"Purblind" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... earth, is on the surface sufficiently finite for us to say: It was on such a day I made my decision; to such and such an event I can look back as the cause of all that has followed. The How thereof remains traceable to our purblind eyes for a month, a term of years, one generation, possibly two; the Where and When can generally be defined; but the Why we ask blindly, ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... accurate explanation of the actual causes of the deluge. Now, it is certainly true, that the Bible does describe things as they appear to men. It is, however, beginning to be discovered, that these popular appearances are closely connected with philosophical reality. Our purblind astronomy and prattling geology may be as inadequate to expound the mysteries of the Bible philosophy as was the incoherent science of Strabo and Ptolemy. The experience of another planet, now transacting before our eyes, admonishes us not to limit the resources of Omnipotence ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... the last ten minutes a stage-coach has driven up to the door, filled inside and out with distinguished characters, comprising Mr. Muddlebranes, Mr. Drawley, Professor Muff, Mr. X. Misty, Mr. X. X. Misty, Mr. Purblind, Professor Rummun, The Honourable and Reverend Mr. Long Eers, Professor John Ketch, Sir William Joltered, Doctor Buffer, Mr. Smith (of London), Mr. Brown (of Edinburgh), Sir Hookham Snivey, and Professor Pumpkinskull. The ten last-named ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... measur'd steps of one, two, three, But made a careless, slouching bow, And said, "Your highness will allow, That I am personable, tall, A rather handsome face withal, And fit to serve as volunteer, At least as any present here! Purblind, and deaf, and long and short, Without distinction here resort; Whilst I, neglected and forgot, Sate daily watching in my cot; And scarcely stirr'd, for fear there might, Arrive that morning or that night A captaincy, or some commission, For I confess I have ambition, ...
— Vignettes in Verse • Matilda Betham
... evening that preceded this proposed expedition, he went into one of the boxes at the playhouse, as usual, to show himself to the ladies; and reconnoitring the company through a glass (for no other reason but because it was fashionable to be purblind), perceived his mistress very plainly dressed, in one of the seats above the stage, talking to another young woman of a very homely appearance. Though his heart beat the alarm with the utmost impatience at sight of his Emilia, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... Doctor, "it is God's truth, and stands in no need of the endorsement of a set of well-meaning but purblind bigots and pedants, who presumed to set metes and bounds to Divine inspiration, and decide by vote what is God's truth and what is the Devil's falsehood. But, speaking of eagles, I never see one of these spiteful old sea-robbers without fancying ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... darkness, Even as the banners And spears of the Morning; Sifting the nations, The slag from the metal, The waste and the weak From the fit and the strong; Fighting the brute, The abysmal Fecundity; Checking the gross, Multitudinous blunders, The groping, the purblind Excesses in service Of the Womb universal, The absolute drudge; Firing the charactry Carved on the World, The miraculous gem In the seal-ring that burns On the hand of the Master - Yea! and authority Flames through the dim, Unappeasable Grisliness Prone down the nethermost Chasms of the Void! ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... to be a lie? Will not He discern the motive that prompts you—desire to see a wronged man righted, the innocent set free—and the motive that prompts them—malicious hate? Or do you deem the all-seeing eye of Heaven is purblind? I tell you this, girl, if I were in your place, and the man I loved stood justly in such peril, I would swear a score such oaths to set him free! Yet here, with justice on your side and truth, and Heaven itself, you hesitate; you shrink from uttering a mere form of words, the spirit of which ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... swine, we went nearer to the gate, to take a peep at the follies of the palace of Love, the purblind king; it is a place easy to enter and difficult to escape from, and in it there is a prodigious number of chambers. In the hall opposite to the door was insane Cupid, with his two arrows upon his bow, shooting ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... these drunken swine, we drew nearer the gate in order to spy out the blemishes in the magnificent court of Love, the purblind king, wherein it is easy to enter, but difficult to get out again, and where are chambers innumerable. In the hall opposite the door stood giddy Cupid, with two arrows in his bow, darting a languishing venom called lust. Along the floor I saw many fair and comely ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... answered with a deprecating laugh: "Yes—she's an awful simpleton, you know, Mrs. Stroud. Her only idea was to have him done by a fashionable painter—ah, poor Stroud! She thought it the surest way of proclaiming his greatness—of forcing it on a purblind public. And at the moment ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... career, at the age of fifty-five (57?), Caesar, whose frank and fearless spirit disdained suspicion or precaution, was assassinated by a knot of rancorous, perfidious aristocrats, whom he had pardoned and promoted. Their purblind spite was powerless to avert the inevitable advent of monocracy. What they did effectually extinguish for more than a century, was the possibility of amnesty, conciliation, and mutual confidence. Careless as usual of historical truth, the great English poet has glorified the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... breaking the bones of the sufferers was avoided in His case. John sees, in that entirely insignificant thing, a kind of fingerpost pointing to far more important, deeper, and real correspondences. We are not to suppose that he was so purblind, and attached so much importance to externals, as that this outward coincidence exhausted in his conception the correspondence between the two. But It was a trifle that suggested a greater matter. It was a help aiding gross conceptions and common minds to grasp the inward ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... Guido's doom; from the unworthy priest in the Spanish Cloister to the very human, kindly Pope in "The Bean Feast." And from all these it is far down the ages to the evangelical parish priest of The Inn Album, that "purblind honest drudge," who, the deeper to impress his flock, painted heaven dimly but "made hell distinct." There are many artists, many musicians. There are poets from Aprile in Paracelsus, and the troubadours Eglamour and Sordello, to Keats and Shelley. The ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... true fashionable is peculiar and characteristic. From the toe of his boot to the crown of his hat, there is that unostentatious, undefinable something about him distinctive of his social position. Professional men, every body knows, have an expression common to their profession. A purblind cyclops could never mistake the expression of an Independent preacher, an universal free-black-nigger Baptist minister, or a Jesuit. Every body knows an infantry officer, with his "eyes right" physiognomy, his odious black-stock, and his habit of treading on his heels, and can ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... printed Document, emanating, as it were, from a vile, mean, and ignorant miscreant of the name of ———, calumniating and vituperating me; it is evidently the production of a vain, supercilious, disappointed, frantic, purblind maniac of the name of ———, a bedlamite to all intents and purposes, a demon in the disguise of virtue, and a herald of hell in the paradise of innocence, possessing neither principle, honor, nor honesty; a vain and ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... once in the twilight undergrowth of a forest of nut-bearing trees a number of little purblind creatures wandered, singing for nuts. On some of these purblind creatures the nuts fell heavy and full, extremely indigestible, and were quickly swallowed; on others they fell light, and contained nothing, because the kernel ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... opinions, I do not think that he ever said anything but what he sincerely thought. The problem, therefore, is to discover and define, if possible, the critical standpoint of a man whose judgment was at once so acute and so purblind; who could write the admirable surveys of English poetry contained in the essays on Mme. de Stael and Campbell, and yet be guilty of the stuff (we thank him for the word) about the dancing daffodils; who could talk of "the splendid strains of Moore" ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... himself of some terrible deed of readjustment, just what, he could not say, some terrifying martyrdom, some awe-inspiring immolation, consummate, incisive, conclusive. He fancied himself to be fired with the purblind, mistaken heroism of the anarchist, hurling his victim to destruction with full knowledge that the catastrophe shall sweep him also ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... their heart; as Pilgrims towards a miraculous shrine. Nay how many come as vacant Strollers, aimless, of whom Europe is full merely towards something! For benighted fowls, when you beat their bushes, rush towards any light. Thus Frederick Baron Trenck too is here; mazed, purblind, from the cells of Magdeburg; Minotauric cells, and his Ariadne lost! Singular to say, Trenck, in these years, sells wine; not indeed ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... frankness, excited in London a chorus of murmurs not dissimilar to that which it had been the fortune of the portrait exhibited in 1884 to elicit in Paris, and had the further privilege of drawing forth some prodigies of purblind criticism. Works of this character are a genuine service; after the short-lived gibes of the profane have subsided, they are found to have cleared the air. They remind people that the faculty of taking a direct, independent, unborrowed impression ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... Nobody understands but me," Kate cried fiercely. "I understand, and I tell you they're all mad. Hopelessly mad." She laughed wildly. "Disaster? Oh, blind, blind, fools. There'll be disaster, sure enough. The old Indian curse will be fulfilled. Oh, Helen, I could weep for the purblind skepticism of this wretched people, this consequential old fool, Mrs. Day. And I—I am the idiot who ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... Did he leave her to be implicitly dealt with by Charles Darwin in his "Theory of Sexual Selection"? Or did he in the good old oriental way regard her as unimportant in the eyes of the Deity? If the latter, he was a purblind prophet and missed the very fount of ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... Thou purblind Boy, since thou hast been so slacke To wound her Heart, whose Eyes haue wounded me, And suff'red her to glory in my Wracke, Thus to my aid, I lastly coniure thee; By Hellish Styx (by which the THUND'RER sweares) By thy faire Mothers vnauoided Power, By HECAT'S Names, by ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... make bad hosts. They have a way of collecting the morally lame, halt, and blind into their drawing-rooms that gives those apartments the air of a convalescent home. The moment a couple have placed themselves beyond the social pale, these purblind hosts conceive an affection for and lavish hospitality upon them. If such a host has been fortunate enough to get together a circle of healthy people, you may feel confident that at the last moment a leper will be introduced. This class of entertainers fail ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... that!' said Daddy, impatiently, adding in a mincing voice, '"I will not love; if I do hang me; i' faith I will not." No, my pretty dear, not till the "wimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy" comes this road—oh, no, not till next time! ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... all the world, with neither thorns nor briers, with no evil insects nor any beasts save the gentle breed of llamas they had lugged and thrust and followed up the beds of the shrunken rivers in the gorges up which they had come. The seeing had become purblind so gradually that they scarcely noticed their loss. They guided the sightless youngsters hither and thither until they knew the whole valley marvellously, and when at last sight died out among them the race lived on. They had even time to adapt themselves to the blind ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... gentlemen along the streets Suspended may illuminate mankind, As also bonfires made of country seats; But the old way is best for the purblind: The other looks like phosphorus on sheets, A sort of ignis fatuus to the mind, Which, though 't is certain to perplex and frighten, Must burn more mildly ere ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... things are turned topsy-turvy, according to whose will all human affairs are regulated—war and peace, government and counsel, justice and treaties. He has begotten her on the nymph Youth, not a senile, purblind Plutus, but a fresh god, warm with youth and nectar, like ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... that His was a life unique and inexplicable by the ordinary motives which shape the little lives of the masses of mankind. They witness to His entire neglect of ordinary and low aims; to His complete absorption in lofty purposes, which to His purblind would-be critics seem to be delusions and fond imaginations that could never be realised. They witness to what His disciples remembered had been written of Him, 'The zeal of Thy house hath eaten Me ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... good humour or out of the way. It was her certain belief that my brother William would have returned to his country, and my eldest brother would not have looked so high, if they had had a little less learning." Poor, purblind, well-meaning, obstructive old dame Herschel! what a boon to the world that children like yours are sometimes seized with this incomprehensible fancy for "looking ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... you, Mr. Wooster, that I appreciate your splendid defiance of the outworn fetishes of a purblind social system. I appreciate it! You are big enough to see that rank is but the guinea stamp and that, in the magnificent words of Lord Bletchmore in 'Only a Factory Girl,' 'Be her origin ne'er so humble, a good woman is the equal of the finest ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse
... attained a great development in the ensuing reign. Paris was unanimous in its opposition. Decamps's absurd cartoon of Charles X hunting, which we have reproduced, is a not unfaithful presentation of the state of public opinion concerning this purblind monarch. ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... neither then, nor in his age, did he ever willingly look any man in the face: and was of so mild and humble a nature, that his poor Parish-Clerk and he did never talk but with both their hats on, or both off, at the same time: and to this may be added, that though he was not purblind, yet he was short or weaksighted; and where he fixed his eyes at the beginning of his sermon, there they continued till it was ended: and the Reader has a liberty to believe, that his modesty and ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton
... ears as should always be closed against poetry, there is no music in verse which has not in it sufficient fulness and ripeness of meaning, sufficient adequacy of emotion or of thought, to abide the analysis of any other than the purblind scrutiny of prepossession or the squint-eyed inspection ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... had I stayed there very long, I should have become purblind, and that would have been a great misfortune, for I have heard men say that a stone-blind horse was safer to drive than one which had imperfect sight, as it generally makes them very timid. However, I escaped without any ...
— Black Beauty • Anna Sewell
... the man whose eyes are red and weeping with the effects of intemperate drinking, we cordially pity purblind students, as in some sense martyrs to the cause of learning. Dr. Reynolds, a distinguished American oculist, administers a rebuke to such which we fear is too often merited: "A closer examination of their history ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... develop wings under the mortal wrapping. Also they tell us not to trouble ourselves about the fact that we see no Psyche-imago detach itself from the broken cocoon: this lack of visual evidence signifies nothing, because we have only the purblind vision of grubs. Our eyes are but half- evolved. Do not whole scales of colors invisibly exist above and below the limits of our retinal sensibility? Even so the butterfly-man exists,—although, as a matter of course, we ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... contrast between "what was" and "what ought to have been," though such studies are inevitably mingled with regrets. We have every reason to regret that the Reformation was so hasty and ill-considered, and that the Papacy was as purblind as it was arrogant. The plant of the Roman Church machinery, which it had taken centuries to lay down, came into the hands of men who grossly ignored its function and the conditions of its working. They used its power partly for the benefit of the human ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... in a court of justice with having forged various notes, and clear evidence given of the fact, corroborated by the additional testimony of his having on a former occasion fabricated a Will of a very ancient date, would a jury hesitate to find him guilty, because two purblind old women should be brought into court, and swear that the Will urged against him had such an ancient appearance, the hand-writing and language by which the bequests were made was so old, and the parchment so yellow, that they could not but believe it to be a genuine deed of ...
— Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley (1782) • Edmond Malone
... purblind crew who fill The heart with each day's care, Nor learn, from past and future, skill To bear ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... man 'mongst other men. Yea, and will Fortune pick out, now and then, The noblest for the anvil of her blows; Great names are few, and yet, indeed, who knows What greater souls have fallen 'neath the stroke Of careless fate? Purblind are most of folk, The happy are the masters of the earth Which ever give small heed to hapless worth; So goes the world, and this we needs must bear Like eld and death: yet there were some men there Who drank in silence to the memory ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... "Wretched, purblind girl! Thirty-five indeed! Why, I am eighteen, and clad in the hide of a leopard with a wreath of roses on my brow, and you, sweet Oenone, are wandering with me on the slopes of Ida—and we are taking your mother, not one, but a peck of ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... continually directed to shape through purpose, then there will cease to be spontaneous beauty and the spontaneous appreciation of beauty, because there will be no need for either. Beauty of music does not exist for the stone-deaf, nor beauty of painting for the purblind; but beauty of no kind whatever, nor in any art, can really exist for the inattentive, for the over-worked or ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... of the telegraph in working railways was manifest, and yet the directors of the company were so purblind as to order the removal of the apparatus, and it was not until two years later that the Great Western Railway Company adopted it on their line from Paddington to West Drayton, and subsequently to Slough. This was the first telegraph for public use, not merely in England, but the world. The ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... the first of their liaison, when they made their love in that same room under the very nose of a purblind husband. ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... leave no profit from agriculture or trade. Twelve to 18 per cent. is charged for loans on ample landed security; and ordinary cultivators are mulcted in 40 to 60. A haunting fear of civil discord, and purblind conservatism in the commercial castes, are responsible for the dearth of capital. India imports bullion amounting to L25,000,000 a year, to the great detriment of European credit, and nine-tenths of it is hoarded in the shape of ornaments ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... uneasiness, that they could not have escaped Booth's observation had suspicion given him the least hint to remark; but this, indeed, is the great optic-glass helping us to discern plainly almost all that passes in the minds of others, without some use of which nothing is more purblind than ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... as he strode up and down the parlour; he was too excited to remain in one place and joy radiated from all his features. 'From now on they are welcome to call me Balzac the tale-smith! I shall go on tranquilly squaring my stones and enjoying in advance the amazement of all those purblind critics when they finally discover the great structure ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... were, so to speak, thrust under our noses, what force remained in the dilemma—creation or nothing? It was obvious that, hereafter, the probability would be immensely greater, that the links of natural causation were hidden from our purblind eyes, than that natural causation should be incompetent to produce all the phenomena of nature. The only rational course for those who had no other object than the attainment of truth, was to accept "Darwinism" as a working ...
— The Reception of the 'Origin of Species' • Thomas Henry Huxley
... difficult. His troops were not veterans, but, in great part, the very rawest of recruits. The enemy's officers and soldiers were not inferior to his own; their leaders were at least equal in capacity to Colli, Beaulieu, and Alvinzi, and the statesmen who directed them were not more purblind than the Aulic Council. Moreover, Jackson was merely the commander of a detached force, which might at any moment be required at Richmond. The risks which Napoleon freely accepted he could not afford. He dared not deliver battle unless ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... and Cain's mark on your brow: the mark of the raceace that carries its Sundays, its—language, its drinks, its dress, and its conventions with it, whereever it goes, and is surprised, and mildly shocked, if these things are not instantly adopted by the poor, purblind foreigner.—You are the ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... turn out goods expressly made with a view to wearing as short a time as possible, so as to need the speedier renewal. They taught their very machines to be dishonest, and corrupted steel and brass. Even the purblind people of that day recognized the vanity of the pretended reductions in price by the epithet 'cheap and nasty,' with which they characterized cheapened goods. All this class of reductions, it is plain, cost the consumer two dollars for every one it ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... hath our Heavenly Father shown How sharp and bitter is the smart When sudden on the purblind heart The Daystar's healing light ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... consulting the police came to an untimely end. The one result obtained was the expression of purblind opinion by the authorities of the detective department which pointed to Isabel, or to one of the servants, as the undiscovered thief. Thinking the matter over in the retirement of his own office—and not forgetting his promise to Isabel to leave no means untried of establishing ...
— My Lady's Money • Wilkie Collins
... Is there not life and mettle in them? Have they not in them power to loose the bands of nature, and to harden the soul against sorrow? Flow they not, think you, from faith of the finest sort, and are they not bred in the bosom of a truly mortified soul? Are these the effect of a purblind spirit? Are they not rather the fruits of an eagle-eyed confidence? Oh, these desires! they are peculiar ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... to those who know the truth," the speaker resumed. "To the purblind laws of the West it may seem a great thing. We seek in Rome to do as Rome does. We judge every man as we find him. Therefore, recognizing that your total disappearance might compromise our movements in the near future, we have ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... for mutual murder, hideous hobgoblins produced by a horde of capitalistic lusts upon our prostituted labour. The poor man starves while they are grassing their royal mountain stags or shooting peasants and phartridges in their purblind pomp of pelf and power. But their reign is rover for ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... the world he lived in and drew out of it all there was, all there was! I could see him in the years to come ranging alone the fields that were sweet and the horizons that lifted for him, and ever returning to pace the common dusty mortal road by the side of a purblind wife. On general principles, as a case to point at, it would be a conspicuous pity. Nor would it lack the aspect of a particular, a personal misfortune. Dacres was occupied in quite the natural normal degree with his ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... distinguished her ever since the days when she and her sister, Lady Lyttelton, were "the beautiful Miss Glynnes." Robert Lowe, not yet Lord Sherbrooke, was a celebrity who might often be seen in Society,—a noteworthy figure with his ruddy face, snow-white hair, and purblind gaze. The first Lord Lytton—Bulwer-Lytton, the novelist—was dead before I came to London; but his brilliant son, "Owen Meredith," in the intervals of official employment abroad, was an interesting figure in Society; curled and ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... say here that I believe this purblind policy of delaying the expedition instead of freely aiding it had much to do with the result. Virginia did her part with some degree of willingness, but Pennsylvania, whence the general expected to draw a great part of his transport and provision, would ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... diamond-digger of the South, the crazed perfume-hunter in the East, the stifled hemp-curer in the fetid swamps of Russia, the shriveled iron-worker in the scorching furnaces of England. Here, in Paris, amid that motley herd who feed on virtue, the moon shines down calmly on purblind embroiderers and peerless beauties, on worn-out roues and squalid beggars. The breeze that wafts to heaven the pure prayer of the maiden witnesses the fierce ribaldry of the courtesan; it flutters the curls of a sleeping infant, and bears on its wings the whispered exchange of chastity for ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... could only regard it from the shopkeeping point of view. When a new world began to arise at the Antipodes, our rulers saw an opportunity not for planting new offshoots of European civilisation, but for ridding themselves of the social rubbish no longer accepted in America. With purblind energy, and eyes doggedly fixed upon the ground at their feet, the race had somehow pressed forwards to illustrate the old doctrine that a man never goes so far as when he does not know whither he is going. While thinking of earning an honest penny by extending the trade, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... But the purblind theorist went on his way: "I hae seen bonnier faces, but no mair takin', Jess, than yours. It's no aye beauty that tak's a man, Jess, ye see, an' the lassies that hae dune best hae been plain-favoured lassies that had ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... old captain of invalids, who had been roused from his bed, and was evidently half asleep. I stoutly denied my being "the criminal who had offended the majesty of the people." But as the governor himself, on gazing at me with his purblind eyes, was perfectly satisfied of my identity, there was no use in contesting the point. A couple of sentinels were placed at the door of my cell, and I was left, like himself, to my slumbers. Before the door closed, I grasped my guide by the throat. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... are those who take a different view of human nature, and who find in its contemplation a source of humility rather than of pride. They remind us how weak, how ignorant, how short-lived is the individual, how infirm of purpose, how purblind of vision, how subject to pain and suffering, to diseases that torture the body and wreck the mind. They say that if the few short years of his life are not wasted in idleness and vice, they are spent for the most part in a perpetually ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... and esoteric. For, as to the last, it denoted that the task of the spectacles was over; that, when a philosopher has made up his mind to marry, it is better henceforth to be shortsighted—nay, even somewhat purblind—than to be always scrutinizing the domestic felicity, to which he is about to resign himself, through a pair of cold, unillusory barnacles. As for the things beyond the hearth, if he cannot see without spectacles, is ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... before him. When her parents returned, she presented him to their embrace, saying in a glad way, "Rejoice with me, O my father and mother! the robbers have at length allowed him to come back to us." Of course the parents were deceived, they are mostly a purblind race; and Hemgupt, showing great favour to his worthless son-in-law, exclaimed, "Remain with us, my ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... hast on foot the purblind hare, Mark the poor wretch; to overshoot his troubles, How he outruns the wind, and with what care, He cranks and crosses with a thousand doubles; The many musits through the which he goes Are like a labyrinth ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... of the time we live in is ophthalmia of intellect, affecting the higher classes. Monarchs, stone-blind, have tumbled headlong from their thrones, and princes have been conducted by their subjects out of their principalities. The aristocracy are purblind, and cannot distinctly decipher the "signs of the times." The hierarchy cannot discover why people would have religion at a reduced price: in fact, they are all blind, and will not perceive that ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... noted, is 't, But of the finer natures? by some severals Of head-piece extraordinary? lower messes, Perchance, are to this business purblind." ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... he be not worse—a rabbi. I, for my part, want to be startled out of my conceits; I want to be put to shame in my own eyes; I want to feel the bridle in my mouth, and be continually reminded of my own weakness and the omnipotence of circumstances. (5) If I from my spy-hole, looking with purblind eyes upon the least part of a fraction of the universe, yet perceive in my own destiny some broken evidences of a plan and some signals of an overruling goodness; shall I then be so mad as to complain that ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he made a speech. I hung back to listen. 'Sir,' he was saying to Ben, 'Secretary Seward some years since purchased your territory from Russia for seven million dollars despite the protests of a clamorous and purblind opposition. How niggardly seems that purchase price at this moment! For Alaska has perfected you, sir, if it did not produce you. Gentlemen, I feel that we dealt unfairly by Russia. But that is in the dead past. It is not too late, however, to tiptoe to the grillroom and offer a toast to our ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... know; yet this you must not know from me. Bargain with him presently, upon as good conditions as you can procure, so you have direct motion from the Marquis to let him have it. Seem not to dive into the secret of it, though you are purblind if you see not through it. I have told Mr. Meautys how I would wish your Lordship now to make an end of it. From him I beseech you take it, and from me only the advice to perform it. If you part not speedily with it, you may defer the good which is approaching near you, and disappointing other ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... on the occasion of the previous visit of these anciently more agitating friends—that of their long talk, on a sequestered bench beneath one of the great trees, when the particular question had come up for them the then purblind discussion of which, at their enjoyed leisure, Maggie had formed the habit of regarding as the "first beginning" of their present situation. The whirligig of time had thus brought round for them again, on their finding themselves face to face while the others were gathering for ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... they took arms against me to enforce it, to pull you down from the place to which I had raised you out of the dust. Yet you can forget it, and in your purblind folly turn to these very men to right the wrongs you fancy I have done you. Do you think that men, holding you in such esteem as that, can keep any sort of faith with you? Do you think these are the men who are likely ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... ago. From all parts of the earth come powers fulfilling your fear. Leagued with our own purblind princes and dwellers in the dusk, they hover over China, waiting for war and bribery to dismember her. And you say your work is done. Yu Tai Shun, where have you buried ...
— The Flutter of the Goldleaf; and Other Plays • Olive Tilford Dargan and Frederick Peterson
... to them so manifestly and entirely finished, began to whisper together, although the patient and the notary were still perfecting some concluding formalities. But presently the notary began to read aloud the instrument he had prepared, keeping his face buried in the paper and running his nose and purblind eyes about it nervously, like a new-born thing hunting the warm fountain of life. All gave close heed. We need not give the document in its full length, nor its Creole accent in its entire breadth. This is only ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... answered. "A purblind Government at last admits the error of its ways and proposes to make reparation for its neglect ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... a common man or good, or for evil, my heart told me he would be conspicuous, and I was, alas the day! too true a prophet. His attachment to his cousin, who, on the death of her mother, had become an inmate of Don Picador's house, had been evident to all but the purblind old man for a long time; and when he did discover it, he imperatively forbade all intercourse between them, as, forsooth, he had projected a richer match for him, and shut Maria up in a corner of his large mansion, Federico, haughty and proud, could not stomach this. ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... flaming torch was applied by Chinese soldiery to half a dozen different places, and almost before anybody knew it, the holy of holies was lustily ablaze. As the flames shot skywards, advertising the danger to the most purblind, everybody at last became energetic and sank their feuds. British marines and volunteers were formed up and independent commands rushed over from the other lines; a hole was smashed through a wall, and the mixed ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... his sad and passive place with those who were. Mr. Croker is not to be blamed as the architect of his overthrow. With what lights that shone, his conduct was prudent enough; and his dethronement is to be charged to destiny—to kismet, rather than to any gate-opening carelessness on the purblind part of himself. 'Prudentia fato major,' said the Florentine. But the Medici was wrong, and before Death bandaged his eyes for eternity it was given him to see that Destiny, for all his caution and for all his craft, had fed his hopes to defeat. And yet, while Mr. ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... who is to tell whether a girl will make an industrious woman? How is the purblind lover especially, to be able to ascertain whether she, whose smiles and dimples and bewitching lips have half bereft him of his senses; how is he to be able to judge, from any thing that he can see, whether the beloved object ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... in array are the prisons of the only sane ones of history, the cells dug by Inquisitorial Ignorance in every age for its wisest men. Now I understand them; walls cannot impede the hands we stretch out to each other across oceans and centuries. One day the purblind world will invoke in its prayers the holy army ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... deeply her beloved had sinned against the truth he owed her. They say that Love is blind, and so he may be at first. But when once his trust is shaken the bandage falls, and the purblind boy is turned ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... "is the purblind dowager, Lady Boucher, just at the door, Lady Delacour; she would not know my face, she would not see my beard, and I will bet fifty guineas that I come into a room in a hoop, and that she does not ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... was not responsible for the crass and purblind idiocy of railway officials, I ignored this expression of ingratitude and ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... wrought by hand, and fixed with binding chalk, Lest weeds arise, or dust a passage win Splitting the surface, then a thousand plagues Make sport of it: oft builds the tiny mouse Her home, and plants her granary, underground, Or burrow for their bed the purblind moles, Or toad is found in hollows, and all the swarm Of earth's unsightly creatures; or a huge Corn-heap the weevil plunders, and the ant, Fearful of coming age and penury. Mark too, what time the walnut in the woods With ample bloom shall clothe her, and bow down Her odorous branches, ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... purblind you are, you old fellows of the days of Saturn! Why, Zeus is poor, and I will clearly prove it to you. In the Olympic games, which he founded, and to which he convokes the whole of Greece every four years, why does he only crown the victorious athletes with wild olive? If he ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... front half plunged into the back of her hut, the Epeira certainly cannot see her web. Even if she had good sight, instead of being purblind, her position could not possibly allow her to keep the prey in view. Does she give up hunting during this period of bright sunlight? ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... my hands over my ears, and looked defiantly round the room. Its walls are no longer standing, and the hands of its builders have crumbled to dust. Some mental accident impressed this picture on the purblind memory of childhood. ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... on those words; or on that double sepulchre. But did I not say well, that the great Abbey was a place of peace—a place to remind hardworked, purblind, and often, ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... upon the least charitable of worlds. Why, sir, in any case your game in Edinburgh is up. The public is dog-tired of you and your ascensions, as any observant child in to-day's crowd could have told you. The truth was there staring you in the face; and next time even your purblind vanity must recognise it. Consider; I offered you two hundred guineas for the convenience of your balloon. I now double that offer on condition that I become its owner during this trip, and that you manipulate it as I wish. Here are the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... knowledge? Confounded it shrivels at Wisdom laid bare! Have I forethought? how purblind, how blank, ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... And so, once more, John fell to work discounting the delightful future: his first appearance in the family pew; his first visit to his uncle Greig, who thought himself so great a financier, and on whose purblind Edinburgh eyes John was to let in the dazzling daylight of the West; and the details in general of that unrivalled transformation scene, in which he was to display to all Edinburgh a portly and successful gentleman in the shoes of the ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is right. Though purblind man Sees but a part o' the chain, the nearest link: His eyes not carrying to the equal ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... in its youth, it had leisure to treasure its recollections; even to pause and look back; to see what flower of a fair thought, what fruit of a noble art, it might have overlooked or left down-trodden. But now it is so old, and is so tired; it is purblind, and heavy of foot; it does not notice what it destroys; it desires rest and can find none; nothing can matter greatly to it; its dead are so many that it cannot count them; and being thus worn and dulled with age, and ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... her every moment; and, interested as were her regrets, they were not unmingled with some faint self-reproach when she remembered how lightly she had prized her services. The antiquated femme de chambre had never appeared so clumsy, purblind, and stupid; and the more her stately mistress chided her, the more bewildered Bettina became, the ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... began to doubt if there was anything before—if there was any just—— He paused and shivered as the thought came to him. And he was glad he paused. To question the Deity was to rank himself at once with a sect he had always despised as self-centred fools, and pitied them as purblind creatures who were ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... carved mantel was a little round old-fashioned mirror, and as I lay back in the chair my purblind eyes were fixed upon it as it reflected the mingled gleams of lamp and fire that touched the shining surfaces of the oaken wall or the furniture of the room. My back was to the door, and yet by the sudden passing of a shadow across the glass I saw that it was being ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... cliffs half a mile ahead and slowly crossed the sands to the edge of the surf, the line of which he began, after a pause, to follow as slowly northwards. His back was turned thus upon the Collector's equipage, to which in crossing the beach he had given no attention, being old and purblind. ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... Epistles of St Ignatius, but she would accept the corruptions bodily upon the smallest hint that they savoured better with the hierarchy, and she would do all this apparently in good faith on the authority of a purblind party within the Church, which exists to keep open its wounds. Now, I submit that a volte face is possible, especially in religious opinions, but that a pronounced habit of religious thought cannot be ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... "Life and Letters," II., page 257.), i.e. to where you treat of the Australian Flora itself; and the latter part I remember thinking most of in the proof-sheets. Either you have altered a good deal, or I did not see all or was purblind, for I have been much more interested with all the first part than I was before,—not that I did not like it at first. All seems to me very clearly written, and I have been baulked at only one sentence. I think, on the whole, I like the geological, or rather palaeontological, discussion best: it ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... and Sweden under the union had been guaranteed by the Constitution of 1814; but, as a matter of fact, the former kingdom is by all the world looked upon as a dependency, if not a province, of the latter. The Bernadottes, lacking comprehension of the Norwegian character, had shown themselves purblind as bats in their dealings with Norway. They had mistaken a perfectly legitimate desire for self-government for a demonstration of hostility to Sweden and the royal house; and instead of identifying themselves with the national movement (which they might well have done), ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... the string; Some give the taper shaft its wing, Or turn the polished quiver's mould, Or head the dart with tempered gold. Amidst their toil and various care, Thus Hymen, with assuming air, Addressed the god: 'Thou purblind chit, Of awkward and ill-judging wit, 10 If matches are not better made, At once I must forswear my trade. You send me such ill-coupled folks, That 'tis a shame to sell them yokes. They squabble for a pin, a feather, And wonder how they came together. ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... appears so naked on my side, That any purblind eye may find it out. Somerset. And on my side it is so well apparelled, So clear, so shining, and so evident, That it will glimmer through ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various
... Browning's intellect, it is his decisive and incisive faculty of thought, his sureness and intensity of perception, his rapid and trenchant resolution of aim. To charge him with obscurity is about as accurate as to call Lynceus purblind, or complain of the sluggish action of the telegraphic wire. He is something too much the reverse of obscure; he is too brilliant and subtle for the ready reader of a ready writer to follow with any certainty the track of an intelligence which moves with such incessant rapidity, or even ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... me add that we have by no means exhausted the lessons which Spiritualism, in the hands of some of its votaries, can teach us. To our purblind vision the joint ownership of one skull by two different persons presents a physiological problem more or less difficult of solution. But all difficulty vanishes as soon as 'the river is crossed.' I derived no little comfort and much ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... not as yet know—'became completely absorbed in silent rumination; very unexpectedly, however, he shewed himself alive to what surrounded him, by one of those singular starts of vision, that made him seem at times, though purblind to things in common, gifted with an eye of instinct for espying any action that he thought merited reprehension; for all at once, looking fixedly on Mr. Greville, who without much self-denial, the night being very cold, kept his station ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... the man who has confided the high secrets of his soul to coarsefibred woman. He turned away, darkly conscious of having magnanimously given Ada a chance to mount with him into the upper air, which opportunity she, daughter of earth, had, in her purblind manner, refused. Thenceforward Ada was to him an unnoticeable ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... forsooth in love, I that have been love's whip; A very beadle to an amorous sigh: A critic; nay, a night-watch constable, A domineering pedant o'er the boy, Than whom no mortal more magnificent. This whimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy, This signior Junio, giant dwarf, Dan Cupid, Regent of love-rimes, lord of folded arms, Th' anointed sovereign of sighs and groans: Liege of all loiterers and malcontents, Dread prince of plackets. ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... we show that what God has done is wise and right? Unquestionably not. That what he has done may be wise and right, could we see his whole scheme of things, no careful thinker will deny; but to suppose it can be shown that he has done this, is an instance of purblind fanaticism which is most startling in a work on Theism. "The best world, we may be assured, that our fancies can feign, would in reality be far inferior to the world God has made, whatever imperfections we may think we see in it." Are we leading a sermon ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... at that time they put no women into nunneries but such as were either purblind, blinkards, lame, crooked, ill-favoured, misshapen, fools, senseless, spoiled, or corrupt; nor encloistered any men but those that were either sickly, subject to defluxions, ill-bred louts, simple ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... three more characteristic moods of minds and men? "Fools, do you know anything of this mystery?" says Swift, stamping on a grave and carrying his scorn for mankind actually beyond it. "Miserable, purblind wretches, how dare you to pretend to comprehend the Inscrutable, and how can your dim eyes pierce the unfathomable depths of yonder boundless heaven?" Addison, in a much kinder language and gentler voice, utters much the same sentiment: and speaks of the rivalry of wits, and the contests ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... proposer were creating a mischief instead of offering relief from one. People are so inured to the evils that they feel as if it were unreasonable, if not wrong, to complain of them. Yet, avoidable or not, he must be a purblind lover of liberty on whose mind they do not weigh; who would not rejoice at the discovery that they could be dispensed with. Now, nothing is more certain than that the virtual blotting out of the minority is ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... knowledge, but contented himself with living like a beast, in a continual round of eating and drinking and sleeping. By trade he was a sawyer, and when he wanted business in his trade, which, as the Ordinary tells us, he often did bring a poor purblind creature, he either sold sawdust about town, or else practised as a bailiffs follower, a profession which led him into yet greater debaucheries and extravagancies than otherwise possible he might ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... passionate conflicting sympathies and curious impartial intellect cannot discover himself so simply; needs, like the diamond, many facets to show all the light in him, and so proceeds to cut them one after the other as Falstaff or Hamlet, to the dazzling of the purblind. ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... relation to the characters in the drama, the audience are as gods looking before and after. Sitting in the theatre, we taste, for a moment, the glory of omniscience. With vision unsealed, we watch the gropings of purblind mortals after happiness, and smile at their stumblings, their blunders, their futile quests, their misplaced exultations, their groundless panics. To keep a secret from us is to reduce us to their level, and deprive us of our clairvoyant aloofness. ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... I can trust my eyes; I am purblind, or you are white marble; you were quarried, I take it, from Pentelicus, turned by Praxiteles's fancy into Aphrodite, and handed over ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... grown accustomed to semi-darkness would be dazzled to the verge of blindness if he were suddenly taken out into broad daylight. This is what was done in 1895 to the teachers of England, and it is not to be wondered at that many of them have been purblind ever since. For thirty-three years they had been treated as machines, and they were suddenly asked to act as intelligent beings. For thirty-three years they had been practically compelled to do everything for the child, and they were suddenly expected to give him freedom ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... ring, And at last spake Reidmar scowling: 'Ye wait for my yea-saying That your feet may go free on the earth, and the fear of my toils may be done That then ye may say in your laughter: The fools of the time agone! The purblind eyes of the Dwarf-kind! they have gotten the garnered sheaf And have let their Masters depart with the Seed of Gold and of Grief: O Loki, friend of Allfather, cast down Andvari's ring, Or the world shall yet turn backward and the high heavens lack ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... O think you, Friend with the musing eye Who watch us stepping by, With doubt and dolorous sigh? Can much pondering so hoodwink you? Is it a purblind prank, O think you, ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... material splendour. A lamentable transition! Virtue broken down by a troop of passing demons. A surprise made on the weak side of man's fortress. All the inferior circumstances called by men superior, ambition, the purblind desires of instinct, passions, covetousness, driven far from Gwynplaine by the wholesome restraints of misfortune, took tumultuous possession of his generous heart. And from what had this arisen? From the discovery ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... the fish. The family of sharks received me. They could not be counted for multitude. The terrible requiem of the storm—the cannibal white shark—welcomed me with open jaws; the blue shark flung up his caudal for joy; the fox-shark lashed the sea; the northern shark glared through his purblind orbs; the hammer-head dilated his yellow irides; the purple dog-fish made a low purring huzza; and the spotted eyes of the monk-fish glistened with satisfaction. The hound-shark, the basking-shark, and the port-beagle were not less ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... inscription on a tomb, or an unread entry on a synagogue brass is their only record. And yet, perhaps, their generation is not all dust. Perchance, here and there, some decrepit centenarian rubs his purblind eyes with the ointment of memory, and sees these pictures of the past, hallowed by the consecration of time, and finds his shrivelled cheek wet with the pathos sanctifying the ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... that among a body of immigrants are one or two who are decidedly unsuitable. There is an example among our particular ship-load. Here is a woman, purblind, decrepit, looking sixty years old at least, and, by some incomprehensible series of mistakes, she has found her way out here as a "single girl!" What was the Agent-General in London about, and what could the Dispatching Officer have been thinking of, when they let this ancient ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... Purblind that she had been. What claim had any man, seeing what the lives of men are, to this pitiful sacrifice of reticence, this rending of the veil of merciful, wise secrecy from an innocent young head? None. Not the shadow of a ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... faithfully reported, through its far-fetched and monotonous irregularities, but nobody realizes the extraordinary scene from which so many columns emanate, either by aid of the reporters' scanty descriptions, or by the purblind sketches of the artists. ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... succeeded so far, like—like perfect machinery; like the thing it is: the outcome of perfect discipline and long, deliberate planning. We have heard no more; but the only hoaxing that I can see is done by the purblind people who have made the public think it a hoax—and that is not conscious hoaxing, of course; they are too bemuddled with their disarmament farce ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... law that drubs him is the highest law! Would you transform your fervid soldiery Into a tool, as lifeless as the blade That in your golden baldrick hangs inert? Oh, empty spirit, stranger to the stars, Who first gave forth such doctrine! Oh, the base, The purblind statecraft, which because of one Instance wherein the heart rode on to wrack, Forgets ten others, in the whirl of life, Wherein the heart alone has power to save! Come, in the battle do I spill in dust My blood for wages, money, say, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Chartist, and enemy of his country and mankind: To the gallows and the cross with him! Barabbas is our man; Barabbas, we are for Barabbas!" They got Barabbas:—have you well considered what a fund of purblind obduracy, of opaque flunkyism grown truculent and transcendent; what an eye for the phylacteries, and want of eye for the eternal noblenesses; sordid loyalty to the prosperous Semblances, and high-treason ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... where the excellent system of payment of Members is adopted, with salaries "On the higher scale," as they say in the Courts. It is curious that, when I explain to my creditors this most promising source of prospective income, they don't seem to see it! But creditors always were a purblind ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 18, 1893 • Various
... search about. I sprang to my feet, and struck him in the middle of his huge body. The roar he gave roused the children, and a storm as of hail instantly came on, of which not a stone struck me, and not one missed the giant. He fell and lay. Others drew near, and the storm extended, each purblind creature becoming, as he entered the range of a garrisoned tree, a target for converging stones. In a short time almost every giant was prostrate, and a jubilant paean of bird-song rose from the ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... canon's extreme circumspection in his relations to Mademoiselle Gamard. When he came himself to live with that saintly woman he was in the condition of a lover on the point of being made happy. Even if he had not been by nature purblind of intellect, his eyes were too dazzled by his new happiness to allow him to judge of the landlady, or to reflect on the limits which he ought to impose on their daily intercourse. Mademoiselle Gamard, seen from afar and through the prism of those material felicities ...
— The Vicar of Tours • Honore de Balzac
... I say again; it only makes you purblind; don't you see what a wild-goose chase it has led you? The bill is ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... thy battered hack, Thy lean cheek striped with plaster to and fro, Thy long spear levelled at the unseen foe, And doubtful Sancho trudging at thy back, Thou wert a figure strange enough, good lack! To make Wiseacredom, both high and low, Rub purblind eyes, and (having watched thee go) Dispatch its Dogberrys upon thy track: Alas! poor Knight! Alas! poor soul possest? Yet would to-day when Courtesy grows chill, And life's fine loyalties are turned to jest, Some fire of thine might burn within ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... indeed, is admitted by all, both from the structure of the heart and the arrangement and action of its valves. But still they are like persons purblind or groping about in the dark, for they give utterance to various, contradictory, and incoherent sentiments, delivering many things upon conjecture, as we ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... Passion, Louer, Appeare thou in the likenesse of a sigh, Speake but one time, and I am satisfied: Cry me but ay me, Prouant, but Loue and day, Speake to my goship Venus one faire word, One Nickname for her purblind Sonne and her, Young Abraham Cupid he that shot so true, When King Cophetua lou'd the begger Maid, He heareth not, he stirreth not, he moueth not, The Ape is dead, I must coniure him, I coniure thee by Rosalines bright eyes, By her High forehead, and ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... that at last it was over, and no more need of him: I kept that thought. Along the sky-line they held their slow way, toilsome through weakness, the rider with weary swing in the saddle, the horse with long gray neck hanging low to his hoofs, as if picking his path with purblind eyes. When his rider should collapse and fall from his back, not a step further would he take, but stand there till he ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... speaking members, God knows that we have enough. And I suppose that these purblind sheep do have some occult weight that is salutary. They enable a leader to be a leader, and even in that way they are useful. We shall get ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... hissed in the House, and especially as he passed through the Great Hall. This circumstance, together with what I saw that afternoon in every street, convinced me how much our friends were dispirited, and I therefore resolved next day to raise their courage. I knew the First President to be purblind, and such men greedily swallow every new fact which confirms them in their first impression. I knew likewise the Cardinal to be a man that supposed everybody had a back door. The only way of dealing with men of that stamp is to make them believe that you design to deceive those whom you earnestly ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... Lady Yarmouth was called, and sent for Princess Amelia; but they only told the latter that the King was ill and wanted her. She had been confined for some days with a rheumatism, but hurried down, ran into the room without farther notice, and saw her father extended on the bed. She is very purblind, and more than a little deaf They had not closed his eyes: she bent down close to his face, and concluded he spoke to her, though she could not hear him-guess what a shock when she found the truth. She wrote to the Prince of Wales—but so had one of ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... But it is quite another matter whether he ever opens the box or not. And he is as likely to poison as to cure himself, if, without guidance, he swallows the first drug that comes to hand. In these times a man may as well be purblind, as unable to read—lame, as unable to write. But I protest that, if I thought the alternative were a necessary one, I would rather that the children of the poor should grow up ignorant of both these mighty arts, than that they should ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... ragout; or the wit and waggery of a farce, sweet and soft-flowing like a petit-verre, to finish the repast. They go, and between the acts try to count the wax and gas, the feet, and foot lights till they are purblind; they return home and dream of Desdemona, sing themselves to sleep with the notes of the last song, are haunted with the odd physiognomy of Liston, and repeat the farce-laugh till the dream is broken. Next day it is mighty pleasant to read how many hundred people the theatre will ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 360 - Vol. XIII. No. 360, Saturday, March 14, 1829 • Various
... Skinner hooted him down. Three months later, however, when Cappy Ricks had changed his mind, and Mr. Skinner was too heartbroken to curse himself for a purblind idiot, it was too late to place the contracts. Every shipyard in the United States and abroad was loaded up with building orders for three years in advance, and the Blue Star Navigation Company was left to twiddle its corporate thumbs. Matt Peasley was so angry that he almost ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... lots for one to be killed to support the others; they turned back on their route, that they might find the dead bodies of their companions for food. Finally, out of the whole crew, three or four, purblind and staggering from exhaustion, craving for death, arrived at the borders of the colony, where they were kindly ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... said; Dorothea was too much jarred to recover her temper and behave so as to show that she admitted any error in herself. She was disposed rather to accuse the intolerable narrowness and the purblind conscience of the society around her: and Celia was no longer the eternal cherub, but a thorn in her spirit, a pink-and-white nullifidian, worse than any discouraging presence in the "Pilgrim's Progress." The fad of drawing plans! What was life worth—what great faith was possible ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... that is good should be maintained—by pure passions and high actions. They forbid that their noble aim should be frustrated by measuring against each other things which are incommensurate—mechanic against moral power—body against soul. They will not suffer, without expressing their sorrow, that purblind calculation should wither the purest hopes in the face of all-seeing justice. These are times of strong appeal—of deep-searching visitation; when the best abstractions of the prudential understanding give way, and are included and absorbed in a supreme comprehensiveness ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... from our admiration of Johnson, and no trifling enhancement of his friends' kindness in tolerating his eccentricities, that he seldom made allowance for his own palpable and undeniable deficiencies. As well might a blind man deny the existence of colours, as a purblind man assert that there was no charm in a prospect, or in a Claude or Titian, because he could see none. Once, by way of pleasing Reynolds, he pretended to lament that the great painter's genius was not exerted on stuff more durable than canvas, and suggested copper. Sir Joshua ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... We are all purblind, but some are blinder than others who use the various means available for sharpening their eyesight. As an onlooker it seems to me safe to say that the lenses recommended by both the "radicals" and their vivid opponents rather tend to increase than ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... that is, curiously enough as it seems to purblind law-loving man,—should the favored one be openly convicted, that alters not one whit his ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... Pommer anew. His pulses hammered, his senses were aflame; but he remained master of himself, and sternly he resolved to sever these equivocal relations with a woman whom he could no longer respect. The weak, purblind man had been steeled against further temptation by seeing a few hours ago the abyss yawning at his feet, in which an illicit love had threatened to engulf him forever. The image of his mother, noble type of womanhood, rose before his ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... fraught with happy promise for Senator Hanway, what should come waddling into the equation to spoil all, but a purblind, klabber-witted journal of Toronto, just then busy beating the beauties of the Georgian Bay-Ontario Canal into the dull Canadian skull. This imprint, as a reason for Kanuck acquiescence in the great waterway, proceeded to show how its effect would be to strengthen Canada ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... Christ was crucified, before Moses was born, began the terrible and pathetic attempt of a predamned people to raise their heads and walk erect. The first lifting of purblind eyes destined never to see even ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... all this myself; for in a quiet, unconscious way this poor child had manifested even to my purblind eyes the dealings of God's munificence with her. By degrees all the old vain regrets after her beauty had yielded to perfect resignation; and resignation had grown into peace, and peace had been transformed ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... cringed before him, palsied, misshapen, a mere wreck of humanity, might have been a being from another sphere—some underworld of bizarre creatures that crawled purblind ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... that you cannot appeal to him, the more need you should appeal to him! Where one cannot go to God, there is something specially wrong. If you let thought for the morrow, or the next year, or the next month, distress you; if you let the chatter of what is called the public, peering purblind into the sanctuary of motive, annoy you; if you seek or greatly heed the judgment of men, capable or incapable, you set open your windows to the mosquitoes of care, to drown with their buzzing the voice of ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... one seems to know thee, with thy purblind spectacled eyes peering into fusty books and parchments, or bending over thy crucibles and retorts! Truly a novel and interesting sight it would be to see thee assuming wings. In thy philosophy there is naught but dreams of elixirs of life or homunculi. Thy highest aspiration ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... Purblind and short-sighted friends! You will listen to me,—you will sympathize with me; for you know by painful experience what I mean when I say that we near-sighted people do not receive from our hawk-eyed neighbors that sympathy and consideration to which we are justly entitled. ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... minutes. Allow me three to have been spent before I was aware of him, three more will be the outside I can have passed gazing at him. But I speak of "minutes," of course, referring to my ostensible self, that inert, apathetic child who followed its mother, that purblind creature through whose muddy lenses the pent immortal had been forced to see his familiar in the wood, and perchance to dress in form and body what, for him, needed neither to be visible. It was this outward ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... once have been supposed to be lost forever in the woods of America, but thrown upon the bosom of Nature, the breath of God revived it, and the world hath gathered its fruits. Even Ireland has contributed her share to the liberties of America; and while purblind statesmen were happy to get rid of the stubborn Presbyterians of the North, they little thought that they were serving a good cause in another quarter.—Yes! the Volunteers of Ireland still live—they live across the Atlantic. Let this idea animate us in our sufferings, and may the pure ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... good friend Master Martin, you are a rich and a prosperous man, but the best of all the blessings which the good Lord has given you is your lovely daughter Rose. If the hearts of old gentlemen like us who sit in the Town Council are so stirred that we cannot turn away our purblind eyes from the dear child, who can find fault with the young folks if they stop and stand like blocks of wood, or as if spell-bound, when they meet your daughter in the street, or see her at church, though we have a word of blame for our clerical gentry, because on the Allerwiese,[16] or ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... are near shore you will probably be near rocks—an unpleasant complication in a hurried dive. There would, probably, very soon be boats out too, seeking with a machine-gun or pompom for a chance at your occasionally emergent conning-tower. In no way can a submarine be more than purblind, it will be, in fact, practically blind. Given a derelict ironclad on a still night within sight of land, a carefully handled submarine might succeed in groping its way to it and destroying it; but then ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... has regretted a thousand times that she bartered her youth and beauty for life companionship with a tub of tallow, mistaken at the time for a god by a purblind public, but even though it be true, as often asserted, that the old boor gets drunk and beats her, a woman could scarce apply for divorce from a man who has twice been president. Furthermore, association with such a man will lower the ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... no such impression on his fancy as the stories in a wretchedly inferior book made. He did not know the name of this book, or who wrote it; from which I imagine that much of his reading was of the purblind sort that ignorant grown-up people do, without any sort of literary vision. He read this book perpetually, when he was not reading his "Greek and Roman Mythology;" and then suddenly, one day, as happens ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... the most elementary sort; and used to forget genealogies, and to confuse lawsuits and other family feuds, and would have made a most unsatisfactory witness upon any topic on earth, yet she was a ready sympathiser, and a restless but purblind matchmaker—always suggesting or suspecting little romances, and always amazed when the eclaircissement came off. Excellent for condoling—better still for rejoicing—she would, on hearing of a surprising good match, or an unexpected son and heir, or a pleasantly-timed legacy, ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... all our unrest, remained cold, distant and alien—the Jewish girl, Berna. Even in the old man the gold fever betrayed itself in a visionary eye and a tremor of the lips; but the girl was a statue of patient resignation, a living reproof to our febrile and purblind imaginings. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... trifling indulgence to my own notions. If that could be allowed, perhaps I might sometimes (by accident, and without an unpardonable crime) trust as much to my own very careful and very laborious, though perhaps somewhat purblind disquisitions, as to their soaring, intuitive, eagle-eyed authority. But the modern liberty is a precious thing. It must not be profaned by too vulgar an use. It belongs only to the chosen few, who are born ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... out, she went to coole loues burning thirst, Yet ere she went (yet as she went) she hide, She had a care to decke her vp in pride, Respecting more his loue to whom she went, Then parents feare, though knowing to be shent, And trickt her selfe so like a willing louer, As purblind Cupid tooke her for ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale |
