"Decay" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... condition of the sewers" is "dangerous to the health and most offensive to the comfort of our people. Public work has been done so badly that structures have to be renewed almost as soon as finished. Others have been in part constructed at enormous expense and then permitted to fall to decay without completion." This is a graphic and faithful description of the result which follows government of the Ring, for the Ring, with the people's money. The legislature in 1885 granted Philadelphia a new charter, ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... body meanwhile being strengthened by a life in the open air of the mountains, and by such athletic sports as well supplied the place of the games of the ancient Greeks and Romans, this fine spirit was saved from premature decay, to the honor of his country, ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie
... provided China with her dynasty and her warrior caste, and was still one of the wealthiest and most cherished lands of that Empire. Having secured these points of vantage in Northern China, the Muscovites could await with confidence further developments in the decay of ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... smoke-dried tie-periwig, which all the flour in his dredging-box had not been able to whiten; his eyes were sunk, his jaws lengthened beyond their usual extension; and he seemed twenty years older than he looked when he and our hero parted at Rotterdam. In spite of all these evidences of decay, he accosted him with a meagre affectation of content and good-humour, struggled piteously to appear gay and unconcerned, professed his joy at seeing him in England, excused himself for having delayed so long to come and present his respects; alleging that, since ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... not mean to suggest that the custom of lying has suffered any decay or interruption—no, for the Lie, as a Virtue, A Principle, is eternal; the Lie, as a recreation, a solace, a refuge in time of need, the fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man's best and surest friend, is immortal, and cannot perish from the earth while this club remains. My complaint simply ...
— On the Decay of the Art of Lying • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
... man, who always wore, except on Sundays, grey clothes—clothes of so light a grey that they would hardly have been regarded as clerical in a district less remote. He had now reached a goodly age, being full seventy years old; but still he was wiry and active, and shewed but few symptoms of decay. His head was bald, and the few remaining locks that surrounded it were nearly white. But there was a look of energy about his mouth, and a humour in his light grey eye, which forbade those who knew him to regard him altogether as an old man. As it was, he could walk ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... they get their little feet settled in a dark, still corner than they are summoned out of it, to sunlight bright and strong. Miss Nancy lives with a bedridden father, who has grown peevish through long patience; can it be that slow, senile decay which has roused in her a fierce impatience against the sluggishness of life, and that she hurries her plants into motion because she herself must halt? Her father does not theorize about it. He says, "Nancy never has no luck with plants." And that, ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... belonged to a mansion at some distance where Sir Thomas Lucy resided at the time of the trespass. The tradition went that they hid the buck in a barn, part of which was standing a few years ago, but now totally decayed. This park no longer belongs to the Lucys. The house bears no marks of decay, but seems the abode of ease and opulence. There were some fine old books, and I was told of many more which were not in order. How odd if a folio Shakspeare should be found amongst them! Our early breakfast did ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... parts of the isle. As we turned through the lodges the old house appeared at the end of an avenue of scrubby and weather-worn trees. It bears the exterior of a respectable farm-house, but is now fast running to decay. On entering a dirty courtyard, and quitting our horses, we were shown by some idlers into a square building, which once contained the bed-room, sitting-room, and bath of the Empereur des Francois. The partitions ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 549 (Supplementary issue) • Various
... there was more than the encounter in the hall to cause the melancholy which he kindly watched and bore with in my brother, who was seriously ill again after he reached their lodgings in London, and indeed I thought at the time when he was with me in Paris, that his decay of health chiefly proceeded from sorrow ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... decay that had imperceptibly begun in his wife's bodily and mental strength during her illness of the previous winter, had been making quicker progress. She lost her reticence of speech, and often talked to herself. She had not so much forethought as of old; slight differences, it is true, but which, ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... fag Armine was. He became a sharer of her attentions and the amusements she provided. She received letters of grateful thanks from his mother, who was, like herself, a widow, but was prevented from coming to him by close attendance on her mother-in-law, who was in a lingering state of decay when every day ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... on in silence, passing by long ruins of stables, coach-houses, granaries, rickyards, all in ruin and decay. The women paused and went towards the garden; and removing some pieces of the broken gate they entered a miniature wilderness. The espalier apple-trees had disappeared beneath climbing weeds, and long briars had shot out from the bushes, leaving few traces of the former ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... a bank that is undermined By a river's ceaseless flow, And leave no trace behind! The world itself is old; The portals of Time unfold On hinges of iron, that grate And groan with the rust and the weight, Like the hinges of a gate That hath fallen to decay; But the evil doth not cease; There is war instead of peace, Instead of Love there is hate; And still I must wander and wait, Still I must watch and pray, Not forgetting in whose sight, A thousand years in their flight ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... minutes we were outside the door, starting upon our expedition. We hurried through the dark shrubbery, amid the dull moaning of the autumn wind and the rustle of the falling leaves. The night air was heavy with the smell of damp and decay. Now and again the moon peeped out for an instant, but clouds were driving over the face of the sky, and just as we came out on the moor a thin rain began to fall. The light still ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... tyrant, with the thought Of distant home, and I remembered then Thy faithful fondness: for not mean the joy, Returning at the pleasant holidays, I felt from thy dumb welcome. Pensively Sometimes have I remarked the slow decay, Feeling myself changed, too, and musing much, On many a sad vicissitude of life! Ah, poor companion! when thou followedst last Thy master's parting footsteps to the gate Which closed forever on him, ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... was the subject. He delicately alluded to my fragile appearance, and spoke of the necessity of a strong constitution to sustain a vigorous mind. If the mind prevailed over the weak body, in its turn it became affected by decay, and would eventually lose its powers. It was applicable to all cases; he did not mean that I was sickly, but that my appearance bespoke one who had not been used to the exercise that was most necessary for me. Horseback rides, walks, fresh ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... the hard earth floor, the great sapling levers, and the festoons of curing tobacco that had hung from the joists overhead, all removed, only the odor left; bold gaps here and there in the pieux, made by that mild influence which the restless call decay, and serving for windows and doors; the eastern end swept clean and occupied by a few benches and five or six desks, ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... frugal, persevering industry, won by years of toil and self-denial, in the hope of its being, as it has been in many cases before, the foundation even of colossal fortunes which have been made from smaller sums. It represents the gradual decay of the hopes for his family of many an industrious artisan. The first step in that downward progress which has led to destitution and pauperism is the withdrawal of the savings of honest industry, and that is ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... morning, the bud of the Spring, The promise of beauty and brightness may bring; But clouds gather darkness, and touched by the frost, The pride of the plant, and the morning are lost. Thus the bright and the beautiful ever decay— Life's morn and life's flowers, oh, ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... will find its way back into the depression. The water will stand in them a good part of the year, and the soil remain damp even in prolonged drought; vegetation is thus more luxuriant than on the outside, and its decay will fill up rather rapidly. In addition, much sand blows from the prairies as well as from the bottom lands, and whatever finds its way into the pit will stay there; it will not blow away again as it would in open ground. The weeds, ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... leaves on trees, the race of man is found, Now green in youth, now withering on the ground; Another race the following spring supplies, They fall successive, and successive rise. So generations, in their course, decay, So flourish these, when ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... who was the author of the observation that a great nation in a state of decay betakes itself to the fine arts. Perhaps no one has made the observation yet. It is certainly among the records of my brain, but I may possibly have put it there myself. If so, I make it now, for the possibilities ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... not audible to me, nor is it to you. But Paul tells us he sees and hears it, not expressed by one creature alone, but by all God has made. What does he mean? What is the sighing and longing of creation? It is not that annually the leaves wither and the fruits fall and decay: God purposes that every year new fruits shall grow; he decrees the shattering of the fallen tree. But Paul refers to the creature's unwilling subjection to the ungodly; "subject to ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... for some years and was threatening to moulder into a picturesque decay when the Douglases took possession of it. This family consisted of only two individuals—John Douglas and his wife. Douglas was a remarkable man, both in character and in person. In age he may have been about fifty, with a strong-jawed, rugged face, a grizzling moustache, peculiarly ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of a few moments. There had been no word of intercourse between the parties, and the youth now surveyed them with looks of curious inquiry, for the first time. The invalid, as we have said, was apparently struggling with the last stages of natural decay. Her companion was evidently youthful, in spite of those marks which even the unstudied eye might have discerned in her features, of a temper and a spirit subdued and put to rest by the world's strife and trial, and by afflictions which are not often found to crowd and to ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... and pacific, he has expressed in literature, as indeed in the other forms of art, his pacific and militant moods. Nor are these moods, of necessity, incompatible. War may become the price of peace, and peace may so decay as inevitably to bring about war. Of the dully unresponsive pacificist and the jingo patriot, quick to anger, the latter no doubt is the more dangerous to the cause of true freedom, yet both are "undesirable citizens." ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... to attain unto a higher and better life. Beware of all excesses, of whatever nature, and guard your personal purity with sacred determination. Let every aspiration be upward, and be strong in every good resolution. Seek the light, for in light there is life, while in darkness there is decay and ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... party waved over the magnificent mansion of which Imogene Beaumaris was the graceful life. As parties were nearly equal, and the ministry was supposed to be in decay, the rival reception was as well attended as that of Berengaria. The two great leaders were friends, intimate, but not perhaps quite so intimate as a few years before. "Lady Montfort is very kind to me," Imogene would say, ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... roseleaf that clings, Pale as transparent psyche-wings, To the vile text, are traced such things As might make lady's cheek indeed More than a living rose to read; So nought save foolish foulness may Watch with hard eyes the sure decay; And so the lifeblood of this rose, Puddled with shameful knowledge flows Through leaves no chaste hand may unclose; Yet still it keeps such faded show Of when 'twas gathered long ago, That the crushed petals' ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... divided into four books or adhyayas and each adhyaya is divided into four padas or chapters. The first four sutras of the work commonly known as Catu@hsutri are (1) How to ask about Brahman, (2) From whom proceed birth and decay, (3) This is because from him the Vedas have come forth, (4) This is shown by the harmonious testimony of the Upani@sads. The whole of the first chapter of the second book is devoted to justifying the position of the Vedanta against the attacks of the rival ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... dark-skirted wilderness of the high forests on Montserrat the infant frost had never trodden; all basked in the equal heat of the perpetual summer; awaiting, it may be, in ages to come, a civilisation higher even than that whose decay Shelley deplored as he looked down on fallen Italy. No clumsy words of mine can give an adequate picture of the beauty of the streams and glens which run down from either slope of the Northern Mountain. The reader must fancy for himself the loveliest brook which ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... of Quebec came in sight. Latterly it had taken on an aspect of decay that caused the Governor to frown. The courtyard was littered with rubbish from a building that had actually fallen down, and a new one was being erected. And though some of the houses were quite comfortable within, the exterior was very unattractive, from the ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... all was utter dark. And then the moon arose, and in a moment John Oxenham's ship was close aboard; her sails were torn and fluttering; the pitch was streaming from her sides; her bulwarks were rotting to decay. And what was that line of dark objects dangling along the mainyard?—A line of hanged men! And, horror of horrors, from the yard-arm close above him, John Oxenham's corpse looked down with grave-light eyes, and beckoned and pointed, as if to show him his way, and ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... white and that was stained by the smoke of years almost to a monochrome of dirty brown. From the lofty cross-beams, on long sennit strings, hung the heads of enemies taken aforetime in jungle raid and sea foray. The place breathed the very atmosphere of decay and death, and the imbecile ancient, curing in the smoke the token of death, was himself palsiedly shaking into ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... are nerve-relationships between the heart and the hand. The condition of the sanctuary is reflected in the state of the empire. If there is uncleanness in "the holy place," there will be blight and degeneracy among the people. The fatal seeds of national instability and decay are not found in economics; they are found in the sanctuary. "Until I went into the sanctuary ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... beginning of our life is to the end! The former is made up of deluded hopes, sensual enjoyment, while the latter is pursued by bodily decay and the odour ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... of them, I know, the colored landscape, the dreamy atmosphere, the unique glory that comes in October days, were only ecstatic suggestions of the life that opened before her. Love is victorious over any mood of nature, even when exquisite beauty is used to heighten the pathos of decay. Irene raved about the scenery. There is no place in the world beautiful enough to have justified her enthusiasm, and there is none ugly enough to ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... are not those of the material senses; [1] for instance, intelligent matter, or mortal mind, material birth, growth, and decay: they are the forever-existing realities of divine Science; wherein God and man are perfect, and man's reason is at rest in God's wisdom,— [5] who comprehends and reflects all real ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... prison-house in which I live Is falling to decay, But God renews my spirit's strength, Within these ...
— Poems • Frances E. W. Harper
... one side of the chimney, which, our readers are aware, is generally built on the outside of the structure, in Virginia, was a small window, one-half of which, in the decay of the glass panes, had been boarded up to exclude the wind and the rain. The job had evidently been performed by a bungling hand, and had never been more than half done. The wood was as rotten as punk; and without difficulty, and without much noise, the ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... custom was too deeply rooted to be stopped all at once. In the reign of Honorius, however, it was altogether abolished. It is very marvellous how this piece of masonry should have stood through all these years with comparatively so little decay. ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... scaffolding had been standing through the whole of the previous winter; and the poles, and more especially the ropes that bound them to the cross-piece, had already gone through several stages of decay. ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... sexes is clearly marked. No love but pure love burns on the altar of any soul, and any one who wishes may stop to kindle the fires or warm himself thereat. There is no bodily contact, no decay, no weakening. This love is enrapturing, uplifting, ever drawing the lover and the loved nearer ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... child who had been recently buried there. Eli Bruce, hearing of the circumstance, proposed to Mr. H. that they should repair to the spot, with suitable instruments, and endeavor to find some relics. The soil was a light loam, which would be dry and preserve bones for centuries without decay. A search enabled them to come to a pit but a slight distance from the surface. The top of the pit was covered with small slabs of the Medina sandstone, and was twenty-four feet square, four and a half feet deep, planes agreeing with the four cardinal points. It was filled with ...
— Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians • Elias Johnson
... peace, and they came between him and the sunlit landscape and Isabel's young eyes. War! always war! human bodies torn to rags in a moment, and the flowers of the field wet with a darker moisture than rain: the very smell of the trenches was in his nostrils, their odour of blood and decay. What in heaven's name had brought it all back, and, stranger still, what had moved him to speak of it and to betray feelings whose very existence was unknown to him and which he ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... of the Elizabethan age. Shakespeare battles against the ills of society as the Greek dramatists had done, by showing sin and wickedness as destroyers of life, and once this is done, by firing mankind to resistance against the forces of ruin and decay. "To hold the mirror up to nature," that men may see the devastation which evil and vice bring about in the social body. And to do this he does not, like some modern writers, shun moralizing. He warns against ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... building, so long the home of so much piety and learning, and from which so many generations of apostles had gone forth to toil in the fields and minister to the poor, was abandoned, and allowed to fall into ruins, until at last it gradually sunk into complete decay, and was buried beneath the sands. Not a trace of it now remains. History has few more piteous sermons to preach on the vanity of all the works ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond
... seemed to have been cultivated at one time as a garden, there stood a picturesque little cottage. It was that of the widow of William Beth. Five years had now elapsed since the disappearance of her son and husband, and the cottage bore the marks of neglect and decay. The door and window, bleached white by the sea winds, shook loosely to every breeze; clusters of chickweed luxuriated in the hollows of the thatch, or mantled over the eaves; and a honeysuckle that had twisted itself round the chimney, lay withering in a tangled mass at the foot of ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... prevailing tendencies of this day; but it provides the safeguards which these tendencies neglect. Notice that this favourite saying of the most advanced school of broad thinkers, who are always talking about the decay of dogma, and the unimportance of doctrine as compared with love, is here uttered by a man who was no sentimentalist, but to whom the Christian system was a most distinct and definite thing, bristling all over with the obnoxious doctrines which are by some of us so summarily ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... skin, the surface layers of fatty tissue, the substance of the tissue changed from the dark red of the wounded tissue to a dark and greenish hue that spoke of deadly decay. ...
— The Memory of Mars • Raymond F. Jones
... "walking leaves." The latter[1], exhibiting the most cunning of all nature's devices for the preservation of her creatures, are found in the jungle in all varieties of hues, from the pale yellow of an opening bud to the rich green of the full-blown leaf, and the withered tint of decay. So perfect is the imitation of a leaf in structure and articulation, that this amazing insect when at rest is almost undistinguishable from the foliage around: not only are the wings modelled to resemble ribbed and fibrous follicles, but every joint of the legs is expanded into a broad plait ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... difficulty that he found the way to his own house, which he approached with silent awe, expecting every moment to hear the shrill voice of Dame Van Winkle. He found the house gone to decay—the roof had fallen in, the windows shattered, and the doors off the hinges. A half-starved dog, that looked like Wolf, was skulking about it. Rip called him by name, but the cur snarled, showed his teeth, and passed on. This was an unkind cut indeed.—"My ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... pretty babes, Rejoicing at that tide, Rejoicing with a merry mind, They should on cock-horse ride. They prate and prattle pleasantly, As they rode on the way, To those that should their butchers be, And work their lives' decay: ...
— A Bundle of Ballads • Various
... rent a coffin, the body is wrapped in a coarse mat, slung on a pole, and carried to the outer door of the church, to have a little water sprinkled thereon or service said over it. If the families are unable to rent a spot of earth in the cemetery, their dead are dumped into a pile and left to decay and bleach upon the surface. In contrast with this brutal neglect of the poor, is the lavish expenditure of the rich. The daughter of one of the wealthy residents having died, the body was placed in a casket elaborately trimmed with blue satin, the catafalque also was covered with blue satin ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... began to rise. He had been old enough, however, to hear people talk. As he had grown older, Salter had observed its advance. Englishmen had married American beauties. American fortunes had built up English houses, which otherwise threatened to fall into decay. Then the American faculty of adaptability came into play. Anglo-American wives became sometimes more English than their husbands. They proceeded to Anglicise their relations, their relations' clothes, even, in time, their speech. They carried or ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... cheer, and then turned him out of school to begin that career of private enterprise we have compactly recorded. France achieved similar imbecilities; Germany was, if possible worse; Russia under the waste and stresses of militarism festered towards bankruptcy and decay. All Europe was producing big guns and countless swarms of little Smallways. The Asiatic peoples had been forced in self-defence into a like diversion of the new powers science had brought them. On the eve of the outbreak of the war there were six great powers ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... a great desire to let him draw a troublesome tooth of hers which, she took pains to assure us, was not impaired by natural decay, but only accidentally broken in cracking a cherry-stone. "The edge is so rough," said she, "that it hurts my tongue; and since this honest gentleman can extract it painlessly, I have a great ...
— Jacques Bonneval • Anne Manning
... taking a strong kind of invisible snuff, up my nose, into my eyes, and down my throat. I wink, sneeze, and cough. The clerk sneezes; the clergyman winks; the unseen organist sneezes and coughs (and probably winks); all our little party wink, sneeze, and cough. The snuff seems to be made of the decay of matting, wood, cloth, stone, iron, earth, and something else. Is the something else, the decay of dead citizens in the vaults below? As sure as Death it is! Not only in the cold, damp February day, do we cough and sneeze dead citizens, all through ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... you might walk for hours and not find one, yet here there were hundreds. Sometimes they covered the ground in layers, several leaves one on the other. In spring violets pushed up through them and blue-bells—sweet hope rising over grey decay. ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... pride of ancestry in a curious point of view. His house was in such a state of dilapidation that the proprietor was in danger of perishing under the ruins of the ancient mansion, which he venerated even in decay. A stranger, whom he accidentally met at the foot of the Skyrrid, made various enquiries respecting the country, the prospects, and the neighbouring houses, and, among others, asked—"Whose is this antique mansion before us?" ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... extent to which this decay of agriculture in the central provinces of the Roman empire went, in the latter stages of its history, we have the following striking account in the authentic ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... of weakness are to be found in the character of each judge. (4) From the story of Gideon and Sampson, point out New Testament truths. (5) From the story of Jephthah and Deborah gather lessons for practical life today. (6) Religious apostasy as a cause of national decay. (7) Political folly and social immorality as a sign of national decay. (8) ...
— The Bible Book by Book - A Manual for the Outline Study of the Bible by Books • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... of this new reach of the vale was a decayed tree, beside a decayed cottage, the vale spreading out into a level area which was one large field, without fence and without division, of a dull yellow colour; the vale seemed to partake of the desolation of the cottage, and to participate in its decay. And yet the spot was in its nature so dreary that one would rather have wondered how it ever came to be tenanted by man, than lament that it was left to waste and solitude. Yet the encircling hills were so ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... town life had been, as we have seen, slower of development.[13] Hence for these Northern cities the period of decay had not yet come. In fact, the fourteenth century marks the zenith of their power. Their great trading league, the Hansa, was now fully established, and through the hands of its members passed all the wealth of Northern Europe. The league even fought a war against ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... change from single to double rig is the decay of the cruel custom of "bobbing" the dogs' tails. When dogs are hitched one close behind the other (and the closer the better for pulling) the tail of the dog in front becomes heavy with ice from the condensation of the breath of the dog behind, until not only is he carrying weight ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... cultivation account for the freedom of the island from miasma. Fever is unknown. The climate has a beneficial effect on pulmonary diseases, especially in their earlier stages, and is remarkable in arresting the decay of vital power consequent upon old age. Leprosy occurs amongst the negroes, and elephantiasis is so frequent as to be known ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... describ'd A hot friend cooling: ever note, Lucilius, When love begins to sicken and decay, 20 It useth an enforced ceremony. There are no tricks in plain and simple faith: But hollow men, like horses hot at hand, Make gallant show and promise of their mettle; But when they should endure the bloody spur, 25 They fall their crests, ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... disaster and death. This is equally true of the intellectual life of a Nation. When through narrow conceit a Nation regards itself self-sufficient and cuts itself from the stimulus of the outside world, then intellectual decay must inevitably follow. ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... exhaustion of the nervous power, beyond what is necessarily occasioned by unstimulating food and drink, and the ordinary physical agents, as heat, cold, light, together with mental and corporeal exertion, &c., is not only useless but hurtful, tending directly to produce disease and premature decay. Such is tobacco. Ample evidence of this is furnished by a departure, more or less obvious, from healthy action, in the organic, vital movements of a ...
— An Essay on the Influence of Tobacco upon Life and Health • R. D. Mussey
... charter in 1153, but the Merovingian city having fallen into a sort of galloping decay Saint Louis gave it to the Dominicans in 1260, who here founded, by the orders of the king, a Hotel Dieu which, in part, is the same edifice which performs its original ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... upon those classical monuments, unequalled almost in Greece or Italy, and on those fairy Aladdin palaces, the creatures of Oriental gorgeousness and imagination, with which Spain alone can enchant the dull European; here let the man of feeling dwell on the poetry of her envy-disarming decay, fallen from her high estate, the dignity of a dethroned monarch, borne with unrepining self-respect, the last consolation of the innately noble, which no adversity can take away; here let the lover of art feed his eyes with the mighty masterpieces of Italian art, when Raphael and Titian ...
— A Supplementary Chapter to the Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... shop which Peter occupied while he was there. It is a small wooden building, leaning and bent with age and decrepitude and darkened by exposure and time. Within the last half century, however, in order to save so curious a relic from farther decay, the proprietors of the place have constructed around and over it an outer building of brick, which incloses the hut itself like a case. The sides of the outer building are formed of large, open arches, which allow the hut within to be seen. The ...
— Peter the Great • Jacob Abbott
... the nature and purposes of Art! And recognize that much of what you have thought will seem on the face of it heresy to the school whose doctrine was incarnated by Oscar Wilde in that admirable apotheosis of half-truths: "The Decay of the Art of Lying." For therein he said: "No great artist ever sees things as they really are." Yet, that half-truth might also be put thus: The seeing of things as they really are—the seeing of a proportion veiled from other eyes (together ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... change of the subtle body. If the subtle body be affected or changed a little, the gross body will also be affected similarly. The material body being the expression of the subtle body, its birth, growth, decay and death depend upon the changes of the subtle body. As long as the subtle body remains, it will continue to express itself ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda
... the case of Artemisia, the wife of Mausolus king of Caria, who made that noble sepulchre at Halicarnassus; whilst she lived she lived in grief, and died of it, being worn out by it, for that opinion was always recent with her: but you cannot call that recent, which has already begun to decay through time. Now the duty of a comforter is, to remove grief entirely, to quiet it, or draw it off as much as you can, or else to keep it under, and prevent its spreading any further, and to divert one's attention to other matters. There are some who think with Cleanthes, ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... SOFT-GRASS.—This has been much recommended as fit for meadow-land. I am not an advocate for it. It is late in blooming, and consequently not fit for the scythe at the time other grasses are; and I find the lower foliage where it occurs in meadows to be generally yellow and in a state of decay, from its tendency to mat and lie prostrate. I hear it has been cultivated in Yorkshire; hence probably its name. Two bushels of the seed would sow an acre; and it is sometimes met with in our seed-shops. It will grow in any soil, but thrives ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... behind it an abiding weakness whose traces were seen in the furrows which seamed his long pale face, in the feebleness of his health, and the nervous tremor which shook his puny frame. The "pigmy body" was "fretted to decay" by the "fiery soul" within it. But pain and weakness brought with them no sourness of spirit. Ashley was attacked more unscrupulously than any statesman save Walpole; but Burnet, who did not love him, owns that he was never bitter or ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... least forty miles of country, easterly and westerly, prepared to intercept all the deer that pass that way in their periodical migrations. It was melancholy to contemplate the gigantic, yet feeble, efforts of a whole primitive nation, in their anxiety to provide subsistence, forsaken and going to decay." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 388 - Vol. 14, No. 388, Saturday, September 5, 1829. • Various
... Optimism and Pessimism, 33. How reconcile with life one bent on suicide? 38. Religious melancholy and its cure, 39. Decay of Natural Theology, 43. Instinctive antidotes to pessimism, 46. Religion involves belief in an unseen extension of the world, 51. Scientific positivism, 52. Doubt actuates conduct as much as belief does, 54. To deny certain faiths is logically absurd, for they make their objects ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... strengthening cordial of life's gall. The lightning's stroke or the fierce tempest blast Which fells the green tree to the earth to-day Is kinder than the calm that lets it last, Unhappy witness of its own decay. May no man ever look on me and say, "She lives, but all her ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... learned disquisitions on the decay of the art of church building. Lack of time in our rushing age, lack of patience, decline of religious zeal, or change in belief, these are some of the popular reasons for this architectural degeneracy. Strange as it may seem none of these have had so powerful an influence as the invention of ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... which their race had won for Islam on the west, and the civilization developed in the country by fifteen centuries of intensive and undisturbed Hellenization was completely blotted out. The cities wore isolated from one another till their commerce fell into decay. The elaborately cultivated lands around them were left fallow till they were good for nothing but the pasturage which was all that the nomad required. The only monuments of architecture that have survived in Anatolia above ground are the imposing khans or fortified rest-houses ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... which bore the number 792. In the remote past there had been some spasmodic attempt to cultivate grass and raise some shade-trees along the sidewalks, but this had long since been given up as abortive. An air of decay hung over the street, the unmistakable suggestion of better days. This was writ large over the house in front of which Yesler stopped. The gate hung on one hinge, boards were missing from the ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... God's lordly universe: On Freedom it is founded, and how rich Is it with Freedom! He, the great Creator, Has giv'n the very worm its sev'ral dewdrop; Ev'n in the mouldering spaces of Decay, He leaves Free-will the pleasures of a choice. This world of yours! how narrow and how poor! The rustling of a leaf alarms the lord Of Christendom. You quake at every virtue; He, not to mar the glorious form of Freedom, Suffers that ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... countries—a fall which has a very direct relation to a rise in the mean standard of comfort and the average age at marriage—and alarmists foretell a time when nations will be extinguished through this decline. They ascribe it to a certain decay in religious faith, to the advance of science and scepticism, and so forth; it is a part, they say, of a general demoralization. The thing is a popular cant and quite unsupported by facts. The decline in the birth-rate is—so far as England and Wales goes—partly a real decline due to a ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... stranger, who in so doing explained that it had been written by the last occupant of the old inn I was so nearly on the point of investigating. She had been its former landlady, and had clung to the ancient house long after decay had settled upon its doorstep and desolation breathed from its gaping windows. She died in its north room, and from under her pillow the discolored leaves were taken, the words of which ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... to nations, we subscribe to the wisdom of the hackneyed Greek sentiment, that no man should be called fortunate until the seal of death shall have placed an everlasting and an impassable barrier between him and the cruel sports of Mutabilities which are played "to many men's decay." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... places of his Yesterdays, the man found, already, many changes. The houses and buildings were a little more weather-beaten, with many of the boards in the porch floors and steps showing decay. The trees in the orchard were older and more gnarled with here and there gaps in their ranks. The fences showed many repairs. The little schoolhouse was almost shabby and, with the wood cleared away, looked naked and alone. The church, too, was in need of a fresh coat of white. ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... king went to his dread account, royalty deserted it, and it soon fell into decay. Intriguing counters no longer crowd its halls; its spacious circus, where Manchegan bulls once roared in rage and agony, is now closed, and the light tinkling of guitars is no longer heard amidst ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... is now in charge of a Eurasian, or half-caste. Up till two years since, however, it was under the supervision of a European resident, and to the latter was due the trim-looking garden with its gravel walks and gardenia hedges—now, alas, fast falling into decay in the care of the half-caste, who, like most of his race, cares but little for anything but filthy lucre. The village of Sadong consists of a Malay population of about 400 souls, and is situated on the banks of the Simunjan, a tributary of the Sadong river, which ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt
... pound iron from the mills of Pennsylvania for four hundred and forty miles and with fifty-six pound iron west of there. As has been mentioned before, the first section was laid with cottonwood ties of local growth, treated by the burnettizing process, which was erroneously supposed would prevent decay. West of there hard wood ties from the East were used, some of them coming from far away Pennsylvania, and costing the Company two dollars and fifty cents laid down in Omaha. For the mountain section, ties of local growth ...
— The Story of the First Trans-Continental Railroad - Its Projectors, Construction and History • W. F. Bailey
... were met and overclasped at the corners by wide, massive eaves. A high, narrow door with a fan-light occupied the middle of the end before which the party stood. Windows above, with little balconies, were hung with old red woolen damask, fading out in stripes; perishing, doubtless, with moth and decay; in one was suspended a rusty bird-cage which had ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... hard-surfaced roadway there were a number of wheeled vehicles moving, which caused the liquefying snow to splash about me. I adjusted my coat controls for warmth and deflection, but that was the best I could do. The reek of stale decay remained. Then there were also the buildings, painfully almost vertical. I believe it would not have disturbed me if they had been truly vertical; but many of them were minutes of arc from a true perpendicular, all of them covered with a carbonaceous material which ...
— The Day of the Boomer Dukes • Frederik Pohl
... related. She was indeed at that time so much better, that we had great hopes of her perfect recovery; but the disorders of her mind on that dreadful occasion so affected her body, that she presently relapsed to her former declining state, and thence grew continually worse and worse, till, after a decay of near seven months, she followed my ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... humanitarianism but cowardice that prompted us, and their answer was to enlarge their programme. Did we suggest a navy-building holiday, it was but a cloak for our weakness and an incitement that they should redouble their efforts. Our decay had become a part of their national faith. At first the wish may have been the father to the thought, but soon under the reiterated assertions of their crazy professors the proposition became indisputable. Bernhardi in his book upon the next war cannot conceal the contempt in which ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... occasion {206} of a general confusion and distraction amongst the population of the country. This continued for a long period, for nearly eighty years, when the affairs of the Moslems had arrived at the last stage of decay, ruin, poverty and wretchedness; since whilst they were too ill-practised in deceit to dissemble an obedience which was not sincere, they neither possessed the power to repel nor means to evade the evils that afflicted them. Nor did the ...
— Rulers of India: Albuquerque • Henry Morse Stephens
... Weston she had kept tolerable health, but certainly her constitution was not strong, and the slavery of Walworth Road threatened her with premature decay. Her sisters counselled wisely. Coming to London was a mistake. She would have had better chances at Weston, notwithstanding the extreme discretion with which she was obliged to ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... of Palmyra was due to the trade along this route, and its decay began when the route was abandoned. The present town of Tadmor is near the ruins of ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... on Grand Island had fallen into decay, Hushiel saw the cornerstone of the dream city, Ararat, displayed in one of the rooms of the Buffalo Historical Society. He was no longer a sensitive boy, yet the tears sprang to his eyes as he re-read the old inscription which you may still read if you visit the Society's ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... it is 'My sour friend.' Yet, after all, this is nothing, in fact, but what is perfectly natural; and, in this respect, marriage only follows the eternal law of nature in all earthly existence. Every form of life carries in itself decay and dissolution—a poisonous snake-king[3] gnaws even at the ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... mill was now largely so only in name. So far back as the Rover boys could remember, it had been a tenantless structure going slowly to decay. The water wheel was gone, and so were the grinding stones, and the roof and sides were full of holes. Henderson, the owner, had years ago fallen heir to a fortune, and had moved away, leaving the building at the mercy of the tramps ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht • Edward Stratemeyer
... A quick succession of encounters occurred at various parts of the seat of war, the general tendency of which was not entirely in favour of the British arms, though the weekly export of prisoners reassured all who noted it as to the sapping and decay of the Boer strength. These incidents must now be set down in the order of their occurrence, with their relation to each other so far as it ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... John Yeardley being our guide, taking his wife and Ann Stordy along with him in a taxed cart. We had a very pleasant ride thither, down a beautiful valley, through which the river Wenning runs; had on our right hand a line view of Hornby Castle, now in part gone to decay. Got to Wray about half-past ten, and went to the meeting, which began at eleven o'clock. Twenty-three persons attended, one of whom appeared to be of another society. I sat therein for a considerable time in a very low state, ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... destined Hymen's willing victim too: Trust not too much your now resistless charms, Those, age or sickness, soon or late, disarms: 60 Good-humour only teaches charms to last, Still makes new conquests, and maintains the past; Love, raised on beauty, will like that decay, Our hearts may bear its slender chain a day; As flowery bands in wantonness are worn, A morning's pleasure, and at evening torn; This binds in ties more easy, yet more strong, The willing heart, and only holds ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... is the last wantonness of loafing. We followed our lout up the right leg, which is a gentle and easy ascent in the general likeness of a street. World-old stone cottages crouch on either side; here and there is a more ambitious house in decay; trees wave over the street, and down its distance comes an occasional donkey-cart very musically and leisurely. By all odds, Arqua and its kind of villages are to be preferred to those hamlets of the plain ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... moral lies too plain below, We view well pleased at distance all the sights Of arms and palfreys, battles, fields and fights, And damsels in distress and courteous knights, But when we look too near, the shades decay And all the pleasing landscape ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... not thoroughly cheerful. The heroism evinced in his life and in his sermons is a sad heroism, a heroism that has on it the trace of tears. Always at work, and dying in harness, the spur of duty made him insensible to the decay of strength and the need of repose. He had no time ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... California pines is shown by their sound condition in California buildings that have stood for generations, many of them in regions where climatic conditions are more conducive to decay than in the ...
— The Marvelous Exploits of Paul Bunyan • W.B. Laughead
... cents per bushel at that time, and the number of alien farm-renters was increasing. True, all the bright boys and girls were leaving the farm, following the example of my critics, but these I was told were all signs of prosperity and not of decay. The American farmer was getting rich, and moving to town, only the renters and the hired man ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... forest green a little village peeped out, or an old castle reared its gray and weather-beaten battlements on high, as if protesting against its impending decay. There was but one building in the whole region which yet stood strong, intact and massive, notwithstanding ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... when his head-strong Riot hath no Curbe, When Rage and hot-Blood are his Counsailors, When Meanes and lauish Manners meete together; Oh, with what Wings shall his Affections flye Towards fronting Perill, and oppos'd Decay? War. My gracious Lord, you looke beyond him quite: The Prince but studies his Companions, Like a strange Tongue: wherein, to gaine the Language, 'Tis needfull, that the most immodest word Be look'd vpon, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... city had owed her existence rather to the rod of the enchanter, than the fear of the fugitive; that the waters which encircled her had been chosen for the mirror of her state, rather than the shelter of her nakedness; and that all which in nature was wild or merciless,—Time and Decay, as well as the waves and tempests,—had been won to adorn her instead of to destroy, and might still spare, for ages to come, that beauty which seemed to have fixed for its throne the sands of the hour-glass as well ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... by the development of railroads make possible such a gathering as this,—these sciences, we cheerfully admit, outrank our modest enterprise, which, in the words of Herodotus, is "to preserve from decay the remembrance of what men have done." It may be true, as a geologist once said, in extolling his study at the expense of the humanities, "Rocks do not lie, although men do;" yet, on the other hand, the ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... the body there is at once a separation. These two motions, the respiration of the lungs and the beating of heart, are the very bond on the sundering of which the spirit is left to itself; and the body being then deprived of the life of its spirit grows cold and begins to decay. This inmost communication of the spirit of man is with the respiration and with the heart, because on these all vital motions depend, not only in general ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... electricity does not enter as a base into the specific fluid whence our Ideas and Volitions proceed? Whether the hair, which loses its color, turns white, falls out, or disappears, in proportion to the decay or crystallization of our thoughts, may not be in fact a capillary system, either absorbent or diffusive, and wholly electrical? Whether the fluid phenomena of the Will, a matter generated within us, and spontaneously reacting under the impress of conditions as ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... soil. The branches become covered with moss, which first kills them, and then breaks them off, so that many tall and tapering sapins point their heads to the sky with trunks wholly guiltless of branches; while in other cases, where decay has not yet gone so far, the branches wear the appearance of gigantic stags' horns, with the velvet; and when a number of these interlace, the mosses unite in large dark patches, giving a cedar-like air to the scene ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... is mortal: human objects are best fitted to human infirmities. I well know how far in wisdom, in feature, in stature, proportion, beauty, in all the gifts of the mind, thou exceedest my Penelope: she is a mortal, and subject to decay; thou immortal, ever growing, yet never old; yet in her sight all my desires terminate, all my wishes—in the sight of her, and of my country earth. If any god, envious of my return, shall lay his dreadful hand upon me as I pass the seas, ...
— THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES • CHARLES LAMB
... Ranger, "but there's others that go down pretty easy, lodge-pole pine, fer instance. But a tree doesn't have to be blown down to be ruined. Even if a branch is blown off—an' you know how often that happens—insects and fungi get into the wound of the tree and decay follows." ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... through the wakening land! Out through the broad land bear us—the dead Insurgents sent, To join, upon our ghastly biers, the German Parliament. Oh solemn sight! there we should lie, the grave-earth on each brow, And faces sunken in decay—the proper Regents now! There we should lie and say to you: "Ere we could waste away, Your Freedom-gift, ye archons brave, is rotting in decay! The Corn is housed which burst the sod, when the March ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... exhorted them to a discharge of their duties in their several counties. He was, no doubt, extremely pleased with such an issue of a session that had began with a very inauspicious aspect. His health daily declined; but he concealed the decay of his constitution, that his allies might not be discouraged from engaging in a confederacy of which he was deemed the head and chief support. He conferred the command of the ten thousand troops destined for Holland upon the earl of Marlborough, and appointed him at the same time his ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... time, this objection has little weight. Chateaubriand was seventy-nine; Madame Recamier seventy. The former was tottering on the brink of the grave. He had lost the use of his limbs, and his mind was visibly failing. Madame Recamier was keenly sensible of the decay of his faculties, though she succeeded so well in concealing the fact from others that few of the habitual visitors at the Abbaye recognized its extent. The reason she gave to her friends for refusing him was undoubtedly the true one. She said that his daily visit to her was his only diversion, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... quality of the action. Every progress is conditioned on a permanence; every permanence lives but in and through progress. Where all, and with equal and simultaneous impulse, strives to move, nothing can move, but chaos is come; where all refuses to move, and therefore stagnates, decay supervenes, which is motion, though a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... for the good and innocent to behold this universal dissolution and decay without remembering that they themselves must pass through some such temporary experience. But upon those who carry guilty secrets in their hearts these impressions descend with crushing weight. David felt them to the full when at last the winter set in; when the days were shortened ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss |
