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Blight   Listen
noun
Blight  n.  
1.
Mildew; decay; anything nipping or blasting; applied as a general name to various injuries or diseases of plants, causing the whole or a part to wither, whether occasioned by insects, fungi, or atmospheric influences.
2.
The act of blighting, or the state of being blighted; a withering or mildewing, or a stoppage of growth in the whole or a part of a plant, etc.
3.
That which frustrates one's plans or withers one's hopes; that which impairs or destroys. "A blight seemed to have fallen over our fortunes."
4.
(Zool.) A downy species of aphis, or plant louse, destructive to fruit trees, infesting both the roots and branches; also applied to several other injurious insects.
5.
pl. A rashlike eruption on the human skin. (U. S.)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Blight" Quotes from Famous Books



... that lurks unseen in the shadows and hovers over the little lives of men for the working of harm, swooped down upon the camp and in a series of untoward happenings impaired its efficiency and impregnated the atmosphere with the blight ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx

... Tip answered, his eyes very blight; in his heart he sang "Glory!" And the angels in heaven sang for joy; for that night there had been laid aside a white robe and a crown ...
— Tip Lewis and His Lamp • Pansy (aka Isabella Alden)

... harsh rebuff, whereupon it subsided through hysterical levity into frigid and brittle sarcasm and gay defiance. For a while, accordingly, the feelings of the observer were deeply moved. Yet this did not make the character of Stephanie less detestable. The blight remains upon it—and always must remain—that it repels the interest of the heart. The added blight likewise rests upon it (though this is of less consequence to a spectator), that it is burdened with moral sophistry. Vicious conduct in a woman, according to Stephanie's logic, is not more culpable ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter

... for the swelling extacy of our young hearts, as those who have cradled and loved us grow proud in our successes? For myself, a life that has failed in every prestige of those that prophesied favourably—years that have followed on each other only to blight the promise that kind and well-wishing friends foretold—leave but little to dwell upon, that can be reckoned as success. And yet, some moments I have had, which half seemed to realize my early dream of ambition, and ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)

... part. It was highly admired at the time, and, amongst others, by Gray. He specially praises a passage which has often been quoted as representing Pope's highest achievement in his art. At the conclusion the goddess Dulness yawns, and a blight falls upon art, science, and philosophy. I quote the lines, which Pope himself could not repeat without emotion, and which have received the highest eulogies from ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen

... are so united That their love can never wane, Then I ween no man should blight it, Death ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka

... The 'apple-blight' of the Calvados must obviously have extended into the neighbouring department of the Eure, or at least into the great and busy arrondissement of Bernay, which gave the Monarchist candidate in September 1889 the tremendous majority of 5,550 votes in a ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... he laid his head upon a tomb, Not knowing it was Arthur's, at which sight One of her maidens told her, 'He is come,' And she went forth to meet him; yet a blight ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris

... marry Ray until I know," she had told herself over and over in great distress, "for I love him too well ever to bring any blight upon ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon

... At last came a very wet summer, and everything went wrong in the country round. The hay had hardly been got in, when the haystacks were floated bodily down to the sea by an inundation; the vines were cut to pieces with the hail; the corn was all killed by a black blight; only in the Treasure Valley, as usual, all was safe. As it had rain when there was rain nowhere else, so it had sun when there was sun nowhere else. Everybody came to buy corn at the farm, and went away pouring maledictions on the Black Brothers. They asked what they liked, and got it, ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various

... people seemed to have been of a serious cast of mind, which led to speculation, criticism, and the cultivation of the exact sciences. From Ferrara came Savonarola, the fanatical prophet who appeared during the moral blight which characterized the age of the Borgias, and Lucretia must frequently have recalled this man in whom her father, by the executioner's hand, sought to stifle the protestations of the faithful and upright against the immorality of ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius

... eight or ten villages and three or four Tokedars under a Zillahdar. The Zillahdar looks out for good lands to change for bad ones, where this is necessary, and where no objection is made by the farmer; sees that the Tokedars do their work properly; reports rain, blight, locusts, and other visitations that might injure the crop; watches all that goes on in his zillah, and makes his report to the planter whenever anything of importance happens in his particular part of the cultivation. Over all again comes ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis

... people who pass their days as do those who now live in the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf." They are free from invidious jealousies and the blight of avarice toward each other, free from doubt of the rectitude of their daughters and relieved from solicitude that the future of their sons, if they remain in the valley, will be influenced by dissipation ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan

... hillside, pleased, I must own, by the warm blight sunlight, the colour of the sea, and the smell of the aromatic herbs,—pleased, and half forgetful of the horrid heathenism that surrounded me, I heard a low wail as of an infant. I searched about, in surprise, and came on a beautiful baby, in rich swaddling bands, with a gold ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang

... patted the sleek head of the sad-eyed seal. Elsewhere she showed the father-hawk a leveret crouching in his form; she took young rabbits to the new spring grass; the fox to the fowl, the fly to the spider, the blight to the bud. Her weakly nestlings fell from tree and cliff to die, but she beheld unmoved; her weasel sucked the gray-bird's egg, yet no hand was raised against the thief, no voice comforted the screaming agony of the mother. ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts

... herein lay his own real danger. Yes, to bolt again, as he had done that time before, would be an easy way out. But its selfishness was too obvious. He could not do it. To do so would be to drag them in his train of disaster, to blight their lives and leave them under the grinding ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum

... usual blight to all such enterprises: a spy or a traitor revealed everything to Wirz. One day a guard came in, seized Baker and took him out. What was done with him I know not; we never heard of him after he ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy

... powerful and unerring movements would slow down simultaneously, as if they had been the functions of a living organism, stricken suddenly by the blight of languor; and Mr. Rout's eyes would blaze darker in his long sallow face. He was fighting this fight in a pair of carpet slippers. A short shiny jacket barely covered his loins, and his white ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad

... and that everything which she published during the forty-three years which preceded her death lowered her reputation. Yet we have no reason to think that at the time when her faculties ought to have been in their maturity they were smitten with any blight. In The Wanderer we catch now and then a gleam of her genius. Even in the Memoirs of her father there is no trace of dotage. They are very bad; but they are so, as it seems to us, not from a decay of power, but from a total perversion ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... in view of Laura's romantic nature—that only a career of gloomy grandeur and high renown would impress the maiden whom yesterday he proposed to make happy forever, but to-day to blight with regret like a "worm i' the bud." He already had a vague presentiment that such a role would often mortify his tastes and inclinations most dismally; and yet, what had he henceforth to do with pleasure? But if, after he had practiced the austerity of an anchorite, she should ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe

... herself, contemplating the beautiful slumbering queen, "oh, that grief might pass away from her like a dark cloud—that no thunderbolt burst forth from it and strike that beloved head! But I am afraid the lightning will at last blight all the blossoms of her heart. O God, give her strength, nerve her in her sufferings, as Thou hast blessed her in her happiness! She is sleeping; let her slumber be peaceful and refreshing, so that it may invigorate her mind!" Madame von Berg leaned cautiously, in order not to disturb the ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach

... during two following seasons, New South Wales suffered a serious drought, which increased in severity. Rivers were exhausted, and their beds left dry. Not only the want of rain was felt, but a withering blight, travelling in a defined current over the cultivated districts, cut off their harvests. In two years the cultivation of wheat in Van Diemen's Land increased from twenty to thirty thousand acres, and the average price of ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West

... sugar in slave countries, and a greater impetus to slavery and the slave-trade." From the same report, we also learn that the prosperity of the Mauritius, no less than that of the West India Islands, had suffered a fearful blight, in consequence of the ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... know, is blind: defects that blight The loved one's charms escape the lover's sight, Nay, pass for beauties, as Balbinus glows With admiration of his Hagna's nose. Ah, if in friendship we e'en did the same, And virtue cloaked the error with ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace

... he explained, "on my departure to-night. The cause hangs upon it. A blight on my evil luck!" he cried. "Were Colonel Myddelton at home, I should not be fleeing from my own country empty-handed. I shall be writing to him most of this day, but a spoken word is worth a ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas

... coming forces of Freedom. Rosalie Leese, the pioneer white child of California, born in 1838, at Yerba Buena, was the first of countless thousands of free-born American children. In the unpolluted West the breath of slavery shall never blight a single human existence. Old Captain Richardson and Jacob Leese, pioneers of the magic city of San Francisco, gaze upon the beautiful ranks of smiling school-children, in happy troops. They have no regrets, like the knights of slavery, to see ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage

... been sharpened to a canine pointedness by the missile which had so narrowly grazed his life. Ellis had been goaded to a pitch of high exasperation by the solicitude and attentions of his fellows. It was his emphatically expressed opinion that the whole gathering lay under a blight of superlative youthfulness. In his mind he exempted Hal, over whose silence and distraction he was secretly worried. The cause was explained when the chairman rose to close ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... One plants what one considers the best seeds, and when the little green shoots come up, it's terribly hard to make them live at all. It is only by constant care that they are made to thrive and all sorts of storms are likely to rise out of a clear sky and blight them. Some of the seeds one thought would surely grow the fastest are total disappointments, while others that one just planted to fill in, fairly astonish one by their growth, but if at the end of the freshman year the garden looks green and well cared for, it's ...
— Grace Harlowe's First Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower

... to the Teazer, some of the kroomen on board Mr Beecroft's Victoria let go her anchor, and there she lay exposed entirely to the fire of the blacks. On seeing this, Captain Lyster pulled back to her to learn what was the matter. "What has occurred now?" he asked of Mr Blight, the boatswain. "The kroomen let go the anchor without orders," he replied. "Then slip your cable, and get out of this," exclaimed Captain Lyster. "It's a chain cable, clenched to the bottom, and we can't unshackle ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston

... whispered him to condense into small compass, and drop into her tender bosom a germ of evil that would be sure to blossom darkly soon, and bear black fruit betimes. Such was his sense of power over this virgin soul, trusting him as she did, that the minister felt potent to blight all the field of innocence with but one wicked look, and develop all its opposite with but a word. So—with a mightier struggle than he had yet sustained—he held his Geneva cloak before his face, and hurried onward, making no sign of recognition, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... enabled him to carry on a propaganda of hellenization. The disappearance for three centuries of the national consciousness in Servia and Bulgaria was not the sole work of the Moslem invader; a more fatal blight to the national languages and culture were the Greek bishops and clergy who conducted their churches and schools. And if Kinglake knew nothing of Bulgaria as late as 1834 it was because every educated person in that country called himself a Greek. ...
— The Balkan Wars: 1912-1913 - Third Edition • Jacob Gould Schurman

... man be too weak to put them down, Christ is not. Though man neglect to put them down, Christ will not. If man dare not fight on the Lord's side against sin and evil, the Lord's earth will fight for Him. Storm and tempest, blight and famine, earthquakes and burning mountains, will do His work, if nothing else will. As He said Himself, if man stops praising Him, the very stones will cry out, and own Him as their King. Not that the blessed Lord ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley

... they should ever need to return fertilizers, but it was only a few years until they yearned for the fertility they had extravagantly wasted. Buildings inevitably decay and they may be destroyed by fire or storm. Orchards may be overturned by a cyclone or be destroyed by blight or by the thousand enemies of the various varieties of fruit trees. The land may be injured by washing that may require years to repair. A single storm has destroyed fields in this way that never can be restored. Noxious weeds take possession of land that can only be eradicated by infinite pains. ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott

... of that terrible discovery. It was all over now, thank Heaven. It had never been any brand or stigma to her; she had never felt any false shame over it; she had never bowed her bright head as though a blight had passed over her. She said to herself it was not her fault, she was not in the least to blame. She had believed herself in all honor to be the wife of Lord Chandos, and she could not feel that the least shadow of blame ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay

... speedy growth of this tree; because in rich soils and sheltered situations, the wood, though it thrives fast, is full of sap, and of little value; and is, likewise, very subject to ravage from the attacks of insects, and from blight. Accordingly, in Scotland, where planting is much better understood, and carried on upon an incomparably larger scale than among us, good soil and sheltered situations are appropriated to the oak, the ash, and other deciduous trees; and the larch is now generally ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... the first time how the relative position of these two women had shifted. Laura Bowman wasn't red-headed for nothing; out from under the blight of Bowman and that hateful marriage, she had already thrown off some of her physical frailness; the nervous tension showed itself now in energy. She was moving swiftly about putting to rights after my meal while she listened. But Barbara sat looking straight ahead of her; ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan

... a soothfast word, Not the true parent is the woman's womb That bears the child; she doth but nurse the seed New-sown: the male is parent; she for him, As stranger for a stranger, hoards the germ Of life; unless the god its promise blight. And proof hereof before you will I set. Birth may from fathers, without mothers, be: See at your side a witness of the same, Athena, daughter of Olympian Zeus, Never within the darkness of the womb Fostered nor fashioned, but a bud more bright Than any ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus

... of promise grew The chilling blight of separation knew. Scarce had he told his heart's unquiet case, And JANE to shun him ceas'd to mend her pace, And learnt to listen trembling as he spoke, And fondly judge his words beyond a joke; When, ...
— Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs • Robert Bloomfield

... was Kano Indara; the last of a mighty line of artists. Even in this material age his fame spread as the mists of his own land, and his name was known in barbarian countries far across the sea. Tokyo might fall under the blight of progress, but Kano would hold to the traditions of his race. To live as a true artist,—to die as one,—this was his care. He might have claimed high position in the great Art Museum recently inaugurated by the new government, and housed in an abomination of pink stucco ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa

... is a blight of the gravest character upon the local industry of the inhabitants, and it is a suicidal and unstatesmanlike policy that crushes and extinguishes all enterprise. What Englishman would submit to such a prying and humiliating position? And still it ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... by it. It holds its position by love. No publisher may say to it: "Buy my books, not those of my rival"; no scientist may forbid it to give his opponent a hearing; no religious body may dictate to it; no commercial influence may throw a blight over it. It ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick

... discredited underlay the fundamental views and principles of Puritanism. The early records of our General Court are thickly strown with appointments of Fast-Days that the people might discover the especial occasion of God's anger toward them, manifested in the blight of some expected harvest, or in a scourge upon the cattle in the field. Some among us who claim to hold unreduced or softened the old ancestral faith have been twice in late years convened in our State-House, by especial call, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various

... prodoocers wouldn't be there at all. Things is gettin' pretty tight on farms now. It means about sixteen hours hard graft a-day to make not half what a railwayman makes in eight hours. If you happen to have grapes or oranges, if they manage to escape the frost, an' hail, an' caterpillar, then the blight ketches 'em, or there's a drewth, and there ain't none; an' if there's any, there's so much that there ain't no sale for 'em; and the farmer's life I reckon ought to be stopped as gamblin', for a gambler's life ain't one bit ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin

... is judgment; But He strikes with the hands of men, And His blight would wither our manhood If we smote not ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various

... handsome incomes until about twenty years ago, when the blight, more devastating than the cotton boll weevil, came with destruction as swift as that which befell Sennacherib. I heard the story of an old plantation near Lipa, whose high-bred Castilian owner once lived in splendor, his imported horses gay in harness made of ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe

... richer and fuller life, a softer beauty. But although an intimacy greater than he and she had yet known, would seem to be enforced by this winter of isolation and leisure, she did not, for a time, see as much of him as before. A constraint, almost like a blight upon their friendship, seemed to have fallen between them ever since the night that she had danced. Seagreave did not come down to Gallito's cabin quite so frequently in the evenings, and, according to Jose, spent much time by his own fireside ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

... alone; she held, within, A second principle of Life, which might Have dawned a fair and sinless child of sin;[dz] But closed its little being without light, And went down to the grave unborn, wherein Blossom and bough lie withered with one blight; In vain the dews of Heaven descend above The bleeding flower and blasted fruit ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... his essay on "The Training of the Negro" in Century Magazine of October, 1906, said that in the large cities the Negro is being forced by competition into the most degraded and least remunerative occupations; that such occupations make them helpless to combat the blight of squalor and disease which are inevitable in these cities, and therefore many of them are being destroyed ...
— Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt • William James Edwards

... and tears. The days are gone! no more, no more, The cruel fates allow; And, though I'm hardly twenty-four, I'm not a lover now. Lady, the mist is on my sight, The chill is on my brow; My day is night, my bloom is blight— I'm not a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 288, Supplementary Number • Various

... the first-line troops, the army in battle array. Instead he saw the base camps, the non-combatant followers of the army, a great deal that was confused and sordid, very little that was glorious or fine. It might conceivably have been possible for him to curse the whole army and cast a blight upon its enterprise, when his eyes rested only on the camp-followers, the baggage trains, the mobs of cattle, the maimed and unfit men; when the fine show of the fighters was out of sight. Plainly ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham

... with the boatman. They were now, he knew, between the two Niles, which joined their waters at Khartoum. The country here had evidently been rich and prosperous before the host of the Mahdi passed like a blight over it. They halted a few miles from the river, near a ruined and deserted village. Edgar was told to watch the camels while they plucked heads of corn from the deserted fields, while the Arabs lit a fire and baked some cakes. None of these were offered to Edgar, who had to content ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty

... that Drake was stepping hastily aside, so that not even his coat sleeve might be brushed by the advancing figure of the elderly, retired judge. And before Judge Marshall had time to speak, Dundee saw that a blight had touched, at last, the solid friendship of the women; that they did not look at each other with that air of standing together whatever happened, but that their eyes, not meeting at all, became secret, ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin

... this, too. Perhaps even these hardened men and the more than hardened woman whose presence was in itself a blight, recognised heroism when they saw it; for when the lawyer, with a certain obvious reluctance, laid his hand on the bolts of the door with the remark, "This is not my work, you know; I am but following out instructions very minutely given me," the smothered growls and grunts ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green

... dove moans from home on branch in morning light, * But shakes my very frame with sorrow's killing might: No lover sigheth for his love or gladdeth heart * To meet his mate, but breeds in me redoubled blight I bear my plaint to one who has no ruth for me, * Ah me, how Love can part man's mortal frame and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... Alas! alas! Like a vapor the golden vision Shall fade and pass, And thou wilt find in thy heart again Only the blight of pain, And bitter, bitter, ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... withdrawal of the royalists from the neighborhood of the coast was merely a strategic retreat that made the occupation of the capital a more or less empty performance. This blunder and a variety of other mishaps proved destined to blight his military career. Unfortunate in the choice of his subordinates and unable to retain their confidence; accused of irresolution and even of cowardice; abandoned by Cochrane, who sailed off to Chile and left the army stranded; incapable of ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd

... it to the course once chosen, was also no indictable offence. Nor could the North on its part be taxed with crime for its "higher law fanaticism," which was simply the spirit of the age; or for seeing early what all believe now, that slavery was a blight upon the land. Much as was "nominated in the bond" of the Constitution, neither law nor equity forbade free States to increase the more rapidly in numbers, wealth, and other elements of prosperity; and northern congressmen must have been other than human, if, seeing this increase and being in the ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews

... gratefully for the destitute and the dying. It was expected, and justly too, that the land of apostolic revivals would be the first to imitate the apostles in the work of saving the heathen. A failure to do this may bring a blight upon the churches, if it has not ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble

... others; for since the virtue of holiness or taboo is, so to say, a powerful explosive which the smallest touch may detonate, it is necessary in the interest of the general safety to keep it within narrow bounds, lest breaking out it should blast, blight, and destroy whatever it comes into ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer

... and the master of the owls. I talk to the wild cat in the hush. I call Tikoloshe (a water spirit) out of the river in the night-time and ask him questions. I make sickness do my bidding on men and cattle. I drive it away when I like. I can bring blight to the crops, and stop the milk of cows. I can, by my magic medicines, find out the wicked ones who do these things. I alone can look upon Icanti (a fabulous serpent) and not die. I know the mountain where Impandulu ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully

... his head gravely: "Not weeks, but years, of a different life are needed. You must give up the laboratory altogether if you want to live. Remember your mother's fate and your father's early death—think of the deadly blight that fell so soon upon the rare beauty of your sister. Some day you will realize your danger: realize it now, in time. Close your laboratory, lock up your library, say adieu to Paris, and lead the life of a traveler, an Arab, a Tartar. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various

... comp. Arc. 48-53, Ham. iii. 4. 64, "Here is your husband; Like a mildew'd ear Blasting his wholesome brother." A mildew blast is one giving rise to that kind of blight called mildew (A.S. meledeaw, honey-dew), it being supposed that the prevalence of dry east winds was ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton

... knowledge exert an acidulating influence upon female temper, or produce an ossifying effect on female hearts? Is ignorance an inevitable concomitant of refinement and delicacy? Does the knowledge of Greek and Latin cast a blight over the flower-garden, or a mildew in the pantry and linen closet; or do the classics possess the power of curdling all the milk of human-kindness, all the streams of tender sympathy in a woman's nature, as rennet coagulates ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... Spaniards found in Cuba and St. Domingo had withered before them as if struck by a blight. Many died under the lash of the Spanish overseers; many, perhaps the most, from the mysterious causes which have made the presence of civilisation so fatal to the Red Indian, the Australian, and the Maori. It is with men as it is with animals. The races which consent to be domesticated ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude

... vitiated as the breath of a toad! The very saints could not be revivified from such a poison, much less our poor selves, sir, who strive a lifetime constructing character for those damned polluters to blight with their graveyard whisperings! I detest it, sir! The stench of it is repulsive to honest men and gentle women! But come," he added more genially, "before we ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris

... three rooms were devoted exclusively to "books printed in the Fifteenth Century: of which they possessed about fifteen hundred." This intelligence recruited my spirits; and I began to look around with eagerness. But alas! although the crop was plentiful, a deadly blight had prevailed. In other words, there was number without choice: quantity rather than quality. Yet I will not be ill-natured; for, on reaching the third of these rooms, and the last in the suite, Monsieur Thiebaut placed before me the ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... of our doom and our dread Ye were cruel and callous. Grim Death with our fighters ye fed Through the jaws of your gallows. But a blasting and blight was the fee For which ye had bartered them. And we smite with the sword that from ye We had gained when ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard

... yourselves, oh! men of the Sagalie Tyee, or I shall blight you with my evil eye. Care for yourselves and do not follow me." On and on she danced through the thickest of the wilderness, on and on they followed until they reached the very heart of the seagirt neck of land we ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson

... East, Over a continent of blight, Like a maleficent Influence released From the most squalid cellarage of hell, The Wind-Fiend, the abominable - The Hangman Wind that tortures temper and light - Comes slouching, sullen and obscene, Hard on the skirts of the embittered night; And in a cloud unclean Of excremental ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley

... Has the withering blight known as Bolshevism any such redeeming traits to its credit account? The consensus of opinion down to the present moment gives an emphatic, if summary, answer in the negative. Every region over which it swept is blocked with heaps of unsightly ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon

... She had up till that moment, with the instinctive aversion which mourners only know, and which we have formerly alluded to in the case of Martha, been shrinking from facing the gladsome light of heaven, caring not to look abroad on the blight of an altered world. But the few words her sister uttered, and which the other auditors manifestly had not comprehended, all at once rouse her from her seat of pensive sadness, and her shadow is seen hurrying by the darkened ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff

... roof with Tai-yue in dowager lady Chia's suite of rooms, he naturally became comparatively more friendly with her than with his other cousins; and this friendliness led to greater intimacy and this intimacy once established, rendered unavoidable the occurrence of the blight of ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... blight of sorrow's smart, Her woman's heart oft faileth, She moaneth not but with fond wiles Her pain in smiles she veileth; So sings she through the live-long night, Till hope's bright light appeareth, Which glittering like a radiant eye, Through ...
— Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century • Edmund O. Jones

... sometimes fostering, sometimes crushing each other. Out of the remains of the dead arises a new generation, with an increase of vital impulse. It seems as though the ice-crowned Andes looked down with envy on the luxuriant vegetation of the forests, and sought to blight it by sending down cold, nightly winds. The low temperature of the night counteracts that extreme development which the humidity of the soil and the great heat of the day promote. But what the vegetation loses in upward growth it gains in superficial extension, and thereby ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi

... sort, together with new power sources to replace the fossil fuels on which factory, home, and vehicle now depend, might also all but eliminate the growing smog and air-pollution blight. ...
— The Practical Values of Space Exploration • Committee on Science and Astronautics

... what can there have been, worth speaking of, to break? Ours was everything a relation could be, filled to the brim with the wine of consciousness; and if it was to have no meaning, no better meaning than that such a creature as you could breathe upon it, at your hour, for blight, why was I myself dealt with all for deception? why condemned after a couple of short years to find the golden flame—oh, the golden flame!—a mere handful of black ashes?" Our young woman so yielded, at moments, to what was ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James

... perceive the same sad evidences of neglect, public grounds unattended, roads uncared for, mills and other public works crumbling into ruin. These palpable signs of decay most strongly impress him. A blight seems to have come over this lately fair and prosperous town. Rapidly it is becoming a 'deserted village,' a 'city ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard

... the failure of fair promise, because I took it to my heart as token of what would come to me in the budding of my years and hope. And even then, being much possessed, and full of a foolish melancholy, I felt a sad delight at being doomed to blight and loneliness; not but that I managed still (when mother was urgent upon me) to eat my share of victuals, and cuff a man for laziness, and see that a ploughshare made no leaps, and sleep of a night without dreaming. And my mother half-believing, in her fondness and affection, that what ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore

... little foxes that spoil the grapes of perfect diction, but they are very little foxes; it is the false elegance of stupid pretentiousness that is an annihilating blight which ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post

... couldn't get over was the fact that this particular blight seemed, in a tradition of self-respect, so undeserved and so arbitrary. No doubt people had a right to take the line they liked; but why should his people have liked the line of pushing and toadying and lying and cheating? What had their forefathers—all ...
— The Pupil • Henry James

... of Soil. Planting of Seeds. Budding, Grafting, and Transplanting. Training the Limbs. Attention to the Soil. Manuring. Filberts. Figs. Currants. Gooseberries. Raspberries. Strawberries. Grapes. To Preserve Fruit; Modes of Preserving Fruit-Trees. Fire Blight. Worms, 347 ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher

... not the first, the fairest of the year: For thee the Graces lead the dancing hours, And Nature's ready pencil paints the flowers: When thy short reign is past, the feverish sun The sultry tropic fears, and moves more slowly on. So may thy tender blossoms fear no blight, Nor goats with venom'd teeth thy tendrils bite, 60 As thou shalt guide my wandering feet to find The fragrant greens I seek, my ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden

... way he flipped a rosebud covered with blight, kicked off a snail which was crawling on the path; then, halfway down the path, he suddenly raised his head and gave a look at ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... mountain land in some sections of Italy is said to be completely covered with chestnut trees. In my state, the weevil is the scourge of chestnuts; I had hoped that after the chestnut blight destroyed our native chestnuts, the Chinese and Japanese chestnuts would be free from that pest. Where it came from I do not know, unless it came from the chinkapin. West Virginia has chinkapins and these, being blight resistant, apparently have kept up the supply ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various

... accomplished the evil they had set out to do, made shift to sail away. And then, just after the palms of the island had sunk from sight below the water's edge, the unspeakable had happened. The Death that was not Death had arisen from out the sea and stood before the ship, and over it, and the blight of the thing lay along the decks like mould, and the ship sweated in the terror of that which ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris

... gentleman became excessively gallant, entreated his fair visitor to remain where she was for a tiny instant until he could descend and admit her, implored her with expansive gestures not on any account to go away and blight his life. As the sweep of the arm and the shrug of the shoulders betrayed only too plainly the fact that the hospitable gentleman was very much in a state of nature, except for the lather on his face, Esther took fright and bolted out of the gate, inwardly execrating the Gallic race and their ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell

... than strange; it was impressive, interesting, pathetic. Not guessing the cause, there was nothing to remind him that experience is as to intensity, and not as to duration. Tess's passing corporeal blight had been ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy

... scarcely seventeen when the Plague swept over Kennons. That mysterious blight, rising in the orient, traveling darkly and surely unto the remotest West, laid its blackened hand upon ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee

... little detour in silence, the corners of her mouth wilting, he would have declared, had he the words, like a field flower in the hands of a picnicker. Marylin could droop that way, so suddenly and so whitely that almost a second could blight her. ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst

... the small boulders of difficulty trip them up, for they are hopelessly unpractical; they have neither strength of purpose nor fortitude, and their best-laid schemes are always frustrated at the critical moment, by either the incurable blight of vacillation, or by the determination to amplify their scheme ere it has proved successful, sacrificing probable ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs

... us leave the din, the dust, the spite, The gloom and glare of towns, the plague, the blight; Amid the forest leaves and fountain spray There is the mystic home of our delight, And through the dim wood ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang

... Lady Harman would no doubt have gone on to the slow, tentative but finally conclusive statement of the new difficulty that had arisen out of her husband's jealousy and to the discussion of the more fundamental decisions it forced upon her, if a peculiar blight had not fallen upon their conversation and robbed it at last of even an appearance ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... the waters of the Cumberland, the lair of moonshiner and feudsman. The knight is a moonshiner's son, and the heroine a beautiful girl perversely christened "The Blight." Two impetuous young Southerners fall under the spell of "The Blight's" charms and she learns what a large part jealousy and pistols have in the love making ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck

... present and the past, troubled me, and I longed to have a future—a future with hope in it. To be shut up entirely to the past and present, is abhorrent to the human mind; it is to the soul—whose life and happiness is unceasing progress—what the prison is to the body; a blight and mildew, a hell of horrors. The dawning of this, another year, awakened me from my temporary slumber, and roused into life my latent, but long cherished aspirations for freedom. I was now not only ashamed ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass

... held a thousand or several thousand when the blight of the white man came, the abandoned paepaes are solemn and shrouded witnesses of the death of a race. The jungle runs over them, and only remnants remain of the houses that sat upon them. Their owners have died, leaving no posterity to inhabit their homes; neighbors ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... by ten years Debussy's junior, and were he less positive an individuality, less original a temperament, less fully the genius, he could never have realized himself. There would have descended upon him the blight that has fallen upon so many of the younger Parisian composers less determinate than he and like himself made of one stuff with Debussy. He, too, would have permitted the art of the older and well-established ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld

... with their Christmas dress of snow and icicles—these trees were clothed with the loveliest foliage, fresh and green and feathery, which no winter's storms or nipping frosts had ever come near to blight. And in the little space between the door where Hugh stood and these wonderful trees was drawn up, as if awaiting him, the prettiest, queerest, most delicious little carriage that ever was seen. It was open; the cushions with which it was lined ...
— The Tapestry Room - A Child's Romance • Mrs. Molesworth

... "Make yourself some clothes. You can shake Dandy Dale's outfit, except when we're on the trail.... And, say, if you knew what I had to pay for this stuff you'd think there was a bigger robber in Alder Creek than Jack Kells.... And, come to think of it, my name's now Blight. You're my daughter, if any one asks." Joan was so grateful to him for the goods and the permission to get out of Dandy Dale's suit as soon as possible, that she could only smile her thanks. Kells stared at her, then turned abruptly away. Those little unconscious acts of hers seemed to affect ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey

... a blemish, but we do not see it. We know the weakness that to-morrow perhaps will blight our joy, but we do not feel it. We hear the word that ought to deal our hopes a mortal blow; and it does not even touch them!... And our reason, which knows, sees, hears and foresees, remains dumb, as though ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc

... woods, though he scarcely ever saw them. Then, past the pines, were roses just breaking into June bloom—roses in such profusion as Jims hadn't known existed, with dear little paths twisting about among the bushes. It seemed to be a garden where no frost could blight or rough wind blow. When rain fell it must fall very gently. Past the roses one saw a green lawn, sprinkled over now with the white ghosts of dandelions, and dotted with ornamental trees. The trees grew so ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... as she gives you. The man doesn't live who is clean enough in heart and in life to be worthy of such a treasure. But I do expect you to be, Felix, and I must assure myself that you are, clean enough and honorable enough not to blight all the rest of her life. What is past is past, but from now on there must be nothing that will not bear the light ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly

... fear of complications, be careful about descending from the lofty heights of logic to the common level of impulse and affection. Many years before, Warwick, when a lad of eighteen, had shaken the dust of the town from his feet, and with it, he fondly thought, the blight of his inheritance, and had achieved elsewhere a worthy career. But during all these years of absence he had cherished a tender feeling for his mother, and now again found himself in her house, amid the familiar surroundings of his childhood. His visit had brought joy to his mother's heart, ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt

... of trash, and taxing him to support such publications, is the fostering patron to which he owes his difficulties. Thus does America nip her young genius in the bud; and when it perchance comes to flower and fruit, she is not behind-hand with a blight. The unknown production of the American author is brought into a depressing competition with works which have been tried in England, and found certain of success in America. The popular British author, whom the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various

... Bertie Mayo, 'oo's allus a turr'ble far-seeing sort of chap, 'e says, "Reckon the trolley 'ull be along fust thing i' the marnin' from the brewery, Missus?" An' when Mrs. Izod 'er says as 'er didn't know, but 'twas to be 'oped as 'twud, a sort of a blight settled down on the lot on us, which I reckon is a pretty fair way o' puttin' it, for a blight allus goes 'and-in-'and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, August 1, 1917. • Various

... Peter was not addicted to habits of intemperance, not even to looking on dandelion wine when it was pale yellow, we did not exactly see why Felicity should have selected such a device. But Peter was perfectly satisfied, so nobody cast any blight on his happiness by carping criticism. Later on Felicity told me she had worked the bookmark for him because his father used to drink before ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... days of his prosperity he has acquired a taste for. The Oil Rivers, which send out the greatest quantity of trade on the West Coast possessions, subsist entirely on palm oil for it. Were anything to happen to the oil palms in the way of blight, or were a cheap substitute to be found for palm oil at home, the population of the Oil Rivers, even at its present density, would starve. The development of trade is a necessary condition for the existence of the natives, and the discovery ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley

... committed by a civilized nation, and it is irrevocable, as its results are to be fatal and lasting. But upon the good reality of unity, the deadly dream of military greatness descended as a killing blight, and the evil vision of political power has blasted the common sense of a whole people. It is one thing to be one, as a united family, each working for the good of each and all; it is another thing, and a worse thing, to be one as a vast and idle army, sitting down to besiege its own storehouses, ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford

... time regretfully, and said decidedly that "A.E." could not be his Messiah, as he abhorred the Absolute above everything else. He was infected with Pater's Relative, said Mr. Russell, "which has fallen like a blight on all English literature." So the boy—he was not yet twenty-one—went out into the night with, I suppose, another of ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt

... back to my sitter I found that the blight which had always settled upon them when they were together was disappearing quickly. They were talking quite amiably, and although I should have been glad to have said something to show that I noticed the change, ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley

... be bettered by reforms of detail, there was more danger to society than in the crass indifference of the selfish and the unreflecting. When the natural leaders of society avow that they despair of the future, fatalism spreads like a contagious blight among the rank and file, until even discontent is numbed into silence. Nor does the evil end here. The idealists pay for their contempt of the real, not merely with their fortunes and their lives, but, worse still, with their intellectual patrimony. Just as a government ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis

... of sorrow, wreck, and blight; Think rather of those moments bright When to the consciousness of right His course was true, When Wisdom prospered in ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth

... other things, but nothing in which is an assurance of perpetuity, and little that is truly wisdom. Our vaunted elixir vito is the art of printing with moveable types. What good will those do when posterity, struck by the inevitable intellectual blight, shall have ceased to read what is printed? Our libraries will become its stables, our ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce

... it became clear again, as happens a thousand times during every year in the East, that what is not nipped in the bud grows with such malignant swiftness as finally to blight all honest intentions. Had steps been taken on or about the 23rd May to detain forcibly in Peking the ringleader of the recalcitrant Military Governors, one General Ni Shih-chung of Anhui, history would have been ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale

... Morny was king of the Bourse and Mexico was to make every Frenchman rich; after the commune and the siege, when the Hotel de Ville was in ruins, the palace of the Tuileries still aflame, the column gone from the Place Vendome, and everything a blight and waste; and I have marked it rise from its ashes, grandly, proudly, and like a queen come to her own again, resume its primacy as the only complete metropolis in ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson

... find him, as the case might be, but in either event to eat his heart in jealousy and impatience. When he found him he burned to insult him by asking him what tailor he advertised, or by addressing him as the Housemaid's Terror or the Nursegirl's Blight. He ground tegmenta of 'Maud' between his teeth as he looked at him. 'His essences turn the live air sick,' and 'that oiled and curled Assyrian bull, smelling of musk and of insolence.' And it happened one night that Captain MacMadden, arriving ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray

... this hell-blight to come upon them? Will they wait till violence and suspicion are the only principles retaining power among them? Will they look on while the Repeal movement—the educating, the ennobling, the sacred effort for liberty—is superseded by the buzz of assassination and vengeance? ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis

... him day after day, With heads on one side and eyes so bright, Surveying the monster, began to say, "Why should this fellow our prospects blight? ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth

... urge that patronage is the curse and blight of all such endeavours, and to impress upon the working men that they must originate and manage for themselves. And to ask them the question, can they possibly show their detestation of drunkenness better, ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens

... la Morte,' and at every turn there is something to remind us of the deadly blight which fell upon the city when its trade was lost. The faded colours, the timeworn brickwork, the indescribable look of decay which, even on the brightest morning, throws a shade of melancholy over the whole ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond

... fertile must be reinforced with friendship. It is the sap that preserves from blight and withering; it is the sunshine that beckons on the blossoming and fruitage; it is the starlight dew that perfumes life with sweetness and besprinkles it with splendor; it is the music-tide that sweeps the soul, scattering ...
— For Auld Lang Syne • Ray Woodward

... The game's up: we must save the swag. (TO DUMONT.) Sir, since your key, on which I invoke the blight of Egypt, has once more defaulted, my feelings are unequal to a repetition of yesterday's distress, and I shall simply pad the hoof. From Turin you shall receive the address of my banker, and may ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson

... fights and falls, his fame no blight shall know, As long as through heaven's free expanse the breezes freely blow, As long as in the forest wild the green leaves flutter free, As long as rivers, mountain-born, roll freely to the sea, As long as free the eagle's wing exulting cleaves the skies, As long as from a freeman's ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller

... befell that, in London, he was stricken with influenza and with subsequent sorrow. The attack was short but sharp—had it lasted Addie would certainly have come to his aid; most of a blight really in its secondary stage. The good ladies his sitters—the ladies with the frizzled hair, with the diamond earrings, with the chins tending to the massive—left for him, at the door of his lodgings, flowers, soup and love, so that with their assistance he pulled through; but his convalescence ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James

... that when she was in her fresh and lovely youth, some strange misfortune had fallen upon her, and that she had worn since then—most innocently—the mark of a direful tragedy. One lady, old, nearly, as Aunt Hannah, but upon whom there had never fallen any blight of poverty or wrong, loved the poor creature well, and she only, of all the inhabitants of the village, frequently entered the cottage where the 'Black Witch' dwelt. This lady, it was said, had known her when both were young, and carried forever locked in ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... me, Life's little day—full, rich, and blessed, for all that storm and wreck and blight have, once and again, befallen me, as was God's will, and therefore, for my eternal good—when, for me, Life's little day darkens to its outgoing, may the lights of the Home that changes not, save from glory to glory, shine out for me through night and chill with such loving welcome as ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland

... families. The Administration will propose authority to contract for 35 thousand additional public housing units in each of the next 2 fiscal years for communities which will participate in an integrated attack on slums and blight. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Dwight D. Eisenhower • Dwight D. Eisenhower

... threatened almost as much by disgrace to name and family as by the disgrace of self. Keith's instinct was always to deal actively with danger. But this blow, whether it fell on him by discovery or by confession, could not be countered. As blight falls on a rose from who knows where, the scandalous murk would light on him. No repulse possible! Not even a wriggling from under! Brother of a murderer hung or sent to penal servitude! His daughter niece to a murderer! His dead mother-a murderer's mother! And to wait day after day, week after ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... Deanery of St. Paul's, that frowning and melancholy house in a backwater of London's jarring tide, where the dust collects, and sunlight has a struggle to make two ends meet, and cold penetrates like a dagger, and fog hangs like a pall, and the blight of ages clings to stone and brick, to window and woodwork, with an adhesive mournfulness which suggests the hatchment of Melpomene. Even the hand of Grinling Gibbons at the porch does not prevent one from recalling Crabbe's ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie

... it not with the exorbitant growth of London that many an ill has spread over the land? London is the antithesis of the domestic ideal; a social reformer would not even glance in that direction, but would turn all his zeal upon small towns and country districts, where blight may perhaps be arrested, and whence, some day, a reconstituted national life may act upon the great centre of corruption. I had far rather see England covered with schools of cookery than with schools of the ordinary kind; the issue would be infinitely more hopeful. Little girls ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing

... The straining cord has broken, and my heart Riots in free delirium! O, Heaven! I struggled with it, but it mastered me! I fought against it, but it beat me down! I prayed, I wept, but Heaven was deaf to me; And every tear rolled backward on my heart, To blight and poison! ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker

... to this prison-house Descended, like an angel piteous, To heal all hearts and make the whole world bright. 'Tis this that thralls my heart in love's delight, Not thy clear face of beauty glorious; For he who harbours virtue, still will choose To love what neither years nor death can blight. ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds

... indefensible causes, however, which too frequently drive the independent farmer out of the country. In too many cases it happens that the rapacity and dishonesty of the agent, countenanced or stimulated by the necessities and reckless extravagance of the landlord, fall, like some unwholesome blight, upon that enterprise and industry which would ultimately, if properly encouraged, make the country prosperous and her landed proprietors independent men. We allude to the nefarious and monstrous custom of ejecting ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... exported from the port of Manilla. Indigo, coffee, sugar, cotton, and tobacco, are grown in abundance; indeed, were the resources of the islands fully developed, they would prove some of the richest in the world. But it may truly be said, that where Spaniards rule there a blight is sure ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston

... of this month, until the end of May, is the best season for sowing wheat in the districts of Richmond Hill, Phillip, Nelson, and Evan, as it is not so subject to the caterpillar, smut, rust, and blight. Oats may also be sown now for a general crop. Asparagus haulm should also be cut and carried off the ground, and ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann

... there is a small mounted lens in a leather loop alongside, which has often to be used. The compass {22} itself is so placed that you can see it well while either sitting or standing up, or when lying at full length on the deck, with the back against a pillow propped by the mizen mast, the blight sun or moon overhead, and a turn or two of the mainsheet cast about your body to keep the sleepy steersman from rolling over into the water, as shown ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor

... return to me, Drear, drear must be life's night! And, mother, I can almost see Even now the gathering blight—my soul Faints, ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart

... never has been so sudden and so terrible a fall from such a height of any man in this nation—not excepting that of Aaron Burr. John C. Calhoun, in talent, learning, and statesmanship, was greatly superior to Jackson, and unsurpassed by any man of the age. But the breath of Jackson was the blight which withered his laurels, and crushed his prospects, and destroyed his usefulness forever, in ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks

... crowd, saw the crowd looking up to these trainers and employers of pickpockets, hailing them "captains of industry"! They reaped only where and what others had sown; they touched industry only to plunder and to blight it; they organized it only that its profits might go to those who did not toil and who despised those who did. "Have I gone mad in the midst of sane men?" I asked myself. "Or have I been mad, and have I suddenly become sane ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various

... discontented and troublesome, now settled down submissively to their yoke; the Spaniards began to work in earnest on their farms; and there descended upon island affairs a brief St. Martin's Summer of peace before the final winter of blight and death set in. The Admiral, however, was obviously in precarious health; his ophthalmia became worse, and the stability of his mind suffered. He had dreams and visions of divine help and comfort, much needed by him, poor soul, in all his ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young

... she remained with William, her daughters, and her two aged unmarried sisters in the plain old house in Albany Street. But Dante Gabriel moved to Cheyne Walk, and began that craze for collecting blue china that has swept like a blight over the civilized world. His collection was sold for three thousand five hundred dollars some years after—to pay his debts—less than one-half of what it had cost him. Yet when he had money he generously divided ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard

... have a great deal to war with in the habits of thought acquired by their mothers from their own early life. Everywhere the fatal spirit of imitation, of reference to European standards, penetrates, and threatens to blight whatever of original ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller

... with delight, The true, good, and beautiful seeking; Hiddigeigei often felt grief's deadly blight, And with ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel

... and die. Such is the fate of all the dainty things That dance in wind and water. Nature herself Makes war on her own loveliness and slays Her children like Medea. Nay but, my Lord, Look closer still. Why in this damask here It is summer always, and no winter's tooth Will ever blight these blossoms. For every ell I paid a piece of gold. Red gold, and good, The fruit of ...
— A Florentine Tragedy—A Fragment • Oscar Wilde

... the opinion that rust is but an earlier stage of mildew or blight, the one form of parasite being capable of development into the other, and the fructification characteristic of the two supposed genera having been evolved on one and the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883 • Various

... There is still mademoiselle, with her new-formed friends in Paris—may a pestilence blight them all! There are still the lands of La Vauvraye to lose. The only true end to our troubles as they stand at present lies in ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini

... oath; (3) then the exacted oath of allegiance; (4) any oath whatever; (5) in early Christian use any sacred or solemn act, and especially any mystery where more was meant than met the ear or eye" (Blight's "Select Sermons of St. Leo ...
— The Church: Her Books and Her Sacraments • E. E. Holmes

... hopes man nurses, Never deem them idly born; Never think that deathly curses Blight them ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall

... Charles Barclay was on his way to Canada, vigorously intent on the new life before him. Agnes drew strength and comfort from the steadfast look of her brother's eyes, as he whispered to her, "Don't fear. Trust God, and be patient." The blight fell away from her, after that. If she was never a light-hearted girl again, she became something even sweeter and nobler. They never talked together about him, for the father had forbidden it; and, indeed, they needed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various

... of humiliation, and, far from rebelling at or despising the small establishment, comparatively speaking, provided for her by Mr. Carlyle, she felt thankful to him for it. But to be told continuously that this was more than he could afford, that she was in fact a blight upon his prospects, was enough to turn her heart to bitterness. Oh, that she had had the courage to speak out openly to her husband, that he might, by a single word of earnest love and assurance, have taken the weight from ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood

... myself—have you no heart that you can refuse to repair a little of the harm that you have done? You are a cruel woman—I could almost say a wicked woman: hard, false, and cowardly; and I wish my words could blight your life as your coquetry has ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... these, the black death, the famines, the hundred years' war, the free companies, the abasement of the church, the great schism—these things were misfortunes to which our modern time can find no parallel. They came suddenly upon Western Europe and defiled it like a blight.... They have made the mediaeval idea odious to every half-instructed man and have stamped even its beauty with associations ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell



Words linked to "Blight" :   oak blight, pear blight, chestnut canker, leaf blight, smite, walnut blight, blight canker, bean blight, cane blight, chestnut blight, tomato yellows, twig blight, American blight, desolation, stem blight, thread blight, plague, needle blight, beet blight, collar blight, stripe blight, blister blight, halo blight, potato murrain, potato disease, spinach blight, late blight, plant disease, potato mold, fire blight, celery blight, coffee blight, peach blight, devastation, potato mildew, rim blight, afflict, halo spot, tomato blight, head blight, potato blight, alder blight, apple blight, apple canker, spur blight, chestnut-bark disease



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