"First blush" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... respects, indeed, there was something that might at first blush have seemed favorable to the Lutheran revolt. Few lands were more open to German and Swiss influences than was their transalpine neighbor. Commercially, Italy and Germany were united by a thousand bonds, and a constant influx ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... first blush, it seems strange that the revivals of the folk speech should have come at a time when the locomotive and the telegraph were extending commerce and communication to the uttermost limits of the earth, when ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... at first blush a dilemma, but our wit makes all clear. Each of you, avowedly in the King's name, did descend upon the dwelling of a disaffected rebel and make certain seizures there which have been duly sent to his Majesty. Each of you ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... intensely, but it seems to me it is far too objective a medium to widen them appreciably, and it is that widening, that increase in the range of understanding, at which I think civilisation is aiming. The case for biography, and more particularly autobiography, as against the novel, is, I admit, at the first blush stronger. You may say: Why give us these creatures of a novelist's imagination, these phantom and fantastic thinkings and doings, when we may have the stories of real lives, really lived—the intimate record of actual men and women? To which one answers: ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... though the interview was over, and he were leaving her. She, as she saw him go, wished that he would return that she might say some word of comfort to him. Not that she could have said the only word that would have comforted him. At the first blush of the thing, at the first sound of the address which he had made to her, she had been angry with him. He had disappointed her, and she was indignant. But her anger had already melted and turned itself to ruth. She could not but love him better, in that ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... position might be brought as swiftly as possible to an end, and some good services to mankind justify the appropriation of expense. It was not so with my friend, who was only unsettled and discouraged, and filled full of that trumpeting anger with which young men regard injustices in the first blush of youth; although in a few years they will tamely acquiesce in their existence, and knowingly profit by their complications. Yet all this while he suffered many indignant pangs. And once, when he put on his boots, like any ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... others, a crowd of others, are facing the big ploughed field immediately before them. That is the straightest riding, and with them he goes. Why has the scent lain so hot over the up-turned heavy ground? Why do they go so fast at this the very first blush of the morning? Fortune is always against him, and the horse is pulling him through the mud as though the brute meant to drag his arm out of the socket. At the first fence, as he is steadying himself, a butcher passes him roughly in the jump and nearly takes away the side of ...
— Hunting Sketches • Anthony Trollope
... upas-tree, tainted and polluted it. That van was another Eden, until PUNCH, the serpent, entered. The lady was a native of Switzerland—yes, of Switzerland. Oh, that he (the learned gentleman) could follow her to her early home!—that he could paint her with the first blush and dawn of innocence, tinting her virgin cheek as the morning sun tinted the unsullied snows of her native Jungfrau!—that he could lead the gentlemen of the jury to that Swiss cottage where the gentle Felicite (such was the lady's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... high in the heavens, and the first streaks of dawn appeared. There is no twilight in these low latitudes, and the full daylight came well nigh at once. I had not closed my eyes since my encounter with the steward, and ever since the first blush of day I had labored under the impression that I could see some unusual dark mass half way up the mast. But although it again and again caught my eye, it hardly roused my curiosity, and I did not rise from the bundle of sails on which I was lying to ascertain what it really was. ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... new indeed, and all wonderful. It was not that she was unaccustomed to society or to conversation, for to their house at Hampstead many people came, uttering many words, but both the people and the words were so very different. After the first blush, the first reconnaissance of the two Bigwigs between whom she sat, her eyes WOULD stray and her ears would only half listen to them. Indeed, half her ears, she soon found out, were quite enough to deal with ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and ailing; and after all this might be the true Popenjoy who, in coming days, would re-establish the glory of the family. But, at any rate, she was his wife, and the bairn would be his bairn. He had been made a happy man, and had determined to enjoy to the full the first blush of his happiness. But when he was told that she was not to be fretted, that she was to be made especially happy, and was so told by her father, he did not quite clearly see his way for the future. Did this mean that he was to ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... conspicuously spiritual nor gentle, but frank, outspoken, fearless, self-willed. He could also see that she had been spoiled by her father and his friends, who had given her carte blanche to say and do what she pleased. Very likely—he could admit that even in the first blush of his emotion—she might be passionate and prejudiced on occasion, even a fierce hater. This he had imagined in the Tochty woods, and was not afraid, for her imperfections seemed to him a provocation and an attraction. They were the defects of her qualities—of ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... one or two sad, separate wives, without A fruit to bloom upon their withering bough— Begged to bring up the little girl, and "out"— For that's the phrase that settles all things now, Meaning a virgin's first blush at a rout, And all her points as thorough-bred to show: And I assure you, that like virgin honey Tastes their first season ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... At first blush of dawn wind from same quarter (east-south-east). Rained heavily all night and to my astonishment, instead of the creek rising as usual (three and a half inches per hour) it was now rising five and a half inches and hourly increasing. Although the creek has in many places overflown ...
— McKinlay's Journal of Exploration in the Interior of Australia • John McKinlay
... prey,—with a long aquiline nose, a finely cut mouth, which he generally kept open, or rather which was gaping like the edges of a wound,—this man would have presented to Lavater, if Lavater had lived at that time, a subject for physiognomical observations which at the first blush would not have been very favourable to the person ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... quickly to the lad's eyes, but it was only light, for with the first blush of dawn he awoke and prepared to ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... that little effect was produced by either fire, gave orders that his should cease. The troops retired to their bivouac and lay on their arms, with orders to cross the strait, or river, which is here about three-fourths of a mile in width, on the following morning. Accordingly, at the first blush of dawn, on Sunday, the 16th of August, when the fire from the British battery was resumed, 330 regulars and 400 militia were embarked, with five pieces of light artillery, in boats and canoes of every ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... a mystery as ever was invented by a writer of the sensation school; and when Catholics declare that there never was a plot, except that which was formed against their religion by artful men for the worst purposes, they do not talk so unreasonably as at the first blush it should seem. This plot was emphatically a gentlemanly transaction. There was hardly a person who had part in it who was not a gentleman by birth or education, or both. Catesby, Percy, Rookwood, Digby, the Winters, Grant, Tresham, Keyes, and the Littletons ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... enemies his ordinance of banishment was a ukase; and, at first blush, it looks like an unwarrantable stretching of his powers. But Durham was on the ground and must necessarily have known the conditions prevailing much better than his critics three thousand miles away. Desperate diseases need desperate remedies. The presumption is always that the man ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... and simple, and seems at first blush so luminous that it is no wonder if many careful naturalists regarded it as an incontrovertible truth. The warning voice of the more prudent men of science was silenced by the loud enthusiasm of the younger generation over the solution of the greatest of the ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... At the first blush of this discovery Mr. Harris felt that perhaps he had been a trifle rash—that it might have been wiser to give more heed to his wife's advice; but since he had got his captives secure at last, he was not going to be such a fool as to set them free after waiting and watching so long ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... which he transmuted into words: "There's the sort of case where the cynical foreigner fails to appreciate the true import of our American life. That couple typifies the elements of greatness in our every-day people. At first blush the husband's rough and material, but he's shrewd and enterprising and vigorous—the bread winner. He's enormously proud of her, and he has reason to be, for she is a constant stimulus to higher things. Little ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... you said what was natural for you to say, and I thought what was natural for me to think, at first blush." ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the theatre that the public does not know. A statement, at first blush, to be disputed. The press agent, the special writer, the critic, the magazines, the Sunday supplement, the divorce courts—what have they left untold? We know the make of car Miss Billboard drives; who her husbands are and were; how much the movies have offered her; what she wears, reads, says, ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... of ocean covered with thick-grown weed. But it was needful that I should plan for my supply of food as I went onward, that was to be got only by returning to the far-away barque; and also I felt an itching desire—as strong as at first blush it was unreasonable—to carry away with me some part of the treasure that I had found. That I ever should get out into the world again, and so have the good of my riches, seemed likely to me only in my most sanguine moments; but even on the ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... of Ema. And now, in the intoxication of her visions, she forgot the care of the day before, the importunate letters, the distant reproaches, and thought of nothing in the world but cloisters chiselled and painted, villages with red roofs, and roads where she saw the first blush of spring. Dechartre had modelled for Miss Bell a waxen figure of Beatrice. Vivian was painting angels. Softly bent over her, Prince Albertinelli caressed his beard and threw around him glances that appeared to ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... much of the sympathy we lavish upon martyrs is wanton waste, because to many minds, if not in fact to all, there is a positive pleasure in considering oneself a martyr. More absolute truth is contained in this than appears at the first blush. There are very few who do not roll under their tongues as a sweet morsel the belief that their superior goodness or generosity has brought them trouble and affliction from ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... among the Germanic peoples and those most closely allied to them, the Scandinavians, that Mark Twain found most complete and ready response. At first blush, it seems almost incredible that the writings of Mark Twain, with their occasional slang, their colloquialisms and their local peculiarities of dialect, should have borne translation so well into other languages, ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... amount necessary to the purchaser, and his means. Even Condillac had said: une chose n'a pas une valeur, parcequ'elle coute, mais elle coute (du travail ou de l'argent), parcequ'elle a une valeur. (Commerce et Gouvernement, 16.) Ricardo's doctrine is more tenable than appears at first blush. We need only to interline his theory of rent, admit that capital is accumulated labor, subtract all objects constituting a natural monopoly, and not forget that the intrinsic value of labor is one of the causes of the difference of price of different sorts ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... must be artificial, although I could not discover the source from which it was diffused. Mrs. Leete was an exceptionally fine looking and well preserved woman of about her husband's age, while the daughter, who was in the first blush of womanhood, was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. Her face was as bewitching as deep blue eyes, delicately tinted complexion, and perfect features could make it, but even had her countenance lacked special charms, the faultless luxuriance of her figure would ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... Fawcett, suppose They could once lead the town as they pleased by the nose; A fig for such actors! tied all in a bunch, Mere mortals compared to old deified Punch. Not Chester can charm us, nor Foote with her smile, Like the first blush of summer, our bosoms beguile, Half so well, or so merrily drive caro away, As old Punch with his Judy in amorous play. Kean, Young, and Macready, though thought very good, Have heads, it is true, but then they're ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... being one of our good friends, sent an Indian to aduertise me that he had descried a shippe vpon the coast, and that he thought it was one of our nation. (M475) Hereupon the brigantine oppressed with famine, came to an anker at the mouth of the Riuer of May, when at the first blush we thought they had bene shippes come from France; which gaue vs occasion of great ioy: but after I had caused her to be better viewed, I was aduertised that they were our seditious companions that were returned. Therefore I sent them word by Captaine Vasseur and my ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... cases, it should seem, the creative energy had set about to fashion its supposed ultimate and perfect work, and with what result? At first blush, the failure seemed most conspicuous in my companions, especially the big and the little one; but a small introspection might, perhaps, have disclosed a deeper disappointment in a nobler aim. The bear was the only success among us. He was perfect in his line, though sadly at a disadvantage; ravished ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... "At first blush," returned Greg, "some of you may not like the job. It is nothing more nor less than a visit to Dodge's room, while he and Blayton are absent ...
— Dick Prescott's Second Year at West Point - Finding the Glory of the Soldier's Life • H. Irving Hancock
... individual character. It arises as often from the weakness of the character as from its strength. The dispersion of this clever and showy ministry is a fine illustration of this truth. One morning the Arch- Mediocrity himself died. At the first blush, it would seem that little difficulties could be experienced in finding his substitute. His long occupation of the post proved, at any rate, that the qualification was not excessive. But this cabinet, with its serene and blooming visage, had been all this time charged ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... will be too well known to need any explanation to the public. Every friend and every enemy of America will comprehend them at first blush. To you, sir, I owe all the apology I can make. The urgent necessity I am in of your advice and assistance, indeed of your conduct and direction of the war, is all I can urge; and that is a sufficient justification to myself ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... at this appalling iniquity, but, in the covenant of circumcision made with Abraham, expressly mentions it, and confirms the patriarch in it, speaking of those 'bought with his money,' and requiring him to circumcise them. Why, at the very first blush, every Christian will cry out against this statement. To this, however, you must come, or yield your position; and this is only the first utterly incredible and monstrous corollary involved in the assertion that slavery is essentially and always 'a ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... that, to the adoration whereof all nations unitedly concur. Beside, to what purpose is it to lay down a definition for a faint resemblance, and mere shadow of me, while appearing here personally, you may view me at a more certain light? And if your eye-sight fail not, you may at first blush discern me to be her whom the Greeks term Mwpia, the ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... perhaps, the most astonishing of all tricks with cards. Although it may be true that whatever puzzle one man invents, some other man may unravel, as before observed, I am decidedly of opinion that this trick defies detection. At the first blush it seems very difficult to learn; but it is simplicity ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... three or four days' food. He ended by transporting up that steep slope everything but his canoe and the small tent. It might be, he said to himself as he lugged load after load, just a whim, a fancy, but he was free to act on a whim or a fancy, as free as if he were in the first blush of careless, adventurous youth,—freer, because he had none of the impatient hopes and urges and dreams of youth. He was finished, he told himself in a transient mood of bitterness. Why should he be governed by practical considerations? He was here, alone in the unsentient, ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... as compared with the apparent magnitude of the ingurgitated object,—and a bubble or two, ascending out of the black depth and bursting at the surface. As regarded Judge Pyncheon, it seemed probable, at first blush, that the mode of his final departure might give him a larger and longer posthumous vogue than ordinarily attends the memory of a distinguished man. But when it came to be understood, on the highest professional authority, that the event was a natural, and—except ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... front hated the wire entanglements, that bright sentence ran up and down the entire line from Belgium to the Swiss frontier. And for men of experience there is more truth in the statement than one would at first blush think. It will take one more year for the fighting, but it will take thirty-nine years more to grow the shade trees. Five centuries ago the French began to develop the love of the beautiful. On either side of the roads running across ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... which precedes and explains the Tales, they may find, not only that the softening process would have spoilt these popular traditions for all except the most childish readers, but that the things which shocked them at the first blush, are, after ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... At first blush, judging from Peter's behavior, the girl was not going to bother him. Peter left his horse at the stable, and taking a hansom, went to his club. There he spent a calm half hour over the evening papers. His dinner was eaten with equal coolness. Not till he had reached his ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... of the escapement has always been to govern, within limits precise and perfectly regular, if it be possible, the flow of the motive force; that means the procession of the wheel-work and, as a consequence, of the hands thereto attached. At first blush it seems as if a continually-moving governor, such as is in use on steam engines, for example, ought to fulfil the conditions, and attempts have accordingly been made upon this line with results which have proven ...
— Watch and Clock Escapements • Anonymous
... is not, my lord, so much the fault of Mr Rattlin as it would, at the first blush, appear to be. He himself pressed a wicked, mischievous young blackguard, who was appointed the young gentleman's servant. Incredible as the fact may appear, my lord, he contrived, in a manner that Dr Thompson can best ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... opponent of no mean pretensions, under the name of the Con-Test, for then, as now, as it always has been, and always will be, a good and taking title produced a host of imitations and piracies. In spite, however, of Murphy's great talents and its first blush of success, the Test soon began to languish, and died of atrophy, after a brief existence of some eight or nine months. One of the most formidable anti-ministerialist papers which, had hitherto ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... light, or her daily walk to the dingy office—dingy no longer—so bracing. And the out-of-doors—the sky and drifting clouds; the low hills, bleak in the winter's gloom—what changes had come over them? Was it the first blush of the coming spring that had softened their lines, or had her eyes been blind to all their beauty? Oh! Marvellous elixir that makes hopes ...
— Abijah's Bubble - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... summary of gifts; and again, "Might and Right," the identity of these two, if a man will understand this God's-Universe, and that only he who conforms to the law of it can in the long-run have any "might:" all this, at the first blush, often awakened Sterling's musketry upon me, and many volleys I have had to stand,—the thing not being decidable by that kind of weapon ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... to a minister with some such formula on their lips, and at times with a calculated timidity, that at the first blush of his request I was inclined to bid him come to me at the proper time; and to remove to another part of the room. But curiosity, playing the part of his advocate, found so much that was candid in his manner that I hesitated. "What is it?" ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... a very worthy fellow he was, was a man of the name of Tallencourt. He was an old soldier, and this caused him to be elected captain of a grenadier company in the Citizen Guard—a position to which, in the first blush of his enthusiasm, he attached an exaggerated importance. Well, some time after Dumas had resigned his position in the library, in the midst of the riots which occurred so frequently about that period, we saw Tallencourt come home one day in full ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... down-trodden inhabitants of the Lyapinsky house. And I could not rid myself of the thought that these two things were bound up together, that the one arose from the other. I remember, that, as this feeling of my own guilt presented itself to me at the first blush, so it persisted in me, but to this feeling a second was speedily ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... press for an immediate answer, Miss Clibborn. I know at first blush it must surprise you that I should come forward with an offer so soon after the rupture of your engagement with Captain Parsons. But if you examine the matter closely, you will see that it is less surprising than ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... infancy—that is, the period during which the young are dependent upon their parents for food, care, and training—is very short, extending even in the highest form of ape to not more than three months. This would appear, at first blush, to be a great advantage possessed by the lower animals. They come into the world equipped with a variety of tendencies to act which, within a week, or, as in the case of chickens, almost immediately after birth, are perfectly adapted ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... fact there. And years afterwards, in the light of further knowledge of Mr. Scales, Sophia came to regard his being on the doorstep as the most natural and characteristic thing in the world. Real miracles never seem to be miracles, and that which at the first blush resembles one usually proves to be an instance of the ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... gazed into each other's faces with a sad tragic air, as though the occasion were one which at the first blush was too melancholy for many words. There was whispering here and there and one young farmer's son gave a deep sigh, like a steam-engine beginning to work, and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. "There ain't ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope |
