"Ploughman" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... huge greatcoat threadbare and patched itself, yet carefully so disposed and secured by what buttons remain, and many supplementary pins, as to conceal the still more infirm state of his under garments. The shoes and stockings of a ploughman were, however, seen to meet at his knees with a pair of brownish, blackish breeches; a rusty-coloured handkerchief, that has been black in its day, surrounded his throat, and was an apology for linen. His hair, half grey, half black, escaped in elf-locks ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... and that thus they have a splendid vault to make from poverty to wealth, an easy spring from a state of dependency to one of vast importance and consideration. The simple axiom of republicanism, that a ploughman is as good as a president, or a quarryman as an emperor, is taken firm hold of in any other sense than the right one. What sensible man ever doubted that we were all created in the same mould, and after the same image; but is there a well educated ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... the pointed cedar shadows Drowse on the crisp, gray moss; the ploughman's call Creeps, faint as smoke from black, fresh-furrowed meadows; The single crow a single caw lets fall And all around me every bush and tree Says Autumn's here, and Winter soon will Who snows his soft, white ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... the sun had cleared the feathery tops Of the fir-thicket on the eastward hill, His horses leaned and laboured. Each great hand Held rein and plough-stilt in one guiding grasp— No ploughman there would brook a helper. Proud With a true ploughman's pride—nobler, I think, Than statesman's, ay, or poet's, or painter's pride, For little praise will come that he ploughs well— He did plough well, proud of his work itself, And not ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... names of the other three are lost to fame. One of them gushed and Jesus cooled off his emotions. The second and third wanted to procrastinate and hid behind social obligations. Note that epigram about the ploughman. It is a splendid expression of intelligent and concentrated energy. You can't drive a straight furrow while you "rubber." You've got ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... cultivation, no doubt, as it was wanted. Achilles contemplates that some of the rich fields of his friends may be exceedingly remote, so that it would be a great thing to spare the ploughman a journey to the nearest blacksmith. And no doubt the powerful men of the community would, by means of their slaves or retainers, acquire additional wealth by reclaiming lands out of the way and therefore requiring a strong hand to protect them, which ...
— On The Structure of Greek Tribal Society: An Essay • Hugh E. Seebohm
... compel attention they do not, after a while, enlarge experience. Husbandmen's lore is profound, practical, poetic, superstitious, but it is singularly stagnant. The cycle of natural changes goes its perpetual round and the ploughman's mind, caught in that narrow vortex, plods and plods after the seasons. Apart from an occasional flood, drought, or pestilence, nothing breaks his laborious torpor. The most cursory inspection of field and sky yields him information enough for his needs. Practical knowledge with him is all ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... of Virgil's Georgics when I was at school; and it is drawn indifferently by horses, bullocks, or heifers. Bullocks and heifers are, however, more commonly used than horses, though it is no unusual sight to see a horse and a heifer yoked together. There is no boy to drive; but the ploughman, as in Scotland, at once holds the stilts of the plough, and with his voice, and a long halter, guides the cattle. With respect to the harrows, I saw little difference between them and our English implements, except that those in Germany are lighter, ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... To be talked of—how poor a desire! Does it matter whether it be by the gossips of this age or the next? Some men are urged on to fame by poverty—that is an excuse for their trouble; but there is no more nobleness in the motive than in that which makes yon poor ploughman sweat in the eye of Phoebus. In fact, the larger part of eminent men, instead of being inspired by any lofty desire to benefit their species or enrich the human mind, have acted or composed, without any definite object beyond the satisfying ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a ploughman, in the service of Lady Bellenden of the Tower of Tillietudlem.—Sir W. Scott, Old Mortality (time, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... midnight business or other, and he saw nothing but a kind of kettle or cauldron, depending from the roof over the fire, simmering some heads of unchristened children, limbs of executed malefactors, &c., for the business of the night. It was in for a penny, in for a pound, with the honest ploughman; so, without ceremony, he unhooked the cauldron from off the fire, and pouring out the damnable ingredients, inverted it on his head, and carried it fairly home, where it remained long in the family, a living evidence of the truth ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... the knell of parting day, The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and ...
— Graded Memory Selections • Various
... how much start he would have, the cook, despite his hunger and fatigue, pushed on with all the speed of which he was capable. After an hour's journey he ventured to ask the direction of an embryo ploughman, and wheedled out of him a small, a very small, portion of his breakfast. From the top of the next hill he caught a glimpse of the sea, and taking care to keep this friend of his youth in sight, felt his way along by it to Brittlesea. At midday he begged some broken victuals from a gamekeeper's ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... beneath the agreeable change of spring and the western breeze; and engines haul down the dry ships. And neither does the cattle any longer delight in the stalls, nor the ploughman in the fireside; nor are the meadows whitened by hoary frosts. Now Cytherean Venus leads off the dance by moonlight; and the comely Graces, in conjunction with the Nymphs, shake the ground with alternate feet; while glowing Vulcan kindles the laborious forges of the Cyclops. Now it ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... infantry or foot. And to make good infantry, it requireth men bred, not in a servile or indigent fashion, but in some free and plentiful manner. Therefore, if a state run most to noblemen and gentlemen, and that the husbandman and ploughman be but as their workfolks and laborers, or else mere cottagers (which are but housed beggars), you may have a good cavalry, but never good stable bands of foot; like to coppice woods, that if you leave in them standing too thick, they will ...
— Landholding In England • Joseph Fisher
... whom they were especial favorites, or who were ambitious that their own names should be signalized on the title-pages with the suffix of EDITOR. The volumes already published are: Increase Mather's "Remarkable Providences"; the poems of Drummond of Hawthornden; the "Visions" of Piers Ploughman; the works in prose and verse of Sir Thomas Overbury; the "Hymns and Songs" and the "Hallelujah" of George Wither; the poems of Southwell; Selden's "Table-talk"; the "Enchiridion" of Quarles; the dramatic works of Marston and Webster; and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... monthly dividends. If that went on prosperously, perhaps he need not return to the colony at all. 'Poor Dick Shand!' he said. 'He is a shepherd far away in the west, hardly earning better wages than an English ploughman, and I am coming home with a pocket full of money! A few glasses of whisky ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... point in the future. An 'earnest' is a fraction of an inheritance, or of a sum hereafter to be paid, and is the guarantee and pledge that the whole shall one day be handed over to the man who has received the foretaste of it in the 'earnest.' The soldier's shilling, the ploughman's 'arles,' the clod of earth and tuft of grass which, in some forms of transfer, were handed over to the purchaser, were all the guarantee that the rest was going to come. So the great future is sealed to us by the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... somewhere upon the Downs, and in the valley a ploughman had just harnessed his team; but the village was hidden from them by the sweep of the hills, and no other being was in sight. He helped Malvina out, and leaving her seated on a fallen branch beneath ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... warm brown farther from its root. Under his linen milking-pinner he wore a dark velveteen jacket, cord breeches and gaiters, and a starched white shirt. Without the milking-gear nobody could have guessed what he was. He might with equal probability have been an eccentric landowner or a gentlemanly ploughman. That he was but a novice at dairy work she had realized in a moment, from the time he had spent upon the ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... tells them his lady and all the family are coming too; and that they are so nobly attended, they care not a fig for anybody. Sir, they have added two cart-horses to the four old geldings, because my lady will have it said she came to town in a coach and six—heavy George the ploughman ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... he were the abbot's huntsman, hunting in the forest; or a monk of St Germain, singing sweetly in the abbey church; or a merchant, taking bales of cloaks and girdles along the high road to Paris; anything, in fact, but a poor ploughman ploughing other people's land. An Anglo-Saxon writer has imagined a ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... pleasures lie in very narrow compass, and are but too apt to be treated with neglect and contempt by their superiors. About ten or eleven o'clock in the morning, perhaps, the first faint shadowy vision of a future pint of beer dawns on the fancy of the ploughman. Far, very far is it from being fully developed. Sometimes the idea is rejected; sometimes it is fostered. At one time he is almost fixed on the 'Red Horse,' but the blazing fire and sedulous kindness of the landlady ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... "In the merry month of May."—First printed in "The Honorable Entertainment given to the Queen's Majesty in Progress at Elvetham in Hampshire, by the Right Honorable the Earl of Hertford," 1591, under the title of "The Ploughman's Song." ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... he, when the ploughman had reached the end of the furrow and was preparing to turn, "jes' you let your hoss res' a minnit till I tells you ...
— Amos Kilbright; His Adscititious Experiences • Frank R. Stockton
... are in the habit of remarking such matters must have noticed the passive quiet of an English landscape on Sunday. The clacking of the mill, the regularly recurring stroke of the flail, the din of the blacksmith's hammer, the whistling of the ploughman, the rattling of the cart, and all other sounds of rural labor are suspended. The very farm-dogs bark less frequently, being less disturbed by passing travellers. At such times I have almost fancied the wind sunk into quiet, and that the sunny landscape, with its fresh green tints melting into ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... unto the seaman's star, The ploughman from the sun his season takes; But still the lover wonders what they are, Who look for day before his mistress wakes. Awake, awake! break thro' your veils of lawn! Then draw your curtains, ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... of much greater antiquity. It appears in the Chronicle of Battel Abbey, p. 27 (Lower's translation), and in The Vision of Piers Ploughman, line 13994. ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... dust. He used to pass his days only in weeping and groaning, because he felt the strain of his misery to such an extent. He made a flute upon which to play a pathetic and mournful tune. By day he used to work as a ploughman, whenever he was called upon to do so. If nobody called him, he used to sit inactive at home, weeping and groaning and smearing his rags with dust and ashes. At night he used to bathe and dress himself ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... difference in the extent of the trade in the periods above referred to. Doing this, we shall find that from 1820 to 1830 there was a decided tendency toward bringing the artisan to the side of the ploughman; whereas from 1833 to 1840 the tendency was very strong in the opposite direction, and so continued until 1842, at which time a change took place, and continued until near the close of the decennial period, when our present revenue system ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... cool and dark-lipped furrow breathes a dim delight Through the woodland's purple plumage to the diamond night. Aureoles of joy encircle every blade of grass Where the dew-fed creatures silent and enraptured pass. And the restless ploughman pauses, turns, and wondering, Deep beneath his rustic habit finds himself a king; For a fiery moment looking with the eyes of God Over fields a slave at morning bowed him to the sod. Blind and dense with ...
— The Nuts of Knowledge - Lyrical Poems New and Old • George William Russell
... ploughman, when he came for his dinner, brought word that he had discovered a partridge's nest with sixteen eggs in the home field, upon which the farmer went out and broke them all, saying that he did not ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... aldermanic banquets rise— And though the duns around you troop, Still float in seas of turtle soup. I here forsake the tuneful trade, Where none but lordlings now are paid, Or where some northern rogue sits puling, (The curse of universal schooling)— A ploughman to his country lost, An author to his printer's cost— A slave to every man who'll buy him, A knave to every man who'll try him— Yet let him take the pen, at once The ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... their present heart. With a past life like ours, my brethren—and everyman knows his own—pride is surely the maddest state of mind that any of us can allow ourselves in. The first king of Bohemia kept his clouted old shoes ever in his sight, that he might never forget that he had once been a ploughman. And another wise king used to drink out of a coarse cup at table, and excused himself to his guests that he had made the rude thing in his rude potter days. Look with Primislaus and Agathocles at the hole of the pit out of which you also have been dug; look often enough, deep ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... his face and death seemed to him better than dreeing life, and he walked on like a drunken man for stress of distraction, and stayed not till noontide, when he came to a little town and saw a plougher hard by, ploughing with a yoke of bulls. Now hunger was sore upon him; and he went up to the ploughman and said to him, "Peace be with thee!"; and he returned his salam and said to him, "Welcome, O my lord! Art thou one of the Sultan's Mamelukes?" Quoth Ma'aruf, "Yes;" and the other said "Alight with ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... I knew I should have learnt there; I knew not then that "the eye only sees that which it brings with it the power of seeing." When will their eyes be opened? When will priests go forth into the highways and the hedges, and preach to the ploughman and the gipsy the blessed news, that there too, in every thicket and fallow-field, is the house of God,—there, ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... Lady Anne, suddenly rendered helpless, she caught at the side of the little carriage, which was being dragged violently at the pony's heels. She had need of all her spirit. Fortunately, the road was a straight one, but there was not a soul in sight to help her, not a sower in the fields, not a ploughman, not even a boy herding cattle along the road. Her right hand still grasped the useless rein. She stared before her, while the rocking of the little carriage grew more and more violent, and the hedges and trees flew past them. How long would it be before the terrified pony shook herself ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... not make any one lose patience," said Mowbray, "to hear her quoting the rhapsodies of a hobnail'd peasant, when a man is speaking of the downfall of an ancient house! Your ploughman, I suppose, becoming one degree poorer than he was born to be, would only go without his dinner, or without his usual potation of ale. His comrades would cry 'poor fellow!' and let him eat out of their kit, and drink out of their bicker without scruple, till his ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... O ploughman! speed boldly away— There's seed to be sown in God's furrows to-day— Row landward, lone fisher! stout woodman, come home! Let smith leave his anvil and weaver his loom, And hamlet and city ring loud with the cry, "For God and our country ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... encourager of industry, thou spring of justice, thou something more than life, beyond the reach of fancy to describe, all hail! It is thou that beamest the sunshine in the patriot's breast; it is thou that sweetenest the toil of the labouring mechanic! thou dost inspire the ploughman with his jocund mirth, and thou tunest the merry milk-maid's song; thou canst make the desert smile, and the barren rock to sing for joy; by thy sacred protection the poorest peasant lies secure under the shadow of his defenceless cot, ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... ordinary hands, which they truly can, but he wants to be fed as if his stomach needed more food than ordinary stomachs, which it does not. A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose, and due leisure, whether he be painter or ploughman. But the rascal of a painter, poet, novelist, or other voluptuary in labor, is not content with his advantage in popular esteem over the ploughman; he also wants an advantage in money, as if there were more hours in a day ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... doth deface, Doth deface Lady Ceres' crown, And the tillage doth go to decay, To decay in every town; Landlords their rents so highly enhance, That Pierce, the ploughman, barefoot may dance; Well a day! Farmers that Christmas would still entertain, Scarce have wherewith themselves to maintain, Well ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... Mass. Ploughman: Farm accounts, even when kept in the most simple form, not only afford great satisfaction, but they do much to aid the farmer in his efforts to success. If at the end of the season he is able to strike ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... the Talayot, and climbed to its top. Two fields off, towards clustered Alayor, a man was guiding a single-handed plough drawn by a small ox and a sixteen-hand mule. Scrambling down again, I went in a bee-line across the intervening walls. The ploughman saw me coming, and nothing loath, pulled up his team and desisted from scratching the furrow any further. A chat was just ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... duplicate, the -jugerum-, "yoking," were, like the German "morgen," not measures of surface, but measures of labour; the latter denoting the day's work, the former the half-day's work, with reference to the sharp division of the day especially in Italy by the ploughman's rest ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... it may be drawn. The lend of the stock is in shape somewhat like that which is formed by a human foot and leg, the foot being the 'share,' which scratches up the soil. That part which corresponds to the leg is prolonged upwards into a long handle, with the help of which the ploughman guides the plough. The bar by which the plough is drawn is attached to the inner or fore side of the bend, at the ankle, as it were. Two oxen of a small kind are, as a ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... persons of a higher grade than the convivial lawyers of Mauchline and Ayr, and the mundane ministers of the New Light school. But now persons of every rank were anxious to become acquainted with the wonderful Ayrshire Ploughman, for it was by that name he now began to be known, just as in the next generation another poet of as humble birth was spoken of as The Ettrick Shepherd. The first persons of a higher order who sought the acquaintanceship of Burns were ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... riding-whip and his gloves and cape behind the door. Then, bareheaded, he took his place on the right hand of his host at the long oaken table, to which in due order came son, daughter, house-maiden, out-lass, ploughman and herd. The only difference was that when it came to the blessing upon the food to be partaken of, Adam the Laird stood up, while the others sat still with bowed heads. Why this was, no one knew, not even Adam or Diarmid. ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... and solitary rise A ploughman urges his dull team, A stooped gray figure with prone brow That plunges bending to the plough With strong, uneven steps. The stream Rings and re-echoes with his ...
— Lyrics of Earth • Archibald Lampman
... never, to any great extent, a literary language. Accordingly, it held its own very well in the names of common things, but failed to answer the demands of complex ideas derived from them. The author of "Piers Ploughman" wrote for the people, Chaucer for the court. We open at random and count the Latin[6] words in ten verses of the "Vision" and ten of Chaucer's "Romaunt of the Rose," (a translation from the French,) and find the proportion to be seven ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... sides, of public regeneration. "The French people," says Robespierre, "seems to have outstripped the rest of humanity, by two thousand years; one might be tempted to regard them, living amongst them, as a different species. In the rest of Europe, a ploughman, an artisan, is an animal formed for the pleasures of a noble; in France, the nobles are trying to transform themselves into ploughmen and artisans, but do not succeed in obtaining that honor."[21111] Life in all directions is gradually assuming democratic forms ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the patient cows Dim rises from the grass and half conceals Their dappled hides. I hear the nightingale, That from the little blackthorn spinney steals To the old hazel hedge that skirts the vale, And still unseen sings sweet. The ploughman feels The thrilling music as he goes along, And imitates and listens; while the fields Lose all their paths in dusk to lead him wrong, Still sings the nightingale ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... always, at all times life here is quiet, unhasting," he thought; "whoever comes within its circle must submit; here there is nothing to agitate, nothing to harass; one can only get on here by making one's way slowly, as the ploughman cuts the furrow with his plough. And what vigour, what health abound in this inactive place! Here under the window the sturdy burdock creeps out of the thick grass; above it the lovage trails its juicy stalks and the Virgin's tears fling still higher ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... 4. A ploughman will be civil, if he is good-natured, but cannot be well bred. A courtier will be well bred though perhaps without good-nature, if he has but good sense. Flattery is the disgrace of good-breeding, as brutality often is of truth and sincerity. ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... Englishman.—Alas! the soldiers who fell under the sword of the Britons are not yet reduced to dust: the labourer in turning up his field, still draws from the bosom of the earth their whitened bones; while the ploughman, with tears of tenderness and gratitude, still recollects that his fields, now covered with rich harvests, have been moistened with French blood. While every thing around the inhabitants of this country animates them to speak of the tyranny of Great Britain, and ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... when from the field some delver or ploughman goes gladly home to his hut, longing for his evening meal, and there on the threshold, all squalid with dust, bows his wearied knees, and, beholding his hands worn with toil, with many a curse reviles his belly; at that hour the heroes reached the homes of the Cianian land near the Arganthonian ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... piping to vs in vaine, As in reuenge, haue suck'd vp from the sea Contagious fogges: Which falling in the Land, Hath euerie petty Riuer made so proud, That they haue ouer-borne their Continents. The Oxe hath therefore stretch'd his yoake in vaine, The Ploughman lost his sweat, and the greene Corne Hath rotted, ere his youth attain'd a beard: The fold stands empty in the drowned field, And Crowes are fatted with the murrion flocke, The nine mens Morris is fild vp with mud, And the queint Mazes in the wanton greene, For lacke of tread ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... preached the old Puritan gospel, but it was presented in such a form and in such simple, idiomatic phrase, as to commend it as no less a gospel to his own generation: besides his sermons as published, other works were also widely circulated; special mention may be made of "John Ploughman's Talk" (1834-1892). ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... the Cobbler, thrusting his awl with great vehemence through the leather destined to the repair of a ploughman's boot. ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and dark-lipped furrows breathes a dim delight Aureoles of joy encircle every blade of grass Where the dew-fed creatures silent and enraptured pass: And the restless ploughman pauses, turns, and wondering Deep beneath his rustic habit finds himself a king; For a fiery moment looking with the eyes of God Over fields a slave at morning bowed him to the sod. Blind and dense with revelation every moment flies, And unto the Mighty ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... River, gentle River! gliding on In silence underneath the starless sky! Thine is a ministry that never rests Even while the living slumber. For a time The meddler, man, hath left the elements In peace; the ploughman breaks the clods no more; The miner labors not, with steel and fire, To rend the rock, and he that hews the stone, And he that fells the forest, he that guides The loaded wain, and the poor animal That drags ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... he reported to Eochy, who found it good; and he ordered that henceforth the children of the Gael should harness their plough-oxen with the yoke upon their shoulders; and so it was done from that day forth. Hence Eochy got his name of Airem, or "The Ploughman," for he was the first of the Gael to put the yoke upon the shoulder ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... fine—a hundred cows, and a white bull with red ears, for every cantrev the king ruled; a rod of gold as long as the king himself, and as thick as his little finger; and a plate of gold, as broad as the king's face, and as thick as a ploughman's nail. ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... private family is full of it, it takes hold almost of all sorts of men, from the prince to the ploughman, even amongst gossips it is to be seen, scarce three in a company but there is siding, faction, emulation, between two of them, some simultas, jar, private grudge, heart-burning in the midst of them. Scarce two gentlemen dwell together in the country, (if they be not near kin or linked in ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... enough about the efficacy of wealth for poetry and to make poets happy. Nay, have we not seen another instance of it in these very days? Byron, a man of an endowment considerably less ethereal than that of Burns, is born in the rank not of a Scottish ploughman, but of an English peer: the highest worldly honors, the fairest worldly career, are his by inheritance: the richest harvest of fame he soon reaps, in another province, by his own hand. And what does all this avail him? Is he happy, is he good, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... sought Sole on the church's northern slope. As when, Some father, absent long, returns at last, His children rush loud-voiced from field to house, And cling about his knees; and they that mark— Old reaper, bent no more, with hook in hand, Or ploughman, leaning 'gainst the old blind horse— Beholding wonder not; so to that grave Rushed they; so clung. Around that grave ere long Their own were ranged. That plague which smote the sire Spared not his sons. With ministering hand From pallet still to pallet passed the ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... Old World,—that part of it which is the seat of ancient civilization! The stakes of the Britons' stockades are still standing in the bed of the Thames. The ploughman turns up an old Saxon's bones, and beneath them is a tessellated pavement of the time of the Caesars. In Italy, the works of mediaeval Art seem to be of yesterday,—Rome, under her kings, is but an intruding newcomer, as ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... The mass was untouched. Every hymn, every prayer, was still in Latin; confession, penance, fastings and feastings, extreme unction, went on as before. There was little to show that any change had taken place; and yet every ploughman felt that all was changed. The bishop, gorgeous as he might be in mitre and cope, was a mere tool of the king. The priest was trembling before heretics he used to burn. Farmer or shopkeeper might enter their church any Sunday morning to ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... use of unsuitable food. By unsuitable food, we mean not so much food that is bad in itself, but rather that which is not suited to the temperament or work of the eater, or to the climate and circumstances in which he finds himself. A ploughman or fisherman, for example, may thrive on diet which will inevitably produce disease in the system of one whose work confines him to the house for the most of his time. One condition of a healthy life is, therefore, careful consideration of our work and circumstances ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... gone out to the West with the intention of working hard and using his hands as well as his brains; he had not been squeamish; he had, in fact, laboured like a ploughman; and to be obliged to give in had been galling and bitter. There are human beings into whose consciousness of themselves the possibility of being beaten does not enter. This man ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... makes amongst the herds, and flocks of shag-wooled sheep, Them frighting from the guard of those who had their keep. But when as all his shifts his safety still denies, Put quite out of his walk, the ways and fallows tries. Whom when the ploughman meets, his team he letteth stand To assail him with his goad: so with his hook in hand, The shepherd him pursues, and to his dog doth hollo: When, with tempestuous speed, the hounds and huntsmen follow; Until the noble deer through toil bereaved of strength, His long and sinewy legs then ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... arable field into the lane, pauses to look back. He is shabbily clad, and there is more than one rent in his coat; yet it is a coat that has once been a good one, and of a superior cut to what a labourer would purchase. In the field the ploughman to whom he has been speaking has started his team again. A lad walks beside the horses, the iron creaks, and the ploughman holding the handles seems now to press upon them with his weight, and ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... nun and three priests, a friar, a merchant, a poor scholar or clerk of Oxford, a sergeant of the law, a frankelein, a haberdasher, a weaver, a tapster, a dyer, a cook, a shipman, a doctor of physic, a wife of Bath, a poor parson, a ploughman, a miller, a manciple or college steward, a reeve or bailiff, a sompnour or summoner to the ecclesiastical courts, a pardoner or seller of papal indulgences (one hundred and fifty years before Luther)—an essentially English company of many social grades, ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... stimulated his imitators to attempt to leap beyond their shadows. Hard work will not do everything: a man can only accomplish what he was born fit for. Many, in the first flush of ambition doomed to wreck, are blind to the fact that it is not in every ploughman to be a poet, nor in every prize-student to be a philosopher. Nature does half: after all perhaps the larger half. Genius has been inadequately defined as "an infinite capacity for taking trouble"; no amount of pumping can draw more water than is in the well. Himself in "the ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... flax as white as their own hair, came to roadside doors, or moved back and forth under orchard trees. For me, the peasants toiled in the fields together, wearing for my sake wide straw hats, or gay ribbons, or red caps. The white oxen were willing to mass themselves in effective groups, as the ploughman turned the end of his furrow; young girls specially appointed themselves to lead horses to springs as we passed; children had larger eyes and finer faces and played more about the cottage doors, on account of ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... and to the siege of Aberdeen marched a hungry half-dozen—three of them from Thrums, two from the Glenuharity school. The sixth was Tod Lindertis, a ploughman from the Dubb of Prosen, his place of study the bothy after lousing time (Do you hear the klink of quoits?) or a one-roomed house near it, his tutor a dogged little woman, who knew not the accusative from the dative, ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... talk!" she replied: "I am no court-dame, but a poor country woman, daughter of a ploughman, and wife indeed of a ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... afloat are better, or just as good; but, d'ye see, as some day or other I suppose he will have to go on shore for a spell, he'd be just like a fish out of water if he has never been before—not know what to do with hisself any more than a bear in a china shop, or a ploughman aboard a ship." ...
— True Blue • W.H.G. Kingston
... broad plain the ploughman's conquering share Upturned the fallow lands of truth anew, And o'er the formal garden's trim parterre The peasant's ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... Had a summer sun risen on a winter morning, it could not have surprised the Lowlands of Scotland more than this Kilmarnock volume surprised and delighted the people, one and all. The milkmaid sang his songs, the ploughman repeated his poems; the old quoted both, and ever the devout rejoiced that idle verse had at last mixed a tone of morality with its mirth. The volume penetrated even into Nithsdale. "Keep it out of the way of ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... plea for the preservation of battlefields. Now, Europe is very rich in battlefields, many of the most fertile sections having been fought over many times. But the ravages of agriculture are everywhere seen. There is no such leveler as the ploughman. Often when one has come to refresh his mind with the events of one terrible day, he finds that there is nothing whatever to remind him of what happened. For centuries there has been ploughing and harvesting. Nature takes so kindly to these peaceful pursuits that ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... the sublime, peculiarly suited to children; accuracy of observation and distinctness of perception, are essential to this species of the sublime. In Percy's collection of ancient ballads, and in the modern poems of the Ayreshire ploughman, we may see many instances of the effect of simplicity. To preserve our pupil's taste from a false love of ornament, he must avoid, either in books or in conversation, all verbose and turgid descriptions, the use of words and epithets ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... occupies the centre of the cavalcade, directs them to the Knight as the person who would be likely to commence their task of each telling a tale in their order. After the Host follow the Shipman, the Haberdasher, the Dyer, the Franklin, the Physician, the Ploughman, the Lawyer, the Poor Parson, the Merchant, the Wife of Bath, the Miller, the Cook, the Oxford Scholar, Chaucer himself; and the Reeve comes as ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... him upon his quitting the table, which the grinner refusing, he was set aside as an unqualified person. There were several other grotesque figures that presented themselves, which it would be too tedious to describe. I must not, however, omit a ploughman, who lived in the further part of the county, and being very lucky in a pair of long lantern jaws, wrung his face into such a hideous grimace that every feature of it appeared under a different distortion. The whole company ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... days of faith the doors of the churches used to be opened with the first glimmer of the dawn in summer, and long before the moon had set in winter; and many a ditcher and woodcutter and ploughman on his way to work used to enter and say a short prayer before beginning the labour of ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... spy on sundry crumbs that slink from notice under the table, and while the twins, too busy to talk, wash the dishes and dispose them in a glistening row along the dresser, and, while David opens the paper and plods up and down it, column by column, like a ploughman furrow by furrow up and down a field, and with almost as much toil; and while the ancient clock on the shelf over the stove and under the motley General Washington ticks loud enough to be heard above the clinking dishes and simmering kettle; ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... this is attached a crosspiece or yoke (depar), fitted with a pair of long pegs coming over the necks of the oxen or buffaloes, and a crosspiece hanging under their necks and fastened to the yoke by native cord. The ploughman holds the tail of the plough with the left and the rod-whip (petjoet) with the right hand. He drives and directs the big lumbering beasts by words or by a touch of the rod. To make them go "straight on," he calls out, ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... a farmer on his own account; and, according to all reports, a very sorry account he made of it. The good soul had none of Mr. Tull's petulance and audacity with his servants; if the ploughman broke his gear, I suspect the kind ballad-master allowed him a holiday for the mending. The herdsman stared in astonishment to find the "beasts" ordered away from their accustomed grazing-fields. A new thicket had ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... the settlers,—so many years before distinguished in the deposition of Governor Bligh. He congratulated the meeting on the appointment of his excellency, whose presence he compared to "the vivifying rays of the sun after a long cheerless winter, encouraging the ploughman to resume his labors ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... conceal the true state of the case. Their Moslem and nominal Christian neighbors are not much better. They all lie, and swear, and deceive. Mr. Lyde illustrates the ignorance of the Greek clergy in Latakiah by the following incident. A ploughman who had learned something of the Bible, heard a Greek priest cursing the father of a little child. He said, "My father, is it right to curse?" "Oh," said he, "it was only from my lips." "But does not the psalmist say, Keep the door of my lips?" "That," replied the priest, ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... England, immediately makes his purchase, settles, and begins his operations. Here his eyes are soon opened. He must send to England for all his implements; and even then his French labourers neither can or will learn the use of them. An English ploughman becomes necessary; the English ploughman accordingly comes, but shortly becomes miserable amongst French habits ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... ancient method of dividing the letters and explaining their sounds. And yet, both before and afterwards, we find this same author complaining of our alphabet and its subdivisions, as if sense or philosophy must utterly repudiate both; and of our orthography, as if a ploughman might teach us to spell better: and, at the same time, he speaks of softening his censure through modesty. "The deficiencies, redundancies, and confusion, of the system of alphabetic characters in this language, prevent the adoption of its subdivisions in this essay."—Ib., ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... the autumn advanced, and the rooks followed the ploughman. Dolly gradually recovered something of her physical buoyancy; her former light-heartedness never returned. Sometimes an incident would cause a flash of the old gaiety, only for her to sink back into subdued quietness. The ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... down is harsh, and spirit of sense/Hard as the palm of ploughman!] In comparison with Cressid's hand, says he, the spirit of sense, the utmost degree, the most exquisite power of sensibility, which implies a soft hand, since the sense of touching, as Scaliger says in his Exercitations, ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... the King with rising voice. "For this; that the ploughman on the plain may reap what he has sown; that the shepherd on the hillside may enjoy the increase which comes to his flock; that taxation may be light; that my nobles shall deal honestly with the people, and not use their position for thievery and depredation; that those whom ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... knit them in one, and write, my full opinion of them, for their choise in our seede. You shall know then that when you goe into the market to chuse Barly for your seede, you shall to your best power elect that which is whitest, fullest, and roundest, being as the ploughman calles it, a full bunting Corne, like the nebbe or beake of a Bunting, you shall obserue that it be all of one Corne, and not mingled, that is, clay Barly, and sand Barly together, which you shall distinguish by ...
— The English Husbandman • Gervase Markham
... Lytteltons, the Grenvilles, the atheist tyrant of Prussia, and the mountebank of history, Mr. Pitt, all are to me but impostors in their various ways. Fame or interest is their object; and after all their parade, I think a ploughman who sows, reads his almanack, and believes the stars but so many farthing candles, created to prevent his falling into a ditch as he goes home at night, a wiser and more rational being, and I am sure an honester than any of them. Oh! I am sick ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... men report Lean, dusk, a gipsy: I alone nut-brown. Violets and pencilled hyacinths are swart, Yet first of flowers they're chosen for a crown. As goats pursue the clover, wolves the goat, And cranes the ploughman, upon ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... valley, high up on the chalky summit of the hill, a ploughman with his team appeared and disappeared at regular intervals. At each revelation he stood still for a few seconds against the sky: for all the world (as the Cigarette declared) like a toy Burns who should have just ploughed up the Mountain Daisy. He was the only living thing within view, unless ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... planted grain or vegetables. Their method of ploughing was primitive indeed. Six or eight men were attached by ropes to a strong stake, to which was fastened a horizontal piece of wood upon which the ploughman might set his foot to force the sharp point into the earth as it was dragged along, while women followed after to break up the clods as ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... superstitions. No deadness of conventionality dulls the edge of his art—he is an original man. His fancy is bold, and he makes no attempt to repress it. Perhaps his most striking poem is I am the Gilly of Christ—strange that its reverence has been mistaken for sacrilege! And in the little song, Go, Ploughman, Plough, one tastes the joy of muscle, the revelation of the upturned earth, and the promise of ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... sheet had broken and shouldered and transported about. About every five or six acres had loose stones and rock enough to put a rock-bottomed wall around it and still leave enough in and on the soil to worry the ploughman and the mower. All the farms in that section reposing in the valleys and bending up and over the broad-backed hills are checker-boards of stone walls, and the right- angled fields, in their many colours of green and brown and yellow and red, give a striking ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... entirely the business of the grazier from that of the corn-farmer, as the trade of the carpenter is commonly separated from that of the smith. The spinner is almost always a distinct person from the weaver; but the ploughman, the harrower, the sower of the seed, and the reaper of the corn, are often the same. The occasions for those different sorts of labour returning with the different seasons of the year, it is impossible that one man should be constantly employed in any one of them. This impossibility of ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... Now the hungry lion roars, And the wolf behowls the moon; Whilst the heavy ploughman snores All with weary ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... corn am I, Kara! Kara![5] Yoked with the kine we gayly fly, Kara! Kara! The ploughman's hand is strong and drives The glowing soil, the meadow thrives! Before the oxen ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... ago—so runs a possibly mythical legend—a certain man was ploughing in a field. The wife of a rich banker was bathing not far off, and laid her necklace of pearls on the bank. A crow took it up and dropped it in the ploughman's field. He presented it to his wife, and proceeded to reason upon the phenomenon. The fowls of the air, he reflected, neither ploughed nor sowed, but they managed to pick up valuables. Why should he not show a similar trust in Providence? He ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... desolation pregnant with the dire lesson of example? The fields had been left uncultivated, weeds and gaudy flowers sprung up,—or where a few wheat-fields shewed signs of the living hopes of the husbandman, the work had been left halfway, the ploughman had died beside the plough; the horses had deserted the furrow, and no seedsman had approached the dead; the cattle unattended wandered over the fields and through the lanes; the tame inhabitants of the poultry yard, baulked ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... Rufus who suddenly joined the group, whip in hand, and looking like a young Achilles in ploughman's coat and trousers. Not Achilles' port could be more lordly; the very fine bright hazel eye was on fire; the nostril spoke, and the lip quivered; though he looked only ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... Forchambeaux," he said next—(a thin, fair-haired young man, already bald); then, pointing towards a simple-mannered man of forty: "Joseph Boffreu, my cousin; and here is my old tutor, Monsieur Vezou"—a person who seemed a mixture of a ploughman and a seminarist, with large whiskers and a long frock-coat fastened at the end by a single button, so that it fell over ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... instructs him in the fatal art, and both moves his own wings himself, and looks back on those of his son. A person while he is angling for fish with his quivering rod, or the shepherd leaning on his crook, or the ploughman on the plough tail, when he beholds them, is astonished, and believes them to be Divinities, who thus can cleave the air. And now Samos,[18] sacred to Juno, and Delos, and Paros, were left behind to the left hand. On the right were Lebynthus,[19] and Calymne,[20] fruitful ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... selection must be made, there are two drawings with their own special claim to consideration. These are the Ploughman and the Priest (Plates 14 and 15). The former has been cited by Ruskin as an example of a perfect design for wood-engraving; but even higher than its art, to my thinking, is its feeling. To the labourer of this sort,—poor, patient, toilworn,—Holbein's heart ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... remember. Life within convent walls would have been scarcely more tranquil or more monotonous. Sir John rode with his hounds three or four times a week, or was about the fields superintending the farming operations, walking beside the ploughman as he drove his furrow, or watching the scattering of the seed. Or he was in the narrow woodlands which still belonged to him, and Angela, taking her solitary walk at the close of day, heard his axe ringing ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... The ploughman inly smiles to see upturn His mellow globe, best pledge of future crop: With glee the gardener eyes his smoking beds; E'en pining ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... billeted on an old French artist. When I saw those canvases, I felt the old Adam in me thirsting for expression. Before all I am an artist! I made a bargain with the old Parley-vous—a pair of my young officer's boots for two canvases and the use of his paints. Agreed. On the one I did a ploughman wending his weary thingumbob home—you know. The following day happened to be my precious young officer's birthday, and we celebrated it in style. I would not say he was an expert with his Scotch, but he was very game—very ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... of Burns in spite of his crude surroundings, ignorance, and lack of most that distinguishes civilization from that childlike simplicity of primaeval life which Macaulay regards as the more favorable to developing poetical temperament, Carlyle says of the ploughman-poet: ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... mandrake wears His human feet, his human hands; Oft, as his shapely form he rears, Aghast the frighted ploughman stands. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... angle at which the pocket could be most easily filled by the dulseman. He then deposited his half-penny, and moved on. Neither had spoken; yet in the country they would have roared their predictions about to-morrow to a ploughman half a field away. ...
— A Window in Thrums • J. M. Barrie
... misty summer morns With cheery ring the mower whets; and kine Move slowly, breathing sweetness, toward the pail Their milking-maid is jingling, as she calls "Hi Strawberry and Blossom, hither Cows;" While slung against the upland with his team The ploughman dimly like a phantom glides: What time that noisy spot of life, the lark, Climbs, shrill with ecstasy, the trembling air; And "Cuckoo, Cuckoo," baffling whence it comes, Shouts the blithe egotist who ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner |
