"Pestilential" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for a short time shaken out of its lethargy by a voice that would be heard, when The Bitter Cry of Outcast London was published. "Few who will read these pages have any conception of what these pestilential human rookeries are, where tens of thousands are crowded together amid horrors which call to mind what we have heard of the middle passage of the slave-ship. To go into them you have to penetrate courts reeking with poisonous malodorous gases arising from ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... November. I am glad you, on your parts, repose till your journey commences, and go not into sultry crowded lodgings at the Ascension. I was at Venice in summer, and thought airing on stinking ditches pestilential, after enjoying the delicious nights on the Ponte di Trinit'a at Florence, in a linen night-gown and a straw hat, with improvisatori. and music, and the coffee-houses open with ices—at least, such were ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... because it is so true. However, when he began to lay on with such rhetoric as "the treasures of the nation lavished in wasteful thoughtlessness,"—"thousands of our troops sacrificed wantonly in pestilential swamps of Walcheren," and gave the details we know so well, Ministers wriggled a good one, though 'twas no news to 'em. Castlereagh kept on starting forward as if he were going to jump up and interrupt, taking the strictures entirely ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... upon my garments the blood of this great multitude of strangled souls of my brothers. The voice of their blood cried out against me from the ground. Every stone of the reeking pavements, every brick of the pestilential rookeries, found a tongue and called after me as I fled: What hast thou done ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... her face in her hands again, and, rocking herself to and fro in an agony of despair, gave herself vip to a paroxysm of utter misery. This was too, too terrible. To think of eighteen hours in that gloom and suspense; and then to die at last, gasping hard for breath, in the poisonous air of that pestilential tunnel. ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... excessive dampness of the climate on The Coast, as the littoral of the African shore 'twixt the Niger and the Senegal Rivers is invariably referred to by the case-hardened white men who have fought against the pestilential climate and won. ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... not a step of progress had been made, and he was bold enough to express his opinion that it would be far more sensible on the part of his Highness, after such deeds of valour, to withdraw his diminished forces out of the freezing and pestilential swamps before Ostend and go into comfortable winter-quarters at Ghent or Bruges. Enough had been done for glory, and it must certainly now be manifest that he had no chance of taking ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... confesses himself an idealist—that is, one to whom ideas are not images or opinions, but the avenues of life. They garner up happiness and they store the harvest of pain; they make the "majestical roof fretted with golden fire" and the "pestilential cloud." The basis on which Hamlet's happiness had rested had been suddenly removed, and with the sanctity of the past the promise of the future had disappeared; the sky and the earth. He could ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... which the humors are consumed. This variety bears the name of pustula. A fourth form is called lenticula. This latter form occurs sometimes with fever, like synocha, sometimes without fever, and it arises from pestilential air or corrupt food, or from sitting near a patient suffering from the disease, the exhalations ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson
... South, should devise some means, by which the end might be accomplished at some future day. The question now presents itself to every friend of humanity—to every philanthropist; is there no remedy for these evils, or must we groan under their pestilential influence forever? ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... with black soot, the four walls garnished with spider-webs, and the floor paved with mortar. On the eastern wall hangs a large sheet of paper with the inscription, 'Hence blows the breath of life', which not many visitors will believe, because, instead of a quickening breath, pestilential odors enter by the window and offend the nostrils of those whose olfactory nerve has not lost all sensitiveness.... On the opposite wall, to the west, appear the words, 'A memorial unto the destruction of the Temple'. To this day I do not know what there was to commemorate ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... cork toggles, were spread out on the sand, and among them some young roosters were pecking about or grooming their shiny feathers, all agleam with a metallic rainbow luster. Along the drain from the Gas House a number of women on hands and knees were scrubbing clothes or washing dishes in a pestilential water that stained the stones on its edges black. Here was the frame of a new boat about which some carpenters were pounding, and from a distance the skeleton of unpainted timber looked like the remains of some prehistoric saurian. Across the drain, some rope-walkers, hanks of hemp ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Kali, patron demon of Kali Ghatta, was hovering above them in the pestilential air as the carriage swiftly rolled along the superb streets of the metropolis born of Governor Charnock's settlement in sixteen eighty-six. The gift of an Emperor of Delhi to the ambitious English, Fort William had grown to be an octopus of modern splendor. ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... he can not. I became very angry when I was there, both with her ladyship and that pestilential old clergyman, and told them both pretty much what I thought. I have the comfort of knowing that I have two ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... her to think of his comfort. The thought of her in his arms dancing set his heart to rioting. He was singing as he dressed, and as he rode put to Grinden Hall, singing a specimen of the new musical insanity known as "jazz"—so pestilential a music that even the fiddlers ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... he lacked confidence in himself. The word charlatan clung to him like a pestilential memory. His hair was cropped close to his head. He had shaved off his moustache. He imitated almost slavishly the attire and bearing of those young men of fashion with whom he was brought into contact. Yet he was somehow conscious of a difference. The women seemed never to notice it—the men always. ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... spy), proclaims at once the morality of the governors and that of the governed: were the former just, and the latter good, this mass of vileness would never be employed; or, if employed, wickedness would expire for want of fuel, and the hydra of tyranny perish by its own pestilential breath. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... second-rate ship like the Ariadne carried eighteen midshipmen; and as six lieutenants were appointed from them, only twelve remained. From these twelve, in the dingy after-cockpit, where the superficial area was not more than twelve square feet; where the air was foul, and the bilges reeked with a pestilential stench; where the purser's store-room near gave out the smell of rancid butter and poisonous cheese; where the musty taint of old ropes came to them, there was a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... are without doubt very proper to animate and raise the almost extinguished Strength of these poor sick Persons; nevertheless we have with Grief seen almost all of them perish on a sudden, which presently confirmed us in the Opinion generally received, that the Malignity of the pestilential Ferment is of a Force superior to all Remedies; but as we have also seen them succeed in some particular Cases, there is Room to presume, and one is but too much convinced of it by fatal Experience, that the Desertion and Inactivity of the ...
— A Succinct Account of the Plague at Marseilles - Its Symptoms and the Methods and Medicines Used for Curing It • Francois Chicoyneau
... wandering about the streets once more. They were shrouded in the fog which made the night heavy, opaque, and nauseous. It was like a pestilential rock dropped on earth. It could be seen swirling past the gas-lights, which it seemed to put out at intervals. The pavement was as slippery as on a frosty night after a rain, and all sorts of evil smells seemed to come up from the bowels of the houses—the stench ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... further reason: We still believe in these piracies; we believe they pay and that we may get our turn at some "swag" to-morrow. France is envied for her possession of Morocco; Germany for her increased authority over some pestilential African swamps. But when we realize that in these international burglaries there is no "swag," that the whole thing is an illusion, that there are huge costs but no reward, we shall be on the road to a better tradition, which, while it may not give us international policing, may do ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... be propagated; also that heat in the air, or heat of weather, as we ordinarily call it, makes bodies relax and faint, exhausts the spirits, opens the pores, and makes us more apt to receive infection or any evil influence, be it from noxious, pestilential vapors, or any other thing in the air; but that the heat of fire, and especially of coal fires, kept in our houses or near us, had quite a different operation, the heat being not of the same kind, but quick and fierce, ...
— History of the Plague in London • Daniel Defoe
... with what increased zeal new candidates for African discovery come forward the moment that the death of any fresh victim to this pestilential country is announced. To the list of those who have already fallen, may be added young Park, the son of the late enterprising Mungo Park, and a midshipman of his majesty's ship Sybille. He went out in this ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... the bridge was a sight in itself, crowded with carriages and waggons all filled with the richer folks and their goods, hastening to the pleasant regions of Surrey to forget their fears and escape the pestilential atmosphere of ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... intonation. Ah! had they seen my soul. But my eyes were half closed like the crocodile's, yet never losing sight of the two I was uniting in sight of God and man. The Devil too was there. He turned the blessings my lips uttered into blighting curses, that fell on the happy couple like pestilential rain! ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... vessels will find it more to their advantage to anchor in Maidstone Bay, and carry on their trade with their tenders only, than to take their vessels up the river, where the long period occupied in procuring their cargoes, affords time for the men to imbibe the pestilential disorders of the climate, frequently occasioning the sacrifice of ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... and a limitless admiration for her missionary husband,—a large, ungainly man, with the manners of a shy schoolboy, and the wrapt gaze of a seer; a man who, in an age of fanaticism, would have walked smiling to the rack. As it was, he walked with no less equanimity through the pestilential mazes of the city and bazaar. For although in this age of tolerance run to seed, a man is not called upon to die for his beliefs, he is occasionally called upon to live for them; which is not necessarily the easier of the two. But up to his lights Henry Peters ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... cornette of our splendid sisters of charity.... You will excuse me for cutting you short before coming to the red, for my unaided memory here suffices me: the red blood of my wounds flowing and clotting on the frozen mud of Argonne that terrible morning in December, 1914; the red mud of pestilential slaughter-houses; the shattered heads of dead comrades; mangled stumps irrigated with peroxide solution so that the living corruption was half hidden by bloodstained foam; red visions glimpsed everywhere in these ghastly and tragical days, ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... Marseilles again to be drenched with the life-blood of their dwellers, poured out as freely as water and as fruitlessly? Are we all again, for full ten years, to toil, strive, struggle and suffer; to be hunted down like the vilest criminals, and, like criminals, plunged into the most pestilential dungeons; to be stripped like slaves of our hard-won earnings, and to be deprived of the most humble franchises of men claiming at all to be free; to be treated with scorn and contumely, and to be debarred the exercise ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... profound."—Bacon. Dign. and Adv. of Learn. book ii. What Lord Bacon desired for the mere gratification of scientific curiosity, the welfare of mankind now imperiously demands. Shallow systems of metaphysics have given birth to a brood of abominable and pestilential paradoxes, which nothing but a more profound philosophy can destroy. However we may, perhaps, lament the necessity of discussions which may shake the habitual reverence of some men for those rules which it is the chief interest of all men to practise, we have now no choice left. We must either ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... late at the vineyard of Cardinal Corneto, enjoying the treacherous cool of the evening, breathing the death that was omnipresent in Rome that summer, the pestilential fever which had smitten Cardinal Giovanni Borgia (Seniore) on the 1st of that month, and of which men were dying every day in the most ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... again. But thy years, O Lord, are everlasting, and thy counsels like the great deep. O, stamp this truth on our hearts, and it shall cure our impatience. How long Divine Wisdom shall permit the raging waves of this pestilential heresy of the arch-deceiver, the licentious Luther, to beat against His church, threatening as with the jaws of hell to devour her, it is not for man to know; but we do know that they cannot prevail, for she is founded on a rock, and bought with a great ransom, ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... am not purposing to describe them. By good fortune I had not read too much about them, and therefore was able to get a natural and rational focus upon them, with the result that they thrilled, blessed, and exalted me. But if I had previously overheated my imagination by drinking too much pestilential literary hot Scotch, I should have suffered disappointment ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of fun of things that honestly were none of My blanked business—and I knew that it was true. At the shameless subway smoker I have been a ceaseless joker—— For that nuisance daily gets me in a huff— But the one that makes me maddest is that pestilential faddist Who is carrying his ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... black crape, and being mixed with a breed of renegadoes, are said to be many of them fair and handsome. This city was besieged in 1270, by Lewis (sic) king of France, who died under the walls of it, of a pestilential fever. After his death, Philip, his son, and our prince Edward, son of Henry III. raised the siege on honourable terms. It remained under its natural African kings, till betrayed into the hands of Barbarossa, admiral of Solyman the Magnificent. The emperor ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... you have never even heard the name; but you will very soon hear it often enough! It is a pestilential disease that is rather harmless where it originated, but when it takes hold of a strange region it becomes a deadly pestilence—as in Paris, where a special hospital has been established for patients with the disease. It was in this hospital I found ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... daresay is an unconscious mesmeriser. The other day our poor Maohn was terrified by a communication from Ali Bey (Moudir of Keneh) to the effect that he had heard from Alexandria that someone had reported that the dead cattle had lain about the streets of Luxor and that the place was pestilential. The British mind at once suggested a counter-statement, to be signed by the most respectable inhabitants. So the Cadi drew it up, and came and read it to me, and took my deposition and witnessed my signature, and ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... good men, which penetrated every shire and every parish, than by the distant reports of the loose behaviour of Charles II. Servility, meanness, venality, time-serving, and a disbelief in virtue diffused 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 ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... sensible," cried the Boy, getting up, "I'm going off home. No, I can't stop for sonnets; my mother's sitting up. I'll look you up to-morrow, sometime or other, and do for goodness' sake try and realize that you're a pestilential scourge, or you'll find yourself in ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... physicians, by their outward demeanour, seemed to be unbelievers; but at the same time, they everywhere insinuated, that there might be a pestilential malignancy in the air, occasioned by the comet, which might be armed against by proper and timely medicines. This caution had but little effect; for as the time approached, the Christian resignation of the people increased, and most of them (which was never ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... steadily forward, and then, advancing at a double, the foes, scared by the onslaught, gave way, and fled at the top of their speed. The whole force now pushed forward, and without further opposition crossed the pestilential swamp which surrounds Coomassie, and entered ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... conventions! I shall sleep here by your bed, on this couch. If you feel worse, call me. Now, good-night; and don't open your lips again." She drew the couch close to the bed, and, shading the lamp, threw her weary frame down to rest; ere long she slept. The pestilential storm had spent its fury. Daily the number of deaths diminished; gradually the pall of silence and desolation which had hung over the city vanished. The streets resumed their usual busy aspect, and the hum of life went forward once more. At length fugitive families ventured home again; and ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... mighty intellect has not yet comprehended the philosophy of religion. Oratorically you soar like the condor when its shadow falls upon the highest peaks of the Andes, but logically you grope among the pestilential shadows of an intellectual Dismal Swamp, ever mistaking shadow for substance. You are frittering away your mighty intellectual strength with the idiosyncrasies of creeds and the clumsy detail of cults, instead of considering ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Herdo'nia, Canu'sium, Ba'rium, and Brundu'sium. Between Fo'rum Ap'pii and Terraci'na lie the celebrated Pomptine marshes, formed by the overflowing of some small streams. In the flourishing ages of Roman history these pestilential marshes did not exist, or were confined to a very limited space; but from the decline of the Roman empire, the waters gradually encroached, until the successful exertions made by the Pontiffs in modern times to arrest their baleful progress. Before the drainage of Pope Sixtus, the marshes ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... Children are pestilential little animals with which we have to cope under a bewildering variety of conditions. Especially when childish sorrows overwhelm them are we put to our wits' end. We exhaust our paltry store of consolation; and then beat them, sobbing, to sleep. Then we grovel in the dust ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... fearful of this new and unexplainable activity of Hope Georgia, slowly departed in search of Senator Langdon to make a last desperate attempt to prevent him from meeting this pestilential secretary that was—and ...
— A Gentleman from Mississippi • Thomas A. Wise
... duty, all the pride and allurements of literary distinction, along with friends, home, the safety and happiness of civilized society, that she might take up the cross, and carry it, an offering of salvation, to the benighted Heathen of Asia, even in the depths of their own far and pestilential climates. ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... very strong big door: an iron bar kept it closed. Nibet raised it with Cranajour's help. Through the door the two men passed into a long dark passage, swept by a sharp rush of air. The floor of it was paved, and at the side of it flowed a pestilential stream, carrying along in its slow-moving water a quantity of miscellaneous filth: it was ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... sound Of thunder roars among the rocks below. There, black as night, an awful cave they show, The gorge of Dis. Dread Acheron from beneath Bursts in a whirlpool, with its waves of woe, And jaws that gape with pestilential death. There plunged the hateful Fiend, and earth and air ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... punishment. In the middle passage, they were even stowed away in the smallest compass possible, like the slaves of Africa, while the best places were assigned to the malefactors; magistrates, members of the cortes, and other reputable persons occupied the most deadly and pestilential berths. Out of respect for their former situation in life, and pity for their present sufferings, they were for some time spared the fatigues of hard labours; but the superintendent soon received orders to discontinue this lenity. Nor were the political prisoners confined in the dungeons at ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... attendant toil, And draws his household round their evening fire, And tells the ofttold tales that never tire; Or, where the town's blue turrets dimly rise, And manufacture taints the ambient skies, The pale mechanic leaves the labouring loom, The air-pent hold, the pestilential room, And rushes out, impatient to begin The stated course of customary sin: Now, now my solitary way I bend Where solemn groves in awful state impend: And cliffs, that boldly rise above the plain, Bespeak, bless'd Clifton! thy sublime domain. Here lonely wandering o'er the sylvan ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... "the allies pledged themselves, should the negotiations not result in a final understanding, to vacate the territory occupied by them, and to return on the road to Vera Cruz to a point beyond the Chiquihuite, near Paso Ancho,"* i.e., in the pestilential coast region. ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... the boastful professions of his whole life, to desert the royal cause, to join with the Wildmans and Fergusons, nay, to propose that the King should be sent a prisoner to a foreign land and immured in a fortress begirt by pestilential marshes. The lure which had produced this strange transformation was the Viceroyalty of Ireland. Soon, however, it appeared that the proselyte had little chance of obtaining the splendid prize on which his heart was set. He found that others were consulted on Irish affairs. His advice ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... wickedness, which, if we did not practise, others would commit. But suppose, for the sake of argument, that they were to take it up. What good would it do them? What advantages, for instance, would they derive from this pestilential commerce to their marine? Should not we, on the other hand, be benefited by this change? Would they not be obliged to come to us, in consequence of the cheapness of our manufactures, for what they wanted for the African market? But he would not calumniate the French nation so much as to suppose that ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... set out, he saw three of the men who had been put under his orders die before his eyes, after a few hours' illness, and amid atrocious convulsions. They had the cholera. During the next four months, seven succumbed to fevers which they had contracted in these pestilential swamps. And towards the end of the expedition, when the work was nearly done, the survivors were so emaciated, that they had hardly strength enough to hold themselves up. Daniel alone had not yet ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... pestilential son of a pontry-maid!' screeched his lordship, as Brilliant ran yelping away from under Sponge's horse's feet. 'Sing out. Jack! sing out!' gasped ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... were built, and a new hostile town arose all around Ptolemais. In spite of this the winter brought innumerable hardships. In that small space more than a hundred thousand men were crowded together, with insufficient shelter, and uncertain supplies of wretched food; pestilential diseases soon broke out, which swept away thousands, and were intensified by the exhalations from the heaps of dead. Saladin retreated from their deadly vicinity to more airy quarters on the adjacent hills; his troops also suffered from the severe weather, but were far ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... the Baltimore cars was a separate apartment for women. It was of comfortable dimensions, and without a stove; and here I betook myself with my children, escaping from the pestilential atmosphere of the other compartment, and performing our journey with ease enough. My only trial here was one which I have to encounter in whatever direction I travel in America, and which, though apparently a trivial ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... forget the rules of honorable warfare, it's because my memory has been corrupted by the vileness of those Outcasts who, in their ego-mania, blaspheme the Almighty God by claiming kinship with Him. I wish you and I could go over there and clean up that pestilential Prussian herd! By gad, sir, they've the hoof and mouth disease, each confounded one of them! Whenever I think of them I get rush of ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... the minuets, the benches were removed to make way for the country-dances; and the multitude rising at once, the whole atmosphere was put in commotion. Then, all of a sudden, came rushing upon me an Egyptian gale, so impregnated with pestilential vapours, that my nerves were overpowered, and I dropt senseless ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... Quetzalcoatl, and when they had gathered together, he fell upon them and slew them with a hoe. Disguised with Huitzilopochtli, he irritated the people until they stoned the brother gods to death, and from the corrupting bodies spread a pestilential odor, to which crowds of the Toltecs fell victims. He turned the thought of thousands into madness, so that they voluntarily offered themselves to be sacrificed. By his spells all articles of food soured, and many ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... to Lord Littimer and tell him where we found it. And then we shall be rid of one of the most pestilential rascals the world has ever seen. When you get back to Brighton I want you to tell ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... into the slums of our great cities, or to the pestilential East, and there observe the survival of the fittest, undisturbed by human knowledge or human pity," recommended ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... expedition. He knew that such a journey would be a series of terrible hardships for Nell and full of new dangers, but he realized that they could not remain all their lives on Mount Linde and it was necessary to start soon on the journey. The time, after the rainy season, when water covers the pestilential swamps, and is to be found everywhere, was the most suitable for the purpose. The heat could not yet be felt on the high table-land; the nights were so cool still that it was necessary to be well covered. But in the jungle below it was considerably hotter, ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... labourer, when he ceased to be profitable as a bondsman: and that day will arrive here also, as surely as that the sun shines on Louisiana; and the lower valley of the Mississippi will yet be peopled by a free and hardy race, born on the soil made each year more fruitful and less pestilential, until it shall rival the valleys of the Ganges or the Nile, if not in the splendour of art, at least in the more solid and enduring possessions,—education, intelligence, and freedom; for only whilst so sustained can the ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... fields. Through this simple act, the entire social community will experience a diminution of misery and an augmentation of health. At the present hour, the radiation of diseases from Paris extends to fifty leagues around the Louvre, taken as the hub of this pestilential wheel. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... should be inclined to recommend the cutting down of the jungle in preference to the cutting up of the serpents; and I have little doubt that, were parts of the great forest cleared, and wide roads cut through it, it would cease to be so pestilential a locality as it is at present. In case of a war, there would be no difficulty, even now, in our troops possessing themselves of the whole territory to the foot of the Cheriagotty hills in the cold season; but as we should have to maintain some position ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... was a pestilential spirit of gossip. There was no lying scandal, there was no malicious whisper, that did not thrive with rank luxuriance in that mean atmosphere, which, at the same time, starved up every great and high-minded wish. There was no circumstance so minute ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... de fiance, of noble firmness, yet there are many expressions which betray "resentment and contempt." "Children of Satan, worshippers of Devils," is their common appellation of the heathen. One of them calls the judge another, one curses, and declares that he will curse the Emperors, as pestilential and bloodthirsty tyrants, whom God will soon visit in his wrath. On the other hand, though at first they speak the milder language of persuasion, the cold barbarity of the judges and officers might surely have called forth one sentence of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... they scan his face, and ask him what they are to do; and let him only feel angry or disgusted with the wordy nonsense, and just make one sign, or raise one finger, and 1200—aye, 2000 men would in a trice surround him, and send the orator and all his staff to preach their pestilential doctrines under the turf, and this without more ceremony and remorse than if they were so many mad dogs. Poor fools! who think it possible to change a people in a few weeks, and imagine that a fine ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... fields, inexperienced in nuptial loves, and hitherto unripe for a brisk husband. You are able to draw after your tigers and attendant woods, and to retard rapid rivers. To your blandishments the enormous porter of the [infernal] palace yielded, though a hundred serpents fortify his head, and a pestilential steam and an infectious poison issue from his triple-tongued mouth. Moreover, Ixion and Tityus smiled with a reluctant aspect: while you soothe the daughters of Danaus with your delightful harmony, their ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... of the gates of the daughters of Belial, on the posterior side of the city of Perdition, and I could there perceive, that the three gates of Perdition contracted into one on the hinder side, and opened into the same place—a place foggy, cold, and pestilential, replete with an unwholesome vapour, and clouds, lowering and terrible. "Pray, sir," said I, "what dungeon of a place is this?" "The chambers of Death," said Sleep. I had scarcely time to enquire, before I heard some people crying, some screaming, some groaning, some talking deliriously, some ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... When a pestilential disease breaks out in the city, the plainness and urgency of the case compel all to see in the sickness of one the danger of all. Wants and discomforts, which charity had been too cold to attend to, now considered as sources of contagion, are administered to with a ready alacrity. The law ...
— The Growth of Thought - As Affecting the Progress of Society • William Withington
... own proceedings. I got upon my dearborn, in order to leave as soon as possible the pestilential atmosphere of New Orleans; and I had just established myself amongst my goods and chattels, when Caesar came running up in great exultation, with a new cloak which he had been so lucky as to find lying before the door of a deserted house in the suburb. I took ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... cause of the trouble. As soon as he was dry I fastened him up in the middle of my drawing-room, and my household, myself included, sniffed at him from all points of the compass. Then, leaving him still chained up, we went into the garden and nearly fainted from the pestilential odours borne on the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 1, 1916 • Various
... the house were intolerable. In those days I was not fastidious, and I seldom had any but the slightest intercourse with those who dwelt under the same roof, yet it happened now and then that I was driven away by human proximity which passed my endurance. In other cases I had to flee from pestilential conditions. How I escaped mortal illness in some of those places (miserably fed as I always was, and always over-working myself) is a great mystery. The worst that befell me was a slight attack of diphtheria—traceable, I imagine, to ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... Creator to bind each separate tribe or community within intelligent and well-defined limits: for, in its absence, order would be banished from the world, collision between the countless orders of creation would be perpetual, and violence would depopulate the world with more than pestilential rapidity. ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... next in Albemarle, while John Archdale, a wise and benevolent Quaker, was put in charge of all the settlements in what was North Carolina, and also those on Cooper and Ashley Rivers, in South Carolina. In the year 1696 a severe pestilential fever visited all the tribes of Indians along Pamlico Sound and destroyed nearly all of them. The Colonists, soon after this, feeling somewhat safer from Indian attacks, began to form ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore
... men as much as it does pure men and virtuous men and pious men. What man needs is familiarity with universal human nature. He needs never to separate himself from men in daily life. It is not necessary that in our houses we should bring pestilential diseases or pestilential examples, but somehow we must hold on to men if they are wicked; somehow the circulation between the top and the bottom must be carried on; somehow there must be an atoning power in the heart of every true believer of the Lord Jesus Christ who shall ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... leaving Rothiemurchus Banff was reached, and the fugitives were sheltered by a Presbyterian minister, who was a secret adherent of the Stuarts. Johnstone at once took the precaution of exchanging his laced Highland dress for that of an old labourer, 'quite ragged, and exhaling a pestilential odour,' due apparently to its having been used for many years 'when he cleaned the stables of his master.' In this unpleasant disguise, he entered the town of Banff, then garrisoned with four hundred English soldiers, and went straight to the house of a former acquaintance, ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... pressure in this direction; and the whole of Florida became part of the United States by treaty signed in 1819. The sale of Louisiana lowered the French flag on the only remaining portion of American territory that acknowledged the tricolour, except the pestilential fragment of French Guiana, on the north-east of South America, where France has had a footing since the beginning of the seventeenth century, save for a short interval (1809 to 1815) when it was taken by the British and Portuguese. But the possession has never been a profitable one, and a contemporary ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... of hundreds of bodies by the recession of the waters has already filled the air with pestilential odors. The worst is feared for the surviving population, who must breathe this poisoned atmosphere. Sharp measures prompted by sheer necessity have resulted in an almost complete subsidence of cowardly efforts to profit by the results ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... course, nightly fed by his companions, and gave them such assistance as he could at the work; but it soon became apparent that a man could not long exist in such a pestilential atmosphere. No tongue can tell how long were the days and nights the poor fellow passed among the squealing rats,—enduring the sickening air, the deathly chill, the horrible, interminable darkness. One day out ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... a protest in 1833 which aimed to show that the consequences of the use of gas were appalling. But this protest failed and in 1835 a gas-plant was founded in Philadelphia. Thus gas-lighting, which to Sir Walter Scott was a "pestilential innovation" projected by a madman, weathered its early difficulties and grew to be a mighty industry. Continued improvements and increasing output not only altered the course of civilization by increased and adequate ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... was not of an excitable temperament ordinarily, but his senses were so affected by the horrors he saw and the pestilential air he breathed that his head began to swim, and only by an especial draft upon his resolution was he able to command himself. There was a pause consequent upon his entrance, and his quick eyes made ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... hoped for, and that they could not hope for success with the force now at their disposal. Even had they been victorious, he argued, they had intended to leave their present camp, which was unhealthy at all times, and was now in the hot season becoming pestilential. The time was the beginning of autumn, and many of the Athenians were sick, while all were disheartened. Nikias, however, opposed the idea of retreat, not because he did not fear the Syracusans, but because he feared the Athenians more, and the treatment ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... quite probable that this girl will come here. It would be just like her to follow up her new admirer. Mrs. Willoughby is so hot in her advocacy of what she terms the 'New South,' that she must speak of everything which seems to favor her pestilential ideas. By birth she belongs to the Old South and the only true South, and she tries to keep in with it, but she is getting the cold ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... the first product of the decomposition of sugar, a dangerous half-way house. The twin product, carbon dioxide or carbonic acid, is a gas of slightly sour taste which gives an attractive tang and effervescence to the beer, wine, cider or champagne. That is to say, one of these twins is a pestilential fellow and the other is decidedly agreeable. Yet for several thousand years mankind took to the first and let the second for the most part escape into the air. But when the chemist appeared on the scene he discovered a way of separating the ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... obviously dangerous and reactionary—and therefore wrong—to insist upon strikes or other forms of class warfare in moments of great calamity, as, for example, during disasters like the Johnstown flood and the Messina earthquake, or amid the ravages of a pestilential plague. Marx, to whom we owe the formulation of the theory of class struggle which has guided the Socialist movement, would never have questioned this important truth; he would never have supported class separatism under conditions such as those prevailing in Russia at the end of 1905. Only ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... comforts the want of which would be intolerable to a modern footman; when farmers and shopkeepers breakfasted on loaves the very sight of which would raise a riot in a modern workhouse, when men died faster in the purest country air than they now die in the most pestilential lanes of our towns; and when men died faster in the lanes of our towns than they now die on the coast of Guinea. But we too shall, in our turn, be outstripped, and, in our turn, envied. There is constant improvement, as there also is constant discontent; and future generations ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... theory of Plato, as far as I have been able to give it a lucid explanation in the time at my disposal. I put my trust in him when he says that the cause of epilepsy is the overflowing of this pestilential humour into the head. My inquiry therefore was, I think, reasonable when I asked the woman whether her head felt heavy, her neck numb, her temples throbbing, her ears full of noises. The fact that she acknowledged these noises to be more frequent in her ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... must be removed; and it is mine and every man's duty to handle the spade and besom. But men want to work miracles; and, because the mountain does not vanish at a word, they rashly conclude it cannot be diminished. They are mistaken. Political error is a pestilential cloud; dense with mephitic and deadly vapours: but a wind has arisen in the south, that will drive it over states, kingdoms, and empires; till at last it shall be swept from the face of ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... particularly devoted to the worship of the Sun; and they were generally situated near hot springs, or else upon foul and fetid lakes, and pools of bitumen. It is, also, not uncommon to find near them mines of salt and nitre; and caverns sending forth pestilential exhalations. The Elysian plain, near the Catacombs in Egypt, stood upon the foul Charonian canal; which was so noisome, that every fetid ditch and cavern was from it called Charonian. Asia Proper comprehended little more than Phrygia, and a part of Lydia; and was bounded by the river Halys. ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... familiarity With open forms of ill, not to be shunned Where youths of all kinds meet, endangered there A mind more willing to be pure than most— Oft when the broad rich humour of a jest, Did, with its breezy force, make radiant way For pestilential vapours following— Arose within his sudden silent mind, The maiden face that smiled and blushed on him; That lady face, insphered beyond his earth, Yet visible to him as any star That shines unwavering. I cannot tell ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... through him that Palestine enjoyed its great peace and prosperity and for these gifts he was truly thankful, and though he feared he might prove tedious, still he would hope that Felix in his great clemency might allow him to say a few further words about a pestilential fellow, an agent of sedition among the Jews throughout the world, and a ringleader of the sect known as the Nazarenes: one who came to Jerusalem but to profane the Temple, and wishing, he said, to judge him for his blasphemy according to our law, we laid hands upon him, ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... free-flowing channel, dug and torn by noble force through the sour mud-swamp of one's existence, like an ever-deepening river there, it runs and flows;—draining-off the sour festering water, gradually from the root of the remotest grass-blade; making, instead of pestilential swamp, a green fruitful meadow with its clear-flowing stream. How blessed for the meadow itself, let the stream and its value be great or small! Labour is Life: from the inmost heart of the Worker rises his god-given Force, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... passions by intemperance, vitiated from childhood their moral affections, and destroyed their imaginations. Madrid is no enormous city, like Paris; over-grown, and disproportionate; sickening and bowing down, by its corrupt humours, the frame of the body politic. Nor has the pestilential philosophism of France made any progress in Spain. No flight of infidel harpies has alighted upon their ground. A Spanish understanding is a hold too strong to give way to the meagre tactics of the 'Systeme de la Nature;' or to the pellets of logic which Condillac ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... stop, for she sank deep in the mire. Hercules, Bat, and Austin, wishing to spare her the unpleasantness more than the fatigue of a passage across this marshy plain, made a litter of bamboos, on which she consented to sit. Her little Jack was placed in her arms, and they endeavored to cross that pestilential marsh ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... head round to gaze at him, all being intent on their own business. The market-place was bordered to the east and west by an extensive swamp, covered with weeds and water and frequented by wild ducks, cranes, and vultures. The house which had been provided for him was close to a morass, the pestilential exhalations of which were increased by the sewers of the houses all ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... part of God's Intention. And when two persons, man and woman, swear to be true to each other before God, so long as life shall last, and afterwards break that vow, confusion and chaos result from their perjury, and all the pestilential furies attending on a wrong deed whip them to their graves! In these times of ours, when wars and rumours of wars shake the lethargic souls of too-exultant politicians and statesmen with anxiety for themselves if not for their country, we hear every ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... become wonted to them—produce just about as much effect as would fantastic champions of hygiene who should attempt to render a marsh inhabitable by killing the mosquitoes one by one with shots from a revolver, instead of adopting as their method and their goal the draining of the pestilential marsh. ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... cost of annual upkeep has risen in their hands to the sum of fifteen million pounds, have given no thought to drainage. But the good Arabs, patiently and without murmuring, gather up their long robes, and with legs bare to the knee make their way through this already pestilential water, which must be hatching for them ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... Perkins and to their two children, Judith and Henry; and it was due to the new-comers that some one, acquainted with the language and country, should aid them through the long and tedious route from Erzroom. After a ride of thirty miles, they were unexpectedly exposed to a pestilential atmosphere at Khoy, where they spent the night. All went well with them until they had crossed the plain of Khoy, and the mountain beyond, and passed their last resting-place, when the beloved daughter showed signs of cholera. They could not rest there under the burning sun, and there was ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... long score to pay the walking boss, seized the iron starting-bar, and descended. Out from the inscrutable white forest murder breathed like a pestilential air. The two men talked about it ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... soldiers are not required to operate in great masses, but very often to fight hand to hand. Their campaigns are not fought in temperate climates and civilised countries. They are sent beyond the seas to Africa or the Indian frontier, and there, under a hot sun and in a pestilential land, they are engaged in individual combat with athletic savages. They are not ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... horrors of Indian war were let loose on the fair valleys and cities of Rohilcund. The whole country was in a blaze. More than a hundred thousand people fled from their homes to pestilential jungles, preferring famine, and fever, and the haunts of tigers, to the tyranny of him to whom an English and a Christian government had, for shameful lucre, sold their substance, and their blood, and the honor of their wives and daughters. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... wild, despairing eyes lighted on many a merry face that but a few hours before had followed him to testify to righteousness; and, mixed with theirs, the faces of his fellow-Jews, sinister with malicious glee. No brother friar droned consolation to him or held the cross to his eyes—was he not a pestilential infidel, an outcast from both worlds? The chief of the Caporioni was present. Troops surrounded the stake lest, perchance, the madman might have followers who would yet attempt a rescue. But the precautions were superfluous. Not a face that showed sympathy; ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... earth are filled with pestilential dust which once was the bones, the flesh, the bodies of great ones who sate upon thrones, deciding causes, ruling assemblies, governing armies, conquering provinces, possessing treasures, tearing down ...
— Ancient Nahuatl Poetry - Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature Number VII. • Daniel G. Brinton
... stupefaction: the monster squatted down by me on the settee, and without farther ceremony or preamble, flings his arms about my neck, and drawing me pretty forcibly towards him, obliged me to receive, in spite of my struggles to disengage from him, his pestilential kisses, which quite overcame me. Finding me then next to senseless, and unresisting, he tears off my neck handkerchief, and laid all open there, to his eyes and hands: still I endured all without flinching, till emboldened by my sufferance and silence, ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... noted, how pestilential and inhumane the cruelty of these Tyrants hath been, and how violently exercised, when as in two or three years space, they were all slain, and the Country wholly desolate and deserted, as those that have been Eye-witnesses can testifie; they ...
— A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies • Bartolome de las Casas
... been an eye-witness of the wonderful achievements of American medical science in the conquest of acute communicable and pestilential diseases in those regions of the earth where they were supposed to be impregnably entrenched, there is the strongest possible appeal in the present rapidly growing movement for the improvement of physical efficiency and the conquest of chronic diseases ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... to the pestilential fuddy-duds who do not approve of tobacco, particularly the fussy-old-maids. Personally, when I hear any of these conscientious objectors to My Lady Nicotine air their opinions, I wish that they could be placed in the trenches for a while. ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... I am a beast, a reptile, and know nothing! From the cave of my ignorance, amid the fogs of my dulness, and pestilential fumes of my political heresies, I look up to thee, as doth a toad through the iron-barred lucerne of a pestiferous dungeon, to the cloudless glory of a summer sun! Sorely sighing in bitterness of soul, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham |
