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Blight   /blaɪt/   Listen
Blight

noun
1.
A state or condition being blighted.
2.
Any plant disease resulting in withering without rotting.



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"Blight" Quotes from Famous Books



... have said the word adieu! A blight has fallen on my soul! And bliss, that angels never knew, Is torn from me, by fate's control! And yet the tear I shed at parting, Was "all ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... over its squares and the raven croaked in its great thoroughfares weeping and bewailing the dwellers who erst made it their dwelling.[FN129] The Emir stood awhile, marvelling and sorrowing for the desolation of the city and saying, Glory to Him whom nor ages nor changes nor times can blight, Him who created all things of His Might!" Presently, he chanced to look aside and caught sight of seven tablets of white marble afar off. So he drew near them and finding inscriptions graven thereon, called the Shaykh and bade him read these. Accordingly he ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... nature and radiates to the circumference. It is the pith and marrow of every substance, every relation, and every process. All things with which we deal, preach to us. What is a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun,—it is a sacred emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow of winter overtakes in the fields. But the sailor, the shepherd, the miner, the merchant, in their several resorts, ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... he flipped a rosebud covered with blight, kicked off a snail which was crawling on the path; then, halfway down the path, he suddenly raised his head and gave a look at ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin

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

... Might ebb, drawn backward from their eyes, and night Hide for one hour the imperishable faces. That they might rise up sad in heaven, and know Sorrow and sleep, one paler than young snow, One cold as blight of dew and ruinous rain, Rise up and rest and suffer a little, and be Awhile as all things born with us and we, And grieve as men, and like slain ...
— Atalanta in Calydon • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... Ida, bitterly. 'You are right. You could not know how mean I am. I did not know it myself till now. And now,' she pursued, with flashing eyes, with a look in her splendid face that seemed to blight and wither him, with all her beauty, all her womanhood, up in arms against him, 'and now to punish you for having kept the truth from me, I will tell you the truth—plainly. I have never cared one straw for you. I thought I did while I still believed you Brian Wendover ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon

... I say, that the Turkish empire has not even that excuse to plead; as is proved by the patent fact that the whole East, the very garden of the old world, has become a desert and a ruin under the upas-blight of their government. ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley

... in the leaden eyes the light that she alone knew how to kindle.... It pleased her.... It pleased her also to blight it at her will. She laughed. She knew as well how to blight as how to kindle. She knew also how to twist a soul in torment; and how to swirl it to the false heaven of unreal joys. For she, of the Unknown, knew much— more, ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne

... power of the Constable faded—his misfortunes and captivity fell like a blight upon the ancient glory of the house of Montmorency—his enemies destroyed his influence and his popularity—while the degradation of the kingdom was simultaneous with the downfall of his illustrious ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... Then, as I looked, it grew darker and darker—the thunder pealed all round me—cries came forth from every hill, as of fierce and deadly beasts in wild dreadful fight. The flowers round me were withering up, as if a burning blight had passed over them; and soon it was all ...
— The Rocky Island - and Other Similitudes • Samuel Wilberforce

... stone In deathless song shall tell, When many a vanished age hath flown, The story how ye fell; Nor wreck, nor change, nor winter's blight, Nor Time's remorseless doom, Shall dim one ray of glory's light That gilds ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly

... nearly stricken down and confidence in the General Government was so much impaired that loans of a small amount could only be negotiated at a considerable sacrifice. As a necessary consequence of the blight which had fallen on commerce and mechanical industry, the ships of the one were thrown out of employment and the operations of the other had been greatly diminished. Owing to the condition of the currency, exchanges between different parts of ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson

... to other laws if that tremendous night Passed o'er his frame, exposed and worn, and left no deadly blight; Then wonder not that when, refresh'd and warm, he woke at last, There lay a boundless gulf of thought ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge

... it is not. The few remaining inhabitants were valiantly pulling themselves together, and if order and some sort of law could be established, they were confident that they could rebuild their life again. We talked to them and encouraged them to continue their struggle against the blight that had defiled their homes and their country. Their hopes seemed to revive from our assurance of English working-class sympathy. I am pleased they did not know that we had some people mad enough to wish to inflict similar ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward

... dreary wet weather—one of innumerable wet summers that blight the potatoes and blacken the hay and mildew the few oats and rot the poor cabin roofs. The air smoked all day with rain mixed with the fine salt spray from the ocean. Out of doors everything shivered and was disconsolate. Only the bog prospered, basking ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan

... that's open to them, if they've made a bad cast for a mate—and good Lord! how are they to know before it's too late!—they haven't a choice except to play tricks or jump to the deuce or sit and "drape in blight," as Colney has it; though his notion of the optional marriages, broken or renewed every seven years!—if he means it. You never know, with him. It sounds like another squirt of savage ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... of mediocrity which I have never seen equalled except in the workingmen's cottages of Ampere, New Jersey, the home of the General Electric Company.] Add to the geographic sameness the universal blight of white civilization with its picture post-cards, professional hula and ooh-la dancers, souvenir and gift shops, automat restaurants, movie-palaces, tourists, artists and explorers, and you have some idea of the boredom which had settled down ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock

... had a right to keep her spancelled in the asylum. She would begrudge any respectable person to be walking the street. She'd hoot you, she'd shout you, she'd clap her hands at you. She is a blight ...
— New Irish Comedies • Lady Augusta Gregory

... are all cases of non-sexual multiplication, and there are other instances, and still more extraordinary ones, in which this process takes place naturally, in a more hidden, a more recondite kind of way. You are all of you familiar with that little green insect, the Aphis or blight, as it is called. These little animals, during a very considerable part of their existence, multiply themselves by means of a kind of internal budding, the buds being developed into essentially non-sexual animals, which are neither male nor female; they become converted into young Aphides, ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley

... them home to fondle them; when I knew them all by their pretty names, assisted them to become chrysalises, and watched over them in that unprotected state as if I had been their mother. Ah, how dear were my little charges to me then! But now I class them with mosquitoes and blight and harvesters, the pests of the countryside. Why, I would let them crawl up my arm in those happy days of old, and now I cannot even endure to have them dropping gently into my hair. And I should not know what to say ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne

... spent have passed away. Of all the fruit borne by the tree of life, how small a portion drops from it when fully ripe, and in the due course of nature. The worm, and premature decay, are continually thinning them; and the tempest and the blight destroy the greater part of those that are left. Poor dear worthy old Minister, you too are gone, but not forgotten. How could I have had these thoughts? How could I have enjoyed these scenes? and ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton

... country, as in France and Italy, who condemn the demand for these precautions as un-Christian and impolitic. Such laxness is the soil in which thrives the upas tree whose shade has so long darkened the organs of our empire and now threatens to blight the whole organism. ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon

... temperance are not contented with taking the property of their fellow-men as they often do in different ways, they are not even satisfied with inflicting bodily injury and suffering upon those who oppose their ways, but they would blight their reputation, and this, too, is no small injury, for in ...
— The Story of a Dark Plot - or Tyranny on the Frontier • A.L.O. C. and W.W. Smith

... The high Messiah who should overthrow The gods that Superstition crowned with might And set above the world,—the coming Christ Whose unshed blood should be the holy tryst 'Twixt man and his lost Eden, washing white From his rebellious soul the serpent's blight. ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove

... in this manner for a long time. At last came a very wet summer, and everything went wrong in the country around. The hay had hardly been got in, when the hay-stacks were floated bodily down to the sea by an inundation; the vines were cut to pieces with the hail; the corn was all killed by a black blight; only in the Treasure Valley, as usual, all was safe. As it had rain when there was rain nowhere else, so it had sun when there was sun nowhere else. Everybody came to buy corn at the farm, and went away pouring maledictions on the Black Brothers. They ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various

... gained a strange power over her. She could not drive them from her sight, and they grew ever stronger, darker, and more unlovely to her eyes. They seemed to cast black shadows over all around, to dim the sunshine, blight the flowers, and drive away all bright and lovely things; while rising slowly round her Annie saw a high, dark wall, that seemed to shut out everything she loved; she dared not move, or speak, but, with a strange fear at her heart, sat watching the ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various

... your father be thinking of? Here had we got three of the ugliest Philistines in Coombeland in our hand, and we've let 'em go to blight and freeze and blast everything. What could ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn

... upon any of his other fellow-prisoners. O'Brien was born, near Ballymacoda, County Cork, the birthplace of the ill-fated and heroic Peter Crowley. His father rented a large farm in the same parish, but the blight of the bad laws which are the curse of Ireland fell upon him, and in the year 1856, the O'Briens were flung upon the world dispossessed of lands and home, though they owed no man a penny at the time. Michael O'Brien was apprenticed to a draper in Youghal, and earned, ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown

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

... their friendship came the blight Of a little thoughtless fight; Then, alas! each passing day Farther bore ...
— Ballads of Peace in War • Michael Earls

... to help or hurt. When Death the bitter murderer doth smite, Red roams the unpurged fragment of him, driven On wings of plague and blight. ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold

... Godwin; "and worthy of you, who are the most honest of men. Yet, Wulf, I am troubled. See you, my brother, have ever brethren loved each other as we do? And now must the shadow of a woman fall upon and blight that love which is so fair ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard

... greatly reduced, by drought. About the same time, the yellow fever prevailed with fearful mortality. The next year the drought returned, and brooded in terror from March until January, and from January until June: not only blasting the harvest of '36, but extending its blight over the crops ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... instances of what may be called dry-rot or local blight on the civilised world's culture the decline appears to be due not to a positive infection of a malignant sort, so much as to a failure of the active cultural ferment, which has fallen below the critical point ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen

... I speak the dreadful word? How shall ye live when ye have heard? Madness hath seized our lord by night And blasted him with hopeless blight. Such horrid victims mightst thou see Huddled beneath yon canopy, Torn by red hands and dyed in blood, Dread ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles

... six million years hence, therefore, it is prophesied, the earth will fall into the grip of an ice age. There will descend on all living things the blight of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, August 11, 1920 • Various

... a blight on their labours lay, And ever their quarry would vanish away, Till the sun-dried boys of the Black Tyrone Took a brotherly interest in Boh Da Thone: And, sooth, if pursuit in possession ends, The Boh and his ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling

... abuses that afflict and retard the nations of the Old World. Not even our neighbours of the United States occupy an equal position of advantage, for we have not the canker-worm of domestic slavery to blight our tree of liberty. And greater than these, we are but commencing our career as a people, our institutions have yet to be established. We are free to look abroad over the earth and study the lessons of wisdom taught by the history of older countries, ...
— George Brown • John Lewis

... dies, in days of feverish sunlight and breathless languor. Everywhere there was the same torpor, the same wornout, desiccated life in death. It was in the streets with their sultry pallor, in the parks and squares where the dust lay like a grey blight on every green thing. Everywhere the glare accentuated this toneless melancholy. It was the symbol of the decadence following the brilliant efflorescence of the season, the exhaustion after that supreme effort of Society to amuse itself. ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair

... in their general sense were common things. In this great growth he felt a quality and a presence. Its moods were as varied as those of life itself—as it stood triumphing over decades of vicissitude, blight, and storm. ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... tell granny once all about it. She said there was a blight on her house—I don't know what that is; but I guess it's something big and heavy—and that it fell on every one of her children, as fast as ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green

... crises of discouragement so frequent with those who long to realize the ideal in this world. Had he discovered the warning signs of the misfortunes which were to come upon his family? Had he come to see that the necessities of life were to sully and blight his dream? Had he seen in the check of his missions in Syria and Morocco a providential indication that he had to change his method? We do not know. But about this time he felt the need of turning to St. Clara and Brother Silvestro for counsel ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier

... her child!" shrieked Rowland, in a voice heard above the howling of the tempest, "risen from this roaring abyss to torment me. Its parents have perished. And shall their wretched offspring live to blight my hopes, and blast my fame? Never!" And, with these words, he grasped Wood by the throat, and, despite his resistance, dragged him to the ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth

... veil'd in deepest night This beauty-breathing world of thine, And taught the serpent's deadly blight Amid its sweetest flowers to twine, Thou, thou alone hast dared repine, And turn'd aside from duty's call, Thou who hast broken nature's shrine, And ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XII, No. 347, Saturday, December 20, 1828. • Various

... hand, alone, is judgment; But He strikes with the hands of men, And His blight would wither our manhood If we ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various

... who had just died. Like many Southern verse-writers of his generation, he had lived and written under the inspiration of Poe. Asbury surprised me by the almost bitter remark that Poe's influence had been a blight upon the younger Southern poets, inasmuch as it had tended to over-subjectivity, to morbid sensibility, and to a pre-occupation with purely personal emotions. He argued, as he has since done so courageously ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry

... died before the subject had appeared. It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that the subject really began to make itself felt, and, like the potato blight or phylloxera, it soon became clear that it had come to stay. I think Greuze was the first to conceive a picture after the fashion of a scene in a play—I mean those domestic dramas which he invented, and in which the interest of the subject so clearly predominates—"The Prodigal ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore

... days had ended, a wave of animation swept through the waiting room and the casting office. "Swell cabaret stuff" was the phrase that brought the applicants to a lively swarm about the little window. Evening clothes, glad wraps, cigarette cases, vanity-boxes—the Victor people doing The Blight of Broadway with Muriel Mercer—Stage Number Four at 8:30 to-morrow morning. There seemed no limit to the people desired. Merton Gill joined the throng about the window. Engagements were rapidly made, both through the window and over the telephone that was now ringing those people who had ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson

... over her, when that beautiful impression was taken. A ripe southern face, with masses of jet-black hair, and dark brilliant eyes. There was a dewy crimson on her lips, and her cheeks were red as damask roses. A bright, happy face, upon which no blight ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask

... let us say—at the strangeness of the surrounding scene, than even by his own ruin. As he looked upon his fellow-gamesters, he seemed, for the first time in his life, to gaze upon some of those hideous demons of whom he had read. He looked in the mirror at himself. A blight seemed to have fallen over his beauty, and his presence seemed accursed. He had pursued a dissipated, even more than a dissipated, career. Many were the nights that had been spent by him not on his couch; great had ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz

... he laughed ironically. "I dare to tell you now to your face what all men say of you in your absence. They believe you to be—and rightly—a conscienceless pirate. You are a scathe and a blight; a pestilential ogre, drunk with self-worship. When first I saw you, you were gloating over having bought lambs that you had never seen for seven dollars which you sold, still unseen, for ten. Since then you have simply amplified, on the ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck

... inconsistent with the rules of romance, I cannot say that the under-plots are equally propitious. The "opening bud of love" between the general and Lady Lillycraft seems to have experienced some blight in the course of this genial season. I do not think the general has ever been able to retrieve the ground he lost when he fell asleep during the captain's story. Indeed, Master Simon thinks his case is completely desperate, her ladyship having determined that he is quite ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving

... over his head since I saw him last? The face that tried to smile at us from the pillow was strangely wizened and old. It was as though a withering blight had touched it. Only the eyes were the same. They glowed in the sunken face, beneath the shock of black hair, with a startling ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber

... the evergreens are manifestations of the abiding life within the plant-world, and they may well have been used as sacramental means of contact with the spirit of growth and fertility, threatened by the powers of blight. Particularly precious would be plants like the holly, the ivy, and the mistletoe, which actually bore ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles

... drag of the surf, under the skilful guidance of Congdon, the boat moved slowly along the line of beach to the line of cliff. All was open as the day. The blazing sun picked out each detail of jut and hollow. Evidently the poisonous vapours from the volcano had not spread their blight here, for the face of the precipice was bright with many flowers. So close in moved the boat that its occupants could even see butterflies fluttering above the bloom. But that which their eager eyes sought was still denied them. No opening offered in that smiling cliff-side. Not by so ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams

... of a sinless couple can be found and if his blood be mixed with the soll of Tara the blight and ruin will depart from Ireland," said ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens

... suffering another kind of impoverishment which is somewhat mysterious in its causes and perhaps impossible to prevent. This is the kind of blight which attacks many of our most ancient, beautiful, and expressive words, rendering them first of all unsuitable for colloquial use, though they may be still used in prose. Next they are driven out ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 3 (1920) - A Few Practical Suggestions • Society for Pure English

... diseased Agriculture, history of Scottish Agricultural statistics Allotment gardens, by Mr. Bailey Apple trees, cider Arrowroot, Portland, by Mr. Groves Berberry blight Books noticed Calendar, horticultural —— agricultural Cartridge, Captain Norton's Cattle, Tortworth sale of Chrysanthemum, culture of Crayons for writing on glass, by M. Brunnquell Crickets, traps for Crops, returns respecting the state of Dahlias, new ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various

... a tender passion which preyed upon his peace, and deeply disturbed his repose. He looked anxiously to the hour when Melissa was to make her decision. He wished, yet dreaded the event. In that he foresaw, or thought he foresaw, a withering blight to his budding hopes, and a final consummation to his foreboding fears. He had pressed Melissa, perhaps too urgently, to a declaration.—Had her predilection been in his favour, would she have hesitated ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.

... python grasp tighter and tighter around the unhappy island. The first symptoms of the dread potato disease showed themselves in the autumn of 1845, and even that year there was much suffering, though a trifle to what was to follow. Many remedies were tried, both to stop the blight and save the crops, but all alike proved unavailing. The next year the potatoes seemed to promise unusually well, and the people, with characteristic hopefulness, believed that their trouble was over. The summer, however, was very warm and wet, and with August there came ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless

... happened, to ask any of my friends to receive her. Naturally, she shrinks from speaking of that terrible time, but I understand that she spent no less than three nights alone in the mountains with him. And that fact in itself would be more than sufficient to blight any girl's career from a social standpoint. I often think that the rules of our modern etiquette are very rigid, though I know well that we cannot afford to disregard them." Again came that soft, regretful sigh; and then in an apologetic tone, "You will say, I know, that for the good of the community ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell

... and muttered, and murmured, was true, I was unfit for England; if false, England was unfit for me. I withdrew: but this was not enough. In other countries, in Switzerland, in the shadow of the Alps, and by the blue depth of the lakes, I was pursued and breathed upon by the same blight. I crossed the mountains, but it was the same; so I went a little farther, and settled myself by the waves of the Adriatic, like the stag at bay, who betakes him ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron

... o'er the spirit of my dream. The Wanderer was alone as heretofore, The beings which surrounded him were gone, Or were at war with him; he was a mark For blight and desolation, compassed round With Hatred and Contention; Pain was mixed In all which was served up to him, until, 190 Like to the Pontic monarch of old days,[52] He fed on poisons, and they had no power, But were a kind of nutriment; he lived Through that which had been ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... her sleeves rolled up above her elbows, displaying a pair of plump forearms and wielding a rolling pin in front of a good hot fire. Covered with flour—her face very red—she would have been in her element. . . . As it was, the dictates of fashion had cast their blight over ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile

... some cause, after they had gone through the winter of 1950 and 1951, at a temperature of nineteen below zero without injury. It may have been they were caught last fall by a hard freeze in full foliage, early before the apples were all picked; and, again, it may be blight. I hope not. But this I do know, the hickory and black walnut in their natural habitat ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various

... to the apartment and, as he did so, the blight moonlight fell upon his face, enabling Mr. Chillingworth to see, without the shadow of a doubt, that it was, indeed, Varney, the vampyre, who was thus stealthily making his entrance into Bannerworth Hall, according to the calculation which had been made by ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest

... pity for him, acting on her gentle heart, had made her in some sort his friend. It was not altogether his fault that he was an officer of the contraresguardo, and other people besides Pancha believed that but for this blight upon him a good career might have been his. But luck had been against Pedro from the very day of his birth; for when he was born his mother died, and a little later his father died also. Being thus left lonely in the world, he fell into the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various

... still ruminated on the blight which his budding laurels had received, it occurred to him that it would be possible to surprise an advanced post of Sir Thomas Fairfax's army, which lay at a small distance from the town of which Monthault was intrusted with ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West

... think it is quite fair to regard comedy as a curse or a yoke. Certainly Eugene Field never suffered under the blight of the one nor staggered under the burden of the other. If there is any curse in comedy, unadulterated by lying, malice, or envy, he never knew it. He knew—none better—that the author who would command the tears that purify and sweeten life must move ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

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

... yield of the first crop; for now clover will grow where none would grow before; another advantage arising from guano is, the wheat ripens so much earlier (15th of June) it escapes the rust, so apt to blight that which is late coming to maturity. He now sows wheat in the fore part of September, three pecks to the acre, after having previously plowed in 200 lbs. of Peruvian guano to the acre, and after the first harrowing sows the clover seed. ...
— Guano - A Treatise of Practical Information for Farmers • Solon Robinson

... Growing one's own choice words and fancies In orange tubs and beds of pansies; One's sighs and passionate declarations In odorous rhetoric of carnations; Seeing how far one's stocks will reach; Taking due care one's flowers of speech To guard from blight as well as bathos, And ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... reflection of possible evil. Ronald would have served Maurice at all hazards, and by all means in his power, or out of his power. He was expressing to his mother the chagrin he felt at the sad position of his friend, and his fear that it would throw a blight over his energies, ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie

... were the theatre on which this classical erudition was more especially displayed. Previous to Isabella's reign, there were but few schools in the kingdom; not one indeed of any note, except in Salamanca; and this did not escape the blight which fell on every generous study. But under the cheering patronage of the present government, they were soon filled, and widely multiplied. Academies of repute were to be found in Seville, Toledo, Salamanca, Granada, and Alcala; and learned teachers were drawn from ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott

... implied secrecy; implied doing something she would dread to be discovered in, something that, if discovered, must cause anger and pain; and that the admission of anything so near doubleness would act as a spiritual blight. Yet the music would swell out again, like chimes borne onward by a recurrent breeze, persuading her that the wrong lay all in the faults and weaknesses of others, and that there was such a thing as futile ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot

... "Rather than blight the prospects of so pure and lovely a creature I will make every sacrifice short of honor—let it be $30,000, ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper

... without money for us; there have been some more,—and will be, I hope! For the Destinies are opulent; and send here and there a man into the world to do work, for which they do not mean to pay him in money. And they smite him beneficently with sore afflictions, and blight his world all into grim frozen ruins round him,—and can make a wandering Exile of their Dante, and not a soft-bedded Podesta of Florence, if they wish to get a Divine Comedy out of him. Nay that rather is their way, when they have worthy work for such ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle

... another side to the country's history. The rainy weather in the summer brought to sudden hideous maturity the lurking potato disease. Any one who recalls the time and the aspect of the fields must retain a vivid recollection of the sudden blight that fell upon acres on acres of what had formerly been luxuriant vegetation, under the sunshine which came late only to complete the work of destruction; the withering and blackening of the leaves of the ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler

... be too hasty! Give me opportunity for explanation. I admit that I did wrong, but there are extenuating circumstances. Let me explain, I entreat you, before you thus blight ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan

... staggers imagination. Without yet measuring its dire extent, enough is known to rank it as the greatest calamity of the natural elements which this country has ever witnessed. Nothing in our history short of the deadly blight of battle has approached this frightful cataclysm, and no battle, though destroying more life, has ever left such a ghastly trail of horror and devastation. It seems more like one of those terrible convulsions of nature from which we have hitherto been happily spared, but which at ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker

... the gloom, and pale in the hoar rime That o'er the bleak and dreary prospect steals.— Spring claims our tender, grateful, gay delight; Winter our sympathy and sacred fear; And sure the Hearts that pay not Pity's rite O'er wide calamity; that careless hear Creation's wail, neglect, amid her blight, THE SOLEMN LESSON ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward

... of Philip Augustus. A remnant of fraternal pity, which never abandons the heart of a drinker, prompted Phoebus to roll Jehan with his foot upon one of those pillows of the poor, which Providence keeps in readiness at the corner of all the street posts of Paris, and which the rich blight with the name of "a rubbish-heap." The captain adjusted Jehan's head upon an inclined plane of cabbage-stumps, and on the very instant, the scholar fell to snoring in a magnificent bass. Meanwhile, all malice was not extinguished in the captain's heart. "So much ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo

... for exterminating from a field, blight, tares, foxtail, and all parasitic growths which destroy the wheat. He defended a rabbit warren against rats, simply by the odor of a guinea-pig which ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

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

... solid grace nor the columned front of the houses I had somewhat hurriedly admired in the Southland some years before, but its lower rooms were wide, its windows abundant, and outwardly it had escaped the blight of the scroll saw. ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson

... daylight for the broken word of a man? Double portion of my shame be on you, Terence Mulvaney, that think yourself so strong! By Mary and the saints, by blood and water an' by ivry sorrow that came into the world since the beginnin', the black blight fall on you and yours, so that you may niver be free from pain for another when ut's not your own! May your heart bleed in your breast drop by drop wid all your friends laughin' at the bleedin'! Strong you think yourself? May your strength be a curse ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling

... to achieve a few strokes in the right direction, I asked her to get me a cigar from an inside pocket of my coat, which was on the seat in front of her. Then came the blight to our bliss. She looked in the wrong pocket and instead of producing a cigar, she extracted two letters ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates

... ere Willoughby and his party could tear themselves from a scene that had witnessed so much domestic happiness; but on which had fallen the blight of death. During that time, the future arrangements of the survivors were completed. Beekman was made acquainted with the state of feeling that existed between his brother- in-law and Maud, and he advised ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper

... Never a spell shall blight our vines, Nor Sirius blaze above us, But you and I shall drink our wines And sing to the loved that ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field

... years in no way lessened his love, which was independent of beauty. Whether Stella was satisfied, who shall say? Mrs. Oliphant thought that few women would be disposed to pity Stella, or think her life one of blight or injury. Mr. Leslie Stephen says, "She might and probably did regard his friendship as a full equivalent for the sacrifice.... Is it better to be the most intimate friend of a man of genius or the wife of a commonplace Tisdall?" Whatever we may surmise, there ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift

... interest all the time has been child welfare, not child age, and will be able to use much of the old literature, simply substituting for "factory" the word "school" when condemning "hazardous occupations likely to sap [children's] nervous energy, stunt their physical growth, blight their minds, destroy their moral fiber, and fit them for ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen

... are laid along the waters of the Cumberland, the lair of moonshiner and feudsman. The knight is a moonshiner's son, and the heroine a beautiful girl perversely christened "The Blight." Two impetuous young Southerners' fall under the spell of "The Blight's" charms and she learns what a large part jealousy and pistols have in the love ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford

... speech is monotonous may mean very little to you, so let us look at the nature—and the curse—of monotony in other spheres of life, then we shall appreciate more fully how it will blight an ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... Libyan plains, tending his flocks, and bringing forth rich harvests from the earth. For him the bees wrought their sweetest honey; for him the sheep gave their softest wool; for him the cornfields waved with their fullest grain. No blight touched the grapes which his hand had tended; no sickness vexed the herds which fed in his pastures. And they who dwelt in the land said, "Strife and war bring no such gifts as these to the sons of men; therefore ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... easy to say: sometimes the tangle descends on us like a net of blight on a rose-bush. There is then an instant choice for us between courage to cut loose, and desperation if we do not. But not many men are trained to courage; young women are trained to cowardice. For them to front an evil with plain speech is to be guilty of effrontery ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... sooner had Lord Byron declared himself unhappy, than every young gentleman with a pale face and dark hair, used to think himself justified in frowning in the glass and writing Odes to Despair. All persons who could scribble two lines were sure to make them into rhymes of 'blight' and 'night.' Never was there so grand a penchant ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... corruption! Versailles seemed but a vast conservatory sheltering the vile soil from which sprang the lilies of France—La Belle France, as Edgar Sheepmeadow so eloquently puts it. Did any single bloom escape the blight of ineffable depravity? No—not one! Occasionally some fresh young thing would appear at Court—appealing and innocent. Then the atmosphere would begin to take effect: some one would whisper something to her—she would leer almost unconsciously; a few days later she ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward

... whatever other deficiencies it may be marked The Ring and the Book is blameless for the most characteristic of all the shortcomings of contemporary verse, a grievous sterility of thought. And why? Because sterility of thought is the blight struck into the minds of men by timorous and halt-footed scepticism, by a half-hearted dread of what chill thing the truth might prove itself, by unmanly reluctance or moral incapacity to carry the faculty of poetic vision over the whole field; and ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley

... himself can flee?[100] To zones though more and more remote,[di] Still, still pursues, where'er I be, The blight of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron

... trying not to sing, the sweetest of feminine creatures, happiness and love and kindness shining in her eyes, a lovely thing saved from the blight of empty years, and brought back to beauty, by Uncle Joachim's ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp

... was such a mistake. Mental consciousness is a purely individual affair. Some men are born to be highly and delicately conscious. But for the vast majority, much mental consciousness is simply a catastrophe, a blight. It ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence

... were extinguished it would involve the ruin of the French hold upon the Indian trade. The bishop and the priests, on the other hand, were ready to fight the liquor traffic to the end and to exorcise it as the greatest blight upon the New World. Quebec soon became a cockpit where the battle of these two factions raged. Each had its ups and downs, until in the end the traffic remained, but under a makeshift ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro

... it is not so. In Blantyre, for example, according to MacDonald, "to be called a liar is rather a compliment." Once more: English sentiment is such that the mere suspicion of incontinence on the part of a woman is enough to blight her life; but there are peoples whose sentiments entail no such effect, and, in some cases, a reverse effect is produced: "Unchastity is, with the Wetyaks, a virtue." It seems, then, that in respect of all the leading ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord

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

... our worthy neighbour begins to feel the weariness of idleness. He hangs over his gate, and tries to entice passengers to stop and chat; he volunteers little jobs all round, smokes cherry trees to cure the blight, and traces and blows up all the wasps'-nests in the parish. I have seen a great many wasps in our garden to-day, and shall enchant him with the intelligence. He even assists his wife in her sweepings and dustings. Poor man! he is a very respectable person, and would be a very happy one, ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford

... well defined, one of the most perfectly beautiful territories the tourist can find, and still fertile,—though the hills have forgotten their fruit and the plain its river,—and capable of sustaining a much larger population than it now supports, if the Mohammedan blight were off it. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various

... was the oligarchy that feared and detested him. It has been said that even His Royal Highness would have granted hospitality, and it would have saved the nation over which he ruled the blight of eternal execrations had he been strong enough to stand against the blundering ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman

... Evan's letter came gave way before the anxiety with which they all saw the change in him. His wife was a quiet, gentle woman, saying little at any time, perhaps feeling less than her stern husband. They all sorrowed, but it was on the father that the blight ...
— Shenac's Work at Home • Margaret Murray Robertson

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

... wholly or partially failed, and all because of too much cold water in the soil. It would seem, by the remarks of those who till the earth, as if there were never a season just right—as if Providence had bidden us labor for bread, and yet sent down the rains of heaven so plentifully as always to blight our harvests. It is rare that we do not have a most remarkable season, with respect to moisture, especially. Our potatoes are rotted by the Summer showers, or cut off by a Summer drought; and when, as in the season of 1856, in New England, they ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French

... bewitched. It don't take long to blight a body. There now, when I look at you, what you ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al

... that to be true; you would think it a pleasant magic if you could flush your flowers into brighter bloom by a kind look upon them: nay, more, if your look had the power, not only to cheer, but to guard;—if you could bid the black blight turn away, and the knotted caterpillar spare—if you could bid the dew fall upon them in the drought, and say to the south wind, in frost—"Come, thou south, and breathe upon my garden, that the spices of it may flow out." This you would think a great thing? And do you think it not ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin

... her mother's life now; knew that there had been a blight upon it, of which a bad unscrupulous man had been the cause. And that man was ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon

... forth new leaves, but it never essays to patch up the old ones. Every tree has such a superabundance of leaves that a few more or less or a few torn and bruised ones do not seem to matter. When the leaf surface is seriously curtailed, as it often is by some insect pest, or some form of leaf-blight, or by the ravages of a hail-storm, the growth of the tree and the maturing of its fruit is seriously checked. To denude a tree of its foliage three years in succession usually proves fatal. The vitality of the tree declines year by year ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs

... dealing with the butcher and even the bishop, to say nothing of the effect it always had upon the commonplace nobodies who go to the butcher and the bishop for the luxuries of both the present and the future life, and it had seldom failed to wither and blight the most hardy of masculine opponents. It was not always so effective in crushing the members of her own sex, for there were women in New York society who could look straight through Mrs. Tresslyn without even appearing ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon



Words linked to "Blight" :   halo spot, tomato yellows, apple canker, pear blight, chestnut canker, smite, chestnut-bark disease, potato mold, afflict, plant disease, desolation, potato murrain, potato mildew, potato disease, devastation



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