"Pestilence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Death! Come to the mother's when she feels For the first time her first-born's breath; Come when the blessed seals That close the pestilence are broke, And crowded cities wail its stroke; Come in consumption's ghastly form, The earthquake shock, the ocean-storm; Come when the heart beats high and warm, With banquet-song, and dance, and wine: And thou art ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... leon; Min is the ruine of the high halles, The falling of the toures and of the walles Upon the minour or the carpenter: I slew Sampson in shaking the piler. Min ben also the maladies colde, The derke tresons, and the castes olde: My loking is the fader of pestilence. ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... to the Gorgon spirit of death by pause, freezing or turning to stone: both of the great divinities taking their glory from the evil they have conquered; both of them, when angry, taking to men the form of the evil which is their opposite—Apollo slaying by poisoned arrow, by pestilence; Athena by cold, the ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... inaugurate the league a town named Alessandria in honor of the Pope was founded on the Piedmont frontier. In the expedition of 1166-1168 Barbarossa, who had set up an antipope, captured Rome and enthroned Paschal III as pope. His triumph however, was shortened by a pestilence which decimated his troops, and thence began a series of reverses which ended in the ascendency ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... engendered. Multitudes were seen dying about the streets. Many deserted to the Spanish camp, eager to barter their liberty for bread; and the city exhibited all the extremes of squalid and disgusting wretchedness, bred by pestilence and famine among an overcrowded population. The sufferings of the citizens softened the stern heart of the alcayde, Hamet Zeli, who at length yielded to their importunities, and, withdrawing his forces into the Gebalfaro, consented ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... the Moor. But now there was no longer battle. Granada had asked and been granted seventy days in which to envisage and accept her fate. These were nearing the end. Lost and beaten, haggard with woe and hunger and pestilence, the city stood over against us, above the naked plain, all her outer gardens stripped away, bare light striking the red Alhambra and the Citadel. When the wind swept over her and on to Santa Fe it seemed to bring a sound of wailing and the faint and terrible ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... by a mere human arrangement in the first place; secondly, by such an arrangement as must disorganize the existing theocratic system of the Jewish people. Upon this crime followed his chastisement in a sudden pestilence. And it is remarkable in how significant a manner God manifested the nature of the trespass, and the particular course through which He had meant originally, and did still mean, to counteract the worst issue of David's apprehensions. It happened that the angel of the pestilence halted ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... occupation are completely unknown. No historian, no document, no chronicle, gives reports of the destruction and the slaughter which must have raged there. Evidently the Polish factions fought between themselves, and crop failures and pestilence may have done the rest. Kulm had preserved from an earlier time its well-built walls and stately churches, but in the streets the foundation walls of the cellars stood out of the decaying wood and broken tiles of the crumbled buildings. There were whole streets of nothing ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... "comfortable, abundant and cheery." "History," he says, "paints this as the worst and most disastrous period that Europe had ever seen; yet here, in the most real poet of the century, we see how life, as a whole, went on in the usual way. For when a great pestilence strikes a country, it slays its thousands and goes away. Time quickly heals the wounds of grief, and the world goes on as before. Then come the English to sack and destroy. Nature heals their wounds, too, by the recurring seasons, and the world goes on as before. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... peasant was absorbed, and his energy spent, in the toils of constant war, when his land was swallowed up in the vast estates that had rapid profits as their end and careless slaves as their cultivators. Then, the moist fields gave out their native pestilence, and malaria reigned unchecked over the fairest portion of the ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... the flattering light of distance. The life was neither enjoyable nor wholesome. The rank woods were full of malaria, and singular epidemics from time to time ravaged the settlements. In the autumn of 1818 the little community of Pigeon Creek was almost exterminated by a frightful pestilence called the milk-sickness, or, in the dialect of the country, "the milk-sick." It is a mysterious disease which has been the theme of endless wrangling among Western physicians, and the difficulty of ascertaining anything about it has been greatly increased by the local sensitiveness which forbids ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... influence on the happiness of life in all its stages and classes, and of society in all its forms, but as the only means of preserving our Constitution from its natural enemies, the spirit of sophistry, the spirit of party, the spirit of intrigue, the profligacy of corruption, and the pestilence of foreign influence, which is the angel of destruction to elective governments; if a love of equal laws, of justice, and humanity in the interior administration; if an inclination to improve agriculture, commerce, and manufacturers for necessity, convenience, and defense; if a spirit of equity ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... knows it, because he was incrusted with the leprosy of cowardice, and because upon him lay the blood of those to whom he should have been in loco parentis, made a solitude wherever he appeared, men ran from him as from an incarnation of pestilence; and between him and free intercourse with his countrymen, from the hour of his dishonour in the field, to the hour of his death, there flowed a river of separation—there were stretched lines of interdict heavier than ever Pope ordained—there brooded ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... little property he had was scarcely sufficient to pay his debts, and Madame Fouquet, since her husband's captivity, is abandoned by everybody. The hand of your majesty strikes like the hand of God. When the Lord sends the curse of leprosy or pestilence into a family, every one flies and shuns the abode of the leprous or plague-stricken. Sometimes, but very rarely, a generous physician alone ventures to approach the ill-reputed threshold, passes it with courage, and risks his life to combat death. He is the last resource of the dying, the ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... deafening peals of thunder." The capital, Sta. Isabel, nee Clarence, did not prepossess him. Pallid men—chiefly Spaniards—sat or lolled languidly in their verandahs, or crawled about the baking-hot streets. Strangers fled the place like a pestilence. Fortunately the Spanish colony were just establishing a Sanitarium—Sta. Cecilia—400 metres above sea level; consequently health was within reach of those who would take the trouble to seek it; and Burton was not slow to make a sanitarium of his own even higher up. To the genuine natives ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... shrouding robe and veil, and thinking that she must suffer here to expiate the fate of Dr. Grimshaw, who, scorpion-like, stung himself to death with the venom of his own bad passions. She is a Sister of Mercy, devoted to good works, and leaves her convent only in times of war, plague, pestilence or famine, to minister to the suffering. She nursed me through the yellow fever, when I lay in the hospital at New Orleans, but when I got well enough to recognize her she vanished—evaporated—made herself 'thin air,' and another Sister served in ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... all the world, the comyn people are in a mase or a hurle burle redy to make insurrections, and to conclude breuelie there lackes no euyll miserie nor myschefe, neyther hoger, thyrst fellonie, robberie, warre, pestilence, sedicio, derth, and great scarsytie and lacke of all good thynges. And howe say you do not all these thynges argue and sufficientlie proue that the worlde is almost at an ende? Cannius. Yea but tell me I praye the of ...
— Two Dyaloges (c. 1549) • Desiderius Erasmus
... are not alive, should be informed of her situation. Possibly, you may know something of her connections, and can therefore do this good office. She is dying in a strange place, among people who avoid her as they would avoid a pestilence. Even though it be only to bury her, some relation ought to be immediately summoned to ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... Bracciolini spoke from personal observation. When he was here in England in 1422, he would not venture abroad nor leave London, on account of the plague which raged in the provinces and extended over almost the whole island (Ep. I. 7.). Details of this pestilence have not come down to us, but we see how terrible must have been its character, when this strong and lasting impression was left on the memory of Bracciolini, that he avails himself of it in this passage of the Annals to serve as a symbol of the worst species of destructiveness, ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... it in both the teaching and practice of the early Christian Church. That great father of the Church, Origen, says: "It is demons which produce famine, unfruitfulness, corruption of the air, and pestilence." St. Augustine said that "All diseases of Christians are to be ascribed to demons." The Church of England still retains in its Articles an authorisation for the expulsion of demons; and a number of charms yet in wide ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... letter. At the same moment arrived the news that the cholera was raging at Naples—news which rendered most ominous this sudden interruption of the correspondence. I obtained leave of absence and hurried south, to learn that my wife and babies were dead—fallen among the very first victims of the pestilence. ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... room for ambition, and envy, and emulation, and all the feverish movements of aspiring vanity and unresting selfishness, which act as prophylactics against this more dark and deadly distemper. It is the canker which corrodes the full-blown flower of human felicity—the pestilence which smites at the bright hour ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... these wanderers have been supposed to presage war, famine, pestilence, perhaps the destruction of the world. And little wonder. Here is a body which comes flashing out of boundless space into our system, shooting out a pyrotechnic tail some hundreds of millions of miles in length; whirling, perhaps, through the very atmosphere of the sun at a speed ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... men, and women with the indescribable voice that once heard is never forgotten, all, seemingly regardless of the storm, laughing aloud or shrieking as a sudden gust whirled them on. Then the alley, dark and noisome, the tall tenement-houses rising on either side, a wall of pestilence and misery, shutting in only a little deeper misery, a little surer pestilence, to be faced as it ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... been a year of terror, and of feeling more intense than terror for which there is no name upon the earth. For many prodigies and signs had taken place, and far and wide, over sea and land, the black wings of the Pestilence were spread abroad. To those, nevertheless, cunning in the stars, it was not unknown that the heavens wore an aspect of ill; and to me, the Greek Oinos, among others, it was evident that now had arrived the alternation of that seven hundred and ninety-fourth year when, ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... leader looked at him sourly. "You're in quarantine, Doc," he said. "Class I, all precautions, contact with unidentified pestilence. If you don't like it, argue with the Black Doctor, I've just got ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... of aggression against the Hindus of Telingana He besieged the fortress of Pangul,[100] seventy miles north-east of Adoni, for a period of two years, but the attempt to reduce it ended in failure owing to a pestilence breaking out amongst both men ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... Samaritan am I. Give me the water that shall be a well of water springing up to everlasting life, that I thirst not in the fever of doing. Give me the manna of life to eat that I faint not nor cry out in plague, pestilence, or famine. Give me Thy grace, O God, as Thou hast given it to Michel de la Foret, and guide my feet as I follow him in life and in death, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... would prove a mighty scandal and corruption to our faith, and manifestly dangerous to our monarchy; nay, he would defend it by arms against all the powers on earth, except our own legislature; in which case he would submit as to a general calamity, a dearth, or a pestilence. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... far day we will pass from under it. In the mean time we would not have it burst. In that case underneath it would lie ruined fields and wrecked homes, and out of its elements would come a fearful pestilence! The Triumph of the Republican Party—no slight darkening of the air is that, no drifting mist of the morning! It is the triumph of that party which proclaims the Constitution a covenant with death and an agreement with hell!—of that party which tolled the bells, and fired the ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... window every day into the faces of six or more dead bodies that were brought to the cathedral, I knew that "The pestilence was ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... out by misfortunes of every sort, reduced to the lowest ebb for want of corn, conquered in two engagements at sea, defeated in their frequent sallies, and struggling moreover with a fatal pestilence, from their long confinement and change of victuals (for they all subsisted on old millet and damaged barley, which they had formerly provided and laid up in the public stores against an emergency ...
— "De Bello Gallico" and Other Commentaries • Caius Julius Caesar
... Lagartos to swim, was instantly devoured before them all by a crocodile. The rest, in spite of wet, heat, want of sleep, clean clothes, and shelter, and a diet of rotting fruit, crocodile, sea-cow, tapir, and armadillo, all survived. They had suffered from no pestilence. Schomburgk thinks Ralegh coloured too highly the mineral riches of Guiana. He attests the veracity of the praises both of its prodigious vegetable and animal fruitfulness, and of its healthiness away from the malaria of the ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... scavengers. They come almost automatically after every great disaster—fire, flood, battle, or pestilence. Ghouls, you understand, from heaven knows where. That man's great-grandfather probably robbed the dead grenadiers of the Legion of Honor ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... poor Welsh will add," said Rose, whose resentment began to surpass her awe for the ancient Saxon dame, "that the Anglo- Saxons were the original disease, and resemble a wasting pestilence." ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... that when population is greatly thinned by war, or pestilence, or famine, Nature hastens to fill up the void by the extraordinary fecundity of those who remain. The Irish must have multiplied very fast in Connaught during the Commonwealth; and the mixture of Saxon and Celtic blood resulting from ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... in Paris reduced me to the limpness and lack of appetite peculiar to a kid glove, and gave Fanny a jumping sore throat. It's my belief there is death in the kettle there; a pestilence or the like. We came out here, pitched on the Star and Garter (they call it Somebody's pavilion), found the place a bed of lilacs and nightingales (first time I ever heard one), and also of a bird called the piasseur, cheerfulest of sylvan creatures, an ideal comic ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... published in such a periodical as the "American Journal of Medical Sciences." Still it had its effect, as I have every reason to believe. I cannot doubt that it has saved the lives of many young mothers by calling attention to the existence and propagation of "Puerperal Fever as a Private Pestilence," and laying down rules for taking the necessary precautions against it. The case has long been decided in favor of the views I advocated, but, at the time when I wrote two of the most celebrated professors of Obstetrics in this country opposed my conclusions with all the weight of their ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... met many with whom he had been acquainted, and from whom he had received condolence at his supposed bereavement, and congratulations when they learnt from him that the danger was over; and from them he also learnt how fatal had been the pestilence. ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... like sum.[24] The net earnings in good years were thus less than four per cent. on the investment; but the liability to hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, epidemics and mutinies would bring the safe expectations considerably lower. A mere pestilence which carried off about sixty mules and two hundred oxen on Worthy Park in 1793-1794 wiped out more than ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... stand erect and go our own way. Love Nature? Never! She is our treacherous and unsleeping foe, ever to be feared and watched and circumvented, for at any moment and in spite of all our vigilance she may wipe out the human race by famine, pestilence or earthquake and within a few centuries obliterate every trace of its achievement. The wild beasts that man has kept at bay for a few centuries will in the end invade his palaces: the moss will envelop his walls and the lichen disrupt them. The clam may survive man by as many millennia ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... Balzac's remark, "One, in order to succeed, must either cut one's way through life like a sword, or glide through the world quietly like a pestilence." ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... that pain at once physical and mental, which invades both soul and body, penetrates to the depths of thought, and paralyzes mind as well as blood! Cold—the sinister demon who grazes the universe with his damp wing, and breathes pestilence on bewildered nations! Cold, tarnishing everything, unrolling its gray and nebulous veil over the sky's rich tints, the waters' reflections, the hearts of flowers, and the cheeks of maidens! Cold, that casts its white winding-sheet over fields and woods and lakes, even over the fur and feathers ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... young man, and worth a hundred of old rotten hulks, like myself." Battus was provoked in good earnest; and it is well known that the whole scheme went to sleep for several years, until King Phoebus sent in a gentle refresher to Battus and his islanders, in the shape of failing crops, pestilence, and his ordinary chastisements. The people were roused—the colony was founded—and, after utter failure, was again re-founded, and the results justified the Oracle. But, in all such cases, and where the remonstrances were least respectful, or where the resistance of inertia was ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... were covered with drowned bodies, which no one collected; these decayed quickly because of heat heightened by fire, and filled the air with foul odors. Sickness broke out on the camping-grounds, and the more timorous foresaw a great pestilence. ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... wherever it has prevailed. In England, more dependent than other nations on the extent of its commercial intercourse, it may be said to have operated as a scourge. The most terrible inflictions of natural evil, storms, famine, and pestilence, have not produced an equal amount of suffering. Indeed, it has combined the characteristics of the worst of those evils. It has devastated, like the storm, the busy hives of industry; it has exhausted, ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... representatives of the state attack what is most venerated by the people—their religious faith and the national spirit which fortunately still exists in those places that are not yet contaminated by the desolating pestilence. When it is attempted to take away the soul of a people to give it a different one; when it is sought to denationalize a people, so to say, perverting its sentiments, its customs, its ideas—it is natural that this people should defend itself, like the man who is attacked by highwaymen on a solitary ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... In her breast they gathered, together fashioning that Cleopatra whom no man may draw, and yet whom no man, having seen, ever can forget. They fashioned her grand as the Spirit of Storm, lovely as Lightning, cruel as Pestilence, yet with a heart; and what she did is known. Woe to the world when such another comes ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... with that devastatingly popular ballad, "Mother's Knee," was one to which he always looked back later with a certain pride. "Mother's Knee," it will be remembered, went through the world like a pestilence. Scots elders hummed it on their way to kirk; cannibals crooned it to their offspring in the jungles of Borneo; it was a best-seller among the Bolshevists. In the United States alone three million ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... followed after, equipped with great shovels, and covered the row with a layer of earth, so thin that the ground had already begun to crack beneath the showers. The work was so badly and hastily done that before two weeks should have elapsed each of those fissures would be breathing forth pestilence. Silvine could not resist the impulse to pause at the brink of the trench and look at those pitiful corpses as they were brought forward, one after another. She was possessed by a horrible fear that in each fresh body the ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... ardency of the sun grew greater, and the Hermit's cliff was a fiery furnace. Never had such heat been known in those regions; but the people did not murmur, for with the cessation of the rain their crops were saved and the pestilence banished; and these mercies they ascribed in great part to the prayers and macerations of the two holy anchorets. Therefore on the eve of the Assumption they sent a messenger to the Hermit, saying that at daylight on the morrow the townspeople ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... Milan the poet received a visit from Boccaccio, who was at that time inclined to renounce the world. He offered to give his whole library to Petrarch: he did afterwards send to his host a Dante of his own copying, which is now preserved in the Vatican. The approach of a pestilence led Petrarch to remove his home to Venice: and here he was again visited by Boccaccio, this time in company with Leontio Pilato, a Calabrian Greek trading in ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... has lifted woman from the position she held under other religious systems and elevated her to a higher sphere. She is brought forward as a teacher; she displays a martyr's courage in the presence of pestilence, or ascends the deck of the mission-ship to take her part in "perils among the heathen." She endures the hardships and faces the dangers of colonial life with a new sense of her responsibility as a wife and mother. In all these capacities, whether teaching, ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... There is no cure for the evil that is in the world but by the giving of more love to men. The laws that are ordained for earth are strange and unequal, and the ways where men must walk are full of pitfalls and dangers. Pestilence creeps along the ground and flows in the rivers; whirlwind and tempest shake the habitations of men and drive their ships to destruction; fire breaks forth from the mountains and the foundations of the world ...
— The Spirit of Christmas • Henry Van Dyke
... Hot Pestilence beat her mortiferous wings Ore all my Kingdome, am I not bound in soule To empty all our Achademes of Doctors And Aesculapian Spirits to charme ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... fourth place, the brother tells us of the opinions of Gualther, Bulhager, Erastus, Aretius. The question is of the examples of churches, not of the opinions of men. But what of the men? As for that pestilence that walketh in darkness through London and Westminster, Liastus' book against Beza, let him make of it what he can, it shall have an antidote by and by. In the meanwhile, he may take notice, that, in the close ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... it for the spiritual content it will bring; if it fail of that, you discover that its value is gone. There is that pathetic tale of the man who labored like a slave, unresting, unsatisfied, until he had accumulated a fortune, and was happy over it, jubilant about it; then in a single week a pestilence swept away all whom he held dear and left him desolate. His money's value was gone. He realized that his joy in it came not from the money itself, but from the spiritual contentment he got out of his family's enjoyment of the pleasures and delights it lavished upon them. Money has no MATERIAL ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of the character of the pestilence, the warden's wife fled with her little children to her mother's home in a neighboring county; maternal solicitude having extinguished her womanly reluctance to desert her husband, at a juncture when her presence and assistance would so materially have cheered, and lightened ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... there is any wood, highly polished and varnished wood, are the only materials fit for patients' utensils. The very lid of the old abominable close-stool is enough to breed a pestilence. It becomes saturated with offensive matter, which scouring is only wanted to bring out. I prefer an earthenware lid as being always cleaner. But there are various good ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... the Jews! Canst thou not see? Aye—look! The Temple falleth! It is scattered until not one stone is left upon another! And ever above the thunder-din cometh the cry, 'Help! Help!' Famine do I see until mothers eat the tender flesh that hugs their bosoms! And pestilence do I see until death hath devoured all life! The Roman plow is driven over the Holy Place of the Jew and scavengers of the desert revel in naked tombs! And here from this place of abominations arise the hands of Pilate! ...
— The Coming of the King • Bernie Babcock
... purposes. The sacrifices of primitive man were immensely practical in character; they were made at the crucial moments and pivotal crises of life, at sowing and at harvest time, at the initiation of the young into the responsibilities of maturity, at times of pestilence, famine, or danger. The gods were given the choice part of a meal; the prize calf; in some cases, human sacrifices; the sacrifice, moreover, of the beautiful and best. The chief sacrificial rites of almost all primitive peoples are connected with food, ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... to avoid, as they would a pestilence, this fiend-like spirit! How ought they to labor to settle all disputes—should disputes unfortunately arise,—without this tremendous resort! On the strength of much observation,—not experience, for I have been saved the pain of learning in that painful school, on this subject,—I ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... around us! how gloomy the sky overhead! I could not help fancying that disasters were about to overtake us; and, indeed, the aspect of affairs on board was sufficiently discouraging. I never, indeed, had before felt so low-spirited. The second mate predicted shipwreck; the doctor, pestilence and death. What else was to happen I could not tell. Several sharp showers fell, then suddenly the sun burst forth from behind some dark clouds with resplendent beauty, spreading over, with a sheet of silver, a wide extent of the raging sea, along which flitted the sombre shadows from masses of ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... my former deed of cruelty, preventing me from physically abusing it. I did not, for some weeks, strike, or otherwise violently ill use it; but gradually—very gradually—I came to look upon it with unutterable loathing, and to flee silently from its odious presence, as from the breath of a pestilence. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... which we ought already to be preparing, he had in his first discourse touched upon political purity—cleanness of citizenship—the Baron showed no interest. He still showed none when the speaker said again, that because the pestilence was once more with us—that was in the terrible visitation of 1878—he had devoted his second discourse to the hideous crime of a great city whose voters and tax-payers do not enable and compel it to keep the precept, "Be thou clean." I thought of the clean little home from whose master beside ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... realities that lie in the abysses of every city,—that hideous, compressed mass which welters in the awful baptism of sensuality and ignorance,—the groans of inarticulate woe, the spectacle of oppression, the shameless cruelty of war, the pestilence that shakes its comet-sword over nations, and famine that peers with skeleton face through the corn-sheaves of plenty. Upon this theory of mere happiness no metaphysical subtlety can solve the fact of evil;—the coiled enigma constantly ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... surroundings, you might be living in the dark ages. For as far back as in the ninth century Ragusa was the capital of Dalmatia and an independent republic, and since that period her literary and commercial triumphs, and the tragedies she has survived in the shape of sieges, earthquakes, and pestilence, render the records of this little-known state almost as engrossing as those ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... from limb, then burned it until a little heap of white ash was all that remained of the man of evil life, whose shade had brought dread to all the citizens of Berwick. But their wise action must, unfortunately, have been taken too late. Very soon afterwards a great pestilence arose, and decimated the town's population. "Never did it so furiously rage elsewhere," says William, Canon of Newburgh, the learned churchman, who has chronicled for us the tale, "though it was at that time general throughout all the borders of England." According to him, the vampire had done his ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... as the first fury of this terrible pestilence was over, a sale was made of the Dey's slaves; I was purchased by a merchant, and carried to Tunis; this man sold me to another merchant, who sold me again to another at Tripoli; from Tripoli I was sold to Alexandria, from Alexandria to Smyrna, and from Smyrna ...
— Candide • Voltaire
... and 'Scorpion Cove' is in Pell street. Necessity next drove me there. It is early spring, we will suppose; and being in the Bowery, we find the streets in its vicinity reeking with putrid matter, hurling pestilence into the dark dwellings of the unknown poor, and making thankful the coffin-maker, who in turn thanks a nonundertaking corporation for the rich harvest. The muck is everywhere deep enough for hogs and fat aldermen to wallow in, and would serve well the purposes of a supper-eating ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... old accustomed things, The privilege of chiefs, the village wall Within whose circling dark Monumme* sings O' nights of belly-full and ease and all They taught us we should prize and praise (Only of dearth and pestilence should be our fears;) And now behind us are the green, regretted days. The water in the desert is our tears. Then ye, who at the waters drink Of Freedom, oh with Pity think On us, who face the desert brink ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... gone through, Stephen Bloundel offered up along and fervent supplication to the Most High for protection against the devouring pestilence with which the city was then scourged. He acknowledged that this terrible visitation had been justly brought upon it by the wickedness of its inhabitants; that they deserved their doom, dreadful though it was; that, like the dwellers in Jerusalem before it was given up to ruin and desolation, they ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... taut, and it might have been supposed that we were eager to reach some port where friends and pleasure awaited us. But it was far otherwise. We were quitting England and our home, that spot which contains all a seaman holds most dear, and were bound for a land of pestilence and death, the little delectable coast of Africa, to be employed for the next three years in chasing, capturing, or destroying, to the best of our power and ability, all vessels engaged in the traffic of human flesh. We touched at the Azores, and reached Sierra Leone, ...
— Tales of the Sea - And of our Jack Tars • W.H.G. Kingston
... to insist on. They would have to belie the best traditions of the party, and discredit the cardinal principles of their once powerful and still deeply revered chief—the late Lord Beaconsfield—to whom Home Rule meant "veiled rebellion," and presented a danger "scarcely less disastrous than pestilence and famine." The Liberals are equally unlikely to risk the integrity and unity of the party by the concession of a claim which even an advanced Radical like Mr. Chamberlain has condemned as unwarrantable, unwise, and ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... of ages, God is brushing from His book; He is opening up its pages, and He bids His children look; And in shock and conflagration, and in pestilence and strife, He is speaking to the nations, of the brevity ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... committed during the war which had been raging for thirty years in Germany—such for instance as the sacking of Magdeburg. It is estimated, however, that about 600,000 people (of whom 500,000 were of the Irish race and 100,000 of the English) perished by the sword, pestilence or famine in the fearful years between 1641 and 1652—in other words, about a third part of the population was wiped out. And the war was followed by a wholesale confiscation—having fought for the king being considered as much an act of treason as having rebelled against ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... every educated person rejects this explanation in regard to all classes of phenomena of which the laws have been fully ascertained; though some have not yet reached the point of referring all phenomena to the idea of Law, but believe that rain and sunshine, famine and pestilence, victory and defeat, death and life, are issues which the Creator does not leave to the operation of his general laws, but reserves to be decided by express acts of volition. M. Comte's theory is the negation ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... very few who aspired to know, went to la Espanola to obtain an education. The few spiritual wants of the people were supplied by monks, many of them as ignorant and bigoted as themselves. War and pestilence and tempest had united to wipe the island from the face of the earth, and the very name of "Rich Port," given to it without cause or reason, must have sounded in the ears of the inhabitants as a bitter ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... that terrible prophecy of yours uttered in the assembly chamber at Montgomery. Heaven knows I was then so little prepared to expect war or any reasonable fulfilment of the doom, that I could only look to see some great pestilence, fire, or other sweeping calamity falling on poor Alabama. Last night, when I read in the Herald of the sweeping extermination that had visited those two fine Alabama regiments, I could not help going to Mrs. Adams's desk, where ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various
... the kantele is lost overboard, and then the Sampo is broken to pieces and lost in the sea. Vainamoinen saves enough to secure the prosperity of Kalevala, but Louhi only carries home a small and almost useless fragment. Vainamoinen then makes a new kantele of birchwood. Louhi brings pestilence on Kalevala, then sends a bear against the country, and lastly, steals away the sun and moon, hiding them in the stone mountain of Pohjola. Vainamoinen drives away the plagues, kills the bear, and renews fire from a conflagration caused by a spark sent ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... upon him, since the other gods agreed to his proposal. But eventually a reconciliation takes place; the great bow of Anu is displayed in the heavens; Bel agrees that he will be satisfied with what war, pestilence, famine, and wild beasts can do in the way of destroying men; and that, henceforward, he will not have recourse to extraordinary measures. Finally, it is Bel himself who, by way of making amends, transports ...
— Hasisadra's Adventure - Essay #7 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... holding raving men in his strong arms. He watched over the sick till the last ray of hope fled; he buried them tenderly when all was over. The splendor of the man's humanity had never shown itself until it stood erect and feared not, while the pestilence that walked in darkness and the destruction that wasted at noon-day dogged his ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... Carlo Zeno, 8th May, 1418; the visible commencement from that of another of her noblest and wisest children, the Doge Tomaso Mocenigo, who expired five years later. The reign of Foscari followed, gloomy with pestilence and war; a war in which large acquisitions of territory were made by subtle or fortunate policy in Lombardy, and disgrace, significant as irreparable, sustained in the battles on the Po at Cremona, and in the marshes at Caravaggio. In 1454, Venice, the first ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... showings of science, a more serious danger than any of these. Comets were once regarded as most terrific objects, but only in a superstitious way, perplexing nations with fear of change, and shaking pestilence from their horrid hair. During an intermediate enlightened time, these notions passed away; and we have even come to think, that such a visitant of our skies may exercise a beneficial influence. We ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 453 - Volume 18, New Series, September 4, 1852 • Various
... the tomb. The iniquities of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, il gran Biscione, the blood-thirst of Gian Maria, the dark designs of Filippo and his secret vices, Francesco Sforza's treason, Galeazzo Maria's vanities and lusts; their tyrants' dread of thunder and the knife; their awful deaths by pestilence and the assassin's poignard; their selfishness, oppression, cruelty and fraud; the murders of their kinsmen; their labyrinthine plots and acts of broken faith;—all is tranquil now, and we can say ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... as they were called, passed from town to town on this Royal progress, the phantoms of war, pestilence, and famine hung over the land. The great cities of Flanders had been deserted by thousands of their inhabitants. The sea trade of the country had been destroyed by the vigorous blockade which the Dutch ships of war maintained along the coast. Religious intolerance had driven the most industrious ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond
... character of foot-and-mouth disease and its rapid spread to practically all exposed susceptible animals lead to heavy losses. Since the mortality is comparatively low, ranging from only 3 per cent or less in mild forms to 30 or 40 per cent in malignant cases, the havoc caused by the pestilence is sometimes underestimated. But there are other sources of loss which are much more important than the actual mortality. The fever and the difficulty of eating cause a rapid and extreme loss in flesh and a lessening or cessation of the ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... sundered, and sorrows awakened by the remorseless action of the "King of Terrors." The strong man was cut down while boasting of his strength; and youth, beauty, or worth furnished no protection from the attack of this West India pestilence. ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... his declaration, that patronage, which he avows to be one of the principles of his government, and to be the principle of the last of his acts, is worse than war, pestilence, and famine,—and that all these calamities together might not be so effectual as this patronage in wasting and destroying the country. And at what time does he tell you this? He tells it you when he himself had just wantonly destroyed an old regular ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... rebellious and mutinous one. O Noltenius, O Panzendorf, do for pity's sake take away your Catechetical ware; and say either nothing to the poor young Boy, or some small thing he will find to be BEYOND doubt when he can judge of it! Fever, pestilence, are bad for the body; but Doubt, impious mutiny, doubly impious hypocrisy, are these nothing for the mind? Who would go about inculcating Doubt, unless he were far astray indeed, and much at a loss ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... there. An earthquake, which ruined many buildings in Cuzco, caused rivers to change their courses, destroyed towns, and was followed by the outbreak of a disastrous epidemic. The chiefs were obliged to give up their plans, although in healthy Tampu-tocco there was no pestilence. Their kingdom became more and more crowded. Every available square yard of arable land was terraced and cultivated. The men were intelligent, well organized, and accustomed to discipline, but they could not ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... greatest Criticks. I do not know any imaginary Person made use of in a more sublime manner of thinking than that in one of the Prophets, who describing God as descending from Heaven, and visiting the Sins of Mankind, adds that dreadful Circumstance, Before him went the Pestilence. [6] It is certain this imaginary Person might have been described in all her purple Spots. The Fever might have marched before her, Pain might have stood at her right Hand, Phrenzy on her Left, and Death in her Rear. She might have been introduced as gliding down from ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... Protestants, and that all the inhabitants, forgetting their religious differences, could assemble together as friends on the common meeting-ground of literature. Such an amalgamation is bound to mitigate the sectarian rancour that too often works like a pestilence in small villages and rural communities. It is an excellent feature, too, in such places as Arisaig, that the local priest gives every encouragement to his people to read and study secular books of an elevating character. ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... is true, remember, on the other hand, that a Christian man can drive away his Master by evil works. The sweet song-birds and the honey-making bees are said always to desert a neighbourhood before a pestilence breaks out in it. And if I may so say, similarly quick to feel the first breath of the pestilence is the presence of the Christ which cannot dwell with evil. You bring Christ into your heart by faith, without any work at all; you keep Him there ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... distillers earn their money by concocting poisons which cause nearly all the crime and misery in broad Britain; there is not a soul living in these islands who does not know the effect of the afore-named poisons; there is not a soul living who does not very well know that there never was a pestilence crawling over the earth which could match the alcoholic poisons in murderous power. There is a demand for these poisons; the brewer and distiller supply the demand and gain thereby large profits; society beholds the profits and adores the ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... found him out. They were polite, kind, even friendly; but here it ended: these gentlemen, of course, did not resign their patients to him; and the inferior class of practitioners avoided his door like a pestilence. ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... "Pestilence sooner than the Austrians!" shouted the people, and hundreds and hundreds of boats surrounded the French vessels. Every one wanted to see the general, their famous countryman, Bonaparte. But Bonaparte's heart was sorrowful ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... zealous and as hasty as the Commons. The Bishop of Rochester said the scheme had been like a pestilence. The Duke of Wharton said the House ought to shew no respect of persons; that, for his part, he would give up the dearest friend he had, if he had been engaged in the project. The nation had been plundered in a most shameful ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... throne, and to a marriage with his father's widow, who was also his own natural mother. He does not yet know the worst: and to have killed an arrogant prince, would not in those days have seemed a very deep offence: but then he believes that the pestilence had been sent as a secret vengeance for this assassination, which is thus invested with a mysterious character of horror. Just at this point, Jocasta, his mother and his wife, says, [8] on witnessing the sudden revulsion of feeling ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... Notwithstanding war, famine, and pestilence, Paris had outgrown the fortifications of Louis le Gros, and, before he departed for the Crusade, Philippe-Auguste ordered the bourgeois of the city to construct a new wall, solidly built of stone, with towers and gates. This was commenced in 1190; the faubourgs were ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... into a proverbial synonym for superexcellence. He had little or no innovating genius, no trade devices, no assumption, no faculty for advertisement, no progressiveness, and no "racket." He had the tolerant good-humor of the Southwestern pioneer, to whom cyclones, famine, drought, floods, pestilence, and savages were things to be accepted, and whom disaster, if it did not stimulate, certainly did not appall. He received the insults, complaints, and criticisms of hurried and hungry passengers, the comments and threats of the Stage Company as he had submitted to the aggressions ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... when, in the midst of his usefulness, and with little warning, he was to be summoned to his eternal rest. He had been seriously attacked with that dangerous pestilence which, in former years, ravaged this country, called the sweating sickness, a malady as mysterious and fatal as the cholera has been in later times. The disease was attended by great prostration of strength; but, under the careful management of his affectionate ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Mr. Delancey's clerks had died, and others had fled the pestilence, but Arthur and Guly still remained; the one, in order to gain enough to carry on his career of dissipation, the other, from a high sense of duty, which, though in the midst of danger, kept him faithful to his post. Mr. Delancey had been more lenient with ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... to be propagated by any contagious infection, but arose from the general disposition of the air and of the human body. In less than twenty-four hours the patient commonly died or recovered, but when the pestilence had exerted its fury for a few weeks, it was observed, either from alterations in the air, or from a more proper regimen which had been discovered, to be considerably abated.[*] Preparations were then made for the ceremony of Henry's coronation. In order ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... given distance from the City walls. Country gentlemen receive peremptory orders to reside on their estates, and not to visit London except by licence; for the authorities are afraid lest the influx of visitors should cause famine and pestilence. There is no drainage; for every householder pours his slops into the street, with a warning shout, that the passengers below may run out of the way. There are few watches, and fewer carriages; no cabs, no police, ...
— For the Master's Sake - A Story of the Days of Queen Mary • Emily Sarah Holt
... mosques there came a voice that called to prayer. Each Mussulman prostrated himself, no matter in what occupation he was engaged, and bowing his head towards Mecca, the tomb of the Prophet, performing his silent devotion. In famine, in pestilence, or in plenty, five times a day the Turk finds time for this solemn religious duty; whether right or wrong in creed, what a lesson it is to the Christian. And so thought the lonely traveller, for he bent his own head upon his breast ...
— The Circassian Slave; or, The Sultan's Favorite - A Story of Constantinople and the Caucasus • Lieutenant Maturin Murray
... spots on their faces and hands with hot wire, and then sprinkled the spots with black pepper. When the doctor came round, they feigned illness, and he ordered these cases of small-pox to be taken to the pestilence-house beyond the guards. In the night the men started for their homes in the West, and were ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... These were not Italy's saints, nor yet the gods, Majestic, calm, unmoved, of ancient Greece. No, they were only townsfolk, common people, And graced a common church—that stood and stood Through war and fire and pestilence, through ravage Of time and kings and conquerors, till at last The century dawned which promised common men The things they long had hoped for! O the time Showed a fair face, was daughter of great Demos, ...
— The Campfire Girls on the Field of Honor • Margaret Vandercook
... the little white maiden as she stood on the hearth rug. The heat of the stove struck her like a pestilence. She looked wistfully toward the windows and caught a glimpse, through its red curtains, of the snow-covered roofs, the frosty stars and the delicious ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
... the city, and begging assistance from such benevolent citizens as would consent to render their aid. On the 12th and 14th, meetings were held at the City Hall, at the last of which a volunteer committee was appointed to superintend the measures to be taken for checking the pestilence. Twenty-seven men volunteered to serve, but only twelve had the courage to fulfill their promise. They set to work promptly. The hospital at Bush Hill was reported by the physician to be in a deplorable state—without order, dirty and foul, and in need of nurses. The last, he stated, ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... goest out. The LORD shall send upon thee cursing, discomfiture, and rebuke, in all that thou puttest thine hand unto for to do, until thou be destroyed, and until thou perish quickly; because of the evil of thy doings, whereby thou hast forsaken me. The LORD shall make the pestilence cleave unto thee, until he have consumed thee from off the land, whither thou goest in to possess it. The LORD shall smite thee with consumption, and with fever, and with inflammation, and with fiery ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... the countries of Europe. Men made songs and sang of his victories, of Crecy and of Calais, and France bowed the knee to England. But the wars and triumphs of the King pressed hardly on the people of England, and ere his reign was over misery, pestilence, ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... bare open space was made, which took in more and more of the town, till at last the unhappy Aztecs, after many desperate sallies, were shut into the portion of the city which lay between the northern and western causeways. Here famine and pestilence did their awful work unchecked. The ordinary articles of food were long exhausted, and the wretched people ate moss, insects, grass, weeds, or the bark of trees. They had no fresh water. The dead ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... "Considerations on the Decline of Italian Art." It was more than merely a piece of architecture. When Butler contemplated it he saw also the chapel with its altar and the people standing in the meadow during the plague; he saw the same people, after the pestilence had been stayed, kneeling on the steps in the dimness, the sky bright through the arch beyond them and the distant mountains blue and snowy, while the music floated out through the open church door; he saw through the windows the gleaming slopes about Cornone and Dalpe, ...
— The Samuel Butler Collection - at Saint John's College Cambridge • Henry Festing Jones
... number, it is true, but they are mighty in medicine. See here," continued he, drawing forth a small bottle and holding it before their eyes, "in this bottle I hold the small-pox, safely corked up; I have but to draw the cork, and let loose the pestilence, to sweep man, woman, and child from ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... a land of magic, to those who probably had never thought of Java but as a place of pestilence, of burning soil, and scorching sunshine, it was not all fairy land. After dinner, at dusk, as Mr Jukes was strolling round the house smoking a cigar, a man with a long spear came up to him, and began to turn him back with an earnest speech, of which the only ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... remembrance, and determined to pay them a visit and discover how it fared with them. I hoped they had left the city; yet Mrs. Henning had told me that her husband, who was a devout man, held it criminal to fly on such occasions, and that she, having passed safely through the pestilence of former years, had no ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... a description of the evil times—and the wicked town in which Caterina Benincasa was born—as long ago as 1347. A pestilence swept away four-fifths of the populace. One man told how he had buried five of his sons in one trench. People said that the end of ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... long. I mean to have my revenge now on the world at large. I will not amuse myself by squandering paltry five-franc pieces; I will reproduce and sum up my epoch by absorbing human lives, human minds, and human souls. There are the treasures of pestilence—that is no paltry kind of wealth, is it? I will wrestle with fevers—yellow, blue, or green—with whole armies, with gibbets. I can possess Foedora—Yet no, I do not want Foedora; she is a disease; I am dying of Foedora. I want to ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... contortions of humanity. "The loss of hue to river-banks," observed Ch'eng Hao, the Sung poet, "is the river-banks' affair." Art has seen worse days than these. Between 937 and 1059, if we may believe Glaber, there were forty-eight years of pestilence and famine. From Constantinople to Exeter the world was one miserable sore. Cannibalism became chronic. In the market-place of Tournus human joints were exposed for sale. Man had sunk to such depths of impotence that the wolves ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... their heritage, But let it only be their heritage, And not their present fee. Their senses, though Alive to love, are yet awake to terror; And these vile damps, too, and yon thick green wave Which floats above the place where we now stand— A cell so far below the water's level, Sending its pestilence through every crevice, Might strike them: this is not their atmosphere, However you—and you—and most of all, 380 As worthiest—you, sir, noble Loredano! May ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... broke out among them, proved exceedingly fatal, both on account of the contageous nature of the distemper, and their harsh and injudicious attempts to cure it by plunging themselves into cold rivers during the most violent stages of the disorder. The pestilence broke out among some nations, particularly among the Pemblicos in North Carolina, and almost swept away the whole tribe. The practice of entrapping them, which was encouraged by the first settlers in Carolina, and selling them for slaves to the West India planters, helped greatly to thin ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt
... really matters little.... We hear that the cholera is in Edinburgh. I cannot help thinking with the deepest anxiety of those I love there, and I imagine with sorrow that beautiful, noble city, those breezy hills, those fresh, sea-weedy shores and coasts breathed upon by that dire pestilence. The city of the winds, where the purifying currents of keen air sweep through every thoroughfare and eddy round every corner—perched up so high upon her rocky throne, she seems to sit in a freer, finer atmosphere than ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... brothers, nor the grace, love and fellowship of the Trinity, but simply for enough money. And the evil to be attacked is not sin, suffering, greed, priestcraft, kingcraft, demagogy, monopoly, ignorance, drink, war, pestilence, nor any other of the scapegoats which reformers sacrifice, but ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... Go. [Exit Ursula. Why was the banishment of tyrant fate Annulled by vigorous will? and why should I, For whom the jaws of death unhinged themselves, Escape from shipwreck, war, and pestilence, And here attain my journey's end at last, But that such evil deaths were much too mild To gratify the fury that pursues me! I was reserved for this last ignominy As in despite of human purposes; Robbed of mine honor where most ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... we have already observed, being very much disgusted with his governor, left him at Geneva, and as if he had been flying from a pestilence, set out post for Lyons, where he arrived about the middle ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... things bewitched; an army without fear They had broken through the rushes their upward way to take; And each one followed steadily a voice no man could hear— While poisoned wind and pestilence came swiftly ...
— The Miracle and Other Poems • Virna Sheard
... VIEW OF EPIDEMICS AND SANITATION. The recurrence of great pestilences Their early ascription to the wrath or malice of unseen powers Their real cause want of hygienic precaution Theological apotheosis of filth Sanction given to the sacred theory of pestilence by Pope Gregory the Great Modes of propitiating the higher powers Modes of thwarting the powers of evil Persecution of the Jews as Satan's emissaries Persecution of witches as Satan's emissaries Case of the Untori at Milan New developments of fetichism.—The blood of St. Januarius at Naples Appearance ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... a medicine in those days. It is mentioned in all the treatises on the Plague, and especially by Thomas Brasbridge, who, in 1578, published his "Poore Mans Jewell, that is to say, a Treatise of the Pestilence: vnto which is annexed a declaration of the vertues of the Hearbes Carduus Benedictus and Angelica." This little book Shakespeare may have seen; it speaks of the virtues of the "distilled" leaves: it says, ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... no hand to tend them. Great man-eating birds hovered about the camp or skulked about, heavy with gorging, amongst the hovels, and no one had public spirit enough to give them battle. The stink of the place rose up to heaven as a foul incense inviting a pestilence. There was no order, no trace of strong command anywhere. With three hundred well-disciplined troops it seemed to me that I could have sent those poor desperate hordes flying in panic ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... accession of the Tudors to the throne. With the exception of Calais and Dunkirk, her dominions on the Continent had been wrested from her by the French. The country at home had been made desolate by the Wars of the Roses. The population was very small, and had been kept down by war, pestilence, and famine.[3] The chief staple was wool, which was exported to Flanders in foreign ships, there to be manufactured into cloth. Nearly every article of importance was brought from abroad; and the ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... not seen it all this week. But Gon[c,]alo is just gone hence, Even from the Court came he And I gave him great offence When I spoke to him of thee, 195 As if thou wert a pestilence, Such disaffection ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... school in the State of Maine, and his father had written to him, apprising him of his intention to come North that season. In a few days Leroy and his wife started North, but before they reached Vicksburg they were met by the intelligence that the yellow fever was spreading in the Delta, and that pestilence was breathing its bane upon the morning air and distilling its ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... task-masters, who were to set them to work in the open wilderness; and with the military, who were to keep them from revolt. The consequences of this strange assemblage were vice, immorality, frightful disease, hunger, dreadful mortality among the settlers; the convicts were decimated by pestilence on the voyage, and again decimated by famine on their arrival; and the most hideous cruelty was practised towards the unfortunate natives. Such is the early history ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne
... It was a formidable campaign; a nocturnal battle against pestilence and suffocation. It was, at the same time, a voyage of discovery. One of the survivors of this expedition, an intelligent workingman, who was very young at the time, related curious details with regard to it, several years ago, which Bruneseau thought himself obliged ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... and frowned. He saw the fortunate few who came for money and received it—and the unfortunate many, who brought their money—left, and lost it. He was indifferent to all. He beheld—as the spirits fair may be supposed to look upon the earth a moment before the sweeping pestilence that comes to thin it—life, vigorous and active, in that house of business, whose latest hour had come—whose knell was already sounding; but it moved him not. He heard men speak his name in tones of kindness, whose lips on the morrow would deal out curses. He ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... amidst tumult, but faintly now, and as in some far echo, sounds the battle-cry that once stopped the beating of thousands of human hearts as it was borne out upon the night wind to the ships. Those dread shapes we saw through our periscopes are dust: "the pestilence that walketh in darkness" and "the destruction that wasteth at noonday" are already images of speech: only the vastness of the stakes; the intensity of the effort and the grandeur of the sacrifice still stand out clearly when we, in ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... its massive fabric save the world from destruction. As for the tribes of earth, this mortal race, and the death of multitudes all doomed to pass away, why bewail them? Some war, some ocean, demands for its prey: some die of love, others of madness, others of fierce desire, to say naught of pestilence: some winter's freezing breath, others the baleful Sirius' cruel fire, others again pale autumn, gaping with rainy maw, awaits for doom: all that hath birth must tremble before death: we all must go, must go: Aeacus shakes the urn of fate ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... the Bible. In sanguine* and in perse** he clad was all *red **blue Lined with taffeta, and with sendall*. *fine silk And yet *he was but easy of dispense*: *he spent very little* He kept *that he won in the pestilence*. *the money he made For gold in physic is a cordial; during the plague* Therefore he ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... Mother of Life, we swear faithfully to observe our agreements, and not to rest till the sacred places be secure from enemies, may they be destroyed by hunger, fire, and pestilence. ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... feverous kinds, Convulsions, epilepsies, fierce catarrhs, Intestine stone and ulcer, colic pangs, Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy, And moon-struck madness, pining atrophy, Marasmus, and wide-wasting pestilence, Dropsies and asthmas, and ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... their manners—a natural consequence of their having actually no society. Formerly, Puebla rivalled Mexico in population and in industry. The plague, which carried off fifty thousand persons, was followed by the pestilence of civil war, and Puebla dwindled down to a very secondary city. But we now hear a great deal of their cotton-factories, and of the machines, instruments, and workmen, brought from Europe here, already giving employment to thirty ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... if the stars alone held to their slow courses above a world rigid and inanimate. The Sylph lay with a slight list, her spars looking inexpressibly helpless against the sky, and, as the minutes dragged, a fine volcanic ash, like some mortal pestilence exhaled by the monster cone, settled down upon the deck, where, forward in the shadow, the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Lucy," her husband had returned. "There is nothing worse than war, unless it be a pestilence. I, too, ...
— On the Trail of Pontiac • Edward Stratemeyer
... the most notable instances of the destruction due to war, pestilence and famine. Sometimes Nature lends a hand, as in the following ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XII, Jan. 3, 1891 • Various
... once bankrupt; all papers, records, and accounts would from that moment be lost. Government being unable to collect the taxes, and failing to maintain its authority, the hand of violence and rapine would go uncontrolled. In every large town famine would be proclaimed, pestilence and death following in its train." {240a} Great allowance should be made for a first work, and I admit that much interesting matter is found in Mr. Darwin's journal; still, it was hardly to be expected that the writer who ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... her weary prow That plunges in a rude and ravenous sea. Earth's buds are nipped, withering the germs within, Our cattle lose their increase, and our wives Have fruitless travail; and that scourge from Heaven, The fiery Pestilence abhorred of men, Descending on our people with dire stroke Lays waste the Home of Cadmus, while dark Death Wins ample tribute of laments and groans. We kneel, then, at thy hearth; not likening thee Unto the gods, I nor these children here, ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... pleasure! Short days, sharp days, long nights come on apace: Ah! who shall hide us from the winter's face? Cold doth increase, the sickness will not cease, And here we lie, God knows, with little ease. From winter, plague, and pestilence, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... of Pennsylvania and of Virginia proper suffered much, Kentucky suffered more. The murderous inroads of the Indians at about the close of the Revolutionary war caused a mortality such as could not be paralleled save in a community struck down by some awful pestilence; and though from thence on our affairs mended, yet for many years the most common form of death was death at the hands of the Indians. A resident in Kentucky, writing to a friend, dwelt on the need of a system of vestries to take care of the orphans, who, as things were, were left solely ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... means of providing for their future wants was interrupted by the necessity of taking up arms to defend themselves against the neighbouring savages. Fortunately for the colonists, the natives had been so wasted by pestilence, the preceding year, that they were easily subdued, and compelled to accept ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... sun! thou canst not wake, In this pure air, the plague that walks unseen. The maize-leaf and the maple-bough but take, From thy strong heats, a deeper, glossier green. The mountain wind, that faints not in thy ray, Sweeps the blue steams of pestilence away. ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... is known of the strength of Philip's confederated tribes. Pestilence and war had depopulated New England previous to the arrival of the Pilgrims. In 1675 the Pokanokets and Narragansets were the most powerful, and together mustered three or four thousand warriors. Philip was sachem ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... consuming pestilence of gaming claim more victims than in the Ghetto. The ravages of drink and debauchery are slight indeed; but the tortuous streets can show too many a humble home haunted by the spectres of ruin and misery which stalked across the threshold ...
— A Ghetto Violet - From "Christian and Leah" • Leopold Kompert
... regions, from diseases induced by strange climates, or oftener by criminal indulgence; and many who survive, lying in prison for crimes, or preferring their vagabond life to the decent restraints of home. Many who do return are worse than lost to their people; coming only to spread a moral pestilence, being thoroughly demoralized; recklessly squandering their ill-gotten treasures till hunger drives them off again to beg. Happily they are now shut out of Russia by the government, and they have little hope from England. But Germany is still ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... of the facts Oedipus was very happy and reigned in great power and glory; but when pestilence fell upon the land and he discovered the truth of the almost forgotten oracle, he was very miserable, and in the madness of grief put ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... what god the fatal strife provoked Jove's and Latona's son; he filled with wrath Against the King, with deadly pestilence The Camp afflicted—and the people died For Chryses' sake, his priest, whom Atreus' ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... creation. Love in the family is the one thing needful to regenerate the earth and cause the wilderness to become as Eden and the desert to blossom as the rose. Reversed, love and discord have broken more hearts, caused more sorrow, estrangement, and downright death than war, pestilence, and all other causes combined. It palsies energy and ambition, engenders gloom and despair, and transforms manhood into an icicle. Statistics prove that the married live longer, on the average, by several years than the unmarried, a most satisfactory proof that the married ...
— Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading • Various
... Troops at the Presidio and Fort Mason Under Command of General Funston Bring Order Out of Chaos and Save City from Pestilence—San Francisco Said "Thank God for the Boys in Blue"—Stricken City Patrolled by ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... happy. He had no aim, no motive. The zest with which he read the papers when he was a merchant, he had lost now he had ceased to be engaged in commerce. A storm, a fleet, a pestilence along the Mediterranean shores, was full of interest to him before, because he had investments there. Now, they were of no consequence to him. The views and aims of government were watched by him before with searching scrutiny, because his destiny was bound up with theirs. The parliamentary debates ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... sickening, stifling, suffocating. It is hot and has a metallic flavor; and it flies from the hot steel teeth of the saws, as pestilence from the hot ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... through the window near his cot at the trickle of river running by in the sands, at the straggling milk-bush of the Karoo beyond. He knew what the Karoo was now, even if he had not seen a Boer roll over like a rabbit, or heard the whine of flying bullets. This pestilence had sneaked on him before he had smelled powder. A thirsty day and a rash drink, or perhaps a tainted fruit—who knew? Not he, who had not even strength left to grudge the evil thing its victory—just enough to know that there were many lying here with him, that he was sore with frenzied dreaming; ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... a moment from doing the work of the gods, from hearing the prayers of men or sending here the Pestilence or there Mercy, They would speak awhile with one another of the olden years saying, "Rememberest thou not Sardathrion?" and another would answer "Ah! Sardathrion, and all Sardathrion's mist-draped marble lawns whereon we walk ...
— Time and the Gods • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... was a dense slough of stagnant misery, squalor, famine, loathsome disease, and dull despair, such as the worst slums of London, Paris, or Liverpool know nothing of. When we hear of the mortality among the townsmen during the periodical outbreaks of pestilence or famine, horror suggests that we should dismiss as incredible such stories as the imagination shrinks from dwelling on. What greatly added to the dreary wretchedness of the lower order in the towns was the fact that the ever-increasing ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp |
