"Taint" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... one parent is consumptive and the other vigorous, the chances are just half as great. If there is a scrofulous or consumptive taint in the blood, beware! Sickly children are no comfort to their parents, no real blessing. If such people marry, they had better, in ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... mind the work," said Lilac, drawing up her little figure. "I'm stronger nor what I look. 'Taint the work as I mind—" She stopped, and her ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton
... in old age, you happy man, your fields Will still be yours, and ample for your need! Though, with bare stones o'erspread, the pastures all Be choked with rushy mire, your ewes with young By no strange fodder will be tried, nor hurt Through taint contagious of a neighbouring flock. Happy old man, who 'mid familiar streams And hallowed springs, will court the cooling shade! Here, as of old, your neighbour's bordering hedge, That feasts with willow-flower the Hybla bees, Shall oft with gentle murmur lull to sleep, ...
— The Bucolics and Eclogues • Virgil
... theologians, and the shadow of dogma has dimmed those divine hues of the early morning, yet ever and anon there comes a cool, sweet air, which seems not to have blown across man's common world, which bears no taint of mortality. ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... happy, and if a fear of the Harris taint ever creeps into her mind, it is dissipated at once in the perfect sunshine which crowns her life. Nearly every year Jakey comes to visit "chile Dory an' her lil ones," and once Mandy Ann spent a summer in Crompton as cook in place of Cindy, who was taking a vacation. But Northern ways of ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... causes, for the origins of that transformation in the life of the nation which has resulted in the conscious ideal of the Britain of to-day. The "separation" from Rome fifty years after Bosworth had no conscious imperial purpose, but it rescued the rising empire of England from the taint of medievalism which sapped the empires of Spain, of the Bourbons, and of the Hapsburgs. The Reformation in England owes much of its character amongst the people at large, apart from the government, above all in the heroic age of the Reformation in England—the Puritan wars—to that ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... character, giving us purely objective sketches of them after the manner of a painter—if we compare these descriptions with what we know of Hoffmann's mind and character, his restless, brilliant imagination, and the taint of sensuousness that helped to mar its purity, his keen eye for beauty in form and colour, his strong talent for seeing the things with which he came in contact through an unmistakable veil of either love or hatred, ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... and have life! Ere two years old, she, whose dream is now with us, all over the small silvan world, that beheld the revelation, how evanescent! of her pure existence, was called the "Holy Child!" The taint of sin—inherited from those who disobeyed in Paradise—seemed from her fair clay to have been washed out at the baptismal font, and by her first infantine tears. So pious people almost believed, looking on her so unlike all other children, in the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... prejudice To my chaste name, no wrong unto my husband, No suit that may concern my wedlock's breach, I yield unto it; but To pass the bounds of modesty and chastity, Sooner[19] will I bequeath myself again Unto this grave, and never part from hence, Than taint my ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... the tropics dulls memory, and time heats only in the heart. The world is a great place, Philippa, and there are corners where the sordid crime of this ghastly butchery has scarcely been heard of, where the horror and the taint of it are as though they never existed, where the sun and moon are still unashamed, and the grey monsters ride ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Let the Republican party be mild and forbearing,—for the opportunity to be so is the best reward of victory, and taunts and recriminations belong to boys; but, above all, let them be manly. The moral taint of once submitting to be bullied is a scrofula that will never out of ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... time Tyson was in no mood for laughter. The plebeian was uppermost in him. His wrongs rankled in him like a hereditary taint; this absurd quarrel with Stanistreet was a skirmish in the blood-feud of class against class. Tyson was morbidly sensitive on the subject of his birth, but latterly he had almost forgotten it. It had become an insignificant ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... haunt they found her in: She lay asleep, a lovely child; The only thing left undefiled Where all things else bore taint of sin. ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... drank but seldom; when he did, desperately. He fought sometimes, but was always thrashed, pommelled to a jelly. The man was game enough, when his blood was up: but he was no favorite in the mill; he had the taint of school-learning on him,—not to a dangerous extent, only a quarter or so in the free-school in fact, but enough to ruin him as a good ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... which he had listened intently, re-perused, throughout, this record of the stone; and finding that the general purport consisted of nought else than a treatise on love, and likewise of an accurate transcription of facts, without the least taint of profligacy injurious to the times, he thereupon copied the contents, from beginning to end, to the intent of charging the world to hand them ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... that the German witnesses are imaginative and enthusiastic, and their confidence ought to be distrusted. That kind of enthusiasm is at least of a quiet sort, evidently the result of profound conviction and certainly free from any taint of worldly interest, and is by no means incompatible with the most perfect conscientiousness. If they are mistaken as to the identity of the plaintiff; if there be in truth two persons about the same age bearing a strong resemblance to the family of Miller ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... marks, the arrow passed far and far beyond sight. At the last it fell; and, where it touched earth, there broke out a stream which presently became a River, whose nature, by our Lord's beneficence, and that merit He acquired ere He freed himself, is that whoso bathes in it washes away all taint and ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... are now so many exceptions to the old rules of greater strictness, that perhaps the usual polish with earth might be considered a sufficient purification. It was a pleasure to eat sugar which one knew for certain was free from all taint of adulteration. Meanwhile several lads and boys had harnessed themselves to the mill which presses out the juice of the sugar cane, in place of the bullocks who had gone off duty, and with great energy and much fun and laughter, made it revolve until enough juice had been pressed out for ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... sudden impulse, she bent down and kissed the old lady good-bye. There was no guile, no taint of ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... proof of her own eyes that the woman was beautiful, eclipsing herself at every point of attraction, Sally was full-swept into the mad whirlpool of unreasoning jealousy. Every action and every incident that her starved eyes fed upon were distorted, embittered to the taste as though the taint of ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... who would rob thee of thy rights, And urge with specious tongue, That theft by Act of Parliament Can surely not be wrong. I'd have them leave thy sheltering wing, And nevermore to dare To stand within thy courts of praise, Or taint thy ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... jestingly, half earnestly. "Do not look so grave. No one knows, or values thy sterling piety half so tenderly and reverentially as I do. But this is no common case. Were Marie one of those base and grovelling wretches, those accursed unbelievers, who taint our fair realm with their abhorred rites—think of nothing but gold and usury, and how best to cheat their fellows; hating us almost as intensely as we hate them—why, she should abide by the fate she has drawn upon herself. But the wife of my noble Morales, ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... be grave. But swear you're a sinner whom she has reformed And the average feminine fortress is stormed. In rescuing men from abysses of sin She loses her head—and herself tumbles in. The mind of a woman was shaped for a saint, But deep in her heart lies the devil's own taint. With plans for salvation her busy brain teems, While her heart longs in secret to know how sin seems. And if with this question unanswered she dies, Temptation came not in the right sort of guise. There's my estimate, Reese, of the beautiful sex; I see ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... one mania succeeded another. A longing to pry into those mysteries of the grave from which human beings avert their thoughts had long been hereditary in his house. Juana, from whom the mental constitution of her posterity seems to have derived a morbid taint, had sate, year after year, by the bed on which lay the ghastly remains of her husband, apparelled in the rich embroidery and jewels which he had been wont to wear while living. Her son Charles found an eccentric pleasure in celebrating ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... do? Is murder your intent?—While I have life I fear you not!—And think you that brutality can taint the dead? Nay, think you that, were you endowed with the superior force which the vain name of man supposes, and could accomplish the basest purpose of your heart, I would falsely take guilt to myself; or imagine I had received ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... somehow, when you saw him in public. A whiff of the vestry queerly clung to his coats and his trousers, thus meanly giving away his relinquished ambitions; unless, and that was worse still, essaying to be extra smart, a taint of the footlights declared itself in the over florid curl of a hat-brim or sample of "neck-wear." To head a domestic procession, in eminently cosmopolitan circles, composed of a small, elderly, very palpable invalid and a probable curate in mufti, demanded ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... Greenway said no more to comfort him, but at that moment he himself was the happiest man on the Caribbean Sea. He seated himself in the little dirty cabin, and his soul saw visions. He saw his master, deprived of all his belongings, and with them of every taint of piracy, and put on shore, accompanied, of course, by his faithful servant. He saw a ship sail, perhaps soon, perhaps later, for Jamaica; he saw the blithe Mistress Kate, her soul no longer sorrowing for an erring father, come on board that vessel and sail with him for good old Bridgetown. ...
— Kate Bonnet - The Romance of a Pirate's Daughter • Frank R. Stockton
... hands, together prest, And on her silver cross soft amethyst, And on her hair a glory, like a saint: She seem'd a splendid angel, newly drest, Save wings, for heaven: Porphyro grew faint: She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint. Eve ...
— A Day with Keats • May (Clarissa Gillington) Byron
... against some Arminian clergymen who had signed them. The most acrimonious of all his works is his answer to Edward Fowler, afterward bishop of Gloucester, an excellent man, but not free from the taint ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... have not yet come to the full development of Christian democracy. The taint of old aristocracies is yet pervading all parts of our society. We have not yet realized fully the true dignity of labor, and the surpassing dignity of domestic labor. And I must say that the valuable and courageous women who ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... gives aid to those who go. The men who go leave hostages behind them. The friendship of years causes Yalois to make him the adviser of his wife in property matters. He makes him his own representative. "Thank Heaven!" cries Valois, "my wife's property is safe. No taint from me can attach to her birthright. It is her ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... and neutral, while we only use this back-door method of gleaning information from an enemy. The word, too, has associations that are ugly, and I fancy that our spies do not boast of their service, but spy-hunting is a service that has no taint, and there is much satisfaction both to the conscience and intellect in routing out the underground worker who, for "filthy lucre," would sell the blood of his fellow man. The traitor and the spy have in all ages been rightly ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... trying to get the message that Nels was working with so obviously. Presently an almost noiseless chuckle came from the man, and he touched Nels' shoulder as if to say that he had it too. The thing had come unexpectedly—the faintest possible taint of a lair. ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... students' lodgings, on the second floor of a house in Quartier Latin. The occupant of the room below, Arnold Dampierre, was with him. He was a man three or four years Cuthbert's junior, handsome, grave-eyed, and slightly built; he was a native of Louisiana, and his dark complexion showed a taint of Mulatto blood in ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... the teacher; we may ask, is his vision perfect? We may indulge in a trifling diagnosis on our own account. And in an examination of this sort we find that Schopenhauer stands the test pretty well, if not with complete success. It strikes us that he suffers perhaps a little from a hereditary taint, for we know that there is an unmistakable predisposition to hypochondria in his family; we know, for instance, that his paternal grandmother became practically insane towards the end of her life, that two of her children suffered from some sort of mental incapacity, and that a third, ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... I marry an honest man?" said the of lady, shaking her head sadly. "Henry Esmond was noble and good, and perhaps might have made me so. But no, no—we have all got the taint in us—all! You don't mean to ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... ceiling—reflected the light of the swaying dull flame, while at the top it oozed out through the imperfect thatch of dried palm leaves. An indescribable and complicated smell, made up of the exhalation of damp earth below, of the taint of dried fish and of the effluvia of rotting vegetable matter, pervaded the place and caused Lingard to sniff strongly as he strode over, sat on the chest, and, leaning his elbows on his knees, took his head between his hands and ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... undeservedly so, for as a matter of fact these lighter wines are most unfairly neglected. They simply require to be properly fined and carefully attended to. The casks in which they are shipped should be thoroughly cleansed and treated before being filled, in order to take out any taint of spirits they may contain; or any excess of tannin, which is always present in Dew wood. If these different matters be looked to they will improve to a wonderful extent on the voyage, and after being allowed a week or fortnight's rest on arrival, they will ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... his task, the bear stopped and lifted his muzzle to the wind. What was that new taint upon the air? It was one almost unknown to him,—but one which he instinctively dreaded, though without any reason based directly upon experience of his own. At almost any other time, indeed, he would have taken the first whiff of that ominous man-smell as a signal to efface himself ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... "No, taint," said Jim, detaining him. "I 'eard 'em speak. Oh, they're sly dogs! They ain't a-goin' to run away arter settin' it alight. They're goin' to run to the station, rouse up the men, an' help to put it out! an' ...
— Life in the Red Brigade - London Fire Brigade • R.M. Ballantyne
... month; then take it down and rub it all over with hickory ashes, which is an effectual remedy against the fly or skipper. When the weather is unusually warm at the time of salting your pork, more care is requisite to preserve it from taint. When it is cut up, if it seems warm, lay it on boards, or on the bare ground, till it is sufficiently cool for salting; examine the meat tubs or casks frequently, and if there is an appearance of mould, strew salt over; if the ...
— Domestic Cookery, Useful Receipts, and Hints to Young Housekeepers • Elizabeth E. Lea
... in high and holy dream Of a white Love that hath no earthly taint, So rapt within his vision he did seem Less like a ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... said Doane, "approved o' his plan o' leadin' out all the critters, 'fore he touched off the barn. 'Taint everybody 't would hev taken pains to do that. But all the same, I tell Sarai't I feel kind o' skittish, nights, to hev to turn in, feelin' 't there's a ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... to look for some other translator less immediately under Wyclif's influence. The freedom with which the Bible admittedly circulated for many years, and the well-known allusion by Sir Thomas More to an English translation untouched by any taint of heresy, point also in the same direction. That the second version is really only a revision of the first can hardly be adduced as a strong argument on the other side. The ethics of literary acknowledgment were not appreciated in Trevisa's days, and I believe that a very ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... Stuart Government never recovered from this monstrous robbery, and the Government created by the Revolution of 1688 could hardly expect to be more trusted with money than its predecessor. A Government created by a revolution hardly ever is. There is a taint of violence which capitalists dread instinctively, and there is always a rational apprehension that the Government which one revolution thought fit to set up another revolution may think fit to pull down. ...
— Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market • Walter Bagehot
... bloodless, as blameless thy cheek divine; But a stain on it stands of the life-blood offered for thine. What thanks shall we give that are mixed not and marred with dread For the price that has ransomed thine own with thine own child's head? For a taint there cleaves to the people redeemed with blood, [Str. 2. And a plague to the blood-red hand. The rain shall not cleanse it, the dew nor the sacred flood That blesses the glad live land. In the darkness of earth beneath, ...
— Erechtheus - A Tragedy (New Edition) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... most gloomily jealous of a Jewish cross in the pedigree, was because, until the vigilance of the Church rose into ferocity, in no nation was such a cross so common. The hatred of fear is ever the deepest. And men hated the Jewish taint, as once in Jerusalem they hated the leprosy, because even whilst they raved against it, the secret proofs of it might be detected amongst their own kindred, even as in the Temple, whilst once a king rose in ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... ensnarement in any of the questions of the day. So frankly does he accept life that there is in him no note of protest whatsoever, which is again fortunate, for protest, too, will lead a man to morals and leave on his work the taint of a passing system of morality as it did even ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... Guide. In the submission of our wills to God and the chastening of our spirits He is the great Co-worker with us. In the bearing of burdens and the enduring of trial and sorrow He joins hands with us to lead us on. In the purifying of every power from the taint of ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... he after reflection, "that the assiduous practice of religion generally results in some intense effects on the soul. Only they may be of two kinds. Either it develops the soul's taint and evolves in it the final ferments which putrefy it once for all, or it purifies the spirit and makes it clean and clear and exquisite. It may produce hypocrites or good and saintly people; there is ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... taint worf while for to git mad about de matter—Massa Will say noffin at all aint de matter wid him—but den what make him go about looking dis here way, wid he head down and he soldiers up, and as white as a gose? And den he keep a ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... soon caught. Sinfulness stood before him not as the liability to penalty for transgressing an arbitrary rule, but as a taint to the entire being, mastering the will, perverting the senses, forging fetters out of habit, so as to be a loathsome horror paralysing and enchaining the whole being and making it into the likeness of him who brought ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the law, a section of rubber hose. To soften the chafe of a freight-car's truss, our portion of cast-off clothes, And the big wide world is ours—a title made good by right— By mankind's deed to the nomad breed with the taint of the Ishmaelite. Some from the wastes of the sage-brush, some from the orange land, Some from God's own country, dusty and tattered and tanned. Why are we? It's idle to tell you—you'd never understand. To and fro We come and go. Old ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... Krauss would linger for fifteen minutes, sometimes for longer, talking over netsukes and Hong Kong with Ah Shee. The atmosphere of the place was overpowering; such a stifling reek of a mysterious effluvium, the combination of joss sticks, stale fish, rancid oil, and a sickly taint like the fetid breath of some mortal sickness; it made Sophy feel faint and, after a short interval, she invariably made her way into the street, where the air—though by no means fresh—was an improvement on that ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... which is one of the special features of Italian life. Nothing is more unlike the social jealousy of the Frenchman, or the surly incivility with which a Lancashire operative thinks proper to show the world that he is as good a man as his master. In either case one feels the taint of a mere spirit of envious levelling, and a latent confession that the levelling process has still in reality to be accomplished. But the ordinary Italian has nothing of the leveller about him. The little town is proud of its Marchese and ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... prevent comparisons; it is the nature of some critics to be invidious; but we need not care we can set them at defiance; they SHALL not make us foes, they SHALL not mingle with our mutual feelings one taint of jealousy there is my hand on that; I know you will give clasp ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... nuther," grunted old Toby. "'Taint pretty for a young gal like you to hear about. Whush! Thar goes ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... honest women as ever her is that's a done that, and more too, for to get their men safe off and out o' way—iss, and wasn't thought none the wus of, neither. You'm growed mighty fancikul all to wance 'bout what us is to do and what us dussn't think o'. I'm sick o' such talk. 'Taint nawthin' else fra' mornin' to night but Adam this and Adam that. I'm darned if 'tis to be wondered at if the maid plays 'ee false: by gosh! I'd do the trick, if I was she, 'fore I'd put up with such fantads from you or either man like 'ee. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... contempt for them. He felt degraded by the mere thought of their degradation. With his mother and sister, he took refuge in the heartfelt prayers which they used to say every evening after the day of deceptions and private humiliations, which to their innocence seemed to be a taint, of which they dared not tell each other. But, in contact with the latent spirit of atheism which is in the air of Paris, Olivier's faith was beginning to crumble away, without his knowledge, like whitewash trickling ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... it; and this too is an evidence of it, and brings me back to what I only hinted at before, but must speak more fully to here, namely, that men went about apparently well many days after they had the taint of the disease in their vitals, and after their spirits were so seized as that they could never escape it, and that all the while they did so they were dangerous to others; I say, this proves that so it was; for such people infected the very towns they went through, as ...
— A Journal of the Plague Year • Daniel Defoe
... comported himself as a Spanish gentleman should. This may be a lie. But if it is true, his old association with you and yours, and some humor of courage and fidelity and gentleness that I doubt not his mother gave him, have washed out the taint. Will you not reconsider your words? Give the maiden to the man. I am an old soldier, sir, and have done you some service. I would cheerfully stake my life to maintain his honor and his gentleness at ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... or his works. The three are inseparably connected, and to understand one we must understand all. The reason is that Shelley is one of the most subjective of writers. It would be hard to name a poet who has kept his art more free from all taint of representation of the real, making it nor an instrument for creating something life-like, but a more and more intimate echo or emanation of his own spirit. In studying his writings we shall see how they flow from his dominating emotion of love for his fellow-men; ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... will tear and taint The Poet, Patriot, Sage or Saint, Not sparing wit nor learning. Now, if you'd know the reason why, The best of reasons I'll supply; 'Tis ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... replied his firm-minded niece; "and even I admit that I love him, as far as a girl of such a cold constitution as mine may; but I tell you, uncle, that if I discovered a taint of vice or want of principle in his character, I could fling him off ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... the community will be debauched by this travel, whilst children are poisoned at these schools, our trade will put the finishing hand to our ruin. No factory will be settled in France, that will not become a club of complete French Jacobins. The minds of young men of that description will receive a taint in their religion, their morals, and their politics, which they will in a short time communicate ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... him such dire disgrace and trouble bred?' And as a neighbour's death appals the sick, and, by the dread Of dying, forces them to put upon their lusts restraint, So tender minds are oft deterred from vices by the taint They see them bring on others' names; 'tis thus that I from those Am all exempt, which bring with them a train of ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... families in Forfarshire, it was not a time for easy social intercourse, and Jean was conscious that the Carnegies and the rest of them of the old Cavalier stock looked askance at her, and suspected the black Covenanting taint in her blood. Claverhouse, like a faithful gentleman, had done his best to conceal from her the injury which his marriage had done him, but she knew that his cunning and bitter enemy, the Duke of Queensberry, had constantly insinuated into ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... agent] to make your check that amount per month hereafter.... This ends the loan business, and hereafter you can reflect that you are living not on borrowed money, but on money which you have squarely earned, and which has no taint or savor of charity about it, and you can also reflect that the money which you have been receiving of me is charged against the heavy bill which the next publisher will have to stand who gets ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... 'twould be too late to scold arterward. Wot I sez is, do you' scoldin' an' yo' whippin' 'fo' dere's any cause fer it—'taint no good to do it arterward; 'twon't ondo nuffin' wot's done," said Henny; but her wisdom was lost on the party, who had already started on their way, aunt and niece riding double, and Dan walking beside ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... it all meant. They wandered here and there with their absurd long staves in their hands, like a lot of faithless pilgrims bewitched inside a rotten fence. The word 'ivory' rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse. By Jove! I've never seen anything so unreal in my life. And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... vast, gigantic, on a scale the world had never seen before, was joined, and the volume of the cannon fire, beyond a doubt, was growing. It pulsed heavily, and either he or his fancy noticed a steady jarring motion. A faint acrid taint crept into the air and he felt it in his nose and throat. He coughed now and then, and he observed that men around him coughed also. But, on the whole, the army was singularly still, the soldiers straining eye or ear to see something or hear more of ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... that they are doing it in a mean way, sir; but of course soldiers hate thieves, and so the merest taint of a suspicion serves to make some of the men feel rather shy about having anything unnecessary to do ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... vine is the slave of certain conditions of soil, which impart to this extremely delicate and sensitive plant a special flavour that is incorporated with the wine, and can never be eradicated. The vines of the Cape, although of infinite variety, produce wines with a family taint which is a flavour absorbed from the soil. Any person who knows Constantia, the luscious wine of the Cape of Good Hope, will at once detect the soupcon of that flavour in every quality of wine produced ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... Chinese employees who had proven themselves such valuable servants. It is with some degree of trepidation that I follow a desire which impels me to describe a bunch of grapes I saw in this vineyard. I must beg my readers to free me from any taint of the spirit of the renowned Baron Munchausen, whose intensely magnifying vision threw its impress upon all objects, but, without the faintest degree of exaggeration, I can say, that while I am no Lilliputian in size, I stood, holding with great difficulty, the ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... the pavement; the shutters of the glass door were closed; I could not see into the interior; and both my eyes and spirit seemed drawn from the gloomy house—from the grey-hollow filled with rayless cells, as it appeared to me—to that sky expanded before me,—a blue sea absolved from taint of cloud; the moon ascending it in solemn march; her orb seeming to look up as she left the hill-tops, from behind which she had come, far and farther below her, and aspired to the zenith, midnight dark in its fathomless depth and measureless distance; and for those trembling stars ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... action—the strange voice of gold, roaring greed and battle and death over the souls of men. But above that, presently, rose the murmur of the creek, a hushed and dreamy flow of water over stones. It was hurrying to get by this horde of wild men, for it must bear the taint of gold and blood. Would it purge itself and clarify in the valleys below, on its way to the sea? There was in its murmur an imperishable and deathless note of nature, of time; and this was only a fleeting day ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... have spoken. As the mother was a slave, the children were so also at their birth, but they had been manumitted by their father. One of them was being educated in Germany; and it was intended that both should spend their lives in that country, the taint in their blood being an insuperable bar to their ever acquiring social position at ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... men, endless columns of deadly engines! Everywhere, always, death, or the preparation for death—every road and footpath crammed with it, every field trampled by it, every woodland shattered by it, every stream running thick with its pollution. The sour smell of marching men, the stale taint of unclean fires, the stench of beasts—the acrid, indescribable odor that hangs on the sweating flanks of armies seemed to infect sky ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... off quicker'n greased lightnin'. But they ain't goin' to Heaven, be they? Not much they ain't; no more'n my dog's goin' to the Legislature. And there's them outside the church that's a whole lot worse. Taint Christianity that makes folks mean, but they're mean in spite of it, though you can't get such fellers as you to see it that way, no more'n you can foller a mosquito through a mile o' fog. To-be-sure, I aint blamin' you ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... most true— All this is very true. When saw you, sir, When saw you now, Baldazzar, in the frigid Ungenial Britain which we left so lately, A heaven so calm as this—so utterly free From the evil taint ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... taint of the same folly, pure as she esteems herself, when she studiously adorns her person only to be seen by men, to excite respectful sighs, and all the idle homage of what is called innocent gallantry. Did women really respect virtue for its own sake, they would not seek for a compensation ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... honest. Get thee home; You'll find her locked, this moment, in your son's Incestuous embrace. Believe your king. Now go; you stand amazed; you stare at me With searching eye, because of my gray hairs. Unhappy man, reflect. Queens never taint Their virtue thus: doubt ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... dimly revealed the man. It was as though his personality was merely a nexus to the things he stood for and had done, so that he appeared to Evelyn less a human entity than a symbol. But at least Bessie Dane was interested and the fine atmosphere of the table was without a taint. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... of it," answered Tom: "I wouldn't use such rot-gut stuff, no, not for vinegar. 'Taint half so good as that red sherry you had up here oncet; that was poor weak stuff, too, but it did well to make milk punch of; it did well instead ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... distinguished his whole manner and bearing—the smile came more readily to his lips—and he seemed content for the present to display the sunny side of his nature—a nature impassioned, frank, generous, and noble, in spite of the taint of overweening, ambitions egotism which somewhat warped its true quality and narrowed the range of its sympathies. In his then frame of mind, a curious, vague sense of half-pleasurable penitence was upon him,—delicate, undefined, almost devotional suggestions stirred his thoughts with the ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... was stigmatised as the outcome of ambition and greed, rendered all the more odious by the cloak of philanthropy which she had hitherto worn. The time has not come when an exhaustive and decisive verdict can be given on this charge. Few movements have been free from all taint of meanness; but it is clearly unjust to rail against a great Power, because, at the end of a war which entailed frightful losses and a serious though temporary loss of prestige, it determined to exact from ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... from a premature misanthropy, but too late to eradicate every morbidity of mind. Something of sternness on the one hand, and of satire on the other, has mingled so long with my better feelings that the taint and the stream have become inseparable. Do not sigh, Aubrey. To be unamiable is not to be ungrateful; and I shall not love you the less if I have but a few objects to love. You ask me my inducement to leave ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... de Lawd, in some of His ways, can be mysterious. De Bible says so. There am some things de Lawd wants all folks to know, some things jus' de chosen few to know, and some things no one should know. Now, jus' 'cause yous don't know 'bout some of de Lawd's laws, 'taint superstition if some other person understands and believes ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Texas Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... 'Philanthropist' has suffered the same fate as many other words in our language. It has become hackneyed and corrupted; it has taken a professional taint; it has almost become a byword. We are apt to think of the philanthropist as an excitable, contentious creature, at the mercy of every fad, an ultra-radical in politics, craving for notoriety, filled with self-confidence, and meddling ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... off through the woods. The night had fallen, it was dark. But she forgot to be afraid, she who had such great sources of fear. Among the trees, far from any human beings, there was a sort of magic peace. The more one could find a pure loneliness, with no taint of people, the better one felt. She was in reality terrified, horrified ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... by remarkable manifestations of mental ability, but it is no part of our doctrine that such conjunctions are incompatible. Byron and Johnson accomplished great things; but who will deny that without that hereditary taint they would have done more and done it better? The latter, it is well known, was much dependent on moods, and spent long periods in mental inactivity. The labors of the other were fitful, and his views of life betray the influence of the same cerebral defect that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... even afar off, had she received even the slightest encouragement. So strong was this weakness that she had been angry with herself for her lack of pride, or even of a decent self-respect. It was, she sometimes thought, the heritage of her mother's race, and she was ashamed of it as part of the taint of slavery. She had never acknowledged, even to her husband, from whom she concealed nothing else, her secret thoughts upon this lifelong sorrow. This silent grief was nature's penalty, or society's ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... questionable or susceptible of defence only by casuistry. That he should have perpetuated evidence of any flagrant misdoing certainly could not be expected; but in a record kept with the fulness and frankness of this Diary we should read between the lines and detect as it were in its general flavor any taint of disingenuousness or concealment; we should discern moral unwholesomeness in its atmosphere. A thoughtless sentence would slip from the pen, a sophistical argument would be (p. 165) formulated for self-comfort, some acquaintance, interview, or arrangement ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... Committee states that rat-catchers are now demanding four pounds a week. Diplomacy, it appears, is the only branch of British sport that has succeeded in escaping the taint of professionalism. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various
... the manner if not in the substance of his thinking, to achieve the polished urbanity of those Englishmen who made a point of being scholars without a touch of pedantry, and men of virtue without the taint of prejudice. ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... conception of sin as a physical contagion to be cured by external rites, and the conception of it as an affection of the conscience which only "grace" can expel. In the one case the fact that a man was under the taint of crime would be borne in upon him by actual misfortune from without—by sickness, or failure in business, or some other of the troubles of life; and he would ease his mind and recover the spring of hope by performing certain ceremonies and rites. In the other case, his trouble is all ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... sense, he had certainly a peculiar taste, as it was of a close and earthy kind, and, besides being frequently impregnated with strong whiffs of the second-hand wearing apparel exposed for sale in Duke's Place and Houndsditch, had a decided flavour of rats and mice, and a taint of mouldiness. Perhaps some doubts of its pure delight presented themselves to Mr Swiveller, as he gave vent to one or two short abrupt sniffs, and looked ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... women seem determined to wear as few garments as possible, and to compensate for lack of number by brightness of coloring. In many a pretty face traces of gypsy blood may be seen. This vagabond taint gives an inexpressible charm to a face for which the Hungarian strain has already done much. The coal-black hair and wild, mutinous eyes set off to perfection the pale face and exquisitely thin lips, the delicate nostrils and beautifully moulded chin. Angel ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... that is, as a pure melody in the scale with harmonic interpretation of instrumental rather than true vocal suggestion. His tunes are pathetic, melodious, and of truly national and popular character, the best of them almost unaccountably free from the indefinable secular taint that such qualities are apt to introduce, and which the bad following of his example did very quickly introduce in the hands of less sensitive artists. They are ...
— A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn-Singing • Robert Bridges
... prostrated himself at my feet in acceptance of the relationship and did me reverence. When he rose his eyes were full of tears ... O little brother mine! I am fast going to my death—let me take all your sin away with me. May no taint from ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... mit musik plest, For if you tried your level best, You can't be plackguarts-taint in de plood: Dus endet de shdory of ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... prompted him, not to listen seriously to the temptings of the monk, but to deal with him on his own terms. He was obliged to justify himself against public suspicion with explanations and pamphlets, but some taint of the calumny stuck by ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... uplifted hand, and glancing around at his little master, Burl, with a look of great surprise, exclaimed, "W'y, Bushie, taint nothin' but a Injun!" ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... well as political sympathies. Although he was not only a friend to religious liberty, as we shall have occasion afterwards to remark, but always viewed with great sympathy the condition of the Roman Catholic portion of the Irish population, he shrank from the taint of the ultra-montane intrigue. Accompanying Lord Stanley, he became in due time a member of the great Conservative opposition, and, as he never did anything by halves, became one of the most earnest, as he certainly was one of the most enlightened, supporters of Sir Robert ...
— Lord George Bentinck - A Political Biography • Benjamin Disraeli
... coming of Ben Fordyce she had accepted all that Haney gave her as from one good friend to another. Once having satisfied herself that the money was clean of any taint from gambling-hall and saloon, she had not hesitated to use it. But now something was rising within her which changed the current of her purpose. Haney was no longer before the bar of her conscience; the soul under question was her own. Dimly, yet with ever-growing definiteness, she ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... light-winged toys Of feathered Cupid seel with wanton dullness My speculative and officed instruments, That my disports corrupt and taint my business, Let housewives make a skillet of my helm, And all indign and base adversities Make ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... that smart she is, all the time," declared Mary Carew proudly, "an' 'taint like she's showin' off, either, is ...
— The Angel of the Tenement • George Madden Martin
... and shout hurrah in, send for his luggage, come and live in, die and be buried in. She had never supposed such a street to exist outside the imaginations of antiquarians. Smells direct from the sixteenth century hung in the air in all their original integrity and without a modern taint. The faces of the people in the doorways seemed those of individuals who habitually gazed on the great Francis, and spoke of Henry the Eighth as the king ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... certain bureaus, whom the land-grabbers kept on their private pay-rolls. This was a matter of public record. Fortunately for the government, however, it has generally managed to secure for the head of the Land Department able and incorruptible men to whom no taint of suspicion attached—men whom the land-grabbers dare not ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... tree-tops stood unchanging, as if traced by an unsteady hand on the clear blue of the hot sky. In the space sheltered by the high palisades there lingered the smell of decaying blossoms from the surrounding forest, a taint of drying fish; with now and then a whiff of acrid smoke from the cooking fires when it eddied down from under the leafy boughs and clung lazily about the ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... There was no taint of gas or poison fumes. The air tasted fresh except for the faint smoke, and the birds were all in full song. Yet we all had to dismount, and to let the prisoners walk, too, because the horses were too drowsy to be trusted. The path that zigzagged downward to the village ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... seemed in a greater hurry than the others, and he beckoned to him a slim, swarthy-skinned youth who answered to the euphonious name of Sam Pretty Cow, who was three-quarters Indian and forgiven the taint for the ability to ride anything he ever tried to ride, rope anything he ever swung his loop at, and for his unfailing good humor which set him far above ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... licence was at hand. But the restoration of Charles the Second rendered the change wonderfully rapid and violent. Profligacy became a test of orthodoxy, and loyalty a qualification for rank and office. A deep and general taint infected the morals of the most influential classes, and spread itself through every province of letters. Poetry inflamed the passions; philosophy undermined the principles; divinity itself, inculcating an abject reverence for the Court, gave ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... space where our sires would lay a saint, A benefactor,—a bishop, suppose; A baron with armor-adornments quaint; A dame with chased ring and jewelled rose, Things sanctity saves from taint: ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... vanished with a hoarse salt scream like the laugh of a delirious woman, and the wind, freshening momentarily in a squall, made one think of the spirit of Nature as eager to purify the air of heaven from the taint of the dead pirate's passage from the bulwarks to ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... I dare not paint Till all is ordered and matured within, Hand-work and head-work have an earthly taint, But when the soul commands I shall begin; On themes like these I should not dare to dwell With our good Prior—they to him would be Mere nonsense; he must touch and taste and see, And facts, ...
— Leonardo da Vinci • Maurice W. Brockwell
... betrayed the passionate, perverted creature. And yet there was a sense in which Maggie's betrayal cried to Heaven, like the destruction of an innocent. Majendie's finer instinct had surrendered to the charm of her appealing and astounding purity, by which he meant her cleanness from the mercenary taint. He had seen himself contending, grossly, with a fierce little vulgar schemer, who (he had been convinced) would hang on to poor Gorst's honour by fingers of a murderous tenacity. His own experience helped him to the vision. And Maggie had come to ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... over the placid waters at the rising sun, Kennedy folds his brawny arms across his bare, sun-tanned chest and mutters to himself, in his almost forgotten mother-tongue: "Twenty years, twenty years ago! Who would know me there now? Even if I placarded my name on my back and what I did, 'taint likely I'd have to face a grand jury for running a knife into a mongrel Portuguee, way out in the South Seas a score of years ago.... Poor little Talamalu! I paid a big price for her—twenty years of wandering from Wallis Island ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke
... unholy source. Its red trail runs through history. Even where the New Testament prevails, its teaching must still be dulled and clouded by its sterner neighbour. Let us retain this honoured work of literature. Let us remove the taint which poisons the very spring of ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... almost crumbling to the touch; it was full of juicy red gravy, and cut pleasantly, the knife went through it nicely; you can tell good meat directly you touch it with the knife. It was cooked to a turn, and had been done at a wood fire on a hearth; no oven taste, no taint of coal gas or carbon; the pure flame of wood had browned it. Such emanations as there may be from burning logs are odorous of the woodland, of the sunshine, of the fields and fresh air; the wood simply gives out as it burns the sweetness it has imbibed through its leaves from the atmosphere ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... go and get skeered, Miss," he said, kindly; "'taint nothin' in the world but a rabbit. Mamie can't never get used to rabbits, someways." He indicated one of the horses—a high, raw-boned animal, sketched on a generous plan, whose ribs and joints protruded, and whose rough white coat had been ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed
... slave," says Green, "became part of the live stock of the estate, to be willed away at death with the horse or the ass, whose pedigree was kept as carefully as his own. His children were bondmen, like himself; even the freeman's children by a slave-mother inherited the mother's taint. 'Mine is the calf that is born of my cow,' ran the English proverb." In the same passage he points out that the number of the serfs was being continually augmented from various concurrent causes—war, crime, debt, and poverty all assisting to drive ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... to Duncan Forbes, declared—"I am very hopeful in my dear wife's constancy, if they do not put her to death." This might be only a part of his usual acting,—a trait of that dissimulation which was the moral taint of his character; or it may have been true that the humiliated being whom he called his wife had really learned to cherish one who seemed born to ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson |
