"Blight" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... eclipsing body. Of course there is no suggestion here that these darknesses may have been eclipses. My own acceptance is that if in the nineteenth century anyone had uttered such a thought as that, he'd have felt the blight of a Dominant; that Materialistic Science was a jealous god, excluding, as works of the devil, all utterances against the seemingly uniform, regular, periodic; that to defy him would have brought on—withering by ridicule—shrinking ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... entwine together, sometimes fostering, sometimes crushing each other. Out of the remains of the dead arises a new generation, with an increase of vital impulse. It seems as though the ice-crowned Andes looked down with envy on the luxuriant vegetation of the forests, and sought to blight it by sending down cold, nightly winds. The low temperature of the night counteracts that extreme development which the humidity of the soil and the great heat of the day promote. But what the vegetation ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... The 'apple-blight' of the Calvados must obviously have extended into the neighbouring department of the Eure, or at least into the great and busy arrondissement of Bernay, which gave the Monarchist candidate in September 1889 the tremendous majority of 5,550 votes in a total ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... of the imagination, or a reality from without—or her, with whom I fondly hoped to have travelled the weary road of life. Friends approved—fortune smiled—one little month, and we should have been one; but it pleased Him, to whom in my present frame of mind I dare not look up, to blight my beautiful flower, to canker my rose—bud, to change the fair countenance of my Elizabeth, and send her away. She drooped and died, even like that pale flower under the scorching sun; and I was driven forth to worship Mammon, ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... six," answered Edward; "nor dare I reckon on the life of the frail babe that England hailed yesterday as my heir. I sometimes deem that the blight of broken covenants ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... power. As for the first of these, the black death, the famines, the hundred years' war, the free companies, the abasement of the church, the great schism—these things were misfortunes to which our modern time can find no parallel. They came suddenly upon Western Europe and defiled it like a blight.... They have made the mediaeval idea odious to every half-instructed man and have stamped even its beauty with ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... to be hard on anything 'cept blight, Master Nic," said the old man one day; "but it comes nat'ral to a man to feel shy of a gaol bird who may rise agen you at any time and take ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... more than a baby, and entrusted to her care—a little nurse-girl, as she then was, not many years older than himself. For years the poor girl had cried herself to sleep on her pallet-bed, moaning over the blight her carelessness had brought upon her darling; nor was this self-reproach diminished by the forgiveness of the gentle mother, from whom Thurstan Benson derived so much of his character. The way in which comfort stole into Sally's heart was in the gradually-formed resolution ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... fact in Nature comes from the difficulty of detecting its true connection. There is reality there, even in blight and corruption; something is forwarded, only perhaps not the thing before us,—as the virtue of the compost-heap appears not in it, but in the rose-bed. The artist cannot forego a jot of reality, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... bier she falleth over, And her shrieks are loud and shrill— "I will have my lord, my lover! In the grave I seek him still. Shall that godlike frame be wasted By the fire's consuming blight? Mine it was—yea mine! though tasted Only one delicious night!" But the priests, they chant ever—"We carry the old, When their watching is over, their journeys are told; We carry the young, when they ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... and his party could tear themselves from a scene that had witnessed so much domestic happiness; but on which had fallen the blight of death. During that time, the future arrangements of the survivors were completed. Beekman was made acquainted with the state of feeling that existed between his brother- in-law and Maud, and he advised an ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... such of the orange-trees as were not uprooted, or have recently been planted, have been attacked by the insect which a few years since was so destructive to the same tree in Florida. The effect upon the tree resembles that of a blight, the leaves grow sere, and the branches die. You may imagine, therefore, that I was somewhat disappointed not to find the air, as it is at this season in the south of Italy, fragrant with the odor of orange and lemon blossoms. ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... troubles. Perhaps he could tell them what to do. She had but one real object of affection in the world,—this child that she had tended from infancy to womanhood. Troubles were gathering thick round her; how soon they would break upon her, and blight or destroy her, no one could tell; but there was nothing in all the catalogue of terrors which might not come upon the household at any moment. Her own wits had sharpened themselves in keeping watch by day and night, and her face had forgotten its age in the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... for the wrong I did you. I should never have spoken love to you at all, or if I did, I should have told you of the blight upon it; but the sky and the trees and the hill were clothed that night in the beauty that wrapt my soul and I thought that God had forgotten and had shrived me in the same sacred light. But He does not forget. That light itself cannot drive ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... of Daddy Darwin's nature, and the ill-luck of his career, that he had a sensitive perception of order and beauty, and a shrewd observation of ways of living and qualities of character, and yet had allowed his early troubles to blight him so completely that he never put forth an effort to rise above the ruin, of which he was at least as conscious as ...
— Jackanapes, Daddy Darwin's Dovecot and Other Stories • Juliana Horatio Ewing
... limbs became stony like her heart. That you may not doubt the fact, the statue still remains, and stands in the temple of Venus at Salamis, in the exact form of the lady. Now think of these things, my dear, and lay aside your scorn and your delays, and accept a lover. So may neither the vernal frosts blight your young fruits, nor furious winds scatter ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... entered their minds. Her heart was buried in the grave with her husband; and he—ah, he had a secret. A gentle being, beautiful to him as an angel, had once crossed his path; but before taking her to the altar, the angels came and took her to their homes, beyond the reach of blight or death; and since then his thoughts often wandered away to the regions of perfection; and with the memory of his loved one in heaven, he never coupled a thought of a second love ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... were a spy passing through hostile lines. None other of the friends of the afflicted father had ventured to bear or send a message of condolence. It was as if the house of the once acknowledged leader had been marked for the pestilence—and no pestilence was more to be shunned than the deadly blight of broken power. Even the slaves shifted about in embarrassed silence, offered little service, and obeyed as if conscious that obedience was something of an indiscretion, and was liable at any moment to become a crime. Some had slipped away to their quarters, and had begun to discuss the relative ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... the jest, Falleth upon my pen a blight. The daily task has lost its zest, And everything is flat and trite. There's nothing humorous in sight; Don't mind if I am dull to-day. For every column is a fight When woods are ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... sleet a serious bit of engineering must be undergone before the sashes can be lifted and the plants saved from dampness; or if the daffodils and tulips lie well bedded all the winter through, if, when the sun has called them forth, the winds of March blight their sap-tender foliage? Yet the lands that send the north winds also send us the means to deter them—the cold-loving evergreens, low growing, high growing, medium, woven dense in warp and woof, to be windbreaks, also the shrubs of tough, twisted fibre ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... which proclaimed its approach. The fresh flowers were all blighted by its scorching breath, and with its forked tongue it fed upon the pride of the forest, drying up the life of great trees, and without waiting to consume them, hurrying onward to blight other groves, leaving a blackened track of ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... as 'twere calling at your door, And I don't mind my bare feet clammy on the stones, And the blight to my bones, For he only knows of THIS house ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... Spaniards found in Cuba and St. Domingo had withered before them as if struck by a blight. Many died under the lash of the Spanish overseers; many, perhaps the most, from the mysterious causes which have made the presence of civilisation so fatal to the Red Indian, the Australian, and the Maori. It is with men as it is with animals. The races which ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... the broad daylight for the broken word of a man? Double portion of my shame be on you, Terence Mulvaney, that think yourself so strong! By Mary and the saints, by blood and water an' by ivry sorrow that came into the world since the beginnin', the black blight fall on you and yours, so that you may niver be free from pain for another when ut's not your own! May your heart bleed in your breast drop by drop wid all your friends laughin' at the bleedin'! Strong you think yourself? May your strength be a curse to you to dhrive you ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... land in some sections of Italy is said to be completely covered with chestnut trees. In my state, the weevil is the scourge of chestnuts; I had hoped that after the chestnut blight destroyed our native chestnuts, the Chinese and Japanese chestnuts would be free from that pest. Where it came from I do not know, unless it came from the chinkapin. West Virginia has chinkapins and these, being blight resistant, apparently have kept up the supply of weevils. Occasionally, shortly ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... one. She is marked with the gallows. Ill-luck attaches to her. There has been a blight on her from the beginning. I mind when her father chucked her down all among the fly-poison. Now she has got the Broom-Squire, she may count herself lucky, and thank ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... years ago, about a friend of ours, a young Southern poet of distinct promise, who had just died. Like many Southern verse-writers of his generation, he had lived and written under the inspiration of Poe. Asbury surprised me by the almost bitter remark that Poe's influence had been a blight upon the younger Southern poets, inasmuch as it had tended to over-subjectivity, to morbid sensibility, and to a pre-occupation with purely personal emotions. He argued, as he has since done so courageously in his Texas Nativist, [Footnote: Published by ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... all, the happiness of our future lives may depend upon our perfect sincerity now. You do not require to be told how poor is the offering of my heart. You are the only person who has ever entered into the secret of its emptiness and desolation; seen blight, where there should be bloom; ashes, where flame should glow. But such as it is, it is yours, if you will have it. If you are willing to trust yourself with me, I will cherish as I now honor you, truly and forever; leave no means untried that ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... rich and fertile must be reinforced with friendship. It is the sap that preserves from blight and withering; it is the sunshine that beckons on the blossoming and fruitage; it is the starlight dew that perfumes life with sweetness and besprinkles it with splendor; it is the music-tide that sweeps the soul, scattering treasures; ...
— For Auld Lang Syne • Ray Woodward
... you had taught her, from the dawn of her intelligence, with your utmost energy and might, that there was such a thing as daylight, but that it was made to be her enemy and destroyer, and she must always turn against it, for it had blighted you and would else blight her;—if you had done this, and then, for a purpose, had wanted her to take naturally to the daylight and she could not do it, you would have been ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... well that he could not make them do anything; and what was more, in some of the very worst cases, the evil was past remedy now, and better left alone. For the drought went on pitiless. A copper sun, a sea of glass, a brown easterly blight, day after day, while Thurnall looked grimly aloft ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... in the arms of Jesus, Safe from corroding care, Safe from the world's temptations, Sin cannot harm me there. Free from the blight of sorrow, Free from my doubts and fears, Only a few more trials, Only a ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... they're having a good time because they're making enough noise for six and drinking too much for ten. I loathe New York, Bertie. I wouldn't come near the place if I hadn't got to see editors occasionally. There's a blight on it. It's got moral delirium tremens. It's the limit. The very thought of staying more than a day in it makes me sick. And you call this ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... article or story about the poor of my native land, so now the publishers, Scotch and English, refused to accept the book as a gift. I was willing to present it to them, but they would have it in no guise; there seemed to be a blight on everything that was Scotch. I daresay we sighed, but never were collaborators more prepared for rejection, and though my mother might look wistfully at the scorned manuscript at times and murmur, 'You poor cold little crittur ...
— Margaret Ogilvy • James M. Barrie
... erosion; a majority of the population does not have access to potable water natural hazards: floods, droughts, and blight international agreements: party to - Environmental Modification, Nuclear Test Ban; signed, but not ratified - Climate Change, Desertification, ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... beseeching Diti sighed. When but a blighted bud was left, Which Indra's hand in seven had cleft:(213) "No fault, O Lord of Gods, is thine; The blame herein is only mine. But for one grace I fain would pray, As thou hast reft this hope away. This bud, O Indra, which a blight Has withered ere it saw the light— From this may seven fair spirits rise To rule the regions of the skies. Be theirs through heaven's unbounded space On shoulders of the winds to race, My children, drest in heavenly forms, Far-famed as Maruts, Gods of storms. ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... in but little uncertainty as to her fate, we have a lively and innocent, though imprudent country girl, transplanted into the midst of all that can bewilder and endanger her, but with still enough of the purity of rural life about her heart, to keep the blight of the world from settling ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... advent of the last decade of the nineteenth century a feeling of foreboding unrest seemed to brood over the western farmer: blight and drouth destroyed his best crops just when they seemed to promise most; farm stock had to be reduced. The good years were few, the bad years were many. The great strain of carrying a large outfit of expensive agricultural machinery which on ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... of some natural blight often fulfil this important office, and bless those within their sphere more, by awakening feelings of holy tenderness and compassion, than a man healthy and strong can do by the utmost exertion of his good-will and energies. ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... drink a good deal, for, thanks to that prescription of Blight's, he found himself extremely well, and he had been careful to take no lunch. He had not felt so well for weeks. Puffing out his lower lip, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... well," her mother agreed. "But remember, we have had great good luck. No epidemic or disease came to blight the lives of our caterpillars; nor did annoyances of any sort interrupt their spinning. We did our part, certainly; but favorable conditions had much ...
— The Story of Silk • Sara Ware Bassett
... root of all evil, this had been. It had come into his life like a poisonous blight, withering and destroying wherever it touched. It had changed Ruth; it had changed William Bannister; it had changed himself; it was as if the spirit of the old man had lived on, hating him and working him mischief. He always had superstitious ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... be institutions in the Pines, and all the bogs for miles around the site of the first experiment were hired by sanguine farmers. But the cranberry-cultivator has one enemy, which is neither bird, nor worm, nor blight, but biped,—a Rat, two-legged, erect, or moderately so, talking, even, in audible and intelligible speech,—the Pine Rat, namely. Few but New Jerseymen, and of them chiefly those who dwell about the forest, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... that Wenceslas shall never set foot in that woman's house. I ask you to make the sacrifice, if it is a sacrifice to forgive the husband you love so small a fault. I ask you—for the sake of my gray hairs, and of the love you owe your mother. You do not want to blight my later years with ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... is the key to a house we have lost possession of, and if we would regain possession and make the ballot something more than a mere symbol of a thing that is dead, we have no choice but to resort to the one process by which the resources of the country can be returned to its people, and the blight of poverty and pauperism that is settling down on the country and is becoming permanent can be removed ...
— Confiscation, An Outline • William Greenwood
... every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right, And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... period when a sceptical philosophy came down like a blight, and destroyed the bloom of his art and faith, he thus recognized that growing knowledge was an essential condition of growing goodness. Pompilia shone with a glory that mere knowledge could not give (if there were such a thing ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... steady day Shines on through earthly blight and bloom, The pure, the everlasting ray, The lamp that shines e'en in the tomb; The light that out of darkness springs, And guideth those that blindly go; The word whose precious radiance flings Its ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... very fair," replied Godwin; "and worthy of you, who are the most honest of men. Yet, Wulf, I am troubled. See you, my brother, have ever brethren loved each other as we do? And now must the shadow of a woman fall upon and blight that love which ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... be true; you would think it a pleasant magic if you could flush your flowers into brighter bloom by a kind look upon them; nay, more, if your look had the power, not only to cheer but to guard them:—if you could bid the black blight turn away and the knotted caterpillar spare—if you could bid the dew fall upon them in the drought, and say to the south wind, in frost—"Come, thou south, and breathe upon my garden, that the spices of it may flow out." This you would think a great ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... thought of work, but at last found satisfaction in a quiet analysis of Jerry's narration of the night before. What did one female or two or a dozen matter if Jerry was fundamentally sound? Sophistry might shake, blandishment bend, sex-affinity blight, but Jerry would stand like an oak, its young leaves among the stars, its roots deep in mother earth. Marcia Van Wyck, her black damask boudoirs, her tinted finger tips, her Freud, Strindberg and all the rest of her modern trash—there would come a day ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... time been awakened to woman's privileges in tergiversation even when it involves another person's possible blight. That Bathsheba was a firm and positive girl, far less inconsequent than her fellows, had been the very lung of his hope; for he had held that these qualities would lead her to adhere to a straight course for consistency's ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... do not imagine from this that there are many of these, for the Chinese have been for days avoiding the Legation quarter as if it were plague-stricken, and sounds that were so roaring a few weeks ago are now daily becoming more and more scarce. A blight is settling on us, for we are accursed by the whole population of North China, and who knows what will be the fate of those seen ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... wit of Chesterfield ably seconded the pen of Burke; and the Earl of Chatham soon found that though he was dignified by the king, he had shorn himself of all his honours in the sight of the people. The influence which the Earl of Bute was supposed to have had over him tended still more to blight his fair fame. He was taunted with being a willing agent of men whom he did not esteem, and his acceptance of a peerage was a never-failing source of invective. Moreover, in his negociations with his brother-in-law, Lord Temple, he had quarrelled with that nobleman, and all ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... less self-sufficing; and the morbid taint of thought then prevalent, and which her natural optimism and better balanced faculties enabled her to throw off very shortly, had entered into him ineffaceably. Whether or not she brought a fresh blight on his mind, she certaintly ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... which forty years before had threatened to dominate the world was no better than a decrepit giant; the form still loomed gigantic, but the substance was gripped with the chill paralysis wherewith Philip had smitten it, since he had entered like a poisonous blight upon his inheritance. ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... founded in 1826, fared no better, although controlled during its last year by the gifted and unfortunate Captain Barker. A blight of stagnation seemed in those days to hang over all attempts at settlement in the tropical regions, and in three years' time Fort Wellington was abandoned, and with it the ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... oasis in the desert of gloom through which he had traveled, and that had been on his interminable trip across the continent, when for ten brief minutes his blight had been lifted, and he had caught a breath of the incense ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... always remembered the day when she had been engaged by Lady Beresford as ladies' maid to Sir John's wards, the pretty Miss Beresfords, the belles of Rutlandshire. Dixon had always considered Mr. Hale as the blight which had fallen upon her young lady's prospects in life. If Miss Beresford had not been in such a hurry to marry a poor country clergyman, there was no knowing what she might not have become. But Dixon was too loyal to desert her in her affliction and downfall (alias ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... sometimes even the municipal voters and their representatives, may all have ideas of their own. But though our cities are still as a whole planless, their growth as yet little better than a mere casual accretion and agglomeration, if not a spreading blight, American and German cities are now increasingly affording examples of comprehensive design of extension and of internal improvement. As a specific example of such an attempt towards the improvement of a British city, one not indeed comprehending all aspects of its life, but detailed and ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... on these ancient ramparts, I watch the sun rise over this land which, once so rich and fertile, now shows hardly a sign of human habitation, this country where not a tree nor a house has been allowed for many years to stand, over which the blight of misrule has lain as a curse for centuries and I see yet one more army going forth to battle; once again columns of armed men sweep forth to encounter similar columns, to kill and to capture within sight of the Median Wall. And watching these columns of ...
— With a Highland Regiment in Mesopotamia - 1916—1917 • Anonymous
... at the feast of Balthazar, God manifested himself. He seemed to command recognition now in the person of an old, white-haired servant with unsteady gait and drawn brows; he entered with gloomy mien and his look seemed to blight the garlands, the ruby cups, the pyramids of fruits, the brightness of the feast, the glow of the astonished faces and the colors of the cushions dented by the white arms of the women; then he cast a pall over this folly by saying, ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... her heart sank lower and lower. She was in the presence of something so mysterious that even wise men in those days shrank from it in fear. It was the finger of God alone, they said, that laid a blight on human minds, and there before her ...
— Vandrad the Viking - The Feud and the Spell • J. Storer Clouston
... there can be but one answer to that question. Oriental superstition cast its blight upon the fair field of science, whatever compensation it may or may not have brought in other fields. But we must be on our guard lest we overestimate or incorrectly estimate this influence. Posterity, in glancing backward, is always prone to stamp any given age of the past with ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... is more imbued with fear than with hope. The timid worshipped the deadly and destructive powers, and their prayers were deprecations. The bolder worshipped the good gods. Similarly, in Greece, the Chtonic deities had their shrines and worshippers, as had the powers of Blight, ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... stormed at these words. 'You are a braggart, Sir,' cried he, 'a wretch—a blot on the cheek of nature—a blight on the Christian world—a reprobate—I'll have your soul, Sir. You must play at tennis, and put down elect brethren in another world to-morrow.' As he said this, he brandished his rapier, exciting Dalcastle to offence. He gained ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... it would involve the ruin of the French hold upon the Indian trade. The bishop and the priests, on the other hand, were ready to fight the liquor traffic to the end and to exorcise it as the greatest blight upon the New World. Quebec soon became a cockpit where the battle of these two factions raged. Each had its ups and downs, until in the end the traffic remained, but under ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... help but think of the chestnut blight that has worked havoc throughout our state and some other states. It has occasioned a big material loss. Yet I think too of another side of the loss and that is the spiritual side because our "chestnut ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... the Middle Ages, when crude grinding made impure flour, were the days of the oppressed peasant and the rich landowner, dark days of toil and poverty and war, of blight and drought and famine; when common man in his wretchedness and hunger ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... world, which is above flesh and above brain; which is, in fact, the unifying force of the brain faculties, called here Intuition. The founders of this society reckoned, too, with the fact that psychology as it has been taught from a material basis in schools and colleges is a blight. One can't, as a purely physical being, relate himself to mental processes; nor can one approach the super-mental area by the force of ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... and hours are not carefully counted. Long work, poor food, poor light, foul air, bad sanitation—all make this kind of life far worse than any life which the immigrants knew in Europe. Better physical starvation there than the mental and spiritual blight of these modern conditions here. That so much of hopeful humanity is found in these unwholesome and congested wards proves the ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... hours, lest I myself mislead By blind desire wherewith my heart is torn, E'en while I speak away the moments speed, To me and pity which alike were sworn. What shade so cruel as to blight the seed Whence the wish'd fruitage should so soon be born? What beast within my fold has leap'd to feed? What wall is built between the hand and corn? Alas! I know not, but, if right I guess, Love to such joyful hope has only led To plunge my weary life in worse distress; And I remember ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... a complete blend of the parent species, the nuts being double the size of the wild parent and of sweet, rich quality. The trees were very shapely and bid fair to become extremely productive but a year or two later were all attacked by the dreaded blight or bark disease, then spreading from its original starting point in Long Island. The work of destruction was very rapid and by the third year all were hopelessly crippled, but a few individuals continued to send up suckers ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... The Germans never would have complained about their war-time coffee, made from chicory and acorns, had they once tasted the Java product. Yet I was assured that this was the choicest coffee grown in Java. I might add that, as a result of a blight which all but ruined the industry in the '70s, fifty-two per cent of the total acreage of coffee plantations in the island is now planted with the African species, called Coffea robusta, and thirteen per cent with ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... folk. All children are poets, and fairy tales are the poetic recording of the facts of life. In this day of commercial enterprise, if we would fit children for life we must see to it that we do not blight the poets in them. In this day of emphasis on vocational training we must remember there is a part of life unfed, unnurtured, and unexercised by industrial education. Moreover, whatever will be accomplished in ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... was made, bucketfuls of which were mixed with tubs of water; the suction-pipe of the engine was inserted in these, the hose and branch attached, and the slaughter of the insects began down between the rows of hop-poles, where the blackened, blight-covered hops clustered, twined, ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... There is no wretchedness, I think, like that which must fill the heart of a mother whose children have strayed away from her loving, clinging solicitude into the by-ways of folly or vice. It is a dark blight upon the most buoyant heart that ever swelled with maternal devotion. I sometimes think I would rather have never existed, that I could forfeit all the grand privileges of a created being destined for a noble end, rather than have become the mother ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... jeopardize his composition, and he allowed Mrs. Barton to remain a chaperon. He was right in this, but Violet should have been the impulse and nucleus of a new story. . . . I began to think suddenly of the blight that would fall on the twain if Violet's lover were to die, and to figure them sitting in the evenings meditating on the admirable qualities of the deceased till in their loneliness he would come to seem to them as a being more ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... animal like this that its visits were held as good omens, and no hunter of the tribe ever tried to slay it. A prophet of the race had said, "So long as the white doe drinks at Onota, famine shall not blight the Indian's harvest, nor pestilence come nigh his lodge, nor foeman lay waste his country." And this prophecy held true. That summer when the deer came with a fawn as white and graceful as herself, it was a year of great abundance. ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... in my side, Thy father's first-born, and his shame; Unstable as the rolling tide, A blight has fall'n upon thy name. Decay shall follow thee and thine. Go, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... Kentucky was fifty years behind the Ohio side, in improvements of every sort. Thus far, we have not ourselves noticed differences of that degree. Doubtless before the late civil war,—all the ante-bellum travelers agree in this,—when the blight of slavery was resting on Virginia and Kentucky, the south shore of the Ohio was as another country; but to-day, so far as we can ascertain from a surface view, the little villages on either side are equally dingy and woe-begone, and large Southern towns like Wheeling, ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... rabbits and mice gnaw the bark in winter; loads of fruit and burdens of ice crush the tree; wind storms play mischief; bad pruning leaves long stubs, and rot develops; cankers produce dead ragged wounds; fire-blight destroys the tissue; a poorly formed tree with bad crotches splits easily; grafts fail to take, and long dead ends are left; the tree is injured by pickers; vandals wreak their havoc. All these accidents must be met and ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... Sandys' ideas—maybe set out a few grapevines or mulberries, as they had been instructed to do. There was good reason for the growing fear among the leading adventurers in London that tobacco might put a blight ...
— The Virginia Company Of London, 1606-1624 • Wesley Frank Craven
... tester, and penny he looks upon, from this day forth for evermore, be a blight to his eyes, and a canker to his heart! But I can't wish him a worse canker than what he has there already. Yes, he has a canker at heart! Is not he eaten up with envy? as all who look at him may read in that evil eye. ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... and from the corners of the eyes to the corners of the mouth a deep channel of tears. The snow lighted up the corpse. Winter and the tomb are not adverse. The corpse is the icicle of man. The nakedness of her breasts was pathetic. They had fulfilled their purpose. On them was a sublime blight of the life infused into one being by another from whom life has fled, and maternal majesty was there instead of virginal purity. At the point of one of the nipples was a white pearl. It was a drop of ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... half weeping. "Never, s'help me God! She's my sister from this hour—no more, no less. And may the red blight fall on my arm and my heart, if I or any man takes her from you—any man!" he cried, his temples flushing and his eye glittering; "sooner than a hundred men should take her from you while I am here I'd die at their ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... indignation shall rise against the profligate wretch as warmly as the Catos of the pit could desire; because in a modern play I am to judge of the right and the wrong. The standard of police is the measure of political justice. The atmosphere will blight it; it cannot live here. It has got into a moral world, where it has no business, from which it must needs fall headlong; as dizzy, and incapable of making a stand, as a Sweden-borgian bad spirit that has wandered unawares into the sphere of one of his Good Men, or Angels. ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... they had the worst side of the argument, and therefore seldom said any thing worth remembering. Moreover their hearts were faint and feeble; for they felt that the people scorned and detested them. They had no friends, no defence, except in the bayonets of the British troops. A blight fell upon all their faculties, because they were contending against the rights of their own ...
— True Stories from History and Biography • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... young hearts, as those who have cradled and loved us grow proud in our successes? For myself, a life that has failed in every prestige of those that prophesied favourably—years that have followed on each other only to blight the promise that kind and well-wishing friends foretold—leave but little to dwell upon, that can be reckoned as success. And yet, some moments I have had, which half seemed to realize my early dream of ambition, ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... "Some strange blight or other must lie in the proximity of that terrific maelstrom," judged Stern, "something that repels all the larger animals. But skirting this bay, there's life and to spare. How many deer have we seen to-day? Three? And one bull-buffalo! With any kind ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... keeper's cottage, village tap-room, at the lockheads, and by five-barred gates; and the exultant keeper, who took credit for all, was heard to say that it was the best bloomin' jack he had seen "for seven year come last plum blight," whenever and whatever that ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... me ever again not to rob a man of his religious belief, as if you thought my mind tended to such robbery. I have too profound a conviction of the efficacy that lies in all sincere faith, and the spiritual blight that comes with no-faith, to have any negative propagandism in me. In fact, I have very little sympathy with Freethinkers as a class, and have lost all interest in mere antagonism to religious doctrines. I care only to know, if possible, the lasting ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... are laid along the waters of the Cumberland, the lair of moonshiner and feudsman. The knight is a moonshiner's son, and the heroine a beautiful girl perversely christened "The Blight." Two impetuous young Southerners fall under the spell of "The Blight's" charms and she learns what a large part jealousy and pistols have in the ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... a soothfast word, Not the true parent is the woman's womb That bears the child; she doth but nurse the seed New-sown: the male is parent; she for him, As stranger for a stranger, hoards the germ Of life; unless the god its promise blight. And proof hereof before you will I set. Birth may from fathers, without mothers, be: See at your side a witness of the same, Athena, daughter of Olympian Zeus, Never within the darkness of the womb Fostered nor fashioned, ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... sought that palace on its haughty height, And came to know its starry joys, Its sudden blackness, and the withering blight ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... coat no moth can corrupt nor blight can wither. The poet Keats had not this sort of protection for his person—he lay bare to weather—the serpent stung him, and the poison-tree dropped upon this little western flower: when the mercenary servile crew approached him, he had no pedigree ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... various language; for his gayer hours She has a voice of gladness and a smile And eloquence of beauty, and she glides Into his darker musings with a mild And healing sympathy, that steals away Their sharpness ere he is aware. When thoughts Of the last, bitter hour come like a blight Over thy spirit, and sad images Of the stern agony and shroud and pall And breathless darkness and the narrow house Make thee to shudder and grow sick at heart,— Go forth under the open sky, and list To Nature's teachings, while from all around— Earth and ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... to sacrifice four thousand millions of property specially protected by law. It was for the existing generation of the governing class in the South to vote themselves into bankruptcy and penury. Far beyond this, it was in their judgment to blight their land with ignorance and indolence, to be followed by crime and anarchy. Their point of view was so radically different from that held by a large number of Northern people that it left no common ground for action,—scarcely, indeed, an opportunity for reasoning ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... days of our years when we are tempted not so much to slight our work as to spare our nerves, in which the stored electricity is lower and scanter than it was, and to let a present feeble performance blight the fame of strenuous achievements in the past. We may then make our choice of two things—stop working; stop going, cease to move, to exist—or gather at each successive effort whatever remains of habit, of conscience, of native force, and put it into effect till ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... slopes of rocky pasture, with here and there a clump of silver birches bent over with the strain of last year's snow; and all along, near by the water, beech and basswood, blue-gum and pin-oak, ash, and even chestnut flourishing still, in defiance of blight. Nor have I ever seen such sheets of water-lilies as starred the swampy thickets, in which elder and hazels and every conceivable bush and shrub and giant grass and cane make wildernesses pathless indeed save to the mink and the water-snake, and the imagination ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... he be so minded, betake himself to the outskirts and suburbs, where he will perceive the same sad evidences of neglect, public grounds unattended, roads uncared for, mills and other public works crumbling into ruin. These palpable signs of decay most strongly impress him. A blight seems to have come over this lately fair and prosperous town. Rapidly it is becoming a 'deserted village,' a 'city ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... vision of the last man," I said. "I wonder myself sometimes whether this old globe of ours is going to collapse suddenly and take us with her, or whether we will disappear through slow disastrous ages of fighting and crushing, with hunger and blight to help us to the end. And then, at the last, perhaps, some luckless fellow, stronger than the rest, will stand amid the ribs of the ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... fatal foolishness casts its blight over his entire character. Reckoning without God, of course, he has no sense of Divine ownership. Quite naturally, therefore, he thinks because he possesses a farm, he owns a farm. Possession and ownership mean exactly the same thing to a man who begins by ignoring God. When you hear this man ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... "Parsifal" and "Salome," but there were humiliating ones, like the prostitution of a great establishment for the performance of "Die Fledermaus" and "Der Zigeunerbaron" to deck out the Herr Direktor's benefits. The blight of commercialism had fallen on the institution. On February 11, 1908, Mr. Conried resigned, and announcement was officially made of a reorganization of his company, and the engagement of Giulio Gatti-Casazza and Andreas Dippel ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... poor child!" murmured Mrs. Channing, her own tears dropping upon the fair young face, as she gathered it to her sheltering bosom. "What have you done that this blight should extend to you?" ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... she had touched something red hot Marcia dropped it, and pushed it with her foot far back under the bed. Then shutting the door quickly she went downstairs. Was it always to be thus? Would Kate ever blight all her joy from this ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... by the movements of her hands, round the vegetable plot in front of the cottage. Mrs. Pascoe was his aunt. Both women surveyed a bush. Mrs. Durrant stooped and picked a sprig from it. Next she pointed (her movements were peremptory; she held herself very upright) at the potatoes. They had the blight. All potatoes that year had the blight. Mrs. Durrant showed Mrs. Pascoe how bad the blight was on her potatoes. Mrs. Durrant talked energetically; Mrs. Pascoe listened submissively. The boy Curnow knew that Mrs. Durrant was saying that it is perfectly simple; you mix the powder in a gallon ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... lingered something of tenderness in her love. Then, too, she was a consummate actress, and a being gifted with the womanly genius for charming, and therein lies sympathy. It is when this sympathetic spark is killed by the terrible blight of over-prosperity, that the deterioration of a woman takes place. Not all in a day, but gradually, the poison works: the first stage signalised by a cruel hardness to those they love; then an entire incapacity for tenderness; ultimately the hideous blight falls ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... day in public, that in consequence of the impiety of the Omaguas, he should retire to a neighboring tribe, of more religious turn of mind; and taking with him the precious instrument, leave their palms to blight, and ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... that the nicest way to grow a few cabbages, radishes, squashes, cucumbers, or potatoes is to plant a few here and there in good soil, at considerable distances from where any have heretofore been grown. For a time enemies are not likely to find them. I have often noticed that, while pear-blight decimated or swept large portions of a pear orchard, a few isolated trees, scattered about the neighborhood, usually remain healthy. The virgin soil of the Dakotas produced, at a trifling cost, healthy, clean wheat, but it was not long before the Russian thistle, false flax, and other pests ...
— Seed Dispersal • William J. Beal
... which would serve as a warning for them in time to come. There might, however, be a difficulty in beginning such a system. I can remember, and others present will remember it too, two or three years of bad fishing, followed by a year of blight, when the man who wrought most anxiously and was honest-hearted could not meet the demands upon him. At such times, if there was no qualification or mitigation of the ready-money system, perhaps the ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... PECAN LEAF BLIGHT (Cercospora Halstedii): This disease of pecan leaves causes them to turn brown, wither up and drop prematurely. At first, small brown spots are noted. These become larger, and at length the whole leaf is destroyed. When attacked by this disease the tree makes no progress. ...
— The Pecan and its Culture • H. Harold Hume
... he thought of them wimmen who had received their dead raised to life agin, he thought of the yearly sacrifice to Intemperance, the thousands and thousands of husbands, sons, brothers who are struck by the death blight now, makin' ready to fall into those oncounted graves. And he wanted to roust 'em up and save their souls and bodies alive and give them back to these wimmen ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... Venner was her father—looked like a man of culture and breeding, but melancholy and with a distracted air, as one whose life had met some fatal cross or blight. He saluted hardly anybody except his entertainers and the Doctor. One would have said, to look at him, that he was not at the party by choice; and it was natural enough to think, with Susy Pettingill, ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... or mule or bullock, decomposing in the sun, seemed to have nothing of offence for Republican noses. The yellow smear of lyddite was everywhere, and, looking over the rock-rampart upon the works below, you saw it like a blight, or yolk of egg spilt upon ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... starving people, and as there was no private enterprise in the country, where all classes were involved in the common ruin, the people were left to die of hunger by the roadside. The lands the potato blight spared were desolated by the adoption of free trade. The exploitation of the virgin lands of the American West gradually threw the fertile midlands of Ireland from tillage into grass. A series of bad harvests aggravated the evil. The landlords and ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... lights along the base of that vast monument in which King Cheops vainly sought eternal privacy. What would he say, we wondered, could he see the crowds of tourists tearing out to pay him a call, on their way to the Sphinx? Would he blight them with a curse, or would he remember pearly nights of old, when his subjects assembled in multitudes for the feast of the Goddess Neith when the moon was full, and all the white, brightly painted ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... across the land. May Heaven arrest its course, avert its terror, And keep the Statesman who this foe must fight From careless blindness and from blundering error, Such as of old lent aid to the Black Blight. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 30, 1890. • Various |
