"Wormwood" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the morning, when the heat begins to grow intolerable to the observer, there is a continual coming and going between the burrows and the tufts of grass, everlasting, thyme and wormwood, which constitute the Tachytes' hunting-grounds within a moderate radius. The journey is so short that the Wasp brings her game home on the wing, usually in a single flight. She holds it by the fore-part, a very judicious precaution, which is ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... soul was sickening. The attentions of the men, their easy manners, their little liberties, their bows, their smiles, their compliments—it was gall and wormwood to the girl's unbroken spirit. Nevertheless she was conscious of a certain pleasure in the bitterness. The bitterness was her own, the pleasure some one else's, so to speak, who was looking on and laughing. She felt an unconquerable impulse to sharpen her wit on Mrs. Jupe's customers, and ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... and dungeons in the great old tower were now occupied by bruised, defeated officers of the law. Baron Jasto Dangloss, crushed in spirit and broken of body, paced the blackest and narrowest cell of them all. The gall and wormwood that filled his soul was not to be measured by words. He blamed himself for the catastrophe; it was he who had permitted this appalling thing to grow and burst with such sickening results. In his mind there was no doubt that Marlanx had completely overthrown the dynasty ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... hemorrhage, brought on every time his mind reverted to his loss on the "ginseng" deal, ceased. During all of that period his peregrinations around the Maggie were as those of one for whom the sweets of existence had turned to wormwood and vinegar. Mr. Gibney confided to McGuffey that it was a toss-up whether the old man was meditating murder or suicide. In fact, so depressed was Captain Scraggs that he lacked absolutely the ambition to "rag" his associates; ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... an orthodox significance. As an example of this mixture of heathen with Christian magic, we may cite the following from a medieval medical book as a salve against "nocturnal goblin visitors": "Take hop plant, wormwood, bishopwort, lupine, ash-throat, henbane, harewort, viper's bugloss, heathberry plant, cropleek, garlic, grains of hedgerife, githrife, and fennel. Put these worts into a vessel, set them under the altar, sing over them nine masses, boil them in butter and sheep's grease, add ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... for the joy of the many who are to read after him. By no willing of his own he has been compelled to take life by the hand and go down where there has been little save sorrow and degradation. The cup of gall and wormwood has obviously been lifted to his lips and to the last drop he has been compelled to drink it. Because of this, we are enabled to see the rug, woven of the tortures and delights of a life. We may actually walk and ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... Wormwood has nothing to do with worms or wood; it is the Anglo-Saxon "wer mod," man-inspiriting, being a ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... slowly, that all states are legitimate and necessary, the one to the other. The parts of life contribute to the perfection of the whole. Each object has its own peculiar office, as it has its own form. The tulip delights with its beauty, the carnation with its perfume, the unseemly wormwood displeases both taste and smell, yet in medicinal value is superior to both. So each temperament, each character, has its good and bad. The one has inclinations of ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... As oft he did, of joy and happiness, And great prosperity, and rising worth, 'Twas like a wave of wormwood o'er ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... or Mackworth, from ever alluding to it even in the remotest way. But that they should know at all the shameful charge which had broken his father's heart, and brought temporary suspicion and dishonour on his name, was gall and wormwood to him. ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... pinchers: Even prayin' don't help, nor helps all your Ave Marias! When you begin 'em, he takes your jaws and claps 'em together; Look to heaven, he comes and blinds y'r eyes with his ashes; Be you hungry, and eat, he pizons y'r soup with his wormwood; Take you a drink o' nights, he squeezes gall in the tankard; Run like a stag, he follows as close on y'r trail as a blood-hound; Creep like a shadow, be whispers: 'Good! we had best take it easy'; Kneels at y'r side in the church, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... of his right hand, and a slight roll in his gait when he walked. But appearances are deceptive, for Mr. Kemp, at liberty or in gaol, had never been out of London in his life. He was born and bred a London thief, and had served all his sentences at Wormwood Scrubbs. For over a minute he and Mr. Holymead remained in conversation. Rolfe would have described it officially as familiar conversation, but that description would have overlooked the deference, the sense of inferiority, in "Kincher's" manner. ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... fashion heaped upon his shoulders. At heart he was restless and unhappy. The mission bequeathed to him by Richard King haunted his thoughts like a spectre not to be exorcised. Was his whole life to be passed in the weary sustainment of an imposture which in itself was gall and wormwood to a nature constitutionally frank and open? Was he forever to appear a rich man and live as a poor one? Was he till his deathbed to be deemed a sordid miser whenever he refused a just claim on his supposed wealth, and to feel his ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... feet, and still he did not touch her. In spite of his quiet words there was a taste of bitterness on his lips, as though his magnanimity had turned to wormwood while he was speaking. After all, he told himself in a swift revulsion of feeling, Judy was his wife and she had made ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... before us, and Ismene, with the sorrow of earth still lingering about her, is there. Soul after soul makes us share in some repentance or some joy. He whom the mourning of his widow taught to drink the sweet wormwood of pain, tells us of Nella praying in her lonely bed, and we learn from the mouth of Buonconte how a single tear may save a dying sinner from the fiend. Sordello, that noble and disdainful Lombard, eyes us from afar like a couchant ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... hand. For the moment the party seemed solidly united. But when the echoes of long continued cheering had subsided the bitterness of faction flashed out with increased intensity. To the Radicals, Raymond's suggestion of Edwin D. Morgan for permanent chairman was as gall and wormwood, and his talk of an entire new ticket most alarming. However, George Opdyke and Horace Greeley, the Radical leaders, chastened by the defeat of Wadsworth and the election of Morgan to the Senate, did not now forget ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... which is principally koa, ceases at a height of about 6000 feet, but a deplorable vegetation beginning with mamane scrub, and ending with withered wormwood and tufts of coarse grass, straggles up 3000 feet higher, and a scaly orange lichen is found in rare pitches at a height of ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... reality that she thought of its fury with a shudder whenever she heard of the world's wickedness. When Parson Fenwick had first made himself intimate at the mill Mrs. Brattle had thought that her husband's habits of life would have been to him as wormwood and gall,—that he would be unable not to chide, and well she knew that her husband would bear no chiding. By degrees she had come to understand that this new parson was one who talked more of life with its sorrows, and vices, and chances of happiness, and possibilities of goodness, ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... fellow-students she was still an insignificant new-comer, with no claim to distinction. If she excelled in one subject, she was behind in the next, while at games she was hopelessly ignorant. It was wormwood and gall to be obliged to join the "Bantlings" at hockey, and be coached by a girl of twelve; but Rhoda set her teeth and determined that if pluck and energy could help, it would be a short time indeed ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... red-hot-cannon-ball-firing sermon, and Solomon Barzinsky could not resist leaning across and whispering to the Parnass: 'Wasn't I right in refusing to vote for Rochinsky?' This reminder of his candidate's defeat was wormwood to the Parnass, spoiling all his satisfaction in the sermon. He rebuked the talker ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... The sourness, bitterness, and wormwood of them, therefore, is only to the flesh, that loveth neither God, nor Christ, nor grace. The afflictions, therefore, that the church in the wilderness hath met with, these cups of gold, are of more worth than are all the treasures of Egypt; they are needful and profitable, and praiseworthy ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... stiff, upright filaments like the broom-corn straws. These stems are very bitter and are often used by the range-riders on long rides or roundups to excite the flow of saliva when thirst overtakes them too far from water. Because of its bitterness it is often called wormwood. ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... for help to the other." The one point on which he chiefly insisted was that we must fear God from love, not love God from fear. "To love Him from fear," he used to say, "is to put gall into our food and to quench our thirst with vinegar; but to fear Him from love is to sweeten aloes and wormwood." ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... these weeds," he said, "which have been hoed at by a million farmers all spring and summer, and yet have prevailed, and just now come out triumphant over all lanes, pastures, fields, and gardens, such is their vigor. We have insulted them with low names, too,—as Pigweed, Wormwood, Chickweed, Shad-Blossom." He says, "They have brave names, too,—Ambrosia, Stellaria, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... making use of a salve against the elfin race and nocturnal goblin visitors (nightmare) is extremely curious. "Take the ewe hop plant (probably female hop), wormwood, bishopwort, lupin, etc.; put these worts into a vessel, set them under the altar, sing over them nine masses, boil them in butter and sheep's grease, add much holy salt, strain through a cloth, throw the worts into running water. If any ill tempting occur to a man, or ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... fact, of two other characters—recur to our reflections as we find that we have shuffled off the coil of bricks and mortar and are rattling across Wormwood Scrubs. More fortunate than some who have been there before us, we have no call to alight. Calls to this ancient field of glory, whether symbolized by the gentlemanly pistol or the plebeian fist, have ceased to be in vogue. Dueling and boxing are both frowned down ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... joy, that your faith in Jesus has been preserved; the Comforter that should relieve you is not far from you. But as you are a Christian, in the name of that Saviour, who was filled with bitterness and made drunken with wormwood, I conjure you to have recourse in frequent prayer to 'his God and your God,' [13] the God of mercies, and father of all comfort. Your poor father is, I hope, almost senseless of the calamity; the unconscious instrument of Divine Providence knows it not, and your mother is in heaven. It is sweet ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... santonine every four hours for two or three days, followed by a brisk cathartic. Wormwood tea is ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... lavender blossoms, and the same quantity of sage, mint, rue, wormwood and rosemary. Chop and mix them well. Put them into a jar, with half an ounce of camphor that has been dissolved in a little alcohol, and pour in three quarts of strong clear vinegar. Keep the jar for two or three weeks in the hot sun, and at night plunge it into a box of heated ...
— Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches • Eliza Leslie
... wood, who shall choose the kinds? There's beech, birch and maple; cherry, whitewood and ebony; ash and brown ash and white ash and black ash; ditto oak, drawn and quartered; there's rosewood, redwood, gopherwood and wormwood; mahogany, laurel, holly and mistletoe; cedar of Lebanon and pine of Georgia, not to mention chestnut, walnut, butternut, cocoanut and peanut, all of which are popular and available woods for finishing modern dwellings. If we choose from this list, which may be indefinitely ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... not be mistaken to mean that he found his penitence easy, or that he was, like Saint Paul, transformed as it were by a lightning flash—"a fusile Christian." I say, there were—after his two sicknesses and long suffering, and experiences bitter as wormwood—there were, I say, no more outward inconsistencies in his life; but I do not say that within there were no fierce, fearful struggles, so wearisome at times that it almost seemed better to yield than ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... regions of Europe, its tall branchless stem is so well adapted. The sow thistle, a plant that occurs in almost every part of the world, was nothing different here from its usual habit in Europe. We observed also a species of Chenopodium and of Artemisia or wormwood; abundance of the Pe-tsai, and other common culinary vegetables. In the small flower gardens, without which we scarcely observed a single cottage, were balsams, several kinds of beautiful asters, holy-hocks, two species of Malva, ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... they had halted, although tumbled down and in ruins, still rose sufficiently high to screen the party from the eyes of the sentinel. Moreover, between the latter and the ruin, the ground was thickly studded with aloe plants and bushes of wild wormwood. ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... decease of his noble friend; and after that event such an acquaintance would probably not have been productive of agreeable reminiscences; for from the moment of the opening of the fatal will the name of Dacre was wormwood to the house of St. Maurice. Lord Fitz-pompey, who, though the brother-in-law of a Whig magnate, was a Tory, voted against the ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... rosemary, wormwood, and lavender, of each a large handful; put them into a stone jar, with a gallon of the best vinegar; tie it down very close, and let it stand a fortnight in the sun, shaking the jar every day. Bottle it, and to every bottle add a quarter of an ounce of camphor, beaten very ...
— The Lady's Own Cookery Book, and New Dinner-Table Directory; • Charlotte Campbell Bury
... back the days that are gone, when my friend was at my side, and grant that once again I may be with him. Lord God of Hosts, when shall I be healed? None knows the bitterness of my sorrow, for none may taste thereof, save such as set their heart on what they may not have. These only, Lord, know the wormwood and the gall." ...
— French Mediaeval Romances from the Lays of Marie de France • Marie de France
... every State to do; Of whose best phrase and courtly accent join'd, He forms one tongue, exotic and refined Talkers I've learn'd to bear; Motteux I knew, 50 Henley himself I've heard, and Budgell too. The Doctor's wormwood style, the hash of tongues A pedant makes, the storm of Gonson's lungs, The whole artillery of the terms of war, And (all those plagues in one) the bawling Bar: These I could bear; but not a rogue so civil, ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... strangers alone, She hears in her anguish his piteous moan, As he eagerly listens—but listens in vain, To catch the loved tones of his mother again! The curse of the broken in spirit shall fall On the wretch who hath mingled this wormwood and gall, And his gain like a mildew shall blight and destroy, Who hath torn from his mother the little ...
— The Anti-Slavery Harp • Various
... deleterious rain, whereby the air will be much purified. Now, as soon as this rain shall announce itself by thunder or hail, every one of you should protect himself from the air; and, as well before as after the rain, kindle a large fire of vine-wood, green laurel, or other green wood; wormwood and camomile should also be burnt in great quantity in the market-places, in other densely inhabited localities, and in the houses. Until the earth is again completely dry, and for three days afterwards, no one ought to go abroad in the fields. During this time the diet ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... antagonizing effect on German popular feeling; but whatever the cause, the general elections of January, 1912, proved a tremendous Socialist victory, which must have been, and still remains, gall and wormwood to the Emperor. Notwithstanding official efforts, over one-third of the votes polled at the first ballots went for Social Democratic candidates. The number of seats thus obtained was 64, and this number, after ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... had turned out quite, quite different from her anticipations. Instead of a delightful supper of some mysterious Jewish cookery, she had been drinking gall and wormwood. That Lina would not let her go—THAT was the gall; that her father made her stay—THIS was ...
— Dotty Dimple at Play • Sophie May
... made Josh think so quick that day. We never thought he was brighter 'n common; but jest see how in that flash o' bein' mad with Lyddy Ann he'd planned out what would be most wormwood for her! He gi'n her the half o' the house she'd furnished herself with hair-cloth chairs an' a whatnot, but 'twa'n't the part that was fit to be lived in. She stayed pretty close for three or four days, an' I guess she never had nothin' to eat. It made me kind o' sick to think ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... dig a grave for me, For my journey's nearly o'er; Of life's sweets I've freely drunk, Of its wormwood even more. Now to earth farewell I cry— Weak and ...
— Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century • Edmund O. Jones
... the whole of his capital, and the almost insubordinate attitude of his navy, he had persevered in the appointment of Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa, because the judgment of Ibrahim was in favour of its being carried out. This, to Roxalana, was gall and wormwood; well she knew that, as long as the Grand Vizier lived, her sovereignty was at best but a divided one. There was a point at which her blandishments stopped short; this was when she found that her opinion did not coincide with that of the minister. ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... lax because of the crowds, he left the cloister to found a home of his own. The abbot selected twelve monks, following the number of apostles, and at their head placed young Bernard. He led the twelve to the valley of Wormwood, and there, in a cheerless forest, he established the monastery of Clairvaux, or Clear Valley. His rule was fiercely severe because he himself loved hardships and rough fare. "It in no way befits religion," he writes, "to seek remedies ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... are hardly weaned, although the breast be rub'd with wormwood or mustard, they will either wipe it off, or else suck down sweet and bitter together; so is it with some Christians, let God embitter all the sweets of this life, that so they might feed upon more substantiall food, yet they are so childishly sottish that ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... of Kames's Law Tracts. The man might as well think of making a fine sauce by a mixture of wormwood and aloes as an agreeable combination by joining metaphysics and Scottish law. However, the book, I believe, has merit, though few people ever take the pains of inquiring into it. But to return to your book and its success in this town. I must ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... grain solid and heavy. Some men even sprinkle their grain with amurca in the proportion of a quadrantal to every thousand modii of grain: others crumble or scatter over it, for the same purpose, other vermifuges like Chalcidian or Carian chalk or wormwood, and other things of that kind. Some farmers have their granaries under ground, like caverns, which they call silos, as in Cappadocia and Thrace, while in hither Spain, in the vicinity of Carthage, and at ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... little bitterly, perhaps, at the thought of a picture gallery being added to the tannery house. And she told herself stoutly that Uncle Jethro was a greater man than any of the others, even if Miss Sadler did not see fit to mention him. So she had her first taste of a kind of wormwood that is very common in the world though it did not grow ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... and at an hour when good men go to morning mass; and she stared at him as though in a dream, when he demanded a jug of brandy, about half a pailful. But the poor fellow tried in vain to drown his woe. The vodka stung his tongue like nettles, and tasted more bitter than wormwood. He flung the jug from him upon the ground. "You have sorrowed enough, Cossack," growled a bass voice behind him. He looked round—Basavriuk! Ugh, what a face! His hair was like a brush, his eyes like those of a bull. "I know what you lack: here it is." ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian • Various
... monotonous waste to the stranger's eye, but not without its charm. It is brown and bare; for, except during a few short weeks in spring, the sparse bunch-grass is sear and yellow, and the silver gray of the wormwood lends an added dreariness to the landscape. Yet this seemingly desert waste has a beauty of its own. At intervals it is marked with green winding river valleys, and everywhere it is gashed with deep ravines, their sides painted in strange colors of red and gray and brown, and their perpendicular ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... no 'count of your foreign spice. Rosemary, thyme, mint, savoury, fennel, and carraway be spice enough for any man, and a deal better than all your far-fetched maces, and nutmegs, and peppers, that be fetched over here but to fetch the money out of folks' pockets: and wormwood and currant wine are every bit as good, and a deal wholesomer, than all your sherris-sack and Portingale rubbish. Hans, lad, let's have a currant-bush or two in that garden; I can make currant wine with any, though I say it, and gooseberry too. ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... son of William the Silent, availed himself of the "force of imagination" to cure his soldiers during a serious epidemic then prevailing among them. He provided his army surgeons with small vials containing a decoction of wormwood, camomile, and camphor. The troops were informed that a rare and precious remedy had been obtained in the East, with much difficulty and at great expense. Moreover, so great was its potency, that two or three drops in a gallon of water formed a mixture of wonderful therapeutic value. These ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... enlivened by Mackay's decree that, if risk were to be avoided, the detested shade must be worn for three full weeks or a month. Thus to imprisonment was added the gall and wormwood of total dependence upon others; the unthinkable prospect of parting with Paul, with the Border itself—with everything that had hitherto made life worth living; and, worse than all, the undercurrent of striving to ignore that veiled danger, which he refused to name, even in his thoughts, ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... easy to cultivate; and annuals such as sow themselves, marigolds and pansies. There was balm in abundance, and two or three gigantic peonies, in their season the admiration of all passers by; and beds of useful herbs, wormwood and sage, and summer savory. But, though it looked like a wilderness of weeds the first day they came to see it, Janet's quick eye foresaw a great deal of pleasure and profit which might be got for the bairns out of the garden, and, as ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... him with fallen jaw. His liqueur had turned to wormwood. He had been fearing this for years. You may drive out Nature with a pitchfork, but she will return. Blood will tell. Once a Pittsburgh millionaire, always a Pittsburgh millionaire. For eleven years his uncle had fought against his natural propensities, with ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... And say, if he does glimpse this fine parade right now, can't you see him turning green with envy to think of another glorious chance coming to the hated Bird boys. Oh! my, oh! me! but it would be gall and wormwood to Perc. Just as like as not ...
— The Aeroplane Boys Flight - A Hydroplane Roundup • John Luther Langworthy
... and goodly institution of civic banquets. People used to come to them, a few hundred years ago, for the sake of being jolly; they come now with an odd notion of pouring sober wisdom into their wine by way of wormwood-bitters, and thus make such a mess of it that the wine and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... let the cat into the pantry half a dozen times; and that when scolded for these sins of omission or commission, she had a fit of crying, and did a little worse than before. Silence was of opinion that Susan was getting to be "weakly and naarvy," and actually concocted an unmerciful pitcher of wormwood and boneset, which she said was to keep off the "shaking weakness" that was coming over her. In vain poor Susan protested that she was well enough; Miss Silence knew better; and one evening she entertained Mr. Joseph Adams with a long statement of the case ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... fundamental law. Though its passage was certain, he prepared a veto message. He then permitted the congressional leaders to know what he intended to do when the bill should reach him. Gall and wormwood are weak terms for the bitterness that may be tasted in the speeches of the Vindictives. When, in order to save the bill, a resolution was appended purging it of the interpretation which Lincoln condemned, Trumbull passionately declared that Congress was being "coerced" by the President. "No ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... warms in the hand the perfumes give forth," said the doctor. "Now the fever is past there must be a fumigatory. Make a good brew, Goody, make a good brew—amber and nitre and wormwood—vinegar and quinces and myrrh—with wormwood, camphor, and the fresh flowers of the camomile. And musk—forget not musk—a strong thing against contagion. Let the vapor of it pass to and fro through ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... being put at a disadvantage by so much greenery; but the discovery was soon made that Mrs. Todd was an ardent lover of herbs, both wild and tame, and the sea-breezes blew into the low end-window of the house laden with not only sweet-brier and sweet-mary, but balm and sage and borage and mint, wormwood and southernwood. If Mrs. Todd had occasion to step into the far corner of her herb plot, she trod heavily upon thyme, and made its fragrant presence known with all the rest. Being a very large person, her full skirts brushed and bent almost every slender ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... point of the desert plain. This bird is the largest of the grouse kind, though it is neither a bird of handsome plumage, nor yet is it delicate in its flesh. On the contrary, the flesh, from the nature of its food, which is the berry of the wild wormwood, is both unsavoury and bitter. It would not have deterred the appetites of our four trappers, could they have laid their hands upon the bird, but without guns such a thing was out of the question. For several ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... slowly away with the wormwood in his heart. He had not grown up among the young people of Stackpole without similar experiences, but it had been his youthful boast that no girl had ever "stopped speaking" to him without reason, or "cut a dance" with ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... was the morning in June, there was the blowing rose, there was the sudden vision—Rand and Jacqueline, hand in hand, with mingled breath! It was into this path that he had turned—it was to this wood that he had stumbled, leaving them there. He felt again the icy shock, the death and wormwood in his soul. They had had the gold, they had loved and embraced while, with his face to the earth, he had lain there beneath that tree where now she stood. Well, Time's globe was turning—there were ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... naturally could not bring himself to make. Yet he had taken a long journey merely to put himself in her way—perhaps counting on a chance meeting, more probably expecting that she, hearing of his presence, would this time extend the sweet olive. The wormwood in it was that she would have been perfectly willing to extend the olive if ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... in vain; my conscience will be satisfied. Far be it from me to cast new bitters in the gall and wormwood waters of sectional prejudice. No, I desire peace—the peace of universal love—of catholic sympathy—the peace of common interest—a common feeling—a common humanity. But so long as slavery is tolerated, no such peace can exist. Liberty and ...
— The Trial of Reuben Crandall, M.D. Charged with Publishing and Circulating Seditious and Incendiary Papers, &c. in the District of Columbia, with the Intent of Exciting Servile Insurrection. • Unknown
... peculiar to themselves; and formerly consisted of many whimsical rites, some of which are now disused. On her wedding day, the bride is crowned with a garland of wormwood; and, after the priest has tied the nuptial knot, his clerk or sexton throws a handful of hops upon the head of the bride, wishing that she might prove as fruitful as that plant. She is then led home, with abundance of coarse ceremonies, which are now wearing off even among the lowest ranks; ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... he'd won from life, Success; Where I had stumbled, with sure feet he stood; Alike—yet unalike—we faced the world, And through the stress he found that life was good And I? The bitter wormwood in the glass, The shadowed way along which failures pass! Yet as I saw him thus, joy came to me— He was the Man that Once ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... for the wormwood shrub. And ho! for the sea-green liquor That softens the brain to sillybub And ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II. No. 38, Saturday, December 17, 1870. • Various
... mother-country, the indifference of absentees, the cruel rage for making the most and the best sugar in the world, regardless of the costly lives which the mills caught and crushed out with the canes. Truly, it was sweet as honey in the mouth, and suddenly became bitter as wormwood in the belly. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... seem that joy is not an effect of devotion. As stated above (A. 3, ad 2), Christ's Passion is the chief incentive to devotion. But the consideration thereof causes an affliction of the soul, according to Lam. 3:19, "Remember my poverty . . . the wormwood and the gall," which refers to the Passion, and afterwards (Lam. 3:20) it is said: "I will be mindful and remember, and my soul shall languish within me." Therefore delight or joy is not ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... bite my nose off. The lady did not at all participate in the joviality; and, as it is difficult to keep up mirth entirely upon one's own resources, we were beginning to be a gloomy party. What I had unconsciously said regarding my master's voice, was wormwood to him. He had long been the butt of all his acquaintance respecting it, and what followed was the making that unbearable which was before too bitter. Many questions were put by the visitor, and the answers ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... employed a number of the simples dear to ancient women, —elecampane and elder and wormwood and anise and the rest; but he also employed certain mineral remedies, which he almost always indicates by their ancient symbols, or by a name which should leave them a mystery to the vulgar. I am now prepared ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... it has the greatest toxicity of all. There are laws against the stuff in France, Switzerland, and Belgium. It isn't the alcohol alone, although there is from fifty to eighty per cent. in it, that makes it so deadly. It is the absinthe, the oil of wormwood, whose bitterness has passed into a proverb. The active principle absinthin is a narcotic poison. The stuff creates a habit most insidious and difficult to break, a longing more exacting than hunger. It is almost ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... the good I would impart, The feelings I would share, Are driven backward to my heart, And turned to wormwood there; ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... deeply—my grandfather, Alexander Loudon. In his time the old gentleman had been a working mason, and had risen from the ranks—more, I think, by shrewdness than by merit. In his appearance, speech, and manners, he bore broad marks of his origin, which were gall and wormwood to my uncle Adam. His nails, in spite of anxious supervision, were often in conspicuous mourning; his clothes hung about him in bags and wrinkles, like a ploughman's Sunday coat; his accent was rude, broad, and dragging. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... gall and wormwood, yet she was all the more determined upon keeping him. She said to herself that she had toiled, and waited, and striven for him for too long to relinquish him now that the victory was hers ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... Even more than an adventurous scouting expedition he relished a situation full of humor, and such, his presence at Mr. Baron's supper-table promised to be. He knew his entertainment would be gall and wormwood to the old Bourbon and his wife, and that the courtesy had been wrung from them by his own forbearance. It might be his only opportunity to see Miss Lou and suggest the liberty he had brought to her as ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... listening for it; it spoilt all the pleasures of sin by its presence; it was with him night and day; it followed him in his sleep, and was waiting for him when he awoke; it made him miserable. Poor Abe was under conviction of sin; he was tasting the wormwood of a guilty conscience, than which nothing is more dreadful, and nothing is more hopeful, because it is the bitter that oft worketh itself sweet; it was so with Abe. While he was in this state of mind, the Rev. David Stoner came to preach in the Wesleyan Chapel at Almondbury. ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell
... their own most painted lives. Religion had been a pole-star to light and to guide. It was now more like to that ominous star in the book of the Apocalypse, which fell from heaven upon the fountains and rivers and changed them into wormwood; for even so did it descend from its high and celestial dwelling-place to plague this earth, and to turn into bitterness all that was sweet, and into ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... simply stood at attention, though his black, weazened face worked and his lips trembled. It was the first time since he was a buck private that he had been spoken to in such a manner. For the first time, the yoke of discipline galled him. The bitterness of his inferiority and servitude was as wormwood within him. The harsh injustice of such treatment in this, his black hour, after years of faithful work, aroused in him a demon of resentment that made ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... had a fatal influence on the home-life of Wenceslas and Lisbeth. The benefactress flavored the exile's bread with the wormwood of reproof, now that she saw her money in danger, and often believed it to be lost. From a kind mother she became a stepmother; she took the poor boy to task, she nagged him, scolded him for working too slowly, and blamed him for having chosen so ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... their necks. On they came, closer—closer, and then Fairchild gritted his teeth. There were four of them leading the parade, displaying the wealth that stood for the bonanza of the silver strike they had just made, four men whose names were gall and wormwood to Robert Fairchild. ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... came a note from his mother, the rector's wife, asking him if he would be so good as to act as chloroformist. It would be inhumanity to refuse, as there was no other who could take the place, but it was gall and wormwood to his sensitive nature. Yet, in spite of his vexation, he could not but admire the dexterity with which the thing was done. She handled the little wax-like foot so gently, and held the tiny tenotomy ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... campaigns which I suspect were not known to that captain himself. He had served in Algeria, and assented to the proposition that more soldiers died there of absinthe than of Arabs, stating his conviction that three-fourths of the whole deaths are caused by that pernicious extract of wormwood, and that he ought himself to have died of it long ago. He pointed out the difference between the massive masonry of the period of the Spanish occupation and the less impressive work of more recent times, and showed the dungeon ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... Mrs Wackles and Miss Wackles were seated, looking on at the dance; and unto Mrs and Miss Wackles, Miss Cheggs occasionally darted when her partner was occupied with his share of the figure, and made some remark or other which was gall and wormwood to Richard Swiviller's soul. Looking into the eyes of Mrs and Miss Wackles for encouragement, and sitting very upright and uncomfortable on a couple of hard stools, were two of the day-scholars; and when Miss Wackles smiled, and Mrs Wackles smiled, the two little ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... these five people—Barbara engaging Josiah, and the two men vying with each other to please Theodora—was gall and wormwood to Mildred. Freddy Wensleydown had always been one of her most valued friends, and for Hector she had often felt she ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... perceiving the hesitation, went out gleefully, persuaded that the decision was gall and wormwood to his inveterate foe. ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... much anxious inspection of ancient shrubs and the faithful among old-fashioned plants, to see whether they have "stood the winter." The fresh, brown "piny" heads are brooded over with a motherly care; wormwood roots are loosened, and the horse-radish plant is given a thrifty touch. There is more than the delight of occupation in thus stirring the wheels of the year. We are Nature's poor handmaidens, and our labor ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... them as the place of their retirement. Wide swamps, deep morasses, tangled thickets, wild impassable forests, were their prevailing features. The "bright valley,'' Clara Vallis of St Bernard, was known as the "valley of Wormwood,'' infamous as a den of robbers. "It was a savage dreary solitude, so utterly barren that at first Bernard and his companions were reduced to live on beech leaves.''-(Milman's Lat. Christ. vol. iii. p. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... should rankle like arrows in a breast where reason was enthroned? But it was even so. The allusion to Richard Clyde, the revelation of Mr. Regulus' romantic attachment, even the playful remarks of Dr. Harlowe relative to his wife's jealousy, were gall and wormwood, embittering the feelings of Ernest. He frowned, bit his lip, rose, and walked into the piazza. His mother's eyes followed him with that look which I had so often seen before our marriage, and which I now understood too well. I made an involuntary ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... saw the other girl waiting on Prudence and Cap'n Ira; she observed her tenderness toward them and their delight in her ministrations; and these things which she regarded with her green-glinting eyes made her taste the bitterness of wormwood. She hated Sheila more and more as the day wore on; and she scorned the old people both for what she considered this niggardliness and for their simplicity, as well, in being fooled by ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... the junior member of the firm to come in; the senior member of the firm, who had just brought up an arm load of green hickory and dry hackberry stove wood, was standing beside the box-shaped stove, abstractedly brushing the sawdust and wormwood from his sleeves and coat front. The colonel was whistling and whittling, and the general kept on brushing after the last speck of dust had gone from his shiny coat. He walked to the window and stared into the ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... exertions. It was supposed that he would have the support of the present Duke of Omnium,—and that Mr. Gresham, who disliked the man, would be coerced by the fact that there was no other competitor. That Mr. Bonteen should go into the Cabinet would be gall and wormwood to many brother Liberals; but gall and wormwood such as this have to be swallowed. The rising in life of our familiar friends is, perhaps, the bitterest morsel of the bitter bread which we are called ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... ground which had been trod above seven hundred years before by the footsteps of the younger Cyrus, and which is described by one of the companions of his expedition, the sage and heroic Xenophon. [47] "The country was a plain throughout, as even as the sea, and full of wormwood; and if any other kind of shrubs or reeds grew there, they had all an aromatic smell, but no trees could be seen. Bustards and ostriches, antelopes and wild asses, [48] appeared to be the only inhabitants of the desert; and the fatigues of the march were alleviated by the amusements ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... Lord George's second and the meeting-place was at Wormwood Scrubs at six a.m. The weapons were pistols and the antagonists ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... mind would not cease to revolve about the undertaking, for he could not at once relinquish his long-cherished dream. The thought of tame surrender was as wormwood in his mouth. To stand by acquiescent while the project collapsed! That prospect he could not endure. Never again, if he capitulated now, would he be able to strike out with the same courage as in this project; never with the same courage, or spirit, or faith. The project was his creation! The ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... by Experience, that the first thirty Days of Matrimony (as 'tis written in the Book of Zend) is Honey-Moon; but the second is all Wormwood. He was oblig'd, in short, as Azora grew such a Termagant, to sue out a Bill of Divorce, and to seek his Consolation for the future, in the Study of Nature. Who is happier, said he, than the ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... shall never become gall and wormwood, in any event, like some old folks. Now, is not that being ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield |
