heart-blood

English

Alternative forms

Etymology

From Middle English herte blood; equivalent to heart + blood.

Noun

heart-blood (uncountable)

  1. (archaic, literary) Blood needed for continued life; blood regarded as the seat of life; lifeblood.
    • c. 1590, William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2, Act II, Scene 2,
      [] 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, Christopher Marlowe, Edward II, London: William Jones,
      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, Aurora Leigh, London: Chapman & Hall, Book 6, pp. 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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