"Purblind" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... understanding pate but thine? For thy conceit is soaking, will draw in More than the common blocks:—not noted, is't, But of the finer natures? by some severals Of head-piece extraordinary? lower messes Perchance are to this business purblind? say. ...
— The Winter's Tale - [Collins Edition] • William Shakespeare
... traditions, customs, obstacles and absurdities, enraged myself, limited myself, gave myself to occupations I saw with the clearest vision were dishonourable and vain, and at last achieved the end of purblind Nature, the relentless immediacy of her desire, and held, far short of happiness, Marion weeping and reluctant ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... hand, there are those who take a different view of human nature, and who find in its contemplation a source of humility rather than of pride. They remind us how weak, how ignorant, how short-lived is the individual, how infirm of purpose, how purblind of vision, how subject to pain and suffering, to diseases that torture the body and wreck the mind. They say that if the few short years of his life are not wasted in idleness and vice, they are spent for the most part in a perpetually recurring round of trivialities, in the satisfaction ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... see more danger in it—you retort. Your taste's worth mine; but my taste proves more wise When we consider that the steadfast hold On the extreme end of the chain of faith Gives all the advantage, makes the difference With the rough purblind mass we seek to rule: We are their lords, or they are free of us, Justas we tighten or relax our hold. So, other matters equal, we'll revert To the first problem—which, if solved my way 760 And thrown into the balance, turns the scale— How we ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... heart unripe and mottled hide, Pale summer watermeloncholly sighed, And—but the Muse would find it vain To give a list of all the train; The hairless, purblind, toothless crew, That burst on Man's astonished view— The Bull dog and the Garden gate; The Girl's Papa in wrathful state; Ma'ma in law; the Leathern Clam; The Woodshed Cat; the Rampant Ram; The Fly, the Goat, the Skating Rink, The Paste-brush plunging ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various
... while he made a speech. I hung back to listen. 'Sir,' he was saying to Ben, 'Secretary Seward some years since purchased your territory from Russia for seven million dollars despite the protests of a clamorous and purblind opposition. How niggardly seems that purchase price at this moment! For Alaska has perfected you, sir, if it did not produce you. Gentlemen, I feel that we dealt unfairly by Russia. But that is in the dead ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... approbation, but by imitation also. Every one of Alexander's followers carried his head on one side, as he did; and the flatterers of Dionysius ran against one another in his presence, and stumbled at and overturned whatever was under foot, to shew they were as purblind as he. Hernia itself has also served to recommend a man to favour; I have seen deafness affected; and because the master hated his wife, Plutarch—[who, however, only gives one instance; and in this he tells us that the man visited his wife privately.]—has seen his ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... that germ which might once have been supposed to be lost forever in the woods of America, but thrown upon the bosom of Nature, the breath of God revived it, and the world hath gathered its fruits. Even Ireland has contributed her share to the liberties of America; and while purblind statesmen were happy to get rid of the stubborn Presbyterians of the North, they little thought that they were serving a good cause in another quarter.—Yes! the Volunteers of Ireland still live—they live across the ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... from the ark, rather than an accurate explanation of the actual causes of the deluge. Now, it is certainly true, that the Bible does describe things as they appear to men. It is, however, beginning to be discovered, that these popular appearances are closely connected with philosophical reality. Our purblind astronomy and prattling geology may be as inadequate to expound the mysteries of the Bible philosophy as was the incoherent science of Strabo and Ptolemy. The experience of another planet, now transacting before our eyes, admonishes ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... admitted by all, both from the structure of the heart and the arrangement and action of its valves. But still they are like persons purblind or groping about in the dark, for they give utterance to various, contradictory, and incoherent sentiments, delivering many things upon conjecture, ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... 630 Blackening on every side, and overhead A vaulted dome like Heaven's, far bespread With starlight gems: aye, all so huge and strange, The solitary felt a hurried change Working within him into something dreary,— Vex'd like a morning eagle, lost, and weary, And purblind amid foggy, midnight wolds. But he revives at once: for who beholds New sudden things, nor casts his mental slough? Forth from a rugged arch, in the dusk below, 640 Came mother Cybele! alone—alone— In sombre chariot; dark foldings thrown About ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... that had brought about the gradual shifting, amounting to a total revolution, in Cally's own attitude. More probably, though, it was only the inevitable resurgence of her own sane fundamental purposes, temporarily swept away by purblind passion. ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... it stands in your mind. You judge thus: you follow your judgment. I judge partly so, and partly otherwise, and I follow my judgment. Mere experience is but a purblind wisdom, after all. When I do not at all see my own way, I follow that, still aware of its imperfections; where eyes are of service, I use them, learning from experience caution, not submission. The real danger in this case was that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... since the world began, more cast down from her high estate. Not a shred of magnificence remained. She saw herself as the most useless, vaporing and purblind of mortals. She had gone forth from the despised Nunsmere, where nothing ever happened, to travel the world over in search of realities, and had returned to find that Nunsmere had all the time been the center of the realities that most deeply ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... Tasmanian Flora" as a whole, see "Life and Letters," II., page 257.), i.e. to where you treat of the Australian Flora itself; and the latter part I remember thinking most of in the proof-sheets. Either you have altered a good deal, or I did not see all or was purblind, for I have been much more interested with all the first part than I was before,—not that I did not like it at first. All seems to me very clearly written, and I have been baulked at only one sentence. I think, on the whole, I like ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... of the race of grown-ups are a purblind people. Otherwise, when we acknowledge what a stronghold this Boyville is, we the banished would not seek to steal away the merry townsmen, and bruise our hearts and theirs at our hopeless task. We have learned many things in our schools, and of the making of books there has been no end; ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... been spent before I was aware of him, three more will be the outside I can have passed gazing at him. But I speak of "minutes," of course, referring to my ostensible self, that inert, apathetic child who followed its mother, that purblind creature through whose muddy lenses the pent immortal had been forced to see his familiar in the wood, and perchance to dress in form and body what, for him, needed neither to be visible. It was this outward self which was now driven ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... Loki's right-hand came the flash of the fruitful ring, And at last spake Reidmar scowling: 'Ye wait for my yea-saying That your feet may go free on the earth, and the fear of my toils may be done; That then ye may say in your laughter: The fools of the time agone! The purblind eyes of the Dwarf-kind! they have gotten the garnered sheaf And have let their Masters depart with the Seed of Gold and of Grief: O Loki, friend of Allfather, cast down Andvari's ring, Or the world shall yet turn backward and the high heavens ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris
... stayed there very long, I should have become purblind, and that would have been a great misfortune, for I have heard men say that a stone-blind horse was safer to drive than one which had imperfect sight, as it generally makes them very timid. However, I escaped ...
— Black Beauty • Anna Sewell
... and loathe the man whose eyes are red and weeping with the effects of intemperate drinking, we cordially pity purblind students, as in some sense martyrs to the cause of learning. Dr. Reynolds, a distinguished American oculist, administers a rebuke to such which we fear is too often merited: "A closer examination of their history presents a very different result. Our sympathy may grow cool ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... said he, "is the purblind dowager, Lady Boucher, just at the door, Lady Delacour; she would not know my face, she would not see my beard, and I will bet fifty guineas that I come into a room in a hoop, and that she does not ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... to have seen that old man listening! His ears must have grown before my purblind eyes! But his story was an extraordinarily interesting and circumstantial effort. And to come back to your question, it did fit in with the theory of a fatal accident on your boy's part; he was frightened to show his face at school after sleeping in ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... "I understand, and I tell you they're all mad. Hopelessly mad." She laughed wildly. "Disaster? Oh, blind, blind, fools. There'll be disaster, sure enough. The old Indian curse will be fulfilled. Oh, Helen, I could weep for the purblind skepticism of this wretched people, this consequential old fool, Mrs. Day. And I—I am the idiot who has ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... now," at some sound below, springing to the little window and flinging it back, "you lazy idle wenches—what are you doing there? Is my work to stand still while you are toying with yon vile whelp? He is tangling the yarn, don't you see, thou purblind Jane Dacre, with no eyes but for ogling. There! there! Round the leg of the chair, don't you see!" and down flew a shoe, which made the poor dog howl, and his mistress catch him up. "Put him down! put him down this instant! Thomas! Davy! ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... its youth, it had leisure to treasure its recollections; even to pause and look back; to see what flower of a fair thought, what fruit of a noble art, it might have overlooked or left down-trodden. But now it is so old, and is so tired; it is purblind, and heavy of foot; it does not notice what it destroys; it desires rest and can find none; nothing can matter greatly to it; its dead are so many that it cannot count them; and being thus worn and dulled with age, and suffocated under the weight of its innumerable memories, it is very slow ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... parents returned, she presented him to their embrace, saying in a glad way, "Rejoice with me, O my father and mother! the robbers have at length allowed him to come back to us." Of course the parents were deceived, they are mostly a purblind race; and Hemgupt, showing great favour to his worthless son-in-law, exclaimed, "Remain with us, ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... conquered, but as reclaimed. Lincoln went further. He found a Confederate legislature ready-made to his hand, and promptly permitted it to repair the situation. In thus mingling the gray with the blue he was neither color-blind nor purblind. He knew what he was doing. He desired to blend them, as emblematic of a more perfect Union. Possibly the Confederate legislature suited his ...
— Memorial Addresses on the Life and Character of William H. F. Lee (A Representative from Virginia) • Various
... in the Crimea? No objection to being made a Field Marshal, and glory not so much an object as a good salary"; in another (A Grand Military Spectacle) we find the heroes of the campaign engaged in inspecting the Field Marshals, a pair of decrepid, purblind, old men seated in arm chairs; in the third we recognise the amiable Prince Consort, who was most unjustly suspected in those days of a desire to interfere in the administration of our military matters—it would ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... O purblind race of miserable men, How many among us at this very hour Do forge a life-long trouble for ourselves, By taking true for false, or false for true; Here, through the feeble twilight of this world Groping, how many, until we pass and reach That other, where ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... but oddly enough these wonderful tales made no such impression on his fancy as the stories in a wretchedly inferior book made. He did not know the name of this book, or who wrote it; from which I imagine that much of his reading was of the purblind sort that ignorant grown-up people do, without any sort of literary vision. He read this book perpetually, when he was not reading his Greek and Roman Mythology; and then suddenly, one day, as happens in childhood with so many things, it vanished out of his possession as if ...
— Boy Life - Stories and Readings Selected From The Works of William Dean Howells • William Dean Howells
... patent and notorious of natural facts, until they were, so to speak, thrust under our noses, what force remained in the dilemma—creation or nothing? It was obvious that, hereafter, the probability would be immensely greater, that the links of natural causation were hidden from our purblind eyes, than that natural causation should be incompetent to produce all the phenomena of nature. The only rational course for those who had no other object than the attainment of truth, was to accept "Darwinism" as a working hypothesis, and see what could ...
— The Reception of the 'Origin of Species' • Thomas Henry Huxley
... recondite, is found in 'Coriolanus' (II. i. 59-60) where Menenius asks the tribunes in the First Folio version 'what harm can your besom conspectuities [i.e. vision or eyes] glean out of this character?' Theobald replaced the meaningless epithet 'besom' by 'bisson' (i.e. purblind), a recognised Elizabethan word which Shakespeare had already employed in 'Hamlet' (II. ii. ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... delivering himself as always with restless vivacity of gesture, "I tell you youth is one of the most wastefully ignored forces in the world! Talk about our neglecting to get the good out of our water-power! The way we shut off the capacity of youth to see things as they are, before it gets purblind with our own cowardly unreason—why, it's as if we tried to make water run uphill instead of turning our mill-wheels with its ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... evening that preceded this proposed expedition, he went into one of the boxes at the playhouse, as usual, to show himself to the ladies; and reconnoitring the company through a glass (for no other reason but because it was fashionable to be purblind), perceived his mistress very plainly dressed, in one of the seats above the stage, talking to another young woman of a very homely appearance. Though his heart beat the alarm with the utmost impatience at sight of his Emilia, he was for some minutes deterred from obeying the impulse of his love, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... father, Plutus, the god of wealth, at whose beck all things are turned topsy-turvy, according to whose will all human affairs are regulated—war and peace, government and counsel, justice and treaties. He has begotten her on the nymph Youth, not a senile, purblind Plutus, but a fresh god, warm with youth and ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... last scene of his eventful life. His size had by this time become enormous, so that when he had first entered the Tower it was jestingly said that the doors must be enlarged to receive him. He could neither walk nor ride, as he was almost helpless; he was deaf, purblind, eighty years of age, ignorant of English law, and it was therefore not a matter of surprise that the high-born tribes, who thronged to his trial, were disappointed in the brilliancy of his parts, and in the readiness of his wit. "I see little of parts in him," observes Walpole, ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... shore you will probably be near rocks—an unpleasant complication in a hurried dive. There would, probably, very soon be boats out too, seeking with a machine-gun or pompom for a chance at your occasionally emergent conning-tower. In no way can a submarine be more than purblind, it will be, in fact, practically blind. Given a derelict ironclad on a still night within sight of land, a carefully handled submarine might succeed in groping its way to it and destroying it; but then it would be much better to attack such a vessel and capture it boldly ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... (yet as she went) she hide, She had a care to decke her vp in pride, Respecting more his loue to whom she went, Then parents feare, though knowing to be shent, And trickt her selfe so like a willing louer, As purblind Cupid tooke her ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... answered. "A purblind Government at last admits the error of its ways and proposes to make reparation for its neglect of ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... (ante, in. 307)—this habit the Burneys did not as yet know—'became completely absorbed in silent rumination; very unexpectedly, however, he shewed himself alive to what surrounded him, by one of those singular starts of vision, that made him seem at times, though purblind to things in common, gifted with an eye of instinct for espying any action that he thought merited reprehension; for all at once, looking fixedly on Mr. Greville, who without much self-denial, the night being very cold, kept his station ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... already moving onwards in a restless, purblind state, should open her eyes wide, should give herself fair-play, by accepting our coals, iron, and machinery, and, under the stimulus of a wholesome competition, should take to manufacturing upon a large scale, even these three millions of slaves will not be enough. France will be competing with ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... of what he had been, but the change fell upon him as quick as lightning, and no flash of lightning could have blighted him more dreadfully. He approached the table shuffling, with bent head, and purblind eyes peering this way and that. I placed a chair for him, but he seemed uncertain what to do with it until I helped him to seat himself. The filthy floor of that unspeakable dungeon had been his only seat and couch ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... missed her every moment; and, interested as were her regrets, they were not unmingled with some faint self-reproach when she remembered how lightly she had prized her services. The antiquated femme de chambre had never appeared so clumsy, purblind, and stupid; and the more her stately mistress chided her, the more bewildered Bettina became, the more ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... lifetime well employed in painting but one picture of her—Kharvani the sorrowful, grieving for the wickedness of earth; Kharvani, Bride of Siva, ready to intercede with Siva, the Destroyer, for the helpless, foolish, purblind ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... the Soul does not see well thro' purblind Eyes. The Ears hear not clearly when stopped with Filth. The Brain smells not so well when oppressed with Phlegm. And a Member feels not so much when it is benumbed. The Tongue tastes less, when ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... "soldier-saint," Caponsacchi, who saved Pompilia, and the wise old Pope who pronounced Guido's doom; from the unworthy priest in the Spanish Cloister to the very human, kindly Pope in "The Bean Feast." And from all these it is far down the ages to the evangelical parish priest of The Inn Album, that "purblind honest drudge," who, the deeper to impress his flock, painted heaven dimly but "made hell distinct." There are many artists, many musicians. There are poets from Aprile in Paracelsus, and the ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... beasts before they were dead. At last they were reduced to such extremity, that they proposed to cast lots for one to be killed to support the others; they turned back on their route, that they might find the dead bodies of their companions for food. Finally, out of the whole crew, three or four, purblind and staggering from exhaustion, craving for death, arrived at the borders of the colony, where they were kindly received and ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... sickening sensation of the man who has confided the high secrets of his soul to coarsefibred woman. He turned away, darkly conscious of having magnanimously given Ada a chance to mount with him into the upper air, which opportunity she, daughter of earth, had, in her purblind manner, refused. Thenceforward Ada was to him an unnoticeable ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... foot the purblind hare, Mark the poor wretch; to overshoot his troubles, How he outruns the wind, and with what care, He cranks and crosses with a thousand doubles; The many musits through the which he goes Are like a labyrinth to ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... sin. It is not the woman alone,—but in her there cluster upon the stage all want and woe, all calamity and disappointment, all shame and guilt. In Christ there come forward to meet her, love, hope, truth, light, salvation. In Simon are acted out doting conservatism, mean expediency, purblind calculation, carnal insensibility. Generosity in this scene is confronted with meanness, in the attempt to shelter misfortune. The woman is a tragedy herself, such as Aeschylus never dreamed of. The scourging Furies, dread Fate, and burning Hell ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... head to utter concerning woman? Did he leave her to be implicitly dealt with by Charles Darwin in his "Theory of Sexual Selection"? Or did he in the good old oriental way regard her as unimportant in the eyes of the Deity? If the latter, he was a purblind prophet and missed the ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... on Pisgah purg'd was the sight Of a son of Circumcision, So may be, on this Pisgah height, Bob's purblind, mental vision: Nay, Bobby's mouth may be open'd yet Till for eloquence you hail him, And swear he has the angel met That met the ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... carved mantel was a little round old-fashioned mirror, and as I lay back in the chair my purblind eyes were fixed upon it as it reflected the mingled gleams of lamp and fire that touched the shining surfaces of the oaken wall or the furniture of the room. My back was to the door, and yet by the sudden passing of a shadow across the glass I saw that it was being opened stealthily—and all ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... desire to acquit himself of some terrible deed of readjustment, just what, he could not say, some terrifying martyrdom, some awe-inspiring immolation, consummate, incisive, conclusive. He fancied himself to be fired with the purblind, mistaken heroism of the anarchist, hurling his victim to destruction with full knowledge that the catastrophe shall sweep him also into the vortex ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... House, and especially as he passed through the Great Hall. This circumstance, together with what I saw that afternoon in every street, convinced me how much our friends were dispirited, and I therefore resolved next day to raise their courage. I knew the First President to be purblind, and such men greedily swallow every new fact which confirms them in their first impression. I knew likewise the Cardinal to be a man that supposed everybody had a back door. The only way of dealing with men of that ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... Generals were unacquainted with the first elements of Castrametation and Tactic; but the Generals of the Sultan had a still more prodigious depth of ignorance; so that to form a correct idea of this War, you must figure a set of purblind people, who, by constantly beating a set of altogether blind, end by gaining over them a complete mastery." [OEuvres de Frederic, vi. 23, 24.] This, as Friedrich knows, is what Austria cannot suffer; this ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... it seems to our purblind eyes that so many girls should be married before they are women! The woman comes at length, and finds she is forestalled—that the prostrate and mutilated Dagon of a girl's divinity is all that is left her to do the best with she can! But, thank God, in the faithfully ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... hosts. They have a way of collecting the morally lame, halt, and blind into their drawing-rooms that gives those apartments the air of a convalescent home. The moment a couple have placed themselves beyond the social pale, these purblind hosts conceive an affection for and lavish hospitality upon them. If such a host has been fortunate enough to get together a circle of healthy people, you may feel confident that at the last moment a leper will be introduced. ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... reading this my narrative shall contemn and abhor me for the purblind fool and poor, desperate wretch I was, and who, living but for murder, could cry thus on God for the blood of his fellow-man—to all such I would say that none can despise me more utterly than I who write these words. For life since then hath learned ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... extract numbers out of matter, And keep them in a glass, like water; Of sov'reign pow'r to make men wise; 555 For drop'd in blear thick-sighted eyes, They'd make them see in darkest night Like owls, tho' purblind in the light. By help of these (as he profess'd) He had First Matter seen undress'd: 560 He took her naked all alone, Before one rag of form was on. The Chaos too he had descry'd, And seen quite thro', or else he ly'd: Not that of paste-board which men shew 565 For groats, ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... productions of the past. For why is a young man like Poliziano (who was not yet born when I was already held worthy to maintain a discussion with Thomas of Sarzana) to have a glorious memory as a commentator on the Pandects—why is Ficino, whose Latin is an offence to me, and who wanders purblind among the superstitious fancies that marked the decline at once of art, literature, and philosophy, to descend to posterity as the very high priest of Platonism, while I, who am more than their equal, have not effected anything but scattered work, which will be appropriated ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... only regard it from the shopkeeping point of view. When a new world began to arise at the Antipodes, our rulers saw an opportunity not for planting new offshoots of European civilisation, but for ridding themselves of the social rubbish no longer accepted in America. With purblind energy, and eyes doggedly fixed upon the ground at their feet, the race had somehow pressed forwards to illustrate the old doctrine that a man never goes so far as when he does not know whither he is going. While thinking of earning ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... world he lived in and drew out of it all there was, all there was! I could see him in the years to come ranging alone the fields that were sweet and the horizons that lifted for him, and ever returning to pace the common dusty mortal road by the side of a purblind wife. On general principles, as a case to point at, it would be a conspicuous pity. Nor would it lack the aspect of a particular, a personal misfortune. Dacres was occupied in quite the natural normal degree with his charming self; he would pass his misery on, and who would deserve ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... hosts of the dead, and know the world about me for the phantasmagoria it had always seemed? Should I drift to some spiritualistic seance, and there make foolish, incomprehensible attempts to affect a purblind medium? It was a state of unemotional curiosity, of colourless expectation. And then I realised a growing stress upon me, a feeling as though some huge human magnet was drawing me upward out of my body. The stress grew and grew. I seemed ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... violin when my mother was either in good humour or out of the way. It was her certain belief that my brother William would have returned to his country, and my eldest brother would not have looked so high, if they had had a little less learning." Poor, purblind, well-meaning, obstructive old dame Herschel! what a boon to the world that children like yours are sometimes seized with this incomprehensible fancy ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... another in Mr. Browning's intellect, it is his decisive and incisive faculty of thought, his sureness and intensity of perception, his rapid and trenchant resolution of aim. To charge him with obscurity is about as accurate as to call Lynceus purblind, or complain of the sluggish action of the telegraphic wire. He is something too much the reverse of obscure; he is too brilliant and subtle for the ready reader of a ready writer to follow with any certainty the track of an intelligence which moves with such incessant rapidity, ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... the evening of the 13th of February, 1820, attained a great development in the ensuing reign. Paris was unanimous in its opposition. Decamps's absurd cartoon of Charles X hunting, which we have reproduced, is a not unfaithful presentation of the state of public opinion concerning this purblind monarch. ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... for Princess Amelia; but they only told the latter that the King was ill and wanted her. She had been confined some days with a rheumatism, but hurried down, ran into the room without further notice, and saw her father extended on the bed. She is very purblind, and more than a little deaf. They had not closed his eyes; she bent down close to his face, and concluded he spoke to her, tho she could not hear him—guess what a shock when she ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom box. But it is quite another matter whether he ever opens the box or not. And he is as likely to poison as to cure himself, if, without guidance, he swallows the first drug that comes to hand. In these times a man may as well be purblind, as unable to read—lame, as unable to write. But I protest that, if I thought the alternative were a necessary one, I would rather that the children of the poor should grow up ignorant of both these mighty arts, than ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... escaped Booth's observation had suspicion given him the least hint to remark; but this, indeed, is the great optic-glass helping us to discern plainly almost all that passes in the minds of others, without some use of which nothing is more purblind ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... that band of New Orleans boys such an hour of glory as this at Champion's Hill. For two years more, by the waning light of a doomed cause, they fought on, won fame and honor; but for blazing splendor—of daring, skill, fortitude, loss and achievement which this purblind world still sees plainest in fraternal slaughter—that was the mightiest hour, the mightiest ten minutes, ever spent, from 'Sixty-one to ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... likelihood of improvement; that the place at which we were was called Rhyd y fen, or the ford across the fen; that it was just half way between Festiniog and Bala, that the clergyman of the parish was called Mr Pughe, a good kind of man, but very purblind in a spiritual sense; and finally that there was no safe religion in the world, save that of the Calvinistic-Methodists, to ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... so fraught with happy promise for Senator Hanway, what should come waddling into the equation to spoil all, but a purblind, klabber-witted journal of Toronto, just then busy beating the beauties of the Georgian Bay-Ontario Canal into the dull Canadian skull. This imprint, as a reason for Kanuck acquiescence in the great waterway, proceeded to ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... course of it, has been too faithfully reported, through its far-fetched and monotonous irregularities, but nobody realizes the extraordinary scene from which so many columns emanate, either by aid of the reporters' scanty descriptions, or by the purblind sketches of the artists. ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... three more characteristic moods of minds and men? "Fools, do you know anything of this mystery?" says Swift, stamping on a grave and carrying his scorn for mankind actually beyond it. "Miserable, purblind wretches, how dare you to pretend to comprehend the Inscrutable, and how can your dim eyes pierce the unfathomable depths of yonder boundless heaven?" Addison, in a much kinder language and gentler voice, utters much the same sentiment: and speaks of the rivalry of wits, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... delude me. This is a rare confession, say the wise, for a traveller to make: pretty accounts will such a one give of outlandish countries: his correspondents must reap great benefit, no doubt, from such purblind observations. But stop, my good friends; patience a moment!—I really have not the vanity of pretending to make a single remark, during the whole of my journey: if—be contented with my visionary ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... the Supreme Wisdom of the Enlightened One, clinging unto his own purblind knowledge, must suffer by fire for long Kalpas ...
— Buddhist Psalms • Shinran Shonin
... purblind Boy, since thou hast been so slacke To wound her Heart, whose Eyes haue wounded me, And suff'red her to glory in my Wracke, Thus to my aid, I lastly coniure thee; By Hellish Styx (by which the THUND'RER sweares) By thy faire Mothers vnauoided Power, By HECAT'S ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... also that the father will be sitting in the room to my right— sitting at his solitary meal, for his digestion is queer, and he prefers to dine alone: a strange, small, purblind man, full of sorrow and strong will. He is a clergyman, but carries a revolver always in his pocket by day, and by night sleeps with it under his pillow. He has done so ever since some one told him that the moors above were unsafe for ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... is lived here on earth, is on the surface sufficiently finite for us to say: It was on such a day I made my decision; to such and such an event I can look back as the cause of all that has followed. The How thereof remains traceable to our purblind eyes for a month, a term of years, one generation, possibly two; the Where and When can generally be defined; but the Why we ask blindly, and are rarely ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... arrivals are quite bewildering. Within the last ten minutes a stage-coach has driven up to the door, filled inside and out with distinguished characters, comprising Mr. Muddlebranes, Mr. Drawley, Professor Muff, Mr. X. Misty, Mr. X. X. Misty, Mr. Purblind, Professor Rummun, The Honourable and Reverend Mr. Long Eers, Professor John Ketch, Sir William Joltered, Doctor Buffer, Mr. Smith (of London), Mr. Brown (of Edinburgh), Sir Hookham Snivey, and Professor Pumpkinskull. The ten last-named ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... some one entered at the same time from the deck. It was Caragol, who was trying to block the passage of a woman; but she, laughing and taking advantage of his purblind eyes, was slipping little by little in between his ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Purblind and short-sighted friends! You will listen to me,—you will sympathize with me; for you know by painful experience what I mean when I say that we near-sighted people do not receive from our hawk-eyed neighbors that sympathy and consideration ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... the Inquisition, does not profess to do more than give an estimate based upon certain fixed data. However, it signifies but little whether we reckon by thousands or by fifteen hundreds. That foul monster spawned in the unholy embracements of perverted religion with purblind despotism cannot be defended by discounting five or even ten per cent. Let its apologists write for every 1000 of Llorente 100, and for every 100 of Llorente 10, and our position will remain unaltered. The Jesuit historian of Spain, Mariana, records the burning-of ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... them so manifestly and entirely finished, began to whisper together, although the patient and the notary were still perfecting some concluding formalities. But presently the notary began to read aloud the instrument he had prepared, keeping his face buried in the paper and running his nose and purblind eyes about it nervously, like a new-born thing hunting the warm fountain of life. All gave close heed. We need not give the document in its full length, nor its Creole accent in its entire breadth. This ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... the pagan instinct in her. She wanted to worship. And even in so doing, she became aware of a kindred something in herself—of an answering and anarchic energy, a certain menace to the conventional works and ways, and fancied security, of groping, purblind man. The insolence of a great lady, the dangerously primitive instincts of a great courtesan, filled her with an enormous pride, a ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... cravat, and he wore a loose damask powdering-gown secured by a cord round the waist. As he advanced he carried his masterful nose high in the air, but his head turned slowly from side to side in the helpless manner of the purblind, and he called in a high, querulous voice for ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... appears so naked on my side, That any purblind eye may find it out. Somerset. And on my side it is so well apparelled, So clear, so shining, and so evident, That it will glimmer through ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various
... conspicuous, and I was, alas the day! too true a prophet. His attachment to his cousin, who, on the death of her mother, had become an inmate of Don Picador's house, had been evident to all but the purblind old man for a long time; and when he did discover it, he imperatively forbade all intercourse between them, as, forsooth, he had projected a richer match for him, and shut Maria up in a corner of his large mansion, Federico, haughty and proud, could not stomach this. He ceased to reside at ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... opinions, I do not think that he ever said anything but what he sincerely thought. The problem, therefore, is to discover and define, if possible, the critical standpoint of a man whose judgment was at once so acute and so purblind; who could write the admirable surveys of English poetry contained in the essays on Mme. de Stael and Campbell, and yet be guilty of the stuff (we thank him for the word) about the dancing daffodils; who could talk of "the splendid strains of Moore" (though I have myself a relatively high ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... business, welcome strife, Welcome the cares, the thorns of life, The visage wan, the purblind sight, The toil by day, the lamp by night, The tedious forms, the solemn prate, The pert dispute, the dull debate, The drowsy bench, the babbling hall,— For thee, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... among a body of immigrants are one or two who are decidedly unsuitable. There is an example among our particular ship-load. Here is a woman, purblind, decrepit, looking sixty years old at least, and, by some incomprehensible series of mistakes, she has found her way out here as a "single girl!" What was the Agent-General in London about, and what could the Dispatching ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... appear, they would say, as we see them through our limited senses; but they must present entirely different aspects to those that differ from ours, just as the vibration of ether appears to us as colours, yet it presents quite different aspects to the colour-blind or to the purblind. The phenomenal universe is what appears to the human mind, and in case our mental constitution undergoes change, it would be ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... Purblind that she had been. What claim had any man, seeing what the lives of men are, to this pitiful sacrifice of reticence, this rending of the veil of merciful, wise secrecy from an innocent young head? None. Not the shadow of a claim. She tossed away her former scruples. ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... blamed as the architect of his overthrow. With what lights that shone, his conduct was prudent enough; and his dethronement is to be charged to destiny—to kismet, rather than to any gate-opening carelessness on the purblind part of himself. 'Prudentia fato major,' said the Florentine. But the Medici was wrong, and before Death bandaged his eyes for eternity it was given him to see that Destiny, for all his caution and for all his ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... as a sign outward, positive, and explicit, or a sign metaphysical, mystical, and esoteric. For, as to the last—it denoted that the task of the spectacles was over; that, when a philosopher has made up his mind to marry, it is better henceforth to be short-sighted—nay, even somewhat purblind—than to be always scrutinizing the domestic felicity to which he is about to resign himself, through a pair of cold, unillusory barnacles. And for the things beyond the hearth, if he cannot see without spectacles, is he not about to ally to his own defective vision a good sharp ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... rifle-fire, designed to frustrate all efforts at extinguishing the dread fire-demon, the flaming torch was applied by Chinese soldiery to half a dozen different places, and almost before anybody knew it, the holy of holies was lustily ablaze. As the flames shot skywards, advertising the danger to the most purblind, everybody at last became energetic and sank their feuds. British marines and volunteers were formed up and independent commands rushed over from the other lines; a hole was smashed through a wall, and ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... of speaking members, God knows that we have enough. And I suppose that these purblind sheep do have some occult weight that is salutary. They enable a leader to be a leader, and even in that way they are useful. We shall get a ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... thing to those who know the truth," the speaker resumed. "To the purblind laws of the West it may seem a great thing. We seek in Rome to do as Rome does. We judge every man as we find him. Therefore, recognizing that your total disappearance might compromise our movements in the near ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... crossed the sands to the edge of the surf, the line of which he began, after a pause, to follow as slowly northwards. His back was turned thus upon the Collector's equipage, to which in crossing the beach he had given no attention, being old and purblind. ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... could not be counted for multitude. The terrible requiem of the storm—the cannibal white shark—welcomed me with open jaws; the blue shark flung up his caudal for joy; the fox-shark lashed the sea; the northern shark glared through his purblind orbs; the hammer-head dilated his yellow irides; the purple dog-fish made a low purring huzza; and the spotted eyes of the monk-fish glistened with satisfaction. The hound-shark, the basking-shark, and the port-beagle were not less loyal; ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... fancy might busy itself of an afternoon, or at morning as he lay awake in bed. With our deeper and more logical sense of life, we can have no idea how large a space in the attention of mediaeval men might be occupied by such figured hangings on the wall. There was something timid and purblind in the view they had of the world. Morally, they saw nothing outside of traditional axioms; and little of the physical aspect of things entered vividly into their mind, beyond what was to be seen on church windows and the walls and floors of palaces. The reader will ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I say again; it only makes you purblind; don't you see what a wild-goose chase it has led you? The bill is good. ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... in the dishevelled drawing-room, after a round of the widely parted chambers, where frowzy beds, covered with frowzy white counterpanes, stood on frowzy carpets or yet frowzier mattings, and dusty windows peered into purblind courts. A vulgar modernity coexisted with a shabby antiquity in the appointments; a mouldering wall showed its damp through the smart tastelessness of recent paper; the floor reeled under a combination of pseudo-aesthetic ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... crane took the old purblind fish first to the bank of the other pond, and alighted in a Varana-tree growing on the bank there. But he threw it into a fork of the tree, struck it with his beak, and killed it; and then ate its flesh, and threw its bones away at the foot of the ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs
... brow: the mark of the raceace that carries its Sundays, its—language, its drinks, its dress, and its conventions with it, whereever it goes, and is surprised, and mildly shocked, if these things are not instantly adopted by the poor, purblind foreigner.—You are ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... anchor on his thigh, so had his posterity, as Trogus records, lib. 15. Lepidus, in Pliny l. 7. c. 17, was purblind, so was his son. That famous family of Aenobarbi were known of old, and so surnamed from their red beards; the Austrian lip, and those Indian flat noses are propagated, the Bavarian chin, and goggle eyes amongst the Jews, as [1317] Buxtorfius ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... infinite? Reason! alas, it does not know itself! Yet man, vain man, would, with this, short-lined plummet, Fathom the vast abyss of heavenly justice. Whatever is, is in its causes just, Since all things are by fate. But purblind man Sees but a part o'the chain; the nearest links; His eyes not carrying to that equal ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... delivered; 425 then an unhandy dandy mutilates the fish by cutting it in a wrong direction; here, an officious ignoramus tears asunder the members of a fowl as coarsely as the four horses dragged Ravillac, limb from limb; there, another simpleton notching a tongue into dissimilar slices, while a purblind coxcomb confounds the different sauces, pouring anchovy on pigeon-pie, and parsley and butter on roast-beef. All these barbarisms ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... Mr. Wooster, that I appreciate your splendid defiance of the outworn fetishes of a purblind social system. I appreciate it! You are big enough to see that rank is but the guinea stamp and that, in the magnificent words of Lord Bletchmore in 'Only a Factory Girl,' 'Be her origin ne'er so humble, a good woman is the equal of the finest ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse
... they took arms against me to enforce it, to pull you down from the place to which I had raised you out of the dust. Yet you can forget it, and in your purblind folly turn to these very men to right the wrongs you fancy I have done you. Do you think that men, holding you in such esteem as that, can keep any sort of faith with you? Do you think these are the men who are likely to fortify and maintain your ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... the most part, consists in fits of anticipation; since, the extra liberty or license of a debauch must be repaid by the iron fetters of headache, and the heavy hand of ennui on the following day: even the purblind puppy of fashion will tell you, if you make free with your constitution, you must suffer for it; and this by a species of slavery. To dance attendance upon a great man for a small appointment, and to boo your way ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 392, Saturday, October 3, 1829. • Various
... the poor souls to whom that Hour never comes, with its memories that nothing can wholly destroy, its brightness that nothing can ever wholly darken. Heaven especially help the poor purblind soul that can sneer at it, the greatest and noblest of mankind's gifts, the countervail of all his ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... landau rolled on; then it came to a halt under the broad porte-cochere of the Villa Irma, and two minutes after that Cleek and the count stood in the presence of Madame Tcharnovetski, her purblind associate, and her ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... Morning; Sifting the nations, The slag from the metal, The waste and the weak From the fit and the strong; Fighting the brute, The abysmal Fecundity; Checking the gross, Multitudinous blunders, The groping, the purblind Excesses in service Of the Womb universal, The absolute drudge; Firing the charactry Carved on the World, The miraculous gem In the seal-ring that burns On the hand of the Master - Yea! and authority Flames through the dim, Unappeasable Grisliness Prone down the nethermost Chasms of the Void! - ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... may of God's work—all's love, yet all's law. Now I lay down the judgeship he lent me. Each faculty tasked To perceive him, has gained an abyss, where a dewdrop was asked. Have I knowledge? confounded it shrivels at Wisdom laid bare. Have I forethought? how purblind, how blank, to the Infinite Care! Do I task any faculty highest, to image success? I but open my eyes,—and perfection, no more and no less, In the kind I imagined, full-fronts me, and God is seen ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... and Sweden under the union had been guaranteed by the Constitution of 1814; but, as a matter of fact, the former kingdom is by all the world looked upon as a dependency, if not a province, of the latter. The Bernadottes, lacking comprehension of the Norwegian character, had shown themselves purblind as bats in their dealings with Norway. They had mistaken a perfectly legitimate desire for self-government for a demonstration of hostility to Sweden and the royal house; and instead of identifying themselves with the national movement ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Curll was the chief of all piratical booksellers, and versed in every dirty trick of the Grub-street trade. He is described in that mad book, Amory's John Buncle, as tall, thin, ungainly, white-faced, with light grey goggle eyes, purblind, splay-footed, and "baker-kneed." According to the same queer authority, who professes to have lodged in Curll's house, he was drunk, as often as he could drink for nothing, and intimate in every London haunt of vice. "His translators lay three in a bed at the Pewter ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... groaned, "it is hard to have to play second fiddle to this purblind old Scotchman." Alaric Hobbs had been a reporter upon that dainty sheet, The New York Whorl, in one of his "emergent" periods, and so he writhed in agony at being left at the post. "I must be content to tap old Fraser when he comes back from London with that embarrassing lump of beauty, ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... to get into all where the excellent system of payment of Members is adopted, with salaries "On the higher scale," as they say in the Courts. It is curious that, when I explain to my creditors this most promising source of prospective income, they don't seem to see it! But creditors always were a purblind race.—WOULD-BE LEGISLATOR. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 18, 1893 • Various
... not," answered the Doctor, "it is God's truth, and stands in no need of the endorsement of a set of well-meaning but purblind bigots and pedants, who presumed to set metes and bounds to Divine inspiration, and decide by vote what is God's truth and what is the Devil's falsehood. But, speaking of eagles, I never see one of these spiteful old sea-robbers without fancying that he may be the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... admiration of Johnson, and no trifling enhancement of his friends' kindness in tolerating his eccentricities, that he seldom made allowance for his own palpable and undeniable deficiencies. As well might a blind man deny the existence of colours, as a purblind man assert that there was no charm in a prospect, or in a Claude or Titian, because he could see none. Once, by way of pleasing Reynolds, he pretended to lament that the great painter's genius was not exerted on stuff more durable than canvas, and suggested copper. Sir Joshua urged the difficulty ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... hearts. Just as some poor black-and-white engraving of a masterpiece of the painter's brush may, to an eye untrained in the harmony of colour, be a better interpretation of the artist's meaning than his own proper work, so our feeble copies of the transcendent splendour and beauty may suit some purblind and untrained eyes better than the serener and loftier perfection which we humbly copy. 'We are the witnesses of these things.' And depend upon it, mightier than all direct effort, and more unusual than all ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... thy battered hack, Thy lean cheek striped with plaster to and fro, Thy long spear levelled at the unseen foe, And doubtful Sancho trudging at thy back, Thou wert a figure strange enough, good lack! To make Wiseacredom, both high and low, Rub purblind eyes, and (having watched thee go) Dispatch its Dogberrys upon thy track: Alas! poor Knight! Alas! poor soul possest? Yet would to-day when Courtesy grows chill, And life's fine loyalties are turned to jest, Some fire of thine might burn within us still! Ah, would but one might ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... such Design is in my head: on the contrary, not even a Friend will know of it except yourself, Mr. Norton, and Aldis Wright: the latter of whom would not be of the party but that he happened to be here when I was too purblind to correct the few Proofs, and very kindly did so for me. As for Mr. Norton (America), he it was for whom it was printed at all—at his wish, he knowing the MS. had been lying by me unfinisht for years. It is a Version of the two OEdipus ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... some other mode of exit, which you have failed to discover," Sir Giles cried furiously. "Ha! here it is!" he exclaimed, dashing aside a piece of tapestry that seemed merely hung against the wall, but in reality concealed a short flight of steps. "Purblind dolts that you are, not to find this out. You shall answer for your negligence hereafter, if we take ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... searched in the presence of that important functionary, a meagre old captain of invalids, who had been roused from his bed, and was evidently half asleep. I stoutly denied my being "the criminal who had offended the majesty of the people." But as the governor himself, on gazing at me with his purblind eyes, was perfectly satisfied of my identity, there was no use in contesting the point. A couple of sentinels were placed at the door of my cell, and I was left, like himself, to my slumbers. Before the door closed, I grasped ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... could meet with any person of stanch credibility who professed to have seen this spectrum; unless it were the widow of Manus Conklin, the blacksmith of Frog's Neck, but then, poor woman, she was a little purblind, and might have been mistaken; though they said she saw farther than other folks in the dark. All this, however, was but little satisfactory in regard to the tales of buried money about which I was most curious; and the following was all that I could for a long time collect ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... larvae, the power to develop wings under the mortal wrapping. Also they tell us not to trouble ourselves about the fact that we see no Psyche-imago detach itself from the broken cocoon: this lack of visual evidence signifies nothing, because we have only the purblind vision of grubs. Our eyes are but half- evolved. Do not whole scales of colors invisibly exist above and below the limits of our retinal sensibility? Even so the butterfly-man exists,—although, as a matter of ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... Knowles, with his heated brain, fancied that the silence without in the night grew deeper, that the slow-moving air stopped in its course to listen. Perhaps the simple story carried a deeper meaning to these brooding mountains and solemn sky than to the purblind hearts within. It was a far-off story to them,—very far off. The old school-master heard it with a lowered head, with the proud obedience with which a cavalier would receive his leader's orders. Was not the leader a knights the knight of truest courage? All that was high, ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... chalk, Lest weeds arise, or dust a passage win Splitting the surface, then a thousand plagues Make sport of it: oft builds the tiny mouse Her home, and plants her granary, underground, Or burrow for their bed the purblind moles, Or toad is found in hollows, and all the swarm Of earth's unsightly creatures; or a huge Corn-heap the weevil plunders, and the ant, Fearful of coming age and penury. Mark too, what time the walnut in the woods With ample bloom shall clothe ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... towards a miraculous shrine. Nay how many come as vacant Strollers, aimless, of whom Europe is full merely towards something! For benighted fowls, when you beat their bushes, rush towards any light. Thus Frederick Baron Trenck too is here; mazed, purblind, from the cells of Magdeburg; Minotauric cells, and his Ariadne lost! Singular to say, Trenck, in these years, sells wine; not indeed ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... current rates of interest leave no profit from agriculture or trade. Twelve to 18 per cent. is charged for loans on ample landed security; and ordinary cultivators are mulcted in 40 to 60. A haunting fear of civil discord, and purblind conservatism in the commercial castes, are responsible for the dearth of capital. India imports bullion amounting to L25,000,000 a year, to the great detriment of European credit, and nine-tenths of it is hoarded in the shape of ornaments ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... tell whether a girl will make an industrious woman? How is the purblind lover especially, to be able to ascertain whether she, whose smiles and dimples and bewitching lips have half bereft him of his senses; how is he to be able to judge, from any thing that he can see, whether the beloved object will be industrious or ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... will get it before long, of course, for Tom is a good provider, and he knows his wife to be economical. Still he cannot see—poor innocent that he is!—why his dear little woman cannot just as well go to church in her last fall's bonnet, which, to his purblind vision, is quite as good as new. What, Tom! don't you know the dear little woman has too much love for you, too much pride in you, to make a fright of herself, upon any consideration? Don't you know that, were your ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... is, it is not. Was this taken By any vnderstanding Pate but thine? For thy Conceit is soaking, will draw in More then the common Blocks. Not noted, is't, But of the finer Natures? by some Seueralls Of Head-peece extraordinarie? Lower Messes Perchance are to this Businesse purblind? say ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... benefactor a purblind sort of wink. "Always belonged to you? Why of course it did," ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... gentlemen along the streets Suspended may illuminate mankind, As also bonfires made of country seats; But the old way is best for the purblind: The other looks like phosphorus on sheets, A sort of ignis fatuus to the mind, Which, though 't is certain to perplex and frighten, Must burn more mildly ere ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... remember, was routed by the tumult from its sleepy perch, and flew slowly over the open space of the ravine. So curious a compound is man!—we watched the great brown-winged creature flap its purblind way across from wood to wood, and speculated there, as we stood in the jaws of death, if some random ball ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... night, were gone. Coquettishly she plied all her wiles to captivate poor Pommer anew. His pulses hammered, his senses were aflame; but he remained master of himself, and sternly he resolved to sever these equivocal relations with a woman whom he could no longer respect. The weak, purblind man had been steeled against further temptation by seeing a few hours ago the abyss yawning at his feet, in which an illicit love had threatened to engulf him forever. The image of his mother, noble type of womanhood, rose before his mind, and ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... Garrick's acting, but here Garrick could take his full revenge. The purblind Johnson was not, we may imagine, much of a critic in such matters. Garrick reports him to have said of an actor at Lichfield, "There is a courtly vivacity about the fellow;" when, in fact, said Garrick, "he was the most vulgar ruffian that ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... Were he charged in a court of justice with having forged various notes, and clear evidence given of the fact, corroborated by the additional testimony of his having on a former occasion fabricated a Will of a very ancient date, would a jury hesitate to find him guilty, because two purblind old women should be brought into court, and swear that the Will urged against him had such an ancient appearance, the hand-writing and language by which the bequests were made was so old, and the parchment so yellow, that they could not but believe ...
— Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley (1782) • Edmond Malone
... Christ was crucified, before Moses was born, began the terrible and pathetic attempt of a predamned people to raise their heads and walk erect. The first lifting of purblind eyes destined never to see ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... characters. Thus one of the sources of amusement lies in the fact that while the audience occupies somewhat the attitude of omnipotence, it has the pleasure of observing the characters of the play living their lives in the purblind way usual to mortals. Lessing said that a comedy should make us laugh at vices, but the vices must be those of characters who have good qualities also. Does 'Twelfe Night' answer to this description? Analyze the causes why the fun of ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... dearest, my excellent young master. Good Heaven! that I, poor old man, should live to have the joy—what a stupid blockhead was I that I did not at a glance—oh, gracious powers! And you are really come back, and the dear old master is underground, and here you are again! What a purblind dolt I was, to be sure! (striking his forehead) that I did not on the instant—Oh, dear me!—-who could have dreamt it—What I have so often prayed for with tears—Oh, mercy me! There he stands again, as large as life, in the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... a purblind prank, O think you, Friend with the musing eye, Who watch us stepping by With doubt and dolorous sigh? Can much pondering so hoodwink you! Is it a purblind prank, O think you, Friend with ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... my ears, and looked defiantly round the room. Its walls are no longer standing, and the hands of its builders have crumbled to dust. Some mental accident impressed this picture on the purblind memory of childhood. ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... the police came to an untimely end. The one result obtained was the expression of purblind opinion by the authorities of the detective department which pointed to Isabel, or to one of the servants, as the undiscovered thief. Thinking the matter over in the retirement of his own office—and not forgetting his promise to Isabel ...
— My Lady's Money • Wilkie Collins
... whose curious glance delights to trace What Heaven and Nature join'd to frame most rare; Here view mine eyes' bright sun—a sight so fair, That purblind worlds, like me, enamour'd gaze. But speed thy step; for Death with rapid pace Pursues the best, nor makes the bad his care: Call'd to the skies through yon blue fields of air, On buoyant plume the mortal grace obeys. Then haste, and mark in one rich form combined (And, for that dazzling ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... instructions seriously and they were so taken by Hardy, but Creede laughed silently, showing all his white teeth, yet without attracting the unfavorable attention of the judge, who was a little purblind. Then there was a brief discussion of details, an introduction to Mr. Einstein of the New York Store, where Hardy was given carte blanche for supplies, and Judge Ware swung up on the west-bound limited and went flying away toward home, leaving his neighbor's son—now ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge |
