"Peasant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a strange individual, this Gaucho Juan. Born in a hut built of mud and maize-stalks somewhere on the superficies of these limitless plains, he differs little, in the first two years of his existence, from peasant babies all the world over; but so soon as he can walk, he becomes an equestrian. By the time he is four years old there is scarcely a colt in all the Argentine that he will not fearlessly mount; at six, he whirls a miniature lasso around the horns of every ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... have least Blood) But thou art still that Bird of Paradise Which hath no feet and ever nobly flies: Rich, lusty Sence, such as the Poet ought, For Poems if not Excellent, are Naught; Low wit in Scenes? in state a Peasant goes; If meane and flat, let it foot Yeoman Prose, That such may spell as are not Readers grown, To whom He that writes Wit, shews he hath none. Brave Shakespeare flow'd, yet had his Ebbings too, Often above Himselfe, ...
— The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher in Ten Volumes - Volume I. • Beaumont and Fletcher
... separated, and both capable of saying the sweetest and most affectionate things by letter, which they could not for the life of them utter in talk. They did, as a matter of fact, spend an immense amount of time apart; and when they were together, Carlyle, having been trained as a peasant and one of a large family, roughly neglected Mrs. Carlyle, while Mrs. Carlyle, with a middle-class training, and moreover indulged as an only daughter, was too proud to complain, but not proud enough not to resent the neglect deeply. ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of the Court played this pleader a trick by appointing him to defend at the Assizes a half-witted peasant accused of forgery. But Monsieur Savaron procured the poor man's acquittal by proving his innocence and showing that he had been a tool in the hands of the real culprits. Not only did his line of defence succeed, but ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... he had said to himself, "but I suppose it was all well meant." He could no longer see the betrothed couple, nor the cheerful old people; but for a long time he could hear them rejoicing and singing. At length there came by two peasant boys, who peeped in among the reeds and spied out the bottle. Then they took it up and carried it home with them, so that once more it was provided for. At home in their wooden cottage these boys had an elder brother, a sailor, who was about to start on a long voyage. ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... total absence of what we would call solidity; and the characteristics of impermanence seem to mark almost everything in the exterior life of the people, except, indeed, the immemorial costume of the peasant and the shape of the implements of his toil. Not to dwell upon the fact that even during the comparatively brief period of her written history Japan has had more than sixty capitals, of which the greater number have completely disappeared, it may be broadly stated that every Japanese city ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... the palace of fatigue and dulness. To these, that black swarm, slow and serried—coming, going, winding, turning, returning, mounting, descending, comparable only to ants on a pile of wood—is no more intelligible than the Bourse to a Breton peasant who has never ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... important consequences of these foreign wars, two exercised an especial influence upon the future fate of the Republic. The nobles became enormously rich, and the peasant proprietors almost entirely disappeared. The wealthy nobles now combined together to keep in their own families the public offices of the state, which afforded the means of making such enormous fortunes. Thus a new Nobility was formed, resting ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... equally distributed by the partition of the large freeholds, the tax should be progressive, i.e. increasing in percentage according to the value of the property, so as to compel the large owners to sell, and establish something answering to a peasant proprietary, or, more strictly speaking, a yeomanry tilling its own soil. The Conservatives look upon such a tax as nothing better than legalized robbery, and hold the most pronounced views on the sacred rights of property. ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... from the spires and towers of the town made a beacon of hope to the peasant as he laboured on the seigneuries leagues and leagues away. Far down the Cote de Beaupre, beyond the Mont Ste. Anne, from the rich farms of Orleans, and across on the Levi shore, the glistening light on the city roofs by day, and at night the twinkling candles in the windows, ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... into fire-crackers. With the introduction of "villainous saltpeter" war ceased to be the vocation of the nobleman and since the nobleman had no other vocation he began to become extinct. A bullet fired from a mile away is no respecter of persons. It is just as likely to kill a knight as a peasant, and a brave man as a coward. You cannot fence with a cannon ball nor overawe it with a plumed hat. The only thing you can do is to hide and shoot back. Now you cannot hide if you send up a column of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night—the most conspicuous ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... at once affiliated with. She knew the excellence of her type as it had revealed itself to her in the best peasant class. Trustworthy, simple, but of kindly, shrewd good sense and with the power to observe. Dowson was not a chatterer or given to gossip, but, as a silent observer, she would know many things and, in time, when they ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... said the young soldier, whose intelligence and native dignity made him, despite his peasant origin, one with whom a gentleman might converse. "Some day they will learn in France of what stuff the little Bearnaise King is made. I have stood watching him when he little supposed that a common soldier might take note of such things, ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... had actually used the coupon to buy firewood from the peasant Ivan Mironov, who had thought of setting up in business on the seventeen roubles he possessed. He hoped in this way to earn another eight roubles, and with the twenty-five roubles thus amassed he intended to ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... and Isal had now been married nearly five years, so that Isal was then eighteen years old and even more beautiful than when the prince found her in the garden. The royal family was at first displeased that the Prince should marry a peasant maiden, but Isal was so good that one could not help loving her, and soon every one said that there never had been such a Queen in Percan. As for the Prince, he loved her more than the whole of his kingdom; he always called ...
— Seven Little People and their Friends • Horace Elisha Scudder
... scene and thought, she certainly only set a sensible example. As it was, she had ample matter of interest in the stirring scenes around her—she with a heart to feel the woes of all: the miseries however real and terrible of the prince did not blind her to those of the peasant; the cold and calculating torture of centuries was not to be passed over because a maddened people, having gained for a time the right of power by might, brought to judgment the representatives, even then vacillating ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... this sad tendency in the clergy to imitate you, you will mend them; if you do not find that after all, it is they who will have to mend you. 'As with the people, so with the priest,' is the everlasting law. When, fifty years ago, all classes were drunkards, from the statesman to the peasant, the clergy were drunken also, but not half so bad as the laity. Now the laity are eaten up with covetousness and ambition; and the clergy are covetous and ambitious, but not half so bad as the laity. The laity, and you working men especially, are the dupes of ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... II. The peasant hears upon his field the trumpet of the knight, He quits his team for spear and shield, and garniture of might, The shepherd hears it 'mid the mist—he flingeth down his crook, And rushes from the mountain like a ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... Construction Industry, Similar Transport and other activities, or FESINCONTRANS; National Confederation of Salvadoran Workers or CNTS; National Union of Salvadoran Workers or UNTS; Port Industry Union of El Salvador or SIPES; Salvadoran Union of Ex-Petrolleros and Peasant Workers or USEPOC; Salvadoran Workers Central or CTS; Workers Union of Electrical Corporation or STCEL; business organizations - National Association of Small Enterprise or ANEP; Salvadoran Assembly Industry Association or ASIC; Salvadoran ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... barricade. Gamins and blouses worked at it. The respectables looked on and did not trouble the workers. Suddenly there was a general stampede among them. A squadron of about fifty dragoons charged up the Champs Elysees. One old peasant-woman in a scanty yellow-and-black skirt, which she twitched above her knees, led the retreat. But soon they stopped and turned again, while the dragoons rode slowly back, breathing their horses. Nobody was angry, for nobody had been hurt, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... the road is the canal, covered at all times with barges and boats decked with flags and streamers. At the cabarets are benches and tables in the open air under the trees; and here are to be seen the artisan, the bargeman and the peasant taking their afternoon delassement, and groups of men, women and children drinking beer and smoking. These groups reminded me much of those one sees so often in the old Flemish pictures, with this difference, that the old costume of the people is almost entirely ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... imprisonment. The Americans protested vigorously but ineffectually against this practice. Indeed, they exaggerated its evils, for many of the "criminals" were only mild offenders against unduly harsh and cruel laws. A peasant caught shooting a rabbit on a lord's estate or a luckless servant girl who purloined a pocket handkerchief was branded as a criminal along with sturdy thieves and incorrigible rascals. Other transported ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... The Count smiled. "It would be the same if she were a peasant girl. We shall be so happy—oh, there is no expressing ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... of this enterprise, the hardships and disappointments; how they dragged the big tools over the mountains by mule power; how they had kept it all secret; how he and Moliterno had done everything with the help of peasant labourers and one experienced man, who had "seen service in the ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... All the guests are in their places— Lilies with pale, high-bred faces— Hawthorns in white wedding favours, Scented with celestial savours— Daisies, like sweet country maidens, Wear white scolloped frills to-day; 'Neath her hat of straw the Peasant Primrose sitteth, Nor permitteth Any of her kindred present, Specially the milk-sweet cowslip, E'er to leave the tranquil shade; By the hedges, Or the edges Of some stream or grassy glade, They look upon the scene ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... ten minutes when another peasant came, asserting that the dog was really his, and he had been on the point of regaining his possession by arbitration of the neighbours when we shot the animal. He thus considered himself doubly injured—in his expectations and his property. He came ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... impression in his work "Pictures from Italy." "In the foreground was a group of silent peasant girls, leaning over the parapet of the little bridge, looking now up at the sky, now down into the water; in the distance a deep dell; the shadow of an approaching night on everything. If I had been murdered there in some former life I could not have ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... glimpses he had had in the streets, as he drove from the volor station outside the People's Gate, of the old peasant dresses, the blue and red-fringed wine carts, the cabbage-strewn gutters, the wet clothes flapping on strings, the mules and horses—strange though these were, he had found them a refreshment. It had seemed to remind him that man was human, and not divine as the rest of the ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... in a red petticoat; Ursule, in a blue blouse and a big hat was a most comical fellow; Casimir, got up as a beggar, had some halfpence given him in all good faith; Stephane, whom I think you know, as a spruce peasant, made believe to have been drinking, stumbled against our sous-prefet and accosted him—he is a nice fellow, and was just going to depart when all of a sudden he recognized us. Well, it was a most farcical ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... then the influence of the Christian upon others becomes a great missionary factor. The beauty of the Gospel story lies in its wonderful adaptability. It is the same in its power to a Pascal, a Butler, a Liddon, as it is to the unlettered peasant, who can ...
— The Discipline of War - Nine Addresses on the Lessons of the War in Connection with Lent • John Hasloch Potter
... delighted and mightily strengthened when they heard that with all the strength and art which our opponents were then called upon to display, they were capable of producing nothing but this flimsy rebuttal, which now, praise God! a woman, a child, a layman, a peasant are fully able to refute with good arguments taken from the Scriptures, the Word of Truth. And that is also the true and ultimate reason why they refused to deliver [to the Lutherans a copy of] their refutation. Those fugitive evil consciences were filled with horror at themselves, ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... of mine told me that a little Russian peasant, whom he had visited often in a military hospital, told him, at their last interview, that he would tell him a prayer that was always effective, and had never failed of being answered. "But you must not use it," he ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... I've hung On every tuneful accent! proud to feel. That notes like mine should have the fate to steal, As o'er thy hallowing lip they sighed along. Such breath of passion and such soul of song. Yes,—I have wondered, like some peasant boy Who sings, on Sabbath-eve, his strains of joy, And when he hears the wild, untutored note Back to his ear on softening echoes float, Believes it still some answering spirit's tone, And thinks it all too sweet to be ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... naked, searching for papers. She at once saw that to see me would be attended with danger; but she wrote a hurried note, and despatched it by another messenger, as well as a large packet of letters from home. In these letters I was adjured to continue the disguise of a peasant in whatever attempts I made. She, too, strongly objected to my proposed plan, and communicated to me a project of escaping which was suggested by a friend of hers at Cork, whither she had gone in her anxiety. His plan was that I should proceed to Cork, that very night, and take ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... The townsman spits at their garments, the shepherd quits his flock, the peasant his plow, to pelt with curses and stones; the villager sets on their trail ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... dutiful child, till her father had told her she might love, it would have been another thing! But this headstrong girl seemed to think she had as good a right to be happy in her own way as a peasant! True, the man of her choice was not a reprobate: he was not even a low-born, unmannerly churl: Don Fernando de Velasquez stood foremost among the young cavaliers of Spain, in gallantry and in that nobility of mind which, should ever accompany ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... my tenants, incited by the choice examples set them by other tenantry, made a descent on my Chateau one night, and did themselves the pleasure of burning it to the ground. By a miracle I escaped with my life and lay hidden for three weeks in the house of an old peasant who had remained faithful. In that time I let my beard grow, and trained my hair into a patriotic unkemptness. Then, in filthy garments, like any true Republican, I set out to cross the frontier. As I approached ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... the last of my strength, I ran on to the place where he had turned out of my sight, and, turning also, I saw him again. But alas! I could not touch him. He was in the act of lifting a girl down from her horse; doubtless it was her scream that I heard. She looked like a small farmer's or a peasant's daughter, and she carried a basket on her arm. Probably she was on her way to the early market at Zenda. Her horse was a stout, well shaped animal. Master Rupert lifted her down amid her shrieks—the sight of him frightened her; but he treated her gently, ...
— The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... money and freedom to 'live your own lives'? You are sexless; you haven't nature's great apology for the animal,—desire. Such women sin, when they sin, with their minds. Great God! I had rather those broad-hipped Italian peasant women of Calabria, with solid red-brown flesh, bred bastards for the country than have these thin, anaemic, nervous, sexless creatures, with their 'souls' and their 'charm,' marry and become mothers! What have you done to the race? The race of blond ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... of the term, but Miss Chislett had a certain perfection of courteous grace and dignified refinement, in every word, and gesture, and attitude, as utterly natural to her as the vigorous tread of any barefooted peasant girl, and which one does meet with (but by no means invariably) among women of the highest class in England. Her dignity fell short of haughtiness (which is not high breeding, and is very easy of assumption); her grace and courtesy were the simple results of constant and ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... which have detained me from my rest till the morning hour, and repair unto a couch often baffled of slumber by the pains and discomforts of this worn and feeble frame, I almost wish I could purchase the rude health of the peasant by the exchange of an idle and imperfect learning for the ignorance, content with the narrow world it possesses, because unconscious of the limitless creation beyond. Yet, my dear and esteemed friend, there is a dignified and tranquillizing philosophy in the writings of the ancients which ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... associations of an opposite description; but most of them, he should hope, from terror on the one hand, and the expectation of impunity on the other." There was the point, which no man comprehended better in theory than this clever law-officer, and none better in practice than the Popish peasant. "This expectation, however," he observes, "must now be effectually removed, and the terror of the law, I trust, be substituted in place of the terror of the conspirators." Adding, "your Excellency will observe with regret, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... Sclavonian race of peasant slaves, they pay tributes to their lords, not under the name of duty work, duty geese, duty turkeys, &c., but under the name of righteousnesses. The following ballad is a curious ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... until the Vienna Exhibition of 1890, when his opera, 'Die verkaufte Braut,' was produced for the first time in the Austrian capital. Since then it has been played in many German opera-houses, and was performed in London in 1895, and again in 1907. The story is simplicity itself. Jenik, a young peasant, and Marenka, the daughter of the rich farmer Krusina, love each other dearly; but Kezal, a kind of go-between in the Bohemian marriage-market, tells Krusina that he can produce a rich husband ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... not! To the unsophisticated monastic and mediaeval mind, as to the mind of primitive man, the marvellous and supernatural is almost as real and near as the commonplace and natural. If anyone doubts this let him study the mind of the modern Irish peasant; let him get beneath its surface and inside its guardian ring of shrinking reserve; there he will find the same material exactly as composed the mind of the tenth century biographers of Declan and Mochuda. Dreamers and visionaries were of as frequent occurrence in Erin of ages ...
— Lives of SS. Declan and Mochuda • Anonymous
... which he rode a good hour longer at full gallop. When he felt pretty sure of having shaken the police off his track, and that their bad horses could not overtake him, he determined to slacken to recruit his horse; he was walking him along a hollow lane, when he saw a peasant approaching; he asked him the road to the Bourbonnais, and flung him a crown. The man took the crown and pointed out the road, but he seemed hardly to know what he was saying, and stared at the marquis in a strange manner. The marquis shouted to him to get out of the way; ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE COUNTESS DE SAINT-GERAN—1639 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... brilliancy in association of ideas—such mental qualities, like the qualities of the apparition of the externally armed head in Macbeth, will not be commanded; but attention, after due term of submissive service, always will. Like certain plants which the poorest peasant may grow in the poorest soil, it can be cultivated by any one, and it is certain in its own good season to bring forth flowers and fruit. I can most truthfully assure you by-the-by, that this eulogium ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... assumed its entertaining aspect; about the wind, the trees, the people who had gone to the Cheniere; about the children playing croquet under the oaks, and the Farival twins, who were now performing the overture to "The Poet and the Peasant." ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... own legitimate purposes, but then that ugliness must be humorous, grotesque, or sublime, and not flat, prosy, or revolting. A blemish is by no means necessarily an ugliness. A leaf nibbled by insects and consequently discolored, a lad with ragged jacket and soiled trowsers, a peasant girl with bent hat and tattered gown, are often more picturesque objects than the perfect ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... lamented his own hard lot, and envied the riches of some persons who actually had cows and cornfields. Bonaparte inquired if some fairy were to offer to gratify all his wishes what he would ask? The poor peasant expressed, in his own opinion, some very extravagant desires, such as a dozen of cows and a good farmhouse. Bonaparte afterwards recollected the incident, and astonished the goatherd by the fulfilment of ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... the "Hex" murder case near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1930! This is scarcely different from an incident which had occurred in 1892 in Wemding, Germany: An hysterical woman was "exorcised" by the Capuchin Father Aurelian, who accused a peasant ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... good peasant," said I; "do you know this country? Can you lead us to a shelter for ...
— Marie • Alexander Pushkin
... out and developed, and his newest device was a dinner in the cage, an actual dinner, in which Madame Marve, bewitchingly dressed in a costume that was a cross between the uniform of a hospital nurse and the garb of a French peasant girl, acted as waitress, and the Missing Link figured as the diner. Actual edibles were used, and a "practicable" bottle ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... were circulated as to intended massacres of Catholics by Orangemen. The Celt is highly susceptible to personal influence; and, just as that of the Fitzgeralds largely accounts for the rising in Kildare, so does the personality of Father John Murphy explain the riddle of Wexford. The son of a peasant of that county, he was trained for the priesthood at Bordeaux, and ardently embraced the principles of the French Revolution and the aims of United Ireland. His huge frame, ready wit, and natural shrewdness brought him to the front in Wexford; and he concerted the plan of establishing ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... with trial on a capital charge of fighting for his country against England; Imperial Romanoff, said to have perished miserably by a more summary method of murder, is perhaps alive or perhaps dead: nobody cares more than if he had been a peasant; the lord of Hellas is level with his lackeys in republican Switzerland; Prime Ministers and Commanders-in-Chief have passed from a brief glory as Solons and Caesars into failure and obscurity as closely on one another's heels ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... China are continually quoted in support of subdivision. In the case of France, let us ask whether any of our stalwart labourers would for a single week consent to live as the French peasant does? Would they forego their white, wheaten bread, and eat rye bread in its place? Would they take kindly to bread which contained a large proportion of meal ground from the edible chestnut? Would ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... vair) as opposed to the ermine(Mus Armenius, or mustela erminia.) I never visit England without being surprised at the vile furs worn by the rich, and the folly of the poor in not adopting the sheepskin with the wool inside and the leather well tanned which keeps the peasant warm and comfortable between Croatia ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... retorted the captain, "and am bound to accommodate myself to them. I suppose this is the prince you spoke of," he added, turning to the towering youth already referred to, with the air of a man who had as little—or as much—regard for a prince as a peasant. ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... castle: it has a round-headed arch, with six pilasters, in the intervals of which are three half-length human figures and two horses' heads. On the southern slope of the hill, three miles beyond the walls, a number of Etruscan tombs were accidentally discovered by a peasant a few years ago. The outer entrance alone had suffered, buried under the rubbish of two millenniums: the burial-place of the Volumnii has been restored externally after ancient Etruscan models, but within it has been left untouched. Descending ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... coming on this stage, some having just landed from the different steamers that had just arrived, and some about to embark in others that were going away. Small boats were coming, too, over the water, with passengers in them, among whom were many peasant girls, whose foreheads and temples were adorned with a profusion of golden ornaments, such as are worn by the ladies of North Holland. Rollo looked this way and that as he passed along the stage, and he wished for time to stop and examine what ...
— Rollo in Holland • Jacob Abbott
... of abstinence and toil by a week of merriment and convivial indulgence. Persons in middle life at this day, who can afford a good dinner every day, do not look forward to it as any particular subject of exultation: the poor peasant, who can only contrive to treat himself to a joint of meat on a Sunday, considers it as an event in the week. So, in the old Cambridge comedy of the Return from Parnassus, we find this indignant description of the progress of luxury ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... knitting in hand, was telling in low tones, scarcely hearing or understanding her own words, what she had told hundreds of times before: how the late princess had given birth to Princess Mary in Kishenev with only a Moldavian peasant woman to help ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... then a young soldier, twenty-four years of age. He was the son of the Emperor Charles V and his mistress, Barbara Blomberg of Ratisbon. His boyhood had been passed, unknown and unacknowledged by his father, in a peasant household in Castille. As a youth he had been adopted by a noble family of Valladolid. Then Philip II had acknowledged him as his half-brother, and given him the rank of a Spanish Prince. He studied at Alcala, having for ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... A peasant told us, if we understood rightly, that he saw the Spanish withdraw, and the enemy place ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... length, while others do not exceed two to three inches. There are specimens in gold of all sizes, single, double, and triple, with large or small links, some thick and heavy, while others are as slight and flexible as the finest Venetian lace. The poorest peasant woman, alike with the lady of the court, could boast of the possession of a chain, and she must have been in dire poverty who had not some other ornament in her jewel-case. The jewellery of Queen Ahhotpu shows to what degree of excellence the work of the Egyptian goldsmiths had attained ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... say, 'here's the chance of your life to win life's chief prize. Now you are peasant soldiers. You have the opportunity to become citizen kings. We are all kings here. Here the least of you can take a rank much higher than that of any General in your army. He can become ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... distant treatment, had not won her to different evenings, or to a new mode of life. But her feeling for Julian led her to ignore now the fact of this fate of hers. She chose to set him aside from it, to keep him for a friend, as an innocent peasant-girl might keep some recluse wandering after peace into her solitude. Julian was to be the one man who looked on her with quiet, habitual eyes, who touched her with calm, gentle hand, who spoke to her with the voice of friendship, ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... reign of Tiberius, that he may have been a religious reformer, that he may have been put to death by Pontius Pilate for sedition. All this is perfectly likely, and to allow it in no way endorses the mass of legend and myth encrusted round this tiny nucleus of possible fact. This obscure peasant is not the Christian Jesus, who is—as we shall later urge—only a new presentation of the ancient Sun-God, with unmistakeable family likeness to his elder brothers. The Reverend Robert Taylor very rightly remarks, concerning this ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... which had deserted him for a moment, he tried to draw out the old steward, who was waiting on him. He strove to glean from him some information of the Des Rameures; but the old servant, like every Norman peasant, held it as a tenet of faith that he who gave a plain answer to any question was a dishonored man. With all possible respect he let Camors understand plainly that he was not to be deceived by his affected ignorance into any belief ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... wife of Jean Macquart, to whom she was married in 1871. She was the only daughter of a peasant in easy circumstances, and was of a fine robust physique. She had three healthy children in as many ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... our poor Warwickshire Peasant, who rose to be Manager of a Playhouse, so that he could live without begging; whom the Earl of Southampton cast some kind glances on; whom Sir Thomas Lucy, many thanks to him, was for sending to the Treadmill! We did ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... It seems a superstition had come along with the stones, from India to Persia, from there to Russia. A maid fortunate enough to see the drums would marry and be happy. The old fellow confessed that occasionally he secretly admitted a peasant maid to gaze upon the stones. But he never let the male inmates of the palace find this out. He knew them a little too intimately. A ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... derived his dignity from the Supreme Majesty of heaven: that, admitting those extravagant principles which levelled all orders of men, the court could plead no power delegated by the people; unless the consent of every individual, down to the meanest and most ignorant peasant, had been previously asked and obtained: that he acknowledged, without scruple, that he had a trust committed to him, and one most sacred and inviolable; he was intrusted with the liberties of his people, and would not now betray them by ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... such stress on my maxim of never believing in anything bad before it forces itself upon me as incontestable? We adhere firmly to our maxims only so long as they are not put to the test; when that happens we throw them away, as the peasant did his slippers, and run off on the legs that nature gave us. If you have the disposition to try the virtue of my maxims, then I shall never again give utterance to any of them, lest I be caught lying; ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... was perceptible only in dumb show. One of the palaces opposite was used as a hotel, and faces continually appeared at the windows. By all the odds the most interesting figure there was that of a stout peasant serving-girl, dressed in a white knitted jacket, a crimson neckerchief, and a bright coloured gown, and wearing long dangling earrings of yellowest gold. For hours this idle maiden balanced herself half over the balcony rail in perusal ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... ourselves in the woods and mountains, and sit by the waterfalls on the starry and moonlit nights, and neither by night nor day have the fear of picnics before our eyes. We were observing the other day that we never met anybody except a monk girt with a rope, now and then, or a barefooted peasant. The sight of a pink parasol never startles us into unpleasant theories of comparative anatomy. One cause, perhaps, may be that on account of political matters it is a delightfully 'bad season,' but, also, we are ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... servants, who, from the big chasseur who stood at the back of the minister's sledge to the boy who blew the organ on which I practised, were serfs, and all, without exception, docile, gentle, and kindly. But there was one standing enemy —vodka. The feeling of the Russian peasant toward the rough corn-brandy of his own country is characteristic. The Russian language is full of diminutives expressive of affection. The peasant addresses his superior as Batushka, the affectionate ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... Abyssinia, and was converted by the Abbot of Antinoe, never ceased to weep. There was also Flavian, the deacon, who knew the Scriptures, and spoke well; but the disciple of Paphnutius who surpassed all the others in holiness was a young peasant named Paul, and surnamed the Fool, because of his extreme simplicity. Men laughed at his childishness, but God favoured him with visions, and by bestowing upon him the ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... condition, and perhaps some improvement in the condition of the shopkeepers with whom they dealt, in India it means the creation of a social and ever wide-spreading revolution. For when in India capital is introduced, and employment on a large scale is afforded to the people, the poorer of the peasant classes are at once able to free themselves from debt, and the labourers soon save enough money to enable them to start in agriculture, coffee culture, or any culture within, their reach. The result ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... concluded by announcing from his platform a special dance in honor of the family of Dr. Mayor. In this dance the family with some of their friends and neighbors took part,—the young ladies dancing with the peasant lads and the young gentlemen with the girls of the village,—while the rest formed a ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... a brusque arm. She did not resist. She did not care. He was neither a peasant tailor, a potential artist, a social complication, nor a peril. He was himself, and in him, in the personality flowing from him, she was unreasoningly content. In his nearness she caught a new view of his head; the last light brought ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... the first I see, and you shall hear him." He who chanced to present himself, was a venerable old man. The General shook him by the hand, and bid him good day, with an easy kindness that gave the aged peasant full encouragement to talk to his Excellency with freedom. Paoli bid him not mind me, but say on. The old man then told him that there had been an unlucky tumult in the village where he lived, and that two of his sons were ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... peasant looked with eager eyes O'er the blue waters, to those distant skies; Where no one groaned 'neath unrequited toil, Where the strong laborer might own the soil On which he stood; and, in his manhood's strength, Smile to behold his growing fields at length;— Where his brave ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... no one so bitter, so arrogant, so proud as your son of a peasant who has got the ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... image of love-scenes between them: he could only fancy and wish wildly—what he knew was impossible—that Romola would some day tell him that she loved him. One day in Greece, as he was leaning over a wall in the sunshine, a little black-eyed peasant girl, who had rested her water-pot on the wall, crept gradually nearer and nearer to him, and at last shyly asked him to kiss her, putting up her round olive cheek very innocently. Tito was used to ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... Lucerne. He plants a small decorated pine-tree before her house at dawn, and if he is accepted a right royal feast is prepared for him. The little tree is {69} treasured till the first baby appears. A Swiss peasant girl is often compelled to take the lover who lives nearest to her home, as the introduction of an outsider is resented by the ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... novelette written about 1250 by a man who calls himself Wernher the Gardner. The locus of the story, which is interesting as a picture of the times, is the region about the junction of the Inn and the Salzach. Its hero is a depraved young peasant, who gets the idea that the life of a robber knight would be preferable to hard work upon his father's farm. So he dresses himself in fine clothes to ape the gentry, becomes a robber and commits all manner of outrages ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... soul-stirring tales about little Bernadette, the peasant girl to whom the grotto's miraculous qualities were revealed by the Virgin, and whose stories were weighed by the Bishop of Tarbes before the Catholic Church sponsored them. The procession of sufferers through Tarbes on their way to Lourdes, and the joyful return of many, must have been ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin
... shining as a consoler. I hasten to add that this resolve was only sub-conscious in the good woman. Her grief was perfectly sincere. And it was not the less so because with it was mingled a certain joy in the greatness of the calamity. She came of good sound peasant stock. Abiding in her was the spirit of those old songs and ballads in which daisies and daffodillies and lovers' vows and smiles are so strangely inwoven with tombs and ghosts, with murders and all manner of grim things. ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... carouse on one side, and the hurdy-gurdy man girds up his loins on the other. A friend of Boethius had a library lined with slabs of ivory and pale green marble. I like to think of that when I am jealous of Mr. Frederick Locker-Lampson, as the peasant thinks of the White Czar when his master's banqueting hall dazzles him. If I cannot have cabinets of ebony and cedar, I may just as well have plain deal, with common glass doors to keep the dust out. I detest ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... games of their neighbours, and all these games—bowling, cricket, football, etc., contributed to their physical health and vigour. They were, for the most part, strong, well- built people, in whose physique little or no difference from that of their peasant neighbours was discoverable. Their children grew up in the fresh country air, and, if they could help their parents at work, it was only occasionally; while of eight or twelve hours work for them there ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... Orleanist), I have left my master, and have no intention of returning as an apprentice. But I might be stopped and questioned at every place I pass through on my way home did I travel in this 'prentice dress, and I would, therefore, fain buy the attire of a young peasant." ...
— At Agincourt • G. A. Henty
... was to be abolished, and the kingdom of God to be introduced by the levelling of all social ranks; and he produced miracles to certify his divine calling. There had also been two risings, closely connected, the first, in 1513, deriving its name of "Bundschuh" from the peasant's tied shoe, a class emblem, and the {88} second, in 1514, called "Poor Conrad" after the peasant's nickname. If the memory of the suppression of all these revolts might dampen the hopes of the poor, on the other hand the successful rise of the Swiss democracy was a perpetual ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... I-talian peasant, hey! Fifth Avenue peasant with diamonds in her hair. Becomin' to ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... of tuberculosis will live for weeks and even months in dark, damp, unventilated quarters, just precisely such surroundings as are provided for them in the inside bedrooms of our tenements, and the dark, cellar-like rooms of many a peasant's cottage or farmhouse. In bright sunlight they will perish in from three to six hours; in bright daylight in less than half a day. This is one of the factors that helps to explain the apparent paradox, that the dust collected from the floors and walls of tents and cottages ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... the east of the Dnieper and Moscow the war is hardly felt at all. This is particularly true of the principal foundations of our life—the peasant country parts numbering their hundred millions. The villages have sent to the war millions of young men, and even fathers of families, heads of households. Many tears have already been shed in the country, and there are many orphans, many cripples. But the peasant countryside has not suffered ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... we get our book learning, we are made heirs to thoughts that breathe and words that burn, we enter into the life, the acts, the arts, the loves, the lore of the wise, the witty, the cunning, and the worthy of all ages and all places; we learn, as says the peasant ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... heavenly: they have not the ideality of Raffaelle's, nor the tender sweetness of Correggio's; nor the glowing loveliness of Titian's; but they have an individual reality about them, which gives them the air of portraits. That chef-d'oeuvre, in the Pitti Palace, for instance, call it a beautiful peasant girl and her baby, and it is faultless: but when I am told it is the "Vergine gloriosa, del Re Eterno Madre, Figliuola, e Sposa," I look instantly for something far beyond what I see expressed. ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... importance mingled with rustic gallantry. Frida's manner was also conscious with gratified vanity; and although they believed themselves alone, her voice was already pitched into a high key of nervous affectation, indicative of the peasant. But there was nothing to suggest that Chris had disturbed them in their privacy and confidences. Yet he had evidently seen enough to satisfy himself of her faithlessness. Had he ever ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... Discontented," as Powderly called the workers, demanded education and protective laws, and turned their attention to competition about 1882. The cutting of wages by peasant laborers, newly arrived in America, was a grievance as soon as labor became class-conscious. Opposition to this became virulent in the Far West, where the foreigner was also a Mongolian. The Chinese of the Pacific Slope, more frugal and industrious ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... pedantry; and Dr. Keynes has shown, in his Scope and Method of Political Economy, that Mill has himself sometimes solved economic problems by the Historical Method. With an analysis of his treatment of Peasant Proprietorship (Political Economy, B. II., cc. 7 and 8) we may close this section. Mill first shows inductively, by collecting evidence from Switzerland, Germany, Norway, Belgium, and France (countries differing in race, government, climate and situation), ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... lady's eyes! The servile suitors watch her various face, She smiles preferment, or she frowns disgrace, Curtsies a pension here—there nods a place. Nor with less awe, in scenes of humbler life, Is view'd the mistress, or is heard the wife. The poorest peasant of the poorest soil, The child of poverty, and heir to toil, Early from radiant Love's impartial light Steals one small spark to cheer this world of night: Dear spark! that oft through winter's chilling ...
— The Rivals - A Comedy • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... the peculiarities of rudimentary art—of the art of the early Renaissance as well as of that of Persia and India, of Constantinople, of every peasant potter all through the world: that, not knowing very well its own aims, it fills its imperfect work with suggestion of all manner of things which it loves, and tries to gain in general pleasurableness what it loses in actual achievement; and lays hold of us, like fragments ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee) |
