"Blighting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dogmas are an insidious poison, sapping the vitality of our civilization, blighting woman and ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... This was the first occasion of my responsibility as a soldier; and I learned, from this time forth, to give commanders-in-chief some credit for their responsibilities. The agonies of that half hour I have never forgotten. Military failure was nothing compared to the universal shame and blighting which must fall on the officer who suffered such a disgrace to be inflicted on him in the presence of the whole army; and such a calamity to arrest the progress of that army, if not the hopes of Europe. My resolution was desperately but decidedly taken, if the post fell into ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... the shock to her consciousness. By that terrible expression of his face, by those thundering words of scorn, would she come to realize the mighty truth of his descent into the abyss and his rise to the heights. Vaguely she began to see. An awful sense of her deadness, of her soul-blighting selfishness, began to dawn upon her as something monstrous out of dim, gray obscurity. She trembled under the reality of thoughts that were not new. How she had babbled about Glenn and the crippled soldiers! How she had imagined she sympathized! But she had only been a vain, worldly, complacent, ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... ate my dinner without once asking myself are these human beings who minister to my wants, Slaves to be bought and sold and hired out at the will of a master?... Even I am getting accustomed to Slavery ... so much so that I have ceased continually to be made to feel its blighting, cursing influence."[52] ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... does so immediately, and is liable at any moment to the ravages of many kinds of doubt. The philosopher does not do so till unity has been reached, and is warranted against the inroads of those considerations, but only practically, not essentially, secure from the blighting breath of the ultimate Why? If he cannot exorcise this question, he must ignore or blink it, and, assuming the data of his system as something given, and the gift as ultimate, simply proceed to a life of contemplation ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... of the coming storm, against which the rulers of Venice were planning defense; there was an oppression, like a sense of mental sirocco, in the air—a vague terror of the unknown among the people, gathering like the blighting breath which precedes some fierce tornado—while in the palace of San Marco, the Doge, Marino Grimani, Chief of the Republic in revolt against the Holy See, ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... Republic which got complete possession in 1879 of all the machinery for giving force and effect to the "beautiful and generous" idea of co-operation, and for giving wings to that idea, leaving it still under the blighting curse of ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... any attempt to protect her from her daughter. Lethbury saw that she was consoled for the sense of her own inferiority by the thought of what Jane's intellectual companionship must be to him; and he tried to keep up the illusion by enduring with what grace he might the blighting edification of ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... consciousness is becoming aroused to the evils of sectarianism and sectarian systems as it has never been aroused in any past age. There is a longing among spiritual people everywhere to escape from the blighting effect of a divided Christianity. Evangelism is becoming more and more detached from organized denominations, and the denominational lines are being ignored in a way that would have astonished the people of a century ago. Numerous attempts are being made to ...
— The Last Reformation • F. G. [Frederick George] Smith
... the country, and such a country, that even in Italy we think of thee, native Hesperia! Here, myrtles grow, and fear no blasting north, or blighting east. Here, the south wind blows with that soft breath which brings the bloom to flesh. Here, the land breaks in gentle undulations; and here, blue waters kiss a verdant shore. Hail! to thy thousand bays, and deep-red ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... common love and their common interest, the idealistic man became more self-centred, more unsocial, more fiercely individual, and the emotional and sensual woman became more self-indulgent, more hostile to any philosophy—anarchism such as Terry's, with its blighting idealism—which limited her simple joy in ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... in their midst. Without warning was I wrested from my place, hurled onto the stage, and before my dazzled eyes could accustom themselves to the footlights, I found myself enmeshed in intolerable drama. I was unprepared. I knew my part imperfectly. I missed my cues. I had the blighting self-consciousness of the amateur. And yet the idiot mummery was intensely real. Amid the laughter of the silent shadowy gods I thought to flee from the stage. I came to Verona and find I am still acting my part. I have always been acting. I have been acting since I was born. The reason ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... caused by the unjust wage system of competitive capitalism for producing and distributing the necessities of life (food, clothing and shelter) for the profit of capitalists, the few who live by owning the materials and machines of production and distribution; and this blighting malady cannot be cured by charity, but it will spread until this system is supplanted by the just one of co-operative industrialism, a system by which these necessities shall be produced and distributed for the use of laborers, those who live by making and operating ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... regenerate society. To accomplish the desired good by a different external arrangement, is hopeless; for in the heart of man lies the evil,—there is the fountain from which flow forth the bitter and blighting waters of crime. ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... fibres being carefully spread out and covered, so that each one is surrounded by fresh earth, they are jammed just as they are (or often with an additional squeeze) into a rigid socket, and small wonder if the conjunction of the two results in blighting and a lingering death rather than the ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... a thousand reasonable explanations and excuses for this speech was so quick that it was upon her almost before she was aware of her resentment. She hurried to shut the door on a blighting new vision of her husband, by telling herself loudly that it was to be expected Paul should feel so; but, rapid as her loyal, wifely movement had been, she had felt a gust of hot revulsion against something in her husband which ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... lifesprings, progress no railroads to move onward. The honorable John, having conquered, and very modestly enthroned himself, was strong to maintain his centralizing power, from which point he would make effectual his blighting policy. Notwithstanding this, John would have us believe him world-wide in his kindness, desire his power made known to mankind in general, and stood ever ready to have his philanthropy and his tears spent upon the sorrows of the American slave. Were ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... other hand, we frequently meet people who make us shrivel and shrink into ourselves. The moment they come near us we experience a cold chill, as if a blast of winter had struck us in midsummer. A blighting, narrowing sensation, which seems to make us suddenly smaller, passes over us. We feel a decided loss of power, of possibility. We could no more smile in their presence than we could laugh while at a funeral. Their gloomy miasmatic atmosphere chills ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... away during the last few weeks," he said to March. It had, oddly, the effect of a set speech. "If she had not been, I'm sure she would have told you, as I do now ..." He stumbled there, evidently from the sudden blighting sense that he was talking like an actor—or an ass. "This isn't the time for you to come here," he went on. "This house isn't the place for you to come. When my father's well enough to take matters into his own hands again, he'll do as he ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... which I have devoted myself. Brief must be the probing of wounds, that nearly five lustres have been insufficient to heal; brief the tale that reveals the infamy of those who have given you birth, and the utter blighting of the fairest hopes of one whose only fault was that of loving, "not too ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... the lecture, particularly with young students. There is no surer method of blighting the interest of students, of murdering their minds, and of ossifying the instructor than to persist in the pernicious habit of the formal lecture. Some men plead large classes in excuse. If they were honest with themselves they would usually ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... glaring instance of the blighting effects of the Walpole Ministry upon the Church is to be found in the treatment of Berkeley's attempt to found a university at Bermuda. See a full account of the whole transaction in Wilberforce's History of ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... be served by their parish pastors. The majority, it is true, accepted the new doctrines with indifference. Rationalism then as now promoted apathy rather than heresy. But Grundtvig observed its blighting ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... have my wits. Leave me free to use them till we choose our path. Let it be the brains between us, as far as it can. You ask me to join my fate to yours. It signifies a sharp battle for you, dear friend; perhaps the blighting of the most promising life in England. One question is, can I countervail the burden I shall be, by such help to you as I can afford? Burden, is no word—I rake up a buried fever. I have partially lived it down, and instantly I am covered with spots. The old false charges ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the men, blighting the joy with which they welcomed her back to life. She took her father's head between her hands, and kissed his bruised face. "I thought you were dead; and I thought that mamma—" She stopped, and they waited breathless. "But that was ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... combin'd to throw A strong delusion o'er my mind, that day I robb'd Achilles of his lawful prize. What could I do? a Goddess all o'er-rul'd, Daughter of Jove, dread Ate, baleful pow'r, Misleading all; with lightest step she moves, Not on the earth, but o'er the heads of men, With blighting touch; and many hath caus'd to err. E'en Jove, the wisest deem'd of Gods and men, In error she involv'd, when Juno's art By female stratagem the God deceiv'd, When in well-girdled Thebes Alcmena lay In travail of the might of Hercules. In boastful tone amid the ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... Cuba. Mr. Draper, however, decided that an inland journey would be best, and, inconvenient as it was, determined to travel as far as some of the cotton-growing states. After the usual busy preparations, they set off, the wife fully realizing that she was blighting in the bud her husband's projected speculations for a few weeks to come, and feeling that he was making what he ...
— Rich Enough - a tale of the times • Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee
... convocation have already been seen; his son is related to have died childless, and the property to have been dispersed into the hands of others, having never remained since his death more than two generations in one family; apparently blighting all its possessors. And the peasantry aver that the noise made by the continual labour of its victims, may still be heard by the adventurous at the close ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various
... Patagonia), could be produced here. Uncertainty as to the duration of the warm period, so vital to the growing and maturing of crops, was the chief problem. No time was to be lost if there were to be harvests before the cold and blighting ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... observe the Golden Rule. Not another tear or sigh would ever be seen or heard again upon earth. But O the pity of it! Man, willfully blind, goes stumbling on through the short span of life, blighted and blighting everything about him with unbelief. Full of misery and heartaches here, he goes into Eternity to stand at the bar of God, naked and undone, and hears the fearful sentence, 'Anathema Maranatha!' or 'Cursed and banished from God!' ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... will be like her mother, I suppose," he thought. "Already she has begun to deceive me and to imperil everything by her folly;" and his heart was full of bitterness toward his child. Thus the poor girl dwelt in a chilled and blighting atmosphere at a time when she most sorely needed ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... dancer, on whose account one of the American artistic bright lights had been extinguished forever, and in ten seconds was inwardly thanking Vandeford for extracting Miss Adair before she had felt the blighting smirch of the big number. While Mr. Farraday watched the exhibition before him, Mr. Vandeford was amusing the child of their joint solicitude by letting her look at the white lights. While waiting at the curb before the Big Show for the large dignitary in uniform ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... restoration to full mental, bodily and sexual vigor within the reach of all, and no man has any right now to enter either blindly or wilfully into so sacred and important a relationship as marriage, and to lower and stultify its ends by blighting the happiness of a fair young wife, exhausting his own vitality in the vain attempt to have offspring, or in having such as shall be a curse to him ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... knowing the general character of their heads, no one would believe a single noble family without at least one unrecorded, undiscovered, or well concealed irregularity in its descent; and he would judge it the cruellest thing to have let him know the blighting fact, seeing that in ignorance he might have ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... Miller had sacrificed a few potatoes out of their store to plant a patch of this vegetable. During August the little garden had thriven and was at last in full bloom. But this night, to the keen disappointment of all, the creamy blossoms fell a victim to the first blighting frost. From now on, while the days were even sunnier and often quite warm, the nights rapidly grew colder and each ...
— On the Edge of the Arctic - An Aeroplane in Snowland • Harry Lincoln Sayler
... Of the blighting and exterminating effects produced upon simple and untutored races, by the advance of civilization upon them, we have many and painful proofs. History records innumerable instances of nations who were once numerous and powerful, decaying and disappearing before this fatal and inexplicable ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... farm and secure from the effects of the flood, and a part of the ploughed and cleared land around the site of the cabin showed no evidence of overflow on its black, upturned soil. But the house was gone! Only a few timbers too heavy to be removed, the blighting erasions of a few months of occupation, and the dull, blackened area of the site itself were to be seen. ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... and his works bespeak a philosophical spirit; but their great and characteristic excellence proceeds from that glow of fresh and youthful admiration for everything that is amiable or august in the character of man, which, in Necker's heart, survived all the blighting vicissitudes it had passed through, combining, in a singular union, the fervour of the stripling with the experience ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... said, "the really blighting contempt that swimmers feel for people who can't feel at home in the water—people who gasp and shiver ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... by one unexpected stroke, had once conjured up the happy past of his early life and its as early blighting, true to her nature, she raised before his mind's eye every hope connected with it and his present doom, till, almost distracted, he quickened his speed. He then slackened it; he quickened it again; but nothing could rid ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... back upon. The pain, the regret, with which she noted her father's decay were little indeed compared with the sharp agony which rent her heart as she perceived the alteration in this dear friend, the blighting of this fair ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... maintaineth its repose.— Is it, O sister of the rose, So better, sweeter, blooming thus Than in this briery world with us?— Where frost o'ertaketh, and the breath Of biting winter harrieth With sleeted rains and blighting snows ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... her hands are like the fall Of velvet snowflakes; like the touch of down The peach just brushes 'gainst the garden wall; The flossy fondlings of the thistle-wisp Caught in the crinkle of a leaf of brown The blighting frost hath turned ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... gave the same energy and attention to consular squabbles as to the reorganization of a national-fighting force, was almost daily engaged in a fierce clandestine struggle to maintain even his modest position. Jealousy, which flourishes in Peking like the upas tree, was for ever blighting his schemes and blocking his plans. He had been brought to Peking to be tied up; he was constantly being denounced; and even his all powerful patroness, the old Empress Dowager, who owed so much to him, suffered from constant premonitions that the end was fast approaching, and that with her the ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... blighting influence of the evil eye which environed the years of childhood—there was also this other danger, already mentioned, that of being spirited away by fairies. The danger from this source was greater when the baby was pretty, and what ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... ultimatum. Though it loosens The kindly bonds that neighbours ought to keep, I'll take a summons out to curb the nuisance Unless you stop it. Can I laugh or weep For those who fling their challenge at the blighting gale, Who smile to hear the cannon's murderous croon, When you go on like a confounded nightingale Under a ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 11, 1914 • Various
... laying as they did in the centre of the continent, and in proximity to one another, we hoped yet to withstand them. But, alas! we had another foe to encounter. Gaunt hunger and famine came with their ghastly forms and bony arms, blighting the strong and the brave. But it could not make traitors or cowards of us, and dying we hurled defiance at our foes. The walls of our cities unmanned, were scaled—the gates thrown open; and our streets ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... denunciatory answers with which to annihilate his brother. He hesitated between two courses, whether he should hurl himself upon him in righteous indignation and demand physical satisfaction, or whether he should rise in a calm and manly attitude and wither him with blighting sarcasm. And while the decision was pending, he still sat with his hands in his pockets, and his feet stretched forth, and blinked indignantly at ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... club was heaped high with hickory logs, a cheerful sight, were it not for that odious motto, "Non Possumus," graven over the mantel-shelf where it must inevitably meet every eye. Never could I read it without a tightening at my heartstrings; a potency of blighting evil seemed to lie ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... Scripture which ought to be read in connection with this text; as for example, "Fools make a mock at sin" (Proverbs 14:9), for only a fool would. Better trifle with the pestilence and expose one's self to the plague than to discount the blighting effects of sin. And, again, "The soul that sinneth it shall die" (Ezekiel 18:4). From this clear statement of the word of God there is no escape. Or, again, "Our secret sins in the light of thy countenance" (Psalm 90:8). There is really nothing hidden from his sight. We may conceal our sinful ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... Greeks. All their splendid work for civilization ought not to have wholly blinded us to the fact of their great and terrible sin against the variety of life. It is a remarkable fact that while the Jews have long ago been rebelled against and accused of blighting the world with a stringent and one-sided ethical standard, nobody has noticed that the Greeks have committed us to an infinitely more horrible asceticism—an asceticism of the fancy, a worship of one aesthetic type alone. Jewish severity had at least common-sense as its basis; ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... from the earth, ventures into the strange, new world of the air, to flutter its brief day. Eternity seems to stretch before it, an eternity of joy hinted in the first glance at this new universe which it attains. Yet comes the sun, the sudden, blighting sun, the same influence which has broken the brooding envelope of another world and brought this gentle being into its new life, and this cruel sun withers at once the tender creature in all its hope and youthfulness and beauty, ending its bright day ere it as ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... house, too, as well as the debtor's gaol, is in part peopled by the same blighting power, and nature recovers itself from a state of languid apathy, only by the terrific excitement of frenzy. Or a passion for suicide ensues; the mind revels in the contemplation of the grave, and covets the ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... goblin and giant, and quite believed in the saints and their miracles, she kept this side of her intelligence close locked when at home, and only nodded very gravely when her father roared against the blighting credulity of men's minds and the follies for which fishers and miners, and indeed the bulk of the human family in Cornwall, ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... hate or scorn arise?— 45 Yes! one more sharp there is that deeper lies, Which fond Esteem but mocks when he would heal. Yet neither scorn nor hate did it devise, But sad compassion and atoning zeal! One pang more blighting-keen than hope betray'd! 50 And this it is my woeful hap to feel, When, at her Brother's hest, the twin-born Maid With face averted and unsteady eyes, Her truant playmate's faded robe puts on; And inly ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... there is in silence! How many resolutions are formed—how many sublime conquests effected during that pause, when the lips are closed, and the soul secretly feels the eye of her Maker upon her! When some of those cutting, sharp, blighting words have been spoken which send the hot indignant blood to the face and head, if those to whom they are addressed keep silence, look on with awe, for a mighty work is going on within them, and the Spirit of Evil, or their Guardian Angel, is very ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... of English history, when the cruel sights and haunting insecurities of the Middle Ages had passed away, and while, as yet, the fanatic zeal of Puritanism had not cast its blighting shadow over all merry and pleasant things, it seemed good to one Denzil Calmady, esquire, to build himself a stately red-brick and freestone house upon the southern verge of the great plateau of moorland which ranges northward to the confines of Windsor Forest and ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... a couple who subsisted, socially, on the fact that they had a studio. Van Sideren's pictures were chiefly valuable as accessories to the mise en scene which differentiated his wife's "afternoons" from the blighting functions held in long New York drawing-rooms, and permitted her to offer their friends whiskey-and-soda instead of tea. Mrs. Van Sideren, for her part, was skilled in making the most of the kind of atmosphere which a lay-figure and an easel create; ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... be something borne on the breath of night, to disturb the rest of the beloved one. But, mother! it will not do; the curse of God is still abroad in the world, the curse on sin. It falls, like a blighting dew, on the loveliest and dearest to our hearts. It is by our side and in our path. It is among the gay, the rich, the proud, and the gifted of the earth; among the poor, the despised, the desolate and forsaken. It darkens the way of the monarch and the cottager, ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... of election arrived. It was no longer an individual struggle, but a party contest between the ins and outs. The question was, whether the withering influence of the overseers, the domination of the churchwardens, and the blighting despotism of the vestry-clerk, should be allowed to render the election of beadle a form—a nullity: whether they should impose a vestry-elected beadle on the parish, to do their bidding and forward their views, or whether the parishioners, fearlessly asserting their undoubted rights, should ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... the reaper Take the ears that are hoary, But the voice of the weeper Wails manhood in glory. The autumn winds rushing Waft the leaves that are serest, But our flower was in flushing When blighting was nearest. ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... illumine her course, should have made of them allies, and "let loose those horrible hell-hounds of war against their countrymen in America, endeared to them by every tie which should sanctify human nature," was a most lamentable circumstance—in its consequences, blighting and desolating the fairest portions of the country, and covering the face of [157] its border settlements, with the gloomy mantle ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... WITHOUT INTENDING TO MARRY.—Nearly all this wide-spread crime and suffering connected with public and private licentiousness and prostitution, has its origin in these unmeaning courtships—this premature love—this blighting of the affections, and every young man who courts without intending to marry, is throwing himself or his sweet-heart into this hell upon earth. And most of the blame rests on young men, because they take the liberty of paying ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... office. Then, abruptly, as he went, "the job" seemed purposeless. Unrealized, hope had still persisted in his heart—the hope that, by some possible turn of circumstance, the shattered ideal of Esme Elliot would be revivified. The blighting of his love for her had been no more bitter, perhaps less so, than the realization which she had compelled in him of her lightness and unworthiness. Still, he had wanted her, longed for her, hoped for her. Now that hope was ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... With the night-wind, Over field and farm and forest, Lonely homestead, darksome hamlet, Blighting all ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... other, raised securely above all the sordid cares of life, what a golden future was theirs! Married with the sanction of the Family and the blessing of the Church—who could suppose that the time was coming, nevertheless, when the blighting question would fall on them, in the spring-time of their love: Are you ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... perceived unmistakable evidences of the blighting effect which was being steadily produced upon certain members of the community by the consciousness—which I think some of them were only now beginning to fully realise—that industry and individual effort were to count for ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... no man in the colony, who would have conducted the enterprize with more boldness and address. He had entered the English navy in boyhood; and, after many years of faithful service, was rapidly acquiring rank and distinction, when the unhappy dissensions of the times threw their blighting influence on his prospects, and disappointed his well-founded hopes of still higher advancement in his profession. His father, an inflexible Puritan, fled to New-England from the persecution of a church ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... the old man's voice were, if possible, more wounding than his language; Francis felt himself exposed to the most cruel, blighting, and unbearable contempt; his head turned, and he covered his face with his hands, uttering at the same time a tearless sob of agony. But Miss Vandeleur once again interfered in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... administer so desperate a remedy for what they considered so insignificant a trouble. With the usual levity of grown-ups, they regarded the coldness between the girls as a subject of mirth and jest, and recked not that it was freezing the genial current of our youthful souls, and blighting hours that should have been fair pages in our book ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... felt the hand of Ailsa drawing him back as though to keep him from the blighting touch of the old ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton
... presence acted as a mildew on all social intercourse or enjoyment; the game was marred, and ended ere ever it was well begun. There were whisperings apart—the party separated, and, in order to shake off the blighting influence of this dogged persecutor, they entered sundry houses of their acquaintances, with an understanding that they were to meet on the Links for a game ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... New York,the atmospheric effects become more rich and varied, until on reaching the Potomac you find an atmosphere as well as a climate. The latter is still on the vehement American scale, full of sharp and violent changes and contrasts, baking and blistering in summer, and nipping and blighting in winter, but the spaces are not so purged and bare; the horizon wall does not so often have the appearance of having just been washed and scrubbed down. There is more depth and visibility to the open air, a stronger infusion of the Indian Summer element throughout the year, ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... nought on earth can gratify. If his "great riches" afford him any enjoyments, yet these are by no means permanent and lasting. The desolating flame may lay them in ruins—the storms on the ocean may sink them in its waves—the famine or blighting mildew may wither them forever, and leave him stript of all his fancied joys. But nothing of this can happen to virtue. That remains forever unharmed amidst the shocks of earth. A good name is, therefore, of inconceivably more value than riches and rather ...
— Twenty-Four Short Sermons On The Doctrine Of Universal Salvation • John Bovee Dods
... icy atmosphere the growth of any young friend in the Christian life was stunted. Such influences are like the dreaded north wind that at times sweeps over the valleys of California in the spring and early summer, blighting and withering the vegetation it does not kill. The brightness of his hope was dimmed, and his soul knew the torture of doubt—a torture that is always keenest to him who allows himself to sink in the region of fogs after ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... must be wielded; Go, a spirit-fray begin, Till the latest foe has yielded— He who threatens you within. Passions vile ye should be blighting, Hate, suspicion, envy, greed— Then take, after heavy fighting, German hearts, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... of the unseen habitation, Walking distress, Blighting presence, Nemesis, Evil, Good-in-Darkness, Passing from breast to breast, Reaching easily all men, And the vine in the orchard, And the thick clusters of the grape, And the bending branches of the young peach trees, When the south wind blows death upon their ...
— The Treason and Death of Benedict Arnold - A Play for a Greek Theatre • John Jay Chapman
... came in sight of the gate, Mary vented an exclamation of pain and anger. Marjorie was not alone. Up the walk she loitered, arm-in-arm with Constance Stevens. The old jealousy, forgotten in Marjorie's hour of triumph, swept Mary like a blighting wind. She turned and fled from the hated sight that met her eyes, a ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... the handsome Siva Rathor, is an event of our own times (1874); she proposed to him, but his heart being pre-engaged he rejected her; and in consequence his earthly bride was smitten sick and died, and the hand of the goddess fell heavily on Siva himself, thwarting all his schemes and blighting his fortunes and possessions, until at last he gave himself up to her. She then possessed him and caused him to prosper exceedingly, gifting him with supernatural power until his fame was noised abroad, and he was venerated as the saintly Siva Bhaia or great brother to all women, being ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... to have been a grave word and that shook another's good resolution, the cool word that ought to have been a warm word and that chilled a pure enthusiasm—we cannot have done with these things. Parents sometimes live to see their sins of indulgence or of neglect blighting the lives of those to whom they owed a debt of firmness and kindness. It is iniquity at the heels. These passages of carelessness and unfaithfulness haunt men, be their repentance never so bitter ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... he received from Herder, who showed no mercy for "whatever of self-complacency, egotism, vanity, pride and presumption was latent or active" in him. Herder, he says elsewhere, "exercised such a blighting influence on me that I began to doubt my own powers." Whether or not Goethe learned from Herder the lesson of modesty regarding his own gifts, it is the truth that of all the sons of genius none has been freer than Goethe was in his maturer years from every form ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... "artistically" rather abject, in fine, if your curiosity (in the grand sense of the term) wasn't worth more to you than your dignity. What was your dignity, "anyway," but just the consistency of your curiosity, and what moments were ever so ignoble for you as, under the blighting breath of the false gods, stupid conventions, traditions, examples, your lapses from that consistency? His Seigneurie, at all events, delightfully, hadn't the least real idea of what any John Berridge ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... fortunes. Then only did I understand. I saw myself for a desolate moment, cast motherless, rudderless on the wide world where art and scholarship met with contumely and undergrown youth was buffeted and despised. My gorgeous dreams were at an end. The blighting commonplace overspread my soul. ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... these things men blow an alarm in every place—for the blasting and for the blighting, for the locust and for the caterpillar, and for the evil beast, and for the sword, they blow an alarm over them, because it is a ...
— Hebrew Literature
... Penitentiary did not relieve him from this act of humiliation. It must also be apparent that the whole system of penance is an unauthorized addition to the ordinances of primitive Christianity. Of such a system we do not find even a trace in the New Testament; and under its blighting influence, the religion of the Church gradually became little better than a species ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... an expensive family with one hand, and with the other had taken away the means of supporting it. Dick was sixty-four now, an unhappy moment in a dashing and artless career, with the shadow of advancing old age blighting and reproving the still ardent enjoyment of ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... the Prince's guardians, and unfortunately others besides, could recognise it. It could not be in any way a cheerful embarkation. It was in the dark days of Lent, in March, when the north is most severe: and the grey skies and blighting wind would be appropriate to the feelings of the exiles as they put forth from their rock amid the wild beating of the surf, anxiously watched by the defenders of the place, who no doubt had at the same time to keep up a vigilant ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... the center of its wide-stretching and intricate web, woven for destruction, chances to touch any thread of the web, immediately that thread vibrates to the uttermost extremity. And man stands at the center of a vast web of wide-reaching influence, woven not for blighting, but for blessing, and every one of these out-running lines, whether related to friends near by or to citizens afar off, thrills and vibrates with secret influences; and there is no creature in God's universe so taxed as man, having a thousand dangers to ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... foolishness or bravado. I could hear the rattle of rifle and machine-gun fire and I tried to sleep. The billets we occupied were the finest we had lived in so far. I had a good coal fire in my room. Some devilish battery commander kept pounding away all night. Every ten seconds his blighting guns would go off and rattle the windows. Major "Billy" Marshall slept in the next room, and his snore told me he was dreaming of Paardeburg, Poplar Plains and battles of South Africa. A few days before we left England his horse had slipped ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... comes out of it that prevents those lips speaking for the Master. Perhaps it is some organization you belong to. If there is lack of freedom and power for Christ you may be sure there is something that is blighting your life and dwarfing your usefulness. It may possibly be that practically in your daily life you are exerting no more power for God than a dead man! A christian, indeed, but without power because of compromise with something questionable ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... in the weaver's experience. It was only the want of adequate knowledge that could have made it possible for Godfrey deliberately to entertain an unfeeling project: his natural kindness had outlived that blighting time of cruel wishes, and Nancy's praise of him as a husband was not founded ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... Achilles of his lawful prize. What could I do? a Goddess all o'erruled, Daughter of Jove, dread Ate, baleful power Misleading all; with light step she moves, Not on the earth, but o'er the heads of men. With blighting touch, and many ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... any drainage. The result of constant irrigation was that the alkali rose to the surface in larger and larger quantities, until no good crop could be raised. The only salvation was to drain the land and thus rid it of the blighting alkali. This meant an expense of from $30.00 to $40.00 an acre. At the present time draining is being rapidly pushed forward and is proving very beneficial, but it can be easily seen what a discouragement the alkali has proved to the colonists, and what an additional ...
— The Social Work of the Salvation Army • Edwin Gifford Lamb
... go to Flanders then, thought Cassy, but, with that look which she could summon and which was tolerably blighting, she said, "Ah! The ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... them. Experience is a keen teacher; and long before you had mastered your A B C, or knew where the "white sails" of the Chesapeake were bound, you began, I see, to gauge the wretchedness of the slave, not by his hunger and want, not by his lashes and toil, but by the cruel and blighting death ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass
... said Captain Pharo, with blighting sarcasm, new-lighting his pipe preparatory to leaving the hall; "I thought ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... father's remains were buried, buy the old estate, and settle down to a quiet and a happy life. Long, anxiously, and prayerfully did that mother and sister wait for his return. Did he come? No; but the soul-blighting news came, which, like a thunderbolt, struck that mother—my mother—dead! Wild and despairing, I heard ...
— Wild Bill's Last Trail • Ned Buntline
... the sub-Mongol physiognomy of the city editor, Banneker suspected something. As he sat writing page after page, conscientiously setting forth every germane fact, the recollection of that speculative, estimating smile began to play over the sentences with a dire and blighting beam. Three fourths of the way through, the writer rose, went to the file-board and ran through a dozen newspapers. He was seeking a ratio, a perspective. He wished to determine how much, in a news sense, the death of the son of an obscure East-Side plasterer was worth. On his return ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... no paving, no cleaning, no lighting. In the country the old Roman roads were unmended, unkept; Europe was slipping backwards into uttermost barbarism. Meanwhile things were very different where the blighting power of Christianity was not in the ascendant. "Europe at the present day does not offer more taste, more refinement, more elegance, than might have been seen, at the epoch of which we are speaking, in the capitals of the Spanish Arabs. Their streets ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... he exercises a fascination almost irresistible. To everybody, indeed, who has in him any latent evil not overbalanced by the habitual performance of positive duties, Densdeth's companionship is morally blighting. The character, fearful in its way as the Mephistopheles of Goethe, is represented with considerable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... already recorded for D., who, being thus elected into the position of fourth letter of the alphabet, will be returned as elected on the Temperance and Vegetarian ticket. So finally you get your members duly elected without the blighting interference of the Caucus and the party wire-pullers generally. You ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 25, 1917 • Various
... sought a rustic bower— Groves, fields, and fruit-trees, filled each hour; But droughts and rains, and blighting dews, On foot, ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... when Cataline stalked into that bad conclave. The fires of hell itself could send forth no more blasting glare, than shot from his dark eyes, as he beheld, and read at half a glance their consternation. Bitter and blighting was the sneer upon his lip, as he stood motionless, gazing upon them for a little space. Then flinging his arm on high and striding to the table he dashed his hand upon it, that it rang and ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... evil repute in Plymouth in the last century. It was said that she had taken pay for luring a girl into her old farm-house, where a man lay dead of small-pox, with intent to harm her beauty; she was accused of blighting land and driving ships ashore with spells; in brief, she was called a witch, and people, even those who affected to ignore the craft of wizardry, were content to keep away from her. When the Revolution ended, Southward Howland ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... terror those awful songs of joy. In all the nightmares that men have ever dreamed, there has never been anything so blighting and horrible as the faces of those five men, looking out of their poke-bonnets; the figures of district visitors with the faces of devils. I cannot think there is anything so ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... sworn it truly! I must bear his freezing eye, Feel his blighting breath upon me while ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... have combined fishing with the cultivation of the soil. It was a departure from this policy, and a determination, at the behest of selfish monopolists, to make the island a mere fishing-station, that postponed for many weary years the prosperity of the colony, blighting the national enterprise, and paralyzing the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... mitigated the ferocity of war, and England had begun to make some approach toward a respect for law and a veneration for the Christian religion, when the Danes came, and with them another period of disgraceful atrocities and blighting heathenism. The Danish invasion had almost extirpated the monastic institution in the northern districts. Carnage and devastation reigned everywhere. Celebrated monasteries fell in ruins and the monks were slain or driven into exile. Hordes of barbaric warriors ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... describes his neighbours as more uncomfortable and discontented than himself. All this while he dedicates successive volumes to rising generations of noble patrons; and while he desolates a line of coast with sterile, blighting lines, the only leaf of his books where honour, beauty, worth, or pleasure bloom, is that inscribed to the Rutland family! We might adduce instances of what we have said from every page of his ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... and the atmosphere was moist. Your horse, that old white horse which has been on the ranch so many years, was impatiently fighting flies. Though you are not any kinder to horseflesh than you are to human beings who come within your blighting influence, you took the saddle off the animal. Perhaps the horse had caught his foot in a stirrup as he ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... held empire long— A blighting curse, a cruel reign; By mimic scenes, and mirth and song ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... little. Some may have been wondering, as they read, how it is that while the South Indian fields are constantly quoted as among the most fruitful in the world, we seem to be dealing with a class where fruit is very rare, and so subject to blighting influences after it has appeared, that we hardly like to speak of it till it is ripe and reaped and safe in the heavenly garner. I think it will be easier to understand all this if we view Hindu Tamil ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... high-minded persons have made a sudden discovery of some great profligacy or deep unworthiness in the person to whom they had surrendered their entire affections. That shock, more than any other, is capable of blighting, in one hour, the whole after existence, and sometimes of at once overthrowing the balance of life or of reason. Instances I have known of both; and such afflictions are the less open to any alleviation, that sometimes they are of a nature so delicate as to preclude all confidential ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... Duke Hildebrod. "Marry, this follows, that you will owe good deed, as well as good will, to him who shall put you in the way to walk with your beaver cocked in the presence, as an ye were Earl of Kildare; bully the courtiers; meet the Prince's blighting look with a bold brow; confront the favourite; baffle his deputy, ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... child in its shroud! Calm and heavenly looks the white face on which the blighting breath ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... can be about these disturbers of society to lead them to become upright citizens? Or, will it fall upon the crushing, cruel, vindictive course, the process of making them more debased, sordid, revengeful? Do you prefer manhood-producing with its benign effects, or money-making attended with the blighting of the higher aspirations of the soul? This subject has been taken up in the narrative form, that the writer could the more easily, by incidents, and in the briefest way, bring out the peculiarities of the two systems in their workings ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... of pity, sympathy with my too visible agitation, superadded to something of perhaps reverence for the blighting misery that was now opening its artillery upon me—for misery has a privilege, and everywhere is felt to be a holy thing—had combined to procure for me some attention and some indulgence hitherto. Answers had been given with precision, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... She has no suspicion of the pain which, since I saw her made another's, has eaten into my heart, making me grow old so fast, and blighting my ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... having not any fellow-feeling with the people whom he had been commissioned to aid, could not know where their strength lay, and therefore could not turn it to account, nor by his example call it forth or cherish it; but that, if his future conduct should be in the same spirit, he must be a blighting wind wherever his influence was carried: for he had neither felt the wrongs of his Allies nor been induced by common worldly prudence to affect to feel them, or at least to disguise his insensibility; and therefore what could follow, but, in despite of victory and outward ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... felt this imputation against his veracity with resentment, suddenly pulled up his horse, and, turning himself on the saddle, looked upon his companion with an expression that was as extraordinary as it was blighting. The stranger, on the other hand, reining in his horse, and taking exactly the same attitude as Woodward, bent his eye on him in return; and there they sat opposite to each other, where we will leave them ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... asking her to give him up. In real life these violent situations are not closed as they are in books, by death or cleverly contrived catastrophes; they end far less poetically—in disgust, in the blighting of every flower of the soul, in the commonplace of habit, and very often too in another passion, which robs a wife of the interest which is traditionally ascribed to women. So, when common sense, the law of social proprieties, family interest—all the mixed elements which, since the Restoration, ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... intricate technique of asepsis to prevent the entrance through the wounded tissues of any disease elements before, during or after the operation. He fears sepsis equally with death, and yet, under the blighting and blinding influence of an ancient and venerated myth inherited from his ignorant and superstitious forbears of a pre-scientific age, he will deliberately inoculate the virulent infective products of diseased animal tissues into the circulation of a healthy person. And ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... retained and recited, under the same circumstances, by any irrational, as well and better, than by any rational being, if, to recite well, mean to repeat without missing a syllable. How far our literature may in future suffer from these blighting swarms, will best be conceived by a glance at what they have already withered and blasted of the favourite productions of our most popular poets, Gray, Goldsmith, Thomson, Pope, Dryden, ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... the magician by his necromancy had created in the depths of the sea a tupilak, or artificial walrus, which should attack Ootah. He knew it might upset Ootah's kayak and cause him to be drowned. The probabilities were, however, that it would permit itself to be harpooned, in which case its blighting curse would fall upon Ootah, who would lose all power and strength of limb, whose body would become bent and crippled and racked with the kangerdlugpoq, and who would die slowly, inch by inch. Thus, Ootah would be helpless the ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... was most noisome; indeed, it was officially known as the worst street in London. It holds a record for suicides, and, I imagine, for murders. It was associated in some way with that elusive personality, Jack the Ripper; and the shadow of that association has hung over it for ever, blighting it in every possible way. To-day it is but a very narrow, dirty, ill-lit street of common lodging-houses within the meaning of the Act, and, though it is by no means so gay and devilish as it is supposed to have been of old, they do say that the police still descend ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... with a club foot, and in consequence, and because of a temperament delicately attuned to the miseries of life, suffers all the pains, recessions, and involute self tortures which only those who have striven handicapped by what they have considered a blighting defect can understand. He is a youth, therefore, with an intense craving for sympathy and understanding. He must have it. The thought of his lack, and the part which his disability plays in it soon becomes an obsession. He is ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... and abstracted meditation. But three or four times—and it was when the assumed airs and affected importance of the musician and their hostess rose to the most extravagant excess—he observed that Fenella dealt askance on them some of those bitter and almost blighting elfin looks, which in the Isle of Man were held to imply contemptuous execration. There was something in all her manner so extraordinary, joined to her sudden appearance, and her demeanour in the King's ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... was truly an innocent affair and an unpretending performance. But notwithstanding these, at least seeming, qualities of young doubtfulness and timidity, they did not soften the austere nature of the bleak and blighting criticism which was ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... disingenuous and ignoble man, Spreading these rumours! sending into exile All those their blighting influence injured most: And whom? thy daughter and adopted son, The chieftains of thy laws and of thy faith. Call any witnesses, proclaim the truth, And set, at last, thy heart, thy ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... murder, and retain them by the terror of the scimeter and the rifle ball; which reduce mankind to the most abject servitude, and womanhood to the most debasing concubinage; which have turned the fairest regions of the earth to a wilderness, and under whose blighting influence commerce, arts, science, industry, comfort, and the human race itself, have withered away—he simply insults our common sense, by ignoring the difference between backgoing vice and ongoing virtue; or acknowledges that he knows as little about Mohammedanism, as he does ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... the drums rolled out the dismal strain which meant disgrace for him and the blighting of all his hopes, he sat his horse with rigid face and eyes from which all life had fled. He had been taught ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... exchanged few words during the ride to the Circle Bar. The heat—the eternal, scorching, blighting heat—still continued; the dust had become an almost unbearable irritation. During the trip to the ranch the two men came upon an arroyo over which Hollis had passed many times. At a water hole where he had often watered his horse they came upon several dead steers ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... nation has no recorded standard of guiding principles of government, it matters not by what name it may be called—Empire, Republic, Oligarchy, or Democracy—it may fall under the blighting influence of the tyranny of a single individual, or a wealthy clique, or ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... blighting effects of slavery on the industries of the country was never drawn than appears in these speeches. Slavery was declared to be driving free laborers from the State, to have already destroyed every industry except agriculture, and to ...
— The Anti-Slavery Crusade - Volume 28 In The Chronicles Of America Series • Jesse Macy
... else will. On the other hand, there are many families who ought to have their whole support given to them for a few years,—widows, for instance, who cannot both take care of and support their children, and yet who ought not to have to give them up into the blighting care of an institution; and these families get nothing, or get so little that it does them no good at all, only serving to {159} keep them also in misery and to raise false hopes, or else to teach them to beg to make ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... I have been pretty mean, but I have not yet got over my cold so completely as to have recovered much energy. It is really extraordinary that I should have recovered as well as I have in this blighting weather; the wind pipes, the rain comes in squalls, great black clouds are continually overhead, and it is as cold as March. The country is delightful, more cannot be said; it is very beautiful, a perfect joy when we get a blink ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... high hedges, or under trees; sometimes portions of a field would be greatly affected with it before other parts were touched at all; and I have sometimes observed the very first symptoms of the disease opposite an open gateway, as if a blighting wind had rushed in, making for some distance a sort of avenue of discoloured leaves and stalks, about the width of the gateway at first, but becoming wider onwards. When the decomposition produced by the blight was in a somewhat advanced stage, the odour from the potato field, which was ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... flagellation was substituted for perspiration, much as, in the Orient, scent is substituted for soap—and with no more satisfactory result. This false notion of dignity has since then, by keeping men out of flannels, gymnasium suits, running-tights, and overalls, performed prodigies in the work of blighting the flowers of the mind and stunting the fruit trees ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... Gosh, and the skies were blue, The great King Splosh no fault espied, And seemed entirely satisfied With Swanks who muddled thro'. But when they fell on seasons bad, Oh, then the Swanks, the bustled Swanks, The hustled Swanks went mad— The minute-writing, nation-blighting, Skiting ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... is like now! A wreck, a poor derelict woman, with no life to call her own. The life of an actress which I gave her, and which was so beautiful, wrecked; and the life of a nun, which she insisted on striving after, wrecked." A cold, blighting sorrow like a mist came up, it seemed to penetrate to his very bones, and he asked why she had left the convent—of what use could she be out of it?... only to torment him again. Twenty times during the course of the evening and the next morning he resolved not to go to see ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... exactly is the eye of any man that, without actually interrupting one, threatens by his impatient manner as often as one begins to speak. It has a blighting effect upon one's spirits. And the only resource is to say frankly (as I said to the dog), 'Would you oblige me, sir, by taking the whole of the talk into your own hands? Do not for ever threaten to do so, but at once boldly lay an interdict upon ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... of the unbelieving Jews. When the Christian Church was pure, the law of God was to her a covenant. When, by the removal of the truth, and opposition to it, she degenerated into Antichrist, it continued not a covenant to her, but acted against her as a law. And before its blighting curse she fell plagued. The judgments poured out on the seat of the Beast were its effects; and to that curse will be due, the accomplishment of the prediction—"I will stretch out mine hand upon thee, and roll thee down ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham
... sooner achieved my room in the garret of the International Hotel than I was called upon by an intoxicated man who said he was an Editor. Knowing how rare it was for an Editor to be under the blighting influence of either spiritous or malt liquors, I received this statement ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... glory and fame,— Not by award of the sword, Not with blighting disease, But by a law of thine own,— Thou, of mortals alone, Goest alive to the deep Tranquil ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... evil is apparently as old as civilization, and no country seems able to escape its blighting influence. Even the Puritan colonies had to contend with it. In 1638 Josselyn, writing of New England said: "There are many strange women too (in Solomon's sense,"). Phoebe Kelly, the mother of Madam Jumel, second wife of Aaron Burr, made her living as a prostitute, and was at least twice (1772 and ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... we'd be safe in starting. You see, the world's lain untouched by mankind for so many centuries that all the blighting effect of man's folly and greed and general ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... whether it be so or not, of one thing I am certain,—and that is that the half-hearted dallying with things sexual is wholly an evil; that the prurient sniffing and sniggering round the subject is more fraught with peril to a community, more debasing to the emotional currency, more blighting to the higher sexual feelings of the race, than the most shameless public repudiation of all moral restraints. Evil cures itself in the sunlight; it grows and flourishes in the darkness. Vice looks fascinating in the gloaming; the ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... dreary repetition never bemused an audience. In fairness to the priest, however, it must be admitted that a Government reporter is on the platform, and that the presence of that official may perhaps exercise a blighting influence on the budding flowers of rhetoric. All that the speaker—a handsome man, with a very fine voice—said, amounted to a statement, repeated over and over again with slight variations, that the people of Tiernaur ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... sleep the endless Sleep at last, Since Life's grim juggernaut 'neath ruthless wheels Crushes the heart; since Age like Winter steals On Youth's fair-flowered fields with blighting blast— Then to the gods our doubts and fears be cast! Enough of Sorrow! Joyance is our due. Gather the roses! Spurn th' envenomed rue. Fling to the waiting winds the pallid past. Steep thee in mellow moods and dear desires; Pluck Love's flame-hearted flower ere it dies; ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... course with truth, that though mountains may be the cathedrals of Nature, they are generally remote from centres of population; that our great cities are grimy, dark, and ugly; that factories are creeping over several of our counties, blighting them into building ground, replacing trees by chimneys, and destroying almost every ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... miner in solitude was grubbing for himself, and confiding to none his finds or disappointments. Agriculture restores and beautifies, mining destroys and devastates, turning the earth inside out, making it hideous, and blighting every green thing, as it usually blights man's heart and soul. There was mining everywhere along that grand road, with all its destruction and devastation, its digging, burrowing, gulching, and sluicing; and up all along the seemingly inaccessible ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... entrusted grain; the seeds "All rotting. Now that fertile land, renown'd "Through the wide earth, lies useless; all the grain "Dies in the earliest shoots: now scorching rays; "Now floods of rain destroy it: noxious stars "Now harm; now blighting winds: and hungry birds "The scatter'd seed devour: the darnel springs, "The thistle, and the knot-grass thick, which choke "The sprouting wheat, and ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... devoted two full columns to his perfidious behaviour in the Tenderloin. For the first time in his life he stood in the limelight. Nellie charged him with other trifling things, such as failure to provide, desertion, cruelty; but none of these was sufficiently blighting to take the edge off the delicious clause which lifted him into the seventh heaven of a new found self-esteem! His first impulse had been to cry out against the diabolical falsehood, to deny the allegation, to fight the case to the bitter end. But on second thought he concluded to maintain ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... up to obloquy by the admirable eulogist of Columbus, Mr. Irving, "as a warning example of those perfidious beings in office, who too often lie like worms at the root of honorable enterprise, blighting by their unseen influence the fruits of glorious action and disappointing the hopes of nations." This denunciation he incurred by thwarting the schemes of Columbus, in their minor details at first, afterwards becoming his open and determined enemy. The first instance ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... admiration of the gay capital, although women of superior physical attractions rendezvous there. Nothing blemished her appearance; no excesses, no indulgements, not even bearing a son had a blighting effect. Unfortunately for the dissevered artist, she had been his model for the most renowned of his works and her name was inseparably intertwined with ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... native of Ballybraggan, are all the same to Mr. O'Crowley. Each and every one is received with the same hearty welcome. He is a man whom we think of in our hours of suffering, whether it be on the scorching heat of a summer's day or the blighting cold of a winter's night. It is my earnest wish, and I am sure that I am only expressing the sentiments of the whole of Munster, that the success which has attended Mr. O'Crowley in all the ventures of his useful life will ...
— Duty, and other Irish Comedies • Seumas O'Brien
... comment on the false measure which people apply to the sufferings of others. Insensibility to wretchedness, or, as in the vocabulary of oppression it is called, content, is often a proof of nothing but that stupefaction of the faculties which is the natural result of long and blighting misery. A contented slave is a degraded man. His sorrow may be gone, but so is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various |
