heart-blood
English
Alternative forms
- heart's blood
Etymology
From Middle English herte blood; equivalent to heart + blood.
Noun
heart-blood (uncountable)
- (literary, archaic) Blood needed for continued life; blood regarded as the seat of life; lifeblood.
- 1591 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Second Part of Henry the Sixt, […]”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, OCLC 606515358, [Act II, scene ii]:
- […] I am not your king / Till I be crown’d and that my sword be stain’d / With heart-blood of the house of Lancaster; […]
- 1594 (first publication), Christopher Marlow[e], The Trovblesome Raigne and Lamentable Death of Edvvard the Second, King of England: […], London: […] [Eliot’s Court Press] for Henry Bell, […], published 1622, OCLC 837836359, (please specify the page):
- What we haue done, / our hart bloud shall maintaine.
- 1684, John Bunyan, Seasonable Counsel, or, Advice to Sufferers, London: Benjamin Alsop, p. 35,
- We shall not need here to call you to mind about the Massacres that were in Ireland, Paris, Piedmont, and other places: where the godly in the night, before they were well awake, had, some of them, their heart blood running on the ground.
- 1856, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Sixth Book”, in Aurora Leigh, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published 1857, OCLC 1000396166, pages 249–250:
- […] both his cheeks / Were hot and scarlet as the first live rose / The shepherd’s heart-blood ebbed away into, / The faster for his love.
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