"First blush" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ye skies!... Be my Colin but there, Not the dew-spangled bents on the wide level Dale, Nor Morning's first blush can more lovely appear Than his looks, since my wishes I ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... At the first blush of this discovery Mr. Harris felt that perhaps he had been a trifle rash—that it might have been wiser to give more heed to his wife's advice; but since he had got his captives secure at last, he was not going to be such a fool ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... endeavouring to limit their practice to cases which they believed to be just. Sir Matthew Hale is a conspicuous example, but he acknowledged that he considerably relaxed his rule on the subject, having found in two instances that cases which at the first blush seemed very worthless were in truth well founded. As a general rule English lawyers make no discrimination on this ground in accepting briefs unless the injustice is very flagrant, nor will they, except ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... might, at first blush, seem to say that everything was in a state of tranquility and peace. This is far from being the case. In the face of the record of Lott Cary as a Christian, a pastor, a representative of the Richmond African Baptist Missionary Society ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... not, my lord, so much the fault of Mr Rattlin as it would, at the first blush, appear to be. He himself pressed a wicked, mischievous young blackguard, who was appointed the young gentleman's servant. Incredible as the fact may appear, my lord, he contrived, in a manner that Dr ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... things it is liable to be abused. A too frequent use of the oath will easily lead to irreverence, and thence to perjury. It is against this danger, rather than against the fact itself of swearing, that Christ warns us in a text that seems at first blush to condemn the oath as evil. The common sense of mankind has always given this interpretation to the ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... while doing this goes without saying, but still he is a valuable addition to the cast. From an announcement in the programme, it appears that Othello, Hamlet, and the Merchant of Venice are shortly to be played. It seems at the first blush a difficult task to pick out of Mr. BENSON'S present company a gentleman quite suited to fill the title roles in the two first, and Shylock in the last. But, no doubt, the Lessee and Manager thinks the playing of the characters of the Prince of Denmark and the Moor ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 1, 1890 • Various
... At first blush of dawn wind from same quarter (east-south-east). Rained heavily all night and to my astonishment, instead of the creek rising as usual (three and a half inches per hour) it was now rising five and a half inches and hourly increasing. Although the creek has in many places overflown ...
— McKinlay's Journal of Exploration in the Interior of Australia • John McKinlay
... but, when once his honor was satisfied, he showed a ready inclination for the peace which the Pope, Calixtus II., in council at Rome, succeeded in establishing between the two rivals. The war with the Emperor of Germany, Henry V., in 1124, appeared, at the first blush, a more serious matter. The emperor had raised a numerous army of Lorrainers, Allemannians, Bavarians, Suabians, and Saxons, and was threatening the very city of Rheims with instant attack. Louis hastened to put ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... urgent cry for help, for men and money; the Church Extension, as the watchman in the night is crying out to our uninterested Catholics—"the day is coming, the night is coming"—meaning that the faint streak on the eastern horizon may be the last rays of a dying day or the first blush of a new dawn; . . . and what are we doing? Here and there, a spasmodic effort, a generous outburst of zeal—the work of some society, parish or diocese. While, what we need now is the combined effort of all the Catholics. This will only be obtained ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... aboard the Sunyado Maru, anchored off the breaks of Amoy, and captured, at first blush, the hearts of the entire forward crew, Bobbie MacLaurin was the most eager prisoner of ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... masses of pink and white fragrance. Nothing could exceed their fluttering loveliness or their luxuriant promise. A few days of fairy beauty, and showers of soft petals floated noiselessly down, covering the earth with delicate snow; but I knew, that, though the first blush of beauty was gone, a mighty work was going on in a million little laboratories, and that the real glory was yet to come. I was surprised to observe, one day, that the trees seemed to be turning red. I remarked to Halicarnassus that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... Curator could utter a word, only to reappear in a few minutes with a man in his wake whom the former at first blush thought to be as much past the age where experience makes for efficiency as the other seemed to be ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... first false step we trace all our future woe, with loss of Eden. But there was a short and precious interval between, like the first blush of morning before the day is overcast with tempest, the dawn of the world, the birth of nature from "the unapparent deep," with its first dews and freshness on its cheek, breathing odours. Theirs was the first ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... rose high in the heavens, and the first streaks of dawn appeared. There is no twilight in these low latitudes, and the full daylight came well nigh at once. I had not closed my eyes since my encounter with the steward, and ever since the first blush of day I had labored under the impression that I could see some unusual dark mass half way up the mast. But although it again and again caught my eye, it hardly roused my curiosity, and I did not rise from the bundle of sails on which I was lying to ascertain what ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... divined him for a clergyman—he bore the clerical impress, that odd indefinable air of clericism which everyone recognises, though it might not be altogether easy to tell just where or from what it takes its origin. In the garb of an Anglican—there being nothing, at first blush, necessarily Italian, necessarily un-English, in his face—he would have struck you, I think, as a pleasant, shrewd old parson of the scholarly—earnest type, mildly donnish, with a fondness for gentle mirth. What, however, you would scarcely have divined—unless ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... horror I noticed what to my mind went to prove that she was the person for whom I was looking. There were dark red stains on the white roses she wore on her dress. It was an unpleasant shock to me, placing me, as it seemed, in a terribly difficult position. For, at the first blush of my discovery, it all seemed to fit in. Clement Henshaw had been, I imagined, in love with Miss Tredworth before Kelson appeared on the scene. She had thrown him over for my friend, and Henshaw, taking his rejection ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... first blush of dawn, when every one in Russia was yet groaning under the strokes of an autocratic tyranny, which the presentiment of its speedy end had driven into madness, the bewitching strains of the new Hebrew lyre resounded through Lithuania. ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... breathe the air! Never had her step been so light, or her daily walk to the dingy office—dingy no longer—so bracing. And the out-of-doors—the sky and drifting clouds; the low hills, bleak in the winter's gloom—what changes had come over them? Was it the first blush of the coming spring that had softened their lines, or had her eyes been blind to all their beauty? Oh! Marvellous elixir that makes hopes certainty and ...
— Abijah's Bubble - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... advocate, rises to speak: Mr. President and gentlemen of the jury. The cause that I am charged to defend before you, requires medicine rather than justice; and is much more a case of pathology than a case of ordinary law. At first blush ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... it. That van was another Eden, until PUNCH, the serpent, entered. The lady was a native of Switzerland—yes, of Switzerland. Oh, that he (the learned gentleman) could follow her to her early home!—that he could paint her with the first blush and dawn of innocence, tinting her virgin cheek as the morning sun tinted the unsullied snows of her native Jungfrau!—that he could lead the gentlemen of the jury to that Swiss cottage where the gentle Felicite (such was the lady's name) lisped her early ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 4, 1841 • Various
... then, but hie thee to bed, good Denys. Next to Margaret I love thee best on earth, and value thy 'coeur d'or' far more than a dozen of these 'Tetes d'Or.' So prithee call me at the first blush of rosy-fingered morn, and let's away ere the woman with the hands ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... Ema. And now, in the intoxication of her visions, she forgot the care of the day before, the importunate letters, the distant reproaches, and thought of nothing in the world but cloisters chiselled and painted, villages with red roofs, and roads where she saw the first blush of spring. Dechartre had modelled for Miss Bell a waxen figure of Beatrice. Vivian was painting angels. Softly bent over her, Prince Albertinelli caressed his beard and threw around him glances that ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... was easy to say; the thing, at the first blush, was undiscoverable. I was overwhelmed with miserable, womanish pity for my broken friend; his outcries grieved my spirit; I saw him then and now—then, so invincible; now, brought so low—and knew neither how to refuse, nor how to consent to his proposal. The ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... results, being even such as we have seen, he did not much repine at, for he felt he had deserved them; and there was a sort of grim satisfaction, dreary as the prospect was, in facing them, and taking his punishment like a man. This was what he had felt at the first blush on the Hawk's Lynch; and, as he thought over matters again by his fire, with his oak sported, on the first evening of term, he was still in the same mind. This was clearly what he had to do now. How to do it, was the ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... always as quite a Mountjoy, because of his talent, and appearance, and habit of command, had whispered to her a word. Why should not Florence be transferred with the remainder of the property? There was something to Mrs. Mountjoy's feelings base in the idea at the first blush of it. She did not like to be untrue to her gallant nephew. But as she came to turn it in her mind there were certain circumstances which recommended the change to her—should the change be necessary. Florence certainly had expressed an unintelligible objection to the ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... aquiline nose, a finely cut mouth, which he generally kept open, or rather which was gaping like the edges of a wound,—this man would have presented to Lavater, if Lavater had lived at that time, a subject for physiognomical observations which at the first blush would not have been very favourable ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... a struggle in the bosom of Robert Bramble. It was some hours before he could recover from the first blush of amazement at the strange discovery he had made. Not to have had something of a brother's feelings come over him at such a time, he must have been less than human; and it was between the promptings of blood, of early recollections of childhood, before he grew to that age when his disposition, ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray
... could not rid myself of the thought that these two things were bound up together, that the one arose from the other. I remember, that, as this feeling of my own guilt presented itself to me at the first blush, so it persisted in me, but to this feeling a second was speedily added which ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... of individual character. It arises as often from the weakness of the character as from its strength. The dispersion of this clever and showy ministry is a fine illustration of this truth. One morning the Arch- Mediocrity himself died. At the first blush, it would seem that little difficulties could be experienced in finding his substitute. His long occupation of the post proved, at any rate, that the qualification was not excessive. But this cabinet, with its serene and blooming visage, had been all this time charged with fierce and emulous ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... At first blush it may seem not only unnecessary, but even indecent, to discuss such a proposition as the elevation of cruelty to the rank of a human right. Unnecessary, because no vivisector confesses to a love of cruelty for its own sake or claims any general fundamental right to be cruel. Indecent, because ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... in spite of the long years of trouble and disappointment! True, the first blush of maidenhood was gone, for she was only four years younger than I, but she was beautiful beyond description. Little of stature, yet perfectly moulded, her great, grey eyes still possessed their old charm, while her brown hair made a fitting crown for so beauteous a face. ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... been suggested that much of the sympathy we lavish upon martyrs is wanton waste, because to many minds, if not in fact to all, there is a positive pleasure in considering oneself a martyr. More absolute truth is contained in this than appears at the first blush. There are very few who do not roll under their tongues as a sweet morsel the belief that their superior goodness or generosity has brought them trouble and affliction from ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... library by any chance. The real librarian, and a very worthy fellow he was, was a man of the name of Tallencourt. He was an old soldier, and this caused him to be elected captain of a grenadier company in the Citizen Guard—a position to which, in the first blush of his enthusiasm, he attached an exaggerated importance. Well, some time after Dumas had resigned his position in the library, in the midst of the riots which occurred so frequently about that period, we saw Tallencourt come ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... of the tufts of aconite, the campanulas, and the meeting of the two post-chaises, one ascending, the other descending. After that he saw no longer anything but a red hood, and his eyes were open when the first blush of the morning penetrated his modest chamber. Eagles sleep little when they ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... "At first blush," returned Greg, "some of you may not like the job. It is nothing more nor less than a visit to Dodge's room, while he and Blayton are absent ...
— Dick Prescott's Second Year at West Point - Finding the Glory of the Soldier's Life • H. Irving Hancock
... up in London was sick and ailing; and after all this might be the true Popenjoy who, in coming days, would re-establish the glory of the family. But, at any rate, she was his wife, and the bairn would be his bairn. He had been made a happy man, and had determined to enjoy to the full the first blush of his happiness. But when he was told that she was not to be fretted, that she was to be made especially happy, and was so told by her father, he did not quite clearly see his way for the future. Did this mean that he was to give up everything, that he was to confess ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... of Durham's enemies his ordinance of banishment was a ukase; and, at first blush, it looks like an unwarrantable stretching of his powers. But Durham was on the ground and must necessarily have known the conditions prevailing much better than his critics three thousand miles away. Desperate diseases need desperate remedies. ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... seen how, in the first blush and budding of the Elizabethan spring, George Peele treated the tale of the judgement of Paris; on the same legend Heywood based one of his semi-dramatic dialogues; it remains to be seen how, in the late autumn of the great age of our dramatic literature, Shirley returned to the same theme ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... contracting debts, and develope it with that cogent logic which is so peculiarly yours. Your station in the councils of our country gives you an opportunity of producing it to public consideration, of forcing it into discussion. At first blush it may be laughed at, as the dream of a theorist; but examination will prove it to be solid and salutary. It would furnish matter for a fine preamble to our first law for appropriating the public revenue: and it will exclude, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... is as certain as anything in life or politics can be that if the Bill of 1902 had been accepted, the Irish tenants would be still going gaily on under the old rent-paying conditions. The United Irish League was still in the first blush of its pristine vigour, and when the delegates of the National Directory came up from the country to Dublin they soon showed the mettle they were made of. They wanted no paltry compromises, and it was then and there decided to enter upon a virile campaign against rack-renters, ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... have seen. Yet in some peculiar manner they seemed one and all not to the last tittle quite of this world. They were, so to speak, more earthy, too definite, too true to the mould, like figures in a bleak, bright light viewed out of darkness. Certainly not one of them was at first blush prepossessing. Yet who finds much amiss with the fox at last, though all he ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... for this measure will be too well known to need any explanation to the public. Every friend and every enemy of America will comprehend them at first blush. To you, sir, I owe all the apology I can make. The urgent necessity I am in of your advice and assistance, indeed of your conduct and direction of the war, is all I can urge; and that is a sufficient justification ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... in the midst on an emerald bright, Fair Geraldine sat without peer; Her robe was the gleam of the first blush of light, And her mantle the fleece of a noon-cloud white, And a beam of the ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... now—to resume my suspended period—but now to the important point,—capital. You must take that, unless you go as a shepherd, and then good-by to the idea of L10,000 in ten years. So, you see, it appears at the first blush that you must still come to your father; but, you will say, with this difference, that you borrow the capital with every chance of repaying it instead of frittering away the income year after year till you are eight and thirty or forty at least. Still, Pisistratus, ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... or two sad, separate wives, without A fruit to bloom upon their withering bough— Begg'd to bring up the little girl and 'out,'- For that 's the phrase that settles all things now, Meaning a virgin's first blush at a rout, And all her points as thorough-bred to show: And I assure you, that like virgin honey Tastes their first season (mostly if they ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... loud laments, With sweeter notes, and more melodious woe. For these nocturnal thieves, huntsman, prepare Thy sharpest vengeance. Oh! how glorious 'tis To right the oppressed, and bring the felon vile To just disgrace! Ere yet the morning peep, Or stars retire from the first blush of day, With thy far-echoing voice alarm thy pack, 40 And rouse thy bold compeers. Then to the copse, Thick with entangling grass, or prickly furze, With silence lead thy many-coloured hounds, In all their beauty's pride. See! how they range Dispersed, how busily this way and that, They cross, ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... Sasanoa River through the upper Hell Gate, entering the Sagadahoc, passing the Chops, and finally through the Neck, into Merrymeeting Bay. The narrowness of the channel and the want of water at low tide in Back River would seem at first blush to throw a doubt over the possibility of Champlain's passing through this tidal passage. But it has at least seven feet of water at high tide. His little barque, of fifteen tons, without any cargo, would not draw more than four feet at most, and ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 2 • Samuel de Champlain
... At first blush it may seem to be a bad example of special pleading to attempt to discover the reason for his opposition to vaccination in his idealism. But it is not far from the truth. He believed in a Ministry of Public Health, that doctors should be servants of the State, and that they should ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... bowling-green at the Court towards the rose-garden, bent upon the same quest as on the summer morning, which seemed such a long time ago, when Tom Burney had first declared his love for her. It was said in the village that Rose had lost her looks, and certainly the indefinable first blush of youth had faded; but if Rose's face had lost its delicacy of colouring, it had gained infinitely in expression. The blue eyes were soft and wistful, the pretty lips had lost their trick of pouting, the head ...
— The Village by the River • H. Louisa Bedford
... two hundred yards, as though the interview was over, and he were leaving her. She, as she saw him go, wished that he would return that she might say some word of comfort to him. Not that she could have said the only word that would have comforted him. At the first blush of the thing, at the first sound of the address which he had made to her, she had been angry with him. He had disappointed her, and she was indignant. But her anger had already melted and turned itself to ruth. She could not but love him better, in that he had loved ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... first blush of triumph these little successes gave him, young Edgar's head was in a fair way to be turned. He saw himself (in fancy) the leader, the popular favorite of the whole school. Indeed, he flattered himself he had leaped at a single bound to this position at the moment, ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... the line at muskrat and am not ashamed to say so. Compelling is the association of ideas, and the thought grips one that muskrat must taste as domestic rats (are rats domestic?) look. Raw fish at the first blush does not sound palatable, yet raw oysters appeal. The truth is that meat or fish frozen is eaten raw without any distaste, the freezing exerting on the tissues a metabolic change similar to that effected by cooking; and it is convincingly ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... gazed into each other's faces with a sad tragic air, as though the occasion were one which at the first blush was too melancholy for many words. There was whispering here and there and one young farmer's son gave a deep sigh, like a steam-engine beginning to work, and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. "There ain't nothin' too bad,—nothin," ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope |
