularity; but his alliance with President Johnson was fatal to his political fortunes. He had placed himself in a position from which he could not with grace retreat, and to go forward in which was still further to blight his hopes of promotion in his party. It was an extremely mortifying fact to Mr. Raymond that with the power of the Administration behind him he could on a test question secure the support of only one Republican member, and he a colleague who was bound to him ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... go in, they will send boys with you from one village to the next; but only in the early hours, or in the late hours of day. See that you do not persuade them otherwise. The full-day heat is called 'blight' because it robs men of ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... settled in his face; there was a hungry, wistful look in his eyes; his ever-winning smile responded less readily than before; sharp lines began to reveal themselves, flanking his nostrils. His heart was bitter. The weeks had brought him to a fuller realization of the horrid blight upon his fair name; he had come to see the wreck in all its cold, brutal aspects. The realization that he was a hunted, branded thing, with a price on his head, sank deeper and deeper into his soul. Hunted! Chased as a criminal! He, a Jenison ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... everything stamped with the impress of our own feelings, and we gather the whole of creation into our own pained being—"the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now." The world you complain of as impure and wrong is not God's world, but your world; the blight, the dullness, the blank, are all your own. The light which is in you has become darkness, and therefore ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... Brown Agricultural progress —— statistics Aphides, to kill, by Mr. Creed Asparagus, French Berberry blight Birds, instinct of, by the Rev. F. F. Statham Books noticed Bouyardias, scarlet British Association Calendar, horticultural —— agricultural Camellia culture Charlock Corn averages and rents, by Mr. Willich ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 207, October 15, 1853 • Various
... I saw myself in the glass, in my mourning-dress, a faded, hollow-eyed vision. Yet I thought little of the wan spectacle. The blight, I believed, was chiefly external: I still felt life ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... left"—obliteration, and another tunnel! "Don't miss that jagged line of snows just beyond the back of poppa's head, dear one. Quick! they are melting away!"—but the next tunnel was quicker. "Put down that the dazzling purity of these lovely peaks must be realised, for it cannot be"—darkness, and the blight of another tunnel. It was very hard on momma's imagination, and she finally accepted the Senator's warning that it would be thrown completely out of gear if she went on, and abandoned the attempt to form complete sentences between tunnels. It was much simpler ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... this way because Aunt Miranda said that unless I improved I would be nothing but a Burden and a Blight. ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... acting on her gentle heart, had made her in some sort his friend. It was not altogether his fault that he was an officer of the contraresguardo, and other people besides Pancha believed that but for this blight upon him a good career might have been his. But luck had been against Pedro from the very day of his birth; for when he was born his mother died, and a little later his father died also. Being thus left lonely in the world, he fell into the keeping of his uncle, Padre Juan, a grim priest who, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... are themselves, suggesting, if you are willing to waste your time listening to their twaddle, that there is something radically wrong in any innovation, that both "Church and State" will be imperilled if things are altered. No blight, no mildew is more fatal to a plant than the "complacent" are to the world. They resent any progress and are offended if you mention before them any new standards or points of view. "What has been good enough for us and our parents should certainly be satisfactory to the younger generations." ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... to the house of wealth to carry the blight of death. Her mission was over, and she was ...
— Allegories of Life • Mrs. J. S. Adams
... thus, while sweet young ladies are leading beautiful lives at Girton and Newnham, their sisters of society are learning to use a language which is a frail copy of the robust language of the drinking-bar and the racecourse. Under this blight lofty thought perishes, noble language also dies away, real wit is cankered and withered into a mere ghastly crackle of wordplay, humour is regarded as the sign of the savage, and generous emotion, manly love, womanly tenderness ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... he prospered despite an unprecedented disregard for the teachings of his father and his grandfather before him. The wolf stayed a long way off from his door, the prophetic mortgage failed to lay its blight upon his lands, his crops were bountiful, his acreage spread as the years went by,—and so his uncles, his cousins and his aunts were never so happy as when wishing for the good old days when his father was alive and running the farm as it should be run! ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... the Hack can scatter into flight Shakespere and Dante in a single Night! The Penny-a-liner is Abroad, and strikes Our Modern Literature with blithering Blight. ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Cayenne • Gelett Burgess
... Buck's determination, his blind loyalty. He felt that herein lay his own real danger. Yes, to bolt again, as he had done that time before, would be an easy way out. But its selfishness was too obvious. He could not do it. To do so would be to drag them in his train of disaster, to blight their lives and leave them under the ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... to be hard on anything 'cept blight, Master Nic," said the old man one day; "but it comes nat'ral to a man to feel shy of a gaol bird who may rise agen you at any time and take ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... and rode as far as we could up the valley, fording the river in deep water several times, and coming down the other side. The coffee trees in full blossom were very beautiful, and they, as well as the oranges, have escaped the blight which has fallen upon both in other parts of the island. In addition to the usual tropical productions, there were some very fine fig trees and thickets of the castor-oil plant, a very handsome shrub, when, as here, it grows to a height of from ten ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... The 'apple-blight' of the Calvados must obviously have extended into the neighbouring department of the Eure, or at least into the great and busy arrondissement of Bernay, which gave the Monarchist candidate in September 1889 the ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... gypsies came the oldest of them all, who was the King's great-grandmother, and she looked from the angry parents to the unhappy lovers and said, "You can blight the tree and make the lantern dark; nevertheless you cannot extinguish the flower and the light of love. And till these things lift the curse and are seen again united among you, there will be no Lords in Gay Street nor ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... the present she remained with William, her daughters, and her two aged unmarried sisters in the plain old house in Albany Street. But Dante Gabriel moved to Cheyne Walk, and began that craze for collecting blue china that has swept like a blight over the civilized world. His collection was sold for three thousand five hundred dollars some years after—to pay his debts—less than one-half of what it had cost him. Yet when he had money he generously divided it with the folks up in Albany Street. But by and by William, too, got to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... placed over the threshold of the door to keep out the Evil One. Sometimes they are tied round the necks of camels, and even placed on trees, especially at the time when bearing fruit, for the purpose of preserving the camel from mange, or the tree from blight. These talismans usually have a diagram of this and other shapes, with certain Arabic signs, letters, words, and sentences, written within ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... suspected the visit, with which he was honoured, to have been preconcerted by his wife and the duke; and he now began to think her majesty was likewise connected with a plot destined to rob him of his peace and blight his honour. However, he was obliged to obey the queen's summons and depart. Nor had he been many minutes absent when Lord Arran entered the presence-chamber where the audience was being held, unaccompanied by ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... took up the pen against King Mob, and placed themselves in rank with the friends of order, good government, and union. Hence the "Anarchiad." An ancient epic on "the Restoration of Chaos and Substantial Blight" was dug up in the ruins of an old Indian fort, where Madoc, the mythical Welsh Columbus, or some of his descendants, had buried it. Colonel Humphreys, who had read the "Rolliad" in England, suggested the plan; Barlow, Hopkins, and Trumbull joined with him in carrying ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... hill, among the vines, We laughed to see him trot, Then frisk along the silent lines To chase the rolling shot; And, when the work waxed hard by day, And hard and cold by night, When that November morning lay Upon us, like a blight; ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... and power of the Constable faded—his misfortunes and captivity fell like a blight upon the ancient glory of the house of Montmorency—his enemies destroyed his influence and his popularity—while the degradation of the kingdom was simultaneous with the downfall of his illustrious name. On the other hand, the exultation of Philip was as keen as his cold ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... ate the bread and drank the milk, their Father and Mother talked about the Tinkers. "Sure, they are as a frost in spring, and a blight in harvest," said Mrs McQueen. "I wonder wherever they got the badness in ...
— The Irish Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... to the most important improvements, that he may cultivate his sense of justice, his benevolence, and the desire of perfection. Toil is the school for these high principles; and we have here a strong presumption that, in other respects, it does not necessarily blight the soul. Next, we have seen that the most fruitful sources of truth and wisdom are not books, precious as they are, but experience and observation; and these belong to all conditions. It is another important consideration, that almost all labour demands ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... great deal to war with in the habits of thought acquired by their mothers from their own early life. Everywhere the fatal spirit of imitation, of reference to European standards, penetrates, and threatens to blight whatever of original growth might ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Perceiving a violet, that grew on the bank of the river, Midas touched it with his finger, and was overjoyed to find that the delicate flower retained its purple hue, instead of undergoing a yellow blight. The curse of the Golden Touch had, therefore, really been ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... the hundred years' war, the free companies, the abasement of the church, the great schism—these things were misfortunes to which our modern time can find no parallel. They came suddenly upon Western Europe and defiled it like a blight.... They have made the mediaeval idea odious to every half-instructed man and have stamped even its beauty with ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... smells, strong and salty; smells of the moist and damp soil, the bitter-sweet of wetted weeds, the aromatic flavor that shell-life yields, and the smells also of rotten and decaying fish—all these were inextricably blended in the air, that was of the keenness of a frost-blight for freshness, and yet was warm with the softness of ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... We see in the early dawn the young patrician standing upon the steps of his paternal portico, his mother with her arms wreathed about his neck, looking up to his noble countenance, sometimes drawing auguries of hope from features so fitted for command, sometimes boding an early blight to promises so prematurely magnificent. That she had something of her son's aspiring character, or that he presumed so much in a mother of his, we learn from the few words which survive of their ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... hills, forest crowned, stretched off into the dim distance—and how sweet the music of childhood's ringing laugh, heard from the far-off shore—or how Aunty thought 'twas such a pity that sin, and tears, and sorrow, should ever blight ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... in dealing with the butcher and even the bishop, to say nothing of the effect it always had upon the commonplace nobodies who go to the butcher and the bishop for the luxuries of both the present and the future life, and it had seldom failed to wither and blight the most hardy of masculine opponents. It was not always so effective in crushing the members of her own sex, for there were women in New York society who could look straight through Mrs. Tresslyn without even appearing to suspect that she was in the range of vision. She had been ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... BLIGHT'S DISEASE, a disease in the kidneys, due to several diseased conditions of the organ, so called from Dr. Richard Bright, who ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... members, and bears evidences of struggle with unkind influences. All such appearances are banished in the supernatural landscape; the trees grow straight, equally branched on each side, and of such slight and feathery frame as shows them never to have encountered blight or frost or tempest. The mountains stand up in fantastic pinnacles; there is on them no trace of torrent, no scathe of lightning; no fallen fragments encumber their foundations, no worn ravines divide their flanks; the seas are always waveless, the skies always calm, crossed only ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... a few brief glimpses of this belief in Purgatory, which was so dear to the hearts of Englishmen, in those centuries before the blight of heresy had fallen upon the Island of the Saints. These hints upon the subject are given very much at random, and will simply serve to show how prayer for the dead was a part of all Christian lives in those ages of faith. It was incorporated in the rules of ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... had believed in its existence, and then one day the earth had broke and he had seen its life and known what its strength might be. 'Twould be of wondrous strength, he knew, and of wondrous beauty if no frost should blight nor storm uproot it. ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... blundered into a black frost, and even though there was something to sing about, there's scarcely a blue-bird left to do the singing. But sometime, somewhere, there'll be an end to that silence. The blight will pass, and I'll break out again. I know it. I don't intend to be held down. I can't be held down. I haven't the remotest idea of how it's going to happen, but I'm going to love life again, and be happy, and carol out like a meadow-lark on a blue and breezy April ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... Republic barely sufficed for sleep. Daily in the oratory of her palace Mass was said, and Marina passed long hours there on her knees alone, tracing the coming horror to its most dread issue, trying to understand it wholly, that she might pray with all her soul against it—this Curse which was to blight the lives of all she loved, and of which her dearest seemed to feel no dread! She scarcely ate nor slept—watching, for the morning, when a new intercession for mercy should rise from the oratory in her palace; waiting for the evening, when she might go with her maidens to vespers in San Marco. ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... the poor girl, "he could be so much to me and I to him! His touch, even in thought, would never be coarse and unfeeling; and I have seen again and again that I can inspire him, move him, and make him happy. Why must a wretched blunder thwart and blight ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... shores, dear Gertrude, unless you are honoured with the chivalry that belongs to them? What wind, what blight, can harm me while within the circle of your presence; and what sleep can bring me dreams so dear as ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... baffled again and again, until at last he had given himself up to a dull hope that the little girl who had become so dear was really his brother's child, and joint heir with Donald to his and his brother's estates; and how Eben Slade actually had come to claim her and take her away, threatening to blight the poor child by proving that she was his niece, Delia Robertson, and ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... tree, which the Phoenix is called By the nations of earth from the name of that bird. 175 The King of glory has granted that tree, The Holy One of heaven, as I have heard said, That it among all the other trees That grow in the glorious groves of the world Bloometh most brightly. No blight may hurt it, 180 Nor work it harm, but while the world stands It shall be shielded from the ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... required no rest. But there is another form of repose; or is it not rest to sit near an open window and look out on dumb nature? The moon had not yet risen; only the stars of heaven shone down on the smooth ice. Their reflection was like rubies spread on a blight steel plate, or the lights which flicker over ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... cornlands. Then the time came when the Great Spirit called for my father, and I was left with the kingship of the tribe. Strange things meantime had befallen our nation in the West. Broken clans had come down from the north, and there had been many battles, and there had been blight, and storms, and sickness, so that they were grown poor and harassed. Likewise men had arisen who preached to them discontent, and other races of a lesser breed had joined themselves to them. My own tribe had become fewer, ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... fruit borne by the tree of life, how small a portion drops from it when fully ripe, and in the due course of nature. The worm, and premature decay, are continually thinning them; and the tempest and the blight destroy the greater part of those that are left. Poor dear worthy old Minister, you too are gone, but not forgotten. How could I have had these thoughts? How could I have enjoyed these scenes? and how described them? but for you! Innocent, pure, and simple-minded man, ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... odious in the eye of the constitution. He undertook to tear in tatters the various modern precedents advanced by the government for their purpose; scouted the alleged visitorial power of the crown; insisted that it would blight future munificence; argued that defective instruction with freedom and self-government would, in the choice of evils, be better than the most perfect mechanism secured by parliamentary interference; admitted that what the universities had done for learning was perhaps ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... was therefore with no little anxiety that the council of Henry VIII. perceived his male children, on whom their hopes were centred, either born dead, or dying one after another within a few days of their birth, as if his family were under a blight. When the Queen had advanced to an age which precluded hope of further offspring, and the heir presumptive was an infirm girl, the unpromising aspect became yet more alarming. The life of the Princess Mary was precarious, for her health was weak ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... on him with the eye of aversion and anger, he shunned her and took a dislike to her. As for Ma'aruf, he occupied himself with the love of fair handmaidens and bethought him not of his wife Fatimah the Dung, for that she was grown a grizzled old fright, foul-favoured to the sight, a bald-headed blight, loathlier than the snake speckled black and white; the more that she had beyond measure evil entreated him aforetime; and as saith the adage, "Ill-usage the root of desire disparts and sows hate in the soil of hearts;" and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... the hour of hope will soon take flight And on your form and features leave a blight; Since Time, who heals full many an open wound, More oft than not ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... hopes man nurses, Never deem them idly born; Never think that deathly curses Blight them ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... though I mean to learn as soon as that child is in a condition to tell me. And then by the great guns something's going to let loose. I've talked with that stone image of a woman at Leslie Manor and I know what it can say. It isn't a woman; It's a blight upon the sex: A freak: It's stone, and when lightning strikes stone something bursts to smithereens. And by all that's powerful the lightning's going to strike this time. Thirty-five miles all alone in the dead of ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... relief; and I am willing to believe that, notwithstanding the aid already furnished, a donation of seed grain to the farmers located in this region, to enable them to put in new crops, would serve to avert a continuance or return of an unfortunate blight. ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... PECAN LEAF BLIGHT (Cercospora Halstedii): This disease of pecan leaves causes them to turn brown, wither up and drop prematurely. At first, small brown spots are noted. These become larger, and at length the whole leaf is destroyed. When attacked by this disease the tree makes ...
— The Pecan and its Culture • H. Harold Hume
... into a waltz. For what would be sleep if it did not contrast life? Then I came to a solitary chamber, in which a girl, in her tenderest youth, knelt by the bedside in prayer, and I saw that the death-spirit had passed over her, and the blight was on the leaves of the rose. The room was still and hushed, the angel of Purity kept watch there. Her heart was full of love, and yet of holy thoughts, and I bade her dream of the long life denied to her,—of ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and, as at the feast of Balthazar, God manifested himself. He seemed to command recognition now in the person of an old, white-haired servant with unsteady gait and drawn brows; he entered with gloomy mien and his look seemed to blight the garlands, the ruby cups, the pyramids of fruits, the brightness of the feast, the glow of the astonished faces and the colors of the cushions dented by the white arms of the women; then he cast a pall over this folly by saying, in ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... coffee, sugar, cotton, and tobacco, are grown in abundance; indeed, were the resources of the islands fully developed, they would prove some of the richest in the world. But it may truly be said, that where Spaniards rule there a blight is sure ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... held up beseechingly to Jennie, who stooped to embrace her, and taking the withered tokens, hastened to hide her emotion in the furthest recess of the carriage that bore her away from the home of her kindred. It seemed to those who watched the receding travelers, as if a blight had fallen upon their pleasant things; as if the winter had suddenly come and frozen up all the springs of pleasure and delight, for that young girl's presence, though unobtrusive in its influence, had diffused warmth and gladness all about her, and now that she was gone ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... was kept away for fear of infection, but HER penance was to wander about the great house, more silent than ever now, to answer the inquiries and listen to the sad forebodings of the neighbors, who came to offer help and sympathy; for all loved little Button-Rose, and grieved to think of any blight falling on the pretty blossom. To wile away the long hours, Cicely fell to dusting the empty rooms, setting closets and drawers to rights, and keeping all fresh and clean, to the great relief of the old cousins, who felt that ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... gained heaven if they were possessed of Madeleine's wealth, her jewels, her carriages, her dresses; but were the veils that shroud the hypocrisy of human joy raised for the warning of the uninitiated, many a noble heart like Madeleine's would show the blight of disappointment, with the thorns thick and sharp under the flowers that are strewn on their path. The sympathy of manhood, ever flung over the couch of suffering beauty, must hover in sighs of regret ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... to marry. They should have waited. They both realized their folly now. But what was done could not be undone. She realized, too, that it was worse for Howard than it was for her. It had ruined his prospects at the outset of his career and threatened to be an irreparable blight on his entire life. She realized that she was largely to blame. She had done wrong to marry him and at times she reproached herself bitterly. There were days when their union assumed in her eyes the enormity of a crime. She ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... as bad as bad can be with the sandy blight,' says Maddie, 'wears green goggles, poor old gentleman. He'll never know nothing, and he'll be able to swear up for Jim if the police pull him anywhere this ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... power of unbelievers to say that the Bible is for me only what the Koran is for the deaf Turk, and the Vedas for the feeble and acquiescent Hindoo. No; I will retire UP INTO THE MOUNTAIN, and hold secret commune with my Bible above the contagious blastments of prejudice, and the fog-blight of selfish superstition. FOR FEAR HATH TORMENT. And what though MY reason be to the power and splendour of the Scriptures but as the reflected and secondary shine of the moon compared with the solar radiance; yet the sun endures the occasional co-presence of the unsteady orb, ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... all chance of happiness between Ethel and myself—have you no heart that you can refuse to repair a little of the harm that you have done? You are a cruel woman—I could almost say a wicked woman: hard, false, and cowardly; and I wish my words could blight your life as your ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... marks of the parasitic fungi. There is a general tendency for the foliage on plants affected with such diseases to shrivel and to hang on the stem for a time. One of the best illustrations of this type of disease is the pear-blight. Sometimes the plant gives rise to abnormal growths, as in the "willow shoots" of peaches affected ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... now known as a form of Typhoid, the disease spreads a sort of blight over the nervous centres, and from the first greatly lowers their power. The patient is too weak to bear the powerful cooling recommended in Fever; there is also a tendency to prolonged and "low" fever. First of all, in such a case, the feet and legs must ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... if you must, but never hate: Man is but grass and hate is blight, The sun will scorch you soon or late, Die wholesome then, since ...
— Country Sentiment • Robert Graves
... On the hills like gods together, careless of mankind. For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurled Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curled Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world: Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands, Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands, Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands. But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song Steaming up, a lamentation ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... it's only tragedy," says Alvin, "the original tragedy of man. See how its blight rests on these around us! Simply over-stimulation of the ego; our souls in the strait-jacket of self; no freedom of thought or word or deed to our fellows. Ego, the tyrant, rules us. Only we of the Free Brotherhood are seeking to tame ours. Do I ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... demeaning themselves, were likely to be of importance. Moreover, Ashe's success in the House of Commons was no longer what it had been earlier in the session. The party papers had cooled. Elizabeth Tranmore felt a blight in the air. Yet William, with his position in the country, his high ability, and the social weight belonging to the heir of the Tranmore peerage and estates, was surely not a person to be lightly ignored! Would Lord Parham ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... discontent and economic distress, such as was responsible for the coming of the Irish, may likewise be traced the source of the Germanic migration. The potato blight that fell upon Ireland visited the Rhine Valley and Southern Germany at the same time with results as pitiful, if less extensive. The calamity inflicted by nature was followed shortly by another inflicted by the despotic conduct of German kings and princes. In 1848 ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... blight all through the year, to me. You hard-lined, thin-lipped, repressive, changeless woman with a wax mask on. You are like the Devil to me; most of all when you teach me religious things, for ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... not a blight day even yet, though the snow had ceased to fall, and the clouds were clearing away. Elizabeth looked ...
— David Fleming's Forgiveness • Margaret Murray Robertson
... permits slavery and fosters despotism. It inspires a blind and bigoted hatred of race and creed, and thus puts far out of sight the salutary truth of the brotherhood of man. Because of these and other scarcely less prominent defects in its teachings, Islam has proved a blight and curse to almost every race ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... care! Take care! The great white witch rides out to-night, Trust not your prowess nor your strength; Your only safety lies in flight; For in her glance there is a snare, And in her smile there is a blight. ...
— Fifty years & Other Poems • James Weldon Johnson
... ten villages and three or four Tokedars under a Zillahdar. The Zillahdar looks out for good lands to change for bad ones, where this is necessary, and where no objection is made by the farmer; sees that the Tokedars do their work properly; reports rain, blight, locusts, and other visitations that might injure the crop; watches all that goes on in his zillah, and makes his report to the planter whenever anything of importance happens in his particular part of the cultivation. Over all again comes the JEMADAR—the ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... stone In deathless song shall tell, When many a vanished age hath flown, The story how ye fell; Nor wreck, nor change, nor winter's blight, Nor Time's remorseless doom, Shall dim one ray of glory's light That ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... misfortune's chilling blight, But bind us closer here, Till we behold the dawning light ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... host, passing quickly but quietly from one group to another. His blight blue eves were cold and tired-looking as ever, and took no part in the rather banal smile which played over his lips, as if the accustomed expression of indifference could never be obliterated. The indolent lines about his mouth were not those of temperament, because if he spoke to ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... occur, but that are not referable to any known eclipsing body. Of course there is no suggestion here that these darknesses may have been eclipses. My own acceptance is that if in the nineteenth century anyone had uttered such a thought as that, he'd have felt the blight of a Dominant; that Materialistic Science was a jealous god, excluding, as works of the devil, all utterances against the seemingly uniform, regular, periodic; that to defy him would have brought on—withering ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... "O thou eternal one; whose presence blight All space doth occupy—all motion guide— Thou from primeval nothingness didst call First chaos, then existence. Lord, on thee Eternity had its foundation: all Sprung forth from thee—of light, joy, harmony, Sole ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... without sacrilege, and cannot be altered by the power of Fate itself. Carlos, as the poet represents him, calls forth our tenderest sympathies. His soul seems once to have been rich and glorious, like the garden of Eden; but the desert-wind has passed over it, and smitten it with perpetual blight. Despair has overshadowed all the fair visions of his youth; or if he hopes, it is but the gleam of delirium, which something sterner than even duty extinguishes in the cold darkness of death. His energy survives ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... out to him by his friend the gardener, and thence to dress for a dinner that he looked forward to with dread, and Philip to make his way home. As he passed up through the little flower-garden at the Abbey House, he came across his daughter, picking the blight from her shooting rose-trees. ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... received material damage, and the process of harvesting it must be tedious. Barley is considerably grown, and has also been a good deal prostrated. Oats have suffered less, being more backward.—Potatoes look vigorous, though not yet out of danger from blight or rot. Not a patch of Indian Corn is to be seen throughout. Considerable grass-land has been plowed up for Wheat next season, and some Turnips are just visible; but it is evident that Grass and Stock, under the influence ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley |
