"Decay" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... This tightening in the vital organs so, Prevents the circulation's healthy flow, And thus the lungs and pliant ribs and heart, Incapable of acting out the part Assigned to them by nature, prove a prey To premature diseases and decay. We talk with pious horror and regret, Of the unwise Chinese, who will not let The feet of their poor female children grow, Entailing thus unutterable woe; But when unprejudiced the reason acts, And we together scan th' appalling facts, Resulting from tight ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... went off into a long, eloquent, and really interesting discourse on the true, sole, and original Christian Church. She admitted, however, that during the sixteenth century the Christian faith had much fallen into decay, and that Martin Luther was not to be blamed for his exhortations against the evil practices of popes and cardinals. Now that the Church had been reformed it was altogether different. She told us how she became converted. It came to her like a vision on a gloomy ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... paramount power of the Christian religion; that what God has once pronounced true can never become a lie; that what was once really alive may change, but can never die; that Christianity is a fact, great, real, and permanent, as birth or death; and that its seeming decay is only the symptom that it is putting off the old skin, and about ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... but one complaint, my dear sir, which all the remedies in the world are not very likely to remove: it is the natural decay of nature, arising from old age. I do not consider that he is in any immediate danger of dissolution. I think it very likely that he may never rise from his bed again; but, at the same time, he may remain bed-ridden for months. He sinks very gradually, ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Yehoshua, says, "Since the destruction of the Temple a day has not passed without a curse; the dew does not come down with a blessing, and the fruits have lost their proper taste." Rabbi Yossi adds, "Also the lusciousness of the fruit is gone." Rabbi Shimon ben Elazar says, "With the decay of purity the taste and aroma (of the fruit) has disappeared, and with the tithes and richness of the corn." The sages say, "Lewdness and ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... concern in his voice, "how unfortunate must be the position of a person involved in a robe that has been embroidered by one who, instead of a long life, has been marked out by the Destinies for premature decay and an untimely death! For ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... after death. It did not much affect the writing of 'Agnes Grey,' which was completed in 1846, and reflected the minor pains and discomforts of her teaching experience, but it combined with the spectacle of Branwell's increasing moral and physical decay to produce that bitter mandate of conscience under which she wrote 'The ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... although he had, from his earliest days, been inured to almost constant fatigue, and exposure to every inclemency of the weather, in the open air he seemed to lose the vigor of the prime of life only by the natural decay occasioned by old age. ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver
... business, you would be the most likely not to dismiss the matter as mere nonsense. What I am glad of myself, and what I wish you to remember, is that I am dying with all my faculties about me. The one thing I have always feared through life was old age, with its gradual mental decay. It has always seemed to me that I have died more or less suddenly while still in possession of my will. I have ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... bustling with life and enterprise. There was a wharf behind, opening on the Thames. An empty dog-kennel, some bones of animals, fragments of iron hoops, and staves of old casks, lay strewn about, but no life was stirring there. It was a picture of cold, silent decay. ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... and now, with that power withdrawn—the man, whether father, brother, lover or husband, gone—derelict as a ship, abandoned of crew, rudderless and dismasted, is derelict; as an obscure habitation, cold of hearth, crazy of walls, abandoned to decay, is derelict. She summed them all up as having arrived at what they were precisely because in their earlier years they had been what in her childhood she had supposed women to be: inferior creatures at the disposal and for the benefit and service of men. ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... the peaceful days passed on into weeks, and months, and years, and Ruth and Leonard grew and strengthened into the riper beauty of their respective ages; while as yet no touch of decay had come on the quaint, ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... inhabitants to the spot, offered an asylum to swindlers, thieves, and murderers, and promised to levy no taxes on the import or export of goods. The attack of Ismail Ben Ferez, in 1315 (second siege), was frustrated; but in 1333 Vasco Paez de Meira, having allowed the fortifications and garrison to decay, was obliged to capitulate to Mahomet IV. (third siege). Alphonso's attempts to recover possession (fourth siege) were futile, though pertinacious and heroic, and he was obliged to content himself with a tribute for the rock from Abdul ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 711, August 17, 1889 • Various
... dark-red, scarlet, and yellow; the reddening shrubs and plantations; a few flowers still lingering behind, roses, nasturtiums, dahlias, shedding their petals round them; the bare fields, the thinned hedges; and the fir, the only green thing left, vigorous and stoical, like eternal youth braving decay; all these innumerable and marvelous symbols which forms colors, plants, and living beings, the earth and the sky, yield at all times to the eye which has learned to look for them, charmed and enthralled me. I wielded a poetic wand, and had but to touch a phenomenon ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... yours," said his friend, glancing at him. "If he had been a countryman of mine there would have been less marvel. But here is none of the sadness of decay none of the withering if the tokens of old age are seen at all it is in the majestic honours that crown a glorious life the graces of a matured and ripened character. This has nothing in common, ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... and a spiteful one, I would not eat them. Instead, I should have the same cluster served me every morning that I might say to mine enemies, with truth, that I have Cretan grapes for breakfast daily. They will keep," he added presently, "for it is tradition that stores laid up for siege never decay." ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... weakening the position of the Franks in northern Syria; and from the beginning of his reign the power of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem may be said to be slowly declining, though as yet there is little outward trace of its decay to be seen. Edessa was lost, however, in the year after Baldwin's accession, and the conquest by Zengi of this farthest and most important outpost in northern Syria was already a serious blow to the kingdom. Upon it in 1147 there followed the second crusade; and in that crusade Baldwin III., ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... both held the gorgeous East in fee; and both fell lamentably from their high estate. The chief point of difference in this comparison of their careers is obvious; Amalfi collapsed suddenly and utterly, whilst the Queen of the Adriatic has sunk gradually to decay until she has become the interesting monument of a vanished ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... then," asked the stranger, "that stones grow and decay, that metals shoot up and propagate their species? Do you fancy that the beds under the earth sprout up just ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... the complete spell thus cast over thought both in Islam and Christendom, we may look at the words of European scholars of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, living far from Islam, long after its intellectual glory had begun to decay, and at a time when Christian scholastic philosophy had reached an independent position. Gerard of Cremona and Adelard of Bath (the translator of the great Arabic geographer, Mohammed Al-Kharizmy) in ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... usual. Better see my nerve doctor, and then come with me to the south of France." For this fellow, who knows nothing of disordered liver or high-strung nerves, goes regularly to a great nerve specialist with the periodical belief that his nervous system is beginning to decay. ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... upon a shrinking prey the rush of kindling breaths; They tap and sap the threatened walls, and bear uncounted deaths; And 'neath caresses scorching hot the palaces decay— Oh, that I, too, could thus caress, and burn, and blight, ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... for the future. She knew that her son was likely to be ruled by the woman at his side, and she hoped nothing from Marion Glamis. The big Edinburgh house with its heavy dark furniture, its shadowy draperies, and its stately gloom, became a kind of death chamber in which she slowly went to decay, body ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... "Floating Island" appears at intervals on the upper portion of the lake near the mouth of the beck. This singular phenomenon is supposed to owe its appearance to an accumulation of gas, formed by the decay of vegetable matter, detaching and raising to the surface the matted weeds which cover the floor of the lake at this point. The river Derwent (q.v.) enters the lake from the south and leaves it on the north, draining it through Bassenthwaite lake, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... the seventeenth century St. Alban's, being in a state of great decay, was surveyed by Sir Henry Spiller and Inigo Jones, and in accordance with their advice, apparently, in 1632 it was pulled down, and rebuilt anno 1634; but, perishing in the flames of 1666, it was re-erected as it now appears, and finished in the ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... until another year had done its work of resurrection and decay, the lovely Indian Summer slumbered under her mound of withered flowers and heaps of gorgeous leaves, unheeding all, or unconscious of the ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... greatest part of Britaine in K. Edwards dominion, he is a great builder and reparer of townes, his death, the dreame of his wife Egina, and the issue of the same, what children king Edward had by his wiues, and how they were emploied, the decay of the church by the meanes of troubles procured by the Danes, England first curssed and why; a prouinciall councell summoned for the reliefe of the churches ruine, Pleimond archbishop of Canturburie sent to Rome, bishops ordeined ...
— Chronicles (1 of 6): The Historie of England (6 of 8) - The Sixt Booke of the Historie of England • Raphael Holinshed
... sense of unbearable loneliness, conceive the feelings of a Russian exile upon first beholding the squalid Arctic home and repulsive natives amongst whom he is destined, perhaps, to end his days. Forty or fifty mud-plastered log huts in various stages of decay and half buried in snow-drifts over which ice windows peer mournfully, a wooden church pushed by time and climate out of the perpendicular, with broken spire and golden crosses mouldering with rust—on the one hand, a dismal plain of snow fringed ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... was never seen until the fall of 1841. Ages have doubtless rolled by since this was placed here, and yet it is perfectly sound; even the bark which confines the transverse pieces shows no marks of decay. ...
— Rambles in the Mammoth Cave, during the Year 1844 - By a Visiter • Alexander Clark Bullitt
... winter night in trying to coax her dear little ruffian out of the centre of the bed. One day the cook asked what she would have for dinner: "I would like a mutton chop, but then, you know, Duchie likes minced veal better!" The faithful and happy little creature died at a great age, of natural decay. ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... unchangeable and true, Of all the light and power, Dispensing light in silence through Each successive hour; Lord, brighten our declining day, That it may never wane Till death, when all things round decay, Brings back the morn again. This grace on Thy redeemed confer, Father, Co-equal Son, And Holy Ghost, the Comforter, Eternal Three in One—Amen." (St. Ambrose's ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... had any good reason for becoming a town, seems already at that time to have entered on the road to rapid decay. Offutt's speculations had failed, and he had disappeared. The brothers Herndon, who had opened a new store, found business dull and unpromising. Becoming tired of their undertaking, they offered to sell out to ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... the foot of the nearest tower a human skull peered whitely. That is rather unusual. Years later now you still see more dead bodies with the meat on them than skeletons. Intense radiation has killed their bacteria and preserved them indefinitely from decay, just like the packaged meat in the last advertisements. In fact such bodies are one of the signs of a really hot drift—you avoid them. The vultures pass up such poisonously hot carrion ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... of this most fragrant ambergris should be found in the heart of such decay; is this nothing? Bethink thee of that saying of St. Paul in Corinthians, about corruption and incorruption; how that we are sown in dishonour, but raised in glory. And likewise call to mind that saying of Paracelsus about what it is that maketh the best musk. Also forget not the strange fact ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... the wall built strong enough, and is not the tower sufficiently strong and high? There was no hole or crevice in it, through which he could pass, unless he was aided from outside. I am sure his hiding-place was revealed. If the wall were worn away and had fallen into decay, would he not have been caught and injured or killed at the same time? Yes, so help me God, if it had fallen down, he would certainly have been killed. But I guess, before that wall gives away without ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... architectural art it surpassed all the genius of this our time as the sun surpasses a star. While we know that man has advanced, it still remains true that the history of architecture alone for the past thousand years indicates a steady retrogression and decay in art, and this constitutes the stupendous paradox to which I have alluded. But Milton has fully explained to us that when the devils in hell built the first great temple or palace—Pandemonium—they achieved the greatest ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... zeal in the public service, and exhorted them to a discharge of their duties in their several counties. He was, no doubt, extremely pleased with such an issue of a session that had began with a very inauspicious aspect. His health daily declined; but he concealed the decay of his constitution, that his allies might not be discouraged from engaging in a confederacy of which he was deemed the head and chief support. He conferred the command of the ten thousand troops destined for ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... this ended a hymn was sung, and then another priest took the centre place and preached. The sermon had considerable eloquence, but of a frightful kind. The preacher described, with ghastly minuteness, the last feeble fainting moments of human life, and then the gradual progress of decay after death, which he followed through every process up to the loathsome stage of decomposition. Suddenly changing his tone, which had been that of sober, accurate description, into the shrill voice of horror, he bent forward his head, as if to gaze on ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 540, Saturday, March 31, 1832 • Various
... them above water; where the above things continue to be accumulated by the sea, till by a bird, or by the sea, a few seeds of plants, that commonly grow on the sea-shore, are thrown up, and begin to vegetate; and by their annual decay and reproduction from seeds, create a little mould, yearly accumulated by the mixture from sand, increasing the dry spot on every side; till another sea happens to carry a cocoa-nut hither, which preserves its vegetative power a long time in ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... seat within the shadow of the curtains; but Jocelyn saw quite suddenly that he was an older man than she had taken him to be the evening before. She saw through the deception of the piteous wig—the whole art that strove to conceal the sure decay of the body, despite the desperate effort of a mind ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... his fort. All of them struck for higher wages, to which Sutter yielded, until they asked ten dollars a day, which he refused, and the two mills on which he had spent so much money were never built, and fell into decay. ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... about the real condition of the Ottoman Empire, and thought that with ten years of peace it might again become a respectable Power. "All that we hear about the decay of the Turkish Empire and its being a dead body or a sapless trunk, and so forth, is pure and unadulterated nonsense." Bulwer's Palmerston, ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... the fact, could be seen set in the building. Bishop Meade, in his history of the Episcopal Churches in Virginia, mentions Benn's Church as being one of, if not the oldest, church in the State. It has been snatched from further decay by some benevolent ladies and will soon again become a place of worship. Let the names of these ladies form the future history of that sacred old church, and let future generations know that it was at one time from decay reduced to bare walls, and that by the humane ...
— The Dismal Swamp and Lake Drummond, Early recollections - Vivid portrayal of Amusing Scenes • Robert Arnold
... and with judgment. I had been reading of the rise and fall of nations, and occasionally I had met a gloomy philosopher who preached the doctrine that nations, like individuals, must of necessity have their birth, their infancy, their maturity and finally their decay and death. But here I read of a government that is to be perpetual—a government of increasing peace and blessedness—the government of the Prince of Peace—and it is to rest on justice. I have thought of this prophecy many times during the last few years, and I have selected ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... washed in salt and water, and wiped with a dry, coarse towel. They have a strong tendency to turn yellow; and the salt prevents it. Moisture makes them decay soon; therefore they should be kept ...
— The American Frugal Housewife • Lydia M. Child
... destroy the relation between them. But as he grew up, the boy had undermined and weakened her affection, though hardly her devotion; and now the youth had given it a rude shock. So far was she, however, from yielding to this decay of feeling that it did not merely cause her much pain but gave rise in her to much useless endeavor; while every day she grew more anxious and careful to carry herself toward him as ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... Japanese chestnuts would be free from that pest. Where it came from I do not know, unless it came from the chinkapin. West Virginia has chinkapins and these, being blight resistant, apparently have kept up the supply of weevils. Occasionally, shortly before the chestnuts begin to ripen, a few decay from ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... hovered a shadow that was neither hood of dust nor hue of gold. It was not physical, but lonely, waiting, prophetic, and weird. No wild desert of wastelands, once the home of other races of man, and now gone to decay and death, could have shown so barren an acreage. Half of this wandering patchwork of squares was earth, brown and gray, curried and disked, and rolled and combed and harrowed, with not a tiny leaf of green in all the miles. The other half had only a faint golden promise of mellow harvest; ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... the drainage contractors. They seemed to delight in turning up the fetid soil, cutting deep trenches through various strata of filth, and piling up for days or weeks matter that reeked with vegetable and animal decay. One needs not affirm that Rosemary Street was not so called from its fragrance. If the Ginxes and their neighbors preserved any semblance of health in this place, the most popular guardian on the board must own ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... occupied by the caretaker, nothing had been disturbed since the family, seeking new fortunes in the city, had left the old homestead to decay among the desolate fields that yielded now a meagre living for Mrs. Brand and her ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... prefer to say simply how things are, without occupying ourselves with the thousand aspects in which the ignorant see them! To explain the laws under which societies prosper or decay, is virtually to destroy all sophistry at once. When La Place had described all that can, as yet, be known of the movements of the heavenly bodies, he had dispersed, without even naming them, all the astrological dreams of the Egyptians, Greeks, and Hindoos, much more surely than he ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... of the causes of present-day corruption, see an article by Professor Edward A. Ross in The Independent, July 19, 1906, on "Political Decay: ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... Chambly; and, when the regiment was disbanded, he followed his natural bent, and betook himself to the Acadian woods. At this time there was a square bastioned fort at Pentegoet, mounted with twelve small cannon; but after the Dutch attack it fell into decay. [Footnote: On its condition in 1670, Estat du Fort et Place de Pentegoet fait en l'annee 1670, lorsque les Anglois l'ont rendu. In 1671, fourteen soldiers and eight laborers were settled near the fort. Talon au Ministre, 2 Nov., 1671. In the ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... black top and along the swelling branches decorously clothed in decay: a salted ebon moss when seen closely; the small grey particles giving a sick shimmer to the darkness of the mass. It was very witch-like, of a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... as ground he tills— Decay and death lie 'neath his sills. The storm that beats, And solar heats, Have helped to form ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... occupied for less laudable objects than the mere protection of commerce. Whatever might have been the original intention of its erection and its subsequent use, the massive towers and turreted walls had long since been disused, and had fallen into the decay of years, unheeded and unknown, except by a few families of fishermen who had from generation to generation followed the same occupation. I call them fishermen, because such was the designation they would have given themselves, ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... of biological, sociological, and historical knowledge, we should recognize that the individual self is subject to death and decay, but the sum total of individual achievement, for better or for worse, lives on in the immortality of the Larger Self; that to live for the sake of the species and posterity is religion of the highest kind; and that those religions which seek a future life ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... of the sun in summer, and a stronghold against the piercing winds of winter. No man could remember when it had been young. Little children played under its branches, grew to be strong men and women, lived to be old and weary and feeble, and died; and yet the ash-tree gave no signs of decay. Forever preserving its freshness and beauty, it was to live as long as there were men to look upon it, animals to feed under it, birds to flutter ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... to life, Here, have I thought, 'twere sweet to dwell And rear again the chaplain's cell, Like that same peaceful hermitage Where Milton longed to spend his age. 'Twere sweet to mark the setting day On Bourhope's lonely top decay; And, as it faint and feeble died On the broad lake and mountain's side, To say, "Thus pleasures fade away; Youth, talents, beauty, thus decay, And leave us dark, forlorn, and grey;" Then gaze on Dryhope's ruined tower, And think ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... the city a statue of Columbus, which was placed inside the inclosure of Louisburg Square, at the Pinckney Street end of the square. The statue, which is of inferior merit, bears no inscription, and is at the present date forgotten, dilapidated, and fast falling into decay. ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... truth. Then constantly, for the world's sake (all living things), destroying the impediments of ignorance and darkness, he shall give to all enduring light, the brightness of the sun of perfect wisdom. All flesh submerged in the sea of sorrow; all diseases collected as the bubbling froth; decay and age like the wild billows; death like the engulfing ocean; embarking lightly in the boat of wisdom he will save the world from all these perils, by wisdom stemming back the flood. His pure teaching like to the neighboring shore, the power of meditation, ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... shall experience after the close of the war the darkest and most difficult days of our existence. The crisis through which we are passing is the gravest we have yet encountered. Let us make it a crisis of growth, not a symptom of irreparable senile decay. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... unto decay, Fall, and die, and pass away. Sinketh tower and droppeth wall, Cloth shall fray and horse shall fall, Flesh shall die and iron rust, Pass and perish all things must. Well I understand and say, All shall die, both priest ...
— Our Little Lady - Six Hundred Years Ago • Emily Sarah Holt
... was no apparent decay in the old man's intellect. He had never been much given to literary pursuits, but that which he had always done he did still. A daily copy of whatever might be the most thoroughly Conservative paper of the day he always read carefully from the beginning to the end; and a weekly copy ...
— Cousin Henry • Anthony Trollope
... home, he emphatically declares his innocence, and against it directs the last and most powerful of the six Inaugural Odes; for this touched the family, and, through the family, the State. This, with neglect of religion, he classes together as the two great causes of national decay. ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... To her, by testamentary injunction from Raphael, an inscription was afterward set up in the Pantheon, where Raphael himself was buried. In 1833 Raphael's tomb was opened, the skeleton being found with the skull showing scarcely any decay ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... children he was par excellence the one man to consult. The house adjoining, at the corner of Sudder Street, has always had the reputation of being haunted, and no one would go near the place for years, and it was gradually falling into decay, when one day to the surprise of everybody some natives appeared on the scene and occupied it, and later on Parrott & Co. leased the premises for their whisky agency. Let us hope that the material spirit has had the effect of exorciting the ...
— Recollections of Calcutta for over Half a Century • Montague Massey
... Magnetism, Decay of. The gradual loss of magnetism by permanent magnets, due to accidental shocks, changes of temperature, slow spontaneous annealing of the iron and other ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... printing, as soon as a given work had been adequately and handsomely printed in a standard edition, all but the finest manuscripts of that book would naturally be looked upon as of little value, and would be subject to loss and decay if not to deliberate destruction. Owing to these and perhaps other causes it is almost entirely the religious manuscripts that have survived, except those preserved in royal libraries and museums from the finer ...
— Printing and the Renaissance - A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York • John Rothwell Slater
... instead of 'going in.' And that regret is perfectly natural and all right. It is part of the condition on which we receive our happiness. The mistake lies in wishing to escape from it by a petrification of our joys. The stone forest in Arizona will never decay, but it is no place for a man to set up his ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... yesterday to act as a corporal to-day, if his services can be useful to his country; holding that to be false pride, which postpones the public good to any private or personal considerations. But I am past service. The hand of age is upon me. The decay of bodily faculties apprizes me that those of the mind cannot be unimpaired, had I not still better proofs. Every year counts by increased debility, and departing faculties keep the score. The last year it was the sight, this it is the hearing, the next ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... extravagance,—a waste that his experienced eye could tell was also sapping the vitality of those outwardly robust shafts that rose around him. He knew, without testing them, that half of these fair-seeming columns were hollow and rotten at the core; he could detect the chill odor of decay through the hot balsamic spices stirred by the wind that streamed through their long aisles,—like incense mingling with the exhalations of a crypt. He stopped now and then to part the heavy fronds down ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... initiated thee in temporal life, and the knowledge of the present. By the pistol-shot, which disclosed to him the invisible world, and removed him from our earthly eyes, has he to thee, his most faithful and believing disciple, given the great doctrine of the decay of all things earthly, and prepared thee for the doctrine of the imperishableness of the celestial. The original of humanity sends me, to make known to thee this holy doctrine. When I met thee in Dresden, at the side of the Countess Dorothea ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... away, but the sea remains the same; and all our empires and literatures, arts and towns, crumble and decay, and are proved toys. Our consolation lies in our unconquerable souls, our glorious after-life beyond this world. But the sea has an immortality in the here and now. I shall never ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... immature confession. Heavens! to come to confession with a string of oaths and to accuse others more than himself! To Don Rocco the heart of the Moro appeared under an image which pleased him, it seemed so new and clear. A healthy fruit with a first spot of decay; only in his case the image ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Italian • Various
... of the year, long before you were born, this heap of decay," stabbing with her crutched stick at the pile of cobwebs on the table, but not touching it, "was brought here. It and I have worn away together. The mice have gnawed at it, and sharper teeth than teeth of mice ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... abiding-place. Accordingly, driven forth into the world again, they embarked in the snow[1] "Good Companion," of Bristol, for the Province of Pennsylvania, and were afterwards heard of no more in those parts. Their vacated houses crumbled away into ruins, and their church tottered to decay. ...
— Stolen Treasure • Howard Pyle
... married; he had not seen her since she was a gentle little thing in pinafores, with a great family of wax dolls. He did not know that she was dead. Aunt Janet made no explanations; his small black eyes took in all the decay and famine of the place; his neat black Sabbatical coat looked queerly out of place in the book-room with its scarred oak refectory table, its hard oak chairs and its dusty banner hung from the ceiling ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... back." The man who thus counseled petulant youth with the experienced calmness of age was thirty-nine years old. A state of society where one could at that age call himself or be called by others an old man, is proved by that fact alone to be one of wearing hardships and early decay of the vital powers. The survivors of the pioneers stoutly insist upon the contrary view. "It was a glorious life," says one old patriarch; "men would fight for the love of it, and then shake hands and be ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... soil was springy with the mould of numberless autumns. The axe had never hurried slow old servant decay. Once in a while we came across a prostrate trunk lying in the trough of destruction its fall had occasioned. But the rest of the time we trod a carpet to the making of which centuries of dead forest warriors had wrapped themselves in mould and soft moss and gentle dissolution. Sometimes ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... may be elected to Parliament—who knows? It is something of a risk, perhaps, to leave all this pretty coin here, but then it's a greater risk to carry it in the schooner"—he argued both ways—"and then, again, damp does not decay pure metal. But," thought Captain Brand, "suppose somebody should discover this little casket in the rock. Ah! that's not probable, for no soul besides myself knows of it, and even the very man who made the door did ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... decay" was his admonition. Reluctantly the great mass of English people saw him leave their shores last summer. Already the demand for his recall as unofficial Speeder-up of ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... But I was discontented with such a view of things as it afforded; man is a being of high aspirations, 'looking both before and after,' whose 'thoughts wander through eternity,' disclaiming alliance with transience and decay; incapable of imagining to himself annihilation; existing but in the future and the past; being, not what he is, but what he has been and shall be. Whatever may be his true and final destination, ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... have come to the white house by the bridge. This house, small and low-storied, with a bushy little garden in front, had been standing empty for several months. Usually when a house was left tenantless in Dulham it remained so and fell into decay, and, after some years, the cinnamon rose bushes straggled into the cellar, and the dutiful grass grew over the mound that covered the chimney bricks. Dulham was a quiet place, where the population dwindled steadily, though such citizens as remained had reason to ...
— The Life of Nancy • Sarah Orne Jewett
... showed no particular signs of decay until he had married a second time, and had considerably increased his number of children. It then became evident that his older children were not educated for active business, and were only destined ...
— The Fugitive Blacksmith - or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington • James W. C. Pennington
... back to a dead epoch, and, lest there be any mistake possible on this head, the old dates turn up again; the old calendars; the old names; the old edicts, which long since had sunk to the level of the antiquarian's learning; even the old bailiffs, who had long seemed mouldering with decay. The nation takes on the appearance of that crazy Englishman in Bedlam, who imagines he is living in the days of the Pharaohs, and daily laments the hard work that he must do in the Ethiopian mines as ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... specimens collected on some one spot. Only a small portion of the surface of the earth has been geologically explored, and no part with sufficient care, as the important discoveries made every year in Europe prove. No organism wholly soft can be preserved. Shells and bones decay and disappear when left on the bottom of the sea, where sediment is not accumulating. We probably take a quite erroneous view, when we assume that sediment is being deposited over nearly the whole bed of the sea, at a rate sufficiently quick to embed and preserve fossil remains. ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... isn't the word for it! It seems almost too good to be true. I sha'n't feel half so badly now that I know this dear spot will never be desecrated by a vandal tribe, or left to tumble down in decay. Why, it's ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... The feeling of hopeless imprisonment that the miles and miles of streets had terrified him with gave place to one of freedom and exaltation. Above him he heard the rasping of pine boughs; his feet trod on a rebounding mat of decay; the sky was as coldly blue as the bosom of Huron. He walked as if on ether, singing a senseless jargon the woodmen had ...
— A Michigan Man - 1891 • Elia W. Peattie
... fountains roll through flow'ry meads, Here woods, Lycoris, lift their verdant heads; Here could I wear my careless life away, And in thy arms insensibly decay. Instead of that, me frantick love detains, 'Mid foes, and dreadful darts, and bloody plains: While you—and can my soul the tale believe, Far from your country, lonely wand'ring leave Me, me your lover, barbarous fugitive! Seek the rough Alps where snows ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... misgivings and haunted by forebodings. He felt that the State had reached its zenith both in material prosperity and intellectual achievement, and that all the future held in reserve was decline and decay. This thought was ever present with him; in the vast extension of empire he foresaw the inevitable disintegration, and he wondered in a melancholy fashion what would be the fate of mankind when the Empire, dismembered and rotten, ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... she planted herself in his studio; but he knew her and classified her as if he had made her. He was acquainted with the London female model in all her varieties—in every phase of her development and every step of her decay. When he entered his house that September morning just after the arrival of his two friends there had been no symptoms whatever, up and down the road, of Miss Geraldine's reappearance. That fact had been fixed in his mind by his recollecting the vacancy of the prospect ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... my life would have nourished Are foodless, and bare, and cold. My flocks by their fountain that flourished Decay ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... nothing nobler than to benefit our benefactors. The infidels of one age have been the aureole saints of the next. The destroyers of the old have always been the creators of the new. The old passes away and the new becomes old. There is in the intellectual world, as in the material, decay and growth; and even by the sunken grave of age stand youth and joy. The history of progress is written in the lives of infidels. Political rights have been preserved by traitors; intellectual ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... fair, I have yet a gem which a purer lustre flings, Than the diamond flash of the jewelled crown on the lofty brow of kings; A wonderful pearl of exceeding price, whose virtue shall not decay, Whose light shall be as a spell to thee and a blessing ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... deterioration that one is forced to regard this unfortunate man. The thing that one sees happening to so many people about one, the extinction of a flame, the withering of a blossom, the dulling and coarsening of the sensibilities, the decay of the mental energies, seems to have happened to him, too. And since it happens in the lives of so many folk, why should it surprise one to see it happening in the life of an artist, and deflowering genius and ruining musical art? All the hectic, unreal activity ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... passing under a ruined gateway we came to the old farm-house in the thick stone wall outside the old quadrangle of Hoghton Towers: which I looked at like a stupid savage, seeing no specially in, seeing no antiquity in; assuming all farm-houses to resemble it; assigning the decay I noticed to the one potent cause of all ruin that I knew, - poverty; eyeing the pigeons in their flights, the cattle in their stalls, the ducks in the pond, and the fowls pecking about the yard, with a hungry hope that plenty of them might ...
— George Silverman's Explanation • Charles Dickens
... so all growth that is not toward God Is growing to decay. All increase gained Is but an ugly, earthy, fungous growth. 'Tis aspiration as that wick aspires, Towering above the light it overcomes, But ever sinking with the dying flame. O let me live, if but a daisy's life! ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... of the use of the Bible in the home are: the crowded programs, or a lack of time due to the absence of any program for the days; a feeling of unnaturalness in the special reading of this book; the decay of the custom of reading aloud; parental ignorance of the Bible and especially of its beauties for the young; and the excessive amount of task-reading frequently required by the schools. The Sunday school also sometimes offends in this ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... me once," Douglas went on, "that the Greek race was the finest in the world in their minds and their looks and in every way, until the Greek women got promiscuous. That as soon as that happened the race began to decay. And he said that there isn't a nation in the world any stronger than the ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... writes to Mr. Harness saying: 'You cannot imagine how perplexed I am. There are points in my domestic situation too long and too painful to write about; the terrible improvidence of one dear parent, the failure of memory and decay of faculty in that other who is still dearer, cast on me a weight of care and fear that I can hardly bear up against.' Her difficulties were unending. The new publisher now stopped payment, so that even 'Our Village' brought in no return for the moment; Charles Kemble was ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... the hollow voice. "You are right. They dare not come, but I am doomed to stay here till this building shall crumble and decay." ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish
... side, silently, for some minutes. They had been pacing up and down the dim avenue, and they were now drawing near the leafless shrubbery at one end of the lime-walk—the shrubbery in which the ruined well sheltered its unheeded decay among the tangled masses ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... he conceived to be a mixture of two elements. In virtue of its higher spiritual nature it participates in the world of ideas, the life of God: and in virtue of its lower or animal impulses, in the corporeal world of decay. These two dissimilar parts are connected by an intermediate element called by Plato thymos or courage, implying the emotions or affections of the heart. Hence a threefold constitution of the soul is conceived—the rational powers, the emotional desires, and the animal ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... and curing. The rules are simple and easily followed, a little care being all that is necessary to insure most perfect success. In every case the skin should be removed shortly after death, or at least before it has become tainted with decay. Great pains should be taken in skinning. Avoid the adherence of flesh or fat to the skin, and guard against cutting through the hide, as a pierced skin is much injured in value. The parts about the eyes, legs and ears should be carefully removed. The various methods of skinning are ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... has a body, an institution, an established and outward interpretation of social relationship. In respect to this it is mortal. In respect to this it has a law of growth and decay. In respect to this, moreover, it is subject to what we call accident, the chances of the world. In fine, the bodies of individuals and of civilizations, the fixed forms, that is, in which they are instituted, serve the same uses and obey ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... science, but as a means of the widest and soundest utility. To antiquaries the services of photography have a unique value, for, by perpetuating in the form of negatives those monuments of nature and art which, though exempt from common accident, are still subject to gradual decay from time, it places in the hands of us all microscopically exact antitypes of objects which, from change or distance, are otherwise inaccessible. To the artist they afford the means of facilitating the otherwise laborious, and often mechanical, task of drawing in detail from nature and from ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... ended I began my part of the entertainment with a portion of my lecture on "The Fate of Republics," tracing their growth and decay, and pointing out that what our republic needed to give it a stable government was the missing link of woman suffrage. I got along admirably, for every five minutes I mentioned "the missing link," and the audience sat content and apparently interested, while the members ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... you the details. It's decay of the optic nerve—a Russian from St. Petersburg. Both eyes completely blind, the nerves destroyed, and he saw light yesterday for the first time. He'll be down from the Russian hospice about eleven. We expect a cure to-day ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... merely local; it cannot apply to similar bodies in America and France; and what are we to say of these? President Cleveland's letter may serve as a picture of the one; a glance at almost any paper will convince us of the weakness of the other. Decay appears to have seized on the organ of popular government in every land; and this just at the moment when we begin to bring to it, as to an oracle of justice, the whole skein of our private affairs to be unravelled, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... developed by Henry VIII. was allowed perforce to decay under his two immediate successors. According to the most authentic lists, [Footnote: Sir W. Laird Clowes, The Royal Navy, vol. i., pp. 419 ff. Throughout this chapter, the figures for tonnage are adopted from this work.] in 1548 there were 53 ships in the Fleet, with a total ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... everything in the universe. Of great power, that Being is stationed in the heart of all. Minuteness, Lightness and Affluence, are his. He is the lord of all, and identical with effulgence, and knows not decay. In Him are all those who comprehend the nature of the understanding, all those who are devoted to goodness of disposition, all those who practise meditation, who are always devoted to Yoga, who are firm in truth, who have subdued their senses, who are possessed of knowledge, who are freed from ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... of confidence and deference for his genius and integrity remained, and to him no difference for some time appeared, in consequence of the secret decay ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... The continuous and rapid decay of all the ancient families of chiefs, from which alone would the people ever think of electing a king or a queen, and the notorious corruption in blood and character of the few remaining half-castes nominally belonging ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... by the flowing Rhine; that all light came from Luther and Lutheran Germany, whose science was still purging Christianity of its Greek and Roman accretions; that Germany was a forest fated to grow; that France was a dung-heap fated to decay—a dung-heap with a crowing cock on it. What would the ladder of education have led to, except a platform on which a posturing professor proved that a cousin german was the same as a German cousin? What would the guttersnipe have learnt as a graduate, except to embrace a Saxon because he was ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... the monument on Grand Island had fallen into decay, Hushiel saw the cornerstone of the dream city, Ararat, displayed in one of the rooms of the Buffalo Historical Society. He was no longer a sensitive boy, yet the tears sprang to his eyes as he re-read the old inscription ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... his Yesterdays, the man found, already, many changes. The houses and buildings were a little more weather-beaten, with many of the boards in the porch floors and steps showing decay. The trees in the orchard were older and more gnarled with here and there gaps in their ranks. The fences showed many repairs. The little schoolhouse was almost shabby and, with the wood cleared away, looked naked and alone. The church, too, was in need of a fresh coat of white. And ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... the present muster represented the wealth, the culture, and aristocracy of all Berkshire. There are far more people in Berkshire now than then; far more aggregate wealth, and far more aggregate culture, but with the decay of the aristocratic form of society which prevailed in the day of which I write, passed away the elements of such a gathering as this, which stands unique in the social history of Stockbridge. The families ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... placed in the barrels in rows around the bottom. Baldwins and Greenings, thus barrelled, will keep sound till the following March; but if care be not used and apples which have fallen from the trees be put in, the barrel of fruit may wholly decay ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... upon which he so prided himself, in comparison with the nonsense of GEORGE FRANCIS, sinks into the most melancholy and insufferable wisdom. He looks forward to the future with a fear lest he may descend to the depths of serious and slow solemnity. When he has arrived at that deplorable stage of decay, he wishes it to be understood that his drum and trumpet are at the service of Mr. GEORGE ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 12 , June 18,1870 • Various
... the other metal being highly negative to it, powerful galvanic action will be set up and the structure will quickly deteriorate. This explains the failure of boats built of commercially pure aluminium which have been put together with iron or copper rivets, and the decay of other boats built of a light alloy, in which the alloying metal (copper) has been injudiciously chosen. It also explains why aluminium is so difficult to join with low-temperature solders, for these mostly contain a large proportion of lead. This disadvantage, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... or less intrinsic force of imagination, and pious sentiment have suffered them to fall into oblivion; but in Ireland they have been all preserved in their original fulness and vigour, hardly a hue has faded, hardly a minute circumstance or articulation been suffered to decay. ...
— Early Bardic Literature, Ireland • Standish O'Grady
... the time to be the culmination of bourgeois rule, the ripened fruit of the bourgeois revolution. And we of to-day can but applaud that judgment. Following upon Capitalism, it was held, even by such intellectual and antagonistic giants as Herbert Spencer, that Socialism would come. Out of the decay of self-seeking capitalism, it was held, would arise that flower of the ages, the Brotherhood of Man. Instead of which, appalling alike to us who look back and to those that lived at the time, capitalism, rotten-ripe, sent forth that monstrous ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... the deeply inquiring traveller will alight as promptly as possible, for the pleasure of climbing into this queerest of cities on foot is not the least part of the entertainment of going there. Then you appreciate its extraordinary position, its picturesqueness, its steepness, its desolation and decay. It hangs—that is, what remains of it—to the slanting summit of the mountain. Nothing would be more natural than for the whole place to roll down into the valley. A part of it has done so—for it is not unjust to suppose that in the process of decay the crumbled ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... of the civil war, America possessed a fine fleet of monitors, of which scarcely any now remain. For the time they seemed all but impregnable to shot and shell; but they were built by contract, of unseasoned wood, and in the course of ten or twelve years yielded to natural decay. But the Brooklyn and the Ohio, both fine examples of naval architecture, still survive to maintain, in so far as two ships ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... 24th.—What one gains in the beauty and abundance of vegetable life here, one loses in its rapid and premature decay. Fruit gathered in the morning is scarcely fit to eat at night, and the flowers brought on board yesterday evening were dead to-day at 4.30 a.m.; whilst some of the roses we brought from Cowes lasted until we reached Madeira, though it must be owned so many fell to pieces that my cabin used ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... each judge. (4) From the story of Gideon and Sampson, point out New Testament truths. (5) From the story of Jephthah and Deborah gather lessons for practical life today. (6) Religious apostasy as a cause of national decay. (7) Political folly and social immorality as a sign of national decay. (8) The method of ...
— The Bible Book by Book - A Manual for the Outline Study of the Bible by Books • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... troublesome in some parts of Florida, where they pierce the skins of the oranges, and cause the fruit to decay. ...
— The Insect Folk • Margaret Warner Morley
... the feeding is managed, some of the food is sure to escape the young fish and sink to the bottom. This, if left as it is, will decay and cause great mischief. A very simple and easily applied remedy for this evil exists in the use of mould dissolved in the water. Livingstone Stone recommends the mould under a sod, and I have always used this with the most beneficial effect. Earth, ...
— Amateur Fish Culture • Charles Edward Walker
... the marching of thousands of soldiers—the long strange tramp, tramp, tramp, the beat, beat, beat, the roll of drums, the call of bugles, the boom of cannon in the dark, the lightnings of hell flaring across the midnight skies, the thunder and chaos and torture and death and pestilence and decay—the hell of war. It is not sublime. There is no glory. The sublimity is in man's acceptance of war, not for hate or gain, but love. Love of country, home, family—love of women—I fought for women—for ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... to the said Herdegen Schopper, my dear brother, Margery's book of memorabilia right truly shows forth the manner of his life and mind in the bloom of his youth, and verily it is a sorrowful task for me to set forth the decay and end of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... do much more. We are caretakers, watching over the whole world. The owners have left for a time, and we must see that the cities are kept clean, that decay is prevented, that everything is kept oiled and in running condition. The gardens, the streets, the water mains, everything must be maintained as it was eight years ago, so that when the owners return, they will not be displeased. We want to be sure that ...
— The Defenders • Philip K. Dick
... Veda, and what other subjects have been explained by me; the various rituals of the Upanishads with the Angas; the compilation of the Puranas and history formed by me and named after the three divisions of time, past, present, and future; the determination of the nature of decay, fear, disease, existence, and non-existence, a description of creeds and of the various modes of life; rule for the four castes, and the import of all the Puranas; an account of asceticism and of the duties of a religious student; the dimensions of the sun and moon, the planets, constellations, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... nothing ruinous about it, for the Hyndses had sought to build it as the old Egyptians sought to build their temples—to last forever, to defy time and decay. It was not only meant to be a place for Hyndses to be born and live and die in: it was a monument to Family Pride, a brick-and-granite symbol ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... thought a better plan? You would say to him: No, sir—my ancestors have lived in this mansion comfortably and honourably for many generations; all its walls are strong, and all its timbers sound: if I should observe a decay in any of its parts, I know how to make the reparation without the assistance of strangers; and I know too that the reparation, when made by myself, may be made without injury either to the strength or beauty of the building. ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... Varallo, is adopted for the centurion in this chapel, and indeed throughout the Saas chapels this particular form of tunic is the most usual for a Roman soldier. The work is still a very striking one, notwithstanding its translation into wood and the decay into which it has been allowed to fall; nor can it fail to impress the visitor who is familiar with this class of art as coming from a man of extraordinary dramatic power and command over the almost impossible art of composing many figures together effectively in all-round sculpture. Whether ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... been said that there is more superstition—that is belief and dabbling in these inane practices—to-day in one of our large cities than the Dark Ages ever was afflicted with. If true, it is one sign of the world's spiritual unrest, the decay of unbelief; and irreligion thus assists at its own disintegration. The Church swept the pagan world clean of superstition once; she may soon be called upon to do the work ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... so called in swine, is principally due to injuries to the teeth received by chewing hard matter, such as bone, etc., which causes them to decay. ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek
... All things change and glide, Corrupt and crumble, suffer wreck and decay, But, obstinate dark Integrities, you abide, And obey but them who obey. All things else are dyed In the colours of man's desire: But you no bribe nor prayer Avails to soften or sway. Nothing of me you share, Yet ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... it protects the land from the rough usage and wash of winter storms; the second, that it adds humus to the soil; and the third, if one of the legumes is used, that it collects nitrogen from the air, stores it in each knuckle and joint, and holds it there until it is liberated by the decay of the plant. As nitrogen is the most precious of plant foods, and as the nitrate beds and deposits are rapidly becoming exhausted, we must look to the useful legumes to help us out until the scientists shall be able to fix the unlimited ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... one of the show spots of this section," replied Mlle. Nadiboff. "It does well enough to look about there for a few minutes. But a ruin like that suggests death and decay, and I—I ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Spies - Dodging the Sharks of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... with the eye of a sculptor. His intention is to give an express and lively image of its external form. The latter is an anatomist. His task is to dissect the subject to its inmost recesses, and to lay bare before us all the springs of motion and all the causes of decay. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... have been detached until the ligaments had decayed, and if it had been separated after the decay of the soft parts, the bones would have been thrown into disorder. But the egg-patches are all on the palmar surface, showing that the bones were still in their normal relative positions. No, Berkeley, that hand was thrown into the pond ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... great caution; but the shrivelled substance which it contained bore now no resemblance to what it might once have been, the means used having been apparently unequal to preserve its shape and colour, although they were adequate to prevent its total decay. We were quite satisfied, notwithstanding, that it was, what the stranger asserted, the remains of a human heart; and David readily promised his influence in the village, which was almost co-ordinate with that of the bailie ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... curious, in which laborious arguments are pursued to prove that despite the evil plight of men, life was still, by some slight preponderance of considerations, probably better worth living than leaving. Despising themselves, they despised their Creator. There was a general decay of religious belief. Pale and watery gleams, from skies thickly veiled by doubt and dread, alone lighted up the chaos of earth. That men should doubt Him whose breath is in their nostrils, or dread the hands that moulded them, seems to us indeed a pitiable insanity; but ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... of a nation. This is plainly corroborated by the other means of reckoning the antiquity of the monuments,—such as the wear of the stones by meteorological influences, or the thickness of the stratum of the rich loam, the result of the decay of vegetable life, accumulated on the roofs and terraces of the buildings, not to speak of their position respecting the pole-star and the declination of the ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... dozen years since some symptoms of Ewen's decay gave very general alarm to his friends. He accosted one of his own people (indeed he never has been known to notice any other), and, shaking him cordially by the hand, he attempted to place him on ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... pandanus. There were no other remains of woven material. The coffins were of three shapes and without any ornament. Those of the first form, which were of excellent molave-wood, showed no trace of worm-holes or decay, whereas the others had entirely fallen to dust; and those of the third kind, which were most numerous, were distinguishable from the first only by a less ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... her best in her morning-gown and mob-cap—it is so she has oftenest come into my room and enchanted me! She was once ill, pale, and had lost all her freshness. I only adored her the more for it, and fell in love with the decay of her beauty. I could devour the little witch. If she had a plague-spot on her, I could touch the infection: if she was in a burning fever, I could kiss her, and drink death as I have drank life from her lips. When I press her hand, I enjoy perfect happiness and contentment of soul. It is not ...
— Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion • William Hazlitt
... themselves over the nation like a pestilential miasma, the depressing influence of which was heavy, even upon those souls which individually resisted the poison. The heroic age of England had passed away, not by gradual decay, by imperceptible degeneration, but in a year, in a single day, like the winter's snow in Greece. It is for the historian to describe, and unfold the sources of this contagion. The biographer of Milton has to take note of the political change only as it affected the worldly circumstances ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... The decay of leaves and woodland vegetation forms rich and fertile soils in the forests, in which conditions are favorable for the development of new tree growth. When living tree seeds are exposed to proper amounts of moisture, warmth and air in a fertile soil, they will sprout ...
— The School Book of Forestry • Charles Lathrop Pack
... aimed at ecclesiastical independence, but in order to assert the pre-eminence of the State as such. The central problem is with him political, and all other questions are subsidiary to it. Therein we have a sense, less clear in any previous writer save Machiavelli, of the real result of the decay of medieval ideals. Church and State have become transposed in their significance. The way, as a consequence, lies ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... noblest looking Indians of the mountains till the white man came. Yet seldom has there been a stronger illustration of the inexorable law, that when a superior and inferior race come in contact the lower is annihilated. Every step of the white man's progress has been a step of the red man's decay. And now this tribe, once so warlike, is a nation of spiritless beggars, crouching near the white settlements for protection from their old foes, over whom in times past ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... why should a writer say over again, in a more imperfect form, what he had already said in his most finished style and manner? And yet it may be urged on the other side that an author whose original powers are beginning to decay will be very liable to repeat himself, as in conversation, so in books. He may have forgotten what he had written before; he may be unconscious of the decline of his own powers. Hence arises a question of great interest, bearing on the genuineness ...
— Laws • Plato
... rich—who is so responsible for it as the crowd of indolent, luxurious and vain women? The frenzy to become notorious—almost entirely women's work. The spirit of reckless ambition in public life encouraged by the sex which has never known the meaning of responsibility. Decay of the arts—inevitable result of the predominance of little fools who never admired anything but art in millinery. Revival of delight in manslaying—what woman could ever resist a uniform? Let them be; let them be. Why should they ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... paradox," he said. "We are, in a sense, the purest democracy. We have become a despotism. Have you not noticed how continually in history democracy becomes despotism? People call it the decay of democracy. It is simply its fulfilment. Why take the trouble to number and register and enfranchise all the innumerable John Robinsons, when you can take one John Robinson with the same intellect or lack of intellect as all the rest, and ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... one of the worst poisons known to mankind. Opium has been and is the source of great revenue to England, but it is the greatest curse to China. It has ruined her to the very core, and is one of the great causes of the decay of the Empire. Many thousands of handsome, vigorous, and hopeful young men are brought every day by its use to untimely deaths. Oh! how the good people of China hate opium. How the poor fathers and mothers weep for their opium cursed sons. How many wives shed bitter tears ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 4, October, 1900 • Various |
