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Mortality   Listen
noun
Mortality  n.  
1.
The condition or quality of being mortal; subjection to death or to the necessity of dying. "When I saw her die, I then did think on your mortality."
2.
Human life; the life of a mortal being. "From this instant There 's nothing serious in mortality."
3.
Those who are, or that which is, mortal; the human race; humanity; human nature. "Take these tears, mortality's relief."
4.
Death; destruction.
5.
The whole sum or number of deaths in a given time or a given community; also, the proportion of deaths to population, or to a specific number of the population; death rate; as, a time of great, or low, mortality; the mortality among the settlers was alarming.
Bill of mortality. See under Bill.
Law of mortality, a mathematical relation between the numbers living at different ages, so that from a given large number of persons alive at one age, it can be computed what number are likely to survive a given number of years.
Table of mortality, a table exhibiting the average relative number of persons who survive, or who have died, at the end of each year of life, out of a given number supposed to have been born at the same time.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Mortality" Quotes from Famous Books



... to be revealed, have been garnered by that precious spirit as it hath soared upward toward the Heaven that is now bending with a summons unto everlasting Life! How gently yet how touchingly do not its glances and its last regrets pass through the diaphanous covering that remains to it of mortality, upon the friend who gazes in equal love and wonder at its side! how like the light within the vase! how sublimated the expression! how intent, how occupied that long look! how effulgent that passage of hope! how intimate, how exalted must have been the communion, when gleams ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various

... three or four years after taking up his residence here," the gentleman remarked, "and very often one or two years are sufficient to carry him off. The climate is bad enough, but it isn't the climate that is to blame for all the mortality, by any means. The great curse of the whole region is the habit of drinking. Everybody drinks, and drinks like a fish, too. When you call on anybody, the servants, without waiting for orders, bring a bottle of brandy, or whiskey, or something of the sort, and place it on the table ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox

... this infirmity will appear from a remark he once made in regard to a professional contemporary whose practice had gradually encroached upon the Doctor's beat. Said he: "They talk a good deal about this Doc Wilson's practice; but I'll 'low that my books will show a greater degree of mortality than what ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson

... occasion, the night before McKeith's party appeared on the scene, and Lady Bridget had a trunk down from the buggy, and there in the road tore up some of her fine-laced smocks and petticoats to provide swaddling clothes for the poor little scrap of mortality. And there were tramps 'humping bluey' on the track likewise, and diggers carrying their picks. Bridget liked seeing Colin hail-fellow-well-met with them all—sharing tucker and quart-pot tea. She wished that her socialistic friends of the old played-out civilisation could see this shrewd, ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed

... that they are descendants of the Norman line in right of the Conquest. It may, therefore, be of service to his doctrine to make this story known, and to inform him, that in case of that natural extinction to which all mortality is subject, Kings may again be had from Normandy, on more reasonable terms than William the Conqueror; and consequently, that the good people of England, at the revolution of 1688, might have done much better, had such a generous Norman as this known their wants, and they had known his. The chivalric ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine

... sufferings of the garrison in the intrenchments became greater, and the mortality among the woman and children was terrible. Every day saw the army of the Nana increasing, by the arrival of mutineers from other quarters, until it reached a total of over twelve thousand men, while the fighting force of the garrison had greatly decreased; yet the handful of Englishmen ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty

... of the house assembled at the other end of the terrace about a tea-table; three white heads and that resplendent vision of woman's glory, the sight of which had the power to flutter his heart like a reminder of the mortality of ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad

... Infinite!—a silent passenger went forth on a voyage to the borders of the Unknown! Coffined in state,—with a purple velvet pall trailing its rich folds over the casket which enshrined her perished mortality,—and with flowers of every imaginable rareness, or wildness, scattered about it,—the body of Lotys was, with no religious or formal ceremony, placed on the deck of a sailing-brig, and sent out to the waves for ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... for every being in the universe, from the butterfly to the archangel. And every plane has its own horizon, narrowest and darkest on the lowest level, but broad as the universe on the highest. Man stands on that wondrous plane where mortality and immortality meet. Below him is animal life, lighted only by the dim lamp of instinct; above him is spiritual life, illuminated by the light of reason and the glory of God. Below him is this old material ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor

... relating to the probabilities of human life, and was suggested by his hearing this letter read at the Royal Society. It contains a confirmation of my observations on the noxious effects of stagnant waters by deductions from Mr. Muret's account of the Bills of Mortality for a parish situated among marshes, in the district of Vaud, belonging to the ...
— Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air • Joseph Priestley

... if the "dead line" was crossed by a foot; harassed by petty tyranny; starved, homesick, diseased, dying like infected sheep. It is a black, black page,—but let its blackness be mainly charged to war itself, and what war always breeds. In Northern prisons, the rate of mortality was nearly as high as in Southern; the work of hunger in the one was matched by cold in the other. "All things considered," says J. F. Rhodes in his impartial History of the United States, "the statistics show no reason why the North should reproach the South. If we add to one side of the account ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam

... risks in early life from the annoying persistence of sundry evil-disposed birds, who insist at inconvenient times in picking him off the leaves of gooseberry bushes and other his chosen places of residence. His infant mortality, indeed, is something simply appalling, and it is only by laying the eggs that produce him in enormous quantities that his fond mother the butterfly ever succeeds in rearing on an average two of her brood to replace the imago generation ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... courts of cool headed reason, has been the mental effort of all doctors and healers, since time began its record. They have had to treat disease as best they could, by such methods as customs had established as the best known for such diseases; notwithstanding their failures and the great mortality under such a system of treatment. They have not felt justified to go beyond the rules of symptomatology as adopted by their schools, with diagnosis, prognosis and treatment. Should they digress from the rules of the etiquette ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still

... already at the threshold, prepared for her journey. There was in all the deportment of this remarkable woman, a promptitude of execution, and a sternness of perseverance, founded on the fanaticism which she nursed so deeply, and which seemed to absorb all the ordinary purposes and feelings of mortality. One only human affection gleamed through her enthusiastic energies, like the broken glimpses of the sun through the rising clouds of a storm. It was her maternal fondness for her grandson—a fondness carried almost to the verge of dotage, in circumstances ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott

... seizure of his sire's locks, will certainly consume us all in battle today. Although I cried repeatedly at the top of my voice for saving the preceptor's life, yet, disregarding my cries and abandoning mortality, a disciple took the life of that preceptor. All of us have passed the greater part of our lives. The days that remain to us are limited. This exceedingly unrighteous act that we have perpetrated has stained that remnant. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... In this year, lentils and honey will be cheap and linseed dear and only barley will thrive, to the exception of all other grain: great will be the fighting among kings and death will be in the blood and there will be much mortality among asses.' (Q.) 'What if it fall on Wednesday?' (A.) 'That is Mercury's day and portends great anarchy among the folk and much enmity and rotting of some of the green crops and moderate rains; also that there will ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous

... thirty-five millions of dollars for the government railroad, strikes out year by year the modest additional score or two of thousands that year by year the Bureau of Education asks for the establishment of hospital work amongst the Indians of the interior, and the preventable mortality continues to ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck

... with stout poles he and Oliver could shove the horse into the water; and, with a line tied to its head, tow it out of the still water into the current which yet ran from the quarry. But what troubled him more was, that there was evidently a mortality among the animals on the hill. They were dying in all directions; some for want of proper food, and from being put out of their usual habits: others from being preyed upon by their stronger neighbours. ...
— The Settlers at Home • Harriet Martineau

... is paralysed. The Marquis de Mazardouin is at last tasting of his mortality. I bear in mind the day when he married her. She says that he has taken to priestly counsel, and, like a woman, she praises him for that. It is the one thing which I have not done to please her. She anticipates his decease. Should she be free—what then? ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... bliss that I was interested in when I was married; it was a sort of marriage in extremis; and if I am where I am, it is thanks to the care of that lady, who married me when I was a mere complication of cough and bones, much fitter for an emblem of mortality ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez

... him, it had seemed splendid. Now, alone in the dark, with the idea to translate into reality, he saw it very differently. It gave him no thrill of glory. He felt exactly as he had felt last March on the way to the dentist to have a tooth out—a mean sense of his own mortality, and an earnest ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant

... up, the Torre, Castillo, and Machuca Rapids form natural dams across the river. These might be raised, locks formed round them, and the water deepened by dredging between them. In this way the great expense of cutting a canal, and the fearful mortality that always arises amongst the labourers when excavations are made in the virgin soil of the tropics, especially in marshy lands, would be greatly lessened between the lake and the Atlantic. Another great advantage would be that the deepening of the river could be effected by steam power, so that ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt

... the whole village was turned towards me; but, unfortunately, when about receiving nearly divine honours, a youth, whom I had frequently met tending cattle in the mountains, recognized me, and said, "He is no angel—he is Yusuf, the son of Coja Petros, of Gavmishlu"; and thus I was reduced to my mortality once more. However, I was treated with the greatest distinction by everybody, and Mariam's relations could not sufficiently testify their gratitude for the service I had rendered. But, all this time, love was making deep inroads in my heart. I no longer saw Mariam ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier

... all this, and her mother a celebrated beauty brought from the Georgian Caucasus, and twice made captive by the chance of war. After giving birth to Zela, she looked, and saw her own image in her child, blessed it, and yielded up her mortality. Is it to be marvelled at, that the offspring of such parents was as I have described, or rather what I have attempted to describe? For I am little skilled in words, or words are insufficient to represent what the eye sees, and the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, No. - 537, March 10, 1832 • Various

... of it I feel grieved to think how many wakeful hours and how much labour Fannius toiled through in vain. I see before me my own mortality and my own writings. Nor do I doubt that you have the same thought and anxiety for the work which is still on your hands. Let us do our best, therefore, while life lasts, that death may find as few works of ours as possible for him ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger

... however, a vastly greater quantity of dust and smoke in the air of towns. The breathing of this dust, to a greater or less extent laden with bacteria, fungi, and the germs of disease, is an ever-present and most potent menace to public and personal health. It is one of the main causes of the excess of mortality in towns and cities over ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell

... must die, Thy fame shall reach beyond mortality! How puny whirlings joy at thy decline, Thou darling offspring of the tuneful nine! The noble lion thus, as vigour passes, The fable tells us, is abused ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift

... best to give a vivid description of the father's personality, while acknowledging that he is not sure of the fate of his soul, the chronicler decides that it would be an excellent moment to paint the son, too, for all time, in view of his mortality. "I will use the past tense so that my words ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam

... madden and break down her proud spirit. The first is an exhibition of wax figures, representing her husband and children as they appeared in death. Then comes a dance of madmen, with dismal howls and songs and speeches. Then a tomb-maker whose talk is of the charnel-house, and who taunts her with her mortality. She interrupts his insulting homily with the exclamation, "Am I not thy Duchess?" "Thou art," he scornfully replies, "some great woman sure, for riot begins to sit on thy forehead (clad in gray hairs) twenty years sooner than on a merry milkmaid's. Thou sleepest worse ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various

... those occasions when a man must undertake, blindfold, ways that may lead to torture or death, or unknown terrors beyond. But, then, a man—if, indeed, he have the heart of a man—can always undertake; he can at least make the first step, though it may turn out that through the weakness of mortality he may be unable to fulfil his own intent, or justify his belief in his own powers. Such, I take it, was the intellectual attitude of the brave souls who of old faced ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker

... invitation. If the note is from the lady of a two-story family to three-story ones, the former highly respectable person will very probably find that an endemic complaint is prevalent, not represented in the weekly bills of mortality, which occasions numerous regrets in the bosoms of eminently desirable parties that they cannot have ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... speaking; but such as it was, it was freely given, and it took much persuasion to induce the honest fellow to accept any remuneration. His post can hardly be a pleasant one, for malaria and fever cause such mortality, that the station is regarded much in the same light as is the gold coast of Africa by our own government servants. As a set-off against these disadvantages, my friend was in receipt of 2d. per day additional pay. May he pass unscathed through ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot

... this ephemeral being, this passing dust and wind, shall come to,"—yet ever, like the little eddying whirlwinds that I see in the street before me, this dusty breath of life struggles upward. I am very sad and glorious by turns; and sometimes, when mortality is heavy and hope is weak, I take refuge in simple resignation, and say: "Thou Infinite Goodness! I can desire nothing better than that thy will be done. But oh! give me to live forever!—eternal rises that prayer. Give me to look upon thy glory and thy glorious creatures forever!" What ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey

... whose verse reluctant sings The changeful state of sublunary things, Bend o'er Mortality with silent sighs, And wipe the secret tear-drops from my eyes, Hear through the night one universal groan, And mourn unseen for evils not my own, With restless limbs and throbbing heart complain, Stretch'd on the rack of sentimental pain! 130 —Ah where can Sympathy reflecting ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin

... the two people most concerned there was no wavering. So many of the stories about her fiance were false that Hildegarde refused stubbornly to believe even the true one. In vain General Moncrief pointed out to her the high mortality among men of fifty—or, at least, among men who looked fifty; in vain he told her of the instability of the wholesale hardware business. Hildegarde had chosen to marry for mellowness, ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... violent expedients for the removal of insupportable evils. It must, in all reason, be acknowledged the last lesson which education could be expected to teach with practical effect, that one part of the community should be willing to resign themselves to a premature mortality, that the others may live in sufficiency and tranquillity. Such heroic devotement might not be difficult in the sublime elation of Thermopylae; but it is a very different matter in a melancholy cottage, ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster

... It is a poem that might be read aloud in Elysium, and the spirits of departed heroes and sages would gather round to listen to it! Mr. Wordsworth's philosophic poetry, with a less glowing aspect and less tumult in the veins than Lord Byron's on similar occasions, bends a calmer and keener eye on mortality; the impression, if less vivid, is more pleasing and permanent; and we confess it (perhaps it is a want of taste and proper feeling) that there are lines and poems of our author's, that we think of ten times for once that we recur to any of Lord Byron's. Or if there are any of the latter's ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... the fury of the pestilence was still worse; from east to west, from north to south, Europe was desolated. The mortality in Asia was fearful. In China there are said to have been thirteen million victims to the scourge; in the rest of Asia twenty-four millions. The extreme west was no less frightfully visited. London lost one hundred thousand of its population; ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris

... September One Thousand Seven Hundred Fifty & eight, I, Thomas Wales of Braintree, in the County of Suffolk & Province of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, Gent—being in good health of Body and of Sound Disposing mind and Memory, Thanks be given to God—Calling to mind my mortality, Do therefore in my health make and ordain this my Last Will and Testament. And First I Recommend my Soul into the hand of God who gave it—Hoping through grace to obtain Salvation thro' the merits and Mediation of Jesus Christ my only Lord ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various

... difficulty about the heart, I do not mean any of those sentimental maladies of that organ which figure more largely in romances than on the returns which furnish our Bills of Mortality. I mean some actual change in the organ itself, which may carry him off by slow and painful degrees, or strike him down with one huge pang and only time for a single shriek,—as when the shot broke through the brave Captain Nolan's breast, at the head of the Light Brigade at Balaklava, and with ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)

... Of hoarded Ills, upon my whiten'd age; Now death—but, oh! I court coy death in vain, Like a cold maid, he scorns my fond complaining. 'Tis thou, insulting Prince, 'tis thou hast dragg'd My soul, just rising, down again to earth, And clogg'd her wings with dull mortality, A hateful bondage! Why— ...
— The Prince of Parthia - A Tragedy • Thomas Godfrey

... place the Sun upon the Earth did hold, When Phaeton his Chariot did misguide, The Tower where Jove rain'd down himself in Gold, Prostrate as holy ground Ile worship thee. Our Ladies Chappel henceforth be thou nam'd; Here first Loves Queen put on Mortality, And with her Beauty all the world inflam'd. Heaven's Chambers harbouring fiery Cherubins, Are not with thee in Glory to compare. Lightning, it is not Light which in thee mines, None enter thee but streight entranced are. O! if Elizium be above the ground, Then here it is, where nought ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley

... the neighborhood of the marshes on both sides of the Thames below London Bridge, that the diseases prevalent in these districts are highly indicative of malarious influences, fever-and-ague being very prevalent; and that the sickness and mortality are greatest in those localities which adjoin imperfectly drained lands, and far exceed the usual average; and that ague and allied disorders frequently extend to the high grounds in the vicinity. In those districts where ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring

... dangerous nature." It is well known that upon our first occupation of the island in July, 1878, all troops, both English and Indian, suffered to a degree that would have rendered them unfit for active service. It is true that the actual mortality was not excessive; but the strength of an army must be reckoned by the EFFECTIVE force, and not by numbers. There can be no doubt that, owing to a season declared by the inhabitants to be exceptionally unhealthy, and the unfortunate necessity for a military occupation during ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... boarded walls of the mansion in an opposite direction to the course of the sun, and continued to perform its revolutions until the domestics retired to rest. This apparition was renewed every night during a whole week, and was pronounced by Thorer with the wooden leg to presage pestilence or mortality. Shortly after a herdsman showed signs of mental alienation, and gave various indications of having sustained the persecution of evil demons. This man was found dead in his bed one morning, and then commenced a scene of ghost-seeing ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends; Scandinavian • Various

... thinking about her as being anything to him either now or hereafter; but it seemed impossible to do that. Carlia's image persisted even as Mildred's did. Mildred, away from the entanglements of the world, was safe to him; but Carlia had her life to live and the trials and difficulties of mortality to encounter and to overcome; and that would not be easy, with her beauty and her impulsive nature. She needed a man's clear head and steady hand to help her, and who was more fitting to do that than he himself, Dorian ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson

... improvement of his experience. They said that doctors and patients and nurses all liked the Regimental Hospital best, and this was clear proof that it was the best. They could at that time say also, that every soldier and every doctor had a horror of General Hospitals, where the mortality was so excessive during the Peninsular War that being carried to the General Hospital was considered the same thing as being ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various

... figures of the geometer, the quantities of the chemist, the measurements of the astronomer, are inexact approximations to their equivalent in the mind. Art, as an embodiment in mortal images, is subject to the conditions of mortality. Hence arises its human history, the narrative of its rise, climax, and decline in successive ages. The course of art is known; it has been run many times; it is a simple matter. At first art is archaic, the sensible form being rudely controlled by the artist's hand; it becomes, in the second stage, ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry

... England is founded upon these family separations, but they are terrible when they occur, especially when the parents are left behind in the old country. To us who remained this wholesale emigration in our family produced the effect of a great and sudden mortality. For my part I have received exactly one letter from the New Zealand Hamertons since they left. It was a very interesting letter, interesting enough to make me regret "there was ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al

... enough to observe that people who ought to die, hardly ever do. You, reader, can recall many instances of this general principle, which, however, I do not remember to have seen stated in any discussions of mortality tables. ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston

... week at sea, he would have won the heart of a mermaid!—Ay—and here are more perplexities, by the return of the Skimmer and his brig, and the notions that young Ludlow has of his duty. Life and mortality! One must quit trade, at some time or other, and begin to close the books of life. I must seriously think of striking a final balance. If the sum-total was a little more in my favor it should be ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper

... higher order of music is the most thoroughly estimated when we are exclusively alone. The proposition, in this form, will be admitted at once by those who love the lyre for its own sake, and for its spiritual uses. But there is one pleasure still within the reach of fallen mortality and perhaps only one—which owes even more than does music to the accessory sentiment of seclusion. I mean the happiness experienced in the contemplation of natural scenery. In truth, the man who would behold aright ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... had lived out a bitter expiation, did she pity her who had missed the fight, slipped out of the struggle. Death seemed to Esther such a terrible thing. The new life stirring in her shuddered at the thought of mortality. That breath of the divine which we name Love began already to proclaim ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

... turned—the plot and conduct thereof—upon a fact narrated by Livy of a hundred and fifty married ladies having poisoned a hundred and fifty husbands in the good old times. The bachelors of Rome believed this extraordinary mortality to be merely the common effect of matrimony or a pestilence; but the surviving Benedicts, being all seized with the cholic, examined into the matter, and found that their possets had been drugged; the consequence of which was much scandal and several suits ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas

... of tobacco, whereupon the smell of the pipe preserved me somewhat from carrying in my clothes the noxious odour of the lepers. At that time the progress of the disease was fearful, and the rate of mortality very high. The miserable condition of the settlement gave it the name of a living graveyard, which name, I am happy to state, is to-day no longer ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... lie in the coldly reasoned conclusion that the most valuable relief to a people so stricken by catastrophe that its very existence as a human group is threatened, is to let whatever mortality is unavoidable fall chiefly to the old and the adult infirm for the sake of saving the next generation on which alone the future existence of the group depends. This actual fact Hoover always clearly saw; but the thing that those close to him saw quite as clearly was that this alone accounted ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg

... prince: for, as 'mongst other creatures, Under that sex are mingled good and bad. There are some women virtuous, chaste, and true; And to all those the devil will give their due. But, O, my dame, born for a scourge[482] to man! For no mortality [I] would endure that, Which she a ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various

... Mozart to the natural human voice. But still they are very charming. If they are not a feature of this world, they are a vision of something above it; of a scene in which the littlenesses and selfishness of mortality are forgotten; in which virtue is generally in the end triumphant; in which honour in women proves victorious over love, and fortitude in men obtains the mastery of fortune. Generosity and magnanimity beyond what ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various

... is," continued Jane. "Yes, and who cares nowadays about the volume of the lumber trade or the mortality at the stock-yards? Why, just those people themselves. The fact is, the town has moved to a higher plane, and we've got to move with it, or else get left. Why, dear me, if it wasn't for an intellectual daughter who had the gift of language and who wrote papers and read them at the club, this family ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller

... gay and wealthy, for it is actually humiliating to wear such, as they are both unbecoming to the young and old. Black, which is the most becoming and convenient colour for general wear, especially to the old and middle-aged; would no longer be regarded with religious horror as the type of mortality and decay, but would take its place on the same shelf with the gay tints that form the motley groups in our handsome stores. Could influential people be found to expose the folly and vanity of this ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie

... country with that cursed disorder, the gout." In such weakness he lived and worked through a month of a short campaign, in which, of the "Hinchinbrook's" crew of two hundred, one hundred and forty-five were buried in his time or that of his successor, Collingwood,—a mortality which he justly cites as a further proof of the necessity for expedition in such climates. But, though he survived, he escaped by the skin of his teeth. Worn out by dysentery and fatigue, he was carried ashore in his cot, and soon after taken to Sir ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan

... well-born children. When this new science makes clear to the public that those diseases which are a direct outcome of the social evil are clearly responsible for race deterioration, effective indignation may at last be aroused, both against the preventable infant mortality for which these diseases are responsible, and against the ghastly fact that the survivors among these afflicted children infect their contemporaries and hand on the evil heritage to another generation. Public societies for the prevention of blindness are ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams

... in charge of a hospital at Calcutta, for the express purpose of mesmeric practice; he continued to occupy similar posts until he left India in 1851. He recorded 261 painless capital operations and many thousand minor ones, and reduced the mortality for the removal of the enormous tumours of elephantiasis from 50 to 5 ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various

... disjecta of wood and field—the sweepings of the sylvan household. It was remarkable that Nature, so kindly considerate of mere human ruins, made no attempt to cover up or disguise these monuments of her own mortality: no grass grew over the unsightly landslides, no moss or ivy clothed the stripped and bleached skeletons of overthrown branch and tree; the dead leaves and withered husks rotted in their open grave uncrossed by vine and creeper. Even ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte

... at the sound of their beloved king's voice; and he said to Helicanus: 'O Helicanus, strike me, give me a gash, put me to present pain, lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me, overbear the shores of my mortality. O, come hither, thou that west born at sea, buried at Tarsus, and found at sea again. O Helicanus, down on your knees, thank the holy gods! This is Marina. Now blessings on thee, my child! Give me fresh garments, mine own ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb

... the pope to Avignon, in the cathedral church of which they still remain. Shortly afterwards, the men of the company of Orsanmichele, having collected a quantity of money of alms and goods given to the Madonna there on account of the mortality of 1348, they decided that they would make about her a chapel or tabernacle richly adorned not only with marble carved in every manner and with other stones of price, but also with mosaic and ornaments ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari

... little mortality after the first volley. The Indians bolted like rabbits into the brush. The white men then returned leisurely to the village, which they proceeded to burn to ...
— Gold • Stewart White

... great vitality.] I'm nothing of the sort. It's my egoism's dead ... that's an intimation of mortality. ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker

... because one of the doctors offended her. He was rather dreadful. He said that in two months she had contributed more to the mortality among the patients than he had in two years, and told her flatly that she had been trained for the drawing-room and ought to stay there. She was glad enough to have an excuse for leaving; for she was heartily sick of making a fool ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw

... the universe will be open to the study of God's redeemed. Unfettered by mortality, they wing their tireless flight to worlds afar,—worlds that thrilled with sorrow at the spectacle of human woe, and rang with songs of gladness at the tidings of a ransomed soul. With unutterable delight the children of earth enter into the joy and the wisdom of unfallen beings. ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White

... with their hats,—and, in accordance with the order of the day, an honourable member rose to propose a pet measure of his own for preventing the adulteration of beer by the publicans. He had made a calculation that the annual average mortality of England would be reduced one and a half per cent., or in other words that every English subject born would live seven months longer if the action of the Legislature could provide that the publicans should sell the beer as it came from the brewers. Immediately there was ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope

... in regard to their intercourse with the community, live in the wilds of America or Siberia! 'Tis true, they assemble on Sundays at church or chapel when their devotions forbid the gaiety which ought to vary the grave pursuits of life—and they meet also in the common receptacle of mortality in the parish cemetery—but they seldom or never meet to cheer life's dull round, to soften asperities, to remove formal distances, to cultivate friendships, and to perform social and neighbourly offices of courtesy and kindness. Why is there not, in every populous vicinage or adjoining ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips

... against such a force? Nevertheless, they met at Bothwell Bridge, a few miles west of Hamilton. It is unnecessary to describe the action.* [footnote... See the account of a Covenanting Officer in the Appendix to the Scots Worthies. See also Sir Waiter Scott's Old Mortality, where the battle of ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth

... some reasons to prove this to be impossible in our case: first, Sir William Petty allows the city of London to contain about a million of people, and our yearly bill of mortality never yet amounted to 25,000 in the most sickly years we have had (plague years excepted); sometimes but to 20,000, which is but one in fifty. Now it is to be considered here that children and ancient people make up, one time with another, ...
— An Essay Upon Projects • Daniel Defoe

... the respect which was due to themselves. But the Russians, profoundly venerating the person of the Grand Prince, and accustomed to consider him as the depository of a wisdom refined above the sphere of ordinary mortality, did not hesitate to ascribe this transcendent exploit to the genius of the reluctant autocrat. They looked back upon his pusillanimity with awe, and extracted from his apparent fears the subtle elements of a second ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson

... books, among others such familiar Scottish household favorites as "Wilson's Tales of the Borders," "Mansie Waugh," by "Delta," "Scots Worthies," Allan Ramsay's "Gentle Shepherd," Scott's "Rob Roy" and "Old Mortality," and the well-thumbed and dog-eared ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh

... increased. This good knight commanded the army of his King Don Alfonso, and on the part of King Don Sancho came Ruydiez the Cid. Both Kings were in the field that day, and full hardily was the battle contested, and great was the mortality on either side, for the hatred which used to be between Moors and Christians was then between brethren. And that day also was the saying of Arias Gonzalo fulfilled. But in the end the skill and courage of my Cid prevailed, ...
— Chronicle Of The Cid • Various

... the direct road to Fort Providence, and some dry wood being at hand, we encamped; by accident it was the same place where the Commander's party had slept on the 19th, the day on which I supposed they had left Fort Enterprise; but the encampment was so small, that we feared great mortality had taken place amongst them; and I am sorry to say the stubborn resolution of my men, not to go to the house, prevented me from determining this most anxious point, so that I now almost dreaded passing their encampments, lest I should see some of our unfortunate ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin

... Hills, on the confines of Dumfrieshire: Dalgarnock, is also the name of a romantic spot near the Nith, where are still a ruined church and burial-ground." To this, it may be added that Dalgarnock kirk-yard is the scene where the author of Waverley finds Old Mortality ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... was very delightful. He shook his head. "The ordinary table of mortality," he said. "First one and ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells

... turned on medicines, or the cause and effects of diseases. Cholera, for instance, very much affected the land at certain seasons, creating much mortality, and vanishing again as mysteriously as it came. What brought this scourge? and what would cure it? Supposing a man had a headache, what should he take for it? or a leg ache, or a stomach-ache, or itch; in fact, going the ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke

... ship of three hundred tons should carry as many slaves and no more. This was, in point of fact, legislating for the slave-owners, inasmuch as the regulations would have the effect of decreasing the rate of mortality; yet as blind to their own interest as they were hardened in cruelty, petitions were presented against the proposed measure by the merchants of Liverpool, Bristol, and London, who stated that it would inflict upon themselves ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... privations was the fever which supervened. Apart from the lack of food, a great cause of mortality lay in the change of diet. Potatoes form a bulky article of food, and stirabout, unless very carefully made, used to swell after it was consumed. Many, too, ate raw turnips from sheer destitution, and these also caused swelling of the stomach as well as a dysentery almost always ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey

... but if this life is all there is to us, then, indeed, it is a pitiful failure. If our thoughts and longings are bounded by this little span of life, then there is no balance-sheet for mortality. The gift of life is then not worth ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin

... twenty-three in number, or more than ten to one in percentage. The temperate had but 4.32 per cent. of crime, the drinkers 45.17 per cent. The percentage of sickness and death was more than twice as great among the drinkers. Liquor, therefore, more than doubled the proportion of disease and mortality, and increased the criminality more than tenfold. Of the numbers tried by court martial there were 120 times as many proportionally among the drinkers as among the temperate. The destructive effects of drink are far greater in hot climates, and perceptibly ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various

... for the profitable study of such vast sciences as Anatomy, Physiology, Therapeutics, Medicine, Surgery, Obstetrics, and the like, upon his knowledge or ignorance of which it depends whether the practitioner shall diminish, or increase, the bills of mortality. Now what is it but the preposterous condition of ordinary school education which prevents a young man of seventeen, destined for the practice of medicine, from being fully prepared for the study of nature; and from coming to the medical school, equipped with ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley

... quoting him of old. Yet, if full knowledge lifted us serene To look beyond mortality's stern screen, A reconciling vision could be told, Brighter than western clouds or shapes of gold That change in amber fires,—or the demesne Of ever mystic sleep. Mists intervene, Which then would melt, to show ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various

... harsh in our judgment of these red Indians. At first, the white colonists from Europe were regarded by them as of supernatural origin, and hospitality, veneration, and confidence were displayed toward the new-comers. But the mortality of the Europeans was soon made painfully evident to them. When the early Spaniards, and afterward the English, kidnaped tribesmen for sale into slavery, or for use as captive guides, and even murdered them on slight provocation, distrust and hatred naturally succeeded to the sentiment ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites

... the arrival of the first Pilgrims at Plymouth there had been a very grievous plague among the red men; and the sages and ministers of that day were inclined to the opinion that Providence had sent this mortality in order to make room for the settlement of the English. But I know not why we should suppose that an Indian's life is less precious, in the eye of Heaven, than that of a white man. Be that as it may, death had certainly been very busy with ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... there, but no more. I keep them out of respect to the dead; but I think it would make me unhappy to read them. The thoughts and the feelings in old letters seem so fresh that they bring our poor mortality too closely home to us when we remember how little except those faded letters remains of those who wrote them. It is well for us to remember that we are only travellers and wayfarers on this earth; but sometimes it seems just a little hard to think how ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon

... weight of a stamp and an approaching peace. A sheet of blank paper that must have this new imprimatur clapped upon it before it is qualified to communicate anything to the public, will make its way but very heavily.... A facetious friend, who loves a pun, calls this present mortality among authors 'the fall of the leaf.' I remember upon Mr. Baxter's death there was published a sheet of very good sayings, inscribed: 'The last words of Mr. Baxter.' The title sold so great a number of these papers, that, about a week after these, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various

... London. In 1758 his Review of the Principal Questions and Difficulties in Morals, a work of considerable metaphysical power, appeared; and it was followed in 1766 by a treatise on The Importance of Christianity. In 1769 his work on Reversionary Payments was pub., and his Northampton Mortality Table was about the same time constructed. These, though long superseded, were in their day most valuable contributions to economical science. His most popular work, Observations on Civil Liberty and the Justice and Policy of the War with America, appeared in 1776, had an ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin

... mood half sportive and half thoughtful, to track these imaginary heirs of our mortality, through their first day's experience. No longer ago than yesterday the flame of human life was extinguished; there has been a breathless night; and now another morn approaches, expecting to find the earth no less desolate ...
— The New Adam and Eve (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... when nature seems to sympathize with the fallen and when if there be moments fit, in this turbulent earth, for celestial intercourse, one must imagine these would be the moments immortal spirits might select to descend within the sphere of mortality, to soothe and comfort, to inspire and support ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 486 - Vol. 17, No. 486., Saturday, April 23, 1831 • Various

... this, as there are more babies there than any other place in the Orient, with the exception of Japan, but the Philippine babies seem to be free from the awful sores we noted on many of the Japanese children. However, it seems that infant mortality is great in the Philippines, on account of the improper diet of the mothers and many of the babies die, we were told, as their mother's milk does not agree with them. One of the first orders of Governor-General ...
— The Log of the Empire State • Geneve L.A. Shaffer

... prepared. So Charlotte sat in quiet meditation until Sophia was fathoms deep below the tide of life. Sight, speech, feeling, where were they gone? Ah! when the door is closed, and the windows darkened, who can tell what passes in the solemn temple of mortality? Are we ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... the will of your Father which is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish." A Christian Church which took seriously its vocation to go before the Lord and to prepare His ways would be effectively and vigorously concerned with problems so prosaic as the rate of infantile mortality and the allied questions of housing and sanitation, with the insistence that the conditions of life among the poorer classes of the community shall be such as make decent living possible, and with the provision of a minimum of leisure ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson

... when the destined era is come, and to make way for a renewal of the emblem in the case of those who arise in succession. Carthage being so much older than Rome, had felt her decay, says Polybius, so much the sooner; and the survivor too, he foresaw, carried in her bosom the seeds of mortality. ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.

... he felt those rites yet more impressively holy than he had deemed them, even when his dreams had pictured them peculiarly and solemnly holy; for he looked not to a continuance of life and happiness, he felt not that ceremony set its seal upon joy, and bound it, as far as mortality might hope, forever on their hearts. He was conscious only of the deep unutterable fulness of that gentle being's love, of the bright, beautiful lustre with which it shone upon his path. The emotion of his young and ardent breast was perhaps almost too holy, ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar

... dug out of the debris of a hundred forgotten graves was the climax of insult. It happened to me once to see a child buried in what was called a common grave. It was a grave which contained already half a dozen little coffins; it was a mere dust-bin of mortality, and it seemed so profane a place that no lustration of religion could give it sanctity. Dissolution met the mind there in more than its native horror; it had the superimposed horror of indecency and wilful outrage. But in the wide wholesome spaces of the ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson

... home with Cousin Frank that evening. I pulled up the tombstone from the head of Caspar Hauser's grave and made an epitaph on the other side for Bay. There might not be another slate broken in the family for months. At the present rate of mortality among my pensioners, it behooved me to be economical. I had not time to indite such an elaborate testimonial to the worth of the deceased as graced Caspar Hauser's last resting-place. Yet I thought the tribute not amiss, and the drop into poetry elated me and electrified my audience. ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland

... down and laid waste the country. Not many days after their arrival in Attica the plague first began to show itself among the Athenians. It was said that it had broken out in many places previously in the neighbourhood of Lemnos and elsewhere; but a pestilence of such extent and mortality was nowhere remembered. Neither were the physicians at first of any service, ignorant as they were of the proper way to treat it, but they died themselves the most thickly, as they visited the sick most often; nor did any human art succeed ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides

... explained his reason for going, there would have been little doubt on the subject. It was then he learnt that Tjilatjap had formerly been a garrison town, but it had been found necessary to abandon it on account of the high rate of mortality among the troops. It was not till after the change at Maos that the young Dutchman acknowledged that Tjilatjap was also his destination, being probably unwilling to appear eccentric in the eyes of his fellow-countrymen who remained in ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser

... yet the special work which He had to do, while wearing the veil and weakness of flesh, had but few days and hours in which it could be done. Therefore, as we ought to do, He worked under the limitations of mortality, and recognised in the brevity of life another call to eager ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren

... the middle ages also is strongly in this appeal or confession of mortality; their legends, their delicacy, their perpetual ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc

... of sections on the Terrestrial Paradise are singularly crabbed and dusty in their display of Rabbinical pedantry, and the little touch in praise of Guiana is almost the only one that redeems the general dryness. It is not mirth, or beauty, or luxury that fires the historian, but death. Of mortality he has always some rich sententious thing to say, praising 'the workmanship of death, that finishes the sorrowful business of a wretched life.' So the most celebrated passages of the whole book, and perhaps the finest, are the address to God which opens ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse



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