"Decayed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... now as the aircar made its third leisurely crossing of the central belt of the peninsula—was another. From here it looked like an irregular brown circle against the peninsula's nearly white ground. Lower down, it would have resembled nothing so much as the broken and half-decayed spirals of a gigantic snail shell, its base sunk deep in the ground and its shattered point rearing twelve stories above it. This structure, known popularly as "the ruins" in Fort Roye, was supposed to have been the ...
— Watch the Sky • James H. Schmitz
... Mrs. O'Sullivan died fifty years ago, at the age of twenty-eight. She had great personal charms, and among them a head of beautiful chestnut hair. After her burial in a family tomb, the coffin of one of her children was laid on her own, so that the lid seems to have decayed, or been broken from this cause; at any rate, this was the case when the tomb was opened, about a year ago. The grandmother's coffin was then found to be filled with beautiful, glossy, living chestnut ringlets, into which her whole substance seems to have been transformed, for there was ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... forgot those assumptions," he said between his clenched teeth. "He is a mere Spaniard. He takes this farcical conspiracy with perfect nonchalance. Decayed races have their ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... course of the morning, and Mr. Kingsland is thinking in what cravat he shall adorn himself when he goes to do the same thing in the afternoon. For Mr. Kingsland has arrived at home, where he and his old father keep a bachelor sort of household in a decayed old house at one extremity of Crocus. They have a respectable name, folks say, but not wealth to set it off; and the household is small. The same little boy who rubs down Mr. Kingsland's horse waits upon table, and there is nobody ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... afterwards we packed up our baggage, and took farewell of our hosts. We shaped our course towards the Indian cemetery. In the first graves which we opened we found the bones decayed in part, and I could only procure two skulls, which were not worth the danger to which they exposed us. However, we continued our researches, and towards the close of the day discovered the remains of a woman, who, from the position of the body in the grave, must have been buried ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... look upon the mangled bodies of these old soldiers. Men with arms and no legs; others had legs but no arms; some with canes and crutches, and some wheeling themselves about in little hand carts. About three thousand of the decayed soldiers were lodged in the Hotel des Invalids, at the time of my visit. Passing the National Assembly on my return, I spent a moment or two in it. The interior of this building resembles an amphitheatre. It is constructed to accommodate 900 ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... additional inconvenience. I descended to the lake, and by the time I reached the far end of it the darkness had increased so much, that I could proceed no farther. Perceiving an old encampment—a few half-decayed branches of balsam, at the foot of a large hemlock—I took up my quarters there for the night. The tufted branches of this tree render it a much more secure retreat in a thunder-storm than the pine, whose pointed ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... of no single condition which gives a scene so great an aspect of wildness and desolation, as dead fir trees. There they stand on the most barren and inaccessible places, rearing their gaunt and whitened forms erect as ever, and though lifeless yet not decayed. Seared and blasted by a thousand storms, they stand stern and silent, ghostlike and immoveable, scorning the elements. No wind murmurs pleasantly through their dead and shrunken branches, the howling tempest alone can make ...
— Three Months of My Life • J. F. Foster
... way over a bed of decayed vegetation often meandering through a dense growth of wiry reeds in a channel set well below the general level. Banks of attenuated grass and rank foliage lined its course, and the welcome sunlight poured down upon its water in sharp contrast ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... this window, as I passed up and down the staircase, one tree has always riveted my attention. It is a large old plane-tree, standing by itself, and having a strange, melancholy, decayed look about it. I noticed—why, I cannot imagine—that on one side of it the ground was bare and black, though everywhere else the grass was green and fresh. I mention this, because it had struck me before the strange events occurred which I ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... nothing to examine except timber, and that of little value. "Plenty of firewood," was his only comment as he went on. Beyond the belt of wood, however, he came upon a clear space bordering the creek, and strewed with decayed fish, fragments of old nets, and broken pieces of wood—traces of the use to which the Indians were in the habit of putting it. A small hut stood just in the shelter of the bush, but it was empty, and the whole place had the ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... What's the use of decayed old walls anyway? You and Major Carew can have the heaps of stones. We don't want to rob you of so much as a pebble. But we do badly want to dig down and look ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... earth, its trunk and its coronal rising so high in the free air, meeting the drifting snow, the cutting winds, and the bright sunshine, before they had reached the ground. All this she said, and she continued: 'The birds sing up yonder, and tell of foreign lands, and upon the only decayed branch the stork has built a nest; and it is a pleasure to hear of the country where the pyramids stand. All this Fancy can well depict, and very much more. I myself can describe life in the woods from the time that I was quite little, and this tree was so tiny that a nettle could have ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... men go into the forests, instead, as before, of cutting down the nearest, thriftiest, and largest trees, they cut those that are decayed, crooked, and not likely to grow any better; pick up those that are blown down, and thus leave the forests in a ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... a very pretty theatre," responded I. And so it was, exceedingly so. It had been built when the place flourished, and the community was prosperous and could afford to be merry. Now, trade having decayed, and money ceased to circulate, the blood has also grown stagnant amongst this once gay people: the fire is out ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... director of this company; twelve hundred volumes are said to have been the output of the chief and his subordinates; the work ceased to be literature, and became mere commerce. The money that Dumas accumulated he recklessly squandered. Half genius, half charlatan, his genius decayed, and his charlatanry grew to enormous proportions. Protected by his son, he died a poor man amid the ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... kinge and sett vpp .iii. wronge kinges arow/ vnder which all the noble bloud was slayne vpp and halfe the comens therto/ what in fraunce & what with their awne swerde/ in fightinge amonge them selues for [the] crowne/ & [the] cities and townes decayed and the land brought halfe in to a wyldernesse in respecte of that ...
— The prophete Ionas with an introduccion • William Tyndale
... humane religion of antiquity had disappeared, and the question between Christians and pagans amounted simply to a choice of fanaticisms. Reason had suffered a general eclipse, but civilisation, although decayed, still subsisted, and a certain scholastic discipline, a certain speculative habit, and many an ancient religious usage remained in the world. The people could change their gods, but not the spirit ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... and (3) my "Chaucer", which I render immediately enjoyable, without preliminary preparation, by an interlined glossarial explanation of the original text, and an indication (with hyphens) of those terminal syllables affecting the rhythm which have decayed out of the modern tongue. I am going to print these books and sell them myself, on the cheap plan which has been so successfully adopted by Edward Arber, lecturer on English literature in University College, London. I have been working on them for two months; in two more they ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... because too proud and strong she flourished. The half-decayed oak withstands the tempest; The vigorous tree is headlong dashed to earth Because the storm has ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... strange and fearful tale of olden times, the gloomy and ancient town of Bacharach. But these walls, with their toothless battlements and blind turrets, in whose nooks and niches the winds whistle and the sparrows build their nests, were not always so decayed and fallen, and in these poverty-stricken, repulsive muddy lanes which one sees through the ruined gate, there did not always reign that dreary silence which only now and then is broken by the crying of children, the scolding of women, and the lowing of cows. These walls ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... piece of Prussia- -I would not care if she even gave to France a piece of Germany, for instance the frontier of the Rhine. In the name of Heaven, I should think that the so-called German empire is decayed enough to permit us to break off a few ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... has a statue decayed by rust and age, and mutilated in many of its parts, he breaks it up and casts it into a furnace, and after the melting he receives it again in a more beautiful form. As then the dissolving in the furnace was not ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume I - Basil to Calvin • Various
... Theresa Cornelys's house of entertainment, of which we hear so much from the writers of the time of Anne, was considered to be most fashionably situated; ambassadors and peers dwelt in Gerrard Street; Bolingbroke lived in Golden Square. Traces of former splendor still linger about these decayed neighborhoods; paintings by Sir James Thornhill, Hogarth's master and father-in-law, and elaborate marble mantel-pieces, with Corinthian columns and entablatures, still adorn the interiors of some of these houses; bits of quaint ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... was not yet re-established; I decayed visibly, was pale as death, and reduced to an absolute skeleton; the beating of my arteries was extreme, my palpitations were frequent: I was sensible of a continual oppression, and my weakness became at length ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... decayed state of this place of worship, and for the safety of those persons who assemble therein, at the recommendation of several architects, a new wall has been erected, and the building generally having undergone a thorough ...
— The Baptist Magazine, Vol. 27, January, 1835 • Various
... it can, I will add that, amidst all this labour, my young friend was building himself a dam, where the beavers, in times when that politic and hard-working little trowel-tailed race owned his property, had seen the value of collecting the waters of the brook. He was repairing their decayed labours, for the purpose of washing his sheep, of getting a good fish-pond, and of keeping a bath always full for the comfort of ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... in the Sagar territories used to show several decayed mango-trees in groves where European troops had encamped during the campaigns of 1816 and 1817, and declared that they had been seen to wither from the day that beef for the use of these troops had been tied to their branches. The only coincidence ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... especially the white orchids, coelogynes, which, bloom in a profuse manner, whitening their trunks like snow. More bulky trunks bear masses of interlacing climbers—vines, hydrangea, and peppers. And often the supporting tree has long ago decayed away and their climbers now enclose a hollow. Perpetual moisture nourishes this dripping forest, and pendulous mosses and lichens are ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... have taken. Description of body, skull, etc: marked with slight sabre cuts, apparently two in number, one immediately over the left eye, the other on the right temple, inclining over right ear, more deep than the left. Decayed teeth existed on both sides of lower jaw and right of upper; the other teeth were entire and sound. In the lower jaw were two teeth, one on each side (four between in front) rather projecting as is sometimes called in the upper jaw buck teeth. I have measured the bones ...
— McKinlay's Journal of Exploration in the Interior of Australia • John McKinlay
... annex, and it was Albert who found it. He discovered a little further up the cleft an enormous oak, old and decayed. The tree was at lease seven feet through, and the hollow itself was fully five feet in diameter, with a height of perhaps fourteen feet. It was very rough inside with sharp projections in every direction ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... oppose them, with a banner of 'Freedom of Election,' hanging on his sabre; behind him stands the Lord High Sheriff, affecting to charge the soldiers with his mopstick and pottle. He is dressed in a magnificent suit of decayed splendour, with an old court sword, loose silk stockings, white shoes, and unbuckled knee-bands; his shoulders are adorned with white bows, and curtain rings for a chain, hung by a blue ribbon from his neck. Next to him, adorned with a blanket, is a character of voluptuous gaiety, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 336 Saturday, October 18, 1828 • Various
... Mr. Rigby. There was a great number of legacies, none of superior amount, most of them of less: these were chiefly left to old male companions, and women in various countries. There was an almost inconceivable number of small annuities to faithful servants, decayed actors, and obscure foreigners. The residue of his personal estate was left to four gentlemen, three of whom had quitted this world before the legator; the bequests, therefore, had lapsed. The fourth residuary legatee, in whom, ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... was large in promise, but poor in fulfillment—the place for ink was infinitesimally small. George tried to use it once when he had three important thoughts to transmit. He wrote out two of them, but the third thought had to go dry. There was a much decayed gentleman of the old school who lived across the street from the Addisons. It had been the custom of George Addison's grandfather, and father also, to always send this individual some useful gift on Christmas ...
— A Few Short Sketches • Douglass Sherley
... colour and richness of detail. The curious may consult the Recherches sur le Cuir dore, anciennement appele Cuir basane, by M. de la Queriere, also M. Jacquemart's Histoire du Mobilier, in which is found a very exact representation of a specimen, probably Italian. The art decayed in Spain after the expulsion of the Moors in 1610, but was introduced in various parts of France by some of the exiled artists, and it may be said to have died out in France about the end of the ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... latter is as distinct, and seems as insulated, as if it stood alone in the centre of a plain; and really I do not think there is a more striking architectural object in Rome. It is in perfect condition, just as little ruined or decayed as on the day when the builder put the last peak on the summit; and it ascends steeply from its base, with a point so sharp that it looks as if it would hardly afford foothold to a bird. The marble ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... tenth of March. He observed a great change in the spirit of the people. They were no longer content with words. The ferment was showing itself in acts of open and violent disorder. The statue of George III, near the Battery, was treated to a volley of decayed eggs, in the evening of his arrival. This hot blood was due to the effort to prevent free speech in the colonies and the proposal to send political prisoners ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... the sand; but he would not listen to reason. He built his church—a squat Perpendicular building of two aisles, the wider divided into nave and chancel merely by a granite step in the flooring; he saw it consecrated, and returned to his home and died. And the church steadily decayed. He had mixed his mortar with sea-sand. The stonework oozed brine, the plaster fell piece-meal; the blown sand penetrated like water; the foundations sank a foot on the south side, and the whole structure took a list to leeward. The living passed into the ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... be in much worse condition than now," observed another; "starving in this pestiferous atmosphere filled with the malaria from that swamp, and the effluvia from half-decayed corpses; men dying every day, almost every hour, from famine, disease, ...
— Elsie's Womanhood • Martha Finley
... to the Praise and Glory of God, by the pious care of Mistress Perpetua Furnival, Widow, for the lodging of six decayed gentlewomen, Spinsters, of Good Birth ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... distinction to the circle on the steps. Most of this circle were so average as scarcely to make an impression at first sight,—a few young women who earned their livelihood in business offices, a few decayed, middle-aged bachelors, a group of widows whose incomes fitted the rates of the Keystone, and several families that had given up the struggle with maids-of-all-work. One of these latter,—father, mother, and daughter—had seats at table ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... terrible on him, Dissolved the shape that was so fair And burnt up every limb. Since the great God's terrific rage Destroyed his form and frame, Kama in each succeeding age Has borne Ananga's name. So, where his lovely form decayed, This land is Anga styled:— Sacred to him of old this shade, And hermits undefiled. Here Scripture-talking elders sway Each sense with firm control, And penance-rites have washed away All sin from every soul. One ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... stuffed the empty sack with three rotten vegetable marrows, an old blackingbrush and two decayed turnips. ...
— The Great Big Treasury of Beatrix Potter • Beatrix Potter
... seen. Pym hastily returned to the hallway, and discovering a stair leading to a small cellar, he descended. The cellar was filled with debris, two small window casements opening to the exterior air were broken and decayed to the last degree of dilapidation, and the icy wind whistled through the rubbish of the doleful spot. He ran back to the laboratory, where Peters was hunting about, hoping to find Masusaelili alive, yet fearing to find his emaciated form lying lifeless ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... all sorts of crop residues, green manures, and the common farm fertilizers from the stables. When these organic materials are decomposed and disintegrated to such an extent that their structure is completely destroyed, the resulting mass of partially decayed black organic matter is called humus. The nitrogen of the soil is one of the constituents of this humus or other organic matter. It is not contained in the mineral particles of the soil. On the other hand the other six elements of plant food are contained largely in the mineral part of the soil, ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... this road (in June, 1883) I found a nest of the yellow-bellied flycatcher (Empidonax flaviventris). It was built at the base of a decayed stump, in a little depression between two roots, and was partially overarched with growing moss. It contained four eggs,—white, spotted with brown. I called upon the bird half a dozen times or more, and found ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... the Lady Hameline, "he would have us believe that in his cold and bleak country still lives the noble fire which has decayed in France and Germany! The poor youth is like a Swiss mountaineer, mad with partiality to his native land—he will next tell us of the vines and olives ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... a building a short distance away, with a slender minaret, from which he hoped to obtain a better view. It was the half-decayed mausoleum of some saint, and Heideck had some trouble to climb up to the top of the minaret, a height of about twenty feet, whilst his servant waited with the horses down below. But the exertion was fully rewarded. He overlooked the flat ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... decorations. I have already shown how feathers are woven in with the warp and woof, and may now give a single illustration of the application of feather work to the surfaces of fabrics. Among the beautiful articles recovered from the tombs of Ancon, Peru, are some much decayed specimens of feather work. In our example delicate feathers of red, blue, and yellow hues are applied to the surface of a coarse cotton fabric by first carefully tying them together in rows at regular distances and afterwards stitching them down, as ...
— A Study Of The Textile Art In Its Relation To The Development Of Form And Ornament • William H. Holmes
... formed by the fallen leaves and decayed trees, is very rich and fertile in the valleys. On the hills it is little better than sand. The rains seem to have carried away and swept into the valleys every particle which Nature intended to ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... others easily lifted it off upon the bier, and thus the tomb was laid open; and there appeared within it a coffin of wood fastened-down with gilt nails, the hair of the coffin being entirely gone, and great part of the wood decayed also. Within this coffin was the holy body, now well nigh consumed, nothing but the bones remaining entire. On some of the bones the flesh was still remaining, not discoloured, but with a rosy colour, and the bones, were of the same rosy colour, and the flesh also which had fallen from ...
— Chronicle Of The Cid • Various
... "that many of the seeds which fall upon the ground do not grow, yet, strange to tell, retain the power of growth. I suspect myself, but have not had opportunity of testing the conjecture, that such fall in their pods, or shells, and that before these are sufficiently decayed to allow the sun and moisture and air to reach them, they have got covered up in the soil too deep for those same influences. They say fishes a long time bedded in ice will come to life again: I can not tell about that, but it is well enough known that if you dig deep in any old garden, ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... in error if he supposed, as from his language he appears to have done, that George Herbert almost rebuilt the church from the foundation, and he must be held to be incorrect in describing that part of it which stood as "so decayed, so little, and so useless." There are portions remaining earlier than George Herbert's time, whose work may be readily distinguished by at least four centuries; whilst at one end the porches, and at the other the piscina, of Early English date, the windows, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 71, March 8, 1851 • Various
... in the mansion of a decayed queen, or the log-hut of a wayside innkeeper?" I questioned ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... to pursue the snake and destroy it; but before I could act upon that impulse the reptile had escaped beyond my reach. A hollow log lay near—the trunk of a large tulip-tree, with the heart-wood decayed and gone. The snake had made for this—no doubt its haunt—and before I could come up with it, I saw the long slimy body, with its rhomboid spots, disappear within the dark cavity. Another "sker-r-rr" reached my ears as it glided out of sight. It seemed a note of triumph, as ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... two shilling and ten pence. James termed the custom of using tobacco an "evil vanitie" impairing "the health of a great number of people their bodies weakened and made unfit for labor, and the estates of many mean persons so decayed and consumed, as they are thereby driven to unthriftie shifts only to maintain their gluttonous exercise thereof."[46] Brodigan ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... bending over a small fire of decayed branches, the flame of which was very disproportionate to the smoke, scarcely producing heat sufficient for the preparation of a scanty portion of food. Her profile only was visible to the strangers, though, from a slight motion of her eye, they perceived that she was aware of their presence. ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the hollow branch like a flash. Mr. Fox reached it just a moment too late, and to vent his anger at losing the rabbit the second time he clawed and snapped at the branch as if he would rip it asunder. But the limb, with a decayed heart, had a stout shell, and the fox soon gave it ...
— Bumper, The White Rabbit • George Ethelbert Walsh
... Coast, at which place great no. of eregular rocks are out and the waves comes in with great force. Near this old Town I observed large Canoes of the neetest kind on the ground Some of which appeared nearly decayed others quit Sound, I examoned those Canoes and found they were the repository of the dead- This Custom of Secureing the Dead differs a little from the Chinnooks. the Kil a mox Secure the dead bodies in an oblong box of Plank, which is placed in an open Canoe ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... the crevices of the sterns of old trees of the species DRYOBALANOPS AROMATICA, when the heart is decayed leaving a central hollow. The tree is cut down, the stem split up, and the crystalline scales of pure camphor are shaken out on to mats. It is then made up in little bundles wrapped in palm leaves. The large-flaked camphor fetches as much as [pound sterling]6 a pound in the Chinese ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... from the top of the cupboard an incredibly dirty carpet bag of huge dimensions and decayed antiquity, and bade me pack therein our belongings. The process was not a lengthy one; we had so few. When we had little more than half filled the bag with articles of attire and the toilette stuffed in pell-mell, we looked around ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... of November the wild apples have lost some of their brilliancy, and have chiefly fallen. A great part are decayed on the ground, and the sound ones are more palatable than before. The note of the chickadee sounds now more distinct, as you wander amid the old trees, and the autumnal dandelion is half-closed and tearful. But still, if you are a skilful gleaner, ...
— Wild Apples • Henry David Thoreau
... passed the frontier, he found "a Province distressed with Warre; the people heartlesse, and rather repining against their Governours, then revengefull against the Enemies, the bravery of that Gentrie which was left, and the Industry of the Merchant quite decayed; the Husbandman labouring only to live, without desire to be rich to another's use; the Townes (whatsoever concerned not the strength of them) ruinous; And to conclude, the people here growing poore with lesse taxes, then they flourish with on ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... now,[29] grim, damp, rugged, ruined, and desolate, even in its state of transition, after several years of toil have been spent upon its long-deserted walls; I can only feel amazed that the task of renovating a place so decayed should ever have been attempted; but, after what has been done, it may well be hoped and expected that the great work will be, in the end, fully accomplished; and ten years hence, the visitor to Pau will disbelieve all that has ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... October, there sailed into Port Royal three privateers, Captains Prince, Harrison and Ludbury, who six weeks before had ascended the river San Juan in Nicaragua with 170 men and again plundered the unfortunate city of Granada. The town had rapidly decayed, however, under the repeated assaults of the buccaneers, and the plunderers secured only L20 or L30 per man. Modyford reproved the captains for acting without commissions, but "not deeming it prudent ...
— The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century • Clarence Henry Haring
... defend his weak cause, yet he himself will never condescend to meet the man on that ground. If his own moral integrity, the lofty standing of his party, and his party's principles, will not secure the victory for him, why, then there is no honesty and patriotism in this decayed age, and the patriotic ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... with a smile, 'You perceive, young gentlemen, that my arm yet retains some portion of the vigor of my earlier days.' He was then in his fortieth year, and probably in the full meridian of his physical powers; but those powers became rather mellowed than decayed by time, for 'his age was like a lusty winter, frosty yet kindly;' and, up to his sixty-eighth year, he mounted a horse with surprising agility, and rode with the ease and gracefulness of his better days. His personal prowess, that elicited the admiration ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... large is none of your business until your business with your private particular evils is liquidated and settled up. A challenge of this sort, with proper designation of detail, is one that need only be made to be accepted by men whose normal instincts are not decayed; and your reflective would-be suicide may easily be moved by it to face life with a certain interest again. The sentiment of honor is a very penetrating thing. When you and I, for instance, realize how many innocent beasts have ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... the most common are Ammonites, half imbedded in a ball of stone, exactly of the same nature with the petrified animal. Others, which are reckoned the most valuable, are balls containing a cavity formed by an Ammonite, that has afterwards decayed, and left only its impression, or they are what Wallerius calls Typolithi Ammonitarum. The Ammonites or their impressions are called the Chakras or wheels of the Salagrams, but are sometimes wanting. The stone is then a mere ball without any ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... purpose, and had reached the cross-trees, when in a lull of the tempest, the brig, lying in the trough of the sea, lurched fearfully to windward. I grasped firmly one of the top-gallant shrouds above the cross-trees, but the rope being old and decayed, parted in the horn of the cross-trees ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... what would'st thou make an implement of me? 'Slid, the boy takes me for a piece of perspective, I hold my life, or some silk curtain, come to hang the stage here! Sir crack, I am none of your fresh pictures, that use to beautify the decayed dead arras in ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... or at least had been, at some more or less distant period. It was the roofless ruin of a once most substantially built log-hut, measuring some twenty-five feet long by sixteen feet broad. The roof had fallen in; the log sides were decayed and moss-grown; and the interior was overgrown with long grass and brambles, with a stately pine springing to a height of some ninety feet from the very centre of the structure—all of which incontestably proved its antiquity; but that it was the work of man—most probably those who had ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... which we first admired him—clearness of vision and a marvellous technical execution. So extraordinary is this later execution that, by comparison, the earlier seems timid and weak. His naturalism has expanded and strengthened: mine has decayed and ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... a pair of stockings or a worked collar, or a man whisper something mysterious about wonderfully cheap cigars. And yet I remember seeing female hucksters in those regions, with their wares on the edge of the sidewalk and their own seats right in the carriage-way, pretending to sell half-decayed oranges and apples, toffy, Ormskirk cakes, combs and cheap jewelry, the coarsest kind of crockery, and little plates of oysters,—knitting patiently all day long, and removing their undiminished stock in trade at nightfall. All indispensable importations ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... monarchs had even challenged the authority of the Pope; but such quarrels had ended in compromises formal or practical. Moral reforming movements like that of St. Francis had arisen within the Church herself; they had not been antagonistic to her, and they had thriven and decayed without producing revolutionary results. Clerical abuses had been for centuries the objects of satire, but the satirists rarely had any inclination for the role of revolutionaries or martyrs. The recent revival of learning had developed a scepticism ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... Dante? "There was such a moan there as there would be if all the sick who, between July and September, are in the hospitals of Valdichiana, and of the Tuscan swamps, and of Sardinia, were in one pit together; and such a stench was issuing forth as is wont to issue from decayed limbs." ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... is a poor substitute for the heavens—and we shall see what we shall see. Tell me now, they mean to revive La Curieuse at the Comedie, I hear—what part in it have you been assigned?" "Ah," exclaimed mademoiselle Hilairet, "is it not always the same thing? I dust the same decayed furniture with the same feather brush, and I say 'Yes,' and 'No,' and 'Here is a letter, ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... Shire-moot.—Whilst the hundred-moot decayed, the folk-moot continued to flourish under a new name, as the shire-moot. This moot was still attended by the freemen of the shire though the thegns were more numerous and the simple freemen less numerous than they had once been. Still the continued existence of the shire-moot kept up the ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... other relics and monuments of antiquity, we now as yet often see, that in all great houses, after the expiring of some few days, these young married blades are readily sent away to visit their uncles, that in the absence of their wives reposing themselves a little they may recover their decayed strength by the recruit of a fresh supply, the more vigorous to return again and face about to renew the duelling shock and conflict of an amorous dalliance, albeit for the greater part they have neither uncle ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... third exhibited the eight Beatitudes, all ascribed with some ingenuity of application to her majesty. The fourth ventured upon a more trying topic: its opposite sides represented in lively contrast the images of a decayed and of a flourishing commonwealth; and from a cave below issued Time leading forth his daughter Truth, who held in her hand an English bible, which she offered to the queen's acceptance. Elizabeth received the volume, and reverently pressing ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... Gloucester made a signal of distress, and we learned that she had a dangerous spring in her mainmast, so that she could not carry any sail upon it. Our carpenters, on a strict examination of this mast, found it so very rotten and decayed that they judged it necessary to cut it down as low as it appeared to have been injured, and by this it was reduced to nothing but a stump, which served only as a step to the topmast. These accidents augmented our delay and occasioned us great anxiety ...
— Anson's Voyage Round the World - The Text Reduced • Richard Walter
... receive, who comes half an hour after the time he was bidden, to find the soup removed, and the fish cold: moreover, for such an offence, let him also be mulcted in a pecuniary penalty, to be applied to the FUND FOR THE BENEFIT OF DECAYED COOKS. This is the least punishment that can be inflicted on one whose silence, or violation of an engagement, tends to paralyze an entertainment, and to draw his ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... which on Thames' broad, aged back doe ride, Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers, There whilom wont the Templar Knights to bide, Till they decayed through pride." ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... as not to leave a certain pressure and debility upon the nerves, by some called a fever on the spirits, which seemed to threaten either an atrophy or consumption; his complexion grew pale and livid, and his strength and flesh visibly wasted; and what was yet worse, the vigour of his mind decayed, in proportion with that of his external frame, insomuch that, falling into a deep melancholy, he considered himself as on the brink of the grave, and expected nothing but dissolution ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... accepted a very advantageous proposal which was made her by Count Brawn. This charming Frenchwoman died of the small-pox a few months later, and there can be no doubt that her death was a blessing, as she would have fallen into misery and poverty after her beauty had once decayed. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the wall he came to more shelves, decayed, broken, left by the last tenant as not worth carrying away. And presently his feet came upon something harder, colder than the boards; it was a hearthstone, and it marked the place where, before the room was turned into a shop, there had been a ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... (including, of course, all preparatory cost in the nature of construction of tools, and of the apparatus for casting, grinding, and figuring the reflectors, of which two were constructed), at a total cost of L4,000. The woodwork of the telescope being so far decayed as to be dangerous, in the year 1839 I pulled it down, and piers were erected on which the tube was placed, that being of iron and so well preserved, that, although not more than one-twentieth of an inch thick, when in the horizontal position it sustained ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... been what they had long since forgot the use of, or what it was to wear them. I allotted the thin English stuffs, which I mentioned before, to make every one a light coat, like a frock, which I judged fittest for the heat of the season, cool and loose; and ordered that whenever they decayed, they should make more, as they thought fit; the like for pumps, shoes, stockings, hats, &c. I cannot express what pleasure sat upon the countenances of all these poor men when they saw the care I had taken of them, and how well I had furnished them. They told me I was a father to them; and that ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... sacrifices" from ruined or disgraced reigning families, unless the attendant circumstances were very gross; and so it came to pass that successive dynasties would strain a point in order to keep up the spiritual memory of decayed or ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... that the question as to the purpose with which they were written and the place they occupied in the literature of their day affords an interesting subject for speculation. Were they written for the stage? Decayed as was the taste for tragedy, tragedies may occasionally have been acted.[206] But there are considerations which suggest doubt as to whether the plays of Seneca were written with any such purpose. Even under Nero it is scarcely credible that the introduction of the mangled fragments of Hippolytus ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... the trees of a private park enclose the view, the chimneys of the mansion just pricking forth above their clusters; on the near side the path is bordered by willows. Close among these lay the houseboat, a thing so soiled by the tears of the overhanging willows, so grown upon with parasites, so decayed, so battered, so neglected, such a haunt of rats, so advertised a storehouse of rheumatic agonies, that the heart of an intending occupant might well recoil. A plank, by way of flying drawbridge, joined it to the shore. And it was a dreary moment for ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in the bamboo forest, but they were all ancient ones, half-filled with decayed leaves and obviously unused for half a century or more. From some of them fairly large-sized trees had grown. Sometimes in the midst of these great, silent, light-green forests we came upon giant ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... was a very sacred ceremony, and accompanied with many forms. The corpse was laid in a pit till the flesh decayed, the bones were then cleaned, and a part of them distributed among the relations and friends to be preserved as relics, part laid in consecrated ground. Dying persons sometimes desired that their bones should be thrown into the crater of the volcano at O Wahi, which was inhabited by the revered ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... safely, but her expectations of illness were realised. She took to her bed on arriving, and though she rose from it, there was reason to think she had had a slight stroke, for her activity of mind and body were greatly decayed, and she was wholly dependent on Mary Nugent for care and comfort. Mary, remembering the consequences of the former alarm, made the best of the old lady's condition; and Nuttie, ashamed of having once ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... she has never turned from me an hour— She knows a woman's duty and a queen's: Whose, then, can her affection be but mine? How can I hurt her—she is still my queen? If her strong inward pain is a real pain Find me some certain drug to medicine it: When common beings have decayed past help, There must be still some drug for a king to use; For nothing ought to be ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... could recover from the alarm he had been thrown into, another customer had entered; a pale young man, with a glossy hat, a white satin necktie, and a rather decayed gardenia. He, too, was one of Tweddle's regular clients. What his occupation might be was a mystery, for he aimed at being considered a ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... by column upon column of wishy-washy twaddle in the morning papers, that Henley Regatta has actually taken place. The effete parasites of a decayed aristocracy who direct this gathering endeavour year after year to make the world believe that theirs is the only meeting at which honour has the least chance of bursting into flower. I have my own opinions on this ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 9, 1890. • Various
... part of one of the last days of November, in the season of the eventful expedition we have been describing, intently engaged in inspecting some fragments of wrought wood, which, from the clue of some protruding piece, they had kicked up from the leaves and decayed brushwood that had nearly concealed them from view. One of these men was past the middle age, of a hardy but somewhat worn appearance. The other was in the prime of young manhood, of a finely-moulded form and an unusually prepossessing face and countenance. But ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... MOLD SPINACH—Remove roots and decayed leaves, wash in several waters until no grit remains. Boil in water to nearly cover until tender, drain, rinse in cold water, drain again, chop very fine; reheat in butter, season with salt and pepper and pack in small cups. Turn out and garnish ...
— Good Things to Eat as Suggested by Rufus • Rufus Estes
... several times against the back of his knife, and thus produced several sparks of fire. "This," said Harry, "will be sufficient to light a fire, if we can but find something of a sufficiently combustible nature to kindle from these sparks." He then collected the driest leaves he could find, with little decayed pieces of wood, and piling them into a heap, endeavoured to kindle a blaze by the sparks which he continually struck from his knife and the flint. But it was in vain; the leaves were not of a sufficiently combustible nature, and while he wearied himself in vain, they were not ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... part of the vegetable mass decayed slowly; but when the final ruin of the forest came, whole trunks were snapped off close to the roots and flung down. These are now found in numbers on the tops of the coal layers, the barks being flattened and ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... driver took us about 4 kilometres outside Poggibonsi to San Lucchese, a church of the 12th or 13th century, greatly decayed, but still very beautiful and containing a few naif frescoes. He told us he had sung the Sanctus here at the festa on the preceding Sunday. In a room adjoining the church, formerly, we were told, a refectory, there is a very good fresco representing the "Miraculous Draught ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... crept out on the large limb until he reached the spot where the line had been thrown over it, directly above his net. There, seating himself comfortably among the branches, he proceeded to sup and enjoy himself, despite the unsavoury smell that arose from the half-decayed buffalo-meat below. ...
— The Prairie Chief • R.M. Ballantyne
... nearer still; While in Chaldea an altitude of god Being mooted, and a saurian unearthed Upon a mountain stirring a surmise Of floods and alterations of the sea, A round-walled tower must rise upon Senaar Temple and escape to god the ascertained. These are decayed like Time's teeth in his mouth, Black cavities and gaps, yet earth is darkened By their deep-sunken and unfounded shadows And memories of man's earliest ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... contain some modern upholstery, but serve only to show what ought to have been there. They are now digging round the cloisters for a traditionary cannon, and in their progress, about five days ago, they discovered a corpse in too decayed a state to admit of removal. I saw the drinking-skull [Footnote: When the father of the present Mr. Murray was a student in Edinburgh, he wrote to his father (April 10,1827): "I saw yesterday at a jeweller's shop in Edinburgh ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... the year, budding life alternating with deadly desolation, spring still bringing back the freshness of leaves, flowers, and carolling birds, as if raising them from an annual interment in winter's cold grave, and then thinking of the destiny of his own race, how many generations have ripened and decayed, how many human crops have been harvested from the cradle and planted in the tomb, might naturally especially if he had any thing of the poet's associating and creative mind say to himself, Are we altogether perishable dust, or are we seed sown for higher fields, seed ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Gualterus H. Riffius, his Geometricall Volume: very diligently translated into the high Dutch tounge, and published. Nor yet the Vniuersities of Spaine, or Portugall, thinke their reputation to be decayed: or suppose any their Studies to be hindred by the Excellent P. Nonnius, his Mathematicall workes, in vulgare speche by him put forth. Haue you not, likewise, in the French tounge, the whole Mathematicall Quadriuie? and yet neither Paris, Orleance, or any of the other Vniuersities ...
— The Mathematicall Praeface to Elements of Geometrie of Euclid of Megara • John Dee
... definitely to avoid, I may, perhaps, help you a little by saying what to seek. In general, all banks are beautiful things, and will reward work better than large landscapes. If you live in a lowland country, you must look for places where the ground is broken to the river's edges, with decayed posts, or roots of trees; or, if by great good luck there should be such things within your reach, for remnants of stone quays or steps, mossy mill-dams, etc. Nearly every other mile of road in chalk country will present beautiful bits of broken bank at its sides; ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... and the hunters entered the fringe of dead trees. By the time they reached the center of the little island where the dead trees were thickest, the little party was nearly overcome by the horrible stench. At every step they crushed in nestfuls of decayed eggs which sent up ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... decayed it is needful to try various lighting. This can be done in the open air, by shading the part by the hands placed around it as a sort of tube, the head blocking out the light over the tube. Then quickly raise a hand alternately, so as ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... could serve for the worship of the conversi. The old inhabitants (near two hundred, Mr. Buckle thinks, rather generously), were still there up to Hugh's time, and if their church was like their houses the wooden roof was much decayed and the walls none of the best. Hugh resolved upon a stone vault of the Burgundian type, followed at the Grande Chartreuse, and he therefore had to thicken the walls by an extra case. The building was next divided into three parts, with doors from the north ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... will include an account of the esteem in which he was held while still in the flesh; of the fame he enjoyed and the influence he exercised until Rome as a great empire was no more and the Roman tongue and Roman spirit alike were decayed; of the way in which his works were preserved intact through obscure centuries of ignorance and turmoil; and of their second birth when men began to delight once more in the luxuries of the mind. This will prepare the way for a final chapter, ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... Philosophers say) then ad pondus; so nature in the mixture of these minerals, hath likewise taken more of some, and lesse of others, as shee thought to be most fit, and expedient for the good and behoofe of mans health, and the recovery and restitution of it decayed; being indeed such a worke, as no ...
— Spadacrene Anglica - The English Spa Fountain • Edmund Deane
... priest his last hath prayed, And I nod to what is said 'Cause my speech is now decayed, Sweet Spirit, ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... named Poorthing Lane, besides forming an asylum for decayed and would-be aristocrats, and a vestibule, as it were, to Beverly Square, was a convenient retreat for sundry green-grocers and public-house keepers and small trades-people, who supplied the densely-peopled surrounding district, and ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... and that the body, when worn and weary, will even subdue the spirit, and force her to fold her wings and suffer. I did not realize that it had gone so far with me, and I imagined that the winged soul could raise the old, decayed body. Therefore I risked, in spite of my lazy old age, to undertake this war, for I recognized it as a holy duty to enter into it, for the honor and justice of our country, and prove to the Emperor of Germany that he could not manage and rule at his will ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... the helplessness of her situation. She cast a hurried glance around, but could find no signs of comfort; yet she fixed her last hopes on Marien Rufa, this decayed piece of blanched mortality, like the drowning wretch who snatches at a withered branch, though conscious of the frail support to which ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... mind, which I believe in, though I hesitate to define it, has too much work before it to umpire in a dispute over the relative taste of the decayed and the raw. In literature, as in pretty much everything else, the central problem is not the struggle of the old with the new; it is the endless combat of civilization (which is old and new) against barbarism. Under which banner our writers are enlisting is the ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... tomorrow held only the desert and the return to a ruined land. Then the word of the Lord came upon the poet. What if the night winds did go mourning through the deserted streets of their capital! What if their language had decayed and their institutions had perished? What if the farmer's field was only a waste of thorns and thickets, and the towns become heaps and ruins! What if the king of Babylon and his army has trampled them under foot, as ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... prepared to confront poverty in this bare and comfortless-looking abode of decayed gentility. But I did not expect quite so many evidences of it as met my eyes as the door swung slowly open some time after my persistent knock, and I beheld Miss Charity's meager figure outlined against walls and a flight of uncarpeted stairs ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... fevers. Indeed, there is probably very little difference in the miasm thrown off from decomposed vegetable matter, and that produced from sluggish streams, standing waters and marshes. These, in the great Valley, abound with decayed vegetable matter. Hence, along the streams which have alluvial bottoms (as low lands upon streams are called in the West,) some of which are annually overflowed, and where the timber and luxuriant vegetable growth are but partially subdued, the inhabitants ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... is most welcome. Poor Nursey once made me a very pretty oil sketch of it: but I gave it to Mr. Jenney. By all means have it engraved for the pocket book: it is well worthy. Some of the tall ash trees about it used to be visible at sea: but I think their topmost branches are decayed now. This circumstance I put in, because it will tell in your verse illustration of the view. From the road before the lawn, people used plainly to see the topmasts of the men-of war lying in Hollesley bay during the war. I like the idea of this: ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald |
