"Withers" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it based on? In the first place, on Christianity—'on the passionate acceptance of an exquisite fairy tale,' said the dreaming spectator to himself, 'which at the first honest challenge of the critical sense withers in our grasp! That challenge Elsmere has never given it, and in all probability never will. No! A man sees none the straighter for having a wife he adores, and a profession that suits him, between him ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... affections. For this there can be no substitute. This deep and steady current of truth and thought, is to the mind in connection with the Spirit's operations, what showers are to the earth. If there are none, it soon becomes parched, and verdure withers; if they descend frequently and copiously, the ground is filled with moisture, vegetation blooms, and fruits ripen; springs burst forth, the streams dash along the valleys, sweep through the meadows, and pouring into the ocean, roll their ...
— The Faithful Steward - Or, Systematic Beneficence an Essential of Christian Character • Sereno D. Clark
... Varro says, that it was used for the purpose of removing, by its own strong scent, the bad smell of the spot where the bodies were burnt, and also of the bodies themselves. It was also said to be so used, because, when once its bark is cut, it withers, and is consequently emblematical of the frail tenure ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... B. Gordon, Henry A. Wise, and William Henry Preston, and Colonels Robert E. Withers and Charles Marshall, delivered eloquent and appropriate speeches, and argued that Richmond is the proper place for the final interment of ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... fanes. What power in me abode! what loveliness! The three vast elements proclaimed me king, Straight from the Sun I sank with gifts to bless The world with living tongue and burning wing. I came, and Man sat caverned with the brute; I nursed him and he rose into a god; I leave him and he withers with the fruit Of ages on the ground his splendour trod. Farewell, you airs and skies from whence I fell, Fond Earth, farewell, and all thy beauty past— And thou, old pulseless Ocean foe, farewell!— All dead! I too shall die, though ...
— The Masque of the Elements • Herman Scheffauer
... religious use of the emblematic flower there are frequent examples. I will only give one from G. Withers, a ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... behind a curve which had given the place the name of Tournevent. It seemed to have sought shelter in this ravine overgrown with grass and rushes, from the keen, salt sea wind—the ocean wind that devours and burns like fire, that drys up and withers like the sharpest frost of winter, just as birds seek shelter in the furrows of the fields in ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... Hobart Ward's 38th New York, which Wilcox has ordered up to support the 1st Michigan, on our extreme right, in this flanking movement, has been misdirected, and is now attacking the Enemy's centre, instead of his left; and Preston's 28th Virginia—which, with Withers's 18th Virginia, has come up to the Rebel left, from Cocke's Brigade, on the Enemy's right—finding the 1st Michigan broken, in the woods, attacks it, and wounds and captures Wilcox. Withers's Regiment has, with a yell—the old "Rebel yell," now rising everywhere from Rebel throats, and so ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... rides him on to the machine. I see she knows her business so I stands beside her 'n' makes her sit him like she ought. It don't take her no time to get wise. Pretty soon she's clear over with a hand on each side of his withers, 'n' him goin' ...
— Blister Jones • John Taintor Foote
... estimable man who had served in the Confederate Senate, now succeeded Arthur L. Boreman of West Virginia. Samuel B. Maxey of Texas, a graduate of West Point, succeeded J. W. Flanagan. Charles W. Jones of Florida succeeded Abijah Gilbert. Robert E. Withers of Virginia succeeded John F. Lewis. Last and most prominent of all, Ex-President Andrew Johnson succeeded ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... at marriages with words that take hold of the upper world, whilst one eye is prowling in the cellar; so that its gravest discourse has a savor of hams and powdering-tubs. Worst, when this sensualism intrudes into the education of young women, and withers the hope and affection of human nature by teaching that marriage signifies nothing but a housewife's thrift, and that woman's life ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... sawbuck tree is by all odds the best, provided it fits. It rarely does. If you can adjust the wood accurately to the anatomy of the individual horse, so that the side pieces bear evenly and smoothly without gouging the withers or chafing the back, you are possessed of the handiest machine made for the purpose. Should individual fitting prove impracticable, get an old LOW California riding-tree and have a blacksmith bolt an upright spike on the cantle. You can hang the loops of the ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... love you." The daisy: "There is no hope." Lily of the valley: "My heart withers in secret." The lilac: "You are my first love." Violets: "I am faithful." You will enjoy hunting ...
— Breakfasts and Teas - Novel Suggestions for Social Occasions • Paul Pierce
... when they found her she was terrified, emaciated and sick, and it was evident that they must have treated her as executioners do, and had she remained longer in their terrible hands she would have withered and perished as a little flower withers and perishes ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... he was a Royalist, but belongs to the literary school of Withers. He is best known by his collection of moral and religious poems, called Divine Emblems, which were accompanied with quaint engraved illustrations. These allegories are full of unnatural conceits, and are many of them borrowed from an older source. He was immensely popular ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... placed, will do much to confound those bumptious sociologists who make haste to rush into print with statistics purporting to show that the Negro Race in America is "fast dying out." The aim of this class of people seems to be to show that the Negro Race withers under the influence of freedom, which is by no means true. It is possibly true that filth and disease does its fatal work in the Negro Race, the same as in other races among the filthy and corrupt, but the filthy and corrupt in the Negro Race, as a class, are growing fewer ...
— History of Negro Soldiers in the Spanish-American War, and Other Items of Interest • Edward A. Johnson
... erected; benches must be arranged, and hand-bills distributed throughout the city. What if the reading succeeds to the height of his wishes? Pass but a day or two, and the whole harvest of praise and admiration fades away, like a flower that withers in its bloom, and never ripens into fruit. By the event, however flattering, he gains no friend, he obtains no patronage, nor does a single person go away impressed with the idea of an obligation conferred ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... sights that need a telescope, or sounds out of reach of the ear. Pride like this has two possibilities. It is a Saint Christopher that will serve only the highest. That unfound, it grows bitter, and shrinks more and more into itself, and withers into hopelessness. But if it find the Highest and draw upon that love too great for change or failure, then all things have a new proportion, for grown up to the shelter of the eternities, human judgments dwindle, and human slights, however they ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... besought to pity the Standard Oil Company for a fine relatively far less great than the fines every day inflicted in the police courts upon multitudes of push cart peddlers and other petty offenders, whose woes never extort one word from the men whose withers are wrung by the woes of the mighty. The stockholders have the control of the corporation in their own hands. The corporation officials are elected by those holding the majority of the stock and can keep office only by having behind them the good-will of these ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... Mecklenburger Queen are distracted; the royal ire withers all before it; but it can't be undone, though they will pass a Marriage Act to make such ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... marquis of Powis; Theophilus, earl of Huntingdon; Robert, earl of Sunderland; John, earl of Melfort; Roger, earl of Castlemain; Nathaniel, lord bishop of Durham; Thomas, lord bishop of Saint David's; Henry, lord Dover; lord Thomas Howard; sir-Edward Hales, sir Francis Withers, sir Edward Lutwych, sir Thomas Jenner, sir Nicholas Butler, sir William Herbert, sir Richard Holloway, sir Richard Heath, sir Roger l'Estrange William Molineux, Thomas Tynde-sly, colonel Townley, colonel Lundy, Robert Brent, Edward Morgan, Philip Burton, Richard Graham, Edward Petre, Obadiah Walker, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... Jericho at dawn; and if we meet it I shall have my camel-drivers round me asking pertinent questions and may be compelled to return with them to Jericho. Come, Jesus, thine ass seems willing to amble down this long incline; and dropping the reins over the animal's withers, and leaning back, holding a puppy under each arm, Jesus allowed the large brown ass he was riding to trot; it was not long before he left far behind the heavy weighted ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... to wish I might flutter towards heaven on natural wings like you, little thrush. Now I can, indeed, outfly you. But whatever I do I'm unhappy, and wherever I go I'm in hell. What is man in his helpless, first spiritual state? He is but a flower, and withers soon. Had I, like the bishop, been less blind, and obeyed my conscience clear, I might have returned to my native earth while Sylvia still sojourns here; and coming thus by virtue of development, I should be able to commune with her. "What is life?" ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... The palace in which Catarina Cornaro spent her girlhood is now a pawnbroker's shop. The last living representative of the haughty house of Lusignan—Kings, in their day, of Cyprus, of Jerusalem, and of Armenia—is said to be a waiter in a French cafe. So royalty withers and power fades. There is no title to nobility save character, and no family pride so unfading as a spotless name. But, though palace and family have both decayed, the beautiful girl who was once the glory of Venice and whom great artists loved to paint, sends us across the ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... loudly of the children she had left fast locked up in her little place, that she could but just pay the rent for. Here, too, were young girls, children with an aged, worn look, like the fruit that withers to half its size before it ripens. Most heartrending of all, persons of real refinement were mingled up with this rude mass; poor wretches who had indeed seen better days, and their helpless, broken-hearted looks, the remnants of early ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... see Poverty and Waste, by Hartley Withers, 1914, written before the war, which has driven its ...
— Progress and History • Various
... soul from sinking to despair! No friend's consoling voice can penetrate His dreary dungeon walls. Should he fall sick! Ah! In the vapors of the murky vault He must fall sick. Even as the Alpine rose Grows pale and withers in the swampy air, There is no life for him but in the sun And in the breath of Heaven's fresh-blowing airs. Imprison'd! Liberty to him is breath; He cannot live ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... vilest deeds, like poison weeds, Bloom well in prison air; It is only what is good in Man That wastes and withers there; Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate, And the Warder ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... on the livery of greatness, While genius idle withers from the sight, And in its triumph takes no note of lateness, For time exists not in ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... and rose, Withers once more the old blue flower of day: There where the ether like a diamond glows, ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... friend, how stronger far than I; As from Experience—that sure port serene— Thou look'st; and straight, a coldness wraps the sky, The summer glory withers from the scene, Scared by the solemn spell; behold them fly, The godlike images that seem'd so fair! Silent the playful Muse—the rosy Hours Halt in their dance; and the May-breathing flowers Pall from the sister-Graces' waving hair. Sweet-mouth'd Apollo breaks ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... scene of bustle. No words were spoken; no further orders given. With the skill of long practice the men gathered their few belongings, shook out the dingy horse-blankets and then, carefully folding, laid them creaseless back of the gaunt withers of their faithful mounts. The worn old saddles were deftly set, the crude buckles of the old days, long since replaced by cincha loop, snapped into place; lariats coiled and swung from the cantle-rings; dusty old bits and ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... and turned in the saddle. "His voice has a familiar sound," said he. He shaded his eyes with his hand, and looked down the slope at the pursuer, who came on crouching low upon the withers of his ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... This morning Withers's battery passed Mr. Elder's on their way to Port Hudson, and stopped to get water. There were several buckets served by several servants; but I took possession of one, to their great amusement. What a profusion of thanks over a can of water! It made me smile, and they ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... too-can draw the most astonishing comparisons to confound the minds of stupid jurors, and make them believe the d—dest nonsense that ever man invented. Yes, sir-when he makes a speech, everybody goes to hear him, for he says what he pleases, and old Judge Withers, whose will is as arbitrary as Julius Caesar's, and has got the obstinacy of Tom Boyce's mule, dar'n't attempt to control the tenor of his plea. And he can tell the best invented story of any man ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... what thou wouldst be, let No "If" arise on which to lay the blame. Man makes a mountain of that puny word, But, like a blade of grass before the scythe, It falls and withers when a human will, Stirred by creative force, sweeps toward ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... ye neglect the tree, and take no thought for its nourishment, behold it will not get any root; and when the heat of the sun cometh and scorcheth it, because it hath no root it withers away, and ye pluck it up ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous
... considered how each man's heart is so tremulously responsive to the hearts of all men; hast thou noted how omnipotent is the very sound of many men? How their shriek of indignation palsies the strong soul; their howl of contumely withers with unfelt pangs? The Ritter Gluck confessed that the ground-tone of the noblest passage, in one of his noblest Operas, was the voice of the Populace he had heard at Vienna, crying to their Kaiser: Bread! Bread! Great is the combined voice of men; the utterance of their instincts, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... step stove it was, two caps below and two higher up. The Burwells had seen to it that their daughter did not go empty-handed to her man. She had a flock tick, quilts, coverlids, and a cow. But, old Granny Withers, a midwife from Caney Creek, sitting in the chimney corner sucking her pipe the night of the wedding, vowed that all would not be well with the pair. Hadn't a bat flitted into the room right over Talithie's head when the elder was speaking the words ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... a wonderful author is Monsieur Voltaire! How lucidly he exposes the folly of this crazy plan for raising the entire revenue of the country from a single tax on land! how he withers it with his irony! how he makes you laugh whilst he is convincing you! how sure one feels that the proposal is killed by his wit and economic penetration: killed never to be mentioned ...
— Great Catherine • George Bernard Shaw
... Sprightliness, or Humanity, or Piety, to its full Spread, and ripen it to a sudden Maturity! But, oh, who shall teach those that have never felt it, how it tears the very Soul; when GOD roots up the tender Plant with an inexorable Hand, and withers the Bud in which the Colours were beginning to glow! Where is now our Delight? Where is our Hope? Is it in the Coffin? Is it in the Grave? Alas! all the Loveliness of Person, of Genius, and of Temper, serves but to point and to poison the Arrow, which ...
— Submission to Divine Providence in the Death of Children • Phillip Doddridge
... to them, but this changes to deep brown. All that part of the stalk that is exposed seems as if it had been pricked with needles, and had exuded blood from every puncture; and the grain in the ear withers in proportion to the number of fungi that intercept and feed upon its sap; but the parts of the stalks that are covered by the leaves remain entirely uninjured; and, when the leaves are drawn off from them, they form a beautiful contrast to the ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... roll! The English voices of the chatting men crouched upon their beasts' withers or sprawling on the limbers, the trampling and snorting of the horses, the sharp signal-whistles of the leaders, the curt utterances of command, mingled with the stream of thought that raced through the busy brain of ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... comes a cataract of rain. The big drops sift through the pine-needles, plash and patter on the granite pavements, and pour down the sides of ridges and domes in a network of gray, bubbling rills. In a few minutes the cloud withers to a mesh of dim filaments and disappears, leaving the sky perfectly clear and bright, every dust-particle wiped and washed out of it. Everything is refreshed and invigorated, a steam of fragrance rises, and the storm is finished—one cloud, one lightning-stroke, and ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... seemed a country empty of man, though sometimes they came on derelict ploughlands and towns of crumbling brick charred and glazed by fire. In sweltering days they struggled through flats where the grass was often higher than a horse's withers, and forded the tawny streams which brought down the snows of the hills. Now and then they would pass wandering herdsmen, who fled to some earth-burrow at their appearance. The Constable had bidden them make for the rising sun, saying that sooner or later they would foregather ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... gather it—it withers on my breast; The heart's-ease dies when it is laid on mine; Methinks there is no shape by Joy possess'd, Would better fare than thou, upon ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... there was published "The Great Assises holden in Parnassus by Apollo and his assessours" a facsimile of the title of which is given on page 57. This work is anonymous but is usually ascribed to George Withers and in it Bacon as Lord Verulan is placed first and designated "Chancellor of Parnassus" ...
— Bacon is Shake-Speare • Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence
... of the whole physical universe. In this respect it is related in the same sense as, for example, the finger of a hand to the entire human body. Separate the finger from the hand and it cannot remain a finger: it withers away. Such would also be the fate of the human body were it removed from that body of which it is a member,—from the conditions of life with which the earth provides it. Let it be raised above the surface of the earth but a sufficient ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... Sheet 24. A hollow cup-shaped vesicle from the brain grows out towards an at first hollow cellular ingrowth from the epidermis. The cavity within the wall of the cup derived from the brain is obliterated, [and the stalk withers,] the cup becomes the retina, and -its stalk- [thence fibres grow back to the brain to form] the optic nerve. The cellular ingrowth is the lens. The remainder of the eye-structures are of mesoblastic origin, except the superficial epithelium of the cornea. The ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells
... too. Good to rest once in a way. Wonder if it's bad to go with them then. Safe in one way. Turns milk, makes fiddlestrings snap. Something about withering plants I read in a garden. Besides they say if the flower withers she wears she's a flirt. All are. Daresay she felt 1. When you feel like that you often meet what you feel. Liked me or what? Dress they look at. Always know a fellow courting: collars and cuffs. Well cocks and lions do the same and stags. Same time might prefer a tie undone or something. Trousers? ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... potential singers. For fate has thrown most of our poets quite on their own resources, so that they have been obliged to live in the large cities, supporting life within the various kinds of hack-harness into which the uncommercially shaped withers of Pegasus can be forced. Such harness, I mean, as journalism, editing, compiling, reading for publishers, hack-article writing, and so on. Fate has also seen to it that the poet's make-up is seldom ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... the Nettleton station, the descending mob caught them on its tide, and they were swept out into a vague dusty square thronged with seedy "hacks" and long curtained omnibuses drawn by horses with tasselled fly-nets over their withers, who stood swinging their depressed heads drearily from ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... this vagabond of noble family, wheeling suddenly in his tracks, had thrown himself into a cause which was all sacrifice, courage, and unselfish patriotism—a holy warfare. The last bitter thrust of the Duke had touched no raw flesh, his withers were unwrung. Gifted to thrust in return, and with warrant to do so, he put aside the temptation, and answered ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the opposite of this. It is not the unreceptive, but the impulsively receptive life. It is not too hard, or too soft, but it is too thin. It is a superficial soil which has no depth of earth, and so with joy it receives the word; but the seed has no depth of earth and quickly withers away. This sort of soil receives quickly and as quickly lets go. It is like that unstable man of whom St. James writes and who is like the wave of the sea, driven with the wind and tossed. We see the wave come flashing up out of the general level, catching the sunshine as it leaps and crowned ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... tooth showing changes at different ages. 56. Teeth showing uneven wear occurring in old horses. 57. Fistula of jaw. 58. A large hock caused by a punctured wound of the joint. 59. A large inflammatory growth following injury. 60. Fistula of the withers. 61. Shoulder abscess caused by loose-fitting harness. 62. A piece of the wall of the horse's stomach showing bot-fly larvae attached. 63. Biting louse. 64. Sucking louse. 65. Nits attached to hair. 66. Sheep-tick. 67. Sheep scab mite. ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... more death the more millions. The more horror and devastation the heavier will be our coffers. The more the people groan the more we will shout. The more they die the more we will live. The more the flag is torn the more our damask curtains will flutter. The more liberty perishes and withers from the earth the more we shall plant ourselves and flourish and rule and reign over a nation that we have destroyed and a people whom we have enslaved. If Mr. Clews wishes any further outline of the history ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... the thin layer of earth which covers a ledge of stone. Seed which falls into such soil springs up most quickly because warmed by the underlying rock; but as the roots cannot strike downward, the grain soon withers beneath the scorching sun. So there are hearers who receive with joy the message of life, but when subjected to the persecution and trials which followers of Christ must endure, they ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... the shows of beauty shed around This fair false world her wings to earth have bound; Unto the Love of Loves aloft she flies. Nay, things that suffer death, quench not the fire Of deathless spirits; nor eternity Serves sordid Time, that withers all things rare. Not love but lawless impulse is desire: That slays the soul; our love makes still more fair Our friends on earth, fairer in ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... has eclipsed them all as completely as the sun eclipses the stars. Even now, you see, after all these years, in an old man's memoirs, the Emperor is still true to his traditions, and will not brook any opposition. As I draw his words and his deeds I feel that my own poor story withers before them. And yet if it had not been for that story I should not have had an excuse for describing to you my first and most vivid impressions of him, and so it has served a purpose after all. You must bear with me now while I tell you of our expedition to the ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the fortifications of a fortress, than ordinary field works. Marlborough and Eugene had seen from hour to hour the progress of these formidable works, and resolved to mask their front attack by a strong demonstration on the enemy's rear. The troops coming up from Tournai, under General Withers, were ordered not to join the main army; but to cross the Haine at Saint Ghislain, and to attack the extreme left of the enemy at the farm of La Folie. Baron Schulemberg was to attack the left flank of the entrenchments in the ...
— The Cornet of Horse - A Tale of Marlborough's Wars • G. A. Henty
... explained to him the sufferings of the people there,—and only General Pierce's double who had given the orders for the assault on that town, which was invaded the next day. My charming friend, George Withers, has, I am almost sure, a double, who preaches his afternoon sermons for him. This is the reason that the theology often varies so from that of the forenoon. But that double is almost as charming as the original. Some of the most well-defined men, who stand out most prominently on the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... calls their followers and eat animal for him. Is allowed to pick fruit, but branches of tree are sharp knives on which he is cut. He puts two of oranges on his spear and it flies away to his home. He dies and lawed vine at his house withers. Giant uses his skin to cover end of drum, puts his hair on roof of house and places his head at gate of town. Wife gives birth to child, which grows one span each time it is bathed. While still very small child angers old woman who tells him of his ...
— Traditions of the Tinguian: A Study in Philippine Folk-Lore • Fay-Cooper Cole
... faith, autocracy and tyranny die. Under such a law every evil withers, every question is unravelled. There are no more problems of poverty and riches, ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... voice yodling and calling to her from afar. It is not to be wondered at that Ilka did not thrive in Berlin as well as her mother did; just as the tender-petaled alpine rose can only breathe the cool breezes of its native mountains, and withers and droops ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... thou bravest, gentlest mind, Thy country's friend, but more of human kind. O born to arms! O worth in youth approved! O soft humanity in age beloved! For thee the hardy veteran drops a tear, And the gay courtier feels the sigh sincere Withers, adieu! yet not will thee remove Thy martial spirit, or thy social love! Amidst corruption, luxury, and rage, Still leave some ancient virtues to our age: Nor let us say (those English glories gone) The last true ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... with his shining steel, To shape the circle of the bending wheel,) Cut down it lies, tall, smooth, and largely spread, With all its beauteous honours on its head There, left a subject to the wind and rain, And scorch'd by suns, it withers on the plain Thus pierced by Ajax, Simoisius lies Stretch'd on the ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... affection and to make the happy home ridiculous: a truly deplorable work, which the incriminated dramatists were discreet enough for the most part to avoid. The remark brings us to the first of the half-truths, which cause the complexity of the subject. The dramatists whose withers the well-intentioned and disastrous Collier wrung seem to have thought their best answer was to pose as people with a mission—certainly Congreve so posed—to reform the world with an exhibition of its follies. An amusing answer, no doubt, of which the ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... observed by a profound adept in human physiology, that if a woman waxes fat with the progress of years, her tenure of life is somewhat precarious, but if haply she withers as she grows old, she lives forever. Such promised to be the case with William the Testy, who grew tough in proportion as he dried. He had withered, in fact, not through the process of years, but through the tropical fervor of his soul, which burnt like a vehement rush-light in his bosom, ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... the bristling withers of the barasingh with his right hand, held the torch away with his left, and stepped out of the shrine into the desperate night. There was no breath of wind, but the rain nearly drowned the flare as the great deer hurried down the slope, sliding on his haunches. ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... "it was but one of those antiques that have their date, indeed, from the beginning of the world, but which Nature eternally withers and renews." So saying, he showed Glyndon a small herb with a pale-blue flower, and then placed it carefully in ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Expell'd and exil'd from the blissful seats, To dismal realms, and regions void of peace, Where furies ever howl, and serpents hiss. O'er the sad plains perpetual tempests sigh, And pois'nous vapours, black'ning all the sky, With livid hue the fairest face o'ercast, And every beauty withers at the blast: Where e'er they fly their lover's ghosts pursue, Inflicting all those ills which once they knew; Vexation, Fury, Jealousy, Despair, Vex ev'ry eye, and every bosom tear; Their foul deformities by all descry'd, No maid to flatter, and ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... you are after." Jesus said: "John came neither eating or drinking and ye say, Behold a wine bibber and a glutton." So it is the world never did understand an unselfish life. It is a small thing to be judged by a man that withers as grass. "If I yet please man, I should not be the servant ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... a last embrace.' There is not one halfpenny's worth of sentiment about it in the Englishman's case, nor are any such thoughts bred in his brain while youth is in him. It is in our midway days, with old age touching us here and there, as autumn 'lays its fiery finger on the leaves' and withers them, that we first think of it. When the weight of anxiety and care is growing on us, while the shoulders are becoming bowed (not in resignation, but in weakness) which have to bear it; when our pains are more and more constant, our pleasures few and fading, and when ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... The rose withers, the blossom blasteth, The flower fades, the morning hasteth, The sun sets, the shadow flies, The gourd ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... familiar looks unearthly indications of the coming change; a dread disease, in which the struggle between soul and body is so gradual, quiet, and solemn, and the result so sure, that day by day, and grain by grain, the mortal part wastes and withers away, so that the spirit grows light and sanguine with its lightening load, and, feeling immortality at hand, deems it but a new term of mortal life; a disease in which death and life are so strangely blended, that death takes the glow and hue of ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... with ale, or viler liquors, 645 Did'st inspire WITHERS, PRYN , and VICKARS, And force them, tho' it was in spite Of nature and their stars, to write; Who, as we find in sullen writs, And cross-grain'd works of modern wits, 650 With vanity, opinion, want, The wonder of the ignorant, The praises of the author, ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... Trade and Commerce was Hon. George E. Foster. He looked over the Grain Bill, passed his hand along its withers and patted it on the rump. Then he sat down and made a copy of it, idealizing it by injecting a few "betterments," then trotted it out for inspection with tail and mane plaited and bells on its patent-leather surcingle. ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... Mameluke oppressors, or keeps them in repair; and within them there are no more chants, no prayers to Allah. Night after night they pass in an infinity of silence. Piety contents itself with not destroying them; leaving them there at the mercy of time and the sun and the wind which withers and crumbles them. And all around are the signs of ruin. Tottering cupolas show us irreparable cracks; the halves of broken arches are outlined to-night in shadow against the mother-of-pearl light of the ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... enameled page unrolled Like autumn's gilded pageant, 'neath a sun That withers not for ancient kings undone Or gods decaying in ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... utterly cruel that when it cannot kill animals by its baleful gaze, it turns upon herbs and plants, and fixing its gaze on them withers them up. ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... offense, it appears, to some of the gensd'armes of the Press, by his satirical sketches of the literary profession. Those whose withers are unwrung will admit the truth of many pages and laugh at the caricature in the rest. In the last number of the North British Review is a clever article upon the subject, written with good temper and good sense. Hitherto publishers have been ridiculed and declaimed against as "tyrants" ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... remembered that we do it perhaps reluctantly, but certainly in obedience to the imperious commands of a duty paramount to all form and ceremony, which dictates that truth must be investigated, no matter what galled jade may feel its withers wrung by it. ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... the man clung fast to his heaving sides and to his flying mane, silent, motionless, inexorable, letting him do what he would, but fixed as Fate upon his purpose. Over Hankley Down, through Thursley Marsh, with the reeds up to his mud-splashed withers, onward up the long slope of the Headland of the Hinds, down by the Nutcombe Gorge, slipping, blundering, bounding, but never slackening his fearful speed, on went the great yellow horse. The villagers of Shottermill heard the ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... my old friend and schoolfellow, Jack Withers, one day last September. On the previous morning, on my way to the India House, I had run up against a stout individual on Cornhill, and on looking in his face as I stopped for a moment to apologise, an abrupt "This is surely Jack Withers," ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... it be possible that in a handful of centuries the Christian character has fallen away from an imposing heroism that scorned even the stake, the cross, and the axe, to a poor little effeminacy that withers and wilts under an unsavoury smell? We are not prepared to believe so, the reverend Doctor and his friend ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... A voice is saying, Proclaim! and I said, What shall I proclaim? All flesh is grass and all its beauty like a flower of the field. Grass withers, flower fades, when Jehovah's breath blows eternal upon it, Grass withers, flower fades, but the word of our ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... a mail for England. In vain he apologises for the non-arrival of ships; there is something radically wrong in his department, for which he is expected to answer; and dark denunciations are muttered in his ear, until worn out with anxiety and nervousness, he loses his appetite, and gradually withers away, ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... means sending a bullet through the upper part of the neck near the withers, and by this means a quagga can be knocked over and captured. The shot, if properly directed, does not kill the animal. It soon recovers, and may be easily "broken," though its spirit is generally ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... find no fault with it. Bill Withers and his brother Jack come along by, talking, and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... these girls but we never see them occupied), or slave in a factory (where there is no change of shift as in the munition factories of the European countries in war time), or work from morning until night as a general servant—"one in help"—wilts and withers, grows pasee, fanee, is liable to ultimate breakdown unless rescued by ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the machinery of international trade, reference should be made to Hartiey Withers' Money Changing (5s.), or Clare's A.B.C. of the Foreign Exchanges (3s.); an outline of the subject will be found in any good general text-book on Economics. On the financial situation, see articles on "Lombard Street in War" and "The ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... mebby five miles before ever he succumbs. With this yere augur hole play it's different. The wolf has to lick the arsenic-tallow out with his tongue an' the p'isen has time an' gets in its work. That wolf sort o' withers right thar in his tracks. At the most he ain't further away than the nearest water; arsenic makin' 'em plenty thirsty, ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... looked up at him in a bored way, but he still held. Skag went back to Carlin. Ian Deal had partly risen. The American did not catch his eye, and now Kala Khan stood between them, Carlin still holding the rein. Skag's hand rested upon the wet trembling withers, where the saddle had covered. There was a blue glisten to the moisture. Skag loved the Arab very hard that moment, and no less afterward. Kala Khan needed care at once. His wound was long and deep, from the hock on the inside, up to ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... immortal, these are the inevitable results. He never looks up again; he has lost all care for good report; by slow degrees the ruin of his life goes on, until it is consummated all round; all that is great in his soul fades, withers away, ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... and then down irresistibly—a crashing, monumental hand. She delighted in his great, solid head as it swung slowly from side to side, and his calm, proud eye—a governing, compelling and determined eye. She had never met his glance yet: she withered away before it as a mouse withers and shrinks and falls to its den before a cat's huge glare. She used to look at him from the curbstone in front of the chemist's shop, or on the opposite side of the road, while pretending to wait for ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... ride with a simple halter and a stick, yet sometimes travel, at least in the larger island, at a desperate gallop. As the horses usually have panniers, the rider sits sideways over the withers, and if the panniers are empty they go at full speed in this position ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... London, after the collapse of Mississippi schemes and South Sea bubbles, were here repeated on a greater scale and in more aggravated form. To most, the loss of wealth was loss of ancestry, repute, respectability, decency, recognition of their fellows—all. Small wonder that their withers were fearfully wrung, and their wails piteous. Enterprise and prosperity were frozen as in a sea of everlasting ice, and guardians of trusts, like Ugolino, plunged their robber fangs into the scalps and entrails of the ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... with Verschoyle and a poor relation of his, a Miss Vibart Withers, for chaperone, Clara left London in a 60 h.p. Fiat, which voraciously ate up the Bath Road at the rate of a mile every minute and a half.... It was good to be out of the thick heat of London, invaded by foreigners and provincials and turned ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... with its religious beliefs, no relation to its ethical conceptions. The whole ideal set forth was not that which really inspired the nation, but at best that which was supposed to inspire the court; and the whole drama, like a tree transplanted to an alien soil, withers and dies for lack of the nourishment which the tragedy of the Greeks unconsciously imbibed from its encompassing air of ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... but the old man, unsoftened by his brother's death, using it even as a further means of speculation, gets rid of the unfortunate lover by gingerly helping him to go abroad. Years pass, and Eugenie's mother dies, while she herself withers, under the miser's avaricious tyranny. At length, old Grandet pays his debt to nature, and Eugenie is left with the millions. Until now she had waited for the wandering lover's return; but he, engaging in the slave-trade, has lost all the generous impulses of his youth, and ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... work wherever any vegetable structure adorns the ground, and takes to itself its favorite robe. We have outgrown the charming fancy of the Greeks that every tree has its Dryad that lives in it, animates it, and dies when the tree withers. But we ought, for the truth's sake, to believe that a life-spirit inhabits every flower and shrub, and protects it against the prowling forces of destruction. Look at a full-sized oak, the rooted Leviathan of the fields. Judging by your senses and by the scales, you would say that ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... lingers, and I linger on the shore, And the individual withers, and the world is more ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... But Tryon's withers could be no further wrung. He merely felt sorry for Druro. The widow was showing herself to be no saint under affliction. Not here the bright companion on a weary road who is better than silken ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... easily on her bit, gliding over the ground smoothly and springily; the horse shaking his head, and every now and then tearing madly at the reins, without being able to gain a hair's breadth on the iron hands that never moved from his withers. ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... pork and greens fur dinner that day, with the best corn-bread I ever eat anywheres, and buttermilk, and sweet potato pie. We got 'em at the house of a feller named Withers—Old Daddy Withers. Which if they was ever a nicer old man than him, or a nicer old woman than his wife, I never ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... take hold of life and mould and knead it into more beautiful and useful forms. Domestic selection it is called. Does he wish horses which are fast, he selects the fastest. He studies the physics of velocity in relation to equine locomotion, and with an eye to withers, loins, hocks, and haunches, he segregates his brood mares and his stallions. And behold, in the course of a few years, he has a thoroughbred stock, swifter of foot than any ever in the ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... mines had been opened in the county, in which a village calling itself a city had grown big enough to have a newspaper and Fourth of July orations. It was plain that the successful issue of the long process would make the heirs of the late Malachi Withers possessors of an ample fortune, and it was also plain that the firm of Penhallow and Bradshaw were like to receive, in such case, the largest fee that had gladdened the professional ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... God, would save me in the day Of Thy fierce anger? only Saviour Thou. Preoccupy my heart, and turn away And cover up mine eyes from frantic fear, And stop mine ears lest I be driven astray: For one stands ever dinning in mine ear How my gray Father withers in the blight Of love for me, who cruel am and dear; And how my Mother through this lingering night Until the day, sits tearless in her woe, Loathing for love of me the happy light Which brings to pass a concourse and a show To glut the hungry faces merciless, ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... hellish doctrine is stamped out from her shores that she will become a nation of mental pygmies and nonentities, as she has long since learned that Catholicism is nothing more nor less than a poisonous breath that withers intellect and causes nations to decay and sink to ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... looked out along the road. Far off on the hillside was a horse, ridden furiously on the downward road, and though dwarfed by the miles, she could see the rider flogging and his urgent crouch over the horse's withers. It was a picture of mad speed, of terror and violence, and struck her with a chill. Were the Kafirs risen? she queried. Was there war abroad? Was ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... Union line concealed by the woods; they march right up to the ranks where the red-barred flag is flying! What can it mean? Neither side fires. There must surely be some mistake. Hark! now the blue line discovers—too late—that the mass is the enemy, and half the line withers in the point-blank discharge. They are swept from the ground. Jack is trembling—demoniac. The gray mass springs forward; they have seized the guns—four of them—and turn them upon the disappearing blue. Then a hoarse shout of delirious triumph. The guns are lost; the day is lost, for now ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... that Islam is dying and that nobody cares; others that, if she withers in Europe and Asia, she will renew herself in Africa and will return—terrible—after certain years, at the head of all the nine sons of Ham; others dream that the English understand Islam as no one else does, and, in years to be, Islam will admit this and the world will be changed. If you go ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... attack any single organ of the human frame, but it withers all that is human—mind, body, and soul. It strikes our youth at the unhappy moment when they first cross the thresholds of vice. For them the spring has no more innocent freshness; their very friendships are polluted by ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... the leather curtains was drawn back, and my heart was quickened by the sight of a pale girl face, with eyes of blue, and brown curls lying upon the slender neck. Her glance lighted on me, swordless and in the midst of that company of troopers, and I bowed low upon the withers of my horse, doffing ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... to the grave together—all alike conscious that every day which sent its light through their melancholy casements, only brought them nearer to a death of misery! But I must say no more of this. My heart withered within me as I looked at the towers of the Temple. It almost withers within me, at this moment, when I think of them. They are leveled long since; but while I write I see them before me again, a sepulchre; I see the mustering of that crowd of more than savages before the grim gate; and I see the pale glimmer of that floating lamp, which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... Sumba, and Philippines. Other breeds are specified by Zollinger in the 'Journal of the Indian Archipelago' volume 5 page 343 etc.) Some of the breeds present great differences in size, shape of ears, length of mane, proportions of the body, form of the withers and hind quarters, and especially in the head. Compare the race- horse, dray-horse, and a Shetland pony in size, configuration, and disposition; and see how much greater the difference is than between the seven or eight other living ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... Finnish carriages, are those strange wooden hoops over the horses' withers so familiar on the Russian droschky, but perhaps most extraordinary of all are the strong shafts fixed inside the wheels, while the traces from the collar are secured to the axle itself outside the wheel. That seemed a novelty to our mind any way, and reminded ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... Sensmeir, of Evansville, Ind., late at night, grabbed her purse, and started to run. Patrolman Withers, who happened by, shot the purse from the hand of one of the men as he ran up an alley, ...
— Owen Clancy's Happy Trail - or, The Motor Wizard in California • Burt L. Standish
... week in which the first fruits of success were offered to her lips—bowl after bowl. It did not matter that her splendid salary had not begun. The world seemed satisfied with the promise. She began to get letters and cards. A Mr. Withers—whom she did not know from Adam—having learned by some hook or crook where she resided, bowed ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... perished. The former endure, because, being simple in their nature, they represent a human impulse, an impulse which animated the prehistoric ancestor as well as the modern descendant. When this tendency ceases to operate, the plant suddenly withers. So it is that an elimination of these beliefs, which formed the science of remote antiquity, has taken place in our own century, which has worked a change greater than fifty preceding generations, because it has been able to introduce generalizations with which ancient notions and habits ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various
... enemy does not scruple to enter the rightful kingdom of woman to rob, murder, and to destroy, and to lay in ruins all that before was bright and beautiful. The strong man is made helpless under its influence, all loveliness withers at its touch, the darkness of its shadow shuts out the sunlight, and its breath of death is over all. While this is true we ought surely to act as if we believed it to be true, and do all in our power to bar the door against this destroyer. As women to ...
— Why and how: a hand-book for the use of the W.C.T. unions in Canada • Addie Chisholm
... as a lion, strong as a horse, strong as an ox, strong as brandy; sound as a roach; in fine feather, in high feather; built like a brick shithouse; like a giant refreshed. Adv. strongly &c. adj.; by force &c. n.; by main force &c. (by compulsion) 744. Phr. "our withers are unwrung" [Hamlet]. Blut und Eisen[Ger]; coelitus mihi vires[Lat]; du fort au diable[Fr]; en habiles gens[Lat]; ex vi termini; flecti non frangi[Lat]; "he that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill" [Burke]; "inflexible ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... back! Once more the gleams Of your lost Eden haunt our dreams, Where Evil, at the touch of Good, Withers in the Enchanted Wood: Fairies, come back! Drive gaunt Despair And Famine to their ghoulish lair! Tap at each heart's bright window-pane ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... base villain! Now, Charles, am I again thine own. Beggar, did he say! then is the world turned upside down, beggars are kings, and kings are beggars! I would not change the rags he wears for the imperial purple. The look with which he begs must, indeed, be a noble, a royal look, a look that withers into naught the glory, the pomp, the triumphs of the rich and great! Into the dust with thee, glittering baubles! (She tears her pearls from her neck.) Let the rich and the proud be condemned to bear the burden of gold, and ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... upper layer, will tumble into a pitfall of legs and mandibles. The least thing is enough to jeopardize its existence; and this least thing has every chance of being brought about in the disordered heap of caterpillars. The egg, a tiny cylinder, transparent as crystal, is extremely delicate: a touch withers it, the least pressure ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... and on his left Hanson's completed that portion of the line. Jackson's brigade reported to Breckinridge and was placed on the east side of the Lebanon road, on commanding ground, a little in the advance of the right of Adams. On the other side of the river the right of Withers's division rested at the bank, near the intersection of the turnpike with the railroad, and was slightly in advance of Hanson's right. It extended southwardly across the Wilkinson pike to the Triune or Franklin road, ...
— The Army of the Cumberland • Henry M. Cist
... also, in general, full two inches taller than any Esquimaux dog we have seen; but those met with in 1818, in the latitude of 76°, appear to come nearest to it in that respect. The tallest dog at Igloolik stood two feet one inch from the ground, measured at the withers; the average height was about two inches less ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... There is a halo fair to see, With "unwrung withers" we afford Our salutation to milord, As due unto his ancient house, Albeit his lordship be a chouse. And riches dazzle us—we know How much they might or should bestow: But power is nothing, sans the will, Often recalcitrant to ill: And yet the mob will stand and gaze On each, with similar amaze. ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... (in affected terror). I own that that utterance chills me— It withers my bloom! With awful emotion it thrills me— That voice from the tomb! Oh, spectre, won't anything lay thee? Though pained to deny or gainsay thee, In this case I cannot obey thee, Thou ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... of mirth and glee and music before his coming, dies in her throat, how the little ones, full of merriment all day long, tremblingly hide in the corner, or withdraw from the room; see how the intrusion of this grim spectre of malcontent shuts the door upon domestic peace and happiness, and withers every pious resolve to make home the dearest, sweetest, most contented and most sacred spot on earth, and then calculate how long, under such disheartening surroundings, woman will be able all by herself, and without any man to help her, ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... keenly at her. "No! where you launch the lightning that either withers or kindles ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... how ignorant this contemptible quality of envy becomes under the lenses of practical life. "Base envy withers at another's joy." What has caused it? In nine cases out of every ten, it is simply the one-sided view of an ignorant mind, which sees only the bare result of unceasing efforts. Envy sees Fame on the peak. Envy therefore hates Fame, and declares that there are ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... the repairs and the alterations, of nature! With no sound of hammer or saw or stone severed from stone, but a music of rustles and ripe thumps on the grass come the fluttering leaves and mellow fruits which the wind tumbles all day from the branches. Silently all droops, all withers, all is poured back into the earth that it may recreate; all sleeps while the busy architects of day and night ply their silent work elsewhere. The same serenity reigns when all at once the soil yields ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... lame in fingers, Crooked in back, with every tooth Rattling in my head, yet, 'sooth, I'm content, so life but lingers. Gnaw my withers, rack my bones, Life, ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... light-beams that are urged from the central sun by its impelling force than the spirit must be receiving, by momentary communication, the gift of life from God if it is to live. Cut off the sunbeam from the sun and it dies, and the house is dark; cut off the life from the root and it withers, and the creature shrivels. The Christian man lives only by continual derivation of life from God; and for ever and ever the secret of his being and of his blessedness is not that he has become a possessor, but that he has become a partaker, of the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... the self is all that man can know Of Beauty, all the wonder, all the power, All the unearthly colour, all the glow, Here in the self which withers like a flower; Here in the self which fades as hours pass, And droops and dies and rots and is forgotten Sooner, by ages, than the mirroring glass In which it sees its glory still unrotten. Here in the flesh, within the flesh, behind, Swift in the blood and throbbing on ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... as the Orange River, the western part of Bechuanaland, and the wide expanse of Damaraland have a quite trifling rainfall, ranging from four or five to ten inches in the whole year. Under the intense heat of the sun this moisture soon vanishes, the surface bakes hard, and the vegetation withers. All this region is therefore parched and arid, much of it, in fact, a desert, and ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... the most human pig that ever breathed, adored by Ben Flint, who, not having given the beast one second's pain in all its beatific life, was, in his turn, loved by the pig as only a few men are loved by a dog—and there, sitting on the pig's powerful withers, his blue smock full of wilted daisies, is little eight-year-old tow-headed Andrew Lackaday making a daisy chain, which eventually he twines round ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... thickets of tangled undergrowth of a great forest. To her the ex-clerk of old Hudig appeared as remote, as brilliant, as terrible, as necessary, as the sun that gives life to these lands: the sun of unclouded skies that dazzles and withers; the sun beneficent and wicked—the giver of light, perfume, and pestilence. She had watched him—watched him close; fascinated by love, fascinated by danger. He was alone now—but for her; and she saw—she thought she saw—that he was like a man afraid of something. Was it possible? He ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... the grass, Or like the morning flow'r; If one sharp blast sweep o'er the field, It withers in an hour. ...
— The Otterbein Hymnal - For Use in Public and Social Worship • Edmund S. Lorenz
... mighty, and gold for the meek, And gold for whoever shall dare to seek? Untold Is the gold; And it lies in the reach of the man that's bold: In the hands of the man who dares to face The death in the blast, that blows apace; That withers the leaves on the forest tree; That fetters with ice all the northern sea; That chills all the green on the fair earth's breast, And as certainly kills as the un-stayed pest. It lies in the hands of the man who'd sell His hold on his life for an ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... E.F. BENSON'S social satires always gives me somewhat the sensations of the reporter at the special sermon—a relieved consciousness that, being present on business, my own withers may be supposed professionally unwrung. Otherwise, so exploratory a lash.... I seldom recall the touch of it more shrewd than in Queen Lucia (HUTCHINSON), an altogether delightful castigation of those persons ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 18th, 1920 • Various
... your own riding; and that you may have a good chance of having a good one, buy one that's young and has plenty of belly—a little more than the one has which you now have, though you are not yet a gentleman; you will, of course, look to his head, his withers, legs and other points, but never buy a horse at any price that has not plenty of belly; no horse that has not belly is ever a good feeder, and a horse that a'n't a good feeder, can't be a good horse; never buy a horse that is drawn up in the belly behind; a horse of that ...
— The Pocket George Borrow • George Borrow
... danger, however inoffensive their shapes, however unobtrusive their advance. When the sensibilities are neglected and suffered to fall into disrepute, they grow idle first, and finally obtuse! even as the limb which you forbear to exercise loses its muscle, and withers into worthlessness. ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... controversy, and just before the summer tour of 1838 to Scotland, John Ruskin was introduced to Miss Charlotte Withers, a young lady who was as fond of music as he was of drawing. They discussed their favourite studies with eagerness, and, to settle the matter, he wrote a long essay on "The Comparative Advantages ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... enjoy'st the fair one's presence; Then undertake my cause, and plead it to her With all the strength and heat of eloquence Fraternal love and friendship can inspire. Tell her thy brother languishes to death, And fades away, and withers in his bloom; That he forgets his sleep, and loathes his food; That youth, and health, and war, are joyless to him; Describe his anxious days, and restless nights, And all the torments that ...
— Cato - A Tragedy, in Five Acts • Joseph Addison
... Without this center, or core, the new instead of being assimilated is, so to speak, merely stuck on. This is the case with much of the subject matter in city-made texts. It does not grow, but soon withers and falls away. It is, then, essential that the textbooks used in rural schools should have the rural bent and application, the rural flavor, the rural beck ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... true Colours of some of Nature's Productions, as in that Gaudy Plant not undeservedly call'd the Mervail of Peru, the Flowers do often Fade, the same Day they are Blown; And I have often seen a Virginian Flower, which usually Withers within the compass of a Day; and I am credibly Inform'd, that not far from hence a curious Herborist has a Plant, whose Flowers perish in about an Hour. But if the Whiteness of Water turn'd into Froth must therefore be reputed Emphatical, because it appears ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... horse. He rejected the sorrel with the Roman nose, as stubborn and foolish. The flea-bitten gray was all horse, but he had a white-rimmed eye. The chestnut bay was a big, hardy animal, but he appeared rather slow and deliberate. Yet he had good, solid feet, plenty of bone, deep withers, and ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... When in his playful moments, rare indeed now for one of his age, he would inadvertently plunge into her, or stumble over a water-pail, she would nicker grave disapproval, or else chide him more generously by licking his neck and withers a long ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... is to woman what the sun is to the flower; if modestly enjoyed it beautifies, it refreshes and improves; if immoderately, it withers and destroys.—Colton. ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 355, October 16, 1886 • Various
... that, if a man has the real literary gift, there are very few professions which do not afford a margin of time sufficient for him to indulge what is the happiest and simplest of hobbies. Sometimes the early impulse has no root, and withers; but if, after a time, a man finds that his heart is entirely in his writing, and if he feels that he may without imprudence give himself to the practice of the beloved art, then he may formally adopt it as a profession. But he must ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... coppery, almost golden, chestnut sorrel; flaxen mane and tail, verging on creamy white; short-coupled in the back and with withers that marked the runner; belly smooth and round; legs trim and neat as an antelope's and muscled like a panther's; head small, carried proudly erect and eyes full ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... felt so resistless, as if it must sweep me right out of the saddle; I should like to have clutched Helen's mane or anything to have kept me on, but both hands were wanted to hold the reins quite low down, one on each side of her withers, so as to guide her exactly according to F——'s pilot-hand on the opposite bank: steering implicitly by this I escaped the holes and rocks which he had come against, and got over safely, but trembling, and with chattering teeth. F——said, ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... wrought. The mere sensuously concrete external nature as such has not this purpose for its only origin. The gay and variegated plumage of the birds shines unseen, and their song dies away unheard; the torch-thistle which blossoms only for a night withers without having been admired in the wilds of southern forests; and these forests, groves of the most beautiful and luxuriant vegetation, with the most odorous and fragrant perfumes, perish and waste, no more enjoyed. The work of art is not so unconsciously self-immersed, but it is essentially a question, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... that moment, just over his horse's withers, she saw the face of Guss Mildmay who was leaning on her father's arm. Guss bowed to her, and she was obliged to return the salute. Jack De Baron turned his face to the path and seeing the lady raised his hat. "Are ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... the first theme of our poet's muse. Averse as the puritans were to any poetry, save that of Hopkins, of Withers, or of Wisdom, they may be reasonably supposed to have had some sympathy with Dryden's sorrow upon the death of Oliver, even although it vented itself in the profane and unprofitable shape of an elegy. But we have no means of estimating its reception with the public, if, in truth, ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... know there are privileged souls, who can make verses everywhere—in the tumult of court life, in the loneliness of Cirey, in the prisons of the Bastile, and in the stage-coach. My poor soul does not enjoy this freedom. It resembles an anana, which bears fruit only in the green-house, but fades and withers in the fresh air." [Footnote: The king's own ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... nostril high and open; the horns smooth, crumpled, but not very thick at the base, tapering and tipped with black; ears small and thin, deep orange color inside; eyes full and placid; neck straight and fine; chest broad and deep; barrel hoofed, broad and deep, well ribbed up; back straight from the withers to the hip, and from the top of the hip to the setting of the tail; tail fine, at right angles with the back, and hanging down to the hocks; skin thin, light color, and mellow, covered with fine soft hair; fore legs short, straight and fine below the knee, arm swelling and full above; hind quarters ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... refuge from women Scorn titles which did not distinguish practical offices The divinely damnable naked truth won't wear ornaments The embraced respected woman The habit of the defensive paralyzes will The idol of the hour is the mob's wooden puppet Their sneer withers Tighter than ever I was tight I'll be to-night With one idea, we see nothing—nothing but itself You want me to flick ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... while those of the latter are like the field through which the plow has never passed, and the face of which has never been prepared; to sow seed on which is, in general, to cast it upon "stony ground, where" it is either picked up by the "birds of the air," or, should it chance to take root, soon "withers away, because it ...
— The Village Sunday School - With brief sketches of three of its scholars • John C. Symons
... to be gone, your Highness, that I may not grow over familiar like the boy with the pikestaff, for if it do not gall you it shall wring the withers of this my ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford |
