"Blear-eyed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... amazement; "mine's all bare end. It's nothing but 'bare end' for some of us. Yesterday morning was wet and cold—you know how cold it was. Well, Rotha had hardly gone out when a tap came to the door, and what do you think it was? A woman, a woman thin and blear-eyed. Some one must have counted her face bonnie once. She was scarce older than my own lass, but she'd a poor weak barn at her breast and a wee lad that trudged at her side. She was wet and cold, and asked for rest and ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... rush came, this old man, bent and blear-eyed, was swept along the gangway like a chip on the tide. In pure lightness of heart a sailor, posted at the head of the plank, expedited him with a kick. "That'll do for good-bye to India," said ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... slag. It sins—yes, it sins; but it takes something by its sinning; but you, reverend pontiffs, tell us what good gold can do in a holy place. Just as much or as little as the dolls which a young girl offers to Venus. Give we rather to the gods such an offering as great Messala's blear-eyed representative has no means of giving, even out of his great dish—duty to God and man well blended in the mind—purity in the shrine of the heart, and a manly flavour of nobleness pervading the bosom. Let me have these ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... attended to, the travellers entered the house, where they found Pierre, the proprietor, dozing on his bar; a bloated, blear-eyed creature, who evidently would have much preferred making them drunk with his vile whisky to preparing them any pretence for a dinner. But they firmly declined his liquor, so muttering unintelligibly to ...
— The Young Woodsman - Life in the Forests of Canada • J. McDonald Oxley
... during our brief visit consisted of grotesque dancing, beating of drums, and blowing upon a shrill fife before a rude altar, upon which incense was burning. There was also marching, by these musicians, around the altar, led by a dirty, blear-eyed priest. The scene was strongly suggestive of a powwow as performed by the Digger Indians of California. So great was the din, we were quite willing to take for granted the presence, in another part of the temple, of the tooth of Buddha, without personal inspection, and hastened to get ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... you to wrestle with, Asa Thor," said the King. Thor looked round and saw an old woman hobbling toward him. She was blear-eyed and toothless. "This is Ellie, my ancient nurse," said the Giant King. "She is the one we would ...
— The Children of Odin - The Book of Northern Myths • Padraic Colum
... room his dame you never saw, Where reigned by custom old a Salic law; Here coatless lolled he on his throne of oak, And every tongue paused midway if he spoke. Due mirth he loved, yet was his sway severe; No blear-eyed driveller got his stagger here; 390 "Measure was happiness; who wanted more, Must buy his ruin at the Deacon's store;" None but his lodgers after ten could stay, Nor after nine on eves of Sabbath-day. He had his favorites and his pensioners, The same that gypsy Nature ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... enough: lest you should think I've dipt in blear-eyed Crispin's ink, And stolen my work from his scrutore, I will ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... at all that night, but showed up next morning at the diggings, looking blear-eyed and sleepy. He told us he had slept with a friend, and replied rather curtly that he was a "little behind the game." I believe myself that he was cleaned out; but that was none of our business. Every night we divided the dust into five parts. Don Gaspar and Vasquez got two ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... the same "I," who thought it so little worth while to win the good opinion of father's blear-eyed old friend, that I went to my first meeting with him with a scorched face, loose hair, tottering, all through prayers, on the verge of a descent about my neck, and a large round hole, smelling horribly of singeing, burnt in the very front of my ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... that in a visit to El Cajon Valley some thirty years ago he was taken to a house in which the aged persons were cared for. There were half a dozen who had reached an extreme age. Some were unable to move, their bony frame being seemingly anchylosed. They were old, wrinkled, and blear-eyed; their skin was hanging in leathery folds about their withered limbs; some had hair as white as snow, and had seen some seven-score of years; others, still able to crawl, but so aged as to be unable to stand, went slowly about on their ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... instrumental, floated out upon the streets to tempt the miners to enter, while away an hour, and incidentally part with their well-earned dust. Some of these hells had "lady waitresses," poor, faded, blear-eyed creatures, in gaudy finery, and upon whose features was stamped the everlasting brand of God's outlawry. These dens of iniquity were only too frequently the scene of awful tragedies, and the sawdust floors drank up the blood of many a poor unfortunate. If the encounter was between two gamblers ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson
... the witch!" cried a merry girl, As they rounded the point where Goody Cole Sat by her door with her wheel atwirl, A bent and blear-eyed poor old soul. "Oho!" she muttered, "ye 're brave to-day! But I hear the little waves laugh and say, 'The broth will be cold that waits at home; For it 's one to go, but another ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... insist on his refunding those cows which do not resemble the original heifers, and are not, as they were, dun and red and white. This sounded magnanimous, and met with grunts of approval until the blear-eyed defendant remarked, hopelessly, "They are all of those colors," which changed the sympathies of the audience once more. Tevula saw this at a glance, and hastened to improve his position by narrating an anecdote. No words of mine could reproduce the dramatic talent that man ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... own attitude in the matter affords painful proof that it is one of the latest. They will understand some day that a steatopygous "Hottentot Venus" is no more beautiful because an African finds her attractive, than an ugly, bloated, blear-eyed harlot is beautiful because she pleases a ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... drink, blear-eyed and ill, Her battered bonnet nodding on her head, From a dark arch she clutched my sleeve and said: 'I've sold no bunch to-day, nor touched a bite ... Son, buy six-pennorth; and 't will mean ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... some theological standard, or pretence to such a standard. His meagre face, too, with its infinity of anxious yet meaningless lines, and its dim spectacled eyes, so plainly overtaxed by the effort to discern anything clearly, might have belonged to any old village priest grown childish and blear-eyed in the solitude of stupid books. Even the blotches of tell-tale colour on his long nose were not altogether unclerical in their suggestion. A poor old man he seemed, as he stood blinking in the electric ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... omnibus, which for fourpence took him to one of the little alleys near Gray's Inn, and there he got down, and threading the well- known locality, through Bedford Place and across Theobald's Road, soon found himself at the door of his generous patron. Oh! how he hated the house; how he hated the blear-eyed, cross-grained, dirty, impudent fish-fag of an old woman who opened the door for him; how he hated Mr. Jabesh M'Ruen, to whom he now came a supplicant for assistance, and how, above all, he hated himself for ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... person of singularly equable temperament. But to have an offer which he had made only with self-sacrificing effort thus cavalierly received by a red-nosed, blear-eyed, impudent little chittermouse (thus, I must reluctantly admit, did he mentally characterize his new acquaintance), was just a bit ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... that the priest, old and blear-eyed as he was, saw him first: the others had heard nothing. With Jehane's hand in his own, the priest stopped and blinked. Who was this prowler, afoot when all else were on their knees? His jaw dropped; you saw that he was toothless. Inarticulate sounds, ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... hangman, who is whistling in the meadow. What a beautiful hempen rope! Sow hemp, not wheat, from Issy to Vanvre. The thief hath not stolen the beautiful hempen rope. Grumble, Greve, bark, Greve! To see the dissolute wench hang on the blear-eyed gibbet, windows are eyes. ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... eyes Ralph caught the vague hum of a lingo of switch pidgin, smut-faced, blear-eyed men near by, himself stretched at full length on sleeping car cushions on the floor of the doghouse. He sat up promptly. There was a momentary blur to his sight, but this ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... the State would never get any good of him. Thunders of applause. Face-Maker dips behind the looking-glass, brings his own hair forward, is himself again, is awfully grave. 'A distinguished inhabitant of the Faubourg St. Germain.' Face-Maker dips, rises, is supposed to be aged, blear-eyed, toothless, slightly palsied, supernaturally polite, evidently of noble birth. 'The oldest member of the Corps of Invalides on the fete-day of his master.' Face-Maker dips, rises, wears the wig on one ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... were really frightened this time. No sophomore could disguise herself like this. These were undoubtedly genuine ruffians of the worst type, hungry, blear-eyed and ragged. ...
— Grace Harlowe's Plebe Year at High School - The Merry Doings of the Oakdale Freshmen Girls • Jessie Graham Flower
... the Trojan war upwards and downwards, full of instances of such strange inexplicable passions? Was not Helen, by the most moderate calculation, ninety years of age when she went off with His Royal Highness Prince Paris of Troy? Was not Madame La Valliere ill-made, blear-eyed, tallow-complexioned, scraggy, and with hair like tow? Was not Wilkes the ugliest, charmingest, most successful man in the world? Such instances might be carried out so as to fill a volume; but cui bono? Love is fate, and not will; its origin not to be explained, its progress irresistible: ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... suddenly to the left into the new road. Alice emitted a sigh of relief. There was a sense of luxury—of exclusiveness—in passing over its smooth surface. Morrison and his common hotel, with its blear-eyed windows, were now well out of sight. Presently the camp lay ahead of them—an orderly settlement of trim buildings. Margaret was too excited to do more than gaze ahead of her with ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... Street neighborhood is not a place where a refined young lady would care to find herself alone, even in the cheery daylight. If she came at all, she would be attended by a trusty escort. She would not get too close to people on the doorsteps, and she would shrink away in disgust and fear from a blear-eyed creature careering down the sidewalk on many-jointed legs. The delicate damsel would hasten home to wash and purify and perfume herself till the foul contact of Wheeler Street was utterly eradicated, and her wonted purity restored. And I do not blame her. I only wish that she would ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... it makes the sight of eyes both sharp and clear; With help of Rue, oh! blear-eyed man I thou shalt see far ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... board walks, the low rookeries, the unshaven, blear-eyed men sitting on the thresholds of the saloons, the slattern squaws wandering abroad like bedraggled hens, made the girl stare with wonder and dismay. She had remembered the town street as a highway filled with splendid cavaliers, a list wherein heroic ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... gone after moose save one half-naked, blear-eyed old paralytic, a dreadful creature who shambled and hobbled up asking for tobacco. The women were expecting us, however, and took the encamping out of our hands entirely, setting up the tent, hauling stove wood and splitting ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... and who forge as with one stroke the constitution that is to be a basis of their laws—are we not provided with a mirror that reflects every lineament with the true disposition of light and shade? If it is a stern, it is yet a truthful, mirror. It flatters neither those who made it nor those blear-eyed maskers, who, forgetful of their own distorted visages, look in askance, and are able to see nothing to admire in the sober, bright-eyed faces of their fathers who gaze down upon them from the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... in the hands of indignant genius, branding the audacious forehead of falsehood or pollution. But ridicule in the hands either of cold-blooded or infuriated Malice, is harmless as a birch-rod in the palsied fingers of a superannuated beldam, who in her blear-eyed dotage has lost her school. The Bird of Paradise might float in the sunshine unharmed all its beautiful life long, although all the sportsmen of Cockaigne were to keep firing at the star-like plumage during the Christmas ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... god Ku, look forth! Huh! Ku is blear-eyed! Aye, weave now the wreath— A wreath for the dog Pua-lena; 5 A hala plume for Kahili, Choice garlands from Niho-ku. [Page 226] There was a scurry of clouds, earth, groaned; The sound of your baying reached Hawaii the verdant, the pet of the gods; 10 A portent ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... effects of Nature; if any one shall put water in his mouth and spit it out so opposite to the sun, that its rays may be refracted on the drops, he shall see the resemblance of a rainbow; the same appears to men that are blear-eyed, when they fix their watery eyes ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... another. 'No, don't,' I begged, for the pretty girl I had flattered myself I had passed a summer's night with that most young men would envy, showed signs of changing, like some siren, into a flabby, blear-eyed boozer. That hurt ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... as surpass her in wisdom. For she is barbarian still, and many men tower above her. The commonplace life still supplies her with weapons, which today are old-fashioned and crude. Her mode of attack, in exterior life, is as it always has been, as it was in Oedipus' days. She shoots like a blear-eyed bow-man, aiming straight ahead of her; but if the target be raised somewhat higher than usual, her arrows fall ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... moodily attentive, chin in hand, and his eyes upon the sunny road, started violently. "Two horses instead of one," he repeated, with a catch of the breath. In a moment he was upon his feet, and the innkeeper, had he looked up and had he been less blear-eyed and dull, might have seen an approach to the old Fairfax Cary—colour in cheek and light ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... a mighty oncomfortable time o' year fur trampin'," said a blear-eyed vagabond near the stove. "I've ben meditatin' somethin' o' the kind myself, but reckon I'll wait fur warm weather. My constitution ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... brighter the fire is getting. It makes me think that something must have happened up above the river. The sun must have risen, or something of that sort, for everything looks clearer and the gold shines out so bright and beautiful, that the blear-eyed dwarf himself sees it and forgets all about trying to catch water nymphs in wondering what it is. He asks the nymphs, and they tell him about the ring that could be made of it if only it could be stolen from them; but it is of no use for him to try, they say, ...
— The Wagner Story Book • Henry Frost
... and in answer to the summons an old, wrinkled, blear-eyed hag made her appearance with the liquor. This old wretch was the 'landlady' of the house; she had been a celebrated and beautiful courtezan in her day, but age and vice had done their work, and she was now an object hideous ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... Fayetooca, or burying-place, we had left before. Here we found Captains Cook and Furneaux and Mr Hodges, with a great number of natives, seated on the fine lawn. They were in conversation with an old blear-eyed man," &c. "From this place we returned to the sea shore, where a brisk trade for vegetables, fowls, and hogs was carried on," &c. "It was near sun-set when we returned on board with our collection, and found ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... sometimes a man and a woman—a teamster out of work or with his wages for the day, and with him a creature—a blear-eyed, slatternly looking woman, in a filthy calico gown. The man clutches her arm, as they sing and stagger up past the cafes. The woman holds in her claw-like hand a half-empty bottle of cheap red wine. Now and then they ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... the passengers will have to sit, entertained by howling blasts, till a fresh engine comes up from Blair Atholl. Such an experience was once mine, and I always think of it when I read the ninth ode of Horace's first book. Outside were the great snow-sheeted mountains, and the moon was gazing in blear-eyed compassion through a screen of haze. From end to end of the train resounded the rhythmic beat of cold-footed passengers striving to bring some warmth ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... indeed, sometimes loud in song or conversation, and taking generally a sort of pride in a dash of rudeness, calling it independence, but you will never find them sottish; nowhere cumbering the footway with their prostrate carcases; nowhere reeling zigzag, blear-eyed and stupid, to a ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... buffalo-robes. Perched, as we were, upon the crown of the height, we looked completely down into the sleigh, and during the whole course of my life I never saw three uglier mortals collected into such a narrow space. The man was blear-eyed, with a hare-lip, through which protruded two dreadful yellow teeth that resembled the tusks of a boar. The woman was long-faced, high cheek-boned, red-haired, and freckled all over like a toad. The boy resembled his hideous mother, but ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... largely on the numbers you received, and it might not be safe to trust to your discretion in limiting the number. Your sympathies would be so wrought on, Oaklands would soon swarm with blear-eyed specimens of humanity, and Mrs. Flaxman and I would be compelled ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... take no denial some dotards and striplings were routed out and the patriarch of the clan was thrust forward. He looked senile from his slippered feet to the shine on his bald-pate, he was blear-eyed and hard of hearing, but he understood plain Latin when he heard it, he knew of old the signs he read in the flash of her eyes, the set of her jaw and every feature as she stood or moved. Also no dog ever had a keener scent for ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... but a few lines just to tell me how that good sagacious man your father is—that kind dainty body your mother—that strapping chiel your brother Douglas—and my friend Rachel, who is as far before Rachel of old, as she was before her blear-eyed sister Leah. ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... blasted, blear-eyed, blundering, thundering, brainless, Godforsaken, doddering, damned fool!" he said without taking breath. "You great silly, ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... house for a few minutes, could have brought themselves to believe that it was such a very broad part of the road leading to destruction: but the landlord had some hazy notion on that point. He sat there day and night, and saw the destruction going on. He saw the blear-eyed, fuddled men that came to drown conscience in his stalls, and the slatternly women who came and went. Nevertheless he was a rosy, jocund fellow who appeared to have a good deal of the milk of human kindness about him, and would have looked ...
— Sunk at Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... awful pretty in the face o' rocks, an' clay an' alkali. Oh, Lord, what a life it is anyway! They eat dirt, they sleep in dirt, they breathe dirt 'til their backs are bent, their hands twisted an' warped. They're all wind-swept an' blear-eyed I tell you, an' some o' them jest lie down in their sweat beside the sluices, an' they don't never rise up again. I've seen 'em there!" She paused reminiscently; then, pointing to the keg, she went on haltingly: "I got some money ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... the costs. It was really suicide for an attorney to throw away business so excellent as this. And now it had gone to Bearside whom Nickem remembered as a junior to himself when they were both young hobbledehoys at Norrington,—a dirty, blear-eyed, pimply-faced boy who was suspected of purloining halfpence out of coat-pockets. The thing was very trying to Nat Nickem. But suddenly, before that Wednesday was over, another idea had occurred to him, and he was almost content. He knew Goarly, and he had heard of Scrobby ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... that of a very old man, blear-eyed, decrepit, dirty, in a battered top hat and faded frock coat, discoloured and weather-stained at the shoulders, seemed familiar to Jadwin. It recalled some ancient association, he could not say what. But he was unable to see the old man's face distinctly; the light was bad, and he sat with his ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... miserable wretch entered who, appearing opportunely in Gavin's Hotel, had cured Dennis of his desire to drink, when weary and despondent, for the sake of the effects. For a moment they looked at the blear-eyed, trembling wreck of a man, and then Dennis asked, "Had God any hand in making ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... the outward state and complexion of her body, the ragged and tattered equipage of her person in the point of accoutrement, and beggarly poor provision of fare for her diet and entertainment; for she was ill apparelled, worse nourished, toothless, blear-eyed, crook-shouldered, snotty, her nose still dropping, and herself still drooping, faint, and pithless; whilst in this woefully wretched case she was making ready for her dinner porridge of wrinkled green coleworts, with a bit skin of yellow bacon, mixed ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... he solaced first, With healing touch, with simples from his pouch, Warming and lulling, best with promises Of constant service till their ills were cured. And some, gray-bearded, bald, and curved with age, Blear-eyed from poring over lines obscure And knotty riddles of the Talmud, brought Their problems to this youth, who cleared and solved, Yielding prompt answer to a lifetime's search. Then, followed, pushed by his obsequious tribe, Who fain had pedestaled him on their ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... now see themselves begirt by an array of savage creatures, such as they have never seen before, though they have had dealings with uncivilised beings in many lands. Two score ugly old women, wrinkled and blear-eyed, and with tangled hair hanging over their faces, every one a match for Macbeth's witches, and with them a number of old men stoop-shouldered, and of wizard aspect, each a very Caliban. Even the boys and girls have an impish, ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... or pale and bloated beast-men, or white-haired, toothless, blear-eyed satyrs grown venerable in vice. But beautiful, youthful profligates, limbed like the gods and fauns of the old Greek sculptors; soft of skin, golden of hair, with sleepy eyes like green jewels, soft persuasive ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... All the Laplanders are blear-eyed, owing to the sharp wind, the glare on the snow, fogs, and smoke. Yet I never met any people who lead such easy, happy lives as the Laplanders. In summer they have two meals of milk a day, and when they have milked their reindeer or made cheese, they resign themselves to indolent ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... couched in whispers. The men around him were blear-eyed and haggard-faced, their skins dry and bluish, and not a one was clad in more than undershirt and trousers. Alive and breathing, they were—but breathing grotesquely, horribly. They made awful noises at it; ...
— Under Arctic Ice • H.G. Winter
... nothing but false friendship, fawning hypocrisy, dishonest civility, base merchandise of words, a plausible discord of the heart and lips. The flatterer is blear-eyed to ill, and cannot see vices; and his tongue walks ever in one track of unjust praises, and can no more tell how to discommend than to speak true. His speeches are full of wondering interjections, and all his titles are superlative, and both of them ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... pleasing in his works. Aesop was crooked, Socrates purblind, long-legged, hairy; Democritus withered, Seneca lean and harsh, ugly to behold, yet show me so many flourishing wits, such divine spirits: Horace a little blear-eyed contemptible fellow, yet who so sententious and wise? Marcilius Picinus, Faber Stapulensis, a couple of dwarfs, [3609]Melancthon a short hard-favoured man, parvus erat, sed magnus erat, &c., yet of incomparable parts all three. [3610]Ignatius Loyola the founder of the Jesuits, by reason of ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... diverting manner. If I have cares in my mind, I come to the Zoo, and fancy they don't pass the gate. I recognise my friends, my enemies, in countless cages. I entertained the eagle, the vulture, the old billy-goat, and the black-pated, crimson-necked, blear-eyed, baggy, hook-beaked old marabou stork yesterday at dinner; and when Bob's aunt came to tea in the evening, and asked him what he had seen, he stepped up to her ...
— Some Roundabout Papers • W. M. Thackeray
... souls bent to earth, empty of divine things! What boots it to import these morals of ours into the temples, and to imagine what is good in God's sight from the analogies of this sinful flesh?... Why do we not offer Him something which Messala's blear-eyed progeny with all his wealth cannot offer, a spirit at one with justice and right, holy in its inmost depths, and a heart steeped in nobleness and virtue? Let me but bring these to the altar, and a sacrifice of meal will be accepted!" In the third and fourth Satires ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... apparent reason at all, leaped upon him and flung him. For a week he saw or knew nothing but a whirling vision of the world seen through rum-crazy eyes; then at last he awoke to find himself hatless, coatless, filthy, unshaved, blear-eyed, palsied. Not a cent of money was left, and so that day and night, in spite of the deadly nausea that beset him and the trembling weakness that hung like a leaden weight upon every limb, he walked all the thirty-eight miles home again to East Haven. ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... nether limbs were cased in silken hose of a pale lavender hue, and silver buckles fastened the tufted purple ribbons on his shoes. On his breast was the red cross of St. James—patent of nobility; had it not been for that and his fine attire he might have passed for a blear-eyed and decrepit tailor ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock
... to me!— Laughs to the lip—tears to the eye, In looking on the gifts that lie Like broken playthings scattered o'er Imagination's nursery floor! Did these old hands once click the key That let "Jack's" box-lid upward fly, And that blear-eyed, fur-whiskered elf Leap, as though frightened at himself, And quiveringly lean and stare At me, his ...
— Riley Songs of Home • James Whitcomb Riley
... arter de great-gran' one pass de hunr' milestone—oh! she hoed ahead like a rattlesnake. De wrinkles an' de crows' foots, an' de—de colour—jes' like bu'nt leather! She lef' de oders far behind, an' looked like nuffin so much as dat poor little blear-eyed monkey you shot de oder day, what Senhorina Manuela say was so nice to eat. What! you un'erstan' Ingliss?" added the negro, looking at the Indian girl, who had given ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... The older man, gaunt, blear-eyed, ragged, turned over on his side. His appearance was little short of repulsive. His voice when he spoke was, curiously enough, the voice of a gentleman, thick and a trifle ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Horrid with bloody jaws. Scaled reptiles crawl From slum and sewer, slimy, coil on coil— Danton, dark beast, that builded for himself A monument of quicksand limed with blood; Horse-leech Marat, blear-eyed, vile vulture born; Fair Charlotte's dagger robbed the guillotine! Black-biled, green-visaged, traitorous Robespierre, That buzzard-beaked, hawk-taloned octopus Who played with pale poltroonery of men, And drank the cup of flattery till he reeled; ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... under his bagging waistcoat. When he used to treat the boys in old days at a coffee-house, he would shout and laugh louder than anybody there, and have all the waiters skipping round him; it was quite painful to see how humble and civil he was to John of the Tapioca, a blear-eyed old attendant in dingy stockings and cracked pumps, whose business it was to serve glasses of wafers, and bumpers of ink in pewter, and slices of paper to the frequenters of this dreary house of entertainment, where nothing else seemed to be consumed. As for William Dobbin, whom ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a fearful old crone; hunchbacked, toothless, blear-eyed, bearded, halt, with huge gouty feet swathed in flannel. As she cast in the ingredients one by one, she ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the inn-yard of some large coachmaster; but few words were said, and I was consigned to the coachman of one of the country stages, with as little remorse and as little ceremony as if I had been an ugly blear-eyed pug, forwarded in a basket, labelled "this side uppermost," to an old maiden aunt, or a ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... happened to be handy, and I happened to be touched. That's all there is to it. I was concerned as to the way he would go out. It would have hurt me if, for instance, he had taken to drink. The earth is so small that I was afraid of, some day, being waylaid by a blear-eyed, swollen-faced, besmirched loafer, with no soles to his canvas shoes, and with a flutter of rags about the elbows, who, on the strength of old acquaintance, would ask for a loan of five dollars. You know the awful jaunty bearing of these ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... "The blear-eyed sorcerers of the north Their vile enchantments sung and wove, And in the night they sallied ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... rout, travelling in a long single file, for it was quite impossible to keep the tail up with the leaders. I shall try to give my reader some slight idea of them, if description is sufficiently palpable to do so. The real leader was an old black mare, blear-eyed from fly-wounds, for ever dropping tears of salt rheum, fat, large, strong, having carried her 180 pounds at starting, and now desperately thirsty and determined, knowing to an inch where the water was; on she went, reaching the stony slopes about two miles from ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... prodigiously old. He did not know how old he was himself, although he did know that no person in his tribe had been alive when he was a young boy in the village. He remembered the days when some of the old men, still alive, had been born; and, unlike him, they were now decrepit, shaken with palsy, blear-eyed, toothless of mouth, deaf of ear, or paralysed. All his own faculties remained unimpaired. He even boasted a dozen worn fangs of teeth, gum-level, on which he could still chew. Although he no longer ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... the fat, ruddy host, open-mouthed, blear-eyed, and the frolicking slender page, who delights in his tricks and covers his victim with jesting compliments, is extremely well described. Wilton finds his man "counting his barrels, and setting the price in chalke ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... Don Francesco had called "not exactly a liberal." He tallied with that description. A wicked old face! He was blear-eyed, brown as a mummy, and so fat that his legs had long ago ceased to be any use save as a precarious support while standing. He rode, in gorgeous apparel, on a milk-white donkey which was led by two pretty choristers in blue. Attached ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... is sad enough: deserted palaces, and crowded hovels scarce good enough for pigstyes. 'One day man see his dinner, and one other day none at all,' as Omar observes; and the children are shocking from bad food, dirt and overwork, but the little pot-bellied, blear-eyed wretches grow up into noble young men and women under all their difficulties. The faces are all sad and rather what the Scotch call 'dour,' not mechant at all, but harsh, like their voices. All the melody ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... the street and entered the saloon where Manley was still drinking heavily, his face crimson and blear-eyed and brutalized, his speech thickened disgustingly. He was sprawled in an armchair, waving an empty glass in an erratic attempt to mark the time of a college ditty six or seven years out of date, which he was trying to sing. He leered ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... time. But to drink at the stoup of beauty; to lift the leafy coverlet of earth and seek the cradled God (since here, if anywhere, He dwells), this in the world's eye is waste of time. Oh, filthy, heavy-handed, blear-eyed world, when will you ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... home, and when he looked at it he turned very pale and sat down quickly as though his knees had failed him. Apparently the house had not been painted since his childhood, and certainly it had not been repaired. Broken, dangling shutters gave it a blear-eyed look which it made him sick to see, and swarms of untidily pin-feathered chickens wandered about over the hard-beaten earth of the yard, which was without a spear of grass, littered with old boxes and crates and unsightly rags, and ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... prism, see through a glass darkly; wink, blink, nictitate; squint; look askant^, askant askance^; screw up the eyes, glare, glower; nictate^. dazzle, loom. Adj. dim-sighted &c n.; myopic, presbyopic^; astigmatic, moon-eyed, mope-eyed, blear-eyed, goggle-eyed, gooseberry-eyed, one-eyed; blind of one eye, monoculous^; half-blind, purblind; cock-eyed, dim-eyed, mole- eyed; dichroic. blind as a bat &c ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... chairs behind their new desks, each smoking a fine brand of cigar, but busy poring over a profusion of maps and blue-prints, in a belated endeavour to get some notion—however indistinct—of how the land lay according to numbers. They knew where Kickwillie Loop was; they could go blindfold to Blear-eyed Monoghan's Ranch, or Mudflats, or Sunset Avenue, but when it came to driving out to, say, lot 21 sub-division 16, district lot 218—well, that was quite another matter and called for ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... either side the sun are sun-dogs, so that there are three suns in the sky. The frost-dust is like the dust of diamonds, and all the air is filled with it. Now the woman coughs, and lies still in the snow until the fit has passed, when she crawls on again. Now the man looks ahead, and he is blear-eyed as with old age and must rub his eyes so that he can see the stranger-man. And now the stranger-man looks back over his shoulder. And Sitka Charley, standing upright, maybe falls down ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... "By Lia, who was blear-eyed but fruitful, is signified the active life which sees less clearly, since occupied with works; but when, now by word, now by example, it arouses its neighbour to imitation, it brings forth many children in good works." But all this ...
— On Prayer and The Contemplative Life • St. Thomas Aquinas
... to glut the lust of godless libertines. Its sign was the ligniyoni, its ideal the almighty dollar. Through its feculent columns Muckle- mouthed Meg and Doll Tearsheet made assignations with forks-of-the-creeks fools, while blear-eyed bummers and rotten-livered rounders requested respectable women to meet them at unfrequented places and wear camp-meeting lingerie. The ICONOCLAST compelled its unrespected contemporary to purify its "personal column"—and this ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... wish me to die?" he asked, coming up close to my stool, and regarding me with a shrewd though blear-eyed gaze; "many do. Do ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... Elsie's arms timidly stole up about his neck. From across the room sounded a hiccough that ended in a dry hacking cough. Lennon jerked his head around. The besotted face of Farley, ghastly white and blear-eyed, was leering at them through a ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... their banners still Painted on fishes' skin with cunning skill. Here Geth, who to the Slaves cried "Onward go," And Mundiaque and Ottocar—Plato And Ladislaeus Kunne; and Welf who bore These words upon his shield his foes before; "Nothing there is I fear." Otho blear-eyed, Zultan and Nazamustus, and beside The later Spignus, e'en to Spartibor Of triple vision, and yet more and more As if a pause at every age were made, And ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... the same token he was turned to a daffodil, and as he died for love of himself, so, if you remember, there was an old ill-favoured, precious-nosed, babber-lipped, beetle-browed, blear-eyed, slouch-eared slave that, looking himself by chance in a glass, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... place under the flooring, banished the make-up stain from his face, his neck, his wrists, and hands as if by magic. It was a strange metamorphosis that had taken place—the coarse, brutal-featured, blear-eyed, leering countenance of Larry the Bat was gone, and in its place, clean-cut, square-jawed, clear-eyed, was the face of Jimmie Dale. And where before had slouched a slope-shouldered, misshapen, flabby creature, a broad-shouldered form ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... hundred years old! It is so many years to live; and then to be such a sinner, too—how hard it must be! I always thought you were very good before; and I am sure you are not gray and wrinkled and blear-eyed, like ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... accosted him was called Blear-eyed Moll, a woman of no very comely appearance. Her eye (for she had but one), whence she derived her nickname, was such as that nickname bespoke; besides which, it had two remarkable qualities; for first, as if Nature had been careful ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... such places; the men probably wandering abroad in quest of that daily miracle, a dinner and a drink, or perhaps slumbering in the daylight that they may the better follow out their cat-like rambles through the dark. Here are women with young figures, but old, wrinkled, yellow faces, fanned and blear-eyed with the smoke which they cannot spare from their scanty fires,—it being too precious for its warmth to be swallowed by the chimney. Some of them sit on the doorsteps, nursing their unwashed babies at bosoms which we will glance aside from, for ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... up and blinked at them. He shaded his eyes with one hand. The other he laid flat upon the papers before him. He was old, blear-eyed, unkempt. ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... replied Cynthia, choking; and Christopher, glancing round, saw several decrepit Negroes leaning against the wall—Uncle Boaz, Docia (pressing her weak heart), and blear-eyed Aunt Polly, already in ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... A blear-eyed ancient stood before him, balancing on a single crutch. His eyes were half-filmed over by a growth of morbid membrane, and what was not yet covered shone red and irritated. His hair was mangy, standing out in isolated ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... obscure ways, to which children dance? Not if you have only heard it ground to your ears' affliction beneath your windows in the square. To hear it aright you must stand in the darkness of such a by-street as this, and for the moment be at one with those who dwell around, in the blear-eyed houses, in the dim burrows of poverty, in the unmapped haunts of the semi-human. Then you will know the significance of that vulgar clanging of melody; a pathos of which you did not dream will touch you, and therein the secret of hidden London will be half revealed. The life of men who toil without ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... more show the mystic enchantment of genius. How else was a ragged sempstress in a squalid garret made immortal, nay, made universal, made to stand for an entire sisterhood of wretchedness? Here is the direst poverty, blear-eyed sorrow, dim and dismal suffering,—nothing of the romantic. A stern picture it is, which even the softer touches render sterner; still there is nought in it that revolts or shocks; it is deeply poetic, calls into passionate action the feelings of ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... contemplation of the mountain peaks which glowed rich orange in the last lingering sun-rays, but really watching which way the sheep on the moor were taking, stood the innkeeper, a brawny, sodden-visaged, blear-eyed six feet of brutishness, holding up his hose with one hand, for want of points, and clawing with the other his elf-locks, on which a fair sprinkling of feathers might denote: first, that he was just out of bed, having been out sheep-stealing all the night before; and secondly, that ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... out the link, boys; ho, boys! The blear-eyed morning's here; Let us wander through the streets, And kiss whoe'er one meets; St. Cecil is my dear! Ram out the link, ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... asked Mrs. Campbell's languid tones, curiously like her husband's, without his coarseness—for this heavy, beefy, blear-eyed man was undoubtedly the husband whom she had never cared to mention on shipboard.—"You know I am deathly afraid of them. I should ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... look towards the window in which shone the reflection of his candle, and vividly pictured to himself his grandfather, Konstantin Makarych, who was night-watchman at Messrs. Zhivarev. He was a small, lean, unusually lively and active old man of sixty-five, always smiling and blear-eyed. All day he slept in the servants' kitchen or trifled with the cooks. At night, enveloped in an ample sheep-skin coat, he strayed round the domain tapping with his cudgel. Behind him, each hanging its head, walked the old bitch Kashtanka, and the dog Viun, so named because of ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... covers the floor. Mr. Krone sits on an empty whiskey-barrel, his stunted features betraying the hardened avarice of his character. He smokes his black pipe, folds his arms deliberately, discoursing of the affairs of the nation to two stupefied negroes and one blear-eyed son of the Emerald Isle. Three uncouth females, with hair hanging matted over their faces, and their features hidden in distortion, stand cooling their bared limbs at a running faucet just inside the door, to the left. A group of half-naked ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... for her husband did not enjoy his newly acquired leisure; he had been so used to blowing a furnace and decocting medicines that he could not give up the occupation and consequently she could not roast so much as a pigeon without having his grim and blear-eyed visage peering ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... night I awoke; what woke me I suppose I shall never know. But when I awoke I sat up suddenly as if I had never been asleep. I was face to face with the worst-looking creature I had ever seen in my life, black and blear-eyed and ugly, on his hands and knees in the tunnel beyond the lantern drawing my gun toward him by the stock. Then Kaiser sprang up like any wild beast; but I held ...
— Track's End • Hayden Carruth
... comes when the Day Star rises in the heart."[63] We pass from "notions" and "words" to an inward power and a bubbling joy. He calls the period of law and letter a "baby-stage," "when we see truth as blear-eyed beholders." Legal religion compared with the religion of the Spirit is "like a spark struck from flint at midnight" compared with the sun; it is like "drawing the waters of Grace, a bucketful at a time," when ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... subject, and said to his master, "I marvel, senor, at the boldness of Altisidora, the duchess's handmaid; he whom they call Love must have cruelly pierced and wounded her; they say he is a little blind urchin who, though blear-eyed, or more properly speaking sightless, if he aims at a heart, be it ever so small, hits it and pierces it through and through with his arrows. I have heard it said too that the arrows of Love are blunted and robbed of their ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... and fro and in hot haste but nothing as to the whereabouts of the gentleman could be learned. The constable searched all night, and the fixer remained with him as long as he could keep pace with the officer. Weary, blear-eyed, unsteady on his limbs, he finally lay down on a bench in the hotel sitting room and was awakened ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... in Tom Braddock was astounding. David had always thought of him as the bullying, bloated giant, purple-faced and blear-eyed. His face was thin and gray—with the pallor of the prison still upon it; his cheeks were sunken, and the heavy stubble of beard that filled the hollows was a dirty white. One would have guessed this apparition of Tom Braddock to ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... writes of him, he saw more than all Greece besides. . . . AEsop was crooked, Socrates purblind, Democritus withered, Seneca lean and harsh, ugly to behold; yet show me so many flourishing wits, such divine spirits. Horace, a little, blear-eyed, contemptible fellow, yet who so sententious and wise? Marcilius Ficinus, Faber Stapulensis, a couple of dwarfs; Melanchthon, a short, hard-favored man, yet of incomparable parts of all three; Galba the emperor was crook-backed; Epictetus, ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth
... before dawn blear-eyed and hungry, to find to our disgust that there was no hurry after all. It seems an order had been received for the whole Battery to march away this morning, to join some column or other, so they sent ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... whom I adore still, is the wife of a fat Marquis—a lop-eared, blear-eyed, greasy Marquis. A man without soul. A man without sentiment, who cares naught for moonlight and music. A low, practical man, who pays his debts. ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 3 • Charles Farrar Browne
... wine upon the women, their jealousy lest either's husband should seem more liberal, their appraisal of each other's jewelry, Scintilla's remark anent the finesse of Habinnas' servant in the mere matter of pandering, the blear-eyed and black-toothed slave, teasing a little bitch disgustingly fat, offering her pieces of bread and when, from sheer inability, she refuses to eat, cramming it down her throat, the effect of the alcohol upon Trimalchio, the little old lady girded round ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... them emitting beseeching, doleful, disgusted moans and shrieks and howls from her air-whistle. But it was too rough for any little choo-choo boat to be battling around. It was 9.30 that night before they could safely be taken off. They were a moderately good-natured lot; but that was the blear-eyed trouble with making sub trial trips with bad weather coming on—a man never knew ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly
... he was, tooth-shaken, and blear-eyed, Went on three feet, and sometime crept on four, With old lame bones, that rattled by his side; His scalp all piled, and he with eld forelore, His wither'd fist still knocking at Deaths door; Fumbling and drivelling, as he draws his breath; ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... but promised the blear-eyed sentinels in the bows of the ship a lively five minutes when the watch was relieved. Slowly the Andromeda swung to the west. Even more slowly, or so it appeared to the anxious man on the bridge, a red eye peeped into being alongside ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... the city, where I had the opportunity of observing what may be called the charitable side of politics. For a whole month, or more, the burden of existence had been lifted from the shoulders of the homeless. No church or organization, looked out for these frowsy, blear-eyed and ragged wanderers who had failed to find a place in the scale of efficiency. For a whole month, I say, Mr. Judd Jason and his lieutenants made them their especial care; supported them in lodging-houses, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... flame of your soul play all about me, That into my limbs may come the keenness of fire, The life and joy of tongues of flame, And, going out from you, tightly strung and in tune, I may rouse the blear-eyed world, And pour into it the beauty which you ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... THE LORD.—A blear-eyed man, but he were all blind of wit, might see the solution of this reason; and though he were blind he might grope the solution, but if his feeling him failed. For if this reason were aught worth, by such manner arguing men might prove that the three score and ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... news and answering questions. "We are looked upon as beings who have come from another world. This afternoon I had a shave after soaking my face in a hot sponge, and then a bath. Lashly had already cut my hair. Bill looks very thin and we are all very blear-eyed from want of sleep. I have not much appetite, my mouth is very dry and throat sore with a troublesome hacking cough which I have had all the journey. My taste is gone. We are getting badly spoiled, but our beds are the height ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... personalities are sometimes gross: chatterbox Fabius, scattercash Nomentanus, blear-eyed Crispinus, Hermogenes the fop, Pantolabus the trencherman, Gorgonius the goat-scented, Rufillus the pastille-perfumed, were derisive sobriquets, which, while ministering to the censoriousness of readers by names genuine or well understood, must ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... and the two girls, without remark or discussion, turned homewards. They were overtaken by the elder Wilson, pale, grimy, and blear-eyed, but apparently, as strong and well as ever. He loitered a minute or two alongside of them giving an account of his detention in the mill; he then hastily wished good-night, saying he must go home and tell his missis he was all safe and well: but after he had ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... students are attended, wherever they go, by a companion who is apt to produce fear and dislike in those who are not accustomed to him. This is a small, blear-eyed, bullet-headed, bloodthirsty-looking bull-dog, with red eyes and snarling mouth. You see such dogs everywhere with the students, running close to their heels, and ready, at an instant's notice, to ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... from the Cowgate with a motley assortment of pallbearers. There was a good-tempered Irish laborer from a near-by brewery; a decayed gentleman, unsteady of gait and blear-eyed, in greasy frock-coat and broken hat; a flashily dressed bartender who found the task distasteful; a stout, bent-backed fagot-carrier; a drunken fisherman from New Haven, suddenly sobered by this uncanny duty, ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... and obey. Yes; she loves the luxury with which she will be surrounded, the glitter of diamonds, the equipages, the great house, all the paraphanalia of wealth, but she hates the trembling, tottering, blear-eyed ...
— Wise or Otherwise • Lydia Leavitt
... sound of uneven footsteps made the poor widow start to her feet, and Sally to cry out. The next moment the door was rudely shaken, and then Jim staggered into the room, haggard, blear-eyed, muttering to himself savagely. The sight of his mother and sister seemed partially to sober him, for the spirit within him bowed instinctively before the beauty of holiness, which neither poverty nor terror could obliterate from the face of those whom he used to love ...
— Nearly Lost but Dearly Won • Theodore P. Wilson
... wrong, Carlyle had gone wrong; but added that, although all the details were wrong, Carlyle's account is essentially accurate. No defense, I think, can be made of Carlyle's statement that Marat was a "blear-eyed dog leach," nor of those statements from which you get the distinct impression that the complexion of Robespierre was green; nevertheless, every one who studies the French Revolution reads Carlyle, ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... men are there upon their own account? No; peradventure in the behalf of one whom they never saw and who never concerns himself for their pains and danger, but lies wallowing the while in sloth and pleasure: this other slavering, blear-eyed, slovenly fellow, that thou seest come out of his study after midnight, dost thou think he has been tumbling over books to learn how to become a better man, wiser, and more content? No such matter; he will there end his days, but he will teach posterity the measure of Plautus' ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... Galen, these quack oculists were very numerous, and Galen inveighs against them. Martial satirized them: "Now you are a gladiator who once were an ophthalmist; you did as a doctor what you do as a gladiator." "The blear-eyed Hylas would have paid you sixpence, O Quintus; one eye is gone, he will still pay threepence; make haste and take it, brief is your chance; when he is blind, he will pay you nothing." The oculists of Alexandria ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... a princely settlement. John Eustace, who was somewhat nearly concerned in the matter, raised no objection to this proposal. There was ever something grand about these Eustaces. Sir Florian was a grand gentleman; but surely he must have been dull of intellect, slow of discernment, blear-eyed in his ways about the town, when he took Lizzie Greystock,—of all the women whom he could find in the world,—to be the purest, the truest, and the noblest. It has been said of Sir Florian that he did not believe ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... noble actions of their ancestors, you ought also to listen to the accusers, if they prove that the defendants have committed many crimes against you, and their ancestors did much harm. 25. For this man, when a youth, at the house of Archedemus the blear-eyed, who had stolen much of your money, while many eyes were upon him, drank, lying at full length under the same rug, and caroused at midday, having a mistress while a mere boy, imitating his ancestors, and ...
— The Orations of Lysias • Lysias
... were drinking shops, with such shocking odors issuing from doors and windows; and red-faced, blear-eyed men, half drunk, leaning against the barrels, and sitting on the side-walks; and decayed fruit, in windows so thick with dirt that one could scarcely see through them; and second-hand, faded dresses and bonnets for sale, swinging ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... converse that steals the wits even of the wise"; in Ares he embodied the lust of war; in Athene, wisdom; in Apollo, music and the arts. The pangs of guilt took shape in the conception of avenging Furies; and the very prayers of the worshipper sped from him in human form, wrinkled and blear-eyed, with halting pace, in the rear of punishment. Thus the very self of man he set outside himself; the powers, so intimate, and yet so strange, that swayed him from within he made familiar by making them distinct; ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... day at length arrived; but the destinies, who had hitherto spun the thread of the two lovers' fate as smooth and even as a whale-line yarn, now began to fill it full of kinks. Well did the ancients represent them as three haggard, blear-eyed, wrinkled, spiteful, old maids, who would not allow any poor mortal to live or die comfortably, and who took a malicious pleasure in disturbing "the course of true love." The inexorable Atropos brandished her scissors, and at one snip severed the ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... scrapping with third- and fourth-rate heavies, and sparring with real, live ones for nothing. The mate's fist whistled through empty air; the blear-eyed hunk of clay that had seemed such easy prey to him was metamorphosed on the instant into an alert, catlike bundle of steel sinews, and Billy Byrne swung that awful right with the pile-driver weight, that even The Big Smoke himself had ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... thought he was a very decent chap, though rather low-spirited. Hugh thought that if Mr. George Loftus had been alive he might have consulted him. In an amicable silence, broken occasionally by whistling for Crack, who hurried blear-eyed and asthmatic out of rabbit-holes, the pair reached Beaumere; and, after following the path through the wood, came suddenly upon the little lake locked in the heart ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... masters, is no blear-eyed spinster mooning over the trumpery of a heyday that is gone, but a Miss Mischief offering her dainty fingers to you before the kiss of your grandfather's lips is yet dry on them. The damask petticoat, the powdered wig, ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... calibre which warrants Yorkshire peasants in describing a man as 'half-rocked,' or 'not plumb.' His wife, on the other hand, was one of those neat, gentle, sensible women, of whom one wonders how they ever came to marry such thick-lipped and blear-eyed men. Between them they informed me that if I did not object to share a room, I could be taken in; otherwise—maire or no maire—not. I asked whether they meant half a bed; but they said no, that would not be necessary at present; and I ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... frantic endeavors to dig them out, permitted squirrels to flash their tails at him a hundred yards away, forgot his usual caches, and left his favorite bones unburied and bleaching in the sun. His eyes grew dull, his coat lusterless, in proportion as his companion became blear-eyed and ragged; in running, his usual arrowlike directness began to deviate, and it was not unusual to meet the pair together, zigzagging up the hill. Indeed, Uncle Billy's condition could be predetermined by ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... gone Charterson said, she doesn't know, she can't know what she's talking about! A decent woman! a lady! talking of driving girls on the street. You ought to be ashamed of yourself! You aren't fit to show your face.... It's these damned papers and pamphlets, all this blear-eyed stuff, these decadent novels and things putting narsty thoughts, narsty dirty thoughts into decent women's heads. It ought to be rammed back down their throats, it ought to ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... turn-out, male and female, of a German free-town, in the shape of scenes from the lives of the Virgin and saints; here are short fat burghers, with enormous blotchy, bloated faces and little eyes set in fat, their huge stomachs protruding from under their jackets; here are blear-eyed ladies, tall, thin, wrinkled though not old, with figures like hungry harpies, stalking about in high headgears and stiff gowns, or sitting by the side of lean and stunted pages, singing (with dolorous voice) to lutes; or promenading ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... did Roger address himself—unnecessarily, mark you—for the third time. Why did he? He had his chance; two chances in fact. But this is folly, for of course he had no chance at all. Fate stood by that news-stall, with the blear-eyed, frousy woman that tended it looking vacantly on; Fate, veiled, too, and not even monosyllabic in his behalf. I should have known this, I think, even if I had not lived those curious, long eight months in Algeria and slept those dreamless nights under the Algerian stars that got ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... escapes the blight. Timoleus, the gay satirist of the first two acts, who scoffed at the pious hypocrisies and money-grubbing ways of the great Roman lords, is grown old and fat and blear-eyed and racked with disease in the third, has lost his stately purities, and watered the acid of his wit. His life has suffered defeat. Unthinkingly he swears by Zeus—from ancient habit—and then quakes with fright; for a fellow-communicant ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... this Akulina more than once. Covered with rags, fearfully thin, with face as black as a coal, blear-eyed and for ever grinning, she would stay whole hours in one place in the road, stamping with her feet, pressing her fleshless hands to her breast, and slowly shifting from one leg to the other, like a wild beast in a cage. ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... doing the devil's will may be discovered in their peculiar characteristics. The repulsive features, moroseness, avarice, malice, garrulity of his hags are said to be appropriate instruments. Scot informs us, 'One sort of such as are said to be witches are women which be commonly old, lame, blear-eyed, pale, foul, and full of wrinkles, poor, sullen, superstitious, and papists, or such as know no religion, in whose drowsy minds the devil hath got a fine seat. They are lean and deformed, showing ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... is Neepoosa," the old woman replied, drawing her inside the tent, and despatching a boy, hot-footed, on some errand. They sat down together on the floor, and she patted Frona's hand lovingly, peering, meanwhile, blear-eyed and misty, into her face. "Ay, it is Neepoosa, grown old quickly after the manner of our women. Neepoosa, who dandled thee in her arms when thou wast a child. Neepoosa, who gave thee thy name, Tenas Hee-Hee. Who fought ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... and sharp-nosed, and without your refined expression of keenness without cunning. And after these canine noblemen of the old regime, whither has vanished the countless rabble of mongrels, curs, and pariah dogs; and last of all—being more degenerate—the corpulent, blear-eyed, wheezy pet dogs of a hundred breeds? They are all dead, no doubt: they have been dead so long that I daresay nature extracted all the valuable salts that were contained in their flesh and bones thousands of years ago, and used it for ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... the commissary's way. So he began to question abruptly, in very bad Portuguese, as to the state of her larder, the elder woman, who, ugly and blear-eyed, with ragged, scanty dress, and bare feet, yet wore a necklace of beads and earrings of gold. She answered tartly, that it being a fast-day, there was no flesh in the house. They had bacalhao and ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... there the space of a month, he demanded Jacob if he would gladly serve him because he was his cousin, and what hire and reward he would have. He had two daughters, the more was named Leah, and the less was called Rachel, but Leah was blear-eyed, and Rachel was fair of visage and well-favored, whom Jacob loved, and said: I shall serve thee for Rachel thy younger daughter seven years. Laban answered: It is better that I give her to thee than ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... place to which she hurried, there were flaming lights, the laughter of men and flaunting women, the crash and rumble and clang of night-traffic, the blatant clamour of the pleasures of night; shuffling, blear-eyed derelicts of passion, creeping beldames, peevish children, youth consuming itself; rags and garish jewels, hunger, greasy content—a confusion of wretchedness, of greed and grim want, of delirious gaiety, of the sins that stalk ...
— The Mother • Norman Duncan
... themselves cultivate the taste and the sentiments, let him look into Salmasius's Responsio. There he will see the first scholar of his age not thinking it unbecoming to taunt Milton with his blindness, in such language as this: "a puppy, once my pretty little man, now blear-eyed, or rather a blindling; having never had any mental vision, he has now lost his bodily sight; a silly coxcomb, fancying himself a beauty; an unclean beast, with nothing more human about him than his guttering eyelids; the fittest doom for him ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... moment forward to the present, no mask has hid from the scorn of the Christian world treason's hideous visage, but that blear-eyed monster, armed with every weapon of iniquity which devilish invention could devise, has alternately, with rage and despair, rushed to and fro across the continent, ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... type sing-song, riff-raff, wishy-washy, harum-skarum, roly-poly. Words of this type are all but universal. Such examples as the Russian Chudo-Yudo (a dragon), the Chinese ping-pang "rattling of rain on the roof,"[46] the Tibetan kyang-kyong "lazy," and the Manchu porpon parpan "blear-eyed" are curiously reminiscent, both in form and in psychology, of words nearer home. But it can hardly be said that the duplicative process is of a distinctively grammatical significance in English. We must turn to other languages for illustration. Such cases as ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... wildly.—A moment more, and he would have leapt into the stream. The sight recalled me to my senses—say, rather, it reawoke in me the spirit of manhood. I seized him by the arm, tore him down upon the pavement, and held him, in spite of his frantic struggles. It was Jemmy Downes! Gaunt, ragged, sodden, blear-eyed, drivelling, the worn-out gin-drinker stood, his momentary paroxysm of strength gone, trembling ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... alone with his blear-eyed wife, but a glance sufficed to tell Mackenzie that the news was already told. So he plunged at once into the business, shifting the beaded sheath prominently to the fore as ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London |
